“In the Fifth Month of Lockdown I Plant Clematis,” by John Minczeski (Poetry ’90)

Poetry alum John Minczeski was recently featured in One Art. Read an excerpt of “In the Fifth Month of Lockdown I Plant Clematis” below:

In the Fifth Month of Lockdown I Plant Clematis

The shovel, striking a root, thunked
all the way down to my moist heart.

An acolyte, I knelt to bury the plant to its neck.
Blame me for trusting coincidence

more than fate. Hold me responsible
for rose thorns. The sloping yard hoards

the memory of past glaciers. Have I searched within
for the gravitational field that holds me here?

 

Read the rest of this poem, as well as two others, here: https://oneartpoetry.com/2022/04/10/three-poems-by-john-minczeski/

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An interview with Chloe Martinez (Poetry ’09)

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Poetry alum Chloe Martinez was recently featured in Beloit Poetry Journal and Palette Poetry. Read an excerpt of Chloe’s interview in Palette below:

Chloe Martinez, poet and scholar of South Asian religions, has a long-breathed relationship with the work of Mirabai, one of the earliest known women poets, who lived in north India in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century. An ardent devotee of the god Krishna, Mirabai (or Mira) is also known as a Hindu saint. Chloe first encountered her song-poems in college and has been rereading and thinking about them ever since. Eventually, she also began to translate them from the original Braj Bhasa, an early form of Hindi—and to write her own poems influenced, in different ways at different times, by Mira’s.   

“By Mira,” Chloe tells me, “I should really say ‘Mira’: we don’t really know which poems were written by a historical person, since they were first sung and shared orally, then gradually written down over centuries. It’s nearly certainly true that other people wrote songs in Mira’s persona and signed the poems with her name… Nevertheless, there’s a corpus of poems that are widely known today as ‘Mira poems’ and that’s what I’ve drawn from in [my] translations.”

Read this interview in its entirety here: https://www.palettepoetry.com/2022/01/27/the-guest-21/

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A conversation with Nancy Mitchell (Poetry ’91) and Dana Levin

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Nancy Mitchell (Poetry ’91) recently interviewed poetry faculty member Dana Levin for Plume. Read an excerpt of their conversation below:

 

A Conversation with Nancy Mitchell and Dana Levin

NM: The title of the book, Now Do You know Where You Are, is taken from lines in Deepstep Come Shining, by the late C.D. Wright. In the title poem, you hear this phrase as a call to WAKE UP, Get your bearings, Hear the trees. What exactly was it about the momentary age of Trump that this call became an urgent command with a new ring of sound?

DL: It was uncanny, the way that phrase—now do you know where you are —ran through my head for months in the wake of the 2016 election. Wright had died at the start of that pivotal year, and it felt like visitation and instruction, hearing that phrase over and over post November. I think my book is driven by this call to wake up to where we are, as a nation, to where I am, as a poet, a citizen, a human—to not fall asleep to peril, which in America has to do with the fragility of our democratic processes and the rise to power of the country’s most violent, bigoted, and corrupt qualities; and peril in the self, where these corrupt qualities are harbored.

NM: This collection of poems chronicles a fervent quest to locate yourself in coordinates, the intersection where external forces meet history and place, where the soul and the body pressed against and into one another.

DL: Yes, the need to get located was profound for me after Trump’s election. In 2017 I found myself traveling through concentric circles of change. I was readying to leave Santa Fe, NM after nineteen years, to move to Saint Louis, a place I knew very little about, beyond Hollywood movies and Michael Brown’s death in 2014 at the hands of police in nearby Ferguson, the protests his death had sparked. I felt as though I was about to move to the navel of the nation: Saint Louis, source of so many American gifts and grotesqueries. Trump’s election and the hostilities it condoned also made me deeply afraid, as a Jew—a feeling shocking and new to me, though familiar to so many. Intellectually, I’d always understood antisemitism as a threat, but in 2017 that threat stopped being purely conceptual for me. My assumption of personal liberty, which I had always had the privilege to imagine strong, began to fray. Of course, that assumption has always been an illusion, but the American mythos of personal freedom carried me along for a long time. It was startling to discover how much I had internalized that mythos: me, a woman, a Jew, a daughter of immigrants, a poet!

