“Scandal” by Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07)

An excerpt from “Scandal” by Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07), published at TransAtlantic Panorama:

Scandal

When I was eight, the nuns told me to pray for my enemies. Knees against wooden kneeler, I prayed for Julio Gonzalez, the Puerto Rican boy who taunted me about my tip-toe walk and my pot belly. Three years later, all my fat gone, Julio snapped the back of my training bra like a slingshot against my shoulder blades. Another year, and he put his arm around me in the back of the school bus.

I liked it.

It was a sin to like it.

That arm around the shoulders – the gesture, the implication – opened an ineludible door. Or maybe, the lid to the treasure chest we all find secreted in the attic, or buried out back, the hinge well oiled, silently opening to the touch.

The nuns were still there. Dressed all in black like the black-lipstick Punks at the public high school. Like beatniks. Like bouncers. When I was thirteen, they called my father in because they’d seen a boy put his arm around my waist.

“Your waist, Evelina, your waist!” my father yelled that night.

I wasn’t allowed to go to the dance party.

So I rebelled. I went out with Eldrian Ocampo, the eighteen-year-old cousin of a Filipino classmate. Parachute pants. Hairspray. Forty neon spaghetti bracelets on each wrist. Yes. The certified, vinyl-scratching DJ of a back-spinning, moon-walking, boombox-carrying crew of break-dancers. Catholic break-dancers, it’s true. But as rebellions go, it satisfied.

I thought of Eldrian today for the first time in years, here in my high school room, and the room of college summers, where Flashdance posters and torn up toe shoes have been busy collecting dust. Keep-sake boxes stuffed with photographs and love letters are scattered across the floor, open among the trash bags and the cardboard box designated for things I cannot part with.

The other boyfriends are still here: The First Writer of Notes, The Under-Confident Gazer from Behind the Pillars of the Cafeteria, The Earnest Jock, The Frog Dissection Partner, The Verbal Abuser, The Only Other Cuban. […continue reading here]

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Five Poems by Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02)

An excerpt from “The Ice Age,” by Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02), one of five poems published at Peacock Journal:

The Ice Age  

Someone is nervous somewhere
with all the shouting
and the helicopters passing over.
A part of everyday is missing people.
The common mill about
in consequence of loss.
To watch the news is to see
the enemy inside all of us.
A dog barks.  A woman cries.
The crows stand the power
line, croaking for peace.
Peace and a little moment
in the woods near the river break
where the bank is green.
The vegetation maintains
its own counsel
unlike the clamorous winds.
Chen Zao once predicted this, saying,
Do not listen to the man
who loves his own voice. […continue reading here]

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Three Poems by Lara Egger (poetry, ’16)

An excerpt from the poem “S.O.S.” by Lara Egger (poetry, ’16), one of three poems published at Jet Fuel:

S.O.S.

Sometimes the heart needs a parachute;
sometimes a life jacket.
This man’s is black and blue.
Despite the heartburn, we volunteer
to walk through Calamity’s revolving door.
Ask the blind baseball team,
the headless orchestra–
do you really need all five senses?
To hear a dog dreaming
is to understand the anguish of clouds.
To lie to oneself is inevitable.
Raise your hand if you’re willing
to break the bad news
to the music-box ballerina.  […continue reading here]

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“Darning” by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry, ’06)

An excerpt from the story “Darning” by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry, ’06), published at Poetry Daily:

 

 

Darning

Roaming the library stacks makes me uneasy. Too many books I haven’t read. The flesh is sad? Alas. But I’ve read all the books? Not even close. Getting my bearings in the third (literature) floor’s musty pulp-and-paper-smelling undergrowth, I file down a narrow path between stacks to tip a few more books from the shelf.

My husband’s sabbatical at a California university has stretched into years. I miss the street corner stink of piss, the damp zinc and glitter of life in Paris. I miss the newsstands. I miss the bookshops. The campus bookstore has been taken over by sportswear with the university logo; books relegated to the caves and eaves. In Paris, the flâneur is forever being lured into small shops still in business because French law restricts discounting and free shipping (no help, unfortunately, for Paris’s English bookshops, like the much-regretted Village Voice, which must still compete with the online trade).

But the campus dweller life allows me to indulge an old fantasy: plugging the holes in my education. Sure, this feels like one of those math problems in which the student is asked to calculate how long it will take to fill a bathtub that is simultaneously draining at a different rate. Still I persist. A card swipe gets me into the university’s Babelian library, its hushed reading rooms with rows of shiny new books (English spines one way, French the other) and the ferny canyon-like stacks. I can audit classes—heaven in my theology will be reading Dante’s Inferno / Calvino’s Cosmicomics in the dauntingly articulate company of students toting laptops on skateboards. I’ve screwed my courage to the sticking point for ‘Philosophy and Literature’, with readings from Aristotle to Lydia Davis’s radically short story (‘It has been so long since she used a metaphor!’): a course so rife with the stuff of thought that when I scrolled through the online catalogue recently and saw it was being offered again with what looked like a fresh slate of readings I messaged the teaching team—a Proust scholar and a historian of late modern philosophy—to beg permission to repeat. ‘The good news,’ my friend the philosopher shot back with characteristic Californian generosity, ‘is that you are most welcome … the bad news is that the syllabus will be exactly the same. Even the jokes.’  […continue reading here]

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“On Blood and Water” by Laura Maher 9poetry, ’14)

An excerpt from the essay, “On Blood and Water,” by Laura Maher (poetry, ’14) published at The Common:

On Blood and Water

When people speak of my city’s river, they say: declined. What they mean is: dry. Only modern cities can survive on the promise of water. Early people settled just east of the river, on the then-fertile floodplain that offered easy access to water, mud, fish, grasses, all the necessary components to forge a life in the desert. In the summer, I imagine cool breezes.

