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The Fallen
By Mark Fleisher
The government gave him a marble tombstone,
his widow a perfectly folded flag,
the raven-haired little girl,
the handsome little boy tugging at his tie
memories wrapped in wondering tears
staining their innocent smiles
He died in the desert,
metal shards leaving little trace,
an explosive device, the captain said,
just blew off his face
He died in a rice paddy,
face down in the filthy muck,
a sniper's bullet in his brain,
a run of lousy luck
He died on a mountain top,
a screaming artillery round
sent shrapnel into his body
defending a piece of worthless ground
He died at thirty thousand feet,
his plane blown from the sky,
didn't have time to parachute,
didn't have time to ask God why
He died aboard a destroyer,
a torpedo ran hot and true,
struck his boat amidships
bloodying the ocean once blue
She died in a prison camp,
serving proudly as a nurse,
comforting the dead and dying
damn wars—the devil's curse
He died in a foxhole,
fell upon an enemy grenade,
a posthumous medal for bravery,
war, you see, is no charade
He died some years later,
lungs shriveled by poison gas,
just a simple country boy
not of the privileged class
Gold stars affixed to windows
made dark by clouds of grief,
the agony of time passing
offers little respite or relief
The government gave them marble tombstones,
their kin perfectly folded flags,
and the little girls and the little boys
will always remember memories of a time
they will come to understand
Sleep
By Judy Kronenfeld
May you fall into it
groggy and disheveled as a baby
who lets go of his mother's
nipple with a thwuck—head lolling,
cowlicks sticking up,
lips open and glistening.
May you fall into it
like a drunk keeling
over onto his own stoop,
having staggered the last possible
step on his slog from the bar.
May you not stand alone
on the shore at 3 A.M.,
longing to extricate yourself
from the gritty sand
of consciousness, when everyone
you know has been swept out
by the sea of sleep.
May you reclaim once or twice
the gauze-fine sleep of childhood—
calmly gliding from flickering shadow
to light, from flickering light
to shadow, like a punt
on a tree-lined river.
And may your last be utterly
black and quiet,
and last forever.
Canva
Canva is an online resource site for easy-to-use graphic design templates for book covers, newsletters, periodicals, and promotional materials. Some templates are free. Use their print service to create custom stationery, business cards, and flyers.
Pixie Cut
By Terri Kirby Erickson
for my daughter
Black-eyed, black-haired girl of thirty-two,
I can see you reflected in a mirror
across the room—one of many mirrors and multiple stylists
with tattooed limbs and hennaed heads, clipping
and snipping. And I am thinking that the cloth draped
around your body, catching the sheared locks that tumble
to your shoulders, your lap, the floor, seems as sacred
as white linen on an altar table—your face emerging
like an angel sculpted from the clay
of your long, dark hair. You are smiling
because you see at last, what we all have seen—
how beautiful you are, that the woman you imagined
has arrived—
and she is and always has been, you.
Excerpted from Becoming the Blue Heron (Press 53, 2017)
Finalist, 2015 Ron Rash Award (Broad River Review)
How the Boy Might See It
By Charlie Bondhus. Finding one's identity is just the beginning of the struggle, in this updated and expanded version of an award-winning gay poet's debut collection. With lyricism and an empathetic imagination, Bondhus claims a place for himself within multiple traditions, daring to juxtapose a comic tryst with a resurrected Walt Whitman, a disciple's erotic memories of Jesus, and the lament of a post-Edenic Adam. New work in this edition includes the poem suite "Diane Rehm Hosts Jesus Christ on NPR", narrated by a very human messiah who "would speak about what God shares with humanity...I mean loneliness".
Able to Choose
By Patrick T. Reardon
Let me honor your courage
to take your life. Oh, David,
why could you not find the
bravery to break out of your
prison before that, the penitentiary
Dad and Mom erected to keep
them safe from your raw life?
They could not live outside the
prison they made for themselves
and for you. And, in the end,
you couldn't.
Oh, David, I flew. I protected
myself. Why didn't you take to
the wing and grow your hair long
and really say fuck you to the church
and to Mom and Dad and find the raw
ripe life that always eluded you.
I am walking to Evanston through a
cold autumn afternoon, and my nose
runs as if I am crying on this trail of
tears and it almost seems that I am.
But I'm not, of course. You know,
David, that we learned early that
crying did us no good.
Oh, David, you were victimized and
victimized yourself. You tried to be
your deep self inside the world they
made so you could not find your
depth. It warped you, and, damn it,
David, it warped me and the others.