Read this conversation in its entirety here: https://plumepoetry.com/d-lev-messenger/

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“Blackberry Clafoutis,” by Beverley Bie Brahic (Poetry ’06)

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Two poems by 2006 poetry alum Beverley Bie Brahic were recently featured in Literary Matters. Read an excerpt of “Blackberry Clafoutis” below:

Blackberry Clafoutis

A recipe I downloaded
Flutters on my desktop.
I keep thinking it’s a poem
Posted there

With its luscious title:
Blackberry irresistible surely
Essence of
My north’s high summer

Its punitive guarded
Providence
When one morning
Is just imperceptibly

Cold enough to turn
The gas-burning
Pot-bellied stove on
For an hour

 

Read the rest of this poem here: http://www.literarymatters.org/14-2-blackberry-clafoutis/

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“Embraced,” by Martha Rhodes

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Poetry faculty member Martha Rhodes was recently featured in Plume. Read an excerpt of “Embraced” below:

Embraced

I have visited an ancient redwood and heard it creak
as I’ve rested my cheek and ear against its trunk. It has received
my deepest sobs and my hundreds of fingerings along its soft bark.
Leaning into it, I have whispered to my most darling ones—
Mother, Lucy, my multi colored cats—as if they’ve coursed through
the tree’s vascular system to form an inner pool— their happy noise
so audible! I have stopped at the tree for hours over years,
in the shadow of Mt. Tam, and I have napped, at tree’s base,
inebriated, by the moldy brew of its memories, boiled up
to commingle with the mist of my breathings
of nose, mouth and cells so that I must slow, resist
rushing past, to recall the paddings of creatures
before me as well as my own over years…

 

Find the rest of this poem, as well as two others, here: https://plumepoetry.com/embraced/

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“Women Aren’t Funny,” By Laura Hulthen Thomas (Fiction ’14)

2014 fiction alum Laura Hulthen Thomas was recently featured in The Temz Review. Read an excerpt of “Women Aren’t Funny” below: 

Women Aren’t Funny

“The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?”
                              – Christopher Hitchens

Mona used to kill it, slay it, crush it. She’d launch perfect zingers at the dinner table or the house party or the back of the classroom where the shop guys and petty hoods, ace wisecrackers all, mocked their teachers. She would wrench guts and split sides and when her victims caught their breaths, the shop guys and the hoods would gasp that she should do stand-up. She’d still been just a kid and didn’t realize a woman’s entire act was a never-ending improv.

She’d been funny once, all right. Consistently hysterical, and it was this consistency that had made her so deadly.

So why couldn’t she come up with a snappy comeback to the knife Bo had just thrust to her throat?

The blade’s tip was just tickling the skin sagging from her neck’s hollow. Another joke, the frilly gobble pregnancy had made of her throat. Their commitment to horsing around meant that Bo was funnier than ever. The knife gag made them both double over with laughter, although she had to be careful not to actually double over onto the knife.

Mona tipped her head back and laughed. Bo’s hand stayed firm at her throat, steady as she goes. “I’ll give youz a rough chop,” he threatened in the gangster voice he’d perfected.

What could she say to one up that? Tears streamed down her face, it was all so funny. Earlier that evening, Bo had started a water fight when the dishwasher flooded. They were both still drying out in the cool night’s breeze, huddled around a newborn fire in the Weber kettle. While Bo’s horsing around never seemed forced, these days her antics fell flat and dangerous. When he’d flicked water at her, the droplets had beaded gently on her arms, sprinkled her hair like a cap of lace. When she’d snatched up a Pyrex measurer to lob a real splash, she’d lost her grip and sent the cup sailing into his crotch. He’d laughed, sort of, and rubbed his jeans. She’d said something about not shooting until she could see the whites of his balls. Neither laughed at that.

Perhaps women stop being funny when they start trying to be, Mona had thought.

Read this story in its entirety here: https://www.thetemzreview.com/fiction-laura-hulthen-thomas.html

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“Origin Story,” by Hannah Silverstein (Poetry ’21)

2021 poetry alum Hannah Silverstein was recently featured in the West Trestle Review. Read an excerpt of “Origin Story” below:

Origin Story

At twenty-two, my father
found an egg in his throat,
smooth as a stone.
 
