A nonfiction piece, “If You’ve Made it this Far, You Might as Well Leave a Message,” by alum Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at Waxwing:

If you’re listening to my voice, it’s too late for me, but there’s still time to save yourself. What you need to know is this: our dead would not stay dead. We fought them off for as long as we could, but soon most of us were infected and joined their ranks. We’ve run out of ammunition and they’re so hungry.

If you called my house in the middle part of the 1990s, that’s the type of message you’d hear when the answering machine picked up. A fake apocalypse — and in the background some guy trying not to laugh.

Continue reading online…

Two poems by alum Gary Copeland Lilley (poetry, ’02), “I Told You” and “The Bushman’s Medicine Show,” appear at Waxwing:

I Told You

Her voice was an earworm in my head
over and over a constant cerebral crawl
I-told-you-you-can-not-trust-Jake who I lent
the 100 bucks that I could be
taking her out to dinner with

Continue reading online…

A piece from alum Geoffrey Kronik (fiction, ’12) appears at The Common:

I was in Hamburg for a language course, and all week the syntactical floodwaters of German grammar had been rising. By Thursday night I was drowning in homework and would need Friday morning, before my afternoon class, to stay afloat.

Then the friend I was staying with, a German lawyer, suggested I join him in court the next morning. I could attend a session with him, see the German system, meet a German judge. An appealing prospect that alas would leave no time for homework.

Continue reading online…

Two poems by alum Nora Hutton Shepard (poetry, ’10) appears at The Cortland Review:

It Was A Friday

How did the child end up
in the stream, his eyes
the flat blue of the sky,
water clear as breath
sluicing over his cheeks,
over the stones cradling
his head?

Continue reading or listen to a reading of each poem online…

An excerpt from alum Mary-Sherman Willis’s (poetry, ’05) new book Graffiti Calculus appears at Beltway:

from Kilroy

10.
In my Cold War duck-and-cover American girlhood, in the bull’s eye
of Washington’s nuclear radius,

under a blue sky etched in contrails and filled by day with keening
air emergency sirens, in brick-walled

Horace Mann Elementary, Mrs. Wilson drew her chalk across the board.
Let AB be a line segment with midpoint M.

Continue reading online…