Poetry alum Noah Stetzer was recently featured in The Night Heron Barks. Read an excerpt of “Grindr 1993” below:

Grindr 1993

I have no idea how it happened when the blizzard
hit and the wind had stopped we all just showed
up at the gay bar on the corner: Jeff and Michael
and Kevin and Frank and Darren. That’s when you saw
who was from the neighborhood and who was not:
the ones that slummed from their suburb straight houses far
enough from home that no one knew them. 

Read the rest of this poem here: https://nightheronbarks.com/winter-2021/noah-stetzer/

Fiction faculty member Caitlin Horrocks was recently featured in Electric Literature. Read an excerpt of “Chance Me” below:

Chance Me

“Just,” his son corrected him at the airport. “Just ‘Just.’ ”

Bond, James Bond, Harry thought. Like they were starring in a rip-off action flick and not the road-trip buddy comedy he’d been hoping for. “Harry, Harry Krier,” he said, holding out his palm for an ironic handshake.

“I know,” Just said, horrified. “I know your name.”

“I know! I know you know. It was a joke.” Harry had insisted on meeting his son at baggage claim rather than at the curb outside, but now he was dismayed at all the witnesses. Also, Just didn’t have any luggage. Only a ratty backpack slung over one shoulder. Harry went in for a hug instead of the handshake. Just raised his arms, awkwardly returning the embrace, and Harry caught a whiff of body odor. His son had grown tall enough that Harry’s nose was armpit height. Willow had been tall, Harry remembered. Willow had been an Amazon. Maybe she still was.

After fifteen years without seeing Just, Harry had steeled himself for almost any physical manifestation of his son, for Just to look exactly like his mother, Willow, or exactly like Harry himself. He was ready to be bludgeoned with memory, or guilt, or joy. But Just was a nearly blank slate — brown hair and eyes, a body that gave no hint of what its occupant used it for, no swimmer’s shoulders or runner’s wiriness. Jeans and sneakers and a plain black T-shirt. Such an ordinary boy, Harry thought, and the words seemed heartless, but not the emotion. Whole and healthy and ordinary. He could deserve no better fortune. He didn’t even deserve that.

“Sorry,” Just said, breaking the hug. “I probably need to shower.”

“You’re fine,” Harry said. “You’re perfect.”

Commentary on the flight (okay), the autumn weather (chilly, gray), and the traffic (heavy) got them out of Logan and onto I-90 heading toward Brookline.

“There are a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts here,” Just observed, looking out the car window.

“Do you want to stop for anything?” “No. I was just saying. There’s a lot.”

“I thought we’d have dinner at home, if that’s okay.

Miriam’s picking something up.”

“That’s fine,” Just said, and he asked Harry how he and Miriam had met.

“I sold her a condo.” After closing, they’d gone out for a celebratory drink. Six months later he’d moved into the condo with her. There was no stipulation against this in the National Association of Realtors bylaws. Second marriage for her. First for him, technically.

“Do I want to know what technically means?” Miriam had asked.

“I was very young,” he’d said, and the truth of this had hit him with unexpected force — a load of bricks, a piano out a window. He’d been very young when he was living in Arcosanti with Willow, and he wasn’t any longer, and he never would be again. Wherever else his life might take him, it would not take him back there, to the red desert hills and the bleached sheet of sky snapped open every morning above them, their baby squalling in a hand-painted card-board box. Now that baby was sitting in his Lexus, six feet tall and applying to Harvard.

On the phone, Willow had rattled off names like she was reading an online list of Boston-area colleges, not just Harvard, MIT, Tufts, but the off-brand schools out-of-staters never applied to, like Lesley, Suffolk, Simmons. “I thought Simmons was a girls’ school,” Harry had said. “I mean, women’s. A women’s college.” Was his son transgender and no one had bothered to mention it to him?

“He’s still narrowing down the list,” Willow had said. “There’s a school counselor who helps.”

