An excerpt from “The Hotel Eden” by Beverly Bie Brahic (poetry, ’06), published at The American Journal of Poetry:

The Hotel Eden

      after Joseph Cornell

Fragments of a life, protected under glass:

A parrot on its perch, a crock of corks. Butt-end of an egg.

The spring from a gutted clock.

This poster for Eden

Scorched and brittle as a boy’s treasure map.

            On the tip of God’s tongue, the bird waits to be named.

            Profoundly silent, the taxidermist’s shop.  ‘If only,’ thinks the bird.

            If only what?

[…continue reading here]

An excerpt from “I Always Thought I was Fine with not Becoming a Father. But Then I Wasn’t,” by Geoff Kronik (fiction, ’12), published at The Boston Globe:

I Always Thought I was Fine with not Becoming a Father…

We pose in July sunshine, my wife and I and the two girls. The older one is 6, the younger 3, and with their bright eyes, dark hair, and shy smiles, they’re as drop-dead gorgeous as people always said our kids would be.

Except they’re not ours. The photo, from an outing with friends, depicts the family we only might have been. The friends lived nearby one summer, and we grew to love their little girls. I looked at the photo later that day, and for a long while after I wished I hadn’t.

We had spent the afternoon on the Common, and at one point the older girl asked me to take her on the merry-go-round. Afraid of falling off, she insisted that I hold her throughout the ride. “Don’t let go,” she said, and soon I realized I didn’t want to — ever. I’d never taken a child on an amusement ride, and now countless other things not done, and never to be, suddenly crashed down on me. If anything, I held on tighter. The ride ended, the girl ran back to her parents, and my sense of loss was palpable. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from “Checkpoint” by Andy Young (poetry, ’11), published at Waxwing:

Checkpoint

The South Sinai Police Chief had spotted the beard. We’d been waived right through the military checkpoint — the kids and I on the side of the car closest to the dust-colored outpost. Collectively, the kids and I look American when we are in Egypt, though the kids are half-and-half, or nusaballah,half-donkey, as the family likes to joke. There were far more uniformed men than it seemed there needed to be for the rolling acres of sand that generally required so little from humans. Some stood, some sat, some leaned in the doorway. As we drove through, Khaled was sitting by the window on the other side of the van, the side the police chief happened to drive past at that very moment. He spotted Khaled and yelled over at the younger men in their desert camouflage to stop the van.

The officer, who’d been smoking in the metal folding chair, the smoke streaming around his thick mustache, stood and leaned into the passenger window, peered back at us, and fixated on Khaled. After a nod to the soldiers behind him, the van door gave a rumbling, sliding noise as the officer opened it. […continue reading here]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]