“Exotica” by Rose McLarney

A new poem by Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appears online in Mudlark:

Exotica

You don’t want the story about the soft clutch
of monkey’s toes, how monkeys swung

languorous from limbs, showering down fruit.
But rather, the one about how 

the blue-eyed Abando boy’s body hung 
after he was lynched for robbing our house,

for robbing any place ever left empty. 
You are not as interested in fruit—

hearing how it was heavy and pendulous
through the forest, a forest hung 

with bunches of bananas, zapotes that fell
erupting orange custard among rambutans—

as in the way thieves ripped jewelry from women’s
ears, hooks pulled through the lobes, so they hung 

with rubies of blood. You listen more closely 
when I tell of how I clung

to the reins when a drunk whipped my horse
into a frenzy and out, swimming, to sea, 

than of the tame iguana I hung
in a bird cage, fine wire formed into a palace.  

Even though I fed him on hibiscus, 
and could describe so many lush, red flowers,

folding from the mouth.
/by

New Work by Gabriel Blackwell

“An Excerpt by Madeline E.”, by alumni Gabriel Blackwell (fiction, ’09),  appears online at The Collapsar:

[EXT. Redwoods (DAY)]

…

There comes a point in our lives when we are most often and most emphatically ourselves on those days when we like to think we are not ourselves.

(Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage)

…

Since Carlotta (like Judy) is a brunette, but Judy-as-Madeleine does not change her hair color when she goes into her trance as Carlotta, the woman whom Scottie follows at the start is Judy-as-Madeleine[-as-Carlotta] (brunette-as-blonde[-as-brunette]). Where Gavin hints that Madeleine is the reincarnation of a dead woman, Scottie first sees Judy, after the murder, as the resurrected form of what he (rightly) perceives as another dead woman, Madeleine. And one reason why Judy-as-Madeleine-as-Judy-as-Madeleine does not look quite right is because what Scottie really wants to see is Judy-as-Madeleine-as-Judy-as-Madeleine[-as-Carlotta].

(Wendy Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended to be Who She Was)

Read more

/by

New Work by Kimberly Jean Smith

“Lucette,” fiction by Kimberly Jean Smith (fiction, ’12), appears online at Flyaway:

“One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness, 

which nonetheless has light in it.”

–Vincent van Gogh

Three days before her father delivered Lucette to Madame Macard’s, the Dutch man arrived in Arles. This meant everything unfolded exactly as destiny would have it, or so said the little-yellow-house-girls, who believed the number three held extraordinary significance. The Madame’s girls spent hours behind its yellow walls, forecasting futures and deciphering dreams–Lucette’s more than anyone’s. Blindness, they thought, gave her second sight. By now she knew nothing turned out as anyone could think it.

The morning of her departure, for example, she remembered pressing her cheek against Mama’s and then the baby’s cry. A close sweet odor of breast milk clung to her mother, damp like earth. When there was nothing left to do but leave, she kissed the baby’s toes and slid her hand along the table where she’d sliced onions for their soup.

Read more

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“Public House” by Michael Collins

A new poem by alumni Michael Collins (poetry, ’03) appears online at Mobius:

A diplomat slumps over warm Riesling,
lamenting the sad limitations of tact

and smiles to outwit fear, cajole all factions
to concur in a better world; a priest consoles

that such kingdoms are within us
if we can find the eyes to see them.

A child on his father’s shoulders,
arms outstretched, playing at being

an airplane, glides quickly, mirage-like
across the open doorway. The diplomat

straightens the crease in his fine necktie,
stares at the now-empty space, a few feet

of concrete in streetlight, and then night.
He almost declares a million children

no different than that boy will starve,
fall to disease this year, or be orphaned

for no crime other than being born
in the wrong country. He doesn’t add

Ask them about kingdoms of heaven.
His thoughts are conquered anyway,

as a louder argument down the bar
draws all conversations under its banner:

A well-suited man, calm as the night
is vague, reminds a wasted kid with dreads,

with whom he’s conversing for reasons
beyond understanding, that he has the privilege

of drinking, denouncing things, because our soldiers
defend us from threats, even those yet unseen.

His colleague seems in a constant state
of disbelieving his ears, keeps screaming,

What don’t you get; we’re killing people!
The nationalist looks at him like a kid

who’s just said the sun orbits the earth,
but the bartender halts the proceedings,

blending up a pitcher of margaritas
that no one seems to have ordered,

glancing knowingly at the old man
in the corner, wearing an ancient coat,

stroking his giant beard, staring, listening,
as if memorizing the entire night.

The priest smiles shyly, already giving away
that he’ll tell a joke, grabs his friend’s shoulder,

says, See, you just never know when
all of a sudden you’ll witness a miracle.

But the mind of the sullen statesman
has already painted the unjust world

in several coats of its most hopeless shades,
bypassing his friend’s blithe kindness,

as if he already knows the sweet nuisance
of phantoms’ drinks will fade like lilies,

knows the truculent pacifist will launch
the salvo he’s been engineering

throughout the barman’s clever armistice:
What if your kids were off in some country

shooting people, being captured? Tortured!
As if he knows the young man’s adversary

will tell him, as if it were obvious,
Well, they’re not my children. Thank God.

