Resources
From Category:
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.
Autistic Representation and Real-Life Consequences
Disability in Kidlit is a multi-author blog that reviews portrayals of disability in books for children and young adults. In this 2015 essay, speculative fiction author Elizabeth Bartmess surveys common stereotypes and limiting depictions of autistic children in fiction, and how they contribute to mistreatment in the real world. This piece is a must-read for fiction writers in all genres who are developing a neurodiverse cast of characters.
Lesbian Poetry Archive
Julie R. Enszer, editor of the long-running lesbian-feminist literary journal Sinister Wisdom, maintains this free digital archive of poetry chapbooks, pamphlets, anthologies, and out-of-print journals of lesbian writing.
Scribe Guide to Getting on Bestselling Book Lists
Tucker Max is the co-founder of Scribe Media (formerly Book in a Box), a writing coach and ghostwriting service for business professionals. In this article from their website, he explains the metrics behind newspapers' and online retailers' bestseller lists, and the reasons why getting on the list is not a cost-effective goal for most authors.
Sage Cohen: 2 Keys to Unlock Your Momentum
In this guest post on publishing industry expert Jane Friedman's blog, poet and writing coach Sage Cohen helps writers navigate the floods of contradictory advice. The first step is to know and accept your unique work style, then stop telling yourself unfriendly things about how you "should" have a different process.
Story Circle Book Reviews
Story Circle Book Reviews provides a review venue for women author-publishers and for women's work published by independent and university presses. The site's sponsor, Story Circle Network, also offers the Sarton Women's Book Awards for small press and self-published books by and about women, published in the US or Canada.
In Sonnino
By Helen Bar-Lev
Signora Italia
sits on her terrace
on the top of steep steps
She is so old, so white,
so wrinkled, so immobile,
she seems to be rooted
in the planters like the flowers around her
She stares at us as we pass up the alley
and is there still when we return
many photographs and espressos later
Signora Italia does not say bongiorno,
does not wave, has not moved at all
and I envy this woman
planted in the soil of her country
While I am the intruder,
stuttering in her language
faltering in her alleyways
humbled before her history
As much as I read,
as much as I see
I shall never know how it is
to be rooted here
This poem and accompanying painting will be included in an exhibit at the Chagall Artists House in Haifa, Israel, opening September 17, 2016.
Inked Voices
Inked Voices connects writers who are looking to form small groups (5-15 members) for critiques or accountability in meeting deadlines such as NaNoWriMo. Their software facilitates sharing of drafts and mark-ups. Each group has its own private online workspace.
Mystery Writers Forum
This free online forum for mystery writers includes boards for writing advice, the publishing business (agents, conferences, and trends), and crowdsourced research about how crimes are committed and solved. Wondering about courtroom procedure, legal ethics, or how various weapons and poisons work? Ask the forum.
One Morning
By Margaret Gish Miller
My husband tells me You were laughing
in your sleep. Funny how nightmares haunt,
like an anaconda swallowing your sister,
but how illusive whimsy is.
Sister & I playing at midnight,
a guessing game we make-up with
O, our friend whose father is sleeping.
The night is dark. No moon, creek
running through buried black-
berries, crick of cricket
dusty roads, the pond.
In the freezer, cost-saving loaves of Wonder
Bread sit stacked, ten for a dollar; Hostess
Cupcakes, dozens, quick-sweet snacks,
two rounds of fudge cake, bitter-
sweet chocolate crust, white icing squiggle,
hieroglyphs of happiness. We play
Who am I? while O's father slept,
a pedophile same as our father,
a million files of defilement
in American homes. Yet I
knew no name for it then
and so we played.
First Sis, down on all fours, head swinging. Mickey
I guess right, Mickey, O's sway-backed old horse. Now
O crouches down, waddling on two feet, head jerking—
George Sis cries. Yes, George the duck, who even
at this late hour waddles, quacking Throw me
into the pond—and we do.
As for me, Maggie, I lie on the bed still as a chrysalis
balled in a ball. A turtle, O guesses. No. You slowpoke.
No. Remember—whoever misses gets cupcakes
smashed in the face.
Oh, what a smashing good time—screaming—laughing
waking his father, hearing him cry Get to bed you kids!
Twisted Road Publications
Twisted Road Publications is an independent literary press founded in 2013 by Joan Leggitt. They publish up to four books a year, with a special interest in work by or about marginalized groups (e.g. people of color, LGBTQ people). The press accepts un-agented manuscripts. Authors in their catalog include Pat Spears, Nance Van Winkel, and Glenda Bailey-Mershon. "We seek to publish gifted writers whose works are under-represented by corporate marketing. We are partial to the writer who possesses a gift for compassionate, sharp-eyed truth-telling, rendering fully formed characters and stories that get under our skin. Ones that push hard to discover the kind of truth that exposes the reality of our deepest humanity."
