2018 poetry alum Shannon Winston was recently featured in On the Seawall. Read an excerpt of “The Supermarket” below:

The Supermarket

When I read the cashier’s name tag — Penelope —
I think: she must be so lonely. She scans my almond butter,
and I imagine her response: I’m not your cliché.

Avocados wobble like Russian nesting
dolls across the conveyer belt,
along with chia seeds and refried beans.

When she grabs my oranges in their green plastic
netting with her knotted hands, does she think of weaving?
Some stitches let the light through,

others are wound so tightly they cut
her circulation off where she’s bitten her nails
down to the cuticle. There’s something about the slow sweep

of her arm: how easily she brushes away time,
and grief, slowly, deliberately, as if she has nowhere to be…

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://www.ronslate.com/the-supermarket/

Fiction alum Robert Fromberg was recently featured in Bullshit Lit. Read an excerpt of “The First Time He Said That Word” below:

The First Time He Said That Word

Wait, what is that expression on his face as he settles into the highbacked seat at the head of the conference table? We struggle to define it. We settle on this: self-satisfied yet expectant, as though the first pitch of the season has not been thrown, but he already sees himself being carried off the field on the shoulders of his teammates after winning the World Series, really singlehandedly, but good of his teammates to keep him company and offer their whoops, their hollers, their shoulders.

And what is he wearing? Around his neck and over his sports jacket, we see a scarf. A sharp one, we must admit, $340 worth of muted colors and wool as smooth as a puppy’s belly. But a scarf at a business meeting? Absolutely unheard of in the history of business meetings, at least any we have attended. But if anyone can pull it off, he can.

Do you want to know what mastery looks like? It looks like a short man relaxing in a highbacked conference room chair without his head being thrust awkwardly forward because it rests too low on a curved seatback designed for a taller person. We fellow smaller men around the table have tried and failed to accomplish this for years, while we women have never enjoyed the luxury of allowing ourselves to lean back in a conference room, and if any people of color or nonbinary sexual orientation were among us…well, none are. No wonder we attend to this man, no wonder we align (one of his favorite words) our followership with his leadership.

We all know something is coming. What? we ask ourselves, knowing it is beyond our station to answer such a question. When? we ask ourselves, knowing that our role is only to wait. We slide back from the edge of our seats. Such an act we are putting on in this conference room, pretending we are not as excited as a group of people in a conference room could be.

There! A pause between sentences. A slight lift of his eyebrows. A leaning forward from his relaxed position against the chairback. As if he is a general in an air-conditioned room far from the front line preparing to order an invasion, a director on a 1950s film set ready to shout “action,” a 21-year-old protester who later in life will become an ad man pulling back his arm before tossing a Molotov cocktail. We glance toward one another to see if we all have caught the signal. We have.

Read this piece in its entirety here: https://www.bullshitlit.com/post/the-first-time-he-said-that-word-by-robert-fromberg

Hannah Silverstein, a 2021 poetry graduate, was recently featured in the Cider Press Review. Read an excerpt of Silverstein’s poem below:

MRI With Enameled Buffalo Horn

(After “Monarch Buffalo Horn Cup,” a sculpture by Kevin Pourier)

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://ciderpressreview.com/cpr-volume-23-5/mri-with-enameled-buffalo-horn/

Fiction alum Candace Walsh was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Aging Out” below:

Aging Out (an excerpt from the novel in progress Cleave)

Franks and beans, canned tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Tuna noodle casserole, served in a series of chipped plates and bowls. If she was the eldest child in a foster home, she cooked. If someone else was older than her, she didn’t have to, but would clear the table or sweep the floor. She noticed how lazy girls got the boot, unless they got by in other ways.

How many houses had she lived in before aging out? The thick file under her bed could tell her, but she let the onionskin paper, index cards, triplicate layers, scalloped letters, clippings, and charts seethe in silence. They didn’t reveal the details of her life before child protective services took her away on the grounds of neglect. 

Veronica’s body kept secrets from her mind, but sometimes dropped hints. She didn’t like to see electrical cords slithering around on the floor, preferring to coil and tuck them behind furniture. She startled easily, at worst emitting raw little shrieks that gave way to fury. She rarely experienced an emotional tie with another person without wanting to stickily garland it with sex. If friendship was a house, none of Veronica’s rooms had doors. Even…no, especially if it was inappropriate. She must have released some etheric semaphore the vulpine teachers and dads of high school friends used to pick up on. And now that she was well into her twenties, she ended up in bed with friends’ husbands. In confidence, over tea, her friends disclosed good and bad qualities, best and worst moments, raciest requests. They were vetted. Nose hairs trimmed. Underwear clean.

These husbands emitted an ursine domesticity she liked to banish, to remind them of what they really were. As good as their opportunities. Panting, filthy, potent. When her friends told her their husbands were suddenly so much better in bed, she felt a mix of benevolence and pride. She’d almost roll her eyes and say, “You’re welcome.”  And best of all, if they ever got crosswise with her, she could detonate the truth with a smile.