/by

New Fiction by Corey Campbell

New work by Corey Campbell (fiction, ’12), “A Handful of Pennies and One Rouge Dime,” appears online at Pithead Chapel: 

Near the Chrysler Building. A dark bedroom in a pre-war apartment, long heavy curtains pulling down, and a skinny strip of light underneath. It makes Janelle lonely to lay belly down on the bed, cheek to the sheet, wrists tied behind her with a silver birthday ribbon. She wishes Sanderson hadn’t gotten so into tying her up.

The dumpling delivery guy is at the door, forty minutes late. Voice like a balding minor league umpire. “Happy Panda,” he calls.

Sanderson grunts in response, pulling on worn jeans and walking barefoot across the carpet, mint green like an old lady’s gum. He steals a twenty from Janelle’s bag and leaves her there on the bed, where they’d stripped all but that bottom sheet. She stares at the pastel walls with her one good eye. He left the door open. Sun barrels through the kitchen window so the hallway leading to the bedroom is an overexposed white tunnel. Through it Sanderson emerges again, parking the Chinese food sack on the dresser, knocking over a glass perfume bottle and raining down chopsticks. Warm salty smells engulf the room, where broccoli is king.

Read more

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New Work by Kathryn Schwille

New work by alumni Kathryn Schwille (fiction, ’99) titled “FM 104” appears in the latest issue of the online journal Memorious.

FM 104

Coyotes, weasels, green flies, crows. The animals heard it first. Along
the weedy edge of Texas Route 20, a turkey buzzard quit the possum she’d
lucked into and took cover in a stand of pines. The wild pig under
Beeman Bennett’s oak trees snorted twice and froze. To us, it came from
out of nowhere: two blasts and the roar of a crashing train that rumbled
far too long. Our windows rattled, our floorboards quivered, our
breakfasts trembled on their tables. We thought terror, we thought
bombs, we thought of our loved ones. A few of us thought to scream.

Read the rest online.  

/by

New Interview with Jamaal May

New work and an interview with alumni Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) is published in The Kenyon Review:

Is there a story behind your KR poems? What was the hardest part about writing them?

The challenge of “The Sky, Now Black With Birds” was inherent in its subject matter. I don’t always go into a poem wanting to address a specific issue. I’m usually led by language and discover what’s nagging me through the process of arguing with a draft. The E.M. Forster adage, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” definitely applies to this process. When I want to address something specific, the “this-should-be-a-poemness” of a subject actually makes the process more troublesome. This is often true of elegies and poems where the trigger is a bizarre bit of trivia as well. These poems are in greater danger of mono-dimensionality, which in a poem with sociopolitical concerns leads swiftly to didacticism. I find that an idea can be so good or important or jarring or socially relevant the poet can be less naturally inclined to find the other spokes that make the wheel turn. My mentor Vievee Francis always said a poem needs torque. I take this to mean a poem always needs a thing moving against another thing around a fulcrum, because without torque nothing moves. I’m kind of old-fashioned in that I want poems to move people.

Read more

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New Work by Elizabeth Eslami

A new story by alumni Elizabeth Eslami (fiction, ’03) appears in The Sun:

Victory Forge

I.

YOUR BROTHER sends you letters from Basic Training, where they are making him into someone else.

He is six years younger than you, and, although he’s over six foot now, you think of him still as “the boy.” He takes to the military quickly, memorizing the Soldier’s Creed, believing the army religion that all things can be improved. He eats their food and wakes to their song. Not long ago you sat with him on the school bus on his first day of kindergarten. Now he says he should’ve been born into his combat trousers instead of skin. He’s a patriot, a gunfighter, a warrior.

He speaks a strange tongue, though he hasn’t yet left for Afghanistan: Fire rate. Recoil. Enhanced m16. He has new friends from Texas and South Dakota, places he’s never been to or even thought about. He’s assigned a partner, a “battle buddy,” the second word to soften the first.

Read more

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Tatjana Soli’s “Picking Up the Scent on the Road to Bliss”

A new essay by alumni Tatjana Soli (fiction ’06) is featured in the New York Times column Modern Love:

One of my first boyfriends announced after our fourth date that he would never consider marrying or even living with a woman who smoked. I was devastated (although I didn’t smoke).

Still in college, I was looking for a soul mate, and my boyfriend’s inflexibility seemed unromantic in the extreme. One of my glamorous ideals back then was a black-and-white picture of Camus looking rumpled, intellectual and French with a cigarette tucked between his fingers. This guy would ask him to take it outside.

“What if she were the most beautiful, smart, sexy woman in the world?” I asked. “What if she said you were the love of her life? You’d give all that up because of a nicotine habit?”

I mention this only to establish that I never would have thought it necessary to establish criteria for boyfriends or husbands, especially one as seemingly unimportant as: Must love dogs.

Read more

/by

New Work by Mary-Sherman Willis

Poems from alumna Mary-Sherman Willis’s (poetry, ’05) forthcoming book, Graffiti Calculus (CW Books, November 2013), appear online at The Cortland Review:

Kilroy (from Graffiti Calculus)

In my Cold War duck-and-cover American girlhood, in the bull’s-eye
of Washington’s nuclear radius,

under a blue sky etched in contrails and filled with the keening of 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.

Let two small semicircles X and Y rise above AB; a parabola Z below AB;
and a large semicircle L, above X and Y….

And I doodled this charm: now let two little eyeballs fill X and Y! And two
sets of cartoon fingertips below AB!

KILROY WAS HERE, I wrote, and because I could, I let AB become the

horizon of the whole Earth,

flexing along lines of longitude and latitude from sea to shining sea. Hail
Empire’s wandering warrior, king killer….

/by

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