Oh, David, you sought to be strong but
fell under the their weight. The world
was so full, but you could never get to
it wearing their straitjacket. You thought
each book you read was right, had to be
right. She taught you there was only true
and false, right and wrong, and she was
the one who
decided.
Oh, David, I wish you could have heard
the music I heard. I wish you could have
risen up and out and beyond on the wings
of words and beauty and disturbing visions.
You could have. It could have happened.
Damn it, David. Why did I survive?
Our last talk,
hours before
the shot was
our most real.
I loved you in
that moment
as I love you
now as I have
loved you from
your birth. In
that moment, I
saw your depth,
and we stood
together, knowing
neither of us had
anything we could
do beyond what
we had been able
to choose.
Your smile was an
explosion.
Getting a Top Reviewer to Read Your Book
In this blog post, Amazon Top Reviewer "Bassocantor", a/k/a Chris Lawson, gives advice on how to craft a professional, targeted pitch to solicit book reviews.
The Smoke of Dreams
By Reena Ribalow. This stately, melancholy collection of poems is steeped in sensual memories of bittersweet love, be it for a holy city or a forbidden affair. Her roots are planted in Jerusalem, sacred and war-torn, harsh and captivating. Her more personal poems show the same mix of pleasure and pain in romantic relationships. One way or another, history is inescapable.
Buck Studies
By Douglas Kearney. Read these energetic, challenging poems once quickly for their frantic virtuosity of sound and rhythm, and again slowly to tease out the allusions in each compressed line. "Buck" was a racial slur in post-Civil War America for a black man who was sexually powerful and defiant of white authority. By juxtaposing it with "Studies", Kearney mocks the pseudoscientific white gaze, and also demands a place for black subjectivity in the canon of high culture. This second theme emerges most strongly in the two poem cycles that bracket the collection. The first reworks the Labors of Hercules through the legend of 19th-century African-American pimp Stagger Lee (the subject of numerous murder ballads by artists as varied as Woody Guthrie, Duke Ellington, and The Clash). The second cycle replaces Jesus with Br'er Rabbit in the Stations of the Cross. As great satires do, these mash-ups make us ask serious questions: Who gets to go down in history as a hero instead of a thug? Would an oppressed people be better off worshipping a trickster escape artist, rather than a martyr?
Thief in the Interior
By Phillip B. Williams. This debut collection from Alice James Books is a formally innovative, visceral and intense collection of poems through which the American tradition of violence against gay and black male bodies runs like a blood-red thread. From concrete poetry collages to experimental sonnets, Williams makes us contemplate murder as a twisted outburst of intimacy across caste lines, and love as a battle cry. Winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Clumping
By Carol Smallwood
Stars form when cosmic dust clumps together
making solar systems now as billions of years ago.
The common dust bunny gathers altogether
like particles joining in space make stars grow.
Making solar systems now as billions of years ago,
mysterious dark energy pushes galaxies apart
like particles joining in space make stars grow—
our solar system has over 300 moons a la carte.
Mysterious dark energy pushes galaxies apart:
there's a galaxy sixty times bigger than our own—
our solar system has over 300 moons a la carte
in a universe only beginning to be less unknown.
There's a galaxy sixty times bigger than our own:
the common dust bunny gathers altogether
in a universe only beginning to be less unknown;
stars form when cosmic dust clumps together.
Representation Matters: A Literary Call to Arms
In this 2017 essay in LitReactor, K. Tempest Bradford shares tips for creating a diverse cast of characters and avoiding stereotypes in fiction. Bradford teaches classes on "Writing the Other" with Nisi Shaw, co-author of the foundational book on the subject. This article includes links to related anthologies and essays.
Director’s Notes: Holocaust Memorial Day, Tel Aviv
By Ricky Rapoport Friesem
Pan across the bustling plaza
bursting with the energy
of busy people on the go.
Zoom out to a long shot
as the siren's piercing howl
brings them to an abrupt halt.
Hold on the shot of the plaza,
still now, and silent.
Zoom in on a pair of sandals
glistening with wet sand.
Cut to a series of tight close ups
of dusty shoes, trendy shoes,
soldiers' boots, high heels,
low heels, new shoes, old shoes,
bridled feet twitching with life.
Tilt up to motionless legs and torsos,
faces settling into solemnity.
Pan the plaza until the siren's
howl is sucked into the void again
and the crowd lets out a collective sigh,
like swimmers coming up for air.