But now that she had been born again in Pastor Steve’s church, the mars in her virtue had been washed clean by the blood of the lamb.

Read this piece in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-11-candace-walsh/

Fiction faculty member Liam Callanan was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Flight” below:

Flight

This is Mona’s favorite public market in Europe. She buys mint here, just to hold it, smell it, remind herself that yes, she’s landed, she’s actually here, in Rome.

Here, too, is the stall with the man she flirts with and the other man who flirts with her, and his wife, white-haired, seated, shelling beans, who never fails to reach for her hand and hold it tight and tell Mona what wonderful skin she has. And then she gives Mona a bean and bends back to her work—the bean is the woman’s signal that their exchange has ended and it’s time for Mona to move on—and good thing, because Mona would be susceptible, like Jack of beanstalk fame, to giving this old woman everything, anything, in return for another magic bean. The first time she gave her one, Mona stealthily pocketed it. The woman gave her a sharp glance, mimed it going into her mouth. So this Mona did. It tasted green and waxy and meaty and mealy and salty. It tasted like she was eating dirt. It tasted like a rebuke: never cook a vegetable again; always eat us raw.

Mona is American, 51, visiting (always). She’s breaking up today with Massimiliano, Italian, local, whose age she never did learn but whose tastes she knows well.

She thought to make a show of her announcement, meet him at, say, a real convent, but while scouting one, she got cold feet at the door. When a nun on her way inside asked, “can I help you?” Mona ran away, and found herself here, this market, again.

It’s the damn arrows. Painted on the pavement by someone who understands aviation. Has to be. Yellow arrows to the sides; white down the middle. Just like an airport: taxiways, runways.

The market, a mix of indoor and outdoor stalls, would have drawn her anyway: there’s always a musician, a rotating cast, some of whom the vendors tolerate less well than the others. There are two young men who not only look alike but, she’s learned, are actual twins who sell cheeses whose names and descriptions are untranslatable to her, though her Italian is decent after so many trips. The word purple always comes into the conversation for reasons she can’t identify—the cheese is not purple nor its rind—but she buys it because Massimiliano loves it.

Massimiliano loves rabbit, too, and that’s available, but she won’t buy it because, rabbit. And so she looks at the chicken and the duck and further on, the lamb—this is no better, so it’s on to the salt cod stand where everything, even the fishmonger, seems to have succumbed to a saline hoarfrost.

She runs her tongue around inside her mouth, along one row of teeth, then the other. They will eat first, a simple salad that he will dress and then they will undress and then they will make love. He is more attentive to her than any man she’s ever slept with, kind, tender but not tentative. She will miss that. And the wine after, tiny globe glasses right there in the apartment or more often, downstairs at the shop. And then he will look at his watch, unless she looks at hers first, which she tries to, to show that she, too, has obligations, another life, plans. And he will signal to pay. This she never interferes with. In her twenties, with other men in other cities near other oceans, she interfered with this part of the meal all the time. She’d grabbed checks out of presumptuous waiters’ hands. Out of dates’ hands. Cheap meals, expensive ones. She could pay! And she did.

After their wine, she and Massimiliano would kiss, one cheek, then the next. To anyone watching, they could be cousins, but for the additional second it takes for their hands to part. Then he would be gone, up the stairs and into his building, and she would look at the market packing up. The men in bright coveralls with the miniature garbage truck sweeping through the market, missing more than they get. Frilly, plate-sized leaves of lettuce would have affixed themselves to the cobblestones, sanpetrini, petite saint peters. Wrapped in lettuce, they look like bright green gifts and complement the red, red pedestrian-punished tomatoes (always present; no other market item sacrifices itself so readily). Left behind: paper and plastic and smears of gelato and pockets of water wherever anyone has half-heartedly slopped a bucket across the pavement.

The market, like its products, ripens over the course of the day. She’s come early on occasion, shopped, and then sat outside one of the cafés on the square, and so she knows what the square smells like when it starts, which is fresh and crisp and wet. She has long been tempted to sit at the rival café across the square—where they’ve never sat together; Massimiliano, like all good Romans, lives a life bracketed and buffeted by years-long feuds, and one concerns the café across the square—but she has no feuds, only curiosities, and one of them is what his ex-wife looks like. He has seen pictures of Mona’s daughter, Audrey, she has seen pictures of his boy and girl. Their beauty makes clear their mother’s. Audrey has her father’s eyes. Neither mother nor daughter has seen him for months.

Ostiense was more of a working-class neighborhood when Mona first came to Rome, years ago. It was the home to the gasworks and a massive transit center. There were no tourists here. There was nothing to see. The Colosseum was only a mile away, but then, in Rome, everything is closer than it seems; distances shrink the longer you’ve been in the city. Massimiliano used to live a 45-minute walk from where she usually stayed. He still does, and the walk still takes 45 minutes, but she always arrives before she realizes it, before she’s ready.

Read the rest of this story here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-11-liam-callanan/