Harry hadn’t realized that tiny Jerome, Arizona, even had a high school. After Arcosanti, Willow had ended up in a mining town turned vertiginous ghost town turned artist colony / tourist trap. She’d bought a house and a metalworking studio for almost nothing because it was at geologic risk of sliding off the mountain. Uninsurable, but she hadn’t cared. She’d sent photographs of Just posed with the lawn ornaments she made and sold; birdhouses on sticks were popular.

“He buses to Cottonwood,” Willow said, like she could hear what Harry was thinking. “It’s a good school. Pretty good, I guess.”

“It’ll have to be if he’s applying to Harvard,” Harry said, pointlessly.

“Look, everyone understands how competitive it is. Can he stay with you or not?”

Harry hadn’t wanted the conversation to go this way. He felt like no conversation he’d ever had with Willow had gone the way he’d meant it to. “Of course he can stay.”

“He just needs a place to sleep. He can get himself to the campus visits on the subway. Right? I think that’s right.” Her voice was suddenly uncertain.

She’d never lived in a town with more than five hundred people, he remembered. Neither had their son. “I’ll show him around,” Harry said. “I’ll take time off work.” “You don’t have to.” Willow never told him he had to do anything. She hadn’t made him the bad guy. He was the no- guy. Not the villain, just written out of the script entirely, and he’d let her do it. Miriam had rented that movie with Daniel Day-Lewis, the one where his character screams, “I abandoned my child! I abandoned my boy!” At least that guy abandoned the little deaf boy to become an oil baron, Harry thought. I abandoned my boy to become a real estate agent. The saddest movie never made. Or maybe it was a road-trip buddy movie after all, now that Just was finally here, and the real movie of Harry’s life had simply had a very, very long setup.

Read the story in its entirety here: https://electricliterature.com/chance-me-by-caitlin-horrocks/

Poetry faculty member Connie Voisine was recently featured in Scoundrel Time. Read an excerpt of “Black-Crowned Night-Heron” below:

Black-Crowned Night Heron

The girl is alive—someone caught her
on video. The girl is alive, alive alive,
the women who fed her one night                  

cackled at that glimpse of her
face in the freezing forest and I
heard them toast her wild will. How

we accepted such things
when we were girls, but why should
a person expect a group of men might

toss her into a truck, that anyone seeing
her small body walking by should
talk about it unpunished, a joke?

Read the rest of this poem here: https://scoundreltime.com/black-crowned-night-heron/

Erin Stalcup, a 2004 fiction alum, was recently featured in Isele Magazine. Read an excerpt of “Anthony Bourdain” below:

Anthony Bourdain

At some point  we just admitted we didn’t know how to mourn. We, the de-ethnicized Americans. Jewish people know how to mourn. Mexican people know how to mourn. Indigenous people know how to mourn, within their individual tribal customs. But some of us have been here so long we forgot where we were from. A cultural framework shows you what to do, makes some decisions for you so you’re less at sea to process this thing that is impossible to process. They are gone. So. Wear black. Wear white. Sit shiva for seven days, forget about comfort, cover the mirrors, forget about appearance, that doesn’t matter now. Then stand up and go back to your life. Walk in jazz funeral processions, and the music will move from dirges to dance tunes. Chop up the body and feed it to the vultures. Bury the dead in a coffin shaped like something they loved in life, a rose or racecar or guitar. A year after their death, disinter the body and dance with it, dress it in new clothes, throw a parade, tell them all the news. Dismember, roast, and eat the dead. Kill a member of another tribe to satisfy your rage. Throw a shovelful of dirt on the coffin, each mourner. Take pictures of the embalmed body. Keep locks of hair. Leave the body with useful tools, your best jewelry, flowers, prepare them for the other side. Some communities still know what to do. But some of us lost loss, forgot.  

The Irish Americans started inviting us to their merry wakes, their funerals. It helped. To celebrate their life joyfully, be intimate with the body, it worked for us to collectively remember why it was worth it to love them. Don’t cry, it will keep the soul here. Then to watch a public performance of mourning—that helped, too. We could watch a woman keen, and it made us feel more pity and sorrow than if we were to cry, and it purged us. 

