Leni Zumas


Leni Zumas's fiction has recently appeared in Open City and Quarterly West, and is forthcoming in New Orleans Review. She is a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award for Short Fiction. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst MFA program, she teaches writing at Hunter College and The New School in New York City.

Bone Chapel
I found a postcard of 1970s vintage—addressed to a stranger—depicting a crypt in Rome whose walls and ceiling are bedecked with the skulls of Capuchin monks. Pretty good, it seemed, as the spark for a miniature story. But how to avoid the gothy triteness of skulls as subject matter? From Italy I got Germany, and from Germany I got trapeze artist. Out of this triangle the story grew.

And you will know us
was composed as relief from the wrapping lines of a novel I was writing at the time. The poem's title is lifted from the name of an arty Texas rock band, one of whose members I used to work with at Starbucks.