New Poetry by Gary Hawkins

Four new poems by alumnus Gary Hawkins (poetry, ’95) appear online in Waxwing:

Vanishing Point

Asphalt, bitumen, tarmac —

all too poetic for you.

For you, the road glows

 

vaselined

like the sequence

of a television dream

…

Continue reading online.

 

Front of the House

 

In the years of their courtship he was a front waiter at the best restaurant in town. Though she could hardly afford to dine there, some nights he’d come to her window late, after he’d closed down the dining room and recite long, fluent descriptions of the evening’s courses, whispered to her so as not to wake up the man from whom she rented her room. She liked most how he spoke of the cheeses and all the ways he sought not to say “stinky” — though they both loved the stinkiest bleus, which some nights he would palm from the kitchen, along with an unfinished bottle of Dom left by one of his regulars, and he would pull taut the linen of her sheets and carefully lay out a cheese course, which their lovemaking would inevitably dismantle. She knew that she should not fall for this…

Continue reading online.

 

Parenthetical for Our Tenth Year

Leaving the whole sky overhead,

a guywire of ridgeline holds

to this low grove where our cabin sits

within white pines, yearly shedding

 

their parentheses to the forest floor.

Inside, we whisper and cough,

hum the slow curve of bodies.

Our asides become our plot.

…

Continue reading online.

 

The Late Radical Reckons Mr. Baldwin

This isn’t going to work out,

America.

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New Poetry by Rose McLarney

Four new poems by alumna Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appear online in Waxwing:

Facing North

How articulate, the eyes

of silent animals when I chose

to shoot the sick goat. All day,

the dogs would not look at me, not

let me touch them, legs folding away from

the level to which I had lowered my hand.

…

Continue reading online. 

 

The Model Walks Aways From A Job

Tonight, when the trainload of coal, trailing ash

from the power plant, passed, I had no mournfulness left

for the suffering caused by the energy my lights

spend. Like the film images of the clouds that form

when the mountains are blown apart — how they pulse,

fill the screen, obscure everything — …

…

Continue reading online. 

 

I Float

When the river flooded, when

I was a child, I boated

around the fields. And so it began,

my myth-making. I recall that altered time

foremost. I float.

 

Transformative washes

over the world — the time of evening when

I can have a drink, being in love,

the lyric way of speaking — that’s what

I’ve turned out to live for.

…

Continue reading online.

 

What Music Should Accompany This

If there was a score to those years,

it was the somber percussion

 

of feed in a bucket, how we would

shake grain to call the cows, chickens,

 

kibble to call the dogs, call voicelessly

whatever would come. We spoke softly.

…

Continue reading online. 

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“Exit From Hockeytown” by Matthew Olzmann

A new piece by alumnus and former Beebe Fellow Matthew Olzman (poetry, ’09) appears online in Some Call It Ballin:

Exit From Hockeytown

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Sometime early in my parent’s marriage, a “news” story aired on one of the major networks in Detroit. My aunts and uncles tell several versions of the story, but the one I remember best goes like this:

The reporter looks at the camera and says, Despite hockey’s popularity in the area, few people know where hockey pucks come from, or how they’re made.

They grow on trees.

Not many people know this but there’s a type of tree where the sap leaks out, drips from the bark, and collects at the end of the branches. As it hardens, it slowly turns into nearly perfect rubber discs. These are harvested and used as pucks on ice rinks everywhere. 

…

Continue reading online.

 
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New Work by Jenny Johnson

Two new poems by alumna Jenny Johnson (poetry, ’11) appear online in Waxwing:

Little Apophat

Your child is a little lion cub

ready to tear into

a hunk of antelope is

a fuse bursting into

electric sprays of light

is trouble, you

say, like me. Has

your eyes though, pale

as the eggs of quail.

…

Continue reading online. 

Dorothy’s Trash:

No dog-eared copy of The Price of Salt,

no nude drawings from a community art class,

no painstakingly Kinseyian inventories,

no anagram tucked in a World Atlas

where the Tapajós and Amazon rivers meet,

no souvenir (stucco wasp nest?) legible as the one

Miss Bishop left, no tickets stubs,

no letter typed in future perfect:

You will have to lift the shag carpet beneath the oak dresser.

…

Continue reading online. 

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J.C. Todd Named a 2014 Pew Fellow

imgresAlumna J.C. Todd (poetry, ’90) has been selected as a 2014 Pew Fellow by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. From the announcement:

“J.C. Todd’s poems investigate the impact of war, with an insistent eye and ear on language. Her current project, War Zone, explores containments and outbursts of resistance, with sonnets that “complicate and contemporize the tradition of war poems.” Todd’s writing seeks out the tender moments that exist in contrast to devastation. “If language bears the trace of war, how can that be revealed and perhaps shaken loose?” she asks.”

