Alumni Mike Puican (poetry, ’09) is the featured poet of the current issue of After Hours.
Six of his poems, including “Durango” and “The Magi Ask for Directions,” appear in the Summer 2013 print issue.
A new poem by alumni Nathan McClain (poetry, ’13) appears online in The Collagist:
Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden, with Koi
Near the entrance, a patch of tall grass.
Near the tall grass, long-stemmed plants;
Each bending an ear-shaped cone
To the pond’s surface. If you looked closely,
You could make out silvery Koi
Swishing toward the clouded pond’s edge
Where a boy tugs at his mother’s shirt for a quarter.
To buy fish feed. And watching that boy,
As he knelt down to let the Koi kiss his palms,
I missed what it was to be so dumb
As those Koi. I like to think they’re pure,
That that’s why even after the boy’s palms were empty,
After he had nothing else to give, they still kissed
His hands. Because who hasn’t done that—
Loved so intently even after everything
Has gone? Loved something that has washed
Its hands of you? I like to think I’m different now,
That I’m enlightened somehow,
But who am I kidding? I know I’m like those Koi,
Still, with their popping mouths, that would kiss
Those hands again if given the chance. So dumb.
A new work by Dana Huebler (fiction, ’00), “Our Two Babies,” appears in Brain, Child:
My parents announced the news one night after supper, a few weeks after I’d started first grade.
“We have a surprise for you,” my father began in his deep, professorial voice, a smile tugging at his lips.
“Something new is coming to our house,” my mother added coyly.
“What?” I demanded.
“You have to guess,” my father answered, smiling fully now.
“We’re getting a new car?” my brother, Dorne, guessed. At 11, a replacement for our old Rambler was about the only surprise that could generate any excitement in him.
My parents shook their heads.
“A pony?” my nine-year-old sister, Darcy, offered, giving voice to the dying hope that one day she’d wake up to find a pony grazing in our backyard.
“No,” my father said, with a dry chuckle.
“A monkey!” I shouted. If my sister could reach for the impossible, so could I. But the fantasy evaporated with the laughter that erupted around me. “A monkey?” Darcy sneered.
I looked at our reflections in the kitchen window, where the black night pressed against the glass. I could almost taste the bracing chill of autumn. That year, caught up in the excitement of starting first grade, I was falling in love with fall: the abrupt shift in weather, the vibrant colors of the leaves, the crisp, deep blue of the October sky. On a clear autumn day, I could pretend I was living in a picture-perfect New England village instead of a drab, dying mill town on the Merrimack River.
As I gazed at our images on the glass, the answer came to me with a flash of certainty so clear I hardly raised my voice. “A baby,” I said, looking to my parents for confirmation. They smiled, then nodded, and a sweet light flooded through me. Even though the baby wouldn’t be born until spring, I shivered with the sense of change electrifying my world. I felt as though I’d been given a precious gift, one that I’d have to wait months to receive.
…
New fiction by Nan Cuba (fiction, ’89) appears online at Fictionaut:
Gerald’s law practice wasn’t new. He’d worked on the law review and finished near the top of his class thirty years ago. After earning his J.D., he’d gotten a master of law in taxation. His favorite cases required researching legal precedents, and he enjoyed debating theory and legal history with friends. At $150 an hour, he should’ve been able to pay bills and still take home a comfortable profit. In fact, it would’ve been more than he needed—he preferred smaller, makeshift, secondhand—and enough to impress Harriet. Instead, he always ran on empty, scrambling when a bill was due, using quarters from his change jar for gas, reluctant even to take Harriet to a restaurant or movie, “Because,” he’d say, “we probably shouldn’t be spending that money right now.” Most of his former classmates were rich. Why, Harriet asked, couldn’t he make enough to cover everything? She worried that everyone else wondered that, too.
