An excerpt from “Beauty Sleep,” one of two poems by Martha Zweig (poetry, ’98) at Scoundrel Time:

 

 

Beauty Sleep 

Kwitcher bitchin, dad snorted. Shut

yer yap up. I hated the salt
stinging my cheeks, it curdled my sass.

Little blue gas flames itched in the kitchen.
A pudding seethed, the better to set.
Pulpy crushed gripes folded in.

Bard: the excellent thing
in a woman’s her stifled voice.
Her boa: sleek silken throat gag. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from “Icarus Does The Dishes” by Tommye Blount (poetry, ’13) at The Kenyon Review:

ICARUS DOES THE DISHES

It leaves a mark when I fall
on the floor of my father’s kitchen.
Only a few days it’s been
of lifting him up from one place,
then putting him down somewhere else,
then driving to work for the late shift
while a nurse looks after him
for five hours, three times a week—
all we can afford. There is no choice;
sometimes, I have to leave him
alone. I ignore the soreness
of the bruise taking shape on my ass,
because these dishes won’t clean themselves
and Father hasn’t had his bath. It embarrasses us,
especially the rolling back of his foreskin,
the veins like tiny stitches on the inside
of a minotaur’s mask, so I let him wash that part
while I look away. He does not see me […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the article “Young Reflects on Stephen Hawking’s Influence, UNC’s Connections” by Katie Bowler Young (poetry, ’07) posted at UNC Global:

 

 

Young Reflects on Stephen Hawking’s Influence, UNC’s Connections

In August 2015, I had a stage manager’s dream role, pulling back a curtain and cuing Stephen Hawking to take the stage. We were at the Waterfront Congress Center in Stockholm, Sweden, where he was to deliver a public lecture, “Quantum Black Holes,” to an audience of more than 3,000 people after being introduced by UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol Folt.

Like Professor Hawking, I was in Stockholm for an academic gathering co-sponsored by Carolina, along with the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics (Nordita), an institute co-hosted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University; the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge; and The Julian Swinger Foundation. The conference was organized through the efforts of Professor Laura Mersini-Houghton, cosmologist and theoretical physicist in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, and her some of her close scientist colleagues.

We were together in Stockholm for a week for the Hawking Radiation Conference, where scientists were grappling with what most of us consider to be inexplicable rules of the universe, a science well outside the boundaries of my experience and knowledge. I had come to be a part of it all through my role as Director of Global Relations for UNC Global, an external relations role with roots in my work as a writer. How a career in writing extended to external relations is a separate matter, but what is important to me about it is the influence that Professor Hawking had on who I am as a writer. Truly, at the core of my love for language, I think of myself as a poet, and in Professor Hawking’s words and being I saw endless metaphors, symbolism and a light I typically associate with literary greatness. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the poem “Terrarium” by Avra Elliott (fiction, ’15), published at Fairy Tale Review:

Terrarium

I’ve made the pitcher on my table human again.
Her elegant white neck, belly slightly bloated
with flowers. Candles my mother stole stand
in borrowed silver candlesticks, and I can’t understand
why one has burnt faster than the other.

If I bought these sleek white chairs the same day,
why is one splay-legged, and treacherous?
There are too many dollhouses for a house with no
children. Not enough water in the vase of petulant
blooms. Grass has grown through the bedroom […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the poem “Return” from Restthe new book by Margaree Little (poetry, ’12),

RETURN

It’s June, the last Saturday in June, when Wendy and I go back again to
search the wash.

In April a doctor found another jaw there, and another jaw means another
person.

Don’t think, thousands crossing every year, hundreds dying, which they are,
don’t think, this is never ending.

There’s a job to do, there’s a plan, there’s one man found by us, his bones
the sheriff left behind: we’ll bring the rest of his body back, and if there’s
another, bring that, too.

We park, walk up by the barbed wire fence and at the gate turn into the
valley, toward the first ridge, the trees brown and low around us, the high
crops of rock rising up after the steep downward walk, the dip between
them where we’ll cross into the second valley.

An excerpt from the poem “Alien” by Brendan Grady (poetry ’11) published in Scoundrel Time:

Alien

Hi friend. The Arcadia Machine and Tool .22
fired into your left temporal lobe and now lies
buried in your parent’s yard next to the yellow poppies.

Strange what we bury in language.
The root of temporal is tempus meaning time,
or temporalis meaning temple, which houses the sacred,
the permanent. When you were sober
you’d decline a pint calling your body a temple.

The smell of fresh dirt at the burial seemed to contradict
your theory. A confession: I never understood
your humor, laughed anyways; (also,
I stole photographs from your room.) […continue reading here]

An excerpt from “Inflatable Jesus Might Save Us All” by Emily SInclair (fiction, ’14) published at The Museum of Americana:

Inflatable Jesus Might Save Us All

One of my first jobs, as a college student in the mid-nineteen eighties, was selling soap at a Crabtree & Evelyn store on New York’s Upper West Side. Across the US, the chain, then less than twenty years old, sold botanically-based soaps, lotions, oils, and powders, all in pretty boxes and containers meant to convey the pleasures of an English garden. By stepping inside one of Crabtree & Evelyn’s cottage-style stores, customers could imagine they’d exchanged familiar malls and streets for another time and place: an Americanized fantasy of Victorian English life, lavender-scented, sheep-filled, and in some inchoate way, better. For some, there is nothing more American than a wish to seem faintly European.