Zoom out to a long shot of the crowd, stirring.
Zoom in to their shoes, in motion once again, then
cut to tight close ups of fancy buckles, worn heels,
burnished leather, delicate straps and tangled laces.
Zoom out to reveal they belong
to the tumbled mass of shoes on display
behind glass in the Auschwitz museum where
they rest now, undisturbed and unclaimed.
Slowly fade to black.
Advice from Judy Juanita, Judge of the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest
My favorite bedtime reading is the great Irish writer Frank O'Connor. I never tire of his short stories or insights. Rather than pretending to have great advice, I defer to him because I have an affinity for what he terms "might-have-beens" or "outlawed figures wandering at the fringes of society." O'Connor said, "There is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel—an intense awareness of human loneliness." (The Best of Frank O'Connor, Knopf, 2009). He also wrote extensively about childhood though he was an only child. He's said, "Children...see only one side of any question and because of their powerlessness see this with hysterical clarity." So that's a small essential for writing—look at marginalia, the smallest, youngest, the never-was, the never-will-be.
Tim O'Brien talks of the consoling power of stories: "If I'm lying in bed at night I'm a little less lonely in a lonely universe. Stories connect me not just to other people, but to myself." Is that another way of saying you need to write a feel-good story? It is not. When we manage to plumb the heart, we touch the reader's heart. It may sting, comfort, sadden, dishearten even, but the touch is the measuring rod.
Essays are a horse of a different color. Opaque doesn't work well in essays; a through line does. I want to follow the complexity of an argument but need markers along the way, like subheadings and bullets. The main lesson I've learned from writing a column is the necessity of moving from the personal to the universal/global. Being 100% personal reads as smug or self-indulgent and tries the reader's patience. Being transparent has enormous value, but the writer has to lead the reader from the deeply intimate detail, e.g. a family tragedy, through extrapolation to the deeper meaning in the detail.
Sometimes, the elements of an essay are like a family—they don't all get along. Some people suffer from too little or too much closeness to a relative. Nowhere is copy and paste handier than in essay writing. Set your essay with care like you would a family dinner. And, remember, you can't invite everybody to everything, even if they are family. You can't dump all your set pieces into one essay.
Learn more about our Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. Learn more about Judy Juanita.
TCK Publishing’s List of Top Kindle Book Promotion Sites
This list ranks the top sites that advertise discounted Kindle e-books to consumers, based on how much traffic they get. The article also includes a link to TCK's companion piece about sites that list free e-books.
TCK Publishing’s List of 100+ Author Tools
TCK Publishing is an independent publishing company specializing in digital marketing. Founder Tom Corson-Knowles teaches online training courses in self-publishing and book promotion. This list compiles over 100 basic tools to write, design, and market your book.
Solace at the P.O.
By Sandy Longley
So, it's my turn and I place an envelope
on the counter. The clerk asks:
"Does this package contain any hazardous liquid?"
Only a thousand tears, I reply.
"Is there anything flammable or breakable?"
Just my heart, I say.
"Would you like this sent express mail
for an additional $7.50?"
Actually, I'd prefer a slow delivery,
maybe in a canvas saddlebag, on a
dappled mare, rambling through mountains,
through valleys lush and deep, pausing
for long drinks in stony creeks.
"How about insurance?"
We both know there's no insurance,
no deductible, for matters like this;
I know what I have given,
what I have received.
He glances at the customer line lengthening—
impatience spreading like a virus.
I want him to close his window and ask me
to meet him out back. He'll be wearing cowboy
boots and smell like fresh cut locust burl.
He'll drape his tattooed arm (wild boar)
around me, offer a cigarette and say
"A dog walks into a bar..."
Reviews of Trans and/or Non-Binary Lit by Trans and/or Non-Binary Reviewers
Erotica writer and social issues blogger Xan West maintains this list of contemporary books on transgender and non-binary themes, with links to reviews by transgender and non-binary readers. West created the list because cisgender reviewers are not always in a position to recognize whether a book's portrayal of trans and non-binary experience is misinformed or offensive. Authors creating gender-variant characters would do well to educate themselves by browsing the relevant reviews.
The hitchhiking robot has been found dead
By Vernita Hall
beheaded and dismembered in Philadelphia, where the lifeless life form was discovered
in Olde City. The robot's followers were shocked and deeply saddened by the news.
A group calling itself "Nobots" has claimed responsibility. Their spokesperson, Dell E.
Terious, issued this statement:
It's about jobs. It's about humanity.
