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]

An excerpt from the novel Car Trouble, by Robert Rorke (fiction, ’10) from Harper Perennial Paperback Original:

From Car Trouble

One Sunday morning a few weeks later, we came down to breakfast and found Himself slumped on the kitchen floor, back against the white enameled oven door. Mom leaned against the sink, sipping a cup of coffee in her pink flannel nightgown, and looked down at him, as if trying to figure out how she was going to lift him—or if she was just going to leave him there.

He was conked out. If you screamed in his ear, he wouldn’t have heard you. We’d found him passed out before, usually at the kitchen table, but never on the floor. Did he fall off the kitchen chair? He looked like the guys you saw on the Bowery. How do you come home like that, so drunk you just collapse? I didn’t want to see him like that and almost went back to my room until Mom hustled him upstairs.

I waited with my sisters in the dining room for the okay to walk in. Mom put the coffee cup down and waved us over. I went

firstMom lit a cigarette on the gas burner and took a long drag on it. “She’s all yours,” she said, pointing.

As shocked as we were to see Himself in such bad shape, the bigger surprise was the dog. She was reclining next to his bent left leg, a tricolor collie blinking at us in the most bewilderedway, as if she were waiting for us to tell her what she was doing here, in our kitchen. She was really very striking, even beautiful. Her coat was mainly black. Her forelegs were brown, her paws and chest white. Her snout was longer and narrower than most collies, with a thin stripe of white in the brown. It gave her a slightly aristocratic air. In this house she was going to need it.

Like me, my sisters were half-asleep. Ringlets of damp hair stuck to their necks and temples.

Maureen immediately knelt to pet the dog. “Look at you,” she said into the dog’s confused, melancholy face. She looked up at Mom. “Where’d she come from?”

“Your father brought her home from a bar. Where else? Who wants coffee?”

The aroma of a freshly perked pot filled the kitchen. I raised my hand. “I do.”

Maureen glanced at Dad. “He’s really smelly, Mom.”

I didn’t plan to get that close. A thread of drool hung from his lip, a pack of Pall Malls crushed in his shirt pocket. I checked the clock over the kitchen window. Eight a.m.

Maureen gently unbent his leg to free the animal. Now Dad was sitting with his legs spread out in front of him, blocking the way to the sink. Standing on his other side, Mom poured coffee into cups that she took from the drainboard and passed them over Dad’s head to Dee Dee, who put them on the table.

“Let’s get her some water,” Maureen said. Mom filled a Tupperware cereal bowl and passed it to Maureen. The collie lapped up half of it and then reclined on the floor next to Himself, crossing her front paws. Master and pet, in repose.

“Ooh, she’s such a lady,” I said. “Definitely not the saloon sort. What did he say when he brought her in?”

“What was there to say?” Mom said, flustered. “He opened the door and said, ‘I got something here for the kids.’ I looked out at the front porch and there she was.”

Having the dog there made it possible to overlook Himself, as if he were a sofa too cumbersome to move.

“Well, she’s pretty and that’s nice,” Patty said. “What’s her name?”

“I don’t know if she has one,” Mom said, wiping her glasses on a hand towel. “I think that’s up to you kids.”

We all looked at her.

“Well, we could name her after the bar where he found her,” I said.

Maureen shot me a rueful look. “Like what? Dew Drop.”

“We are not naming her Dew Drop,” said Patty. “Don’t be such an ass.”

“No, I think we’ll name her Queenie,” Maureen said.

She was always so pushy. “Hey, who says you get to decide?” I asked.

Mom took a ratty leather harness off the closet doorknob and handed it to Maureen. “Before you worry about giving her a name, why don’t you get dressed and take her out for a walk? Your father swore she was housetrained.”

We threw our clothes on and walked the dog together, the five of us. Me, Maureen, Patty, and our two youngest sisters, Dee Dee and Mary Ellen. I found my sneakers under the couch in the living room and helped Maureen put the harness on the dog. I felt the hairless skin under her coat. Himself was grum- bling on the kitchen floor.

“Go on now, while I get him up to bed,” Mom said.

