Christine Fadden in Germ Magazine

A new story by alumna Christine Fadden (fiction, ’09) appears online in Germ Magazine:

Read Aloud

Martini’s was a small family-run grocery store, just a five-minute drive from Grandmom’s house. I hadn’t been in yet that summer, what with all my softball practices and games. When we got there, Mr. Martini greeted my grandmother with a hug. She had been his teacher in high school, and had known my mom and dad growing up.

“Special on cherries, Mrs. Carter,” he said. “All the way in the back.”

“Look at you,” he said to me. “You’re turning out to be just as beautiful as your mother.”

I smiled. Beautiful wasn’t a word directed at me too often.

“Same almond shaped eyes.”

Almond shaped? Was he saying that because he was a grocer?

“And why hasn’t she come to see me yet this summer?

“Mom and Dad aren’t here this summer,” I said. “Not yet.” I wasn’t about to tell Mr. Martini they were back in Delaware plotting their divorce.

He pursed his lips and nodded. “Bet your dad has some big exciting project going on, huh? Henry always had the big exciting projects, even in high school. Your mom thought that was pretty neat. Selling skyscrapers beats selling Gobstoppers and Pop Rocks, I suppose.”

We both looked up and down the candy counter.

My grandmother returned with cherries and a pint of Breyers Vanilla ice cream. Mr. Martini said something about how lucky she was to have such a lovely family and she thanked him and said, “Tootaloo.”

“Go on, Grandmom,” I said, “I’ll walk home.”

…

 Continue reading online. 

 

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New Work by Jamaal May

Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) is a featured poet on Poetry Daily:

Triage

A suture would be useless
and a tourniquet can’t choke off
blood when it spills
from this far up the inner thigh…

Read more online at Poetry Daily.

Four poems by Jamaal May also appear online in the PEN Poetry Series:

God of the Wood

The air in this world is thicker than I remember
from nights at camp, whacking fireflies with a fallen branch.
I wondered if the shadows, numbering in the hundreds, were all cast
by the same god I hung out with when I was little—his voice
is the silence I’ve been afraid to hear since.
I would smack the side of a tree and stand in the rust-red
shower of leaves until I felt stronger than god;
I could’ve cracked his moon in half
if I wanted to—if I swung my stick high and hard enough,
if I screamed loud enough. But I’m afraid
to know what happens when enough
is the sound of my staff splintering against heaven,
a shock up my arm—
more with every strike.   ….

Read more of “God of the Wood” and other poems online at PEN.org.

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New work by Jeremy Bass

A new poem by alumnus Jeremy Bass (poetry, ’10) appears in Tupelo Quarterly:

Six Studies of Francis Bacon

Prologue

My grandfather was a butcher. In death, my mother took on the color and countenance of meat. One week earlier I’d studied these paintings, trying to decipher screams from the kill on its hooks. I did not want to look is why I looked. Then I wished I’d turned away.

1.

Around him bones are scattered in a railing. Staircases run through the sections of meat. If the room lifted into light, her bed was a sunken confluence of red. The way her face contained its own absence. And still I could not understand how a man could disappear into his umbrella, become nothing inside his own clothes.

2.

Distorted, of themselves and other, I wrote. Humans absolved into clay. As now her face appears in the painting: distorted of themselves, distorted other— While behind her, letters overwritten: an unseen language, muttering.
…

Continue reading online at Tupelo Quarterly.

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Amelie Prusik’s “Infrangible”

A new story by alumnus Amelie Prusik (fiction, ’12) appears online in Latern Journal:

School ends, the chattering days go back into their box. Outside my office the long hall empties of girls then fills with June light. I’m grateful for the time off without knowing how to fill the empty squares on my calendar. For once, I’m not signed up for any graduate classes; the lack of something to look forward to feels first like serendipity, later like a mistake.

Pierce wants me to come home for June and July, to spend time with our mother in the large, loosed-framed house on Jefferson Avenue. Mother is failing, although Pierce won’t give me any specifics other than to repeat, Say you’ll come, for Eulalie. Pierce and her husband Grady bought the house so Mother could come live with them should the need ever arise. Four years ago the need arose; now Eulalie occupies a commodious apartment over the garage.  Having my mother and sister live together feels like a conspiracy—a covert project—to make me feel excluded form what is left of our family. We started with five. Now, with our father dead and my brother Toby living in an SRO in San Francisco, we are down to three.

…

Continue reading online.

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Rose McLarney in Connotation Press

An interview with and new poems by alumna Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appears online in Connotation Press.

Interviewer John Hoppenthaler: Rose, first let me say congratulations! Your next book of poetry, Its Day Being Gone, won the National Poetry Series award and will be published by Penguin in spring 2014. What can you tell us about the process? How did you learn of your book’s selection? What were/are your thoughts about this big step ahead?

Thank you. I so appreciated winning a contest in which submissions were judged anonymously because it let me be sure that it was the writing all on its own, regardless of any qualification or connection, that earned the attention.

I received the phone call letting me know I’d won while in line in the library, between teaching classes. I didn’t know what to do other than go on and lead my next workshop, which I’m sure I did distractedly. I was too surprised to say anything for the rest of the day, and that ended up being good practice because I had to wait many months before the official award announcement came out. In the meantime, I did collect myself to tell close friends—and buy some Scotch.

…

Continue reading interview online.
 

Six poems, including “What the Snake Says,” “My Gift,” “How to See,” “The Treatment was Frogs, or The Tradition was Honey,” “Conservators,” and “Glossing the Image,”  also appear in Connotation Press.

 

What the Snake Says

 

So inelegant, your arms and legs,
that wrapped around the one you loved.
It seems they still pretend to.

 

At least, it doesn’t look like limbs help much,
seeing you scrabble up proud mountains, thrash
through old brush.

 

That’s what the snake says, gliding over the ground
or climbing an oak with the same sleek movement,
nothing attached, her body a clean line.

 

*

 

Continue reading online.
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Andy Young in The Volta

A new piece, including a video and poem, by alumnus Andy Young (poetry, ’11) appears online in The Volta:

Song of the Plastic Bags

on the road to Saqqara

a road beside the road

or a piled path of rocks
 
or oh my trash
 
solid seeming

….

Continue reading online at The Volta.

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Erin Stalcup’s “Hit”

A new work by alumna Erin Stalcup (fiction, ’04) appears online in the magazine, Hinchas de Poesia.

I want to tell them. I want to tell them what is wrong. Why I no hit. They going to ask me, soon they will ask me, but all I can say to them is I don’t know why I am not me.

Before, they ask me how it feel to win big, they ask what I doing different when I hit 22 homeruns one season, 41 the next. They notice when I do good, they ask me what I doing to be so good. So they will ask me this. Soon.

And I will have to say to them I am doing what I always doing up there, nothing different. But now I no hit the ball.

Mi papá me llama, he say I scared of the pitch. He say never before is he seeing this in me. He watch the game against Tampa on the television I buy for him, he call me and he say, ¿Por qué te da miedo la pelota? Nunca te asustas antes. I say I don’t know, Papi, but the hitting coach, he will tell me what is wrong. Papi say he will tell me I scared.

…

Finish reading online at Hinchas de Poesia.

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“Cosmonaut” by Colleen Abel

A new poem by alumna and current Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow Colleen Abel (poetry, ’04) appears online in Drunken Boat:

“I wanted to hang myself. Of course it’s impossible

                    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. 

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Antarctica’s Poet-in-Residence Jynne Dilling Martin

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. 

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Goldie Goldbloom Awarded NEA Creative Writing Fellowship

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.

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