Maeve MacNamara—the most famous keener in the world—knew, though we didn’t, that the term catharsis was originally a medical term for the expelling of menstrual and reproductive fluids. What the body doesn’t need anymore, to restore balance. We all knew the term as the reason we turn to art, the reason seeing someone else play out a tragedy helps us with our own. When the keener straightens her shoulders, lets us see her tears, then walks away, we follow her out of that space. 

So, we agreed upon consensual reverse colonization—Ireland didn’t impose their cultural customs on us, but they let us adopt them.   

But of course it doesn’t totally work.

Read this piece in its entirety here: https://iselemagazine.com/2021/02/03/anthony-bourdain-erin-stalcup/

Poetry alum Leigh Lucas was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “For Antoine de Saint-Exupéry” below:

For Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I see myself in the child in you. Below us I see
                                                                                                       fields of sand. Breath is
                            all        there is
                                                    between us.

This airplane is aluminum and tin, thin
                                        between us and a zillion stars.  

I carry the canteen gently to your cracked lips, cradle
your head and let you drink. You clear your throat and tell my favorite story.

Your voice, the engine,
                 hum,

                    until I drift off              
                                                                  and we drift,                 we drift.

Read the rest of this poem here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-6-leigh-lucas/

       Brother
 
 
Because he can’t tell his own story—
 
            may he never sleep another night in jail.
            May he never shiver heroin sweat, flea-bitten, rib-broken.
 
Because he forgot that we’d walked with our dog—
            
            may he never forget the blue-spotted salamanders
            we found in muddy banks,
            or how we swung by the rope into those rough waves.
 
            May he sing all night, dream of a sunflower woman.
 
And let me forgive him, brother and consolation—
            
            though he dealt me a bad hand,
       and the price rose.
 
Let me not forget him, brother and sorrow—
            
       returned from prison, those five years
            engulfing him like a rubber suit,
            his cheerless eyes pondering me—
 
                                                my every fortune.

Fiction faculty member Kevin McIlvoy was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of McIlvoy’s poem below:

Gravitationally Completely Collapsed Objects, as Observed from A Circumstellar Accretion Disk

At
last
in
a
triumph
of
botany
there
is
a
black
rose
named
Baudelaire

&
a
black
tulip
named
Cup-a-joe

&
a
morning
glory
named
Grimm
resembling
a
black
hole.

Humankind
is
not
done
blackening

&
isn’t
that
a
lesson
we
should
learn
from
when
we
are
naming

children
hurricanes
pet
fish
new
parks
song-based
foods
bomb-kits
cookbooks
twitter
poems
grazing
stars
dinner
plates
extinct
insects
aging
brains?

Read the rest of this poem, as well as three others, here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-6-kevin-mcilvoy/

2021 poetry graduate Dane Slutzky was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “My Battery is Low and It’s Getting Dark” below:

My Battery is Low and It’s Getting Dark

 For Opportunity, the Mars Rover, 2004-2019

No human programmed
you to be poetic.
You didn’t craft

a sentence, but
sent data, after a
delay via satellite,

in an ontological
structure—battery:
low. Tau level: rising.

One last grainy
half-complete photo
of the sky, stars streaked

with lines. We offer
animal experience: hormones,
lactic acid, sorrow.                  

Read the rest of this poem here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-6-dane-slutzky/

2020 poetry graduate Eric Cruz was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Harbingers” below:

Harbingers

  1.

All morning my throat catches,
the wind gray and wandering
along the spine of grief
hot from the bellies of howling dogs.
The windchimes stir, agate
clinking like a thousand well-learned prayers.

       2.
While hearing my children shriek
in Spanish and English–playtime,
two swings rising higher— 
a squirrel rests like a stone atop
the fence. 

Read the rest of this poem, as well as two others, here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-6-eric-cruz/

Poetry faculty member Sandra Lim was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “April” below:

April

Showers overnight. Coffee on the desk,
Untasted, now cold.

The birds have been silent all morning.
But you still suppose

The world will bound toward you,
Opening its gardens and doors!

The pale, irregular blush of Winter Daphne
Spreads outside and upward.

Read the rest of this poem here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-6-sandra-lim/