Hello to new readers and old! As you may have noticed from the last few posts on our events this semester, we are now officially ONLINE! We are incredibly excited to have you reading this on our very own website for The Laughing Medusa. After years of committing ourselves to putting out the best possible work from Boston College’s women in print, we’re looking forward to expanding our publication with lots of fresh updates for the web. As part of the celebration for our new online home, we will be featuring a selection of some of our favorite pieces from previous issues of our magazine. If they leave you wanting more (and we hope they do) be sure to check out the full version of our latest issue, now available online under that “Our Current Issue” tab you’ll find above.

Each piece has been selected by a member of our Editorial Council, and this week the poem below was chosen by our very own Christin Snyder. Though we’ve loved “blue nude october” since we featured it in our Spring 2017 magazine, this feature is extra special–the poem was authored by former Medusa Katerina Ivanov, and has just been published beyond BC’s walls by Bird’s Thumb. We send all our congratulations to Kat! Read on for the full poem:

blue nude october

my father is that first day when it starts to
get cold. when summer kind of gives up
paddling and sinks, when your eyes are
covered by a thin layer of wool, when the air
lingers between dawn and dusk, and all your
jackets seem too thin.

there’s no fall in Moscow
or there is, but they call it summer and their fingers
mediate between green and violet and they call that
love and their stomachs rattle and they call that strength.

they stretch halves into thirds, blankets into coats
and keep their eyes on the cement scented
permafrost so they can catch the first shoots
after winter, which they call spring.

my father bares his arthritic branches
to the sky. when I ask him about those
winter spring summer falls, he is quiet. but
he never lets me throw out bread crusts and
he goes outside, that first cold day

and stands with no shoes in the driveway, creaking, weighed
down by the threat of long winter. he holds
his head like an old boxer, bruised knuckles and
blue fingers and tired pride.

once I asked him why he was outside and weren’t
his feet cold? and he shrugged and tilted
his head a little and said
it’s going to snow.