Two new poems, “All I Have is News” and “In the Heart of the Heart,” by faculty member and MFA Program Director Debra Allbery, appear online in Construction Magazine:

All I Have is News

              -my 9-year-old’s caption to one of his drawings

Dawn’s tea light through the etched
isinglass of the bus stop, Monday morning
the color of concrete. The newsstand

vendor lowers his face into the steam
of his coffee, while behind him a thin song
drifts like a wood scent, burned leaves,

from some past I can’t place.  Brittle
handbills on the kiosk rattling their warped
calendars, quick skiff of newsprint

down the street. I know that song

from somewhere, its tinned minor chords,
plainchant boxed in was, in lost—in
that other yesterday, as my child

used to say. His own past a brief
blurred mural behind him, his face
floating its descant into this white

sky’s steam and exhaust. Lie down,
he used to say, his motion halting mine,
lie down mama look at the clouds Read more