When I give him that look, he asks why I think it’s weird for him to rap along with the radio. He looks back at his game on the TV as I shake my head, place my hand on his shoulder. We were the first in school to begin to grow beards. We will order pizza with halal pepperoni; he will ask about my mother, what it was like for her to re-marry. My mother has not made Arabic food since she converted and met her husband at church. His mother rolls grape leaves on the front porch, wet like his gelled hair. She whispers to the neighbors. When he asks his questions, he stares into the hybridity in my arteries. I stare at the hair on his arms, compare the tight curls on my head, the curve of his nose.
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit, graduated from Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, and will be attending University of Michigan’s MFA program this fall. His writings have found homes in River Styx, Yemassee, and Midwestern Gothic, among others. You can find him online at marlinmjenkins.tumblr.com and @Marlin_Poet.
Eyes rend and tear.
Mouths gape, jaws have forgotten
their function. Idolized
is she, amongst the strobing lights
and fluorescent bulbs.
But, we’re rarely pretty when
stripped of our hearts, when
the camera shifts below
our hips, when flesh and jaw
dangle, longingly attached
to their former structure.
She’s shucking her glossed
leather gloves, flicking light
from shadow. She’s tugging
each gloved finger, peeling back
it’s black casing, a second
skin. Her sash blinds
in the stuttering lights, freed
from its bindings. Her hips
dip and roll in their easy crash
and saunter of angst-laced bass.
The precise pitch a perfect fever
to settle deep in the bones.
Glacial heels slam and crack
against the stage, her glove
drifts to the floor.
Why is death never a woman?
Why is she only aching
when she creates a life
for you? This body half loved
by you, this body spinning
a new life for you and
loving it more because that
budding body is half of you
too. Why is does she ache while
she’s creates a body
to sustain you?
Her robe parts, a scar
cleaves her soft belly
in two. The hood
of her robe, peaked over
her brow sheathes
pitted sockets and mangled
maw. Scuffed heels pierce
the sleek pedestal in which
she was raised. Her ease
fractures with rigor
mortis, her gentle serial
suicides laid as stepping
stones for the ferrying.
Her hood falls, long locks
moth eaten, much like
the webs she’s weaved.
The lies piled upon curled
silk, spun from ashes
and grief.
Why is she
not our harbinger
of death? The androgynous
shape the same
as any cut
from the stripped
fineries of living.
—
For now Brit Graham traverses the tundra that is South Dakota, while tripping over things while stargazing in the all too brief summer months. She is the crux of an ongoing love affair between the Pacific and Atlantic. She managed to pry an MFA in Poetry from the grasp of Converse College. You can read her poetry things in publications like Devilfish Review, The Night Owl, RealSouth Magazine, and The OWL.
strangers lined in rows sundresses on layaway where’d you buy dem shoes?
MéShelle Fae has a passion for teaching and developing others, which led to the creation of meshellefae.com, her online blog for writers who want to hone their craft or learn how to tell their stories on a digital platform. She’s an avid reader of anything she finds interesting and thinks of herself as “the ultimate geeky, weird nerd-girl.” She’s a resident of Charleston, SC, where she operates The Writers’ Block, a literacy and mentorship program.
It is tempting not to speak. Rather, to breathe in cold catacombs with eyes wide open. I think I understand the way you hope. In your mind, above, crisped spring: white plum blossoms icing up saplings. Belief is like this, getting carried away by progress. I cannot believe in history. Still, the fisted buds flare into wicks burning atop stone- cold facades tipping deeper into silence.
Michelle Matthees lives and writes in Duluth, Minnesota. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Recent work of Michelle’s can be found in PANK, The Prose Poem Project, Cider Press Review, 22 Magazine, Proof, Memorious, Anderbo, Defenestrationism, 5 Quarterly, Humber Pie, Specs, Third Wednesday, Paradise Review, The Mom Egg, Sou’wester, Thrice Fiction, and elsewhere.
Remembering the sound of my father’s axe as it split wood, the pile of kindling on the ground, how my fingers would test the edge of the blade for sharpness and the day it left us when we ice-fished on Banks Lake, Mark chopping a hole through the thick ice, the axe slipping from his grasp as it broke through the opening and fell to the lake’s floor where it still lies— Have you felt the surprise when you swing at something expecting to feel resistance, but hit emptiness?
This December, George Such will graduate from University of Louisiana Lafayette with a Ph.D. in English, a significant change from his previous incarnation as a chiropractor for twenty-seven years in Washington State. His creative writing has appeared in Arroyo Literary Review, Barely South Review, The Cape Rock, Dislocate, The Evansville Review, and many other literary journals.
Let’s pretend the room is dark. You on your blue bedspread daydreaming when your daddy comes swaggering down the hall bringing presents. Hmm, not here since Christmas, but he’s come to lead the singing on Easter, make your church thunder with hallelujahs, rock with hosannas;
let’s pretend he promises to watch you in the senior play, and you slip out front to take a peek, but he’s not there. Not that you expect a miracle, but let’s say he appears in the second act: your dead-beat father, ashen in the stage lights, new Afro, his deep brown face reminding you so much of yourself, you forget your lines, forget how lonely you always are.