…

Read the full announcement online.

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New Work by Kimberly Jean Smith

“Diptych: A Study of Flora and Fauna in Two Short Tales,” by alumna Kimberly Jean Smith (fiction, ’12) appears online in Shadowgraph Magazine: 

A Man of the Country

When walking city streets, I am often overcome by a strange sensation; there is no one left I haven’t seen. In the park, I spy a young lady. She wears a velvet skirt and too-tall heels, kicking dust into the face of the little dog following on a leather leash. With but a glance, the pair dismiss me, for the benches are filled with middle-aged men much as myself, sitting in once fine suits. I need only turn my head this way or that to see their fraying collars. Nevertheless, even with such dismissal are not the young woman, her dog, and I somehow linked? Why I saw a-nose-in-the-air-pair much like them last week. Just as yesterday, while waiting for the tram, I spotted an old man with thick glasses, looking exactly like a man I observed three years ago spitting grape seeds across the platform’s varnished floor. Or is this man, now staring at me blankly as if I were a stranger, the very man who has lived above me for years? Surely it is he who nightly crosses the room overhead with the aching pace of the infirm. Yes, I say to myself, I have already seen each of you.

…

Bird

When I was six years old, a pink and yellowing corpse, bright against a playground’s black asphalt, caught my downcast eyes––a hatchling, feathers unformed, fallen from its nest. I slipped it into my pocket quickly, for I did not want my classmates to see. I was afraid they would prod and kick the strange mass, which to me was already precious.

Understand, my father was away at war, and I was alone much of each day.

…

Continue reading online. 

 

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“Just a Bird” by Rosalynde Vas Dias

A new poem by alumna Rosalynde Vas Dias (poetry, ’06) appears online in Riverbabbble:

Afterwards, once she returns from wherever
that place was . . . the oriole—but of course,
it isn’t the same one. It is just a bird again.
Anyway, she never sees him—maybe once a year
she sees him. Or them. Not often. Once, then
not for years. But always suddenly still—
a quick check around—is she still right there?
Is the bird just an ordinary bird, the day still
clear, early spring—he is on his way somewhere—
and she sees herself—in the past or in a dream—
or maybe this is the dream, a brief reprieve—
she sees herself back there—a figure in a landscape—
like a sketch, like an idea, like the way an image
begins to bother you, at the edge of yourself—
just like the cat’s eye . . .

…

Continue reading online.

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“Tongue” by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

A poem by alumna Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ’09) appears online in Knot Magazine:

The tongue in the Dictionary

does all the defining

(It will never

be tried

at the Hague)

 

is a translucence

milked from a mature snake

…

Finish reading online.

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“Haben Sie Schleim?” by Geoffery Kronik

A new piece by alumnus Geoffery Kronik (fiction, ’12) appears online in The Common:

Because I had a roomy exit-row seat on a full plane to Berlin, I sent a photo of my gloriously unbent legs to my wife. A petty triumph, the frequent-flyer’s tame version of sexting. My seatmate was a small, physically non-intrusive man, but troublingly prone to coughs and sneezes.

The day after, in November drizzle, I walked from my hotel past the street where my great-uncle used to live. I never saw his home, but was intimate with its address from legal briefs and bank statements. Continuing to the historic KaDeWe department store, I paused before its tinsel-garroted window mannequins. I felt a familiar temporal shiver, a generational shift into events I longed to understand but had not lived in the first place. Jean Améry wrote “no one can become what he cannot find in his memories.”

When I was in my teens, my great-uncle worked at the KaDeWe in the men’s department. He sat before customers and helped them buy shoes, but I did not know this until my mother told me years later. He had returned to Berlin in 1975, when I was twelve, forty years after he fled Hitler, and I never saw him again. A lifelong bachelor, with few friends and no children, he died in Berlin in 1998. He and I had no relationship that I knew of, until his death revealed a contractually binding one.

…

Finish reading online.

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“Native Species” by Rose McLarney

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

It was nearly still water, that river,
with no rapids talking, but she learned from it
the fish. First, noticing the one with a hard
maw for scraping the algae she ate off stone,
then all the ways beings were made to live
in those parts.

Molly crawl bottom had a downturned mouth
for bottom feeding. The commonest
fish, living even in ditches, Mollies found ways
to make do. And she could identify them
in however much murk because of how long
she’d spent staring at the same places.

…

Continue reading online. 

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