Fiction alum Daniel Tam-Claiborne was recently featured in The Seventh Wave. Read an excerpt of “Tomorrow Will Be Even Brighter” below:

My roommate Wei Wei is different. He’s lying spread-eagle in bed, seemingly oblivious to my presence, wearing the dull grimace of an older brother forced to babysit a dim sibling. I clear my throat, trying to exonerate him from his perceived charge.

“Bieguan wo,” I tell him, taking a long drag and directing it toward the closed window. Most people find it impressive that I speak Mandarin. But Wei Wei says nothing, just paws at his shirt like he’s fanning a stove, and directs his attention back to the TV.

For ten years, I’ve done everything a foreigner can do in China. I managed a baijiu bar, taught English at a private kindergarten, ran my own guiding company for tourists. It hasn’t always been easy. I can’t count how many black-outs there’ve been on my street, or how much digouyou I’ve ingested, or how many VPNs I’ve burned through just to outpace the firewall. But there’s a certain recognition here I can’t get back home. After so long in China, life in America has begun to feel illusory. I pride myself on knowing the work-arounds, understanding which strings to pull to get things done.

Continue reading the story here: Tomorrow Will be Even Brighter by Daniel Tam Claiborne – The Seventh Wave

Daniel Tam-Claiborne on the web:

Daniel Tam-Claiborne (travelbreedscontent.com)

Daniel Tam-Claiborne (@datclaiborne) • Instagram 

Fiction alum Rose Skelton was recently featured in Alocasia. Read an excerpt of Skelton’s essay below:

Little Starts

When my wife and I marry in autumn, the seasons are all wrong. On our Philadelphia rooftop, spinach sprouts in the heat of late September and in early October, basil flourishes in pots. Summer flowers—petunias, fuchsias, geraniums—gush from other people’s window ledges. Tomatoes, fat and misshapen, line the counter of the vegetable shop across the street.

On the island in Scotland, where I am from, at this time of year I sleep under one, two, thick quilts, and rain slants sideways across the windows. The shops are void of all summer fruit. There, it is the season I gather mushrooms from the woods, when the cool wet weather pulses black trumpets from the loam. Horn of plenty, birch bolete, chicken of the woods, cep.

But in Philadelphia, the days are a humid stench that won’t let up. The woods, though I scour them, give up nothing to me.

Continue reading “Little Starts” here: https://alocasia.org/2022/06/21/rose-skelton-little-starts/

Rose Skelton on the web: https://rose-skelton.squarespace.com/

Rose Skelton on Twitter: Rose Skelton (@rosieskelton) / Twitter

Poetry alum Megan Pinto was recently featured in Guernica. Read an excerpt of Pinto’s poem below:

A Poem is a Landscape of the Mind

It was the winter of my life. Afternoons,
I watched light fade
from the faces of brownstones. I took
long, aimless walks by the water. Each day
more leaves fell. The starkness
of trees nearing winter,
their sheer nakedness. . .

My friend calls to tell me about a neighbor
who cornered her in the stairwell.
She describes standing perfectly still.

The shape of the lake nearing dusk,
its symmetrical, man-made enclosures.

Rumi speaks of sorrow as a clearing
of leaves, making space for joy. But what
to do with rage? And in such a desolate
landscape?

Read the rest of this poem–and hear Pinto read it–here: https://www.guernicamag.com/a-poem-is-a-landscape-of-the-mind/

Fiction alum Fred Arroyo was recently featured in Waxwing. Read an excerpt of “Mar Adrento (Sea Within)” below:

Mar Adrento (Sea Within) 

I heard my father’s sea

in the azure waves of his name,

and remember its animals

in that last hour before

he left for work.

He lifted me up

on top of the refrigerator,

sat down, drank his coffee,

laced up his boots.

Hijo, you are riding on the shoulders of a seahorse.

Read the rest of this poem here: https://waxwingmag.org/items/issue27/10_Arroyo-Mar-Adrento-Sea-Within.php