An excerpt from the novel, What Luck, This Life, by Kathryn Schwille (fiction ‘99), published in September by Hub City Press.
(pub date: Sept. 18) Used by permission of Hub City Press. This section originally appeared in New Letters

What Luck, This Life

She was a bit of a free spirit, his wife. Not your run-of-the-mill preacher’s mate. Pastor Will Simpson knew his congregation, some of them, at least, thought Holly MacFarland and her long wild hair had brushed against the devil’s ways. Her first husband had turned out to be gay. Also, there was her yoga studio, a shady bit of spiritual business. The members of Spring Creek Baptist might have chosen differently for the second wife of Pastor Simpson, but he loved her with all his heart.

Holly had closed her yoga studio – Kiser could not support it – but a little group of them still met on Saturdays, here at the house. Soon they would be coming up the walk in their flowing tops and unfettered pants. Simpson still had tomorrow’s sermon to write, and this presented a problem. Before the yoga, the women would talk, and they would take over the den, which had the most floor space but also his favorite chair. He’d typed a few words from Job on his laptop screen: His wealth will become hunger. Thanksgiving was next week.

            Simpson had married Holly on the rebound, his critics would say, two years after her divorce. She had come into the marriage with a large, stubborn pony and a smart but troubled boy. It seemed to Simpson that he’d spent his whole short marriage trying to connect with the child. He loved Frankie but was relieved when, after totaling Holly’s car in a wreck a year ago – the day after Thanksgiving – Frankie had moved to Houston to live with his father. That left Simpson and Holly with most of this year to themselves. He’d expected it to be different.

            The pony was still with them and Simpson could see him from the den window, staring at his pasture when he should have been eating from it. Drought had brought Texas to its knees; the fields were devoid of grass. There was no hay anywhere in the state, a drought like this not seen since the fifties. Rosco’s new diet was all processed, too expensive by far, and still he was chewing on the fence posts.

Holly came into the room and spread out her yoga mat. Simpson helped her move the coffee table to a corner. “I’m sorry honey,” she said. “You mind going in the kitchen?”

He could smell her shampoo in the damp frizz around her shoulders, a grapefruit scent that wouldn’t linger, though he would not have minded if it did. When they were first married, they would take long showers together and his fingers would be greedy for the slick, lathered abundance of her hair. Soaping her bottom, or her breast, he would wonder how Wes MacFarland could not have wanted her, the way any normal man would. His early sex with her was ferocious, desperate and frequent. She was the most exciting woman he’d ever been with, and she had competition in that regard. Simpson was tall, and some said handsome, dark auburn hair when he was young, a slender build going only a little soft now. He had answered the call later than most.

Holly set a portly beige candle in the center of the room and lit it. Now he smelled sandalwood, which he disliked. “Seems like a nice day,” he said. “I’ll go hide out at the church.” He didn’t have an office there – the church was too small for that – but it was a warm fall day and there was a bench by the cemetery.

“If you hadn’t left it to the last minute,” she said. “You weren’t even teaching this week.”

“I know.”

This was old territory. He procrastinated about the sermons. He was a part-time minister; pastoral inspirations came and went as they pleased. His other job, substitute teacher, came and went, too. The teachers had been remarkably healthy this year, with no emergency surgeries or problem pregnancies. He wouldn’t wish the flu on anyone, but he could wish for the women – the married ones, of course – to be more fertile.

“I’m a sloth. And you’re a good preacher’s wife.”

“So they tell me. What are you writing this week?”

“About hunger, I think.”

“Mmm. Nice.” She gave him the smile that said, I’m about to ask you for something. Her usual smile was girl-next-door-bright, like a model in an outdoor catalog. This other displayed the slightest tension at the corners. He often wondered if Wes MacFarland had found her so telegraphic.

“Could you stop by the feed store?” she asked.

“Again?”

“He has to eat. There’s nothing in his –” she hesitated. “Nothing in his pasture.” When he met her, she would occasionally curse. Nothing in his damn pasture.

“Poor guy. So more alfalfa pellets. How many bags?”

“How many can we afford? He’s going through one a week.”

Simpson had not yet told her that his church salary would be fifteen percent less next year. The Great Recession, as people were calling it now, plus the drought, had bit deeply. Collections were down and the deacons had been firm. He could hardly complain. Some in his congregation had lost their jobs. The salary cut, when he got around to telling her, would trigger a round of frugal, meatless meals. She felt guilty that her job at the furniture store, tied to commissions, paid so little.