A story by Alain Park (fiction, ’13) appears in The Madison Review:

Life in the Snow

Kathryn was a twenty-nine-year old former artist and expatriate, a restless creature at one time prone to burning her old work though she hadn’t had to in years. She lived in Switzerland with a well-known clinical psychiatrist ten years her senior—the father of her unborn child and also a kind man she’d recently agreed to marry. They spent their time making thin pancakes on weekends and rearranging the smart furniture of his house, located on a mountain slope in the German-speaking region of the Swiss Alps, a wonderland of frost and sun and smiling people, a playground to Kathryn’s eye of healthy goodness and all that was right and handsome in the world. She’d come to love the penetrating light in the mountains, it filled her, the landscape solid and full at every turn, and yet at that moment in her life what those sights evoked most in Kathryn was not contentment, but rather a desire that her old friends back home should know these things as well. [ … continue reading here.]

A poem by Nancy Koerbel (poetry, ’92) appears in One:

Crow Road

After my mother came home from the hospital
she asked me if she was going to die
and I thought fuck, and I said, yes. Then
she made a quick animal gasp, then
was quiet. Then went to sleep.

From that day until it happened these

. . . continue reading here.

A poem by Kimberly Kruge (poetry, ’15) appears in Poetry Northwest:

Apology

Sometimes I forget where I am.

I go as far as the patio and hear
three dogs wailing into the night.
Dogs that still have ardor in them. I see
shadows that fold into the honey of dirt
and its fruits being molded into shapes.
The silver tooth of some sister somewhere.
Someone, somewhere, not dying.

A town on the horizon lights

. . . continue reading here.

A story by Eric Rampson (fiction, ’16) appears in Penultimate Peanut Magazine (keep scrolling down for the story):

Like the Skins of Great Beasts

I hunt them. I go to where they are and I wait for them. I glimpse them. A rustling, they move through the periphery. They glide and shift. I never see them in full, only flashes and hints, suggestions, and a certain dread.

I hunt them inelegantly. There is no smooth take-down. There is no whisper-soft kill. There is blunt force trauma. There is blood and noise. There is wrestling with jaws, claws, and all manner of horns, spikes, razor-sharp plates. … continue reading here.

A guest post by Muriel Nelson (poetry, ’96) appears in Superstition Review:

Looking for Inspiration, Distraction, or Most Anything That Doesn’t Start with T or Rhyme with Rump

Coffee, yes.

Pink hats, yes.

Chocolate, yes.

But none of these inspires for long. Just look at the length of those “paragraphs.” The poems I wrote last winter were equally stunted.

I tried starting each day with coffee and resistance.

• Email Electors. Their purpose is to protect us from an unfit candidate, right?
• Sign petitions. We’re the majority. We’re strong if we stick together. We need to save what’s worth saving! (Can we?)
• Challenge the NYT to publish a front page without mentioning #45. Don’t play what he deals!
• Contact GOP senators without revealing my blue-state zip code.

I tried pink wool next, along with gutsy poets Eleanor Wilner and Maxine Kumin. Later I read Mark Twain for his anger and humor combined and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his thoughts on hilaritas from inside a Nazi prison.

. . . continue reading here.