Robin Rosen Chang‘s poem “Many things I am not” recently appeared in the Atticus Review. Read an excerpt below:
Many things I am not
the road, its ruts and rises disappearing
around a corner. I’m not the forest floor.
I’m not a pond, not a lily pad floating on a pond
or the silty bottom my feet sink into…
Find the rest of this poem here: https://atticusreview.org/many-things-i-am-not/
Dawn Abeita‘s short story “Corner of Main and Paradise” recently appeared in the Yemassee Journal. Read an excerpt below:
“The man stands on the same street corner near the wire garbage can every day. He never sits or squats or leans. He is a pole, planted on the corner like a reminder of something. The four and five and ten story fringes of the city huddle above the storefronts. Some windows are arranged and curated, but one contains a toaster, a nightgown, and bowls for cat food, unmoved for a decade. In another a retro TV/VHS combo is showing a movie: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It can’t be heard…”
Read the rest of Dawn’s story here: http://yemasseejournal.com/2020/03/01/corner-of-main-and-paradise/
“Fever,” a short story by Sumita Mukherji, was recently published in Wildness. Read an excerpt below:
“The children’s hallucinations bloomed at night: abandoned skyscrapers and derelict hulls of ships and wildfires wrecking villages. All of us, not knowing what the sickness was, called it the midnight virus. All of the parents said, We will win against this fever, this endless pandemic.
Though the town knew my ten-year-old daughter, I did not mention her. I did not mention that she lived without fever, even when parents of the dying stared at her as she skipped across our back lawn. I did not mention that against my wishes, she kissed her ill friends’ cheeks and as they slumbered, pilfered old teddy bears, diaries, necklaces, games. How she glued their toys and trinkets, wet with fever, into a pyramid. How she laid on her rug and embraced its triangular base in her sleep…”
Read the rest of “Fever” here: https://readwildness.com/21/mukherji-fever
Faculty member Amaud Jamaul Johnson‘s poem “Other Women’s Children” was recently published on poets.org. Read an excerpt below:
Other Women’s Children
I still don’t know how he knew
I was running. My mouth was open,
or those boys were barking that loud;
not that I hadn’t been chased
by dogs. There’s a moment when
you can’t tell from which angle
it’s coming, and the air is a red drum…
Find the rest of this poem (and hear Amaud read it) here: https://poets.org/poem/other-womens-children
“The Pedestrian,” a poem by 2013 MFA graduate Tommye Blount, was recently published on poets.org. Read an excerpt below:
The Pedestrian
When the pickup truck, with its side mirror,
almost took out my arm, the driver’s grin
reflected back; it was just a horror
show that was never going to happen,
don’t protest, don’t bother with the police
for my benefit, he gave me a smile–…
Find the rest of this poem here: https://poets.org/poem/pedestrian-0
Kate Lister Campbell‘s short story “Zion” recently appeared in the Four Way Review. Read an excerpt below:
“This summer, all the kids call themselves Zion. They come one by one and hang on the fence behind the backboard, then drift in until they’re standing under the basket, waiting for the rebound off my shot. Teams form by nods and dissolve at eleven or twenty-one, each of us breaking off into the veins of city streets and subway tunnels. The summer I emigrated, every kid on the courts wanted to be like Mike, and I was thrilled because that was my name, Mikhail. The last time my sister and I got chased home in Minsk, my parents decided: Israel or America, whichever we could reach first. Chubby, with harsh Russian dribbling down my chin, my second language became one of cuts and jumps, of lay-ups punctuated with a single English word. Dude! I cried, when my shot fell through the hoop, when I got fouled, when I slapped my sweaty hand against a tall teenager’s after a play. Dude, they always replied, their faces lit with sweat and admiration…”
Read the rest of “Zion” here: http://fourwayreview.com/quarto-zion-by-kate-lister-campbell/
Alumna Jill Klein’s poem “birds often beat against what they don’t know can’t see” recently appeared in Radar. Read an excerpt below:
birds often beat against what they don’t know can’t see
windows dirty hung high strung such bangs such
bashing in the cabin on an island
gently sloping with an edge of sweetness
towards the sea who pocked the lawn with yellow
spots not the dog he’s sleeping early dawn
see sleek and long they’re hauling sea like
up the lawn sea otters looking for some
respite under cabin fur stench rising…
Find the rest of this poem (and hear Jill read it) here: https://www.radarpoetry.com/birds
“One Day I Suddenly Notice,” by faculty member Daisy Fried, was recently published by the Poetry Foundation.
