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Poetry: Luisa Caycedo-Kimura

Cartagena Sunrise–April 2009

The guitars finally hushed their trebled
chords over the sand. Accordions rested
their bellows. Even the twelve-year-old
boys stored away their peddler chants (more…)

Lemons and Peppers

Lemons are yellow and round today.  Not oval like the rants that screw our minds
to surface in jealous rages. In Colombia
all were limones–yellow or green (more…)

Poetry: Renee Emerson

I Take the Kitchen Scissors to the Double-Stroller

slice along the plaid print, trace with blade the baby-pink grid.  (more…)

Snowmaggedon

If you ask the locals, ground warmth makes a snow dangerous in North Georgia, where even the man-poured asphalt doesn’t know when to forgive its commitment to each and every sun-soaked day. (more…)

Fiction: Leah Griesmann

The Slave

Three-thousand-dollars? It seemed exorbitant, even for a work of, what was it, Meso-American era Nahuatl pottery?  (more…)

Poetry: Lisa Hiton

Moon Child

Like living inside an angiogram, I remember the womb:

        blood vessels illumined, eellike, hot to the touch. (more…)

Afterfeast

There is a deep-sea fish with two stones in its head. When you eat it, if you only find one stone, you’ve killed the fish too soon.  (more…)

Fiction: Saskya Jain

Chapter Two from Fire Under Ash

The prayer mark his mother pressed on to his forehead with the tip of her middle finger had dried on his skin as a heavy drop.  (more…)

Poetry: Abriana Jetté

The Women 

It was the butcher who got me
thinking, after he kissed mom
         on the cheek, … (more…)

Commute

Day drags between stops. Doors
ajar; gray shoes. Shut: black
suits. (more…)

Featured Faculty Member: Karl Kirchwey

Ocean Grove

The onshore breeze this morning arrives unopposed
since Portugal and the Azores. (more…)

TWO TRANSLATIONS

1. The Owls

Under the black yews that shelter them,
all in a row the owls wait
like foreign gods on a tympanum,
and dart their red looks.  (more…)

2. The Garden
In what garden forever watered and blessed, where,
on what trees, from what calyces stripped and tender,
does the strange fruit of comfort ripen?  (more…)

Poetry: Aviya Kushner

Highway

Driving in the fast line, the left lane,
I finally understand
what it is to say “if I forget thee O Jerusalem
let me lose my right hand…” (more…)

Ancient Hebrew

How close the villain is to the harp!
Two vowels separate them, just as two small
letters separate the harp from the generous.  (more…)

Poetry: Calvin Olsen

Territory

The owl’s eyes are perfect

circles the color of hay

almost ready for harvest

but backlit… (more…)

I Wish the Moon

I wish I was the moon.
I wish you were the moon. (more…)

Fiction: Laina Pruett

The Last Con

Collectables were not Clyde’s primary area of interest, so he quickly walked past the first aisle of booths at the UberMegaCon Pop Culture Spectacular.  (more…)

Fiction: Patricia Robertson

The Calligrapher’s Daughter

It was the fourth day of Ramadan and the calligrapher’s daughter sat, as she always did, with her qalams of sharpened reed, her inks of soot and copper sulphate bound with wine, her burnished paper.  (more…)

Fiction: Shubha Sunder

The Western Tailor

At seven o’clock Ramesh turns off the sewing machine, slings his leather bag over his shoulder, and says his customary good-bye to his boss, Parul. (more…)

Essay: Tomas Unger

Listening Now Again: On Seamus Heaney
It is now two years since Seamus Heaney died. To certain of his younger readers—say, those who might have discovered “Digging” in a high school class, and gone further, until they couldn’t “remember never having known” the ground this poet opened, and made familiar, and made loved—this loss was the first of its kind. (more…)

Poetry: Anna Ziering

Please 

In my dreams, you are faceless,
blank space lightly shaded.
I would sculpt you, red clay
dug from riverbanks. Terra cotta,
small warrior, to fit
between my fingers like a charm.  (more…)

Litany

Like ice, fright,
dishes smashed
on the counter

old bruises at night,
swiped-away
cobwebs, bricks…  (more…)