“The Chapel of Want,” a poem by Colleen Abel (poetry, ’04) appears online at A River & Sound Review.
What was your heart like?
Dropped crumbs in a wide forest
Slow drip slow chant
In the chapel of want
One said he will not live
Long like this
Your body sounding a bell
To my body …[Keep Reading]…
Colleen is the author of the chapbook Housewifery (2013, Dancing Girl Press).
“Three Rooftops,” a poem by Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) appears online at Driftless Review.
It happens on rooftops: the jump, the cut, the kiss smack between the stripper’s
breasts, your lover holding her lips right there, watching you watch.October, 2001, Chinatown highrise apartment building, flags of restaurants and America
whipping below, before the sordid and banal became photographedon phones, dilated cyclopean eyes, sent to other eyes across the globe, across the room,
the rooftop. Now she’s dancing with some guy, some dude, tall and lanky like you
Read more
Three poems by Abigail Wender (poetry, ’08) appear online at New Orleans Review.
House on the Bluff
In winter you strapped the canoe
to the basement ceiling,every rib written in silt.
Every year the huge lake froze,ice figures clawed
and covered the pier.Even in summer we shivered with cold,
my two brothers and I,the lake growing inside us,
farther from your shore.
“Bay Conjury,” a story by Faith Holsaert (fiction, ’82) appears online at Watershed Review.
I am Madeleine who was nicknamed Dunk.
I knew the machines, I knew the land, I knew the outbuildings and the barns and the livestock they sheltered. They were my body. He’d trained me up to be his son, his little farmer. The white envelope cut into me like the blade of a plow, working me, preparing me. We both knew the white envelope bushwhacked his plan.
Last night Isolde, with her slanting cheekbones and her Russian accent said, “No way emergency preparedness. We will be bush whacked.” She was carrying a 1940s handbook of English idioms.
Jackson with his feist dog held against his chest said, “I dated a guy whose tag was BushWhack.”
“To live or travel in the wild,” Isolde said.
One of the first photos I took was in the dusky bottom near the creek. The sun was behind me, and I was facing downhill, standing on the edge of my great long shadow laid out in the blue pooled at my feet.
I told myself when the day rolls around for another missed payment, I’ll get on a plane, leave the house, leave LaFayette, leave Indiana.
Already I hear someone else running the water in my shower. …[Keep Reading]…
“He Sent Flowers,” a short story by Christine Hale (fiction, ’96, Beebe Fellow, 2005) appears in Shelter: The 2012-2013 Issue of Mandala Journal.
When I was still a newbie volunteer at the safe house for battered women in upstate New York, the director sent me, because no one else was available that day, on a salvage mission. A woman who’d run away from a beating and a gun needed a ride back to the home she’d shared with her abuser to pick up her things. The law, public awareness, and the attitude of police departments toward domestic violence as a criminal rather than family matter was still forming in the early eighties, and activists—resources for victims were not yet the province of social services departments—had learned the hard way how much could go wrong. The director gave me careful instructions. Call the local police before driving to the woman’s home, and ask them to meet us there—to observe that we observed the law, and as deterrence in case the abuser, who was supposed to be at work, got a tip from a friend or neighbor and showed up armed and angry. Stay in the car, no matter what, while the woman went in for her things, so that no one, including she, might later allege that I’d committed a burglary. Tell the woman to hurry, and remind her that if she insisted on rescuing a pet, we’d have to take it to a vet who’d agreed to provide temporary safe haven for non-human victims. …[Keep Reading]…
Christine is the author of Basil’s Dream
Poet Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09; Beebe Fellow, ’12) was recently interviewed by Stacy Parker Le Melle for The Huffington Post.
Every time I’ve heard you read, you make the audience laugh. I mean, really laugh. Have you ever been surprised by audience reactions? How important to your process is audience reaction?
I think the “idea” of an audience is important for any writer. What I mean is that it’s important to remember as artists, we’re not simply trying to tell the audience about an experience, but create an experience in which they are — to varying degrees — participants.
Take for example, something as simple as metaphor. If the poet says, “The moon is a coin,” that expression is completed by the reader connecting the two parts of the expression, and determining how those parts are alike: the moon and the coin are round, they shine, they have some kind of symbolic value, etc. This happens in the mind of the reader, and if you multiply that private moment by a hundred or thousand similar moments, you have the cumulative experience of a piece of writing. For that piece of writing to be “successful,” the writer has have at least some awareness about how readers might respond to each of the pieces placed before them.
