“Chronic Migraine Syndrome” by Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07)

Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07).

An essay by Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07) appears in TransAtlantic Panorama:

Chronic Migraine Syndrome

After the floors of the towers came down one on top of the other, and people leapt out windows, and hearsay spread of heads all alone on the sidewalk, my own grief seemed unmentionable. Refugee syndrome. Car accident. Divorce. My little grief in my little life.

Overnight the ground – my ground – crumbled.

I was falling through clouds. I was falling too.

Searing pain. Blindness. Agoraphobia. Weeks and months lost underneath unwashed covers.

Now, it’s different. My body and I are uneasy friends, like girls in high school after a bout of screeching and hair pulling. My life has gone on safely, beautifully, but my body has to be cajoled now, bargained with. If I don’t drink red wine at dinner, can I stay up past ten? Drink the decaf coffee? Eat an avocado? A mango? She is a seismograph, measuring all things subterranean, the hidden significance of culture clash, and then, no warning, whiplashing me out of the jaws of dangers small, but not inconsequential. [… continue reading here.]

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The Wolf Tone by Christy Stillwell (fiction, ’14) Wins 2017 Elixir Press Fiction Award

The Wolf Tone, the debut novel by Christy Stillwell (fiction, ’14) has won the 2017 Elixir Press Fiction Award. Click here to read the prize announcement!

Congratulations, Christy!

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“Nursery” by Kimberly Kruge (poetry, ’15)

A poem by Kimberly Kruge (poetry, ’15) appears in The Madison Review:

Nursery

Their game goes:

We will play now in the forest,

while the wolf is gone,

for if the wolf emerges,

he will eat us all.

 

Wolf,

are you there?

. . . continue reading here.

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“Life in the Snow” by Alain Park (fiction, ’13)

2016-17 Beebe Fellow Alain Park at his Warren Wilson campus reading, Oct. 27, 2016.

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.]

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“Troth” by Martha Zweig (poetry, ’98)

A poem by Martha Zweig (poetry, ’98) appears in One:

Troth

As surely as eleven Eastern
gray squirrels twirl twigs
roundabout the parade grounds, I
love you & lash my leaves too.

Yay! until very God Herself
appears slinky in sequins & in full
diatribe roaring No way! will
I assuredly love you.

. . . continue reading here.

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“Crow Road” by Nancy Koerbel (poetry, ’92)

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.

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Ruthless Heaven by Ian Randall Wilson

Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02; fiction, ’16) has a new collection of poems, Ruthless Heaven, available now through Finishing Line Press.

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“Apology” by Kimberly Kruge (poetry, ’15)

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.

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“from ‘Articulation'” by Kimberly Kruge (poetry, ’15)

Work from Kimberly Kruge (poetry, ’15) appears in Witness:

from “ARTICULATION”

A Michoacán pine loosens a spirant into the night, and deeper, the collective forest modulates a fricative. Deeper yet, the forest on fire. Silently. Suddenly: I hate everything I’ve ever written. Even the alright utterance. The forest, on the other hand, really knows how to put an observation between its teeth and let it speak for itself: order in not disrupting the order.

*

In June, advances. The rain. The frog mates. The velvet spider emerges. June: the whip snake, the reproduction of the winged ant.

. . . continue reading here.

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“Like the Skins of Great Beasts” by Eric Rampson (fiction, ’16)

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.

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