“COYOTES” BY TERRI LEKER

“Coyotes” by Terri Leker (fiction 17) won the 2019 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, selected by Claire Vaye Watkins. It was published in New Ohio Review Issue 26.

The coyotes moved into the woods behind my house just after I learned I was pregnant. On a quiet June morning, while my husband slept, I pulled on my running shoes and grabbed a leash from a hook at the back door. Jute danced around my feet on her pipe-cleaner legs, whining with impatience. It would have taken more than this to wake Matt, but I hushed her complaints with a raised finger and we slipped outside. A light breeze blew the native grasses into brown and golden waves as we wandered, camouflaging Jute’s compact frame. She sniffed the dirt, ears telescoping as though she were asking a question. When we reached a shady thicket of red madrones and live oaks, I unclipped the leash and wound it around my wrist.

It was over with Richard, had been since I’d found out about the baby. Anyway, I had come to believe that adultery sounded more illicit than it actually was. Between managing my schedule with Matt and making time to rendezvous with Richard, an affair often seemed more about time management than sexual gratification. I was meticulous with the calendar, but I would have known that the baby was Matt’s regardless, because Richard’s sperm could not locomote. He had told me so early on, while showing me the master bedroom of his faithfully restored North Oakland Victorian. His unexpected disclosure had interrupted my admiration of the exposed brick walls, so unusual for the earthquake-conscious Bay Area. Matt was having dinner just then with friends, thinking I was helping my mother set up her new television (she would be dead within a few months, but we all pretended to be optimists then), so he was eating eggplant parmesan at the Saturn Café as I lay with Richard on his king-sized bed, hearing words like motility and capacitation. Richard’s sober tone had suggested that I might comfort him in his sterility, which I did, if the definition of comfort was a passionate encounter that lasted as long as one might spend unboxing a 48-inch HDTV and connecting it to both Netflix and Hulu. But Matt and I had tried to have a baby for three years, so I took the pregnancy as a sign to recommit myself to my husband, who, predictably, jumped up and down on our unmade bed when I shared the news, attempting, in his white-socked excitement, to pull me up with him, not realizing that doing so might judder the bundle of cells loose, delivering me back to Richard and a childless but aesthetically pleasing life.

Read the rest of the story here: https://newohioreview.org/2019/12/13/coyotes/#more-2578

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SHANNON WINSTON in CITRON REVIEW

Shannon Winston (poetry 18) has two poems in the current issue of CITRON REVIEW. Here is an excerpt from “The Spinners:”

Early on, I learned how to put a spin on things—
     something I picked up from the spinners in my hometown.

Me, the quiet observer who watched artisans
     at fairs and in storefront windows turning batting,

spool by spool, into fine, magnificent strands.
     Magenta, turquoise, purple—the seamlessness of it all.

Read the rest of “The Spinners” and the poem “Peer” on (or near) this link https://citronreview.com/2019/12/21/the-spinners/

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ALYSON MOSQUERA DUTEMPLE (fiction 19) in FLOCK

Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s story “Prix Fixe” was nominated for a Pushcart and appears in the latest issue of FLOCK.

It was May, but the trees outside the restaurant didn’t seem to know it.  Their blighted leaves shuddered and fell, lending an autumnal feel to the air even before Mary took me out to dinner and announced that she wanted to leave me.

“Stephen, I’ve thought long and hard about this, and… Stephen?  I need you to listen,” she said.

A waiter had walked by. “I’m worried about you, Stephen,” Mary began, and though I tried to focus, there was something about this waiter, this kid, that caught my eye.  The way he bounced up a little on his toes as he walked.  That nervous jump at the end of each step.   The same skipping motion, the same funny little stride.  It reminded me of our boy, Everett.

“Stephen? Are you listening to me?” Mary’s voice rose.  “Now see?  This. This is exactly what I’m talking about.”  She rattled the ice in her glass.  “I can’t stand it.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the waiter, the one with Everett’s walk, standing just a little way off from our table, patting down his pockets.  “You tune me out,” Mary continued. “Whenever I bring up—” Her words rumbled indistinctly around me, a storm on the horizon, the wing-beat hum of locusts.  “It’s like you’re trying to be distracted all the time.”  I watched as the waiter brought a tiny notebook from his pocket, the kind used to write down orders in a restaurant.  I wondered if there was a name for such a book.  I wondered why I hadn’t asked Everett if there was a name for such a book the summer he worked on the pier washing dishes. Back when he was saving up for college or for whatever else he thought, we all thought, might have come next.