We call on all Americans to oppose
the raw evil of automation.
We've struck a blow for human independence.
No bots! No bots! No bots!
They've released a video of the execution, where hooded members, holding raised
machetes, chant:
Raw
evil demands
war
demands evil
Human rights activists have decried the killing. They've called the fringe crusaders
savages, expressing outrage that the grinning guest—benign, child-sized, and
helpless—was martyred in the cradle of liberty.
Still, the bot's creators have committed to continue their novel social experiment.
But Ms. Terious has cautioned more to come. Up next, a warning on the perils of
hitchhiking.
This is Mark Jeering, Ferret News. And that's the way it is.
Certain Doorways
By Jessica Goody
Doorways are a metaphor
for transience, transformation, opportunity.
The two-faced god Janus controlled the doorway
between past and future, a cosmic stage scrim.
Behind each wooden portal,
between brass digits and flowerpots,
lives occur. Auras of lamplight illuminate
domestic scenes like something in a play.
Curtains billow like sails against the windowpane.
Coats are heaped on pegs
and kicked-off shoes are scattered.
Umbrellas stand dripping, upended along the wall.
A cat stares from a window,
an all-knowing glow in its green eyes.
A door is a blind eye,
glassless and impenetrable.
A closed door is a haven, a cave
guarding the privacy of its occupant,
a friendly fortress, a retreat, a cocoon
of calming silence, encouraging contemplation.
Every house is a box filled with heartbeats,
footsteps, history, a potpourri of voices.
The old trees lining the street bear witness
to their gossip, their comings and goings.
As I pass, I consider the geometry of every door:
Narrow windowpanes, light glowing through stained glass,
the mouth-flap of the mail slot, the gleam of knob and hinge,
the relationships that shift and evolve with every entrance and exit.
It is human nature, when one encounters a box,
an eagerness to look inside and discover its secrets.
The most basic desire is the one to open the door,
to step, inside, secure in the knowledge of arriving home.
Half Mystic
Half Mystic is a semi-annual print and online literary arts journal dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. They publish poetry, fiction, interviews, artwork, essays on music and the arts, and original songs. Diverse voices welcomed.
Four Things to Decide Before You Write Your Memoir
In this article from the blog of self-publishing company BookBaby, writing coach and scientist Dr. Dawn Field describes how to structure your memoir so it reads like a compelling story. Some pointers: Focus on a span of time with a defined narrative arc, not your whole life; feel free to move back and forth in time to foreground the most important events; and have a clear take-away message that makes your personal story relevant to others. "The best memoirs are like parables. They are not only intriguing—they help others improve their lives."
Website Setup: 10 Best Website Builders
Website Setup is web designer Robert Mening's tech support site for artists and small business owners seeking to set up their own website or blog. Authors who are weighing the pros and cons of a custom design versus website-building software will benefit from this list, updated annually, of the most user-friendly and cost-effective site builders.
Submission Strategies: Advice from The Masters Review
In this blog post from the literary journal The Masters Review, editor Kim Winternheimer discusses the submission strategies that work best for different writers. Topics include whether to re-submit original or edited stories, targeting the right mix of top-tier and more accessible magazines, and how many pieces to send out at a time.
Living Right
By Laila Ibrahim. In this timely, heartwarming novel, a conservative Christian mother is forced to question her beliefs about homosexuality when her son attempts suicide. Their journey to acceptance includes a realistic depiction of so-called conversion therapy and how it can tear apart a loving family with a witch-hunt for nonexistent trauma. Sympathetic to faith, this book shows the diversity of views even within evangelical families, as well as the social pressure to keep silent about one's doubts.
Speak Up: Responding to Everyday Bigotry
The Southern Poverty Law Center has published this free online guide with suggested scripts for compassionate, appropriate conversations to interrupt prejudice and bullying in everyday social settings. Topics include becoming aware of our own biases, responding to prejudiced comments in the workplace or family gatherings, and ways to fight structural inequalities like racial profiling and discriminatory corporate policies. For writers, this guide will also be useful for correcting stereotypes in our own work, and writing dialogue for characters who are dealing with these issues.
Family: 5 Variations
By Annie Dawid
1.
At table, silence,
rum-blossomed cheeks
puffing with goose,
adult children smile
slyly, sipping their drinks.
2.
Squatty-bodied, dark and loud,
they gallop their words
over lox and chopped herring,
opinions fly like scrapping gulls.
"You're wrong!"
"You don't know what you're talking about!"