Tucson lies in a valley between four mountain ranges, so each range becomes a landmark. A trained eye can decipher a way through the desert using these mountains alone, though this eye will also see the lines of cottonwood trees, will find where water runs silently underground—the Santa Cruz River (translation: “Holy Cross”) long buried under a bed of pummeled stone, sand, bits of mica.

In this valley, a trained ear can distinguish predator calls: a wolf from a coyote, for instance.

The news is a gray wolf has been spotted at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, the first found in Arizona in seventy years. She is alone, but scientists are hoping she is pregnant. What they can be sure of is that it seems miraculous, this appearance of her after so long. It is long work to replace what was erased once before. […continue reading here]

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Three Poems by Adrian Blevins

An excerpt from “Triage,” one of three poems by Adrian Blevins (poetry, ’02) from the collection, Appalachians Run Amok, and published at Blood Orange Review:

 

Triage

Each time I fly I look a little longer out the window, so that’s good, that’s maybe
upgraded depth perception, but who knows since I didn’t take physics

on the Smoking Block as a girl in overalls in a Mustang at the fair
sitting cross-legged in the back with a joint or a bottle or some other joy thing

illegal, alien, licked, fringed, and laced. It was Frank O’Hara. It was D.H. Lawrence.
It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti in my purse with me trekking the sweet fodder.

It was not needlepoint. It was never Einstein. It may have been Darwin
somewhere in the back of the little skull but more likely it was condoms.

More like it was a party in the hunting shack up on the parkway where we went to fuck
because it was fucking because it was forgetting because it was rural America on drugs in the 70’s  […continue reading here]

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“Parable of the Groundhog” by Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10)

An excerpt from “Parable of the Groundhog” by Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10), published in Kenyon Review:

 

Parable of the Groundhog

At the Cut—a prison where cities get lost to time—
everyone knows the story of the groundhog.
People remember who told them—
the damn rodent that could climb. Or at least did

before the rest of it happened. Tasha told me.
This was after I’d driven thirteen hours,
I-95 from New York to Richmond
to Jessup, visiting prisons. I’d missed

a Greyhound; whisky & bad memories
kept me. Left me renting a car & asking the patron
saint of fools to keep my eyes open.
Bon Air, a juvie prison in Virginia, & the Cut,

a max in Jessup, Maryland, waiting.
I left Bon Air with images of kids flicking
their tassels from right to left, tossing caps
into the air, surrounded by razor wire.

Every state still turns men into numbers.
& I tell Tasha, there’s not a city
in this country where I can feel free.
The things that can be both true & absurd are enough

to befuddle anyone: time
is so fucking inexorable is what I mean.
& sometimes there is nothing—
just days & their ruthless abundance.   […continue reading here]

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“In Everything A Little Remains” by Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09)

An excerpt from “In Everything A Little Remains” by Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) published in the Kenyon Review:

In Everything A Little Remains

In everything a little remains.
In our factory-farmed eggs, a little pasture
remains, one wide enough to cool
the pain of the fire-hot blade

slicing each hen’s beak after birth.
A freedom of the heart, if you will,
an imagined green—with waterfalls, and lilies—
to spare us the constraint of wire walls

that restrict a wingspan’s width, providing
no space to move without stepping
on another hen. Why think of each hen
stepping upon the next, when we can envision

the prairie—as the label depicts—
where the birds roam at will and do not die
cramped in piles of ten, unable to budge
from their trembling cage mates who

have not, and will not, spend one day outside?
In everything a little remains. In our “100% Whole
Grain” shredded wheat, a little pesticide remains,
just a little bit. A 100% weed killer, if you will.

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“The Game of Catch” by Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14)

An excerpt from “The Game of Catch” by Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) published at Poetry Daily:

The Game of Catch

Let me first try something idyllic: a ball that moves
between two men. They say a great player manages the thrown
ball’s position—steps forward, steps back—so that the ball

appears to move at a constant speed and he’s in the right
place at the right time—stationary fielders rarely make the catch;
so let’s say we’ve got a father with the expected son:

me standing still with my hand stretched out—but that won’t work—
the neuropathy has numbed my grip and he’s been dead a year now.
Let me show you instead: two strangers—let me use intercept or seize;

along with ways of exerting influence over one’s circumstance—reach
and board in time a train; perceive a glimpse; discern an idea, catch him
unawares, risk a whistle, a catchy tune to catch his eye, he’s a catch,

catch his arm, catch him off guard, I’m more of a catcher, catch my drift,
catch you later, catch up, did you catch my mistake? can’t catch a break,
catch the news? guys have been catching something,

there are worse things you can catch, don’t let it catch you
with your pants down, you’ll catch your death, who’s catching
what, what are we catching, what’s left to catch, catch […continue reading here]

 

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“Lore” by Robin Rosen Chang (poetry, ’18)

An excerpt from “Lore” by Robin Rosen Chang (poetry, ’18) published at Up The Staircase:

Lore

Besides the eyes, I’ve always denied
any similarity to my mother.

But I too worry about birds, a lone egret
standing at lake’s edge,
one leg buckled backwards.

For flight, its wings beat
only two times per second.

I saw one pruning its white feathers
the day my mother died.

If I could, I’d ask her
why have a fifth child
when you were out of love
and had options.  [….continue reading here]

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