One Day I Suddenly Notice
Abstract for a happy poem
You made your students write stories about happiness and they were, you said, the worst stories of the year. Remember the pregnant woman? in a Fontainebleau café, I meant to reset it in America when I wrote the poem, she was sordid with mammalian culmination, dissatisfied with the first table she chose, the chair, with too much too hot sun soaking her through the picture window, she gathered crockery, groceries, her unsatisfactory handbag in order to move but the space between tables was small and the deadweight of her near-term baby in the moonbounce of her body made her clumsy, trip, fall, splash, and spill her au lait into a man’s open laptop.
His screen went blank. She broke into tears. Him so angry and sorry for her he couldn’t speak. He lifted the milk-glopped computer out of the coffee; it dripped viscous stalactites onto the table and his knees and the floor, pooling around tasseled, perforated loafers. The woman at the end of her tether. Tears dribbled down her face to her blouse and into the now-empty cup she swooped over to pick up nearly losing her balance. That happens pregnant: you forget for a minute and the front weight shocks you. The man, scrunched up in an expensive embroidered sweater, navy, thread beads, intricate, abstract in pattern, with thighs to make you think of sex, was heavy too with urgency to save circuitry, get back to his important work, money work, stocks work, smoke-and-mirrors work, rather like poetry, without forgiveness or incivility. His earpiece lighting up with calls he didn’t take.
Find the rest of this poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/152097/one-day-i-suddenly-notice-1
David Saltzman‘s short story “Our Lot” recently appeared in Two Sisters. Read an excerpt bellow:
“The streets in this town are just filthy with memories, their tidal nostalgia pulling me gently past curbside racks of ironic t-shirts and artisanal food-cart ecologies, pop-up art installations warring for attention with painfully earnest street performers, gastropubs on every corner from Harris all the way down to the Brick-Walnut roundabout, where I light up one last cigarette before soldiering on up the hill toward College toward this unkempt gravel lot where once there’d been a church, and before that, another church, and before that another—now, there’s only a brick wall, but embedded in this wall are all the different materials from all the generations of churches, each silhouette a different color and each nestling into the last and all of it nested against a red-brick backdrop, watching over a lot nobody’s even parked in for years…”
Find the rest of “Our Lot” here: https://www.twosisterswriting.com/winners-1/2020/2/1/our-lot-by-david-saltzman
Faculty member Peter Turchi‘s “Relative Accuracy” recently aired on Engines of Our Ingenuity. Read an excerpt bellow:
“Today, we’ll question the virtue of accuracy. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
Given a choice between an accurate map and a distorted one, most of us would choose accuracy. After all, accuracy is good, right?
Well — it depends. “Accuracy,” we need to remember, is relative.
One of the great reminders of that fact is a map that’s been used around the world for nearly a century.
The first underground railway opened in 1863. For 70 years, the map of the London Underground, or Tube, was simply superimposed over a road map. As the Tube expanded, that map grew increasingly difficult to read. The names of the stations in the center of the city were clustered together; the stations at the outskirts were so far apart that the map was unwieldy. The depiction of the lines and stations was accurate, but confusing…”
Continue reading “Relative Accuracy” here: https://uh.edu/engines/epi2985.htm?fbclid=IwAR3FChYED4VnsseAbnz7ck_uZJeUcUfFtljdGBts36Hgj8mAkGSg7_nwYFY
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