“after the dream act is revoked” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10)

An excerpt from “after the dream act is revoked” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) published at The Humanist:

 

after the dream act is revoked

it’s time to get my hair cut again & the dream act
just got rolled back      what can i do
get in the car    keep the appointment
preserve etiquette        the economy        routine
so stupid        stupid        stupid        what can i do
pick fruit for a pie      sweep the floor
feed the dog        call my reps        send emails
knit a pink hat        go to a march         write this dumb poem
phone my kids who I can reasonably assume
will not get shot going out for milk        or sling-shot
back to a country that vomited them up
in fire & thirst & dismemberment
to land here with no guarantees
but what it says in the constitution        oh        right

that applies only to        “citizens”
& those the law defines as        “persons”
such as some corporations        but not to all human beings
& as per the 3/5 clause and Dred Scott       does not even
always recognize all 5/5 of each human being         oh         right
that what’s-a-person thing is a very vexing question   […continue reading here]

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“Henry’s Turn” by Geoff Kronik (fiction, ’12)

An excerpt from “Henry’s Turn” by Geoff Kronik (fiction, ’12) published at TSS Publishing. The story is Highly Commended in the spring TSS Flash 400 Competition

 

“Henry’s Turn”

That rainy Christmas Henry’s father put down Athena, their old German shepherd. A long-limbed man with a hanging face and opaque gray eyes, Henry’s father did everything with quiet care and Henry had idolized him. That morning they ate breakfast and then sat in silence until his father pushed his chair back.

“Okay, girl,” he said. Athena limped after him.

The shot startled Henry although he expected it, but when he heard his father sobbing he covered his ears. His father came back inside and Henry said it was all right, but his father said “no, it isn’t” and Henry secretly agreed with that and they never spoke of Athena or any past or future sadness again.

Now it is a cat and Henry’s son.

“Let me do it,” Matty says, “I watched a video. It’s peaceful. Almost beautiful.” April sleeps in a corner, too thin, orange fur dry, her tail a protective circle. Some boys never matured, others were old at twelve, Henry thinks. Who or what had made Matty? His mother left before he knew her, but he does not seem bothered by that or anything. Like mother, like son, Henry supposes, remembering her. He wouldn’t take it that well. […continue reading here]

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Joseph J. Capista wins 2018 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize!

Congratulations to Joseph J. Capista (poetry, ’16)! Beth Ann Fennelly, poet laureate of Mississippi, has selected Joseph J. Capista’s Intrusive Beauty as this year’s Hollis Summers winner, to be published next spring.

“Both wry and ardent, Intrusive Beauty is an immensely accomplished book,” she wrote. “Readers have all the pleasures of great poetry here—nuanced syntax, a musician’s harmonious ear, and a remarkably deft and varied handling of form.…Nothing is precious here—even the poems about fatherhood and nature, those baited traps, are leapt over by Capista’s nimble speaker.” […continue reading here]

The 2017 Hollis Summers winner was Idris Anderson (poetry, ’06)

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Four Poems by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (poetry, ’09)

An excerpt from “The Missing of the Great War,” one of four poems by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (poetry, ’09) published at Cagibi:

The Missing of the Great War

Belgian Flanders, 2017

It was a test. She asked, Are they here or not?
Because the land is flat it is hard to see.

The men may be hidden in that empty space.
The canal was a serious obstacle.

The banks of the dykes are bordered with willows.
The lyric moment at its best.

At the edge of each moment I thought I saw movement.
It was a test. She asked, Are they here or not?

The lines kept changing but not by much.
Because the land was flat it was hard to see.

The men may be hidden in that empty space.
The banks of the dykes are bordered with willows.

You can read this, she said.
The lines ran right through this corn field. […continue reading here]

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Register NOW for the 2018 Alumni Conference

The DEADLINE TO REGISTER for the 2018 Post-MFA Alumni Conference (http://friendsofwriters.org/the-2018-alumni-conference/) is MAY 1

The 2018 conference is shaping up to be an exciting one with an array of inspiring and evocative classes, lectures, and panels. If you’re on the fence about registering, it’s time to get down—and land on the side of Yes!

You can find details on the website here (http://friendsofwriters.org/conference-information/). It’s easy to register online here. (http://friendsofwriters.org/conference-information/) (Note that there is a $15 fee for online registration; sorry, but that can’t be helped.)  Questions? Email To apply e-mail: pegalford.pursell AT gmail.com (replace AT with @ and remove spaces).

If you’ve never been to a conference before, or if it’s been a while, it’s time to take the plunge. You will be welcomed!

