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.

A story by Emily Sinclair (fiction, ’14) appears in Cheat River Review:

Wildland

It was the second week in September, and bright yellow mums in buckets sat outside the Safeway, in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. On impulse, I grabbed a bucket, imagining the flowers on my front porch, a spot of color against the gray hazy air from wildfires twelve miles to the north. As I pushed my cart through the store, two women stopped me to say how beautiful they were, how they wanted them, too. For dinner, I bought colors: red peppers, green acorn squash, yellow carrots.

The fire had started three days before; by the second day, it had grown, uncontained, to more than two thousand acres; by day four, nearly four thousand.

… continue reading here.