Then, one day peeling peaches for a cobbler—crumbling sugar, flour, and more sugar in a bowl and smearing sweet salted butter over everything, taking your time when a door slams, and there he is, smelling like Wild Turkey and Old Spice, you blinking at white sharkskin and gold incisors, the loss of all the
years, when the knife leaves your hand, clatters to the floor, and Gran appears, lifts the hem of her apron, fans her face, speaks slow like she’s from high class Southern soil: Every girl need a daddy, but this girl walking in the light. We don’t need no trouble,
and your daddy steps back, catches himself before he falls clear through the screen door and slips away, you leaning against the table, thinking this is just pretend, but there’s a knife on the floor, your gran reaching for the Bible, shaking and praying, peach juice running down your wrist.
Ann Herlong-Bodman’s work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, including The Courtland Review,Atlanta Review, South Carolina Review, Cold Mountain Review, Main Street Rag and KaKaLak, anthology of Carolina poetry. She is a former journalist, travel writer, and college teacher whose full-length poetry manuscript was named runner-up in the 2010 SC Poetry Initiative competition. A featured reader at the Piccolo Spoleto Sundown Poetry Series in Charleston, SC, she lives along the Carolina coast.
I said Vic Damone. He was a singer, like Mike Douglas
or Jerry Vale or Steve Lawrence, narrow tie
and pastel shirt, a pleasant enough face, pleasant enough voice
singing the standards, the love songs of his parents’ courtship.
Think singing new songs so that they sound old, wrong,
nothing to fall in love by, but Vic Damone a star
in my family’s firmament, because of the famous elevator ride.
At the Jersey shore for our summer vacation,
in a hotel with an outdoor pool, it was the afternoon
my sister and I were allowed to sunbathe by ourselves
as we waited for my mother to come down,
as my father took a nap in the room.
Could it have been that my mother and father
both took a nap, together? This question did not occur to us.
Anyway, we dangled our feet in the water, made sloppy,
slappy footprints to the plastic lawn chairs, and we waited.
When my mother stepped into the elevator, there he was,
Vic Damone, like any man wearing a polo shirt and plaid shorts.
My mother, bright white towels
pressed to her pink seersucker bathing suit with boy-cut legs,
my mother smelled of suntail oil, and did not speak a word
to Vic Damone, did not even look at him, although
she could not help but see his reflection
in the elevator’s steel doors, until the doors slid open onto sunlight.
She walked over to us and sat, began combing my sister’s hair
into a pony tail, while Vic Damone paused beside the elevator.
He put on his sunglasses, lit a cigarette,
maybe preparing to meet his agent or sign a contract,
to be driven to rehearsal for a show. Then he turned,
headed into the lobby, and my mother, still combing, whispered,
That’s Vic Damone, as if she spoke not a man’s name, but,
rather, a verb or noun, and she was enriching our vocabulary, vicdamone meaning “to prepare for departure” or “to pause,
to reconsider,” vicdamone meaning “privacy in a public space,” vicdamone the discretion that keeps strangers from saying
what could divert them from other, more important, things.
—
Suzanne Cleary‘s poetry books are Keeping Time and Trick Pear, both published by Carnegie Mellon. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in several anthologies, including Poetry 180 and Best American Poetry.
The Blues down south would cut you like a paper mill and let your rotten stink blow all the way north on a hot summer breeze. That’s how she left, you know.
She was the second oldest of thirteen, stocky as a sawed-off shotgun, red hair, freckles and plump green eyes that traced an un-retraceable line.
When I met her, she was Sunday dressed in a full-length cashmere coat and matching camel-colored hat. The wide brim tilted over her right eye leaned into each heavy stride.
Legend has it, she snatched a black snake out an oak tree in mid conversation and ripped his head off in the street. She gripped my hand and pulled a knife one night –
we stayed too late at Menlo Park Mall and had to walk out the service exit. I was just tall enough to see the blade flash in the corner of my eye.
Her anointed hands could rub a rash clean and make me believe the Blues were always one bitter snuff can away from spittin’ out the truth.
Valerie Smith delights in writing poetry and creative nonfiction. She is currently studying Creative Writing in the Master of Arts in Professional Writing program at Kennesaw State University where she is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant of first-year composition. Most recently, she presented her poems at the 2016 Decatur Book Festival. Her poetry has also appeared in Exit 271: Your Georgia Writers Resource and BlazeVOX15.
Not sure whether you are ready to start an MFA program?
Try the Converse MFA Immersion Residency, which offers writers who hold a bachelor’s degree a chance to immerse themselves in the writing culture by attending and fully participating in one full residency session.
The Converse Low Residency MFA program also offers a lecture pass that includes morning and afternoon craft lectures and round table discussions as part of the instructional curriculum during each residency session.
It’s a great opportunity to get a glimpse into the Converse MFA program.
In addition to meeting the minimum requirements set by the Converse University Graduate School, the MFA applicant must receive approval for degree program status from the MFA program faculty and director.
1. Manuscript, according to genre directions (see link).
3. Two (2) letters of academic and/or professional references .
4. Official transcripts from the accredited college or university from which applicant’s highest degree was awarded. A minimum GPA of 2.75 on a 4.0 scale is required for full admission.
5. A brief personal statement .
6. Online application with the $40 application fee.