2004 fiction alum Erin Stalcup was recently featured in Isele Magazine. Read an excerpt of “Anthony Bourdain” below:

Anthony Bourdain

At some point  we just admitted we didn’t know how to mourn. We, the de-ethnicized Americans. Jewish people know how to mourn. Mexican people know how to mourn. Indigenous people know how to mourn, within their individual tribal customs. But some of us have been here so long we forgot where we were from. A cultural framework shows you what to do, makes some decisions for you so you’re less at sea to process this thing that is impossible to process. They are gone. So. Wear black. Wear white. Sit shiva for seven days, forget about comfort, cover the mirrors, forget about appearance, that doesn’t matter now. Then stand up and go back to your life. Walk in jazz funeral processions, and the music will move from dirges to dance tunes. Chop up the body and feed it to the vultures. Bury the dead in a coffin shaped like something they loved in life, a rose or racecar or guitar. A year after their death, disinter the body and dance with it, dress it in new clothes, throw a parade, tell them all the news. Dismember, roast, and eat the dead. Kill a member of another tribe to satisfy your rage. Throw a shovelful of dirt on the coffin, each mourner. Take pictures of the embalmed body. Keep locks of hair. Leave the body with useful tools, your best jewelry, flowers, prepare them for the other side. Some communities still know what to do. But some of us lost loss, forgot.

The Irish Americans started inviting us to their merry wakes, their funerals. It helped. To celebrate their life joyfully, be intimate with the body, it worked for us to collectively remember why it was worth it to love them. Don’t cry, it will keep the soul here. Then to watch a public performance of mourning—that helped, too. We could watch a woman keen, and it made us feel more pity and sorrow than if we were to cry, and it purged us.

Maeve MacNamara—the most famous keener in the world—knew, though we didn’t, that the term catharsis was originally a medical term for the expelling of menstrual and reproductive fluids. What the body doesn’t need anymore, to restore balance. We all knew the term as the reason we turn to art, the reason seeing someone else play out a tragedy helps us with our own. When the keener straightens her shoulders, lets us see her tears, then walks away, we follow her out of that space.

So, we agreed upon consensual reverse colonization—Ireland didn’t impose their cultural customs on us, but they let us adopt them.

 

Read the rest of this story here: https://iselemagazine.com/2021/02/03/anthony-bourdain-erin-stalcup/

2021 fiction alum Koye Oyedeji was recently featured in AGNI. Read an excerpt of “The Last Train” below:

The Last Train

I could tell it was her, even from afar: the self-serviced closecropped hair, her zany leggings, and the neon Nike Flight windbreaker she always wore, no matter the season. And since Raven had no business being on campus, I gave it all a second look, knowing something was either off or about to go off. She looked wild. Like she was ready to kirk on someone, pacing up down the path like she had all this extra energy. Then Mr. K stepped out the school and saw her, and when she saw him, she mean-mugged him so bad I had an oh-shit moment: the whole time she’d been waiting on a teacher, and it kinda made sense it would be him. He ain’t stop or approach her or nothing though; acted like he ain’t even know her and walked the path across the lawn to where I was, with other students, waiting to catch the D2 bus to DuPont Circle. Clearly, he had nothing to say to her, which also kinda sorta made sense. She wasn’t even a student at the school anymore.

At the bus stop, students bounced off the fencing and fooled around dangerously close to the road, like hardheaded monsters— their mama and all them PSAs ain’t teach them nothing about nothing. Everyone shouting too—like they couldn’t hear themselves speak. A mash-up of fluorescent leggings, slides with mismatched socks, stonewashed denim jackets thrown over hoodies. We were an arts school, so we wore what we wanted, sans uniform in the name of self-expression and all that, forever pushing the limits, bending shit where it won’t break, driving the dean crazy with pants that hung too low and designer tears that revealed too much thigh. And we got out late because of our arts classes, so we were always hungry, an appetite for home, for the skate park, or to link up with friends who already had a two-hour head start. I was never pressed about it, I didn’t have anywhere to run to. My day ones were a geek squad, boys who’d set themselves up with a homework club, math, English, algebra. No thanks. I just wanted to write. And home was never the ideal place for that after school, because by the time I made it back northeast, my nana would have all these different chores waiting on me.

I watched Mr. K scan the bus stop, searching for any kids from his department. Students he had lectured, argued with, drilled the importance of writing into—show not tell; make it clever, cool, and meaningful. His words. He was pressed, too, about us acting accordingly in the communal parts of the school. We were not to comport ourselves like them thirsty Studio Tech kids, to be as showy as the vocal department, or as outwardly tormented as the theater kin. That was their bag. We were young writers. Hard workers who shunned the spotlight.

He brushed his pencil tie, locked eyes with me. I nodded and he nodded back. Then he did this thing he does, where he’d say your name to formally acknowledge you. Because he was British, though he’d want you to tell it how he saw it: Black British of Nigerian descent. But whatever, too many words. On the one hand, weren’t nothing African about the way he said “Malik,” all extra like, as if he was the host on Masterpiece Theater, but on the other hand, there was something distinctly African about his being, his belief in education, about having a pick-yourself-up attitude and dusting yourself off no matter what got the drop on you; something about the way he looked through you and judged what you could do, not who you were. He was against laziness, against too much pleasure. His whole thing was “Just listen to me and you’ll be okay.” I could deal most times, but sometimes that shit be annoying. Acting like immigrants have a monopoly on hard work or something. Go on with that mess.

