2020 poetry alum Margaret Ray was recently featured in December. Read an excerpt of Ray’s poem below:

Disaster A/version / Re/vision

In one version, the evening is hot and I ride

my bike to the grocery for emergency

garlic replenishment, waiting carefully at each stoplight

until my phone buzzes in my pocket

Read the rest of this poem here: https://decembermag.org/2021-jeff-marks-memorial-poetry-prize-winners/

1983 alum Robert Fromberg was recently featured in The Dillydoun Review. Read an excerpt of Fromberg’s essay “Autism, Writing, and the Necessity of Repetition” below:

Autism, Writing, and the Necessity of Repetition

Autism is repetition.

As a boy, my brother Steve would play the same 15 seconds of “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles 50 times in a row. Today, he sometimes has to touch a doorjamb with the edge of his foot five times before entering a room. Our phone conversations must occur at the same time on the same day each week, and they follow a strict template for what I ask and how he responds.

Some of Steve’s repetition is for fun. The passage in “A Day in the Life” that he used to repeat is the accelerating sound collage toward the end of the song. The effect is really cool, and who wouldn’t want to listen to it multiple times?

Some of Steve’s repetition is for comfort. He used to do what we called “bounce.” When he sat, he bounced forward, fell back into the seat, bounced forward, fell back, bounced forward. As a boy, I tried to bounce. It felt good, like sleeping in motion. This type of repetition, in the autism world, is called self-stimulation and has an addictive quality. I don’t know about Steve, but I wanted to bounce forever.

Read the rest of this essay here: https://thedillydounreview.com/2021/07/21/autism-writing-and-the-necessity-of-repetition/

2018 poetry graduate Megan Pinto was recently featured in the Los Angeles Review. Read an excerpt of Pinto’s poem below:

In Heaven There Will Be No Bodies

which exist to tempt us, and move us

toward grace. I try and imagine 

a bodiless place, full of holographic angels 

and saints, walking through clouds or staring 

into space. When I think of grace

I see my Grandmother on the carpet, folded 

over at her knees. I see my Mother

in lamplight, eyes closed and feeling 

for the next Rosary bead. As a child, 

my Mother waited outside St. Michael’s

in Mahim, for rations of milk and curds

of cheese. She tells me they had only 

white bread to eat, which is how I imagine 

manna, torn and falling from God’s open palms 

like bags of Sara Lee before geese 

at the park. Inside all my Bible picture books, 

God’s face is European, maybe even

Portugese…

Read the rest of this poem here: https://losangelesreview.org/heaven-will-no-bodies-megan-pinto/

Leslie Blanco, a 2007 fiction alum, was recently featured in Hunger Mountain. Read an excerpt of Blanco’s story below:

My Wish for You in the Land of the Dead: a Cuban Sandwich

See what things have come to? See? Yesterday, I very nearly fell asleep in the grocery line while waiting to buy you a ham.*

You don’t like ham.

Neither do I.

But it’s the tradition.

Every year, the ham “provokes” you. “Como me provoca!” Every year you say: “It’s just not right without the ham.” Pink. Shiny. Glazed. You like to add pineapples to it, affixed helter-skelter with the kind of tooth picks that have red plastic fringes on the ends. “There. Now it looks like Chiquita Banana.” You say that every time. Also: “Poor Carmen Miranda. Dead of heart attack at forty-seven. She wore herself out.”

Without the ham, you tell me, the side dishes don’t look right. “A flower with no center,” you say. “The petals are pretty, but …” Shrug.

There are doilies, of course. To make the home-made food look prettier, and the store-bought food look home-made. A little trickery of yours. A little brujeria, your every-day sorcery.

And the easy-to-wash polyester tablecloth, that’s there too, off-white with a border of embroidered flowers in every neon color of the rainbow. More Chiquita Banana.

None of this ever varies. The pineapple slices must be Dole. No other brand. “No se te ocura!” Don’t let it occur to you! As if the pineapples will be second rate. Imported from the wrong place. Unreliable. “Niña! There’s enough insecurity in the world without having to go and try new brands,” you say. “Not that they aren’t capable of changing what goes in the can without so much as changing the label.” They. You say that a lot. Who’s they? “The scoundrels. The sinverguenzas. You know they mess with the sugar in this country, don’t you? In Cuba, I can tell you for a fact, the sugar was sweeter.”

I never believed you, about the sugar, until that year I visited a friend in Mexico. My standard two spoonfuls in my coffee, and I had to pour it down the drain. Too sweet. And a few years back I met a lobbyist, or a regulator, some politically inclined person who worked for the sugar industry. You are right. You are right! They mess with the sugar. They alter the volume chemically. “So we’ll have to use more and pay again,” you say, “for what should have been enough for the recipe the first time.” 

You are absolutely right.

Read the rest of this story here: https://hungermtn.org/my-wish-for-you-in-the-land-of-the-dead-a-cuban-sandwich-by-leslie-blanco/