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Two poems by Nathan McClain (poetry, ’13)

An excerpt from “Aubade Ending with a Pacemaker,” one of two poems by Nathan McClain (poetry, ’13) published at The Rumpus:

 

 

Aubade Ending with a Pacemaker

It’s so easy, from the hotel’s twelfth floor,
to see the sheet of ice splinter, then drift

like continents on the river. From this height,
the snow flurries, doesn’t seem to fall at all. Maybe

it’s the trucks delivering meat (packed
in salt, I imagine), gliding slowly along

that make me think back on the La Brea
Bakery truck driver whose heart quit

at the intersection of Melrose and Western.
Paramedics listened to his chest. Blew

and blew into his mouth before he was wound
to a stretcher, rushed away—the truck, all […continue reading here]

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Two Poems by Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14)

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

 

 

 

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

floss. Everywhere I go I think
about what is impossible.
Can homing pigeons carry
their nth letter and still get lost? […continue reading here]

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2018 Alumni Conference Scholarships

The 2018 Post-MFA Alumni Conference  (http://friendsofwriters.org/the-2018-alumni-conference/ ) is scheduled for July 5 through July 11 at Dominican University in San Rafael, CA, is pleased to offer six scholarships of $500 for the Full-Stay option. The deadline is April 24. No exceptions.

Scholarships are as follows: The Linda Dyer Memorial Scholarship for Poets; the Recent Graduate Scholarship for those who have graduated from July 2015 through January 2018; the Distance Scholarship, for those who live 1500 miles or more from San Rafael; and three unrestricted awards.

To apply e-mail: pegalford.pursell AT gmail.com (replace AT with @ and remove spaces), stating which scholarships you are eligible for. In the subject line, please enter “Scholarship Application.”

Names will be drawn from a hat. Recipients will be notified via email April 25.

Please apply only if you would be unable to attend the conference without the assistance. If you’ve received a scholarship in the last three years, please give someone else the chance to benefit.

 

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“Blood Moon” by Joseph Bathanti (poetry, ’91)

An excerpt from Blood Moon by Joseph Bathanti (poetry, ’91), published at storySouth:

Blood Moon

Lorraine Venoble had insisted on driving home from the country club. She was angry and a little drunk, though not a whit drunk as her husband, Charles, known as Pink because of his complexion, who functioned well drunk, never speeding the way his wife sped, that night, along Cashion Store Road.

Beneath the sanguine moon, spreading ruby light over the heaving cropland, she welcomed the hot wind in her clipped hair, gone silver prematurely, something else she blamed Pink for. She flicked off her headlights. The gaudy moonlight washed the land incarnadine. Pink grinned like an idiot, threatening some boyish platitude to placate her: how beautiful she looked, an entreaty to pull over so they might undress and make love in a field of dying chiggers and beggar lice—his notion of romance.

Deep in the woods, at intervals, flame spurted in long skirmishes along the earth. Fire, more suggestion than fact—dream, even. But real fire, nonetheless, set by the county in controlled burns—an ironic way of appeasing the conflagration that threatened St. Joan’s County each drought-ravaged Indian Summer. The season when skunks, led from their lairs by the harvest moonscurried often in pairs through the fields and flirted with the road. Was the blood moon, however, that bewitched them to tarry that extra moment on the white line that spelled their ends. They lay like totems at intervals along the roadbed: elegant little muffs of plush black and white, fur ruffing as the gold sedan whooshed by. Their unmistakable yeasty smell like strong stout that Pink found stirring and Lorraine abhorred. […continue reading here]

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“Veil” by Kathryn Schwille (fiction, ’99)

An excerpt from the short story “Veil,” by Kathryn Schwille (fiction, ’99), published at storySouth:

Veil

My brother, on his deathbed, could not get out of his mind the big things he’d screwed up in his life. Each would nag at him for a day or so until he seemed to come to terms with it, then he’d move on to some other mismanaged affair. Carl believed he’d mistreated his first wife, which he had, and he fretted that he’d ignored our aging father, which was also true. There was one event Carl never mentioned, though, and I wonder if he thought of it at all. The incident with Plato Winchester has troubled me more and more over the years. Perhaps at the end of my life, I will have to answer for both of us.

People used to say about Plato Winchester that you could drop him in the woods buck naked and hungry, and if you went back in a week you’d find him fully clothed and well-fed. He was a throwback to another time, a woodsman who could sling a gut hook and skinner with the grace of a TV chef filleting a trout. We thought of him as a modern-day Davy Crockett, though his life—as we knew it, anyway—lacked mythic proportions. Plato was not a romantic figure. His social wits were on the dull side and near as we could tell, he’d never had a woman’s company for more than a night. Diabetic, Ghandi-thin and prone to mood swings, he lived deep in the woods in a broken-down camper with nothing for company but his private thoughts and a posse of hog dogs. He came to town once a month for his pills, and when he did, people who didn’t know him cut him a wide berth. His beard was longer than the one you imagine for Methuselah and his clothes were holey and rough. A couple of times a year, to raise what little cash he needed, he’d sell off some boar that the dogs had hunted. Though he fed those plotts and curs from the pet food aisle in the grocery store, Plato would leave Brookshire’s grocery with nothing for himself but a can or two of beans. He named the dogs according to the alphabet, like tropical storms. The yellow cur he carried in his arms that winter was number sixteen, a young one he called Pip.

[…continue reading here]

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