“Fifty-seven-year-old Sharecropper Woman. Hinds County Mississippi” by Gail Peck (poetry ’87)

An excerpt from “Fifty-seven-year-old Sharecropper Woman. Hinds County Mississippi” by Gail Peck (poetry ’87), published by The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Fifty-seven-year-old Sharecropper Woman. Hinds County Mississippi

When there are no doctors
you do what you can, a dime with a hole
on a string tied around each ankle
to prevent headaches.
Her bare feet rest on the planks
of a porch, her feet so calloused
it’s hard to feel splinters.
How many miles have they walked among rows?

[…continue reading “Fifty-seven-year-old Sharecropper Woman. Hinds County Mississippi” at Dead Mule.]

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“Woof” by Peter Schireson (poetry ’17)

An excerpt from “Woof” by Peter Schireson (poetry ’17), published by Vox Populi.

Woof

I take Buster out for his walk,

above us, wild geese

fly south, honking,

going nowhere, geese without edges, 

no longer geese.

[…continue reading “Woof” at Vox Populi.]

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“Operation Babylift” by Tiana Nobile (poetry ’17)

An excerpt from “Operation Babylift” by Tiana Nobile (poetry ’17), published by Kweli Journal.

Operation Babylift

“We bucket-brigade-loaded the children right up the stairs into the airplane.”
– Col. Bud Traynor, pilot

April 4, 1975

Skin still wet with mother’s
grief. I brought my baby
to them, I admit it.

Airlift Takes Off

Tucked in cardboard and stowed
two to each seat.

At 23,000 Feet Systems Fail

In the event of being born
in a country ravaged by war –

Explosion

[…continue reading “Operation Babylift” at Kweli Journal.]

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Registration for the 2019 Alumni Conference is Open!

Information and the links to register and pay are here: http://friendsofwriters.org/the-2019-alumni-conference/

Deadlines are short: Register today!

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“If You Go to Bed Hungry” by Angela Narciso Torres (poetry ’09)

An excerpt from “If You Go to Bed Hungry” by Angela Narciso Torres (poetry ’09), published by Poetry.

If You Go to Bed Hungry

If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot.
Stop playing with fire before the moon rises or you’ll pee in your sleep.

Sweeping the floor after dark sweeps wealth and good fortune out the door.
Fork dropped: a gentleman will visit. Spoon: a bashful lady.

Bathing after you’ve cooked over a hot stove makes the veins swell.
For safe passage to the guest who leaves mid-meal: turn your plate.

[…continue reading “If You Go to Bed Hungry” at Poetry.]

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“My Early Twenties” by Lesley Howard (fiction ’18)

An excerpt from “My Early Twenties” by Lesley Howard (fiction ’18), published by Narrative.

My Early Twenties

End of April, New York, my friend Liza picked me up for my Hardee’s morning shift, an act of deep love because I had to clock in at four thirty in the a.m. I said something about a best friend being better than a lover, and she squinted at me like it was a November afternoon when the sun slants in at that awful angle and the glare is blinding, regardless of sunglasses.

“You’re prickly,” she said. “Fight with David last night?”

We hadn’t fought but we hadn’t done anything else either. Liza reached for her ever-present coffee mug; it wasn’t there and she muttered, “Damn, where’d my mug go?” and turned around to ask her four-year-old daughter, nickname of Pixie, to ask if she had Mommy’s cup and that was all that was said about my mood, but she is a psychic, seriously, her own storefront and some A-list Broadway clients she’s protective of. And although she never says anything about what she can’t help but know, I go around knowing she knows and usually it’s not a problem because we are old friends, from Pixie’s age on, the kind of friend that’s essentially family. All to explain that we didn’t say anything, but I got out at the Hardee’s feeling like I’d already worked my shift and was dredged in butter and dusted in flour.

[…continue reading “My Early Twenties” at Narrative.]

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“Apple Thieves” by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry ’06)

photo of Beverly Bie Brahic (poetry '06)

An excerpt from “Apple Thieves” by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry ’06), published by The New Yorker.

