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]

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]

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]

An excerpt from the essay, “Heart to Heart: Reading Melvin Dixon in an age of AIDS,” by Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14), published at Poetry Foundation:

 

Heart to Heart

2010: Short Breath. Fatigue.
It’s early on a Sunday morning in January of 2010. I sit on the edge of the bed, already dressed, with my hand on my partner’s foot as he sleeps. The night before, I couldn’t catch my breath, and I told myself that if I felt the same in the morning, I’d go to the hospital. I feel the same. My lungs are constricted. I pause a moment before waking my partner. I know that going to the ER means saying that this is real, this is an emergency. I thought it would all go away if I just waited. But it hasn’t, so I wake him up and say we need to go, and we do.

Heartbeats
The lines about breathing are what first draw me to Melvin Dixon’s “Heartbeats”:

Mouth wide. Drink this.
Breathe in. Breathe out.

No air. Breathe in.
Breathe in. No air.

The poem, included in Dixon’s posthumous collection Love’s Instruments(1995), comprises 20 couplets of four-beat lines that enact the regular rhythm of a heartbeat.  […continue reading here]

 

An excerpt from the story “Your Hysterical Wife” by Genanne Walsh (fiction, ’04), published at Catamaran Literary Journal:

Your Hysterical Wife

Your hysterical wife is twerking in a nightclub, look at her go. Now she’s sitting outside of Safe – way with a backpack and a pit bull. In point of fact, your hysterical wife is standing in line for artisanal ice cream; she is planting carrots; she’s replacing the register tape and clocking the hours. No, she’s kicking drunks out of a dive bar. Your hysterical wife is picking through the recycling bins on Polk Street in the middle of the night. There she is, taking up two seats on the 22 to Life bus. Your hysterical wife was last seen walking toward the Golden Gate Bridge: alert the authorities.

Let’s be honest, your hysterical wife is good at making things but not so good at taking care—she has been known, to paraphrase the incoherent pop hit from the sixties, to leave the cake out in the rain. Really, she is just trying to BART home after a shitty day at the office. She is teaching, diagnosing, emailing, snorting, sorting, shooting, defend – ing, organizing, embezzling, talking talking talking. Your hysterical wife wants you to learn everything about her and then fix it. Your hysterical wife wants you to fuck off and leave her alone.

Your hysterical wife is exhausted by her perpetual state of bewilderment. Equally, she is depleted by her endless capacity to bewilder you. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the poem “Homing,” by Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14), one of two published at Four Way Review.

Additionally, Kerrin has two poems, “Killeter Forest: Father McLaughlin’s Well” and “When My Brother Dies,” in the winter 2017 issue of Prairie Schooner, unavailable on line.

 

HOMING

The sky is at the feeder again.
I mean the indigo bunting
with no bearings for home.
A man pulls into the driveway

after work—crunching stones,
hallooing up the stairs—
wanting to know about my day.
All the days are wranglers,

I say. I am not able to cite
my sources, but I make a list.
A woman at lunch said we do not 
plan to live two hundred years
,

and so I think to tell him
well, I do not plan to live
two hundred years! 
In my hands,
pillowcases I bought, embroidery […continue reading here]

An excerpt from “Brave? Me? Nah.” by Mary Jean Babic (fiction, ’02) published at Medium:

Brave? Me? Nah.

“So you’re traveling by yourself?” the woman asked me as we wrapped up a tour of Dexter Avenue King Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, this past April. When I answered yes, she said, “Wow, that’s brave.”

The woman — about my age, late forties — was part of a Friendship Forcegroup of about a dozen Americans and Brits that had swelled the 12 p.m. tour now wrapping up. For the past hour our exuberant docent, Wanda, had led us around Dexter Baptist, discussing its significance in the civil rights movement.

In the basement, we’d seen the paneled office where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had worked during his tenure as pastor, 1954 to 1960. We’d all had our pictures snapped at the lectern from which King had delivered his “How long? Not long” speech at the state Capitol, one block away, after the 1965 march from Selma. We learned that the organist King hired, Althea Thomas, plays at the church to this day. Upstairs in the sanctuary, Wanda had us hold hands and sing “We Shall Overcome.” (It didn’t sound remotely like this, but for mostly middle-aged-and-up white people, we weren’t half bad.) Now, as sunlight streamed in through stained-glass windows, casting colorful rectangles on the floor, we milled around the pews and altar, snapping photos, chatting, absorbing the history that seeped from the walls. […continue reading here]

The newly formed SoCal Wally MFA Alumni chapter, based in Greater Los Angeles, is launching a reading series for local alums and current students. To benefit from community wisdom and experience, Dinah Berland (poetry, ’95) and her cohorts would appreciate hearing from other Wally alums who run similar reading series elsewhere who might be willing to share their experiences, as follows:
  • How often are your readings held?
  • How many readers are invited?
  • By what rationale are they selected (e.g., to feature those with new books or publications, to give voice to emerging writers, to achieve gender/ethnic diversity, or by using some random means for fairness)?
  • Do you also attempt to contact Wally alums who may be passing through town?
  • How long does each reading last, and how many writers are featured each time?
  • Are readings held in a public venue (such as a library or art gallery) or a private home; or if in various locations, which has been most successful and why?
  • Are poets and fictioners featured together or at separate events?
  • Are refreshments served?
  • Any other advice you might offer for establishing a successful reading series, besides making full use of social media, word of mouth, and institutional contacts?
Please send your responses to Dinah:  [email protected]

An excerpt from the essay, “Economy and Endings in Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women,”  Christina Ward-Niven (fiction, ’18), published at Fiction Writers’ Review:

Economy and Endings in Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women

As a writer, I spend considerable time revising toward compression. I cut, I condense, I push my reluctant self to get rid of unnecessary modifiers and wordy exposition. My goal is to transform each (often-sprawling) first draft into something tighter, more energized, more powerful.

Similarly, I focus ample revision attention on endings. As a reader, I love a strong, surprising short-story ending—final lines that are often, paradoxically, a kind of opening-out. I strive for that kind of closure in my own stories.

Lucia Berlin’s stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women serve as a model in both of these arenas. Each piece features a remarkable combination of compression and intensity. How is she able to pack so much—a distinct voice, vivid details, understated but palpable emotion—into such short, deceptively simple-seeming stories? A close examination of economy and endings in this collection reveals several craft choices made by the author that consistently bolster efficiency and surprise.

One way Berlin is economic is in her characterization. She is somehow able to evoke full, distinct characters with minimal words. An example is the dentist grandfather in “Dr. H. A. Moynihan.” The first-person narrator of this story is remembering a summer during her childhood when she was required to work in her grandfather’s dental office. Over the course of the 7.5-page story, the author gives us a thorough picture of “Grandpa”—both as a physical being and a personality. One tool she uses is direct, straightforward reporting; the narrator acknowledges the complex mixed emotions she has about Grandpa (so true-to-life, these forever-complicated feelings about family), along with conveying how her mother feels about him, and there’s a matter-of-factness to the tone.

[…continue reading here]

An excerpt from the poem, “If Only I Didn’t Love You,” by Susan Jo Russell (poetry, ’17), published at Mass Poetry:

If Only I Didn’t Love You

I knew where to dig
to reach the well of wet sand
where the sand crab, barrel-shaped, sandy pale,

burrowed down fast
while I dug faster, with both hands, the sand falling in
and falling in. It was ancient,

shy, eating
the world from underneath.
Those hard tickling claws,

too alien to hold for long,
scrabbled on my palm—
when I, sad, had to let it go, […continue reading here]