“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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“Blue Prints” by Rose McLarney (poetry ’10)

“Blue Prints” by Rose McLarney (poetry ’10), published by Blackbird.

Blue Prints

I saw the blueprint
of your apartment.
Edna always
shows me the letters,
Mama also.
Seems we should be
talking color schemes,
picking cotton,
and hunting apples
in the leaves. (Ha)
They are all gone
now you know.

Reading the lines tailored to a slender slip of paper, I read into the breaks. I read them as baring the bleakness held in the parentheses, giving the ha, like a dejected speaker’s lip, a twist. As pausing after They are all gone so the reader can think back to the loves named that would go too. And as making a heavy declaration of now you know by standing it alone.

This is the first among the letters to my grandmother, Elizabeth (as I must get used to her being addressed). Elizabeth, age seventeen, had just married and moved from the family farm in North Carolina to where her husband would work in Washington, DC. The writer is an aunt I never met. At the time, she is near Elizabeth’s age, also recently married.

In North Carolina, the unmarried women of a household had all slept in a single bed. In DC, the bed is only something the family can inquire about as a movable object, wondering how, among other furniture, it has been positioned.

[…continue reading “Blue Prints” at Blackbird.]

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“Sum Effects” by Peggy Shiner (fiction ’94)

“Sum Effects” by Peggy Shiner (fiction ’94), published by The Paris Review.

Sum Effects

When my grandmother died she owned no property, personal or real; no goods, durable or consumable. Personal property is also called movable property, personalty, movables, chattels (chattels first meant goods and money, and later came to be associated with a beast held in possession, livestock, cattle; chattel, as slaves, came into use in the seventeenth century), and under U.S. law can be further divided into tangibles and intangibles. Tangible property can be felt or touched and intangible property is immaterial. Personal effects are tangibles; debt and goodwill, intangibles. (And then there was paraphernalia, a specifically female version of personal effects: these are called her paraphernalia … the apparel and ornaments of the wife, which also included tableware and sometimes her bed.) Real property, with its echoes of real estate, realty, royalty, realm, kingdom, is immovable property, land and the structures on it. Durable goods, also known as hard goods, have a useful life of three or more years, and consumable goods, also known as soft goods, get used up or discarded; a further subset is known as perishables, goods prone to disintegration or decay. Personal or real, tangible or intangible, durable, hard, soft, consumable, or perishable: my grandmother owned none of it. Goldyne Alter died with no possessions. She didn’t leave a thing, save her body and that, of course, would be gone soon, too.

[…continue reading “Sum Effects” at The Paris Review.]

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“In the year of our Lord’s rising this April first” by Idris Anderson (poetry ’06)

“In the year of our Lord’s rising this April first” by Idris Anderson (poetry ’06), published by Peacock Journal.

In the year of our Lord’s rising this April first

Easter and Fool’s day. Aren’t they the same?
Well yes, today anyway. And it’s spring,
cherry blossoms full out, blowing like snow,
scatterings of snow, for it has been cold
and the sky is castover, the air not clear,
trees hiving with bees humming one sustainable note,
electric tremblings,  hundreds of tiny fluorescent bulbs.
Light! Light! The sun has risen but is dimmed.

[…continue reading “In the year of our Lord’s rising this April first” as well as four other poems by Idris Anderson (poetry ’06) at Peacock Journal.]

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“The Children” by Dilruba Ahmed (poetry ’09)

“The Children” by Dilruba Ahmed (poetry ’09), published by Four Way Review.

The Children

How each one is taken  
with care from car 

to school doorstep, each one 

hand-in-hand with an adult.  
How the mothers 

and fathers kiss 

their foreheads, first 
pushing aside their bangs 

or smoothing 

a stray wisp.  One 
parent straightens 

her daughter’s velvet 

headband; another wipes 
dried oatmeal 

from his son’s pink lips.  

[…continue reading “The Children” as well as two other poems at Four Way Review. You can also find another poem, “When the Time Comes,” at Blackbird.]

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“Portrait of a Becoming” by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19)

headshot of Candace Walsh (fiction '19) gazing at the camera wearing a blue cardigan.

“Portrait of a Becoming” by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19), published by Pigeon Pages.

Portrait of a Becoming

Ludlow Street will always be stuck in 1994, the year I moved from Buffalo to live in an Alphabet City summer sublet. I may also always be stuck in 1994, in complicated thrall to the Perland sisters. 

When I made a reservation to stay at a glossy, high-rise hotel on Ludlow last year, I did so with the urge to collide my present-day self against my younger self. I wanted to slip into the old Ludlow’s grotty sepia, walk past paint-tagged storefront gates closed like brittle eyelids over vacant shops, jam a toehold into my chimerical youth. I also wanted to know what it would feel like to press up against Ludlow Street’s new skin: In short, I ate vegan ice cream scooped at one a.m., found the rooftops of Loisaida buildings to be free of charm, and walked along Houston, feeling both like a ghost and far more solid and grounded than I ever did as a callow twentysomething. 

[…continue reading “Portrait of a Becoming” at Pigeon Pages.]

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