We’re thrilled at the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop to hear that Aaron Graham’s manuscript, Blood Stripes, will be published in 2019 by Sundress Publications. Aaron, an alumnus of our 2017 New Orleans workshop, hails from Glenrock, Wyoming, which boasts seven bars, six churches, a single 4-way stop sign and a population of 1159. He has twice served as editor of the Squaw Valley Review and is currently the assistant poetry editor for The Tishman Review. Aaron is a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where he served with the The Marine Corps Human Intelligence and Counterterrorism Task Force Middle East as an analyst and linguist. He is an alumnus of Squaw Valley Poets and the Ashbury Home School and was the Cecilia Baker Memorial Visiting Scholar at Seaside Writers. His poetry has won the Penumbra Prize and f(r)iction Magazine’s Best Poem for Summer 2017. He has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Aaron is currently finishing his Ph.D. in Literature at Emory University, hosting elaborating tea parties for Disney Princesses and his daughter Alexi and holding down an English Lectureship at Kennesaw State University.

Proposal

So marry me with my guns
on and with a big bag of
earth plant a couple of
morning lights some solar
lights, the kinds
that often come up stolen.
We have a headstone, a big one,
So put bricks down, dig the dirt
in between. I put flowers there ever
since I bought that plot to be buried
in.

I wore my best wig, and put her Mole
on my heel. My brother brought his actor
friends and they performed late into each
night
and gave away pink umbrellas.
A week before her birthday, we held her
wake and we didn’t know that at a birthday
wake there is a raising, then a lowering of
the casket.

—Aaron Graham