2009 poetry alum Mike Puican was recently featured in OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters. Read an excerpt of Puican’s poem “As Though the Narrative Went Out for a Smoke” below:

As Though the Narrative Went Out for a Smoke

As though the narrative went out for a smoke and never returned, and now
the cruel waitress
the afternoon sun warming the shoulders of a runaway daughter
the teenagers in loud cars who will not live much longer
the baby on a ledge
the hand gun in the freezer under a pork roast
the upright piano approaching on the ice
the key that fell into the cuff of her rolled-up jeans…

Read the rest of this poem here: https://ojalart.com/poetry-all-forms-stylesmike-puicanas-though-the-narrative-went-out-for-a-smoke/

Fiction alum Rose Skelton (along with Skelton’s spouse and poetry alum Nomi Stone) was recently featured in Ecotone. Read an excerpt of Skelton’s essay “Little Starts” below:

Little Starts

When my wife and I marry in autumn, the seasons are all wrong. On our Philadelphia rooftop, spinach sprouts in the heat of late September and in early October, basil flourishes in pots. Summer flowers—petunias, fuchsias, geraniums—gush from other people’s window ledges. Tomatoes, fat and misshapen, line the counter of the vegetable shop across the street.

On the island in Scotland, where I am from, at this time of year I sleep under one, two, thick quilts, and rain slants sideways across the windows. The shops are void of all summer fruit. There, it is the season I gather mushrooms from the woods, when the cool wet weather pulses black trumpets from the loam. Horn of plenty, birch bolete, chicken of the woods, cep.

But in Philadelphia, the days are a humid stench that won’t let up. The woods, though I scour them, give up nothing to me.

The night before our City Hall wedding, we sleep with the windows thrown open. At 5 a.m., the bin lorry wakes us as it thunders past our bedroom. My wife, to-be, throws a leg into my sprawled crook, insists her body into the shape of mine so that her beating heart, tiny, hot, thrums against my scapula. I know I should use the American terms for things—trash, truck, fall—but it isn’t a reflex yet. Only my wife understands me in this new strange country where I didn’t mean to end up.

I hadn’t dreamed of getting married either—I had watched my parents suffer their own twenty-four years before divorcing—and by the morning of our wedding I am forty. N., a poet, and I met in a writing program at grad school two years before, and were within days talking of a life together. She captivated me, the way she seemed to be one thing, but also another. She was brought to tears by blossoming trees, and by Marx. She complained of feeling cold, but her body burned with a heat that felt electric to touch. She had spent two years researching in a military special-forces training site, but she only wore cowboy boots, didn’t own a rain jacket. She had published two books of poetry, but her poem tattoo had a punctuation error, something she showed me the first time we met, both of us laughing as she pulled up her T-shirt to show me her slender naked back. She didn’t give a damn for convention, actively sought out the other. I had spent my life being bored by people, but of N., I never tired.

In time, I noticed that a change had come over me, a softness that grew as she burrowed into my life. People said I was nicer when I was with N. I started to like dogs, and children. I began to believe in myself, I wrote more. I learned to fight away the harsh words I had always tormented myself with.

Read the rest of Skelton’s essay here: https://ecotonemagazine.org/nonfiction/little-starts/

Jayne Benjulian, a 2013 poetry alum, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Irruptive Species” below:

Irruptive Species

I heard the owl too close
to the house, rustling leaves

skimming the back side
of her wings in air before

she settled atop a dead
birch. From there she surveyed.

I examined her too.
White and black bars across her chest.

Early for me, half-light:
my husband’s breathing, a storm

inside his marrow, violent rush,
upsurge in numbers, balance disturbed.

Read the rest of this poem here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-8-jayne-benjulian/

Shannon K. Winston, a 2018 poetry alum, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Wish Fulfillment” below:

Wish Fulfillment

                                                   Paul Klee Pink Springs in Deep Winter, 1932

Spectacular: the way pink petals open
               against an equally pink
sky. Each brush stroke: a stem

             that connects to other stems,
to fine lines, and blooming buds.
             If I look closely,

I see a map, cracked
             glass, and tiny veins.
The blueprint of my own clumsy

               body, too, projected onto the clouds.
My ribs, my crooked teeth, the scar
              on my right cheek.

My hard, unassuming breasts.
             My legs, bruised from
knocking into objects

              I forget are there…

Read the rest of this poem here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-8-shannon-k-winston/

Fiction alum Anne Elliot was recently featured in TriQuarterly. Read an excerpt of Elliot’s craft essay, “The Beloved ‘You’: Direct Address in Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend,” below:

The Beloved “You”: Direct Address in Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend

When I encounter direct address in fiction, my first assumption is that the “you” is me—that the narrator uses the second person to create kinship with the “dear reader.” But on a deeper look, the second person has more potential for complexity. “You” could be a single person, or many people, or could change over the course of a story. Or “you” could be specific to one of the story’s characters.

The pronoun “you” has often been used in fiction as a veiled first person, foregrounding a main character’s insecurity by putting the self at arm’s length. In Lorrie Moore’s Self Help, for example, the second person is cast in the imperative, taking the form of flawed instruction, crafting a warm-humored, self-deprecating parody of popular texts that purport to make living easier. In Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, the second person has an accusatory feel, as it narrates the self-destruction of its protagonist and implicates the reader at the same time. As veiled first person, “you” is tied up with the ego or with troubles in a character’s relationship with herself. “I” and “you” have trouble coexisting, because they are the same person, and because they each see flaws in the other. As veiled first person, “you” is a being one cannot escape.

But what about an “I” whose “you” is absent—and sorely missed? Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018) offers another approach to the use of “you”: direct address as a focal point for monologue.

Read the rest of this essay here: https://triquarterly.org/craft-essays/beloved-%E2%80%9Cyou%E2%80%9D-direct-address-sigrid-nunez%E2%80%99s-friend