Resources
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Writing Contest Links at The Writer Magazine
The Writer is a monthly magazine with craft articles and publication opportunities for creative writers. Their website includes an up-to-date list of links to contests with upcoming deadlines, searchable by genre: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, journalism, and more.
Ringed
By Fathima E.V.
Sinews and blood coursing
In determined lunges of joy
In the dance of fate
Limbs arrayed in freefall
Tangled swirls, hand in hand
In its circle of joy
Naked, earth rejoicing
Matisse, your figures dancing
In an abandon of vitality
The momentum of the rocking
Pulse trapped in its unreason
Insane, insane does leap
Heady joy swelled buoyant.
Ritual of desire, ringed
The thrums of legs and hands
The sheer vigour of buttocks
Going astray before being pulled into
The current of the merry go round.
Lightning touched limbs
In a tenuous balance of grace
stepping in unison, caught forever in
the intimacy of moon lured trysts
its luminous permanence aglow
in orange, blue and nude green
Careening, yet grave with a purpose
In a paroxysm of desire
That loathe to be revealed
Yet thrum.
New Plays and the Destructive Cult of Virginity
In this provocative article at the online journal Howlround, lesbian-feminist playwright Carolyn Gage critiques the "previously unpublished/unproduced" requirement in most submission guidelines for contests, magazines, and drama festivals. Gage observes that this system disadvantages writers from less-privileged backgrounds or with radical viewpoints, who may not have access to a high-profile venue for their work's first publication or production, and are then banned from submitting it elsewhere. "I would like to see folks really challenge this obsession with 'purity' as it relates to manuscripts for new work. The protocol is shot-through with patriarchal and deeply classist prerogatives and assumptions about the entire nature of the relationship between the producer/publisher and the playwright. This should be a relationship of equals. I do not demand that they come to my work with no previous experience with producing or publishing, and I find it an insult that they impose a virginity criteria on my work. In their fixation on virginity, these publishers and producers bypass many fresh and innovative plays and they penalize the most entrepreneurial authors."
Cathy’s Comps and Calls
Award-winning poet and fiction writer Cathy Bryant curates this writing resources site, which specializes in free-to-enter contests and calls for submissions that can be entered online. Her book How to Win Writing Competitions (and Make Money) collects the knowledge she has gained from editing this site and publishing her work.
Prime: Poetry & Conversation
Edited by Jericho Brown, this essential anthology brings together a new generation of black gay poets: Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip B. Williams, and L. Lamar Wilson. The book begins with a selection of poems from each author, after which they interview one another about poetic mentoring, influences, and identities. Publisher Sibling Rivalry Press is known for supporting LGBT literature.
Badilisha Poetry X-Change
Badilisha Poetry X-Change is both an online audio archive and a Pan-African poetry show delivered in radio format. Now the world's largest online collective of African poets, Badilisha features over 350 poets from two dozen countries. The project aims to introduce African readers to the best contemporary and classic work from their continent, bringing together literary cultures that had been isolated from one another by colonialism and language barriers.
Four Hidden Dangers of Writing Groups
Jane Friedman's blog features expert advice about today's publishing industry. This guest post by Jennie Nash, the chief creative officer of Author Accelerator, challenges the conventional wisdom that group feedback is always helpful for learning to write. Among other issues, she observes that peers may lack expertise, and that the fear of failure in a social setting may hold writers back from taking necessary risks.
Dress Rehearsal
By Diana Anhalt
After 48 years together—Or is it 49?— the eventual
becomes inevitable. And I must teach you the secrets
of the pressure cooker, to sun-dry the sheets, water
the dahlias, and introduce you to a good woman, Anne,
perhaps, without arousing your suspicions.
Did you know mustard eases leg cramps?
A pinch of salt helps water boil? Toothpaste
takes the itch out of mosquito bites?
I won't tell you that someday—not long from now—
we'll become one with wind-blown silence, taste
of grass. I will tell you the password for my email,
and place the Christmas card list—grown shorter
every year—on your computer.
You'll need to know I hide spare keys inside
old shoes. You'll find my obit in the pocket
of your winter coat.