Somewhere in Time
These amusing columns from Vulture.com music critic Dave Holmes are useful for writers researching popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s. They're also a humbling reminder of how quickly our favorite media seems dated. Trend-chasers beware.
Midwest Book Review
Established in 1976, the Midwest Book Review is an organization committed to promoting literacy, library usage, and small press publishing. Reviews are posted monthly on their affiliated websites and distributed to libraries, literary websites, databases, and online discussion groups. MBR welcomes small press and self-published authors.
The Uncapping
By Tim Mayo
A friend once told me this story
as I was on my way to a wedding.
It happened deep in the woods
on a ridge somewhere west of where
he lived: a woman he once loved
led him there down path after path,
reading signs only she could see,
to show him a secret place in the earth,
shown to her many years before.
It was capped with a nondescript rock
no one would have ever noticed,
which still took all her small weight
to push aside showing the entrance
to an ancient beehive chamber.
Inside: a circular stone wall rose
from the earthen floor, then arced
inward to form a dome making it
seem impossible to scale back up.
He couldn't believe they climbed in,
so that small opening—its light—
became the only link between them
and the outer world—that they stayed
waiting in the dark, as long as it took,
to see how the buried past hunched
its earth and stone shoulders over them,
and then, they made the difficult
climb out into the rest of their lives.
When Grief Becomes Surreal
In this 2016 article from Literary Hub, Tobias Carroll surveys some techniques that great novels and films have used to show the reality-distorting effect of grief and other overpowering emotions. Carroll is the managing editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn and the author of the novel Reel (Rare Bird).
Books About Transgender Issues for Teens
Parents, educators, and teenagers will benefit from the New York Public Library's list of recommended YA books about gender identity, last updated in 2015. These fiction and nonfiction books can help schools create a more welcoming and diverse environment.
Erika Dreifus: 13 Questions to Ask Before Submitting to a Literary Journal
Erika Dreifus is the media editor for Fig Tree Books and publishes the monthly e-newsletter The Practicing Writer, a list of free contests and paying markets. In this article at Literary Hub, she shares her own methods for picking the best submission opportunities for her work. Factors to consider include whether the journal is attractively designed and well-edited, and whether it is actively engaged with a diverse community of readers.
The Taxidermist’s Cut
By Rajiv Mohabir. Taxidermy is the organizing metaphor for this ambitious, passionate debut poetry collection: a stripped and reconstituted skin as shapeshifting for survival, as forbidden gay intimacy that always carries the hint of violence, and as inescapable and often misread ethnic identities in a dominant white Christian culture. (Mohabir descends from Indian indentured laborers who were transported to British Guyana's sugar plantations, and grew up in Florida.) The poet is willing to lay his own veins bare in order to create an artifice that is painfully and beautifully true to life. This book won the 2014 Four Way Books Intro Prize.
Online Marketing for Busy Authors
By Fauzia Burke. If you're getting lost among all the options for marketing your book, this quick and well-organized guide will give you a helpful overview of the available tools and why to use them (or not). Especially useful are the opening chapters about deciding on your goals and dreams, because you can't figure out the what till you know the why. The advice seems most on-target for writers of commercial nonfiction (business books, self-help, cookbooks), but fiction writers will also find good tips here. Use this book to plan your overall strategy, then supplement it with more detailed guides on the specific topics that are relevant to you. Burke is an online publicist who has worked with bestselling authors such as Deepak Chopra and Sue Grafton.
i’m alive / it hurts / i love it
By Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. This poet's first full-length book transforms the raw material of emotions into visionary language without losing their sincerity and immediacy. The untitled short poems can be read as sections of a single long work, as journal entries, or as miniature worlds in their own right, composed of clouds and hormones and rain on the freeway and blood and mirrors. Each represents the daily choice to feel everything, though pain coexists with joy. Espinoza writes with honesty and wit about her life as a transgender woman who manages anxiety and depression.
Nameless Boy
By Douglas Goetsch (now Diana Goetsch). Like a Garrison Keillor monologue at the end of an evening, humorous riffs and tender anecdotes prove only partially effective at warding off a deep melancholy in this poet's third full-length collection. You can laugh at light verse such as "Pee on Your Foot", and a few pages later, be slain by the self-lacerating loneliness of "Forgiveness Poem". Sometimes the shift stuns you with surprise in the same poem, as when a tongue-in-cheek tribute to 1989's morning radio mix ends with the questioning of a worker's hopeless endurance, reminiscent of Philip Levine. In their unpretentious way, these narratives hope to heal the deepest wound of ordinary life: that of never really knowing the people close to us, or being known. Both this theme and the title seem to take on an additional significance from Goetsch's post-publication gender transition. The book closes with a delightful, multi-part fantasy about names and whether they determine our destiny, the poem itself a gift for a boy who is named at the end.