The child wishes for worlds
where only one person
speaks at a time.
3.
Parents and grandparents,
three friends, four visitors
representing Jews, Hispanic
lapsed Catholics, more lapsed
Wasps and various agnostics
argue testosterone
and range-and-basin geology,
baby spitting peas and pasta,
two husbands check their balls
(still there) and mourn
their manhood while tacos keep
flipping from grills, beer keeps
emerging, warm, and later
the men clean up, grumbling.
4.
Three lesbian couples, two babies, adopted,
of another race, urban vegetarian
uniting with rancher's daughter
over potato salad, public radio from Fargo humming
in the background, Lucy Blue
coming to town and questions of
childcare, no spice in the rice,
no men in the room,
air heavy with intrigue
as one couple crumbles, all eyes
on the parental pair, one
wanting babies while her protesting
partner wants the newcomer,
too alluring to resist for long.
5.
Three gay men, one straight woman
at her house, she's serving
spanakopita and baba ganoush
while her dog, neutered, huddles under the table,
and the topic of
discussion is how to make
a family, she wanting baby
from the one who refuses,
the one with the temper wants one now,
but she prefers his partner,
already a father in a previous life,
now monogamous.
At breakfast, nothing concluded,
they start over again.
Lodestar Quarterly
Lodestar Quarterly was an online journal of gay, lesbian, and queer literature, published 2002-06. Contributors included S. Bear Bergman, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jane Rule, Susan Stinson, Michelle Tea, and Emanuel Xavier. Complete archives are available on the website.
Love Justice
By Bracha Nechama Bomze. This debut poetry book from 3Ring Press is simultaneously a book-length love poem, a family memoir, and an epic of social change. The title's multiple meanings encompass generations of Jewish labor activism, winning the right to marry her lesbian partner, and the heartbreak of a closed adoption system that stigmatized her birthmother. Through all these personal and political traumas, the poet continues to praise the natural world that feeds her soul, and the life partnership that comes as a fairy-tale happy ending to a lonely childhood. The book is an inspiration and a delight.
Top 100 Book Review Blogs for Readers and Authors
Feedspot, a site that aggregates content across the Web, compiled this list of book review blogs that have the highest visibility in terms of Google search ranking, social media presence, and consistent quality of posts. The list includes both general-interest and genre-specific sites such as romance, children's books, and fantasy.
A Small Hotel
By Robert Olen Butler. Through brilliant use of flashbacks and alternating perspectives, this intimate novel tells the story of Michael and Kelly Hays, a Southern professional couple who are divorcing after two decades of marriage, though it becomes apparent that they are both still painfully in love with each other. As soon as the reader starts to side with one character, a new twist reveals the other character's vulnerability and the dysfunctional family pattern that he or she is struggling to break. The novel winds toward a suspenseful climax as we wait to discover whether they will tell each other the truth before it's too late.
Fire Shut Up in My Bones
By Charles M. Blow. The New York Times op-ed columnist's gorgeously written and introspective memoir is a case study in overcoming patriarchy and healing from abuse. Brought up in rural Louisiana by a devoted but stern and overworked single mother and their extended family, young Charles yearned for more tenderness and attention than a boy was supposed to need. An older male cousin preyed on his isolation, giving him a new secret to add to his fears of being not-quite-straight in a culture where this was taboo. Channeling his need for connection into school achievement and community leadership, Blow found himself on both the giving and the receiving end of violent hyper-masculinity as a fraternity brother. In the end, he recognized that self-acceptance, not repression, was the best way to become an honorable man. Blow writes like a poet, in witty, image-rich, sensitive lines that flow like a mighty river.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman
By Kaitlyn Greenidge. This ambitious, unsettling debut novel delves into the secret history of primate research and race relations in America. The Freemans, a high-achieving middle-class black family, accept a live-in position at the (fictitious) Toneybee Institute in rural Massachusetts to teach sign language to a chimpanzee. Their narrative is braided with that of Nymphadora, a maverick black schoolteacher in the 1920s who was seduced into taking part in the Toneybee's questionable experiments. In both timelines, the black protagonists' lives unravel because they underestimated how the white scientists saw them, too, as animal test subjects.
Geraniums
By Carmine Dandrea
No geraniums, please.
I want no geraniums—
those funereal flowers found
with their greeny smell
casually erect in pink clay pots
dotting cemetery lots.
I'll have none, please.
Those blown petals parted
by each vagrant breeze.
No geraniums, please.