Curly Howard Misreads Edgar Allan Poe
By Paul Fericano
The director yells Cut! and everyone on the set
is relieved to feel the weight of the day lifted
like a dark comedy of unscripted errors,
no one more thankful than Curly Howard
who retreats to his trailer for a quick smoke and a drink,
rubbing as he goes his shaved cue ball head,
where once the hair grew so thick
he actually appeared handsome to women
who fought to run their fingers through it.
He's reminded now of the sacrifices he's made,
the punishment he endures at the onscreen hands
of his older brother, Moe, who lovingly calls him Babe,
the mixed emotions he feels with each conk on the head,
each slap of the face or fingers poked in bewildered eyes,
and all the bricks and bottles and picks and shovels
and falling pianos and entire buildings collapsing
down around him in heaps of lowbrow humor and pain
can't hide the desperation of his clownish art,
the dreary midnight in his laughter.
Sitting alone, the alcohol convinces him otherwise
and he imagines himself a student of serious literature,
finding wisdom in the works of Edgar Allan Poe,
reading tales of unspeakable horrors befalling others,
grateful for this small refuge of scholarly insight,
and he commits to memory poems of young love dying,
mourning loss in a small room, much like this one,
childlike and powerless to rescue the slipping away,
the black doom of wings waiting above the door,
and he reads as he rocks, repeats the line
Quoth the raven, 'Nevermoe,' over and over again,
until he knows it to be absolutely true.
Resources for Organizing a Poetry Manuscript
This 2014 post from the blog of poet Nancy Chen Long features links to books and articles with advice on organizing your poems into a coherent manuscript. Authors cited include award-winning poets Jamaal May and Alberto Ríos, Tupelo Press publisher Jeffrey Levine, and Two Sylvias Press publisher Kelli Russell Agodon.
Young Girl With Wolf
By Ruth Thompson
In the photograph you are playing with a wolf. You are holding up a towel and the wolf, a cub, a dying cub though you do not know that yet, is reaching up to grab the towel with his mouth. Did he bite people's hands too, the way a mouthy puppy does? You do not remember. He was not troublesome, hardly there at all in your memories, poor stolen orphan cub, sold to a boy who wanted a wolf. And you too saw nothing wrong in it then, so far were you from anything real, so lost in college and books and boyfriends and probably trouble at home.
You knew no more than the wolf about the world, though unlike the cub you pretended to—you with your eyes and face swollen from allergies you didn't know about yet, your narrow waist and full hips, round arm stretching up to hold the towel, the grit of jaw and eyes hidden under pneumatic blonde prettiness, mascara, big hair. Two years later it would be Twiggy, short dresses and skinny legs, but for now you are in the sexual thick of things, sitting in the sunshine, just come from bed or on the way to bed, playing with another baby who is soon to die, alone and far from home.
And you, too, not tomorrow, but soon enough, you too will die, and far from home. Cut off willingly from home. Down, down, down you will fall, and all your prettiness, your innocent seductiveness, your fresh full arms and lips, the emerging strength of jaw and mouth, all will be torn from you and wither away, and you will be a servant, a nothing, drone, unformed and worthless blob. Until, twenty years later, long after all is lost, you will begin to reconstitute yourself—from what? How? Unlike the wolf pup you will be reborn—browbeaten, aching, childless, gray. And you will begin from that.
Book Review Directory
Launched in 2015, the Book Review Directory is a growing list of bloggers who review books in various fiction and nonfiction genres. The site has three goals: to match authors with reviewers, to raise the profile of book review blogs, and to help readers find new books in their areas of interest.
Vitality
Vitality is an online literary journal for poetry, fiction, essays, and artwork with LGBTQ protagonists. Submissions accepted year-round. This is a paying market. They are especially interested in genre fiction with an adventure storyline (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, mystery, thriller, steampunk, comedy, travel, historical fiction) and characters who are nonbinary in their gender identity and sexual attraction. No homophobic slurs or bullying, even by villains; explicit sex; or "tragic queers" (LGBTQ characters dying). Read the full list of the editors' likes and dislikes here.
Waiting for Pentecost
By Nancy Craig Zarzar. Winner of the 2007 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest, this poetry collection depicts intimate relationships cleaved by silences, frustrated by communication barriers both psychological and inter-cultural, but capable of being healed by empathy. Divine grace helps some of these characters find the willingness to enter into another’s strange mental world, like the husband who alone appreciates the creative visions of his stigmatized, mentally ill wife. Others remain on the opposite side of the barrier, perhaps because their intentions were not as pure, like the male narrator who is intrigued by his hairdresser’s quiet daughter.
