Two poems by alum Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15), “Sewing Feathers” and “After the Miscarriage II,” appear at Waxwing:
A daughter lifts away, an intricate
set of homemade wings
sewn to her back.
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…
A poem by alum Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at The Offing:
1.
Dear Angel of Death,
A long time ago, one of my writing teachers said, “Make a list of what you’re most afraid of and write to the thing at the top of the list.” I looked at my list, saw your name, and ignored that teacher for the rest of the year.
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…
Friends of Writers wishes to congratulate Karen Smyte (fiction, ’15) for winning the 2015 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. Karen will be graduating from the MFA Program for Writers this July. You can read more about the award, as well as the winning story, “Anya,” 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 bulls eye
of Washingtons 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…
A piece by alum Colleen Abel (poetry, ’04) appears at phoebe:
The word deviant. A lovely, leering word, its two keening e sounds and the snap shut of its final syllable. You would never guess this body harbors such linguistic loveliness. This deviant body. I move it around during the day, along the asphalt, up the stairs. I tend to it in the shower, imagining that I am a gardener with a vast acreage to water and weed. I walk the body to work. I search out eye contact, but all eyes deviate. Look at me, I want to say. What my body says: don’t.
Continue reading online…
A piece by alum Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) appears at The Collagist:
The taxi slows, stops before the mailbox, staked to the edge of the small front yard. The driver’s door opens and a man comes around the car with something in his arms – or several things, judging by the way his arms contort to contain them. He shuffles stealthily toward the front porch, the concrete steps. Then stoops to place the objects, one by one, on the top step: a small bundle of pamphlets tied in twine, a large fruit that looks like a combination of football and cactus, a pair of calf-high boots, and a doll lying on her back in a box.
Continue reading online…
A piece by alum Lauren Alwan (fiction, ’08) appears at The Millions:
It’s a single line of dialog in Ernest Hemingway’s classic story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” but that one line, 11 words, has had an outsized influence on the course of literary titling. It’s spoken by the female character, Jig, as she waits for a train in Zaragosa with her unnamed American man. In the train station they begin drinking, first cervezas then anisette, and soon conduct a suppressed dispute about whether or not to end a pregnancy. Tensions mount, differences are exposed, and with that, Jig utters the legendary line. It’s a breaking point that is as much textual as emotional: “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
Continue reading online…
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