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

2019 alum Cynthia Dewi Oka was recently featured in the Massachusetts Review. Read an excerpt of “Poet, Formerly Known as Activist, Formerly Known as Child Of God” below:

Poet, Formerly Known as Activist, Formerly Known as Child Of God

Having lost my faith, again, in the given of an indifferent, discoverable order wherein my injuries might be filed alphabetically, safe from tsunamis and termites in color-coded cardboard boxes labeled International Relations, American History, Political Economy, the High Priestess, so that they might emerge aromatic, lipsticked, the day I am, at last, called to the podium of the ultraviolet narrative that is the stranger’s literary citizenship in this country, which admires distillation, as in, here is my venti cup of suffering, but also complexity, as in, can you detect the floral notes in it;

having fled my home, again, the gossiping bamboos, ax with its face buried in a stump in the yard, the front steps flecked with cigarette ash and occasionally, cat piss—details that for a while kept the sweetness at bay, sweetness I did not have the webbing to hold and therefore resisted with my life, leaving me brittle, my head a cauldron tipping from side to side, saying, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, in iron urgency—I was strict with it—determined to “channel my anger” as admonished by the nonprofit feminists, though relief would have been to waste it, to let scald in every direction…

 

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://massreview.org/sites/default/files/16_63.1Oka.pdf