Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books, and a book of flash fiction, Alabama Steve. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Salt Hill, Subtropics, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and The Poetry Foundation’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and is currently a PhD candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She is the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast and coordinator for the Houston Indie Book Fest and Gulf Coast Reading Series.
I keep forgetting things. You, for example, who I tagged “important” with a yellow star but never followed up— too busy flinging myself face-first into the space jam before checking the expiration date. And just as the bossa nova rhythm really hits its elliptical love trot… Read more →
That I would spend my life listening to five cassettes while fighting the seatbelt of a blue Chevy Nova, that Peter, Paul and Mary wrote their songs with my mother in mind, and I was her lemon tree, that the distant refineries lit up in the Texas night were carnivals, and I could hear the delightful terror of children’s screams… Read more →
Trophies open and close their glass eyes. A little steam & then the Wildebeest and the Water Buffalo step out of the wall—, that wood-paneled pond. Hoary beards, white ghost shivers, trampling the guest sheets, buckling the thin mattress. It is not quite Thanksgiving. Just shy. She gazes toward the guns on high racks, the fold-out couch retracts, and from… Read more →