“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 –
An excerpt from “The Queer Gaze and the Ineffable in The Price of Salt,” an essay in two parts by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19), published in CRAFT.
The Queer Gaze and the Ineffable in The Price of Salt
I almost didn’t read Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, one of the most influential, relevant, and exquisite novels I’ve ever encountered. Why? I felt like it would be dated. I thought that I should read it. I saw the movie. And I had reason to believe that it would end in predictable tragedy.
Published in 1952, The Price of Salt, about a lesbian love affair, was made into the 2015 film Carol, and (spoiler) the ending is realistic, but decidedly not tragic. In the book, nineteen-year-old stage designer Therese Belivet and Carol Aird, a wealthy woman in her early thirties going through a divorce, fall in love. Given that the novel was published seventeen years prior to Stonewall, I was expecting a lot of coy, plausible-deniability-ridden allusions, and a tragic ending, required at the time to avoid censorship. Instead, I found the book to be rich with frank expressions of desire—descriptions refreshingly different from the expressions of heterosexual desire that I am used to reading in novels with straight characters.
Albatross: Poems by Hannah Fries (poetry ’10) appear along with paintings by Sara Parrilli on Terrain.org
Albatross, 2,000 Miles from Shore
The imagination is an animal,
anima, ten-foot wingspan and certain beak—
it goes where it goes on air and doesn’t
count days and nights are liquid like the sea.
• • •
Albatross, pelagic, passing through, ghost-
like—no, it’s the world’s a ghost: fog, spray, lift
of the gale’s invisible hand, and you,
insistent form, unbound, the lost mind’s gift.
Two Poems by Faith Gómez Clark appear in Scoundrel Time
First Camping Trip
Mescalero, New Mexico
Overhead: the night sky like a dark hand reaching
towards me. Around me, all I see
are pine trees, our campfire’s light gone.
I try to turn around, to go back before my mother
realizes I didn’t listen, didn’t stay close,
but my uncle grips my hand tighter until
what little strength I have is lost
in the rough terrain of his. Keep walking
he says, I want to show you something.
We make our way deeper into the trees,
deeper into darkness. Then, our destination:
a small fire. A group of men standing around it.
[…continue reading and read “La Llorona” here]
An excerpt from “Edge Effect” by Daye Phillippo (poetry, ’14) published at the Valparaiso Poetry Review:
EDGE EFFECT
First day of summer, overcast morning after rain
all night. Lights on in every room. The dripping woods
lean close to the house, so this lamplit room
becomes a room inside a room of trees and weeds,
their leaves, a multitude of shapes and shades of green
and the sky, a close gray ceiling heavy with rain.
[…continue reading here]
An excerpt from “Lost Children” by Joseph Capista (poetry, ’16) published at Valparaiso Poetry Review:
LOST CHILDREN
Coney Island, June 9, 1941
In Weegee’s photograph we see the boy
Unmothered underneath the boardwalk sign,
But it’s the man, his smile, on whom we fix
Our gaze, white shirt, white belt, white captain’s hat:
Our eye holds him a beat, then wanders toward
The littoral awash with roustabouts
And idlers, women half-undressed who laugh
A little loud because lost’s almost found.
[…continue reading here]
An excerpt from “Learning the Color of the Sky: An Interview with Rolf Yngve” (fiction,’12) published at Fiction Writers Review:
Learning the Color of the Sky: An Interview with Rolf Yngve
To say that Rolf Yngve has taken an unusual path to his first book would be an understatement. Yngve first took up fiction as an enlisted man in the U.S. Navy in the 1970s, and marshaled his talents enough to end up in Best American Short Stories in 1979. Then fiction slipped out of his life as he worked his way up to Captain, only to force its way back onto his radar.
The stories in Yngve’s debut collection, Dog Watches (Saddle Road Press), feature characters locked in battle with forces they can’t control or understand. One expects death to be close at hand in a combat story full of enemy guns blazing; but in Yngve’s work, it’s still there in the shadows even while the ships he writes about are (at least ostensibly) at peace.
Physical death can come from a small boat launching rocket-propelled grenades, from a carless move in a storm, from a mistaken wandering in the bowels of a ship, or from the fed-up tiredness of a self that doesn’t know its purpose on earth. Psychic death can come from lying, from telling too much truth, from holding onto unprocessed memories, from reliving guilt too many times.
One way or another, that grim truth is never far away when you’re on a warship at sea, and this imbues Yngve’s prose with a haunted whisper of omnipresent danger that makes Dog Watches such a strong collection. Behind the veil of military uniformity sit forces of destruction and self-destruction, and Yngve’s hand is always on that veil, pulling it back for us to take a look.