 

Read the rest of this story here: https://agnionline.bu.edu/fiction/the-last-train/

2016 poetry alum Jill Klein was just featured in the Leon Literary Review. Read an excerpt of Klein’s poem below:

Ode to a List-Maker

You make fire
for the first time
and it’s like you tried to climb
out of the crib.
Burning up,
you check off
caroling
and sex.

You find the last sock
you were missing.
You’ve had
an orgasm.

Your pleasure is leisure
wear. Leisure is wearing pleasure
until it wears off. Check.

 

Read the rest of this poem here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-14-jill-klein/

2021 poetry alum Hannah Silverstein was recently featured in Dialogist. Read an excerpt of Silverstein’s poem “Propolis” below:

Propolis

Honeybees Survived for Weeks Under Volcano Ash After Canary
Islands Eruption
New York Times headline, 4 December 2021

We glued the pores of our city shut and ate
and ate—why not? Locked down, we gorged sweet stores,
we waggle-danced, and buzzed, and drank. The end
had come, the earth burped up cantankerous fumes,
florescent flames where lavender bloomed. Honey
glowed, it rivered bright, it flowed and sang,
and we sang, too, forgetting flight, forgetting
sky, and petal shades and anther-dust…

 

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://dialogist.org/poetry/2022-week-20-hannah-silverstein

2022 poetry alum Karen Hildebrand was recently featured in Defunct. Read an excerpt of Hildebrand’s poem below:

Visiting My 91 Year Old Mom at the Rehab Center

We face off — heavyweight to flyweight

Mom’s chair leather, mine mesh. She punches

down her tea mug, sending the cart into a spin.

I’m sparring with the best. Hundred degrees,

arid Colorado heat, Mom approaches the ring

in a droopy sweater, ankles blown twice normal.

 

Read the rest of this poem here:

https://defunct.site/issue/10/authors/117/karen_hildebrand/246/visiting_my_91_year_old_mom_at_the_rehab_center

Poetry alum Leigh Lucas was recently featured in Defunct. Read an excerpt of “September 12th” below:

September 12th

We sat, wrestled paper with markers and scissors and

 

held our own small fates,

 

in a homemade deck of spell-casting cards,

 

drawn perfect from memory —

 

deadly nightshades, unicorn horns,

 

black cats and a single prince.

 

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://defunct.site/issue/10/authors/122/leigh_lucas/250/september_12th

Poetry alum Martha Zweig was recently featured in Defunct. Read an excerpt of “Saffron Immolations” below:

Saffron Immolations

Sweet dreams of fire:

orange filmy sheets my mother snapped

afloat to make our beds with Mondays then

when I was small & fearless.

 

I was the tiger’s eye:

I made up the tiger’s mind & gave it its courage,

banished its shame, practiced its jungular amble

& let its long tongue loll.

 

Read the rest of this poem here: https://defunct.site/issue/10/authors/127/martha_zweig/258/saffron_immolations

Fiction faculty member Debra Spark was recently featured in Barnard Magazine. Read an excerpt of Spark’s essay about Alicia Jo Rabins (Poetry ’09) below:

Her Many Muses

Not long after the Bernie Madoff scandal broke, Alicia Jo Rabins ’98 started a yearlong artist residency on an empty floor of a Wall Street high-rise. At first, Rabins — a poet, musician, and Jewish educator — wasn’t sure what she’d produce. This was a time to be creative, but her mind kept turning to the disgraced financier who defrauded thousands of people. Here she was in the heart of the financial district — in his environs. How to understand the man who once operated the largest Ponzi scheme in history? And what about the individuals and families he impacted? Why was she even so curious?

When Rabins is interested in something, she has a tendency to dive in deep. In 1994, she arrived at Barnard, an accomplished violinist who wanted to be a poet. She left as a Phi Beta Kappa whose friendship (and subsequent study) with a Modern Orthodox classmate spurred a desire to immerse herself in Judaism. Previously a more-or-less-secular Jew, she moved to Jerusalem for a year of study but wanted more, so she stayed for a second year, then returned to New York and eventually earned a master’s in Jewish women’s studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

In 2008, she was still in the habit of immersing herself in all-consuming subjects, only now that was Madoff. In the end, she says of her obsession, “I did what any artist does when something drives them crazy — I made it into art.”

 

Read the rest of this essay here: https://barnard.edu/magazine/spring-2022/her-many-muses

Rabbit Pâté,” a poem by 2016 alum Jennifer Funk, was recently featured in Painted Bride Quarterly. Read an excerpt below:

Rabbit Pâté

It arrived this afternoon swaddled in plastic wrap and packed in ice, already beheaded
and de-furred, lustrous and pale.  Both creatures ready, the counter sanitized and clear,
Chef takes animal apart, parting limbs from torso with practiced hands

and a paring knife, shearing burgundy muscle loose from bone, his wrist loosening
tissue with swift flicks.  His frame mounts a shadow over the once-a-rabbit, the getting
comes easy, his synapses discharging from the memory grove: brain to bicep

to wrist to knife’s edge.  He stills, holds the heart a beat.  This heart, a rough
nugget of muscle, the size of a walnut…

 

Read the rest of this poem here: http://pbqmag.org/jennifer-funk-rabbit-pate/

2019 poetry alum J. Estanislao Lopez was recently featured in Zocalo Public Square. Read an excerpt of “What the Fingers Do” below:

What the Fingers Do

My daughter learned to point
in a cemetery.
There were many deaths that year.

The priests’ black shirts grew discolored from sweat.
Florists did well.
Pillowy, white fabric lined the open casket,

as if we were burying, with the body,
a bit of sky…

 

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2022/05/13/j-estanislao-lopez/chronicles/poetry/