An excerpt from “MIRROR ROOM, MEHRANGARH FORT” by Chloe Martinez (poetry, ’09) published at Four Way Review:

MIRROR ROOM, MEHRANGARH FORT

Jodhpur, Rajasthan

You live in a high fort above a blue city. The rooftops below
speckled with laundry. At night the distant echoes
of a hundred brass bands, a hundred weddings. The blue
of the city is not quite robin’s egg, not exactly
the blue of chicory. Outside the city is the desert.

Don’t tell it like a story. It will sound too beautiful.
You stand on a high parapet, in the rustle and coo
of pigeons, under filigreed eaves. When you step over red
velvet ropes, leaving the museum behind, you find rooms
empty as the moon, floors carpeted in desert silt.

In one bedchamber-turned-cave, you hold your breath, you bow
before a rank hill of bat guano. You touch niches
for the ghosts of little lamps, and frescoed girls dance
with gods along the wall. Plaster dusts your fingertips.
Stained glass windows turn your thin skin rainbow. You take

[…continue reading here]

An excerpt from “SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SINGLE MALT SCOTCH AND GUITAR HERO” by Ross White (poetry, ’08) published at The Indianapolis Review:

 

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SINGLE MALT SCOTCH AND GUITAR HERO

Alternately, Self-Portrait on a Wednesday Night.
Alternately, This Keeps Me from Engaging
with a Friend Who Continually Disappoints Me.
Alternately, I Hardly Leave My Basement.
Alternately, The Soft Forest of Carpet
Beneath My Bare Feet Will Suffice as Refuge.
Alternately, If I Could Shrink Myself and Wander
Its Great Fibrous Oaks, I Might Never Regret Solitude.
Alternately, Self-Portrait With Thunder In My Bones.
Alternately, I Got into an Argument Over Drowning,
and Whether a Drowning Man’s Twitch Might  […continue reading here]

An excerpt from “36 text messages, 16 missed calls” by Chloe Martinez (poetry, ’09), one of two poems published at The Indianapolis Review:

36 text messages, 16 missed calls

There is an urgency with which they write and call,
starting after work, about the seven boxes
of laminate flooring that somebody—but not me—
is giving away: free free free!!! The flooring is somewhere

in Sacramento. I have their names and their numbers.
Their inquiries range from casual—“Heyyyy my name’s
Jose do you still have the boxes”—to formal: “Good evening,
I am interested in the laminate flooring posted

on Craig’s List…” Some take a pleading tone—“if you still
have the flooring, I’ll come and get it right now ???”
One even says, “I need flooring desperately!”
A lady named Dee writes a careful, warm message  […continue reading here]

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]