Next only, in proximity
with deadly death,
to gardenias' anemia—
old faded odor
sifting silently
from ancient ladies' breasts.
So, no geraniums, please. I'll have none, please.
If to avoid a family feud,
I'm pressed to choose,
a few chrysanthemums
would freshly do.
But, for God's sake,
no geraniums, PLEASE.
Empty Red Chair
This striking poetry video, by an Australian author who goes by the pen name "Initially NO", draws a provocative analogy between political prisoners and people involuntarily confined to psychiatric hospitals.
Domestic Enchantment
By Reena Ribalow
Some spells turn a prince into a frog,
some tame wild girl to wife,
conjure mother out of woman,
tranced by cooking, tending, laundry.
Swaying from their pegs the colored clothes
are dazzling as the wings of
subjugated butterflies.
Sun scents the air with opiate of soap;
captivity subdues the blood like sleep,
with cleanly, sweet,
obliterating peace.
The kitchen table is set
with the artifacts of enchantment:
a jug of flowers upon a blue-checked cloth,
white mugs, a fresh-baked cake.
She herself prepared the potion,
self-bewitched,
the recipe her mother's song,
sung before memory.
A cup of flour, two eggs,
a handful of the magic
that fetters sense and soul:
that gilds the room the gold
of an imagined sun:
that heats her veins
like the tea which steams
from teapots,
with the smoke of dreams.
Peacock Journal
Launched in 2016 by poet W.F. Lantry and musician Kathleen Fitzpatrick, this online literary journal seeks to publish beautiful creative work, taking advantage of the graphic possibilities of modern web technology. They also put out an annual print anthology of poetry and flash fiction. Send previously unpublished poetry, fiction, personal essays, artwork, or short audio files. See website for lengths and formats. Michael Linnard, the editor of the literary press Little Red Tree, is the journal's publication liaison.
Literary Agent Links at Ardor Magazine
The online literary magazine Ardor maintains this annually updated list of over 100 literary agents and their preferred genres, with links to their websites.
Poetry Contest Links at Ardor Magazine
The online literary magazine Ardor maintains this annually updated page of links to 60+ poetry contests that the editors recommend. The contests are arranged in date order, with prizes and fees listed.
Prism Comics
Prism Comics is the leading nonprofit, all-volunteer organization supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex, asexual and LGBTQIA-friendly comic books, comics professionals, readers and educators. Prism awards an annual Queer Press Grant to help an independent comics creator publish their work of interest to an LGBTQIA audience. Prism also publishes anthologies and hosts panel discussions at comics conventions around the United States.
Just Publishing Advice
Derek Haines, a speculative fiction and thriller writer, maintains this useful blog with advice for self-published authors, with detailed and timely articles about such topics as using social media to sell books.
How to Be a Good Beta Reader
In this article from the self-publishing and marketing service BookBaby, science writer Dawn Field shares eight tips for giving useful feedback on a manuscript.
The Tipping Point for Best Selling Authors
In this 2016 post from his blog Dying Words, a resource for mystery and thriller authors, crime novelist Garry Rodgers interviews nine best-selling indie and self-published writers about the strategies that took their book sales to the next level. Some common themes: build a mailing list, focus on your niche, and keep putting out new titles that are well-written and professionally edited.
Beauty
By Hubert & Kerascoët. This memorable graphic novel is a tragicomic feminist fairy tale for adults, sketched in an effortless retro style with an earthy color palette suggestive of old storybooks. A troublemaking fairy grants a homely peasant girl's wish for supreme beauty, but the maiden soon finds that being a maddening object of desire is no safer than her old life of humiliation. Her reversals of fortune add up to a profound fable about power, illusion, and sexism.
the Shade Journal
In July 2016, queer black poet Luther X. Hughes transformed his blog into an online literary journal, with this mission statement: "the Shade Journal is an online poetry journal focused on the empowerment of queer people of color (QPOC); publishing poems that inspires, devastates, and howls–work that challenges form and upsets the canon, but understands its rigorous and traditional roots. the Shade Journal believes there is something divine about being a queer person of color in a world designed to destroy these bodies." Follow on Twitter @ShadePoetry.
Tincture
Lethe Press is a well-regarded small press with an interest in queer literature. Their imprint Tincture is dedicated to publishing LGBT authors of color. Books in their catalog include the anthologies From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction and Walking the Tightrope: Poetry and Prose by LGBTQ Writers from Africa, as well as individual titles by Nathan Goh, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Timothy Wang, and others.
