A new poem by alumna Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appears online in Valparaiso Poetry Review:
Guts, Gleam
Gutting the deer, down among the blasts
of fallen leaves, golden and red against
the gray of winter pending, and the red,
of course, of blood, and the more various
shades of insides—the yellows and purples
and pure, resistant whites you don’t think of
until you’re doing the work—is not what
strummed, beat in, certainly not what
set to singing, my senses.
…
Finish reading online.
A new work by alumna Amy Minton (fiction, ’09) appears online in Gravel:
Ten Minutes
Seated by the window and looking toward the hospital bed, I notice the bag of my stepdad’s urine. It’s at eye level, hard to miss. Yellow liquid travels slowly through a clear tube into a plastic measuring hold, which is recorded every fifteen minutes and dumped into a larger pouch by a nurse with an Aryan demeanor whom we call Herr Dreyer. Herr Dreyer also records numbers on the LCD screen behind my stepdad’s head, which is steep with mountains of bandages.
“It does look like a turban, but why call yourself Osama bin Laden?” I ask. “It’s too obvious. Go for the little teapot, short and stout.”
My stepdad giggles and does the teapot dance the best he can while in the clutches of a fussy hydra of narrow tubes sprouting from the top of his turban. The tubes drain fluid accumulating in the space between his brain and skull. Each tube ends in its own separate pouch with measuring marks. The drained fluid looks like blood, but it could be something else. It’s creamier-looking and not as thick. While sleeping, if he rolls over on the pouches then alarms will go off. He has already burst one pouch under the weight of his shoulder. The accumulated liquid leaked, and had to be discarded. “I had to start over,” he said, flicking a newer pouch with less liquid than the others.
This is what we do while we are waiting for God.
…
Continue reading online.
Alumnus James Franco (poetry, ’12) is the featured poet for The Paris-American this week. His poem, “Film Sonnet,” appears online:
You, Monica Vitti, with your lips, like fruit, how could
That guy in L’avventura be blamed for forgetting
The other pouty bitch? If I got a new life I’d pray for
A girl like you. The island where you lose your friend,
Deserted and mysterious. And then after looking
All over Italy for her, you fall for him. And what is
It that compels him, in the aftermath of that party? …
Continue reading online at The Paris-American.
A new essay by alumnus Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) appears online at Bending Genre:
1982, Revisited
On March 19, 1982, a group of Argentine scrap metal merchants raised the flag of their nation on the coastal, British-occupied island of South Georgia. In the next two weeks, Argentina invaded the island, and then the Falkland Islands, assuming Britain would retaliate.
By June 14, ten weeks later, Argentina had surrendered to Britain. Argentina had lost 649 military, Britain 255. Three Falkland Island civilians had been killed. This is what Wikipedia tells me. In April 1982, I turned seven years old. I lived on Linwood Avenue, on the second floor of a three-family home, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with my mother, sister, and – for a year or two by this time, I can’t remember – my mother’s new man, whom she would marry in the summer of 1983.
Two poems by alumnus Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02) appear online in Shadowgraph Magazine:
Praise Diligence
The family asks you to write
the shape of beauty
oh lethal tree
oh cloud
curved like death
shall your lies go on and on?
Cat on My Lap
No matter what promises
the world makes
always an end…
Continue reading online at Shadowgraph Magazine.
Eight Scholarships of $500 each are available for this summer’s WWC Alumni Writing Conference.
Alumni who wouldn’t be able to attend without some assistance are invited to submit their names to the Conference Coordinator by April 11. Details available at wwcmfa.org.
The Greenhouse, a chapbook by alumna Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (poetry, ’05), has been awarded the 2014 Frost Place Chapbook Contest Sponsored by Bull City Press. The Greenhouse will be published in August 2014. Stonestreet will attend the 2014 Frost Place Poetry Seminar as the second Frost Place Chapbook Fellow. She will have the opportunity to reside in the Frost Place Museum for one week in September 2014.
Alumni Jeremy Bass (poetry, ’10) and Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.‘s (poetry, ’09) chapbooks were also named as finalists in the competition.
Read more about Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet and the Frost Place Chapbook Contest Sponsored by Bull City Press.
…
Alumna Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) has been named the 2014 Dartmouth Poet-In-Residence at the Frost Place. The program “supports working poets by providing them the space and time to devote to their craft.” Foust will spend an eight-week summer residency in poet Robert Frost’s former farmhouse, and give a series of public readings across the region, including at Dartmouth College.
Read more about Rebecca Foust and the Frost Poet-In-Residence Program.
A new poem by alumna Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. (poetry, ’09) appears online in New Orleans Review:
Sermon
Because that’s how you break through, said Blake.
How you see desire for what it is.
His brown hair was matting nicely, his loincloth
getting the hang of him. He had some chants down pat
and nicely-emerging ribs. Om-most there, he quipped,
striking a pose. The horse’s ass-ana, I believe,
said Greg quietly, and we braced ourselves
for another one on the virtue
of sitting still among charred tibias and pariah dogs.
Of trying to keep it hard but not come. Of that
No.
Alumnus Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) has been selected as a 2014-2016 Kenyon Review Fellow. Read more about this award online at The Kenyon Review.
Alumna Nan Cuba‘s (fiction, ’89) novel, Body and Bread, has been awarded the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction.
Subscribe to the Friends of Writers Forum and receive notifications of new posts by email.