“Fire Sale,” by fiction alum Alyson Dutemple, recently appeared in Pithead Chapel. Read an excerpt below:

Fire Sale

We are a few months into my “honesty-only” policy when my son asks the question. “Why are bananas so cheap?”  We are in the supermarket.  He is taking notes for an elementary school project about balancing budgets, making informed family decisions.  Behind one pink ear, he has tucked a chewed pencil.  Evening is approaching and the last rays of sun pump their quiet heat through the window glass, illuminating persimmons, kumquats, other expensive exotics.  “Maybe it’s a fire sale,” I say.  Our shopping cart wobbles as I push it.   I tell him what I read about bananas dying out, about the fungal disease slowly decimating their numbers, as I steer three working wheels, and one broken one, out of the section marked “Produce.”

At the register, I hang back while my son tabulates his expenses in a notebook, places each item on the conveyer belt with care, without my assistance.  Though the cashier is uninterested in the particulars of his project, he tells her about them in great detail.  She rings up his selections with a red laser beam that recalls a television program I used to watch with my grandfather back when I was my son’s age.  Before we even knew phrases like “genetic predisposition.”  Before anyone understood all the different ways words like “heart” and “disease” could fit together.  Women in short dresses wielding astral powers, ray guns, dynamite calves.  My grandmother, in the other room, frying a chicken.

Read “Fire Sale” in its entirety here: https://pitheadchapel.com/fire-sale/

Poetry faculty member Sandra Lim was recently featured in Zocalo Public Square. Read an excerpt of “Spinoza Says” below:

Spinoza Says

He who loves God
cannot endeavor that God
loves him in return.

Do you know,
I think the cool silver
of this is hard to live by.

When there is anything
you want very much,
you are making up a story

all of the time,
of how you will get it
and how it will be.

You want the love of God
and the human sort. A big treasure
and a little treasure.

I wonder if you’re like me,
a touch affronted by your own
underlying avidity.

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/11/20/sandra-lim-spinoza-says-poem/chronicles/poetry/

Poetry faculty member Matthew Olzmann was recently featured in the Four Way Review. Read an excerpt of “Commencement Speech, Delivered to a Herd of Walrus Calves” below:

Commencement Speech, Delivered to a Herd of Walrus Calves

Young walruses, we all must adapt! For example, 
some of your ancestors gouged the world 
with four tusks, but you can grow only two. 
It’s hard to say what evolution plans for your kind, 
but if given a choice,
you should put in a request for thumbs. 
Anyway, congratulations! You’re entering 
a world that’s increasingly hostile and cruel 
and full of people who’ll never take you seriously
though that will be a mistake on their end. 
You are more tenacious than they know. 
You’ll be a fierce and loyal defender 
of those you love. You will fight polar bears 
when they attack your friends and sometimes you’ll win.
Of course, odds always favor the polar bear, 
but that’s not the point. The point is courage.
The point is bravery. The point is you are all fighters
even when the fight in which you find yourself
ensures unpleasant things will happen to you. 
For example, the bear will gnaw apart your skull 
or neck until you stop that persistent twitching; 
it will eat your skin, all of it, then blubber, then muscle, 
then the tears of your loved ones, in that order; 
it will savor every bite, and you will just 
suffer and suffer until the emptiness can wash over you. 
The good news is: things change! 
For example: the environment. 
Climate change, indeed, is bad for you, 
but it’s worse for polar bears whose conservation status 
is now listed as “vulnerable” which is one step removed 
from “endangered” which is one step removed 
from “extinct” which is a synonym 
for Hooray! None of you get eaten! 

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://fourwayreview.com/commencement-speech-delivered-to-a-herd-of-walrus-calves-by-matthew-olzmann/

“The Meaning of Air,” an essay by 2016 fiction alum Boyce Upholt, recently appeared in Emergence Magazine. Read an excerpt below:

The Meaning of Air

…THERE ARE PEOPLE, I guess, who regularly regard the air—cloud watchers lying on their backs in the grass, contemplating the meaning of a breeze. I come from a different tradition of nature watching. What I have always wanted is contact. “The solid earth!” as Henry David Thoreau once put it, standing atop a barren mountain. “[T]he actual world!” The material things, the rocks and soils: the dust from which life emerged, to which we will return.

Until recently, the closest I’d come to contemplating the sky was a five-week commitment to sunrise. A few years ago—after the death of my father, after a dismaying US election, amid the final fraying of a six-year relationship—I canoed a thousand miles down the Mississippi River, camping on islands and sandbars. I wanted to be in a landscape that made me feel small, that showed me something bigger. I made it a point to rise before dawn each morning so that I could watch the sky shift from the gray scale of morning twilight to gentle oranges and pinks, until these were overtaken by the spreading blue.

But what was a sunrise? What produced such pastel magic? These were questions I could not answer—questions I did not even think to contemplate.

Read the essay in its entirety here: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-meaning-of-air/

2019 fiction alum Lynnette Curtis was recently featured in the High Desert Journal. Read an excerpt of “Lazarus” below:

Mornings that long-ago summer, the sun consumed the sky. The suburban air smelled of hot asphalt and absence. We wore nylon shorts and his-and-her sunhats on our miserable walks. We carried 30-ounce water bottles and our own immeasurable grief.

Along Windmill, the cicadas buzzed. Most of our neighbors remained cocooned inside their cool stucco homes while the two of us sweated and suffered, darting like lizards between patches of shade provided by the occasional palm or purple plum tree.

And then an ancient, stooped man would appear, out on a walk of his own. We would watch in amazement as he drew nearer in his faded dress shoes, shapeless trousers, dark corduroy blazer and derby cap.

This was in July, remember, in Las Vegas.

The old man’s face looked dry as parchment, his expression serene, as though he had acclimated to this harsh desert climate generations ago, or discovered some secret to staying comfortable and eternally alive on this disinterested planet.

We forgot our discomfort—and sometimes even our despair—for a moment, our torsos like overheating engines. We slowed our pace and studied the old man as he shuffled toward us on the sidewalk. His small feet lifted almost imperceptibly with each tiny step, as though he were floating or dancing, without a care in the world.

Read the story in its entirety here: https://highdesertjournal.squarespace.com/lynnette-curtis-lazarus/