Read the rest of the story here: https://flocklit.com/fiction-dutemple-prix-fixe/

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LIA GREENWELL IN THE SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW

Lia Greenwell’s (poetry 13) Pushcart Prize-nominated essay “Your Soul Doesn’t Need You” appears in Southern Humanities Review issue 52.4. The essay recounts a traumatic event in which Greenwell was carjacked at gunpoint, midday, at a gas station in a small town. In an interview, Greenwell discusses the different ways she has written about this trauma, the stranglehold of fear, and both the limitations and possibilities of form and genre.

Read the interview with Lia here: http://www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/interview-lia-greenwell.html

And read an excerpt from the essay here: http://www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/524-lia-greenwells-your-soul-doesnt-need-you.html

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“Interior with Young Woman” by Susan Okie (poetry ’14)

An excerpt from “Interior with Young Woman” by Susan Okie (poetry ’14), published by Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Interior with Young Woman

A borrowed house awaited,
empty but warm with intention—
soft white rugs for bare feet,
orange cushions posed on sofas.

A woman by Picasso kept one eye
on us. The other watched the lights
down in the valley. He played me
music from his country, asked

to dance. Awkward, I shuffled
to the beat. When he held me,
my body recoiled. I was a crane,
he a rooster, glossy, compact.

[…continue reading “Interior with Young Woman”at Valparaiso Poetry Review.]

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“First” by Lillian Cummins (fiction ’19)

An excerpt from “First” by Lillian Cummins (fiction ’19), published by West Branch.

First

Hot, dry Friday night, late September in Texas. Callie, Mina, and Emma get ready for the football game. Constrained during the week by the plaid skirts and button-down shirts of the St. Agnes School for Girls, they go all out. Callie pulls Emma’s purple miniskirt off and tosses it to Mina, sitting on the bed. Callie hates that she keeps getting taller. The skirt’s too short for her, and it’s too tight for Emma, who’s all boobs and hips. Mina’s Chinese so she’s small. She could maybe get away with it.

Emma leans into the mirror; her damp breath steams the surface. Her eyes take shape as she lines them in black. Pale and blonde, she’s a couple of shades away from disappearing altogether. The girls are at Emma’s house because she can take the car wherever, whenever she wants. Her parents are too busy getting divorced to notice.

“Anything else?” Callie says.

Emma’s pulled-down lower eyelid is a blood-red crescent moon. She rolls her eyeballs toward the closet. The accordion doors are hinged wide open, and a tongue of clothes spills out, licking the soft blue carpet. “Cropped jacket and matching shorts,” she says, circling the eyeliner above her head. “All black. Super cute.”

Callie pushes at hangers while Mina’s attention gets caught by an orange stain on her khaki shorts. “Damn,” she says. She licks her thumb and rubs the stubborn cotton.

“Try the skirt, my dear,” Emma says. She bats her eyelashes, thick with mascara, but Mina ignores her, scratches a bitten-down nail against the dry clot. The scraping is like ripping cardboard. The purple miniskirt lies abandoned on the bed, lapping against Mina’s bare, brown calf.

These are Callie’s best friends. She didn’t dare hope for friends at this new school. Last spring, when Aunt Rosa brought home two heavy plaid skirts, Callie didn’t know they were from St. A’s second-hand sale. Aunt Rosa held one up to the light and nodded with the kind of conviction that would make any fifteen-year-old nervous. “Ain’t so thin you can see right through them,” she said.

[…continue reading “First” at West Branch.]

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“Tin Boy” by Sumita Mukherji (fiction ’15)

An excerpt from “Tin Boy” by Sumita Mukherji (fiction ’15), published by Failbetter.

Tin Boy

My mother called herself a modern-day witch. With all of her poultices and potions, I thought of her more as a mad scientist. But I should have thought of her as a magician, because one day she disappeared.

That day started like many others. It was one of those California valley summers that extends into the fall, the kind that leaves you thirsting for your mother’s limeade all day and dreaming of ice castles all night. On our walk home from sixth grade, the sun, having scorched the ridge where my nose had once broken, burned the back of my stringy neck and parched my friend Jenny’s delicate throat. At the end of my cul-de-sac we paused and tapped at our injured skin, making mock sad faces at each other.