Matthew is the author of the poetry collection Mezzanines
Nathan Poole (fiction, ’11) has won Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.
Our contest season has come to a close, and Edith Pearlman has made her decision. The winner of the 2013 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction is Nathan Poole for his collectionFather Brother Keeper.The prize includes a $2,000 cash award, publication of a collection of short stories, novellas, or a short novel, and a standard royalty contract.
Read more at Sarabandebooks.org
Maya Smith Janson (poetry, ’06) talks about where she writes at the Orion Magazine blog:
Any attempt to speak to where I write becomes tangled-up with the when and how and why, the where of it existing as just one element in a formula that involves interiors and exteriors, a sort of psychic littoral zone that has to do with looking inward and outward at the same time. Has to do with being stationary and concentrated and mobile and expansive. Both parts equally important, the whole endeavor influenced by factors seasonal and situational and temperamental.
For example, this past January, in order to meet a commitment to write every day, I began rising before dawn and wrote until sunrise. This meant I had an hour or so before daylight and the stirring of my family signaled the end of the day’s early work. The assignment required that I develop a new routine. First rule: no houselights. I stoked the woodstove and boiled water in the dim light provided by my bicycle headlamp. Then, for reasons mostly romantic, I wrote in the small globe of light afforded by one candle, looking through the French doors out to the snowed-over yard.
Five a.m., but not really dark, the yard bright with snow and illuminated by what I came to think of as dual moons. The real one and a small, domesticated one in the form of a solar-powered paper lantern hung on an ornate iron crook in the dormant Budleja bed. The actual moon waned toward mid-month, then waxed to full by its end. It featured large in my writing. Every poem in some way moonie, moon-soaked. (Did I notice a small, brightening of mood in the lines on the page as the moon returned, fattened, taking up more space within the white pines as it drifted from east to west? I did.) …[Keep Reading]…
“Gerald Ford,” a short story by Matthew Simmons (fiction, ’08), first published in Melville House, was recently included in the 2013 Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions:
GERALD FORD
by Matthew Simmons
Gerald Ford wakes up. He’s the president of his own morning. He opens both his eyes at the same time, like a president does. He is ready.
Gerald Ford wakes up and does one push-up. He takes four deep breaths. He gently slaps his face ten times: both hands, both palms, his cheeks, gets the blood flowing. He cracks his neck and cracks his back.
Gerald Ford opens the window and looks outside. It is spring. It looks like it’s going to be a nice day. He takes one more deep, deep breath, and he smiles.
And from somewhere out in this very nice day, he hears a shout:
“The fuck you pardon Nixon for?” he hears.
“I did it for America,” says Gerald Ford. And he slams shut his window and puts on his clothes. …[Keep Reading]…
“Little Wife,” a story by Lara Markstein (fiction, ’13) appears in the latest issue of The Greensboro Review.
We are leaving Elizabeth City in a week. The bus tickets and a wad of twenty-dollar bills crunch between my thin mattress and the crooked slats of the bed at night. I haven’t told Tuyen we’re going, yet. She’s only eight and asks too many questions, and there’s not enough time to prepare Mom’s memorial and explain to her how I am not a thief.
I tried to get a job that summer at Pizza Hut so we could run away. From the storms and the way the gas stove leaked and the mold in the bottom of the sink that stuck beneath my nails and Uncle, pick-pick-picking at the gaps between his teeth. Tuyen wanted me to work in a grocery store because there were whole aisles of candy she said she’d never tried. Twizzlers. Mars bars. Swedish Fish. But no groceries were hiring.
“Pizza Hut is,” she said between mouthfuls of sour jelly worms.
I said I’d stink of grease and thwacked a fish I’d caught for dinner against the dock where she sat watching me. Tuyen spat on her palm to clean the dirt from the hem of her dress.
“You could catch fish.”
The bass still flopped, so I hit it with a rock. Its belly shivered in the sun. In a bit, I’d slit the stomach, then saw the fish guts free from where they were fixed to the bone. The innards would float on the water, pointing down the river bend to where Will Johnson lived. Will Johnson played basketball and drove his brother Joe’s sedan.
“When we find Dad, will he buy me glitter shoes?” Tuyen asked.
“That mess on your dress looks like squashed Milky Way,” I said, ankle deep in warm June sludge. It was a clear day, full of stars. In the scales of the largemouth and the mud.
Read more in the print issue of The Greensboro Review.
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