Every week day, Gerald read contracts, making copious notes. He took clients’ phone calls, explaining his progress, calming fears about the IRS, postponing document revisions and research until the weekends when, instead of fly fishing, he could work uninterrupted. He had only a part-time receptionist, a recent high school graduate he hoped he could train to file and fill out forms. His office was a single room in the back of an old house that needed paint. No air conditioning or heat, but the rent cost less than his phone. Although his suits were professionally cleaned and pressed, his cuffs were frayed. He used spot remover on his ties and shirt fronts. A dent creased the right side of his car; the side-view mirror hung from two blue wires and swayed whenever he turned a corner.
Once, a prospective client pointed outside the receptionist’s office window at a maroon Dodge that rattled into the parking lot. “I’m glad that’s not my lawyer,” he said. Later in the waiting room, the receptionist introduced him to its driver, Gerald, who was handling the case. When Gerald got home that evening, he found Harriet in her personal office. After sharing the receptionist’s story, he laughed.
“That’s not funny,” Harriet said. She sat at her desk where she’d been checking housing statistics on her computer. “What’s the matter with you?” She took off her glasses, slumped in her ergonomic chair. Her right hip felt like a nail had been shoved into its joint. “It’s embarrassing.” She didn’t care if she sounded critical. She couldn’t stand him being the butt of a joke. “We’ve got to get you a different car.”
“Yeah, right after our trip to Europe.” He’d wanted her to laugh, but as soon as he said it, he cringed. He fiddled with unopened mail on the glass-top table next to her desk.
“You know what? I’m tired, Gerald.” Her chin quivered as she raised it higher. “I kill myself in an impossible market, impossible, but whatever I bring home evaporates.”
“I know, I know,” he mumbled. What could he ever do to repay her? he wondered. He still couldn’t believe that she’d married him. Sometimes, though, her disappointment felt like a dreaded day in court. “Please stick by me just a little while longer,” he said.
Continue reading online at Fictionaut.
“Every Good Woman Has an Ax,” a new story by alumni Elizabeth Eslami (fiction, ’03), appears online in The Manhattanville Review:
PART ONE
Someone said the day Isla Corlett married The Great Cullion of the West, all the winter boxelder came unfurled. That bitches whelped unfinished pups, that Pumpkin Creek spilled its banks. Over a single April night, foggy and damp, the snow drew itself back, and the hard buds split. Magpies turned away from their eggs, so went the story. Clouds of bees, clouds of birds. The smell of plow horses and dead elk steamed from the ground.
But there was no red moon, nor fish-headed babies born. It was only a dry wind blowing, a simoom thawing the cold earth a little.
Idle people did love to talk.
It might have been, in the end, the marvel of the trains. Screaming through the early mornings, carrying glass from Minneapolis, silk on fabric wheels and stout bags of grain piled seven cars across. Novel enough that if you heard train-whistle or breath, felt its heartbeat through the ground, you went out to watch for it.
You might believe anything was coming.
“A unique tale of love, commitment and redemption. In “Mammals,” an orphaned teenager sent to juvenile detention because of a violent crime becomes part of an odd experiment to see if he can learn about compassion and also teach it to another living creature. The story displays sensitivity without sentimentality and a sense of the strange that is grounded in very real emotions. A thoughtful and unusual gem.”“Poe,” a new story by V.C. Shapira (fiction, ’98), appears in this month’s TriQuarterly:
The well-heeled couple strolling arm and arm discussing the upcoming presidential race had already agreed that General Zachary Taylor would be elected the new president. All the newspapers were extolling the general’s triumphant exploits during the Mexican War, resulting in the annexation of a great swath of land connecting the territory of Texas with distant California. They agreed it was god’s will.
On one of those humid afternoons familiar to those who live in the South, the gracious lady was cooling herself with a silk fan when she stopped abruptly. In the most prosperous neighborhood in all of Richmond City, Virginia, a derelict was blatantly occupying a park bench reserved for her kind alone.
