An excerpt from “Interstate” by Kate Lister Campbell (fiction, ’18) published at Salamander:

Interstate

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]

An excerpt from the poem “My Black Friend” by Edward Porter (fiction, ’07) published at Miracle Monocle:

My Black Friend

          I don’t have a black friend, that is to say, a Black friend, an African American friend. It was the TV the other night that got me thinking. A commentator, a professor at the university, an African American woman, was saying that the problem was that so many white people let themselves be isolated.

          “How many white people say they’re not racist, but don’t actually socialize with African Americans, have never had African Americans in their homes?”

          I had to admit, that was me. The professor’s voice was full of anger, of outrage. Although we’ve never met, I felt her anger attach itself to me. That seemed only right. It was the truth. She was speaking to me. She knew who I was.

          I’m a middle-aged single white woman who lives in a small city in the Midwest. We don’t have many black people here. I work at a bank, taking care of the database. The bank has no black employees. In the downtown where I work, not many of the businesses have black employees. The black people I see are usually either janitors or the homeless. Obviously, that fact in itself is witness to the racism we struggle with in this town.

          Given my actual situation, it’s difficult to think about being friends with a homeless person. I know I shouldn’t be limited that way, but I am. If I were friends with a homeless person, white or black, then I would essentially have to take care of them. It’s too unequal.

          I could be friends with a janitor though. I’m not better than a janitor just because I write code for a database. I would go to a janitor’s house. I would have a janitor to my house for dinner. If the janitor at my bank was black, perhaps I could strike up a casual friendship, over time. I’d notice something about him, maybe the ball cap of a team from a faraway city and ask him about it. That would give us a start. Then, eventually, I could ask if he wanted to come over for dinner. […continue reading here]

Congratulations to Robin Rosen Chang (poetry, ’18) for winning first place in the Poet’s Choice category of the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2018 Contest. Below, an excerpt from her winning poem, “Dream: At the Beach.”

Dream: At the Beach

They were sitting at the edge of the ocean, my mother and Eve, digging for mole crabs. Amphipods. They’re prehistoric, my mom says, like horseshoe crabs. Look at their exoskeletons. Like little armored torpedoes. Or drills. Their legs tunnel them backwards into the sand.

Eve catches one, holds it between her finger and thumb, examines its tiny alien face. Its eyes. Planted at the end of two stalky appendages, next to their antennae, my mother said, trying to teach Eve, like she’d done with my kids and me, unaware Eve already knows.

Watch out for gulls! When I was still married, one tried to steal a fish right from my husband’s hand. Then they’re looking for tiny coquina clams, shiny pink and purplish-gray ones, each with its tiny muscled foot burrowing it, before the next wave. […continue reading here]

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]