My Crabtree & Evelyn, on Columbus Avenue, was owned by a guy named David, a tall, thin nervous man of about fifty. David was something of a tyrant, sitting in his back office clutching his head as he went over the numbers. As a gesture of goodwill, he regularly employed teenage boys who’d just been released from juvenile hall, and they gazed at us with hope and sullenness as they carried boxes up the steep stairs from the basement to our street-level store. We were not permitted in the basement; the boys were not allowed to linger in the store.

Periodically, David emerged from his office to yell at us about the way we arranged things, about carelessly leaving open boxes on the floor while we stocked the shelves with new inventory. For David, the boxes disrupted the narrative that our products were crafted in some nearby pasture, brought in by horse and carriage.

The store manager was a former opera singer named Ethlouise. She was probably in her forties, a black woman with a creamy voice and a calm demeanor. She wore elegant suits with silk shirts and pearls, as if she were hosting a tea. She, more than anyone, was the person who best embodied the Crabtree & Evelyn brand. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the poem, “Old Fools,” by Francine Conley (poetry, ’14) published at Fogged Clarity:

 

Old Fools

You fool, I said, to not look me in the eye.
I used to wait for the serenade. Now I’m waiting
for some lover who takes pictures of himself
alone in his room
to notice, beck and call, to thicken
my milk. Some nights I go bustle my balling gown
from a gray gull closet, then wait to be asked to dance. But he’s too busy
taking pictures of himself to see me in the room,
disco ball bleating silver specks––I’m the smudge in the corner
by the keg clutching a restless flock of Grey-Lag geese,
the quick flighty types who hiss. Kiss me
and up we go. Then a six-foot drop
to the ground where we peck and doodle. Imagine the double dance I can do
with my geese, my orange beak and me. Wait a second. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the article, “Poetry as a Mirror,” by Glenis Redmond (poetry, ’11) in Teachers and Writers Magazine:

Poetry as a Mirror

Poetry has given me a mirror in which to reflect upon myself as a Black girl turning into a Black woman. The first poem in which I saw my reflection happened when I was eleven years old. I was a fifth-grade student at Aviano Elementary in Ms. Vann’s class in Aviano, Italy–we were an Air Force family stationed overseas. On one uneventful day in February, the teachers rounded up all of us elementary students and walked us over to the high school gymnasium for a Black history program. Assemblies in my eleven-year-old mind were cool because we missed class, but assembly in lieu of recess was not so cool. However, little did I know that I would not miss my favorite playground game that day, Prison Ball–little did I know that my small world was about to be magnified.

I am sure that I was well mannered and respectful during the program, because that was how I was raised. Yet it was not until Yolanda Walker, a tenth-grade girl, took the stage that I became fully engaged. I became rapt before a word ever fell from her mouth. I noted how cool Yolanda was–dressed in all black and sporting an Angela Davis afro. Her clothes, her swagger, and her sense of agency took me in. Then she recited a poem, “1,968 Winters” by Jackie Earley. Her performance blew my fifth-grade mind. It was not just the poem, but how she conveyed the poem with a full-bodied delivery. The essence of the poem came alive with Yolanda’s gestures, stance, and attitude.

The poem she read evoked laughter with its colloquial speech and repetition of black black black, then white. On the surface it could have been mistaken for just a funny poem. I laughed along with everyone else, but the turn in the poem got me. When the speaker walks out into the white snow after arming herself with black feelings, black music, and black thoughts, I wasn’t laughing anymore. I saw myself in a piece of literature for the first time. This poem instructed: If you live in a world that does not embrace or accept you, you will feel emotionally cold. I got it. The poem demonstrated how I felt in my young life to date. Up to then, I had never seen myself reflected accurately in a textbook or any other literature. I liked my teachers, but they were not culturally competent.  […continue reading here]

Miss Warren Wilson? Miss the packets, the lectures, the long, late-night conversations and being validated for your madness by other people who share your madness? Well, we can do it all again as alums! Why should New England and DC and Bay Area Wallies have all the fun?

Here are possibilities for the future:

– parties at which we share cheese and other unhealthy foods
– readings
– a listserv or Facebook page to post our weird thoughts or local events
– a feedback group
– self-led continuing education mini-lectures and/or bookshop style book groups
– Friends of Writers fundraisers

But for now, let’s start with a party at Leslie’s house!

Please save the date: Saturday, March 17th, 1-ish.
Please mentally prepare to drive all the way to: South Pasadena.
Please jump up and down because: David Haynes will (probably) be there!  (If not this time, the next!)

Email Leslie Blanco at: [email protected] if you are interested in helping  organize the party or any of the above-mentioned possibilities. Also – email addresses for some Southern California Wallies are missing from the alumni list, so please spread the word!

An official Evite or similar invite will follow soon.