A new poem by alumna and current Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow Colleen Abel (poetry, ’04) appears online in Drunken Boat:
because of the weightlessness.”
—Alexandr Laveikin
Some creatures can die from gravity.
The beached whale suffers the weight
of its own organs, unbuoyed, and is crushed. …
Continue reading online at Drunken Boat 18.
Two poems by alumna Jynne Dilling Martin (poetry, ’06) from her tenure as Antarctica’s Poet-in-Residence are published online at Slate:
Am Going South, Amundsen
An oil painting of a jaguar eating an emperor penguin
is the start of a daydream in the Royal Society library.
Nineteen ponies wedged in narrow wooden stalls
sail south; they will soon go blind from miles of radiant snow,
lap at volcanic ash for a last smack of salt, be shot
and fed to dogs. For now they sway this way, sway that.
The magnetic needle dips. Only afterwards we ask if it cost
too much. Will this species be here tomorrow or not? …
***
What Endures and What Does Not?
Soon this ship will be crushed in a polar storm; below deck,
pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica are read aloud,
shredded and used to light pipes. A century later
the preservationist draining antique food tins
sneaks a taste of raspberry jam. That night he’ll dream
he digs out a tomb on a glacier filled with bay leaves
still fragrant and green. The emperor penguin egg
tucked warm in the explorer’s pocket is delivered intact
to the receptionist desk at the Royal Geographic Society; …
Finish reading both poems online at Slate.
Alumna Goldie Goldbloom (fiction, ’11) has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose.
These Creative Writing Fellowships in Prose (fiction or creative nonfiction) enable recipients to set aside time
for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. Non‐matching grants are for $25,000.
Read more about the winners online.
Alumna Nancy J. Allen (fiction, ’12) won the 2013 bosque Fiction Prize for her story “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes.” She received $1,000 and publication in bosque (the magazine). Elizabeth Rosner judged. The magazine may be ordered from the ABQ Writers Coop website.
Five new poems, including “Bitter Carrots,” “Losing Friends,” “The Rules of Accurate Choice and Prudent Restraint,” “The Physics of Stuff,” and “Iron Mike in Three,” by alumnus Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02) is published online in Nine Mile‘s Fall 2013 Issue:
Bitter Carrots
Out back they’re reporting a riot
among the spirit guides.
I have tried to convince everyone
that a sponge understands excess.
No luck.
One man’s floor
is another man’s yellow,
anger is nudity,
the wrestler behind the leaded glass door
stops us all from singing.
Certainly the Chinese food was flawed
but that’s not a reason
for them to whip the flowers to death.
…
Finish reading “Bitter Carrots” and his other poems online at Nine Mile.
“Its Day Being Gone,” a book by alumna Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10), was one of five books selected as winners of the National Poetry Series’ Open Competition. Her manuscript, chosen by Robert Wrigley, will be published in the summer of 2014 by Penguin Books.
For more information, and to read about the winners, check the National Poetry Series website.
A new story by alumna Peg Alford Pursell (fiction, ’96) appears online at The Quotable:
When I was a child, Day of the Dead meant sugar skulls, staying up past midnight, marigolds, burning copal, blazing votives. I didn’t recognize any of the faces in the photographs on the altar. Now I have my own dead – and no sweet bread, hot wax, or tequila to lure them, no fancy papel picado. The dead come anyway, in fragments, perforated memories. My grandmother wearing a man’s fedora, a secret greeting card folded into her dress pocket. My grandfather, who burnedbasura in his basement fireplace, sending obscene odors throughout the neighborhood, whose last act was to eat a bowl of strawberry ice cream in the middle of the night. The crush I smoked pot with behind the brick chimney in the attic of his parents’ home, wrapped up with me in his sleeping bag. He confessed he had no plan for after graduation, and he laughed, and he never needed the plan. The stillborn girl who looked like a baby bird with bulging eyes curled in a nest under the acacia. The man I’d once thought was the one who wasn’t and whom I couldn’t live with once I understood that, who on a tear of amphetamines put a gun to his head.
…
Finish reading online.
A new story by alumna Elisabeth Hamilton appears in Necessary Fiction:
Boys, you notice, have perfect hair. It sticks up in just the right way — after a swim meet, after a soccer match, after changing their shirts. You think their hair is the best thing about them, even when they wrestle, finding a thing they want in someone’s hand — a box of matches, a basketball, a trading card — and pounce, scrap, pull, scuffle, roll. They pant. They come up triumphant, object between fingers, gasping for air, hair-perfect, and then they are pulled down again, shoving bodies into carpet, into turf, elbows in ribs and hands around ankles and cheeks pressed against chests, smelling of sweat, the taste of a sweet briny palm as it shoves a face into mud. The only thing you want that badly is a body that does not fold and grow soft, that could put holes in sheetrock, that could bounce off of walls. On TV, you watch street dancers who use their bodies like skateboards or boomerangs, who flip and turn and curl, and you, in the mirror in the bathroom, grow breasts.
New poems by alumna Glenis Redmond (poetry, ’11) appear online in the journal When Women Waken:
Titled Bowl
There’s no circle
that can bear this load,
not the moon of my mama’s face,
or the circumference arms
that were supposed to fit around me for life.
In this loss I am alone.
…
Continue reading here.
I Lost the Baby
Not as in couldn’t find, but as in perished.
I lost my child
and still I was in search.
He found me, in my bed busy dreaming.
I lost my child:
blond hair, hazel eyes, skin really fair.
He found me in my bed, busy dreaming.
He kissed me awake, though I was still asleep.
Blond hair, hazel eyes, skin really fair
shining like a familiar son.
He kissed me awake, though I was still asleep
saying, I will tell Amber and Celeste there’s no school, snow!
…
Continue reading here.
A new piece by alumnus Matthew Muller (fiction, ’10) appears online in the Lowestoft Chronicle:
Back in a Minute
We lived at the bottom of Spencer’s Butte in Eugene, and sometimes, on weekends, we climbed to the top. My mother told us to listen for rattlesnakes that she said lived on the mountain, in case they were coming near the path. The whole darkness of the underbrush seemed about to rattle. The enormous trunks of the evergreens rose out of the inclines below us to a ceiling of branches and leaves above. In this green darkness, my father started talking about the cafe he would open if he ever had the money and wasn’t a poor teacher.
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