“To Go To Belfast,” by William Burnside (Poetry ’18)

William Burnside, a 2018 poetry graduate, was recently featured in Zocalo Public Square. Read an excerpt of “To Go To Belfast” below:

To Go To Belfast

Whether you’ve boarded from Liverpool or Heysham
or Stranraer, years later the journey is the same
along the Lough at evening, the chimney of the power station

in Kilroot, Carrickfergus Castle, white eiders skimming
the surface of the bay at Carnalea, the oystercatchers at Cultra
piping on the rocks, as you slide past the gantries at the yards

where David and Goliath tower like the spires
of a decayed cathedral. Here’s where I first heard
hexameters of Homer intoned in harsh Ulster accents,

Speak to me, Muse, about the many-sided hero who travelled
far and wide after he sacked the great town of Troy:
many were the cities he visited, the customs he came to know

Here’s where my grandfather built the Titanic.
Here there were two cathedrals rising in opposition
and two stories each told with a certainty dispensed

like a cheap drug, with hatred scribbled on the walls,
King William on his horse, Up the Rebels, to Hell
with the Pope, and one man’s hope was another’s

damnation. How could I not be tempted by the glory
that was Greece, lucidity and sanity, a golden mean between
opposing ills, Athens revered in the words of Pericles?

We are an example to others rather than imitators. Our
administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is
called a democracy. Our laws afford equal justice to all…

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/10/30/william-burnside-belfast-poem/chronicles/poetry/

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“Pronounced,” by Carlos Andrés Gómez (Poetry ’18)

2018 poetry graduate Carlos Andrés Gómez was recently featured in Underbelly. Read an excerpt of his poem “Pronounced” below:

Pronounced

You excavate anything that has tried to lodge itself
in your body without permission. You bury the toothbrush
between your back molars and scrape whatever

you find. One loss makes you feel all other losses.
Eleven years later, when you no longer eat pizza
or speak Spanish, when your father’s profile invades

your clenched jawline, you borrow his brisk gait,
his snort, his face. People say you look white.
Your father never does. The restaurant won’t seat

you, the hostess says neither of you meet the dress
code (your father’s wearing a double-breasted suit). 
You are a man trying to roll your r’s again…

Read the poem in its entirety, see an early draft of the poem, and hear about Gómez’s creative process here: https://www.underbellymag.com/carlos-andres-gomez

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“The Switch,” by Michael A. de Armas (Poetry ’20)

The LEON Literary Review recently featured “The Switch,” a poem by 2020 graduate Michael A. de Armas. Read an excerpt below:

The Switch

Yes it’s true you can break things,
I tell my younger daughter one night, who,
after crying in her crib in our room
without much result, turns the light switch
on and off and so makes her need known
to an entire city block, even boats out in the bay
see the wild flicker of her distress…

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/2020/09/michael-a-de-armas-the-switch/

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“Two Chairs,” by Lizzy Beck (Poetry ’20)

“Two Chairs,” a poem by 2020 graduate Lizzy Beck, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt below:

Two Chairs

Beside the health center you saw two chairs:
wooden, solid, placed
just so, as in a draftsman’s rendering.

They sat inside a bed of daffodils—
not two-toned
but yellow all the way through. The chairs

were empty. Had to be. You had a momentary
wish to meet
the giddy gardener who had planted daffodils

right up to the chairs’ legs, so the chairs would be
swimming in blooms,
the seats like placid rafts the yellow waters

sometimes lapped. If you pick your way through,
delicate and discerning
in your bare feet, you must then raise your legs

out of the cluster, cross them well, and sit
as if an island.
You must commit to quiet…

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/2020/09/lizzy-beck-two-chairs/

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“Shooter,” by Perry Janes (Poetry ’19)

Perry Janes, a July 2019 poetry graduate, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Shooter” below:

Shooter

There are things I don’t know,
can’t know, and maybe don’t want to,
including what a man’s teeth look like
through a rifle’s magnifying scope. Tonight
a frightened anchor on the radio reports
a gunman stalking Interstate 96 firing
into backseats, windshields, drivers behaving
erratically, causing pile-ups. I’m sick of
God and his potholes, the many mouths
opening relentlessly, beneath…

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/2020/09/perry-janes-shooter/

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“Reconsidering Plato’s Cave,” by J. Estanislao Lopez (Poetry ’19)

Poetry alum J. Estanislao Lopez was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Reconsidering Plato’s Cave” below:

Joshua Estanislao Lopez

Reconsidering Plato’s Cave

My opinion?
Plato never
set foot
inside a cave.

