2002 fiction alum David Rutschman was recently featured in Defunctmag. Read an excerpt of “The Father Becomes a Cloud” below:

The Father Becomes a Cloud

Slowly, over years, the father becomes a cloud. At first only occasionally, around the edges.

The mother tries to sort out next steps.

The doctor asks him the day of the week, to count backward from 100 by 7’s.

The doctor names three objects: an orange, a pen and   something else  and later asks him to repeat the three. Dirty trick.

Other doctors, scans.

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://defunct.site/issue/9/authors/42/david_rutschman/134/the_father_becomes_a_cloud

Meg Stout, a 2020 poetry alum, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of Stout’s poem “Hinge” below:

Hinge

In memory’s eye, I imagine my grandmother,
lithe as a willow tree, swinging
the vacuum across a high pile
carpet, washing a dish in the sink
overlooking the suburban marsh
she never visited. Her life a stop sign
to pleasure, hand held up
to a subdued face, guarded.

Read this poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-12-meg-stout/

Fiction faculty member Charles Baxter was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of Baxter’s poem “The Last Sign” below:

The Last Sign

A weekend drive: and we got lost just west
Of Waconia, near the lake whose name you couldn’t
Pronounce, though we knew it sounded like “Whisby” or
“Wherby,” and around then, cresting over a hill
We came to a green stretch of somebody’s farm,
The grass so saturated it might have been boiled
In paint, and you said, behind the wheel, “What
Have they done with the signs?” and sure
Enough, someone or something had taken down
The mileage marker to town X, also the name of the river
Over whose chuckling rivulets we were now crossing…

Read this poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-12-charles-baxter-2/

Poetry faculty member Eleanor Wilner was recently interviewed for the Harvard Review. Read an excerpt of the interview below:

Julie Swarstad Johnson: In your prefatory note to Gone to Earth, you describe the experience of writing a poem as “what the ancients called the muse, what Wanda Coleman called ‘zoning,’ a term [that] signals the opening to another zone or state of being.” Once the poem is finished, the poet becomes one of its readers and encounters it in a new way. As you came back to these early poems, fifty years on, did you become a reader of these poems in a different sense, given the greater separation across time? Had you returned to these poems in any significant way prior to this time?

Eleanor Wilner: At the time I wrote these, I think I read them with amazement at the work of imagination, and as guides, sometimes admonitions—a way forward through troubled times. And yes, altered by all these years, I read them now with different eyes, disinterested really, as if I were (and perhaps am) a different person, no longer with a personal stake in them. Yet, like old friends I hadn’t seen in years, I felt glad to see them; they had served me well.

To your second question: no, I had not returned to reread these poems in all the years since I wrote them. Perhaps because they did the work they were meant to, and so could be left behind.

A few of them, however, seemed fundamental to the work of poetic imagination and had remained in memory, not word-for-word but in their imagistic action. But when I unearthed them for this book, I discovered that those I remembered as illuminating and key to the process that followed, memory had simplified, made more emblematic—removing some of the ambiguities, the cross currents and complexity. In short, time and distance tended to exaggerate the positive, life-serving side of what transpired in the poems, which, in the long run, turned out to be true to their effect. And why shouldn’t hindsight create its own version of what mattered most?

Read this interview in its entirety here: https://harvardreview.org/content/fire-from-an-open-hand-an-interview-with-eleanor-wilner/

2019 poetry alum Sarah Audsley was recently featured in Defunct. Read an excerpt of Audsley’s poem below:

Still Life with Watermelon Seeds, Mannequin, Dead Mouse

Serrated edge flash shards of light on white walls, carving

up the watermelon slices that drip juice down our thin

brown arms, my father salts his pink slice-smiles, tiny

grains melt in. A neon sign, in my mouth, this shock of fruit-flesh.

Don’t swallow the seeds! he warns & I want to so bad & I’m bad

under the covers, eyes shut, I see twisted vines tumble, roots

embed in my stomach’s black, new green shoots slide

over my thick pink tongue . . .

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://defunct.site/issue/9/authors/64/sarah_audsley/124/still_life_with_watermelon_seeds_mannequin_dead_mouse