An excerpt from “Mother of Rock” by Tiana Nobile (poetry, ’17), one of two poems published at The Indianapolis Review:
The familiar clack of shoes against tile, click
of the key in the lock. Wait and rock.
Your gaze silent and grim, I long for the touch
that doesn’t come. My tongue caught
on the cage of my mouth
tart with sour milk.
In the picture from your wedding,
a white dress of lace. As if held […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:
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 “Pantoum with Lines from Virginia Woolf’s Diary” by Angela Narciso Torres (poetry, ’09) published at Swwim:
Truth is, one can’t write about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.
Why have I so little control?
One wants to finish sentences.
To go adventuring on the streams of other people’s lives.
Why have I so little control?
This is the normal feeling, I think.
To go adventuring on the streams of other people’s lives.
I take a census of happy people, and unhappy.
This is the normal feeling, I think.
Happiness is a little string onto which things will attach.
I take a census of happy people, and unhappy.
How Vita’s inkpot flowered on her table. […continue reading here]
An excerpt from the poem “And Someone Said ‘Forever'” by Trish Reeves (poetry, ’83) published at Crab Orchard Review (page 192):
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 the transcript of a New Yorker podcast in which faculty member Kaveh Akbar reads Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Groundhog.” Also, the podcast itself:
Kevin Young: Hello. You’re listening to The New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I’m Kevin Young poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine on this podcast we asked poets to choose a poem for the magazine’s archives to read and discuss along with a piece of their own that we published in The New Yorker. My guest today is Kaveh Akbar who has received a Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship a Pushcart Prize and the 2018 Levis, that’s Larry Levis, reading prize. Welcome Kaveh.
Kaveh Akbar: Thank you so much for having me on. Great pleasure to be here.
Kevin: We’re happy to have you. So the poem you decide to read for us is Groundhog by Ellen Bryant Voigt.
Kaveh: Yeah.
Kevin: What in particular drew you to this piece.
Kaveh: Yeah I encountered this piece early in my relatively early, in my, I mean I’m still early in my poetry journey but I encountered it years ago when it first appeared in The New Yorker and it was one of those poems that just arrives like an angels blaring trumpet, you know it just sort of absolutely ripped the top of my head off and it was just my first encounter with language that felt so charged in that played with momentum so intelligently in the centripetal force and the inertia in this poem is just so incantatory and so magical.
Kevin: Well let’s hear it let’s hear it. Here’s Kaveh Akbar reading “Groundhog” by Ellen Bryant Voigt.
Kaveh Akbar reads “Groundhog.”
Kevin: That was Groundhog by Ellen Bryant Voigt which ran in the February 14th, 2011, issue of the magazine. So I can hear what drew you into it. I mean there’s this discussion of language and what we call things that sort of strikes me first but also nature I think as nature you know she’s trying I think in a poem to or the poem is trying to make us feel it. You know it’s enacting the thing that it’s describing sort of describing a groundhog. It is a groundhog.
Kaveh: Yeah. You think of the great deep familiars pronouncement to make the stone stonie right. Victor Shalosky an artist’s technique and I’ve never felt a groundhog to be so groundhog-y as in this poem right. You never feel, you never feel the groundhog-yness. It’s never so apparent as it is in this poem but just all of nature is like that. Right. And you encounter the way that taxonomy kind of flattens and the way that a poem can kind of really give texture and really give life. It does the opposite of what taxonomy does. […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:
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 “Exclusive in New York for Bergdorf Goodman” by Cammy Thomas (poetry, ’99), published at Nixes Mate Review:
So it says on the back of the ashtray.
On the front, a mysterious girl sits on an elephant.
She looks large or he small,
his fan-like ear brushing her knee.
Her long hair loosely braided,
she holds an elephant hook before her,
the way pharaohs hold an ankh.
The beast’s tusks are curved and short,
its trunk long, open at the end,
twisted back toward her. This elephant
has toes like a cat, and his back knees point
backward, unlike any elephant ever seen. […continue reading here]
An excerpt from “Pour Out Your Heart Like Water Before Me” by Abby Horowitz (poetry, ’15) published at The Collagist:
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 “God’s Work, Women’s Work” by Abby Horowitz (fiction, ’15) published at Waxwing:
God pulls on a pair of latex gloves, the points of His fingernails poking sharply at the ends.
God moves like a lover, rolling down the comforter, rolling up the sleeping woman’s shirt. God peels off her underwear. God spreads her legs apart. Then, closing His long-lashed eyes, God blows a mighty breath into His cupped hands. The curtains tremble with the air that overspills His grasp, the woman stirs a little in the breeze.
God bends down above His target until He’s so close that His lashes brush the insides of the woman’s thighs. Then He opens the woman with His gloved pinky, and guides His handful of divine air inside.
God says, “Let there be —” and names the child who then begins to grow.
The woman sighs a little in her sleep, and God sighs with her, pleased with His labor. He tugs off His latex gloves and cocks His ear towards the bed, listening for the whispers of the new creation growing and singing God’s name.
Weeks later, the angel comes to Him in tears with the report: that the woman, at the doctor’s office — how there was silence where the heartbeat of God’s creation should have been.
God’s face turns dark. God tries to remember the woman over whom the angel cries. God tries and tries. The Gods pulls up his suspenders and heads back down to work. […continue reading here]
An excerpt from “Currents” by Tracy Winn (fiction, ’02) published at Waxwing:
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]
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