Alumni Literary Journal of the BU Creative Writing Program
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236 Alumni Literary Journal of the BU Creative Writing Program Issue 3 Fall 2011 Editor Caroline Woods Poetry Editor Bekah Stout Contributing Faculty Robert Pinsky Program Director Leslie Epstein Cover Design Zachary Bos TABLE OF CONTENTS Editors’ Note 3 Fiction: ILLEGAL DREAMS 6 J. Kevin Shushtari Poetry: THE WANT BONE; THE WAVE; ANTIQUE 16 Robert Pinsky Fiction: THE GIRL FROM HIGHWATER 18 Swann Li Poetry: KRISTALLNACHT 33 Martin Edmunds Fiction: ADMISSION 34 Kathleen Carr Foster Poetry and Prose: THREE TRANSLATIONS 57 Ani Gjika Poetry: TO A PHILOSOPHER 64 Zachary Bos Fiction: A TEMPORARY FIX 65 Joseph Fazio Poetry: TWO UNGARETTI TRANSLATIONS 69 Dan Stone Non-fiction: ANNE SEXTON “ONE WRITES BECAUSE ONE HAS TO” 71 (EXCERPT) Mary Baures Fiction: A RIVER CANNOT BE A RIVER 74 Shilpi Suneja EDITORS’ NOTE Thank you for reading Issue 3 of 236, the Alumni Literary Journal of the BU Creative Writing MFA Program. 236 is an online publication that appears twice yearly, in the fall and spring. We publish exclusively the work of our alumni, with one faculty contributor in each issue. This fall we’re excited to include three poems by our esteemed poetry professor Robert Pinsky. You’ll notice that many of the stories and poems in this issue already appeared in notable journals on the web and in print, and many are award-winners. We are equally excited to include first-time publications in our pages. If you graduated from our program, we’d love to hear from you. Please see the submission guidelines on the 236 homepage, and be sure to send us your updates for the program website’s News page. Best wishes, Caroline and Bekah Caroline Woods (Fiction 2008), a 2011 Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, currently teaches fiction writing at Boston University and literature at the Boston Conservatory. She is also the Administrative Coordinator of Creative Writing at BU. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Slice and Lemon Magazine, and she has been awarded two Glimmer Train honorable mentions. As a teenager, she self-published a book of ghost stories, Haunted Delaware, which has been commended in The Village Voice, Writer’s Digest, Delaware Today, and the News Journal. At the University of Virginia (CLAS 2005) she was a Jefferson Scholar. She has just finished writing her first novel. Bekah Stout (Poetry 2010) teaches poetry at Boston University, and is the director of programs for the Favorite Poem Project, a non-profit organization founded by Robert Pinsky during his tenure as Poet Laureate. She is also a reader for Slate. In 2009 she won the Poetry International Prize. To view the Favorite Poem Project website and videos, visit www.favoritepoem.org. 3 CONTRIBUTORS Mary Baures (Poetry 1974) studied with Anne Sexton at Boston University. After graduating, she was hired by the MFA writing program at Emerson College. In 1994 she earned a doctorate in psychology. Her work as a writer taught her how psychic wounds can be metabolized through writing and other creative projects. Soon she began interviewing people who had used creativity to make positive transformations after a trauma. Her work has been published by Charles Press (Undaunted Spirits: Portraits of Recovery from Trauma), and she was co-producer of the documentary Strong at the Broken Places: Turning Trauma into Recovery. She is now a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Beverly, MA and gives shows of her watercolors and oils. Zachary Bos (Poetry 2009) is kept busy with shoulder to wheel at Boston-based small press publisher, The Pen & Anvil Press. His current projects include translations from French of the sonnets of Pamphile Le May, and a collection of entries for The New Book of Imaginary Beings. His writing has appeared recently in Moria, Literary Imagination, and the inaugural issue of The Black Herald. Martin Edmunds (Poetry 1984) is completing a new book of poems, Boca Negra, and working on a screen adaptation of a Calderón de la Barca play. His first book, The High Road to Taos, was chosen by Donald Hall for the National Poetry Series. He has won a Discovery/The Nation Prize, and his poems have appeared in anthologies as well as many journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Grand Street, The Partisan Review, and The Southwest Review, AGNI, A Public Space, and Consequence. He is poetry editor of Epiphany. Joseph Fazio (Fiction 2006) is currently working on a novel and a collection of stories. He lives in Boston with his wife, Shivani. Born and raised in Albania, Ani Gjika (Poetry 2010) transferred to the U.S. at 18 and began writing poetry in English shortly thereafter. At Boston University, she was the recipient of a 2010 Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and a 2010 Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize for her translations from the Albanian of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s poems. Her work has appeared in Salamander, Seneca Review, Linebreak, The Literary Bohemian, Two Lines Online and elsewhere. Julia Gjika is a contemporary Albanian poet who has lived and written in the United States since 1996. Gjika was born in 1949 and studied finance and Albanian literature. She belongs to the first generation of Albanian women poets, having published her first book, Ditëlindje ("Birthday"), in 1971, followed by Ku Gjej Poezinë ("Where I Find Poetry") in 1978. Her other books of poetry include Muzg: Permbledhje me Poezi (“Dusk: Collected Poems”) 2008 and Ëndrra e Kthimit ("The Dream of Return"), 2010. Her work is translated from the Albanian in this issue by Ani Gjika. Kathleen Carr Foster (Fiction 2008)’s fiction has appeared in Slice Magazine and Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories. She received a nomination for Best New American Voices, an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Prize from Boston University, where she earned both the M.F.A. in Creative Writing and an M.A. in English Literature. She holds a B.A. from Wellesley College, where she was awarded the Johanna Mankewicz Davis Prize for Fiction. She is currently working on a novel. Mimoza Hysa was born in Tirane, Albania, August 6th, 1967. She studied Italian from University of Tirane and Universita di Pisa (Italy). Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Albanian Literature at the Centre for Albanological Studies (QSA) Albania. Her translations into Albanian include work by Italian poets and writers like Montale, Quasimodo, Pascoli, Buzzati, Tabucchi, Mazzantini, Manfredi and others. Hysa is the author of two novels, Times of Wind (Koha e Eres, 2005), A Story Without Names (Histori Pa Emra, 2007) and a short story collection Vend/imi 1 + 10 (2008). She is the winner of several national literary prizes. Her work is translated from the Albanian in this issue by Ani Gjika. Swann Li (Fiction 2009) writes fiction, poetry, and plays in English and Chinese. She has been published in World Journal, New Threads, Writers Talk, and CND. She loves to read English literature and world literature translated into English or Chinese. Robert Pinsky is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Boston University. His Selected Poems was published in 2011. His recent anthology, with accompanying audio CD, is Essential Pleasures. His honors include the Harold Washington Award from the city of Chicago and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his translation The Inferno of Dante. The videos from the Favorite Poem Project, an organization that he founded during his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate, can be viewed at www.favoritepoem.org. J. Kevin Shushtari (Fiction 2010)’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, Meridian, The Iowa Review, and Glimmer Train Bulletin. His recent honors and awards include the 2010 Very Short Fiction Award from Glimmer Train, the 2011 Editor’s Prize in Fiction at Meridian, and the 2011 Forugh Farrokhzad Fellowship Award from the Vermont Studio Center. He is a practicing physician and is presently at work on his first novel, Secrets From Back Home. Dan Stone (Poetry 2009) is spending this spring in Italy and Malta, working on a novel about the life of Caravaggio. Otherwise, he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he pays the bills by tending bar. Shilpi Suneja (Fiction 2009) was awarded the Saul Bellow Prize at Boston University. She is currently at work on her first novel and a collection of stories. 5 ILLEGAL DREAMS J. Kevin Shushtari (Fiction 2010) This story was first published in Meridian (www.readmeridian.org) and won their 2011 Editor’s Prize. You come home from school wearing a blood-red headband and a black and white scarf. Your mother takes one look and starts to cry. Baba says it's a great honor—“He’s a soldier of God now.” You ride in a caravan of buses through the desert in a cloud of dust and diesel exhaust. At the front in Ahwaz, you outlive each fresh wave of Basij recruits. Before the attacks, Ink Eyes hands out plastic keys painted a shiny gold from a cardboard box marked Made in Taiwan. The keys to heaven, you tell the new boys. Wear them around your neck and never take them off. Ink Eyes ropes the youngest together in groups of twenty, running the white nylon cord through their belt loops. He tosses out metal tubes of ointment. “For your eyes if you smell rotten eggs.” He’s saving the gasmasks for the real soldiers. “The tall one’s lucky,” an officer says as he collects rials from his comrades. They’re making bets on you to survive another march. Make them proud. Bring your father glory. Ink Eyes gives blankets to the older boys.