An excerpt from the poem “And Someone Said ‘Forever'” by Trish Reeves (poetry, ’83) published at Crab Orchard Review (page 192):

And Someone Said ‘Forever’

1. The Republic

Say we got off to a bad start; women

fallen upon by the most restless

of men, the wrong creation story

tucked under their arms; not a legend

of a turtle, her children resting

upon her back of green diamonds,

but an earthen statue of a god

thundering through the likeness

of a man who knew the power of his fear

something to hide, and a woman the place

to put this if only she would

not feel his trembling […continue reading here]

An excerpt from “Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out” by Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10), published in the New York Times Magazine:

Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out

One afternoon in the fall of 2016, I sat in a windowless visiting room at the Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire, Conn. A recent graduate of Yale Law School, I was a certified legal intern on a fellowship in the New Haven public defender’s office. J., a lanky 18-year-old brown-skinned kid sitting across from me, was my first client. He didn’t talk. Instead he stared at me as if I were the police. Sanford O. Bruce III, my supervising attorney, listened as I explained to J. (one of his initials) what we knew of the charges against him. A young man with whom J. attended high school had claimed that J. and another kid he didn’t know had threatened him with a pistol, then robbed him of his cellphone and a couple of hundred dollars. Officers arrested J. minutes later, but the other suspect, who supposedly held the gun, was never found.

The prosecutor thought he should serve time in prison. I let J. know this and described what would happen next: a series of court dates, a bond-reduction motion, plea-bargain offers. After remaining silent for nearly 40 minutes, he leaned forward in the blue plastic chair, cutting me off, and asked, “Aren’t you the one who did time in prison?” With a single question, this kid reminded me of what a law degree, even one from Yale, could not do — make my own criminal history vanish.

On Dec. 7, 1996, a month and two days after my 16th birthday, I climbed with four other people into a beat-up ink-colored sedan in Prince George’s County, Md. During that year, I’d read the Evelyn Wood guide to speed reading and J. California Cooper’s novel “The Wake of the Wind.” My Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher at Suitland High School had nicknamed me Smoky after he spied me rolling a blunt before his first-period class. I hadn’t won a fight since second grade. Had been suspended half a dozen times — once for setting off a stink bomb, but every other time for what teachers called being disruptive but was really just talking too much. People knew me for finding four-leaf clovers, doing back flips and making too many jokes. I didn’t know who I was.

[…continue reading here]

An excerpt from “Pour Out Your Heart Like Water Before Me” by Abby Horowitz (poetry, ’15) published at The Collagist:

Pour Out Your Heart Like Water Before Me

Before I had the rabbi, I had a dog.

And one day, the dog died.

The dog was old and had been sick, and I believed in proportional grief.

I loved that dog, but it was not a devastation.

And my dog’s body, still on the exam table.

My hand combing through her fur.

We were talking about next steps, the vet and I.

(I could already imagine moving on to whatever might come next.)

(I was not struck prostrate on the floor.)

(I did not hide for days afterwards in bed.)

And the vet said: Many people like to bury their pets right in their backyards.

But I did not have a backyard then.

I lived in an apartment that overlooked a lot of cars.

And so my dog’s life ended in a crematorium for pets.

I did not have a backyard and so I scattered my dog’s ashes around her favorite park.

It was May and there were some sunbathers by the park’s fountain and I scattered the ashes in such a way that when the wind blew, the ashes would blow onto those sunbathers, lying half-naked and carefree in the grass. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from “Currents” by Tracy Winn (fiction, ’02) published at Waxwing:

Currents

No one else swims in this river, but Leo follows a course where the sculling shells slide through the shadows of city buildings. The rowers in their brightly colored jerseys are as accustomed to seeing him as they are the cormorants that pop to the surface just beyond reach of their oars. With each butterfly stroke, Leo fights the suck of the dark water. His head is large, his limbs long. He surges up, defying gravity for a split-second. Clumps of birches on the shore leap and wheel — subsumed by water as he sinks. Riverfront buildings rise and fall as he falls and rises, their murky gray-brown foundations under water, their whitewashed balconies in the sunny air above. His heart thuds; his lungs empty and fill. He is in the rhythm, working toward numbness. Breathe in. Let it go, a silver bubble at a time. Do not think back, do not plan forward. Breathe in. Let go. Let go. He needs to lose himself, to bear — for a breath at a time — that he lost her. He swims until he is desperate with cold, almost too cold to recover.

On a stretch where there is no beach, just nubbins of worn grass, he emerges, dripping. He has stashed his towel and uniform in a neglected strip between apartment buildings. He flattens himself against a sunny wall and shivers until his blood responds and his fingers and toes come tingling back to life.

Leo hops on one foot to keep from tipping over while he pulls his pants on. “I lost my wife,” makes it sound as if he had misplaced her like a lighter or a pair of reading glasses. He didn’t need reading glasses when she vanished. Now, to re-read the consoling words of the philosophers, he does. She disappeared a year to the day after their wedding. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from “Exile Status,” one of two poems by Adrian Blevins (poetry, ’02) published at Waxwing:

Exile Status

All my life I’ve been a stupid little runaway

& tried therefore to like philosophy

as beauty pageants

really wouldn’t work

though smoking yes & beer & sex

a speck I guess.

But dipping tobacco no

& pink trucks sorry no

& no football either

or deer assassination or coons up trees

or weekends gutting pigs

& geese. Which is why

I tried with ideas to escape myself

like ideas are Black Eyed Susans

or mice. But ideas

are not the Mason jars & homemade jams

of the Apocalypse

& ideas are not

the shredded roosters & sourdough starters

of the Apocalypse, & knowing that means

I’m just an old farmer […continue reading here]