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Department of English College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Works

Swimming South Off Key West

Friday May 16, 2025

Ernest Hilbert I wade into the warmth along the jetty.Sharp copper tracings of a sunset waveRide in, carrying light on its liquid peak. The wind is up. I dive. I rise to findA broad-winged pelican, a terrifyingSight at first, so close I could touch it. The bird holds still above me in the wind,White feathers […]

People’s Overture

Friday May 16, 2025

Piotr Florczyk                 Arise, children—get dressedand eat your toast with gooseberry jam—                before it’s too late. To arms, parents—let’s march                the kids back to school.Our cities may be asleep, the worms       […]
Brad Felver

Brad Felver

Wednesday April 24, 2024

“Orphans” by Brad Felver (Issue 33) has been published in The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners.

Keisaku Palm

Tuesday January 16, 2024

Carol Moldaw for Miriam Sagan Gravity brought down the palm frond’s wideand weighted sheath-end first: the bark,still loosely attached like coarse black fringe,lashed my ear when the stalk fell straightfrom on high and thwacked the top of my crown. On my way to the internet-connected garage,taking the river-rock steps two at a timeto outrun the […]

Ampersand

Tuesday January 16, 2024

Nicholas Friedman We squeeze between erratics fuzzedwith moss to a stand of Krummholz firs,deranged, wind-sculpted, then step from the trailwhile he bends for breath. After a silence,he turns to face me. Finally, I think,he’ll use the word that we all fear,the one that names his mutinous blood.Instead, he explains how “ampersand”was once the 27th letter,before […]

Dear Geryon—

Tuesday January 16, 2024

Jehanne Dubrow At twelve I lashed my own magenta wingsbeneath my shirt, afraid of how they stirred,moved independently, soft whisperingsof feathers at my back. Ungainly bird,I sat alone, the schooldays like a cage.I hunched over a book, my scarlet handa tanager that pecked across the page,red fingers hopping through a meadowland.The only place I flew […]

Black-Eyed Suzie’s

Tuesday May 2, 2023

Erin O’Luanaigh My first regular gig. Of late an aging child prodigy,now I sounded like a woman and was one.“I don’t know whether to take you over my kneeor take you over my knee,” some barfly Cicero said.(“Why don’t you think about it and get back to me?”)The microphone was somehow always wet,the crowd forever […]

Salomé

Tuesday May 2, 2023

Erin O’Luanaigh Running Wilde’s imagination was a wishto see behind the curtain of Mark’s prose,in which he only noted that she “dancedto please King Herod’s guests,” then fixed a dishserved cold. Her charms (and how many she disclosed),her need at last to catch the Baptist’s glanceadded flesh to Wilde’s fabricated romance— added scandal when, in […]

Late Style

Friday July 22, 2022

Mary O’Donoghue The last time I went overseas the passenger next to me asked if I knew about the plight of the Icelandic pony. It was as if we’d been talking for years.When they go abroad for competition, she said, they’re not allowed to come back. The purity of the bloodline. They might pick up […]

The Hamburg Sisters in Nebraska

Tuesday October 5, 2021

Sylvie Baumgartel We don’t talk about that.We make fruitcakes.We love our husbands like cardboard.We keep our nails trimmed close.The skin under our eyes is likeDrowned moons.The skin between our eyes isGathered like skirt pleats.We hide our purple nipples.We forget our language.You can’t speak it anymore anyway.We crochet dresses from bakery string.We stink of candy grease.We […]

Rebel

Tuesday October 5, 2021

Sylvie Baumgartel Savonarola was hanged & burnedWith two others in the sameSquare where he had called for theMass burning of paintings, Mirrors, books & makeup.A giant bonfire of all thatTakes us away fromPure joy, he said.Savonarola condemnedCorrupt papal power. The Florentine childrenDanced & laughed& threw stones at theDangling, burning men.

Piedra de Sol

Tuesday September 28, 2021

Lawrence O’Dwyer Piedra de Sol The workshop is a cluttered, busy space. There are clamps and drills, chisels and burins; the tools might be those of a cobbler or a stonemason. Drawers are stuffed with wires and molds. A cast-iron disc is lost in a blur of speed. There is a microscope on a bench […]

I’m Hungry if You Are

Friday September 24, 2021

Natanya Biskar The call comes from a number in Todos Santos, Mexico, and at first I do not register what that means. One student has just left and I have ten minutes to clean, breathe, return emails, collect myself, finish paperwork, use the bathroom, drink three glasses of water, be a different person, and wipe […]

1900

Friday September 24, 2021

Jennifer Moxley An old cuss in a MAGA masklimps past me, going againstthe taped arrows on the aislefloor. I get a close-up viewof his milky eyes trying tofocus under the fluorescents,one arthritic hand cuppinga gallon of boxed ice cream.Before his about-face, I had feltthe need to avert my eyesfrom the pink chapped skinand butt crack […]

Blue Moon

Tuesday December 1, 2020

Scott Bailey           I walk out to check on the squawking hens & brood     of chicks, the morning night an atmospheric dewimmune to suspicion & fear unlike the nature     of heifers in the barn, a rest from snagging neckson barbed wire to eat honeysuckles along the fence     line, a commotion often thwarted by territorial hensperhaps unsettled by the blue […]
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