The Opposite of People
By Patrick Ryan Frank. Blank verse and loosely structured sonnets eloquently explore the yearnings we express through TV and movie archetypes. Sincerity and contrivance are not opposites here. The comedian, the stunt man, the late-night movie monster, and the bad-news blonde take their turns revealing the existential paradox of film: how it underscores the passage of time by freezing it on the screen, a fixed point against which we measure our real lives racing past like "a car with its brake lines cut". Frank's blend of wry conversational tone and formal meter harks back to W.H. Auden, but his aesthetic lineage is more Disney than Brueghel: "About violence they were never wrong,/the old cartoons."
Poetry by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier
"No Results for That Place" was chosen by Billy Collins for an Honorable Mention in the 2019 Fish Poetry Prize, and was published in Fish Anthology 2019.
****
The Deepest Hours
Sometimes my infant daughter
wakes in the middle of the night
irrepressibly happy.
My husband and I lull her back
to sleep with our various
Shaolin techniques:
His trick is to stroke her ears and mine, to
put the radio on static and
dance slowly.
These things work like hypnosis, like
narcotics, like prayer:
hit or miss.
Sometimes our desperate trying
reminds me of all the stops
my mother pulled out, years ago
to try and cheer herself up
about life: liquor, crystals, seminars, triathlons
and legal drugs that made her hair fall out.
I remember driving home late
a senior in high school
and seeing her dart
across the road in front of our house
barefoot, eyes wide. I slammed
on the brakes and
when the car stopped
inches short of her
she met my eyes.
We stared
through the windshield and
my mind kept trying to turn her into a deer.
Like a doe she darted off wildly
over the dirt shoulder and into
the dark door of the forest.
My father was waiting at home.
I don't know what to do, he croaked, and
it was the only time in his whole macho life
that he ever admitted as much to me, so
although he was an abusive bastard
I took him in my arms
and swayed.
Sometimes
in the deepest hours
I sway that way with my daughter
to sedate her.
Other times
I remember how
my mother slept
still as a stone, for days and days
when she finally came home.
It was like
she wanted to forget
her husband, her house
her thoughts and me and
recapture the darkness of the woods.
Those nights I
set my daughter on my stomach
facing me, wobbly
and we talk.
Her words rattle up from her little chest
and straighten out into
rapturous ooohs and aaahs.
I tell her
all of my secrets and
sometimes
we stay awake
for hours.
First published in The New Guard
****
Cormorants
In Svay Pak
I met two girls
priced to sell.
They were sisters
six and eight
both trained well
and I spent forty U.S. dollars
to take them for the night.
I bought one a Crush and one
a Fanta, like the sweaty red
fat jolly foreign Santa that I was
and tucked them in.
If there are better things
in the life after this
let the record show that I have
been remiss in earning them.
In the ripe wet air
I watched them sleep
and thought
even if I come up with
a way to keep them
feed them, house them, clothe and
untrain them
still
there will be
more children
opened on damp red sheets
more, bent over
cracked plastic seats, pried
apart
on earthen floors.
There will be more:
their parents'
only stock
sold when they mature or
years before—more.
In a small, idyllic
East Coast town
my father laid
my body down
and opened it.
Poverty alone, then, cannot explain
this unmapped latitude of the
adult human brain and
even when Svay Pak
gains industry
her children
will shoulder this pain.
I thought these thoughts as
I brought the girls back
the morning sun distilling
itself from the sky.
There were Cormorants
circling as we said goodbye and
I remembered that, in fishing towns
the men once tied these birds to boats.
They exploited their beaks and
pulled the fish from their throats.
I imagine that these watchful birds
came to understand
the long and short of human will.
There is something slightly human
in their voices still: something
familiar and forsaking.
Every day after that, in Cambodia, waking
I noticed the echoes of the Cormorants' calls.
They fell gently between the peeling walls
of the brothels of Svay Pak.
****
Play Wedding
For some reason, they both wore dresses
Alina and Shawn—he ten, she twelve
in the corner of Casa Del Lago Mobile Home Park
where a giant mud puddle formed
the closest thing to a lake
in at least three square miles, and
we closed in an expectant knot around them
shaded by scrappy cedars:
twelve scrappy kids
from three scrappy families.
Shawn had lost a bet
(on purpose, we suspected, as each of us
had seen him following Alina—even
since before her mother bought her
the training bra—down root-ripped paths
around the park's square, beige club house
with its frayed lounge chairs and disappointing pool
up the center of the one real road that divided neat rows of
not so neat homes)
and now he had to marry her.