Steven Wingate: I’m very curious about the time between your early foray into fiction in the late 70’s and the writing you’ve done since you retired from the Navy. Did you keep your writing practice going while you were working your way up in command, or did it sit dormant? Did some changes to your writerly self—unseen, internal developments or reconfigurations—happen during that time?
Rolf Yngve: Not dormant, but not moving either. And it wasn’t so much the Navy that made me stop going forward. I worked on the fiction pretty steadily until the mid 1980’s. Then a strange thing happened: a wonderful, early marriage to a passionate reader and writer ended, and I found myself unable to read fiction or poetry of any kind. I even remember that last novel, still only halfway finished, a splendid Richard Bausch title, The Last Good Time.
I still wrote. But—this is true—trying to write fiction without reading fiction is like drinking without water. All the work from those days shows the lack of reading, the lack of thinking like a writer. I still have boxes of failed manuscripts lying around in a closet like sedimentary rock.
By the mid-1990’s, I had found another family, married another great reader, and the sound of it all started to come back when a former teacher, David Kranes, took a look at some of my work and encouraged me to start thinking like a writer again. Forward another decade, and the stories of Dog Watches began to come, along with a couple of failed novels, a few memoir pieces, and another clutch of stories less fertilized by the Navy experience. But I had started to read again. Everything.
[…continue reading here]
An excerpt from “Night Divine” by Samantha Hunt (fiction, ’99) published at The Cut:
Night Divine
Elves leave messages for my kids. Sometimes it seems like the elves have been drinking. I bet they get jolly come December with the end of a year’s labor in sight. I know I do. The elves write, “Ganymede, Jupiter’s ginormous moon, is named for a prince kidnapped by an eagle.” Or the elves write, “There’s 22,000 pounds of cheese in a tunnel in New York. That cheese does not belong to you, kids. It’s Nacho Cheese.” Odd facts. Rotten jokes.Usually there are no gifts involved. The elves are frugal, like me. I’m not interested in raising monsters.
I can foresee the questions that might swarm around this elf tradition, like: Is Santa so unfair he sends messages to only my children? Or you might wonder: How do the elves get to my middle-of-nowhere house each night?
Here are your answers: Santa, in harmony with the whole wide world, is unfair. My kids haven’t had a dad for two years. If you want to trade elf messages for a father, you got it. Second answer: The elves don’t have to get here. Santa employs local, seasonal help like any department store. Which probably only triggers more questions in this economy. Does Santa pay a living wage? Can I get a Santa job too?
But zip it. Please. Questions chip away at belief in stuff and we are trying to believe in stuff. It’s Christmastime.
[…continue reading here]
An excerpt from “Guernica,” one of two poems by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) published at Salamander:
Do you still look and see that it is good?
You spoke, then saw what you’d wrought.
We are the monster in the mirror, God,
your world made of words. Let there be untied
sky from earth and sea, night from light,
and you looked and saw that it was good.
With spit and a fistful of dust, you made
the first man. Then to make Eve, took him apart.
You made everything, even the mirror, God
and it’s all carnage. A cell cleaves to breed.
Before one war ends, the next one will start,
then the next—still looking? Still good?—
[…continue reading here]
An excerpt from “Interstate” by Kate Lister Campbell (fiction, ’18) published at Salamander:
We play games in the backseat, the children and me. Is it bigger than a breadbox? Smaller than a house? Everyone’s a good sport before lunchtime but, by afternoon, our minds are tired and the games become more brutal.
“JXQ!” yells Hugh, as a car passes us on the right. He reaches across me in the middle seat to pinch his brother, James. You get a pinch for any license plate that starts with the same letter as your name. This plate reads MZ7 but James is too short to see it. I catch Hugh by his wrist.
“Quit cheating.”
“Ow, jeez,” he says, slumping away from me.
Elise lies behind our heads on the wide stretch of felt beneath the Cadillac’s rear window. She’s small for her age, a runt in the womb who somehow survived while her larger sister didn’t. She plays her own silent games with the passengers in the cars behind us, laughing at gestures we can’t see. When she’s bored, she crawls down over my shoulder and climbs into the front seat between her mother and father. Grace pulls Elise’s hair into a tight ponytail. Edward lifts her hand onto the wheel and pretends to let her steer. James, Hugh, and I squirm, wishing we had Elise’s freedom.
[…continue reading here]
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