“Dear,” the gentlewoman whispered, elbowing her husband. “It’s preposterous what license these people take. We cannot allow these laggards to invade our community. Already they roam the city at will. Wave him away, will you dear?” …
A new poem by Joanne D. Dwyer (poetry, ’09) appears in the current issue of New England Review:
Descent by Rope If a throne is an angel of the seventh-highest order out of nine possible heights, and you suffer vertigo, will you be satisfied being a bottom floor angel? Bargain basement, Everything’s-On-Sale angel? The South American woman at the gym whose sweatpants have the word Angel stenciled vertically down the leg will not look me in the eye and is almost always breaking the no-cell-phone rule, talking so heatedly, a la Latina, while on the rowing machine. In the locker room I am a voyeur watching her blow-dry her hair, even in summer, when the sun would do the same without injury. Her hair as thin as a queen ant’s wing which unfastens the instant she mates. I told you last night that it is ironic that I have seen more women’s breasts than you. I recently laid my eyes on the prototype adolescent Eve – the most beauteous body I have ever seen coming out of a public shower. A body that illuminated more than any library of books or cave of echolocating microbats or remnants of chandeliers. And understood for the first time the concupiscence of the old for the young. And just as it is well past the era of electrocuting communists, it is well past the era of seeing the snake as penis or messenger-boy of the devil. The new symbology of the snake is exemplified in the new creed of the three R’s: The rinds of limes under a pillow, a bottle of Rogaine and the unharnessed rappelling down the ravine without a reality show there to film you. The willing, non-oppositional, come-to-me mama dying and then the ingesting of your own death, as if death was a carton of dyed ostrich eggs or a fanny-pack full of trail mix that will get you up and over the mountain pass, even in the snow, with Nazis chasing you. And at the fin de siècle, after crossing the border, you are reunited with your soul mate or your first childhood pet. And for the lucky, the two are one in the same. You wed soon after your frostbite heals, but before a background check is run on you. And for the lucky, your betrothed doesn’t care you were a stripper and that most of your best work was scribed in that era when you were saturated of libations and libertine slogans and sale underwear. And lead in the boots of the messengers in the form of Revolutionary War musket balls to keep them closer to the saltgrass, to the humidity of ants and resurfacing crushed beer cans. Look at the folded latticed wing of a hibernating angel, just now unhinging its eyes, rising through the air like caustic powdered sugar in the bakery warm from the bread ovens. And though there are new forbidden fruits, and new machinery replacing red wheelbarrows – the truck drivers are still pulling off the road to sleep.Dwyer’s first book of poems, “Belle Laide,” has recently been published by Sarabande Books (2013).
“Rain Meditation” by Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ’09) appears online at 3 Quarks Daily:
Heat is eerie: lipsticks left unrefrigerated melt into deformity, ice cream liquefies and renders the scoop useless; fruit and flower stalls carry the smell of that peculiar cusp between ripe and rotten.
Then rain comes, licking the sky green; the veil between the mysteries and the sun-weary, bleached and hardened world dissolves away, becoming thin as a glassy insect wing. A dusty estrangement washes out, newly woven silken webs everywhere; meditation is possible again.
Clarity makes me humble: I’m smaller than a melon seed, slighter than a fishbone. I’m the moisture in the air and the movement in antennae; I’m filament and feelers, the quiver within the quiver, the wet crease in the smallest leaves. I’m also a rusty door hinge, static on television, soaked clothesline, scurrying lizard, the moving minute hand on the timepiece that is suddenly ticking louder; Rain changes the acoustics entirely— each syllable, sob, twitter, footfall, turning of a knob, is distinct. The airwaves have cleared and the cosmic channels open up.
I watch the raindrops make rings on the surface of a mossy cistern: water bangles! I imagine the continuously disappearing rain bangles on my wrists. Leaves float, throats are stirred into singing: a frog’s croaking has a timbre of energy today, as if it is charging the earth in its deep, steady way.
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