Three poems by alumna Sara Quinn Rivara (poetry, ’02) appear at Blackbird:
Lake Ice
The length of a first marriage: eternity, shore-fast ice
creeping onto the Lake. In such cold, when told to sing, stones
fell from my throat; when told to sit still, knees hum.
So the Lake chews the pier when told to be quiet, sand
runs in frozen ridges up the dune. It’s all done; the mouth
unfolds its origami cranes. Was I the wife who cowered
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A new piece by alumna Jynne Dilling Martin (poetry, ’06) appears at Food & Wine:
The worst part of sleeping in a snow cave in Antarctica is not the minus-20° windchill or the midnight sun glaring through every crack. It’s not peeing in a bottle or feeling achingly sore from digging the cave in the first place. The worst part is crawling out the next morning, stiff and starving, fantasizing about a latte, eggs and pancakes, and prying open a box of rations to find a choice between a baggie of frozen raisins or a baggie of frozen nuts. I’ve often opened my pantry at home and groaned at the limited options, but that pales in comparison to the scarcity of food on a remote ice shelf where the nearest grocery store is a nine-hour cargo plane ride away.
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A poem by alumnus Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at Ampersand Review:
Orlen!! Just now, I was remembering, several winters
back, you were telling me that if you got stuck
while writing a poem, you’d try to make
a “random seeming, radical move” toward
a different subject, something to jar the work
onto newer terrain, and be sorted
out in later drafts. I like “newer terrain,”
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A poem by alumnus Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at Mead Magazine:
I’d like a day where all the buildings remain intact.
Let the Hydra stay asleep beneath the surface.
Let the tornado be befuddled, yawn,
go back to bed. No floods. No lightning strikes.
No movie theaters where a man walks
in with a terrible idea hidden in his coat.
Forgive me, for I have longed
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A story by alumna Helen Hooper (fiction, ’09) appears at American Short Fiction:
The window over the kitchen sink looks out at the backyard. Theory’d been, she could watch the kids play. Croquet or whatever. That was a long time ago. Carl had put in a garden that turned out to be popular with local wildlife. Once the shoots were up they came and returned, voracious. Subsequent Googling to learn that deer like edge habitat. Which is what this is, he said. The edge. The best place.
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A poem by alumna Cheney Crow (poetry, ’14) appears in The Cortland Review:
As he closed the door
one night he said,
If you don’t find me in bed in the morning,
Look in the south field.
I’ll be in my white suit.
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A poem by alumna Rosalynde Vas Dias (poetry, ’06) appears at Four Way Review:
What do you know
of the former
beloved/still beloved?
He lives in another
city or speaks
infrequently.
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Faculty member Marianne Boruch’s essay, “Saint Kevin, Saint Blackbird,” from the fall 2014 issue of FIELD is currently featured on Poetry Daily:
Certain poems have inside them the source of all poems. I’ve thought this, and probably said it many times. Because it is these I love instinctively, pretty much automatically, poems I read and reread. They share their bounty and radiate wildly or so quietly. They return me—and perhaps others—to the reason one writes poems in the first place. This is not sentimental. This is fact, real as fable to haunt and light the way forward, back to prehistory.
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Two poems by alumna Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appear at This Land Press:
First in Right
A subdivision’s plumbing, a predictable grid, is of greater
worth than irrigating the uncertain growth of stalk and vine,
sees the farmer who sells his water rights, looking ahead.
But with the rivers, nothing moves forward
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A new piece by faculty member Robin Romm appears at Role Reboot:
I could accumulate objects even if the people and life I loved and wanted more than any object were stripped from me ruthlessly, brutally.
After my mother died, my father couldn’t bring himself to empty out her closets. My mother had been sick for a decade, declining slowly throughout my 20s. She had plenty of time to feel all the things people feel when they understand that they’re dying, when it no longer feels like an abstraction, but rather a fact. She felt alone. She felt afraid. She felt able to appreciate the sun on her face, the velvet of a cat’s ear. She felt out of control. She felt grateful for her friends. She felt air hunger. She felt like something in her was against her, was eating her alive.
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