“Pleas for Companionship” by Avra Elliott (fiction, ’15)

An excerpt from “Pleas for Companionship” by Avra Elliott (fiction, ’15) published at Contrary:

Pleas for Companionship

The passion flower had doubled back on itself, the curls of new growth returning, a snake on its own tail, twisting and thriving on the stems of dead older siblings. Stacia did not know if the old growth eventually fell away, or if it became green again, and this ignorance caused some anxiety and grief when she batted away dried leaves that might have just been sleeping.

Farther down the chain-link fence, away from the flowering vine, several wooden crosses were bound to the wire. On the ground beneath the crosses plastic purple tulips, red poppies, and faded blue forget -me-nots pretended to grow from weighted pots. Purple heart, veteran’s flower, cheesy sentiment, Stacia thought when they first appeared, and assumed the victim the shrine had been erected for was someone’s grandfather, taking a turn too wide one evening. Perhaps he’d become a poster child for the care of veterans, signs saying “if only he’d been able to afford new glasses…” […continue reading here]

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“Floodgate” by Tracy Winn (fiction, ’02)

An excerpt from the short story, “Floodgate,” by Tracy Winn (fiction, ’02) published at The Harvard Review Online:

Floodgate

Inside this barn, I could be fooled into thinking everyone is where they’re supposed to be. All I hear is the milking machine. Milk sloshes into the glass tank, and the cows breathe. It’s humid tonight. The cows’ breath blows out like steam under the bare light bulbs. Everything seems simple in here. The cats know it. They lick their paws and curl up on hay bales. I could almost believe we’re all safe. It feels safe with smells you can count on, hay, manure, piss. But take a look out the door and see what was destroyed all around us in this one day.

The barn’s okay. The flood didn’t crap up the white trim, and the tall part where the pigeons get in still points toward heaven. Dickinson Farm has been the only dairy farm in the valley for a while now.

Mikey says I am one lucky SOB to have this job as a farmhand. Or, she says, maybe the Dickinsons are lucky. They could’ve rented a backhoe, but that would’ve cost them. That’s her joke about how strong I am.

The guy on the radio says, Who else could punish the gays with storms like today’s but God? He did with AIDS, and 9/11, and now this flood. My boss, Don, turns off the radio and says not to believe everything I hear. Think it through, Tyler, he says. What is the evidence? What can you be sure of?

Mikey says I’m no philosopher. Mikey says to make a list when it’s hard to think.

1. Mikey is missing.
2. Yesterday, I did something I regret so bad I can hardly think of anything else.
3. Today a hurricane came to the mountains.
4. Hurricanes don’t belong in the mountains.
5. The guy on the radio says that everything that happened is part of God’s plan.

It’s hard to believe that this morning the storm just seemed like any old heavy rain. While I fed the calves their bottles, I watched the raindrops sliding down the edge of the barn roof near where the spiders hang. Drips flew off like in the TV ad for joining the Marines. One drop after another bailed out into the air and was gone. Just as gone as Mikey. […continue reading here]

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Two Poems by Daye Phillippo (poetry, ’14)

An excerpt from “Soon, Spring,” one of two poems by Daye Phillippo (poetry, ’14) published at Mom Egg Review:

SOON, SPRING

Snow is falling softly past the windows, no wind to drive it,
so the flakes take their time, turning, some rising a bit again

like the clouds of gnats one sees stirring by the roadside in fall.
Mother Goose preening her feathers, my father used to say

of snow like this, snow intending no harm, not blinding drivers
or the woman walking out to her mailbox on its leaning post

by the gravel road. Motherly snow, gently blanketing the garden
and house, fences and fenceposts, giving the mailbox a little

peaked cap. Blanketing also, one supposes, the white-tailed deer
we haven’t seen by the white pines for days now. Herd of nine

at last count, frisky among the fragrant, soft-needled branches,
then loping off downhill to the creek, trail into the deep woods […continue reading here]

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Three Poems by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10)

An excerpt from the poem “An Autist’s Mother Reflects,” one of three poems by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) published at Mom Egg Review:

An Autist’s Mother Reflects

afraid to die
before you

but in this wild
dark New Hampshire

meadow fireflies
glow like downed pulsars

all incandescence
like your face

& no trace of errant gene
or what perished […continue reading here]

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Three Poems by Angela Narciso Torres

An excerpt from “Lilli’s Urn,” one of three poems by Angela Narciso Torres (poetry, ’09), published at Mom Egg Review:

Lilli’s Urn

Jolted awake by a flash—
a text from my college freshman
awake in his dorm at 2 a.m.