It grew and grew, a bad tenant
nested in the apartment
of his thyroid, and my father
 
said nothing about it.
Those days, my mother
chain-smoked filtered Camels,
 
hiding her sadness under ashtrays
heaped with ruined ends.
They married, legend has it,
 
so he could hand off
the burden of speech
to someone—anyone—else.

Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.westtrestlereview.com/west_trestle_hannah_silverstein.html

 

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“Swan Days,” by Rose Auslander (Poetry ’15)

2015 poetry alum Rose Auslander was recently featured in Juniper and the Baltimore Review. Read an excerpt of Auslander’s poem “Swan Days” below: 

 

Swan Days

That deceptive ease of floating, of flying, of leaving
& winging it back, of living rough, staying unruffled &
never once saying what you think. Of not thinking.

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://juniperpoetry.com/swan-days-by-rose-auslander/

 

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“In Whom the Dying Does Not End,” by J.C. Todd (Poetry ’90)

Poetry alum J.C. Todd was recently featured in The Night Heron Barks. Read an interview with Todd here, and read an excerpt of Todd’s poem “In Whom the Dying Does Not End” below: 

In Whom the Dying Does Not End

Just as her eggs began
to cluster along
the genital ridge
and the neural groove
began to close, its cells
churning toward brain,
just as a vacuole
opened to become a mouth,
and nubs of her limbs budded,
Hafez, father of Bashar,
ordered the military
force of his regime
to crush the revolt of
the Muslim Brotherhood.
It happened in Hama
while I gestated, TV off,
newspapers unread,
in Harrisburg, my thinking
sludgy, speech cut back,
consumed by what I fed.

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://nightheronbarks.com/j-c-todd-in-whom-the-dying-does-not-end/

 

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“Christians and Poets,” by Candace Walsh (Fiction ’19)

2019 fiction alum Candace Walsh was recently featured in Passengers. Read an excerpt of Walsh’s story “Christians and Poets” below: 

Christians and Poets

Dear Mrs. Gunderson,

Please forgive the tardiness of my reply to your letter sent twenty-three years ago. I re-encountered it while going through my mother’s bedside table drawer. I emptied her walk-in closet in under an hour. The women’s shelter volunteer comes tomorrow to pick up six big black garbage bag sachets wafting tea rose and Comet.

Leave it to a little wicker drawer of ephemera to slow my progress. Birthday cards from her mother. My sparse stack of letters from college. And then an envelope you once asked her to give me: a scalloped leaf of stationery folded over photocopied poems framed by dark toner, cleft down the middle by the gutter’s shadow. I remember reading the note, skimming the poems, and leaving the mess on her kitchen counter.

*

You were my first and second grade teacher, and I loved you so much the thought of summer recess[1] made me recoil. When I told my mother, she said I wanted to be your pet, a term that pricked warm at my spine. She didn’t seem to worry about what it meant that I’d imprinted on a short-haired woman who parted seas of children with a no-nonsense stride. 

You had an office off the classroom with a glossy wooden paddle on the wall, Bible verse posters, shelves of books, and a Mason jar of dried chickpeas. When I’d turn the jar, they’d tumble, rattle. They looked like little butts. I knew better than to point that out as I helped you staple handouts.

In class, you’d sometimes talk about your sons Ernest and Lawrence with a deep fondness that made me sad. I fantasized about being Ernest or Lawrence, I didn’t care which. I wanted to be your child, even if it meant being a boy. 

Do you remember that day in second grade when I came up to you, hand outstretched with the cluster of flowers I’d picked for you during recess? Their milk dribbled out of the downy stems and into my palms. 

You told me dandelions were weeds and I should throw them out. My belly felt like the freshly-emptied trash in which I dropped the scraggly blooms. Were you also meaning to discourage me from wooing you with flowers? Back at my desk, the dandelion milk on my palms dried as brown splotches. Proof of my cumbersome sun-shot fealty.

 

[1] 1. the action of receding; 2. a hidden, secret, or secluded place or part; 3. an indentation, cleft; 4. a suspension of business or procedure often for rest or relaxation (Merriam-Webster)

Read this story in its entirety here: https://www.passengersjournal.com/volume-3-issue-1-prose/#walsh

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