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

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/

“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

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

“[men shouting],” a poem by faculty member Connie Voisine, was recently published by Zocalo Public Square. Read an excerpt below:

[men shouting]

“The hallways lead through the belly of
hospital, hotel, laundry service, nowhere.
These vague industrial spaces with safety doors

reading Alarm Will Sound if Opened
in this cement and cinderblock gullyway
lead me to florescent-lit workers who cannot

identify the woman I hold forward in a tired
photograph. A few more corridors and I can find
only steamy pots of bleach or stew abandoned

by immigrants dispersing through other doors.
I know this woman was from across wars, capsized
rafts and droughts and more wars and I,

with my sweat and smells, broken nails,
and stained teeth, well, it’s a kind of
devotion which summoned me to this journey…”

To read the rest of this poem, visit this link: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/01/24/men-shouting/chronicles/poetry/