My sweaty San Francisco 49ers t-shirt fell to the middle of my thighs, over my loose gray shorts. At age eleven I was double-jointed, and as Jenny and I climbed the porch steps, I bent my arms forward and backward, aiming to impress my mother, who used to adore my awkwardness and loved watching me journey home from her bedroom window. “My sweet, tottering son,” she would say as a greeting at the front door. She adored it until a few months ago, when my father was legally allowed to stop sending alimony payments, and she quit her job at a marketing firm so that she could devote her days to herbalism and witchcraft.

[…continue reading “Tin Boy” at Failbetter.]

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“La Creel” by Andrés Reconco (fiction ’18)

An excerpt from “La Creel” by Andrés Reconco (fiction ’18), published by West Branch.

La Creel

My mother was obsessed with soap operas and pan dulce. One day, after my photo shoot, I went to a panadería she likes. It’s a Cuban place with little sweet breads stuffed with guava and cheese. I hadn’t planned on visiting her, but the photoshoot went well and it’s still early. My mom likes to drink coffee late while she watches television, so, I buy some sweet bread and then drive to her apartment. The lock to her door is tricky but after a couple of tries I get inside. She’s on the couch, watching a show about the best Telenovelas of the 80s and 90s.

“Trajiste pan!” she says when she sees me come in. It’s not cold but she’s wearing a burgundy sweater and she has a blue fleece blanket draped on her legs.

“Son panecillos cubanos,” I say. “The ones you like.”

 She looks into the bag and says, “Que rico. Voy a poner el cafecito.”

 I don’t see her often but whenever I do I can’t help but focus on the deepening creases around her eyes, the thinness of her hair, the way her skin is so dry it looks shiny, like scales. She grunts when she gets up from the sofa, and then grunts again when she bends over to get the pot for coffee. While the water heats up we sit in front of the TV and watch reruns of old novelas.

“Uy,” she says. “That novela came out when I was thirty! Look at how young Veronica Castro was! Wow. You know, she still looks really young but that’s only because she can pay for it. Rich people don’t get old. I’m getting old. Everything hurts now.”

Behind us the water begins to boil.

The coffee she makes comes in little yellow packets we empty into our cups of hot water. It tastes terrible but I drink it anyway.

“This coffee is really good,” she says. “I’ll buy you some for your house. Does Sofia drink coffee? I forget.”

[…continue reading “La Creel” at West Branch.]

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An excerpt from Charlotte Matthew’s (poetry ’98) memoir COMES WITH FURNITURE AND PEOPLE

I grew up without guesswork about where we were going to live or what we were going to eat. The rotation of Stouffer’s meals went something like this: Monday: turkey tetrazzini; Tuesday: stuffed bell peppers; Wednesday: creamed chipped beef; Thursday: chicken pot pie; Friday: lasagna. I don’t remember the weekend meals much, though we would occasionally go out to eat. And I was as certain as a person could be that we would never move. That brick house on Garfield Street with its slate roof and radiator heat was part of my mother. She embodied it. There was simply no place else for her to reside. 


How I knew my mother had something incurable is hard to say, except we have all witnessed how a dog senses a thunderstorm long before the rest of us. That’s the best way to explain it. My entire childhood, I felt something menacing burgeoning in her, something slow growing, taking over her body. She was a stately, modest woman, and I’d never seen her in anything other than pants suits and house dresses, occasionally a flannel nightgown. Still, I knew that underneath those garments, something had gone irreparably wrong. And when it grew worse, became bigger, overtook her all the way—who would take care of me then? And I was right. The year after leukemia cells got the best of her, The Washington Post ran a front-page story.: photographs of the contaminated soil she’d played in as a kid, pictures of the very street in Spring Valley she lived on cordoned off, her house, her lawn, on the front page of The Post. Turns out, her neighborhood had been a bomb testing ground during World War I. The Army Corps of Engineers has proclaimed the area uninhabitable. As I write this, they are conducting a clean-up of a one-mile wide swath of northwest Washington. 