Transgender Today
Launched in 2015 on the New York Times website, this evolving collection of personal essays by a diverse group of transgender youth and adults is inspiring and informative.
Don Dreams and I Dream
By Leah Umansky. Inspired by the hit TV drama "Mad Men", this chapbook captures the show's lingering atmosphere of cigarette smoke, perfume, and unfulfilled dreams. Rather than recapping events from the series, the subject of these poems is the cultural ambience of the 1960s advertising agency and the America it created. Catchphrases, images, and snippets of dialogue are layered atop one another like the collage of peppy poster girls and noir silhouettes in the show’s opening credits. Umansky understands that "Mad Men" is fundamentally about how our identities are constructed by what we desire. And what we desire–such is the promise of advertising–links us to whom we desire.
Tara
By Catherine Sasanov. This exquisite, penitent chapbook unearths lives overlooked by official histories. Upon discovering that her Missouri forebears had owned slaves, the poet undertook the task of reconstructing the latter's stories from the scraps of information in local records. The incompleteness of the narrative stands as an indictment of white America's lack of care for black lives. Suburban development appears as the latest form of erasure of the graves on which civilization is built.
The Disappeared
By Norbert Hirschhorn
What makes us human is soil.
Even landfill of bones, shredded jeans;
mass graves paved over for parking.
What makes us human are portraits
—graduation, weddings—
mounted in house shrines and on fliers, Have You Seen?
Names inscribed around memorial pools
or incised on granite. Names waiting,
waiting for that slide of DNA, or any piece of flesh—
for the haunted to be put to rest.
What makes us human is soil.
To stare into a hole in the ground,
fill with the deceased, throw earth down,
place a stone. Bread. Salt.
For Fouad Mohammed Fouad
Full Moon
By Adam Phillips
My friend's weird son
speaks only in terms
of werewolves
One day I pointed
out to him Ronnie, your werewolves
do nothing
differently because of their lycanthropy; in your stories they
Study the city's bus schedule,
shop for groceries after work on Thursday
in order to keep
the whole weekend clear; your werewolves
Are really worried about the economy and their
digestive health; doesn't that
kind of
Defeat the whole purpose, shouldn't
they be
Ripping out hearts, running
through the marsh?
Aren't werewolves just a metaphor
for man's frustrated virility,
for the scarcely repressed
Dark side
of human nature?
Each of us wants
the thing we are not,
said the boy,
Blinking the moonlight out of his eyes.
Nepantla
Launched in 2014 by the Lambda Literary Foundation, Nepantla is an online journal of poetry by LGBTQ writers of color. The journal's name is an Aztec-language word for the space between worlds, or liminal space. For guidelines or other questions, contact the editors at nepantla@lambdaliterary.org.
Rattle Young Poets Anthology
Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century is a well-regarded literary journal that produces this annual anthology of writing by young people. The editors select the top 52 poems from thousands of submissions from all over the world. Entrants must have been age 15 or younger when the poem was written, and 18 or younger when submitted. See website for guidelines, privacy protections, and online submission form.
Garden Party
By Silvia Curbelo
The day makes its final appearance,
the sky rubbed out in places
with a blue so understated it's nearly
a memory of blue. Forget the vase
arranged on the table, the tulips
are too vague. Even the white
tablecloth is an erasure.
Imagine the pale drone
of dinner conversation,
the politics of brie, cold soup.
The good china infects everything.
Even now the knife falters,
the wine glass can't be saved.
Think of the blank mirrors
of spoons, the fish
whose whiteness is a given.
Consider the ravenous napkin.
The Independent Publishing Magazine
The Independent Publishing Magazine is an online magazine that highlights trends, resources, and best practices in self-publishing and small presses. It is edited by Mick Rooney, an author, journalist, and consultant, who has written two books of advice on self-publishing.
