“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.
A new poem by alumnus Jeremy Bass (poetry, ’10) appears online in Vinyl Poetry:
Passenger
Will rain fall we don’t know
only a few drops seem willing to answer.
High clouds the hulls of unseen ships
parked their dented blue enamel over our heads
each rib of cloud an arched gunnel
longer than the highway we drove on
…
Continue reading at Vinyl Poetry.
A new poem by alumnus Tommye Blount (poetry, ’13) appears in Vinyl Poetry:
The House
I. Willi Ninja, Mother of the House of Ninja
(1961—2006)
Bitch, give me a body
and I will show you how it works.
Break it down
like the math of my hands—
have you seen my hands?—
first, a blade, then a compact,
now, a mirror. What you see
is a legend on the map.
…
Continue reading at Vinyl Poetry online.
Why are these people smiling? Because they had so much fun at the 2013 conference!
We are pleased to announce that the 2014 Alumni Conference will be held at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA from June 28 to July 5. Those of you who have never attended a conference before have probably already heard it: Come! You’ll be welcomed! Well, it’s true, because you already belong here. Lots of recent grads have come in the last few years; reach out to someone you know who attended to check it out. Maybe recruit a buddy or two to share a ride (or teach a course or sit on a panel). We hope to have more information on prices, etc., in the next few weeks, so keep your eye on the blog or check in with wwcmfa.org from time to time.
Photo credit: Marcia Pelletiere.
A new story by alumnus Scott Nadelson (fiction, ’11) appears online in Four Way Review:
Could Be Worse
For a week in the middle of March, Paul Haberman felt increasingly out of sorts. Not much appetite, lousy sleep. In meetings he’d find himself absently chewing a knuckle. When the phone rang after nine at night, he braced for calamity. The wind blew hard against his bedroom window, and he imagined his neighbor’s oak tipping onto the roof. Lying in bed, with Cynthia huffing peacefully beside him, he asked himself what could be the matter and then did his best to answer. Maybe he’d been working too hard. Maybe he was troubled by the state of the world. Maybe by the fact that his stepchildren were growing up too fast. Or maybe it had been two months since he’d taken his car to the Baron. As soon as it grew light enough outside, he picked up the phone and dialed.
“Dr. H!” the Baron shouted on the other end of the line. “Why’s it been so long?”
“Lost track of time,” Paul said.
“You, maybe. But not that big beauty of yours. She needs a man who’s regular.”
“Any chance I can bring it—her—tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, huh? Pretty busy, doc. But for your sweet lady, sure.”
A new poem by alumna and current Beebe Fellow Colleen Abel (poetry, ’04) is published online at Four Way Review:
Self Portrait As Teenage Boy Beating Swan
Sometimes you have enough–
the cob, the pen twining
their necks to hearts,
all that fidelity.
The dank pond by the council
flats, like it’s bloody Windermere.
You only wanted to wreck
that love-shape they were making.
After, you sat, sad Zeus, and held
the one you’d caught,
stroking its feathered throat
as if to make it sing.
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