Inside a cave,
there’s no
deception.
Only you…

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/2020/09/j-estanislao-lopez-reconsidering-platos-cave/

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“The Fault Lines in Midwestern Racism Run Deep,” by Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Poetry faculty member Amaud Jamaul Johnson was recently featured in LitHub. Read an excerpt of “The Fault Lines in Midwestern Racism Run Deep” below.

Amaud Jamaul Johnson

I moved to Madison, Wisconsin in the fall of 2000. My wife was starting a teaching position, and I was still trying to “find myself” as a writer. Money Magazine had recently named Madison the #1 place to live in the US, so this seemed like a great place to land. After leaving Compton for college, I crisscrossed the country, living in DC, New York, Atlanta, and Oakland. The Midwest was the frontier. I’ve lived in deeply segregated communities my whole life, but I rarely experienced being the only Black person in a room. For me, the opposite was true; the white world was elsewhere, in other neighborhoods or on TV. Wisconsin is a lovely state. We actually live in our dream home, a lovely Colonial. I bike and hike; I ice skate and cross-country ski; I’ve become an amateur sommelier of craft beer, but I’m also a kind of mascot, a pet Negro, that one Black body in the coffee shop, or at the private pool; I’ve become everyone’s one Black friend, the anchor of every “one drop” diversity initiative, everything short of a drummer. Maybe a year ago, I was out alone having lunch, and a woman approached me. She placed her hand on my shoulder and said: “I’m so glad you’re here.” I felt like Sticks walking into Arnold’s. I’m concerned that I exist to improve the political capital of my neighbors. Is the purpose of my life the cultural enrichment of a white community? Was that my grandmother’s dream when I left for college? 

Read the essay in its entirety here: https://lithub.com/the-fault-lines-of-midwestern-racism-run-deep/

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“Far and Away,” by Sally Keith

Poetry faculty member Sally Keith recently had a poem featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Far and Away” below:

Far and Away

Upstairs in the café, which once had a long bar with stools, where you could plug in your computer and work with a good view of the frozen foods, if not also the line for express checkout, sometimes you would see people you knew.

*

Long ago, far away, somewhere I loved, was loved, or where I loved once—

*

A mother watching her child and the swimming instructor watching Amor model a perfect flip-turn each time she arrives at this end of the pool.

*

To tack, to turn, to add, to get, to put yourself
So as to speed along
Really fast. 

There, sailing once
The glasses flew off and got lost—
No recovery.

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-4-sally-keith/

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“Nautical Twilight,” by Jen Ryan Onken (Poetry ’20)

“Nautical Twilight,” a poem by poetry alum Jen Ryan Onken, was recently featured on The Night Heron Barks. Read an excerpt below:

Nautical Twilight

But when below decks Jason
tried to stitch his lips to mine
the sun was still twelve degrees
under the slipknot of dawn.
By the Equinox, he’d cast
himself off from the moored
hull of the horizon… 

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://nightheronbarks.com/fall-2020/jen-ryan-onken/

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“Navigating Crisis: On Asian American Solidarity in a Post-Covid America,” by Daniel Tam-Claiborne (Fiction ’20)

2020 fiction graduate Daniel Tam-Claiborne was recently featured on LitHub. Read an excerpt of his essay below:

Daniel Tam Claiborne

The stories we tell about ourselves say a lot about how we’d like to be seen. Here’s mine:

Before it was the Pacific heir to the American century, China was an apparition lodged in the back of my throat. My mother, whose family fled China following the Japanese invasion in the mid-20th century, grew up in Cuba and came to America when she was six years old. She married—and, not long after, divorced—my father, an Anglo-American Jew, and I grew up the eldest of two children in a shared one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

My identity as Chinese American has long been central to my “origin story,” but the truth is, there is an inherent tension between who I espouse to be and the person I am. For anyone who identifies as mixed race, this tension is all too familiar: being too much of one thing, too little of something else. Being mixed race means only ever having partial authority, and the very nature of my heritage has had the unintended effect of leading me to double down on race as a marker of identity. In other words, race is the primary lens through which I would want me, the protagonist of my own life, to be read.

POC and marginalized writers often wrestle with an obligation to present race in their prose and have historically been seen as “writing on behalf” of their identity. I wanted to understand how other contemporary Asian American writers grapple with marking identity, and especially race, in their characters through choices in dialect or speech, and what, if anything, they can teach us about how Asian Americans can use their voice today.

Read the rest of the essay here: https://lithub.com/navigating-crisis-on-asian-american-solidarity-in-a-post-covid-america/

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