Author Solutions and Friends: The Inside Story
This 2015 article from self-publishing expert David Gaughran's blog "Let's Get Digital" exposes the deceptive marketing practices of Author Solutions and its questionable partnerships with major publishing houses. Author Solutions is the umbrella company for several well-known self-publishing imprints such as iUniverse, Trafford, AuthorHouse, and Xlibris. According to allegations in a pending class-action suit: "Author Solutions operates more like a telemarketing company whose customer base is the Authors themselves. In other words, unlike a traditional publisher, Author Solutions makes money from its Authors, not for them. It does so by selling books back to its Authors, not to a general readership, and by selling its Authors expensive publishing, editing, and marketing services that are effectively worthless."
TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics
TAB: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics is a national and international journal of creative and critical writing. The mission is to discover, support, and publish poems and other writing and art about poetry; to provide a forum in which the poetic tradition is practiced, extended, challenged, and discussed by emerging and established voices; and to encourage wide appreciation of poetry. TAB is part of Tabula Poetica: The Center for Poetry at Chapman University. Print issues appear annually in January; electronic issues are published during the rest of the year. Back issues can be read for free online.
Museum of Bad Art
Located in a theatre basement in Massachusetts, the Museum of Bad Art is the world's only museum dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and celebration of bad art in all its forms. Why study bad art? Because art that is sincerely meant, yet unintentionally awful, can teach us what pitfalls to avoid in our own work. It can also be very funny, and (to quote the literary journal Ploughshares) "convey a distinctive and strange vision" that lifts it above banal badness. Better to fail ambitiously than succeed and be boring.
Library of Congress Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature
This online archive at the Library of Congress features over 150 recordings of significant 20th and 21st century American writers reading their work.
Choice of Words
By Valerie Nieman
My father and I
each became single
in the same year.
He is bereft,
robbed of his happiness,
a widower, or widowman.
His life has come undone,
and he is adrift
among the wreckage.
The only words worthy
of his loss are Anglo-Saxon
uncensored howls.
*
But I am separated
on the way to divorce,
terms for a civilized
coming apart.
Separated like an egg,
occasionally messy
but with some care
the yolk rests aloft,
while the white goes
cool and sliding into the bowl.
*
In plain words,
it's all butchery,
whatever the parting:
disjointed, sundered, severed.
*
A separation is also,
however, embarkation.
We stand at the rail,
each waving a white handkerchief
at the sinking shore.
The Block
By Sherry Ballou Hanson
I used to be an oak
before they cut me down.
I was substantial they said.
Catholic bells pealed for generations
and stars danced in my branches
all the nights of my life
as a tree in a wood
along the Thames
but things change. One day they came
and I was hauled out dead
before the sun had set;
better to have silvered among the stumps
than do the devil's work.
I was paired with axe
and together we served the Tower
four hundred long years,
shrinking from the screams at Tyburn
and the mob at Tower Hill
until it was our turn.
The first was worst, a mess of blood,
the severed head cut loose;
we scarce could stand the shame.
When Lady Jane knelt at last,
I felt my death again, wondered
how axe and I came to this fate,
but one goes on.
When the Earl of Essex
finally bowed his head,
we prayed for a sharpened blade.
Seven times we stood to the duty.
Axe kept his shine and I my gloss
but we were hollowed out.
Scrubbed clean now we are shunned
by all except the rack and manacles.
Nights in the Tower are cold,
and life was beautiful as a tree.
This poem was published in her collection A Cab to Stonehenge (Just Write Books, 2006) and was part of the portfolio that won the 2014 Paumanok Poetry Award.
Priya’s Shakti
This graphic novel is a collaboration between poet and playwright Vikas K. Menon, artist Dan Goldman, and filmmaker Ram Devineni. The provocative story portrays an Indian female super-hero who fights against sexual violence in a Hindu-inspired mythic reality. The comic's creation was prompted by the December 2012 gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi. The story can be downloaded for free from the website, which also features videos and information about supporting anti-rape activism.
The River in the City
By Paul Martin
How strange to see the river here
in the city, far from the green
country of long summers and swimming.
If only I could reach down
and touch it, let it shape
itself around my wrist
so as to remember me
as it moves under the dark bridge
past the looming blast furnaces.
Reprinted from Floating on the Lehigh (Grayson Books, forthcoming 2015); originally published in Southern Poetry Review
Ride the Pen
Alexander Limberg's blog Ride the Pen features craft essays based on great works of literature. Learn about using realism to sell a fantastical premise by studying Kafka's "Metamorphosis", or analyze the effective use of subtext and theme via Chekov's "Cherry Orchard". Each essay ends with a writing prompt.
