/ˈməT͟Hər/
We tend to our roles like we tend to a fire,
poking the coals with the blazing tip of an iron.
The head of a woman occasionally produces more heads.
The body of a woman is the source of all our breaths.
See Also: The naming of riverbanks.
See Also: Nature’s tendency to cleave.
An excerpt from “The Unseen Shore” by Amy Lin (fiction ’17), published on Failbetter.
The Unseen Shore
Brie and Sarah were twins, and Brie looked like Sarah but then again she didn’t. Brie had the same dark brown eyes and full cheeks, but she was more muscular and stood straighter. Brie’s nails were bare but carefully shaped. Those were the little things. What everyone saw was the limp, or that Brie did not have one and Sarah did. She never masked the scars ribboning her leg. The marks were almost two decades old, ripped into her right leg when she was fourteen.
She and her sister had attended water ski camp about eighty miles north of San Francisco. Sarah dragged Brie along after hours as she, and a group of other teenagers at the camp, loosed a ski boat from its moorings. At first, it was enough to heist the boat and drive it as fast as possible but then the girl steering slowed the engine to idling. In the quiet, someone suggested truth or dare. When it was Sarah’s turn, she picked dare, and it only took a few taunts—“you scared?”—before she agreed to ski. Silver flew everywhere from the moonlit water, and there was a flood of adrenaline when she cut the dark skin of the lake. Calm, suspended and flattening, folded over her when she raised her fists in the air and dropped the towrope, sinking into the water. The boat looped to pick her up, and it moved so slowly that she saw her sister, her hand outstretched. Brie’s face warped and sagged as she realized the boat was too close, the propeller already tugging Sarah towards it.
“It Has a Wish” and “Once She Was” by Peter Schireson (poetry ’17), published by Connotation Press.
It Has a Wish
It has a wish, she says.
When a skirt has a fold like this,
small and unintended in the hem, it means
it has a wish.
I bend over and straighten it,
trying to conceive what more,
beside brushing against her legs,
her pale green skirt,
sheathed about her, folded,
could be wishing for.
Excerpt from “Oh My What is That?: Strange Objects” by Elizabeth Mayer (fiction ’19), published by Fiction Writers Review.
Oh My! What Is That?: Strange Objects (Part I: Joy Williams’s “Congress”)
On the wide sill near the table in our foyer where I write (and eat meals and do art projects with my daughter and anything else that requires a flat surface), an abstract structure sits below the window. The base is a roughly cut rectangle of foam board, that light yet rigid backbone of middle school science fairs and witty political protests. The two walls are constructed partly of foam board and partly of small scraps of wood cut into blocks and stacked into a pattern reminiscent of mid-century modern interior design. The foam sections of wall are braced at the base by more wooden blocks glued into L-shaped brackets. One of the columns of blocks is built, inexplicably, atop a flat gray stone that looks as if it were plucked from a riverbank. The roof is constructed of paper plates, scalloped around the edges and stacked four deep. A small red whelk sea shell stands on toothpick stilts fastened to the roof by—you guessed it—small wooden blocks. A string of plastic pearls is intertwined through a distended spring, one end of which sits in a puddle of dried glue. A sprig of polyester bluebells juts upward from the far wall. Two flaps of felt enclose the ends. And the entire thing is swathed in a crude coat of hot pink paint.
Anytime someone enters our house, their eyes are drawn almost immediately to this blazing apparatus. “Oh . . . my! What’s this?” they ask. One woman, who had once professed to me that she rejected perfectionism despite the fact that the books on her shelves were divided precisely by the color of their jackets, took one look, grinned, and remarked, “How… creative!
The structure, a cat house built by my seven year old daughter, is an object that demands attention and invites questions.
[…continue reading Part I: Joy Williams “Congress” and Part II: Yoko Ogawa’s “Sewing for the Heart”]
An excerpt from “Graft” by Laurie Saurborn (poetry ’08), published by r.kv.r.y quarterly literary journal.
