A story by alumna Tracy Winn (fiction, ’02) appears online in an audio recording at The Drum. Follow the link to hear “Another Way to Make Cleopatra Cry” in the February 2014 issue.
A new poem by alumna Jayne Benjulian (poetry, ’13) appears online in The Ilanot Review:
Kaddish
In the attic deep enough for twenty
childhoods, an autograph book,
Oak School No. 3, resplendent in gold,
zipper teeth around the pastel sheets,
her signature in shaky cursive.
Bundled in blankets, smaller than
a ten-year-old, fingers cold,
she must have found it awkward
to hold a pen.
…
Finish reading online at The Ilanot Review.
A new poem by alumna Faith S. Holsaert (poetry, ’82) is published online in Glass:
The Last Day
-after Lucille Clifton
I will ride a freckled mare
Into the sturdy mother oaks,
the bending birches of the aunt,
the moody autumn maple of the father,
the dogwood gleaming from inside she
bitch lover I chose.
…
Finish reading online at Glass.
New work by alumnus Matthew Zanoni Muller (fiction, ’10) is published in Rappahannock Review:
Lights
On Saint Martin’s Day in Germany the children would go into the dark woods carrying their lanterns in long snakes of colored lights, orbs in the darkness bobbing up and down on unsteady arms, held and reached by their mothers. I stuck in close to my father’s rough coat, felt the cold melting into his pockets where he kept his tissues and plastic spoons and sugar packets. Inside of that coat was his warmth and his belly and the belt around his black jeans. I clung to his body at night when I walked into my parents’ dark room to escape the darkness of my own, where the faint light cut across to where my brother lay on the other end of the long dark open wood floor, sleeping.
…
Finish reading online at the Rappahannock Review.
A new story by alumna Lara Markstein (fiction, ’13) appears online in the journal Necessary Fiction:
Abduction at the Deluxe Kwik-Trip Pump
I was abducted at the Deluxe Kwik-Trip pump. Yet more proof that supporting local business has its benefits. It is not easy getting abducted, you see. It was May, and I’d been angling for a kidnapping since tax season in March.
The reason: I discovered my husband’s life insurance policy.
Tim is an oncologist. He is paid a tidy sum to save generally unhappy, but suddenly valuable lives. If he were to die, a check for three million dollars would arrive in the mail. A figure like that makes a girl think.
…
Continue reading online at Necessary Fiction.
Work by alumna Kate Greathead (fiction, ’11) appears online in The Hairpin:
The Best Time I Learned My Last Name Means Blow Job
As a shy, late bloomer with a nervous twitch in my eye, I didn’t particularly enjoy high school. I was consistently the last one to get a joke, with the exception of dirty jokes, which I usually didn’t get at all. This sense of being on a different wavelength from my peers led to a paranoid, left-out feeling—like nobody knew I existed, and at the same time, they were all laughing at me behind my back.
One night after dinner in tenth grade, my mom said there was something she wanted to “talk about.” My first thought was that my mom had seen one of those TALK TO YOUR KID ABOUT SEX commercials and I’d have to confess I’d never even kissed a boy, which I knew to be pathetic at my age. To my relief, it wasn’t sexual relations my mom wanted to discuss, but our last name. Which is Greathead. Spelled like it sounds: the word GREAT, then the word HEAD.
…
Finish reading online at The Hairpin.
“Appearance of the Deer Woman: Diptychs” by alumna Laurie Saurborn Young (poetry, ’08) appears in Tupelo Quarterly:
I.
The afternoon of the day she dies, my grandmother reminds me to check the weather before driving home from the hospital, in case the growing thunderheads decide to unleash a torrential rain.
Some oil, a little water, and those bald tires of yours will get you into trouble, she says, straightening her wig. My mother, feeding her bits of ice from a Styrofoam cup with a small plastic spoon, nods. Think of the baby.
After a two-hour drive on dry roads, I arrive home with the baby intact and asleep. The phone on the kitchen counter rings. It is loud on the other end of the connection, as if my mother is eating the ice she recently fed my grandmother. Though by now, the ice is melted. The crunching sound is tears between receiver and chin.
Holding the baby, who squirms in her rumpled two-piece embroidered with daisies, I walk out into the backyard and stand in the shade of a sweetgum tree. A woman with the face of a deer steps out of the bamboo. I blink, and her face vanishes behind the wind. On the other side of the fence, our neighbors begin throwing empty beer bottles against their garage door.
When she returns home that evening, I run toward my mother, waving two tissues in the humid August air.
…
Finish reading online at Tupelo Quarterly.
New work by Joan Frank (fiction, ’96) appears online in TriQuarterly:
In Case of Firenze
Banishing the Voices
See the mouths open before you finish telling them you’re going.
Watch the breath being drawn. Watch the lecture-on-the-brink fire their gazes:
(Here is what you should do. Here is what you must see. There’s where you’ll find the darling old couple who will cook you the Renaissance Special. This is the exact street and stall and name to ask for and what you must understand to the roots or you cannot possibly claim to know anything about it.)
(Here is what you must think and feel about this ancient, compressed dream of red-tiled roofs and mustard and rust, salmon pink ochre, cocoa, café crème, Roman archways showing through in patches, fading frescoes across marble. Chunks of felled columns. Seven bridges over a brown river boiling through town day and night throwing light; cold mist cloaking the air, palazzi aligned like tired dowagers reporting to duty. Dark, icy museums packed with dusty relics. Long, sorrowful windows, splintering shutters. Towers of mossed stone buttressed by a sea of Tuscan green; carved passages surging with anthill traffic, cavalcades of light.)…
Continue reading at TriQuarterly.
Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse (poetry, ’12), with Soran Azad, has a new translation, of a poem by Jamal Khambar in Words Without Borders:
If You See Fatima
Translators’ note: Maria was the name of a girl murdered in an honor killing in Sweden; Fatima Shahindal was killed for the same reason a few years before Maria.
Maria,
If you see Fatima, tell her
They are still here, the women-killers, still here with knives,
Waiting.
Tell her still
This darkness, this killing devours us, all our seasons.
Tell Fatima
This atmosphere changes from one song to another,
One sea flies to another,
One garden gives rain to another.
….
Read more at Words Without Borders.
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.”
…
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