I rub sleep from my eyes,
find an audio clip
he’s written for solo cello—

Lilli’s Urn, he names it,
for the pup who arrived
on his sixth birthday,

his companion for a decade
before we lost her to cancer.
Four minor notes plucked

in a slow chuffing beat—
the stifled sobs of mourning.
Bow dragged over strings […continue reading here]

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“Fatty Acids” by Rose Skelton (fiction, ’17)

An excerpt from the short story, “Fatty Acids,” by Rose Skelton (fiction, ’17), published at Waxwing:

Fatty Acids

It didn’t matter that it was June, Sorrel was pleased for her all-in-one jumpsuit. A sharp wind blew and rain slanted across the bare Scottish hills in the distance. In the greenhouse, between seedlings of kale, spinach, cabbage and broccoli, their tender shoots sprouting in rows from orderly trays, Sorrel straightened the jumpsuit across her shoulders, pulled the metal zip upwards until she was neatly zipped inside, and went out to the potato patch. It was Tuesday; her father was coming to stay at the weekend. She wanted to dig the first new potatoes of the season for dinner, as a special treat for them all.

The garden was twenty yards from the sea, attached to the house where Sorrel had grown up. The house had been sitting empty since her mother had died and her father had moved to London, the garden left untilled. When Sorrel had lost her job at the university and moved back to the island, her father had suggested she get the garden growing again, make a little extra money, supplement her income from the on-line teaching job she had managed to get. Sorrel had re-dug the garden herself, her hands had been blistered every day for an entire month. That was two years ago, before she’d met Daniel. He could have helped, though he wasn’t as strong as he looked. But the garden was beginning to be productive now. She spent all of her spare time in it. It was the one place where she felt at ease. […continue reading here]

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“We peered into the shadow” by Robin Rosen Chang (poetry, ’18)

An excerpt from “We peered into the shadow” by Robin Rosen Chang (poetry, ’18), published at The Summerset Review:

We peered into the shadow

on the balcony, behind a plant
so desiccated it closed into itself,
three misshapen squabs in a squalid nest.
Wayward tufts of yellow feathers poked out
of their pink bodies. Beautiful, my aunt said.
I thought how un-picturesque, how unlike
pigeons you might find in a painting.
Picasso’s pigeons, for instance, on his terrace,
overlooking an untroubled sea, two bright white ones,
a few others, whimsically plump, roosting,
and a pair on a rail. But, in these
unseemly squabs, only a beginning before
they and the mother would separate,
the young moving on, the mother living
only a few more years before she’d die. […continue reading here]

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Two Poems and a Collection by Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry, ’11)

In addition to a “Weep Holes in Body,” a poem published at Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry, ’11) is celebrating the release of her second collection of poetry, Nightbloom & Cenote.

Below is an excerpt from her poem, “No One Asked What Happened (And I Wouldn’t Have Had The Words),” published at Rogue Agent Journal.

 No One Asked What Happened (And I Wouldn’t Have Had The Words)

he smiled in the rearview mirror, he was driving [

 

fifteen, nine months old                      ]

 

my face [                                                                                             my back on the hood                                                                          ­

 

she arched on the screen         ]

 

swallowed                                                                                                                   no

 

carried

 

felony of the first degree                              the Texas code § 22.011 defines two degrees of the crime sexual
assault                                             the victim was a person whom the actor was prohibited from marrying
or purporting to marry or with whom the actor was prohibited from living under the appearance of being
married under Section 25.01

 

in                                                                            the throat […continue reading here]

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“Quick” by Brendan Grady (poetry, ’12)

An excerpt from the poem, “Quick,” by Brendan Grady (poetry, ’12) published in the Cortland Review:

Quick

Stirred up by a stick, picked up by the wind
sent spiraling above cinders to land near
the zipped tent’s shadows, campfire sparks
vanish like the lit wick of some two-bit votive

pinched out. I’ve been sleeping around again.
Why confess what you already know.
Once, I watched you put out a cigarette
on your wrist. As I treated the burn

I never loved you so much. […continue reading here]

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“The Fall Zone” by Laura Moretz (fiction, ’15)

An excerpt from the short story, “The Fall Zone,” by Laura Moretz (fiction, ’15), published at Cleaver Magazine:

 

The Fall Zone

First thing that morning, a woman told Henry his crew must not cut her tree’s branches. She looked as though she wouldn’t survive if he cut the thinnest twig from the huge willow oaks in front of her house. Fully dressed and made up before eight a.m., she clutched the notice that his crew had hung on her door knob a few days before. She argued for the integrity of the tree as though he had suggested cutting the arms off her grandchildren. A branch as large as a trunk had shot over the power lines. He gave her his supervisor’s phone number. Her hands shook as she dialed the number on her flip phone, murmuring, “murder, murder, murder.” They moved their trucks to the next house—on this road, almost all the properties had tree limbs extending over the wires.

There, a woman came across the lawn in her pajamas and a loose sweater, her arms crossed like a shelf under her breasts so he wouldn’t see them shaky and unsupported. I’ll be damned, if this isn’t the day from hell. He knew what she would say: “you can’t cut our tree” and “it will fall over backward if you take off the front” and “it has never knocked out power,” and he would have to give her his boss’s number and hold off cutting, screwing up the work flow all down the road.

But she smiled, looked right in his eyes as though he were her equal and not the angel of death, and said, “I just wondered if you might cut one of our dead limbs, too,” and she pointed, so they walked together and she showed him where a major limb jutted out, silver and leafless, on the other side of the massive trunk. “My husband wanted me to ask.” […continue reading here]

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