Apple Thieves

In his dishevelled garden my neighbor
Has fourteen varieties of apples,
Fourteen trees his wife put in as seedlings
Because, being sick, she wanted something
Different to do (different from being sick).

In winter she ordered catalogues, pored
Over subtleties of mouthfeel and touch:
Tart and sweet and crisp; waxy, smooth,
And rough. Spring planted an orchard,
Spring projected summers

Of green and yellow-streaked, orange, red,
Rusty, round, wormholed, lopsided;
Nothing supermarket flawless, nothing imperishable.
Gardens grow backward and forward
In the mind; in the driest season, flowers.

[…continue reading “Apple Thieves” at The New Yorker.]

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“The Creative Drive” by Catherine Barnett (poetry ’02)

An excerpt from “The Creative Drive” by Catherine Barnett (poetry ’02), published by the Academy of American Poets poem-a-day feature.

The Creative Drive

A recent study found that poems increased
the sale price of a home by close to $9,000.
The years, however, have not been kind to poems.

The Northeast has lost millions of poems,
reducing the canopy. Just a few days ago,
high winds knocked a poem onto a power line

a few blocks from my house.
I had not expected to lose so many at once.

[…continue reading “The Creative Drive” at the Academy of American Poets.]

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“Omne Trium Perfectum” by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19)

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

An excerpt from “Omne Trium Perfectum,” creative nonfiction by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19) published by K’in Literary Journal.

Omne Trium Perfectum

The Rule of Three

Jeanine saw four in the lower parking lot. Steve saw two on a hike in the woods. Sam saw two near his dorm. After Sam and before Steve, safe in my rental car, I saw one cross the road.

Most bears are born in January, the month of our MFA winter residency, and are out and about in July when we return in the summer—thick on the ground because they are hungry.

He ambled on all fours, sine curves rolling through his spine and rump. His paws knew the smooth dark road that sank into the hill between groves, knew the up-and-down land. The campus buildings were built into slopes, so you could enter a first, second, or third floor from the ground.

As I sank my foot on the brake, the bear stopped and swiveled his neck. His dog-like snout tilted up. A wow bloomed through my chest. Terror did not taint the wow, because in that millisecond my reptile brain knew I was protected by a metal shell.

I held his gaze for a dark infinity. Capture, said my brain. Shoot. But my phone-fumbling hand released him from our trance. Boulder-still to blur, he ran into the trees behind the faculty dorms. We took that path back and forth from early morning to after midnight. The alleged safer way, the road, is where I found the bear. There is no safe way, only stories we tell to make us brave.

I believed he was a man-child of bear, with paws that hit the ground soft like petals.

[…continue reading “Omne Trium Perfectum” at K’in Literary Journal.]

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“All the Chinese Food in the World” by Sue Mell (fiction ’16)

An excerpt from “All the Chinese Food in the World” by Sue Mell (fiction ’16) published by Cleaver Magazine.

All the Chinese Food in the World

I’m always sad when the gig ends. Three grueling weeks with a showroom crew I only see each spring and fall, preparing for the home textile market. I’ll especially miss the Flower Marys—a jubilant self-named group of gay men who fashion stunning floral arrangements. Peggy, Mary, Louise. Men whose real names I never learned or have long since forgotten. Over time, a musician among them will marry the showroom designer. Others vanish into illness, addiction. The displays shrink, the crew downsize with budget cuts. But this warm spring evening, in the early aughts, it’s all still in place, and I’ve got one night left in New York, where old friends, commercial photographers soon to be forced from the city by hostile buyout, have graciously lent me their tiny West Village apartment while they’re out of town.

Bags packed, rooms tidied, I’m caught in familiar disjunction between east and west coast. “Pick up,” I say, over-ordering Chinese from the place on Bethune, though it’s blocks away.

At Bleecker, a yellow cab slows; the driver stares rolling past. Exhaust trailed by a faint scent of honeysuckle. Violet dusk dissolves the thin wedge of playground ahead, memory slip-sliding into overlay as I cross the street—this neighborhood the stomping ground of my early adulthood. I was forged here, but it’s no longer my home.

[…continue reading “All the Chinese Food in the World” at Cleaver Magazine.]

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