Poetry faculty member Marianne Boruch recently had an essay featured on Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation. Read an excerpt of “The Burning” below:

The Burning

COVID. But the sorrow doesn’t stop.

The best escapes from lockdown have meant walks in the woods. I can praise our favorite trails or new lush spots that friends in our small pod have shown us. Spring! Into summer! Time still passes. Thus those silent birds with nothing to say in March now sing out of lust for offspring or territory, first wildflowers like Bloodroot, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Trillium come and gone, sunlight in the leafed-out trees a dappled flourish.  I’ve learned new things from field guides long ignored, i.e., the diameter of the Maple out back makes it 150 years old. One foot = a half century. (Happy birthday!) For a while, I told everyone: Guess the natural world didn’t get the bad-news-Covid memo!  A lovely spring, I said ad nauseam, in glad disbelief. A little coolish, my mother would’ve put it, if she still could. But I wrote that before, in a poem.  

My point: Since Pliny the Elder, 70-whatever CE but even earlier, we’ve paid some attention—in poetry and beyond—to the natural world. Here’s the end of his bio: after writing the 37 books of his Naturalis Historia, the most exhaustive study we have from the Ancients, no bestiary stranger or more surreal, Pliny died near Pompeii of fumes from the fiery rain of Vesuvius. That famously food-loving genius insomniac heroically crossed the Bay of Naples in a small boat to rescue a friend in direct line of a volcanic eruption that would bury two cities. As for his Natural History, I suspect the most curious Pliny would have given a lot to add Australia to his everywhere hoard of everything. Such astonishing wildlife there, science still perplexed as to how such oddities got to that continent in the first place. (Ask the Indigenous Elders, I want to say.)

I mention Australia because I spent five months there on a Fulbright last year observing Kangaroos, Wallabies, Emus, Koalas and preparing to write my own neo-ancient/medieval bestiary. And the quirky, capable Pliny, first looker, somehow ended up in those poems as fuse and startle, a now and then forget-me-not though I didn’t fully invite him. It’s how poems work, laying claim then losing track of stumbled well-meaning starts, intention itself not worth much.

Read the full piece here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2020/07/the-burning

Poetry alum Mary Lou Buschi recently had three poems featured by Indolent Books. Read an excerpt of “How to Snake a Drain” below:

How to Snake a Drain

As the auger begins its journey down the drain,
push the end in until you feel resistance.

It was a shoe, one that could not be snaked.
Brenda sobbed when she found her Kork-Ease
unceremoniously jammed into the toilet.

It all happened between English and gym
in the 2nd floor bathroom.

No one would come forward to say that they had done it.
Was it an accident? Was someone playing catch
over the bathroom stalls? Did Brenda do it herself?

You may have to apply pressure as you rotate the snake
around the tight curve into the trap.
The rotating action enables the tip of the snake
to attach to the clog and spin it away or chop it up.

Brenda denied the claim.

If the clog is a solid,
the auger head entangles the object.

Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.indolentbooks.com/what-rough-beast-07-28-20-mary-lou-buschi/

2017 fiction graduate David Saltzman was recently featured in Parhelion. Read an excerpt of “Gator Days” below:

Gator Days

I’ve always been fascinated by gators—there’s something seductively simple about a life of natural law and rote response, all dead eyes and sinew and death rolls levied upon unsuspecting wildebeest. I consume gator documentaries, have spent hours scouring YouTube for videos of their visceral, primordial force. And I never understood a thing about them until my wife and I, visiting New Orleans for our first real vacation together, decided to take a gator tour.

We drove forty-five minutes west, weaving through the swamplands besieging the city until we reached a rundown shanty that served as the global headquarters of Airboat Adventures, LLC. Stepping out into a wet, gauzy heat, we immediately scurried for the office, passing a middle-aged couple in matching I ♥ Oak Alley Plantation t-shirts; another family, obviously midwestern, extricated themselves from a rented minivan. We creaked open the screen door and entered, air conditioning conspicuously absent.  

The office was all gift shop, its shelves sagging with the larval forms of yard sale. People trickled in behind us, making awkward, gator-adjacent small talk until a perky protomillennial slammed inside and herded us all down to the pier, tickets clutched in our sweaty little fists. We grouped up in front of a flat-top, shallow-draft boat, a creature of sheet metal and simple geometry—clearly, I thought, the result of a productive day shopping at Home Depot.

One by one, we twisted gingerly aboard, the boat dipping threateningly whenever our weight shifted, which was approximately always, until the guide had us balanced out like cargo on an airplane and we puttered away from the dock through a mat of flowering lilypads, curving out to join the main channel beyond. Cypress bent to the water’s edge, caterpillars of Spanish moss glowing in spectral catenary curves, palmetto and sawgrass alongshore yielding to a moist, green density beyond.

Read the full piece here: https://parhelionliterary.com/david-saltzman/

“Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant,” a found poem by poetry alum Jeneva Stone, was recently featured in Room. Read an excerpt below:

Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant

could you bring the light
“inside the body”?

(how may I
find the Light
in the midst of)

supposing we hit
the body
with a tremendous —

(darkness
of my heart,
which is so
great)

whether it’s
ultraviolet or just
very powerful light —

supposing
you brought
the light

(by its discovering
and warring
against
the darkness)

inside the body

Read the rest of this poem here: http://www.analytic-room.com/poems/sunlight-is-the-best-disinfectant-jeneva-stone/

“In the Gem Mine Capital of the World,” a poem by poetry graduate Rose McLarney, was recently featured in the Cortland Review. Read an excerpt below:

In the Gem Mine Capital of the World

In the Gem Mine Capital of the World,
stands lined the roads, selling buckets of red dirt

for visitors to sift through, wash on screens,
sloshing and staining their fingers and clothes,
lifting out stones.

The town’s title was repeated
by billboards every few feet of highway.

This was home, familiar to me.
So I passed by the superlative claim
without thought of distinction or singularity.

The name meant nowhere else were there more
mines of this kind, inviting you to
bring a bag lunch, vending drinks and sunscreen.

Not that the land, or its miners’ futures,
held much wealth.

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/85/mclarney.php