This is a real wedding, we told him
and afterward if we catch you kissing
another girl
even on the cheek
we'll beat your skinny ass.
Maybe, being ten, he hadn't understood
the accoutrements of weddings
how the bride always wore the dress
and the groom, the tuxedo
in the framed photographs our parents kept
or perhaps his big sister
ringleader of the day
had forced him into the drooping white cotton
that slid and slid and slid
off his shoulders. The low sky
went gray and
a bracing wind picked up.
Do it, said the sister in a voice that meant business
and even now I remember
more clearly than I do my own
first wedding, or even the one
that stuck, how a
cold drop struck my shoulder
and a station wagon appeared slowly
in the street, past the trees—paused, backed up
turned around and drove away as
they moved together to kiss
she in white and he in white; how he
leaned with his eyes closed
like a man on the edge of a cliff
his whole body
taut and perspiring
the sudden drop before him
breathtaking.
First published by Kore Press
****
Photographs of Earth
Street love: not sugary-sweet love, CBS or any other BS love
not Hallmark Greetings or business meetings between merging CEOs—
sidewalk love, bruisable but unusable by any outside force, immune
to penetration, lapsed communication, plague of the American nation—divorce—
elusive, tricky, jealousy-provoking, not just mutual ego-stroking, dirty love
just doing it better than Nike and less sinkable than Cheerios because
dirty equals more than bed-breaking sex.
Dirt is what we came from, what we stand on, the bed we'll go to, tectonic flex
of the textures and colors of skin, bone and the long lines of blood within.
Quiet love: not necessarily intelligible, possibly slurred
like the first photographs of the earth—blurred
but unmistakably irreversibly revolving its way around the sun
steadily, not clamoring to be heard.
First published in The Comstock Review
****
Piñata
We called them piñata girls
girls you could fuck the fun out of
otherwise known as
hit it and quit it girls,
cheap girls, girls who got
their lip-gloss at the dollar store, whose
fathers probably beat them
but my brother
he was always a sucker for sweets.
He fell hard for a piñata girl
pretty little thing named Sonia
and against our best advice
he married her. In time the rest of us
forgot what we'd called her, the way
we'd picked on him for wanting her.
Turned out she was a good girl
smart, clean, funny and loyal
part of the family. They were happy
for about ten years.
Then my brother found out
he had lymphoma, right around the time
his youngest son turned three.
His last day at home before
what we thought was to be
a brief hospital visit
but turned out to be a long one
was his son's third birthday.
My brother was a hero
that day, exhausting himself
keeping ten screaming boys happy.
Everyone was happy, all day.
At the end of the party
before my wife and I headed home
I found my brother
hunched on his knees in the yard
picking up ruffles of yellow paper.
I watched him gently patch up
with his big, slow-moving hands
the wide-eyed pony piñata
that the boys had battered open
for candy. "What the hell
are you doing," I asked him, laughing.
My brother looked up at me.
"I'm taping her together," he said
his eyes as wide as the pony's
in the dimming bronze light
"so we can keep her."
First published in Mudfish
****
The Sleeping Couple
For years they slept bound, her
slender legs wound warmly in his
and their faces close, speaking in breath,
bartering in touch, until enough had
been said. Now they lie back
to back in their bed.
There is less physical talk.
Sometimes she feels his fingers
walk across her hip, like a solitary man
crossing a bridge, and once
she woke him with a quick squeeze
but there is little need
for exchanges like these. Outside,
a cold rain washes the trees
and a dim horizon blurs.
Massive clouds merge. Vast rivers join
and there is no conversation
as this occurs.
Marc J. Frazier Poetry
Marc Frazier is the author of the poetry collections Each Thing Touches (Glass Lyre Press, 2015) and The Way Here (Aldrich Press), and the chapbooks After and The Gods of the Grand Resort, both from Finishing Line Press. Cyrus Cassells calls Each Thing Touches "rich with striking and dynamic questions...refreshingly human, urgent, and disarming." Frazier has had several residencies at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois and received an Illinois Arts Council award in poetry. Visit his website to find out about his workshops.
Disability in Kidlit
Disability in Kidlit is a multi-author website dedicated to discussing and improving the portrayal of disability in middle grade and young adult literature. They publish critical essays, reviews, and interviews. Their goals are to help readers, editors, and libraries find books with accurate and respectful treatment of disability, and to educate writers and editors about problematic portrayals. All contributors and editors identify as disabled.