A Quiet Courage
A Quiet Courage is a journal of microfiction and poetry in 100 words or fewer. Submissions are also accepted in Spanish with exact English translations. Contributors have included James Penha, Adrian S. Potter, and Patrick Williams.
The Object of White Noise
By Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Now we will say it with a small poem.
–Ernest Hemingway
Loneliness, I remember you before Polonius' talk of friendship in old verse,
final ellipsis in short taps and kicks, gusting metaphor extending itself, to think
of death early on, at once counterpoint and bargain end to life, as if to say
long marches were tedium, as Stein's invitations to garden parties, as want
as insatiable, ripped off book covers, on the quarterdeck or bowsprit, to see
larger ships, castle view beyond Pont Neuf, its elbow of a park, where I read
something of 12 rue de l'Odéon, as concrete a place as Mary's Avallon, a read
open as Sylvia Beach's hand, firm shake, first kindness, like the first verse
sciolti da rima, where rhymes recede, caesurae percolating, as the poet sees
rather than hears his words, oblique, their cello and echo, Rodin's Thinker
in a new tableau, left arm extended like a big wing, fast updraft, as if wanting
flight as escape, denouement, hurtling towards the poplar, rising obelisk to say
this is the way Marlowe wrote of undying dandelions and mirrors, to say
Milton's Aegean isle was like any other mapped dot, as open an autumn read,
as dismal and removed and blank a slate and stare, singly at Artemis, and want
a new fabric, sky and land, less architrave and Phrygian cadence than verse,
that invention meant movement, a rotation clear of the drydock, of thinking
what virtue to make into a creed, what rendered scruple to surface and see
in the light of day, not to decorate or scaffold, but in burning, to truly see
and intend the words, creation for all its vagaries like a tremulous saying,
its memory, distinct tremor, of Hecht casting Yolek between soldiers, thinking
his lungs would give way, along with his tiny legs, all for one midnight read,
with Spenser asleep, as with the common nightingale, in Augustan verse,
the way Nani tasted cumin, garlic within Ríos' albondigas, softly wanting
more chiftele in her soup, more celery, carrots and halved onions, to want
so desire is made clear, like agulha rice soaking in flavoured water, and seen
from outside the Oriel window where a boy swivels his orpharion, girl's verse
rolled into a scroll, yellowed, tied with daisy chain and bow string, as if to say
I made this for weight and resistance and home, so read it the way I read
your every word, fistmele of thought and image, on our long walks, to think
life is but its own long wait, Tennyson searching for the Happy Isles, thinking
maybe a late sun after the rain, in Paris too, its Cubist book carts, same wanton
disregard, or just joie de vivre, like Frost in his seat, same street café, to read
the same tone and rest at line's end, his road home through apple trees, seeing
Joyce in a make-believe Dublin, as filled with grain and mettle, as if to say
even this libretto, even this madrigal has emptied itself into portamenti, verse
of wanderlust; think Illinois sonata into Hemingway's Seine, its wave of seers
and their want of love, hope for soft courage, one more ostinato today to say
read me to sleep, beyond this city's noise and history, and meandering verse.
* This poem is excerpted from Sanctus Sanctus Dirgha Sanctus (Red Wheelbarrow Books, 2014). It placed as runner-up in the Georgetown Review Magazine Contest, and was subsequently published in the journal. It also received the Segora Open Poetry Commendation. The epigraph is taken from "Portrait of a Lady", Hemingway's poem about Gertrude Stein. Originally subtitled "The Oak Park Sestina", the piece remains an ekphrasis of Hemingway's poem, "[Blank Verse]", written in Oak Park, 1916. Published in Trapeze the same year, the poem is made up of missing texts, evidenced only through the presence of punctuation marks and symbols.
Cultured Vultures
Cultured Vultures is an online journal of contemporary writing, literary and entertainment reviews, and articles on politics and culture. Their free poetry contest offers web publication to the top three unpublished poems submitted each week.
Jane Friedman’s “MBA for Writers” Lectures
Digital publishing expert and former Writers' Digest executive Jane Friedman's blog contains a wealth of resources for professional writers. Her 6-part "MBA for Writers" online lecture series covers the principles for success in today's rapidly changing industry. You can purchase access to the whole series or individual sessions.
