An excerpt from “Saint Nobody” by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple (fiction ’19) published by Pigeon Pages.
Saint Nobody
To prepare the eighth graders to choose their new names for confirmation, Sister Antoninus lectured them about the saints. The miracle workers, the mystics, the martyrs with their severed limbs and cut out tongues. The girl found herself drawn to stories about acts of penance, self-mortifications. She liked to hear about hair shirts, especially. Whenever the topic came around to St. John the Baptist, his image appearing on the slide projector in his wiry loincloth, a shroud on his shoulders of coarse animal hairs irritating, purposely scratching his skin, the girl was reminded with a pleasurable stab of him, the boy she loved. She held her breath and squeezed her knees together in the dimness of her religion class and wondered, with a shudder, how the source of such feelings could be anything less than a miracle, an actual gift from God.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-03-29 15:00:232022-02-25 17:12:57“Slippage” by Kim Hamilton (poetry ’16)
Eighteen years old: I’m standing at the entrance to the newsroom at The Dallas Morning News. I’m wearing a white linen Ann Taylor suit and white stockings, bought special for this internship. For me, it’s a time during which I intend to come into the person I want to be: a hard-bitten reporter, albeit one with hot-rollered hair, because I’m a Texas gal. In my purse is a pack of cigarettes. It’s 1985. I love Madonna and Prince. This job is the bridge between the life I’ve been expected to lead and the life I have secretly always wanted for myself. This is my beginning.
An excerpt from “Model Tribute” by Ian Randall Wilson (poetry ’02, fiction ’16), published byThe Olive Press.
Model Tribute
In the land of 100 million cars, what kind of man chooses a bike? What kind walks? Have they a better sky sense of what’s up? Fluff does not call cloud its father. The hallway paintings are not often seen. I wanted to cover the walls in black, the floors in white. My suggestions were roundly rejected.
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An excerpt from “An Astonishing Plentitude” by Sarah Audsley (poetry ’19), published by Alpinist.
An Astonishing Plentitude
Before the bitter cold of ice-shatter from wind battering the treetops, snow drifted from gusts, before the shadows of dusk consume the length of day, before it is too much to slot fingertips into rimy seams of granite, before there is frost coating the un-harvested squash in the garden, sit still & remember the question you didn’t know you asked yourself against the flicker of campfire.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-03-26 15:00:062022-02-25 17:12:54“An Astonishing Plentitude” by Sarah Audsley (poetry ’19)
An excerpt from “From Mars” by Megan Pinto (poetry ’18), published by Passages North.
From Mars
Each person has their own reason: the man sitting next to me drove his wife into a tree, and the lady scaling that volcano just miscarried. The stars cannot understand our grief, so I take off my space suit and show them my skin, places I’ve ripped into again and again. You’ve told me you cannot love me, and I’m trying to understand but it hurts. Out here, Earth looks tiny—like a pretty, marbled thing, and you are so far away.
An excerpt from Daniel Jenkins‘ (poetry ’18) review of Nomi Stone‘s (poetry ’17) new collection Kill Class, published by Tupelo Press. Read the full review at Poetry Northwest.
Shall We Play a Game?
I must’ve been eight or nine the first time I watched War Games, the 1983 action film starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, about a tech-savvy teenager who hacks into a computer war game called ‘Global Thermonuclear War.’ Much of the film involves Broderick and Sheedy running into and from the government, but what has stayed for me is the five-word question that flashes across an old black DOS screen, cursor blinking green on black: SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? At the story’s conclusion, when playing ‘Global Thermonuclear War’ is suggested for a last time, the computer says, A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY. This blur between playacting and real warfare in the film scared the hell out of me. Those five words became an entrance to my childhood reality: growing up in a culture saturated with an enemy—The Soviet Union—somewhere over “there,” but not “here.” Kids in the 80s could unravel the acronym ICBM. I knew their purpose. But never once was I asked, Shall we play a game?
Kill Class, the second full-length collection of poems from poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone, embodies the fear and reality of this question. In the same way Stone used her fieldwork studying the Jewish community of Djerba in Tunisia through her first poetry collection, Stranger’s Notebook (2008), she opens her field journals once again in an unveiling of the American military machine. Stone explains in the book’s contextual notes that these poems come from
. . . two years (2011-2013) of ethnographic fieldwork, observing predeployment exercises in mock Middle Eastern villages at four military bases across the United States. The setting of these poems is the Middle East-inflected, US military-created fictional country of Pineland, in the woods of the American South, where people of Middle Eastern background are hired to theatricalize war for the training soldiers, repetitively pretending to bargain and mourn and die.
Kill Class gives us Gypsy, the collection’s heroic centerpiece. She is, according to Stone, a hybridized anthropologist-speaker and sometime “role player.” Through her studies of Pineland, she observes, interviews, and even participates in war games along with those people of Middle Eastern background who have been hired to play guerillas, the dead, the grieving, and the avenging. Throughout, Gypsy and the role players receive instructions from American soldiers conducting the trainings. Kill Class ultimately asks readers—through digressions, refractions, and the dismantling of consciousness—to directly confront the indirect and faceless experience of 21st-century warfare.
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An excerpt from an interview with Mike Puican (poetry ’09) about the reinvention of oneself, being a disupter in writing, and looking at oneself from the outside. Published by The Collagist.
“One of Me Wonders”: An Interview with Mike Puican
Where did you find the inspiration to begin this poem? As a reader, I felt that this poem’s grounding is in reality rather than a poetic fantasy. Did the inspiration for this poem spark out of a memory that you may or may not have included in here?
All the images are from my past. I am someone who has reinvented himself a few times in my life—athlete, anti-establishment radical, capitalist businessman, poet, activist for incarcerated writers, and others. With each reinvention, my inclination has been to pretend that anything that doesn’t fit my current persona didn’t exist. I’m now trying to understand this bundle of disparate directions and how it all originated from the same source.
The poem lists experiences from these different times with no interest in providing a narrative explanation. It’s a collage of disparate scenes joined only by the voice of the poet who is trying to understand how this can be explained. The closest the speaker can come is to attribute it to some unknown fire in his heart.
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The water calls to my water body. The water turning aqua-purple, my body diving deep into Japanese eggplant, my body turning suddenly nervous at a stroke of jelly green
tendrils along an ankle bone. What is the water? Breathing, turning, trying to remember there is nothing here to harm. In the unknown depths below, sea creatures moving, slow in grey-green
darkness. This water is still as a held breath. Barely a breeze as I duck back below. I can’t help but think of purpled mouths opening like the ray I saw gasping in the fisherman’s hand.
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An excerpt from “Like Magic ” by Sue Mell (fiction ’16) published by Matter Press.
Like Magic
It seemed delightful at first, the magician making the rounds on the 6th floor of the rehabilitation center where my mom was recovering from a fall. Then it grew to be a bit much—his acting as though this were his own personal stage, and not a room shared by four elderly women on Medicare. He liked making a big fuss with the privacy curtains: whoosh, whoosh, alakazam, and all that. But Mrs. Uriga complained, claiming this stirred up the dust, despite the floor being waxed and polished, the surfaces wiped down with pungent cleansers, at inconvenient times nearly every day. Miss Cho was the one in need of a nebulizer for congestion in her lungs, and it didn’t bother her—though, like the rest of us, Mrs. Uriga’s loud and constant complaining did.
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