Graduate student Brad Aaron Modlin published three essays and poems recently.
Brad Modlin
Modlin is a doctoral student in the Creative Writing poetry program in the English Department at Ohio University.
Modlin published the nonfiction essay “Thomas” in StoryQuarterly.
He wrote the nonfiction story “They’ll Try Again Tomorrow” in Proximity Magazine.
The fourteen housewives on this block have soggy hair and dirty kitchens. Sweeping linoleum, they mutter about the seaweed that always manages to float in through closed windows. If they’ve told their husbands once, this evening they tell them the thousandth time: I told you so, but you wouldn’t listen. I said we could never keep a tidy and happy home under water! The fourteen men, too proud to admit that they are also miserable, pour brandy toward tumblers. As it dilutes in front of them, never reaching the glasses, they cite the great bargain of the murky land, how ocean floor real estate is bound to rise in value eventually. They each say, Happiness is a choice, my dear. You must learn to adjust.
While their parents argue into the night, fourteen teenagers again work tirelessly in soaked barns, stretching and kneeling with tape measures, callusing their hands with sturdy ropes. I’ll build an inflatable raft, each thinks, as if for the first time. They still haven’t noticed the dime-sized holes in the corners of their yellow plastic. Read more.
Modlin performed the audio poem “All of It” in RHINO. Listen to him read “All of It.”
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