Graft
Back to the green tiled wall, I watch the surgeon apply clamps to a patient’s fingertips. Unrolling a length of gauze, he winds it through the clamps and then the loops of a cloverleaf mounted at the top of a metal pole. With one pull, the arm is lifted. In a blue hairnet, blue shoe covers, a mask, and a giant white onesie—a “bunny suit”—it looks as if a cloud swallowed me. When I modeled it earlier for the patient in pre-op, they laughed, asking if I was married because my husband would certainly find the sight of me hilarious.
From an uncovered leg, a long, rectangular strip of skin is peeled away with a tool that looks like a potato peeler. Surprisingly gray, the skin is dropped into a stainless steel basin filled with sterile saline. A resident removes it and passes it through a device that looks like a pasta machine. The resulting skin mesh is applied over an injury that was prepared by washing, cutting, and cauterization.
Under my bunny suit I wear bright red scrubs that mark me as a nursing student. Thinking of my students in the creative writing classes I taught only last spring, the list of what I have lost runs through my mind: my house in Texas, my poetry and art books, my cat, my cameras, my marriage, my job as a lecturer of creative writing. This is the second surgery I have witnessed at the university hospital and when the arm is finally lowered I think not, Why am I here in an operating room? But: How did I get here?
An excerpt from Signing my Checks as Mrs. Franz Kafka: An Interview with Peg Alford Pursell (fiction ’96), published by Connotation Press.
Signing my Checks as Mrs. Franz Kafka: An Interview with Peg Alford Pursell
Our readers are in for a treat this month with your three excellent hybrid pieces, “Schematics,” “Laundry,” and “Exposed.” In “Schematics,” I feel we have the perfect hybrid, story and poetry intertwining effortlessly. I love so many lines in this piece, like: “He’s in the particles she breathes in this study, his epithelial cells, the thirty thousand scales of skin that had flaked off his body per minute. Dust, those bits of a self shed.” What is your process in writing short hybrid pieces like these? Are they cut down from longer stories? Or do they evolve from a single line or phrase?
Thank you so much, Jonathan. I don’t have a particular method for writing short hybrids. Often, the genesis is the sound of a phrase that comes to me from who knows where or why, a mysterious process that I love, and runs through my head and asks to be written down. Sometimes, as in the case of the example you cited, I’m captivated by information I’ve come across, and that starts the engine turning. An arresting image can form the impetus. Occasionally, I still whittle away at longer stories to carve out a story that satisfies me, but it seems that’s less a frequent process these days.
An excerpt from “[let the patient describe a door]” by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth (poetry ’15), published in ANMLY.
[let the patient describe a door]
| [ let the patient describe a door ] in the dark I am not going to I do not know if I am going to I am certainly not going to lay down I will have to pull back the blanket I pulled back of course I would not say yes of course the blanket was tightly pressed between the mattress & the boxspring such is the weight of a mattress a spring a spring |
An excerpt from “You Are Here” by Lia Greenwell (poetry ’13) published at the Kenyon Review Online.
You Are Here
Once, as a child, I was playing hide and seek at a house out in the country. We hid in old outbuildings. We were running, ducking under fences, crawling. When I finally stood up and looked around, I was in the horse’s pen. The horse, colossal and brown with dark, knobby joints, looked at me. When I began to walk away, to find some exit, the horse followed. As I began to run, the horse galloped after me. Sprinting around a barn toward the widest part of the pasture, bordered by an electric fence, I saw I was too short to jump over it. I had to jump through, the wires buzzing around me. I landed in a hard tangle on the ground, breathless. The horse looked at me stock-still from the other side.
Once, I could slip out of my body and into the shelter of my mind as easily as a wet fish from a hand.
“Moon with a Supermarket Trolley” by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry ’06) appears along with an analysis in Carol Rumens’s poem of the week column at The Guardian.
Moon with a Supermarket Trolley
From my Juliet balcony
Overlooking a creek whose bed
Has been trash-filled for months,
Moon, I see you preening like a supermodel –
Nothing to do with me, or any
Of those other heavenly bodies
So difficult to discern
Through the excess of human light –
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