Indies Unlimited PublishingFoul Survey
Indies Unlimited is a platform to promote the work of self-published and small press authors and discuss best practices in the industry. This page summarizes the results of their 2015 PublishingFoul survey, which asked authors to share stories of being scammed by publishers. Follow them on Twitter @IndiesUnlimited and search the #PublishingFoul hashtag to keep up with and contribute to this conversation.
The Offing
The Offing, an affiliate of the Los Angeles Review of Books, is an online literary magazine publishing creative writing in all genres and art in all media. The journal seeks work that challenges, experiments, provokes: work that pushes literary and artistic forms and conventions, while demonstrating a rigorous understanding of those forms and conventions. The Offing welcomes work by people of color, women and gender nonconformists, LGBTQ and differently abled people. This is a paying market. Contributors have included Paul Lisicky, Eileen Myles, and Matthew Rohrer.
from Love Justice
By Bracha Nechama Bomze
[In this excerpt from Bomze's book-length poem Love Justice (3Ring Press, 2015), she is speaking to her partner about the latter's family history.]
My darling, who is this woman who gave you birth?
Brooklyn-born to anti-Tsarist revolutionary immigrants
her father, an escaped Bundist from 1905 failed uprising,
chosen Honor Guard at the funeral of martyred sailors from the Battleship Potemkin
(He quips: "I didn't need to see the movie—I was there!")
Your grandmother denied a job by Triangle Factory bosses
whether for her famed paddy wagon lock-ups
for sweatshop organizing, or for her klutzy sewing skills,
one week before the murderous blaze, March 25, 1911.
What if they weren't paying attention at Grandma Sheindl's interview
as she stitched her trial sample—an only slightly tangled mess?
What if they just needed a body,
a Yiddish-speaking girl's body
to seat, as was their custom, beside an Italian-speaking girl
lest two teenage neighbors, machines hammered down side-by-side,
stitch insubordinate whispers into ready-to-wear plans,
baste strong threads from a common tongue into off-the-rack revolt?
What if her notorious unionism had escaped their cold scrutiny?
What if she'd pulled off a few swift needle tricks and aced their test?
What if, uncharacteristically,
she'd managed to restrain herself,
refrained from needling the bosses with wry, sassy quips?
What if they hadn't sniffed out her apron crammed with subterfuge,
Yiddisher Arbeiter Bund leaflets stuffed in her lunchpail?
What if they hadn't been warned by a prior boss
of her paddy wagon excursions for justice?
Hundreds of young seamstresses
locked down inside towers of ragged scraps
locked down to keep out women like Sheindl
locked down to shut in women like Sheindl.
The only fire escape window, with a secret key,
by a foreman's resolute click, padlocked...
A burning cigarette flickers, hurling sparks.
Dusty mountains of fabric explode in volcanic flame.
Bosses flee the executive door, bolting stairway doors behind them
lest some seamstress child take undue advantage,
escape alive, but with a few spools of thread, a tin of buttons,
a pincushion not yet deducted from her salary
stashed inside her flaming smock.
One hundred forty-six workers, within minutes, morph into ash.
Or, wailing, screaming, the women help each other to leap,
from the high diving board of the ninth floor sill
to the empty pools of Washington Street, Greene Street
empty but for the charred bodies of girls too poor to stay in school.
Joe Zito, elevator operator, escorts his terrified sisters
into a flaming free-fall
no fire ladders can reach.
No nets can sustain the impact
of their bodies slamming the sidewalks
thud after thud after thud after thud.
Each strand of long, dark hair a wick in a blazing memorial candle.
What if what if what if what if...
What if, somehow, Triangle bosses had chosen Sheindl?
Then never could I have chosen—you.
What can be escaped?
What will always follow?
Bud
By J.C. Todd
What an exact moment,
beyond stop watch, clock, daily planner.
Nothing meted out. Pure season,
expression of something immense
that you barely glimpse.
Coiled tight like spirochetes, hundreds
squinched in a head, how many heads
on a bush? On a bank of them? Fragrance
when sun hits not green but not blossom.
Less cloud, longer light, a shift of wind
to south—imagine—detonation
as though bombs have been ticking below notice,
ticking in a rhythm so full of silence
who could count it out?