I still have my mother’s address book, a blue three-inch hardback I remember buying together on one of our rare outings. She entered names with a black flair pen in her flawless, left-handed script. Whenever someone moved, she marked through the old address and wrote the new one below it. If someone died, she blacked out the most recent address, then wrote the date of death. Even though much of the book had cross-throughs, she refused to buy another. I can understand why. 


I wonder about the van driver who drove my mother’s body from the hospital to the funeral home. It was January, icy and cold. Was he listening to the news? Was she smoking a Salem Light? Did he know what cargo he had? When Gauler’s Funeral Home told us we needed to confirm the body as hers, Clark stood up without pause. Four minutes later, when he came back to the conference room where we were meeting with the funeral home director, his face revealed nothing of what he had just seen: our mother, dead under a white sheet, about to be burnt up. I’ve never asked my brother about it, but my gratitude for his taking on that task will never, ever fade. 


Yesterday my students and I set out to compile a list of agreed-upon facts: oil floats on water, if you touch its whiskers a cat will blink, the earth is not flat, pearls melt in vinegar. But the exercise got tricky real quick. We all had to agree it was an agreed upon fact. How long do houseflies live? Do elephants cry? Does time speed up when you get older? In Hindi, there is a phrase: to me, your memory comes. It is the same as our saying I miss you. Hindus use it to address the living. I employ it for the dead. My mother’s memory comes to me. I miss her. Because she was an expert at staying distant in real life (agreed upon fact) now that she’s gone, I miss her in a way that does not fade, guileless and dependable as Elmer’s Glue.

Sometimes I miss my mother so much she turns into the woman on the city bus, the stranger carrying a bag stuffed with cans of cat food. She becomes the single sound I can hear, all my attention has room for. When I got the news of her death, I turned into someone else, and for a very long time—a shocking alchemy. I became a motherless daughter. I became an orphan. 
My train is rolling slowly north, rural Virginia countryside. In the town of Orange, I see into shop windows, the tracks mere feet from Main Street. On one corner, a man exuberantly waves a brown paper bag at the passing train. The passenger seated across the aisle from me does not open the book that’s perched on his lap—but I don’t really expect him to. He looks like he’s just heard bad news, the kind you keep on hearing long after the words have been said. The kind that hangs in the air, stagnant and suffocating. It reminds me that there is no good way to get such news, and that there is no wrong way to mourn. On the train, I read a novel, translated from Italian, entitled The Days of Abandonment. Like most books I love, it’s hard to say what it’s about. There’s regret and loneliness, there’s suspicion and disfigurement. And there’s this sentence: we carry in our head until we die the living and the dead. My mother, though she’s been dead for two decades, peoples my head as much as—no, far more than—living people I see every day. There she is in her sitting room, as real to me as these words, as real as paprika. 

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A Continuation of Work: an Interview with Ian Randall Wilson (poetry ’02, fiction ’16)

Victoria DiMartino interviews Ian Randall Wilson (poetry ’02, fiction ’16) for The Rupture.

A Continuation of Work

Ian Randall Wilson‘s work has appeared in Forklift, Spinning Jenny, The Alaska Quarterly Review and Puerto del Sol. A chapbook, Theme of the Parabola, was published by Hollyridge Press.

His poem, “Nights Below,” appeared in Issue Eighty-Five of The Rupture.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Victoria DiMartino about engagement with the world, getting political with your work, and how eliminating part of the view always requires effort.

Nature is abundant is this piece, both in the imagery and the subject. Did your inspiration for this piece come from the current treatment of the environment by you or by others, or from an experience that you may have had in nature?

This piece is a kind of continuation of a movement in my work that tries to move from the inside to the outside. While there are still concerns with the “I” of the piece, there is at least an attempt at engagement with the world. At the same time, I’m preoccupied with my own mortality. I recently got the memo that gets distributed to all writers when they hit my age, the one that says: You’re going to die soon. Start writing about it. I would say that in more recent work—the poem we’re talking of is over 3 years old—I have begun to engage with more political concerns, be it the idiot that purports to be running our country or the accelerating degradation of our environment. This poem is an early start in that direction. I have to say also, that the end of the poem is an acknowledgment of something that has run through my work. In the past, I have derided certain lyric poets who wrote about “dead grandmothers and trees.” But you know something, sometimes you have to look for a spot of beauty in the world and the majesty of trees might just provide it.

[…continue reading this interview at The Rupture.]

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