Each noon buds loosen, scent is more intense,
perfume you long for, whiff of an awakening
so piercing it will disappear as you open to it.
The brain can't hold such beauty
and keep the body running.
Just before it blows into bloom
you could die of it—lilac.
Cut, it will fade. You'll say it's lost
its scent, but that's been given
to you, and to stay alive,
you've had to forget.
Le dur désire de durer,
how harsh the desire to endure.
Originally published in Big Bridge, Issue #16
Fireship Press
Fireship Press, based in Tucson, AZ, publishes e-books and print-on-demand books of nautical and historical fiction and nonfiction. They publish a wide range of works from Age of Sail, Medieval and Renaissance histories, to Westerns and Civil War fiction. The press's Cordero imprint publishes fantasy, murder mysteries, thrillers, biographical and instructional books.
tree turtle
tree turtle is a Pushcart Prize–winning writer, educator, and activist, whose work explores the intersection of black, LGBT, Buddhist, and working-class identities. tree turtle's work has appeared in journals such as Fence Magazine, The New Formalist, Prick of the Spindle, Ploughshares, and many others. Eight works of couture book art were published by Widows Nails Press, a project of Marcel Christian Labeija, who was also an affiliate of the famed Nuyorican Poets Café.
Stock Photo Resources at Canva
Canva, an online community sharing best practices in web design, has compiled this directory of sources for free stock photos that writers can use for blogs, book covers, and other promotional materials.
Trish Hopkinson Poetry Blog
Poet Trish Hopkinson is the author of the chapbooks Emissions and Pieced into Treetops, as well as many poems published in literary journals. On her blog, she shares interesting writing tips, articles, calls for submissions (no-fee only), and other information to help promote good writing.
Poetry Has Value
Poet and professor Jessica Piazza started this blog in 2015 to chronicle her plan to submit her poetry exclusively to journals and markets that paid their contributors. She wanted to challenge the prevailing culture that expects poets to be satisfied with publication or prestige rather than making a living. The blog features links to paying markets, interviews with editors and publishers, and essays by other professional writers about the financial aspects of poetry publishing.
Step-by-Step Guide to Dealing with Content Theft
In this article at The Book Designer, a resource website for self-published and indie authors, attorney Helen Sedwick explains how to combat unauthorized uses of your writing. Common infringements include websites offering unlicensed electronic downloads of your books, or reposting or republishing your blog content without attribution.
In a Kept World
By Carmine Dandrea. This noteworthy chapbook from Finishing Line Press is a unified 17-poem cycle voiced by a solitary older man inside a house in Michigan in deep winter. As the "prime suspect" of his own examinations, he reflects on mortality and time wasted. Women from his past reappear as nameless sirens and ghosts, arousing both desire and regret that he did not value their intimacy enough. Despite the assaults of unforgiving weather and the temptation to succumb to darkness, he also finds moments of sensual joy and radiance in the ordinary furnishings of his monastic cell. The recurring image of the garden comes to represent not only the literal promise of spring but the "seeds of love" and "sureness of life" that he wants another chance to cultivate in his soul.
Where the Meadowlark Sings
By Ellaraine Lockie. This widely published writer is known for narrative poems that capture the unique character of a place and its people. In her eleventh chapbook, winner of the 2014 Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, she returns to her native Montana to honor the land that her parents and grandparents farmed. The collection includes humorous character sketches, elegies for towns hollowed out by economic collapse, and love songs to the landscape that revives her spirit.
[insert] boy
By Danez Smith. This debut full-length collection is a furious love song to black men, whom he embraces as lovers and mourns as brothers slain by racist violence. An award-winning slam poet, Smith is superlatively skilled at translating the rhythms of spoken word to the page, with double-entendre line breaks that snap from comedy to tragedy, or back again, in the space of a single breath. These poems are inspired in the religious sense of the word, revealing the sacred in the body's earthiest moments, and sounding a prophetic call against injustice.
The Side of the Road
By Dawn Schout
You are relief from cement, stones,
a soft place to land,
trod only by shoes, no youthful bare feet.
You may not be decorated
with daisies, but you'll get
other gifts: the first
slice of bread, apple cores,
empty boxes,
sweat from runners,
flavorless gum, strands
of hair longer than grass,
spit, words we no longer want
to read, bandages holding blood,
all we have to offer,
these little pieces of us.