Elegy for a Dead World: A Game About Writing
Created by Dejobaan Games, Elegy for a Dead World features three beautiful post-apocalyptic landscapes based on poems by Shelley, Keats, and Byron. Gamers explore and restore the world by completing writing challenges. In this positive review at Big Think, screenwriter Laurie Vazquez shares how the game helped her overcome writer's block.
Facets of the Heart
By Eleanor Gamarsh
My emotional heart is a child.
When left alone
its smile turns down.
My intelligent mind is an adult
always telling my child,
"It's okay to be alone."
My child's heart says,
"To be alone
is to be without love."
My adult mind says,
"Love can never be gone;
only hidden by the shadows
of your fears."
Book Trailer Design Advice from Zara West
In this blog post, romantic suspense author Zara West (Beneath the Skin) describes the basic elements of a successful book trailer and how to create them using public-domain music and images.
The Museum of Americana
The Museum of Americana is an online literary review dedicated to fiction, poetry, nonfiction, photography, and artwork that revives or repurposes the old, the dying, the forgotten, or the almost entirely unknown aspects of Americana. It is published purely out of fascination with the big, weird, wildly contradictory collage that is our nation's cultural history.
Killer Nashville Writers’ Conference
Founded in 2006 by writer/filmmaker Clay Stafford, the Killer Nashville Writers' Conference provides unique educational and networking opportunities for genre and non-genre writers whose work contains elements of mystery, thriller, or suspense. Held in Nashville, TN in August, this four-day event boasts 500+ participants annually. Three crime-writing honors (Claymore, Silver Falchion, and John Seigenthaler Legends) are awarded during the conference.
The Luminous In-Between
By Cynthia Leslie-Bole
the portal
is the moment
where mind opens
and what's real rushes in
the nubbly sidewalk
the tarry parking lot
the cars blithely
maneuvering into slots
then suddenly
the bird
the crow
the huddled bundle of feathers
parked in a too-huge space
delineated by very straight
white lines
the stalled crow
blue-black sheen
dulled with dust
toes curling around asphalt
instead of branch
life flickering on and off
in a body remembering flight
in a voice echoing
lost morning warbles
the homeless man
the busy woman
gather to witness
the body heaving
the beak opening
the tongue darting
the lids drawing
opaque curtains across
obsidian eyes
as cars cruise by
with AC on high
time collapses
to one still point
the black hole of crow
in holy retreat
of spirit from flesh
I am the woman
watching
with impotent compassion
I am the vagrant
shrugging
with philosophical detachment
I am the bird
feeling life wane
choosing not to struggle
letting what's next begin
I am the white lines
containing it all
I am
breath
no breath
and the luminous
in-between
Cloud formations over Carolina
By R. Bremner
Cloud formations over Carolina;
scratchy lines which Paul Klee
would have been proud to stroke;
Colors which would have shat-
tered his dynamic sensibilities;
Forms which might have re-
defined his mad contexts,
brought madness to his sane
world.
(First published in Turbulence Magazine, December 2013)
Lovecraft Country
By Matt Ruff. This suspenseful and satirical novel-in-stories follows an African-American family in 1950s Chicago who tangle with a cabal of upper-class white occultists. Each chapter cleverly inverts the xenophobic tropes of one of H.P. Lovecraft's classic horror stories, with the implication that the heartless and greedy cosmic forces of the Cthulhu Mythos are more a self-portrait of Jim Crow's America than an enemy from beyond the stars.
The Rest of the Iceberg
This chart from education blog Janine's Music Room will be useful for writers who want to create accurate, well-rounded characters from a culture other than their own, as well as teachers with a diverse classroom population. Beyond surface differences like folklore, clothing, and holidays, consider cultural distinctives such as body language, manners, concepts of justice, family roles, notions of modesty, and sense of humor.
99 Designs: Book Cover Design
99 Designs connects self-published and indie authors with freelance designers to create a professional-looking book or magazine cover. Set your price (minimum $299), describe your concept, and choose from proposals by 10 or more designers.
Wilgefortis Press
Launched in 2016, Wilgefortis Press publishes the Good News Children's Book Series, a line of religious picture books that feature and affirm children and families who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and genderqueer. The press is sponsored by Grace Lutheran Church in San Francisco. Debut titles by Megan Rohrer, pastor at Grace Lutheran and the first openly transgender pastor ordained in the Lutheran church, include Faithful Families (co-authored with Pamela Ryan and Ihnatovich Maryia), which teaches that God loves all types of families, and What to Wear to Church, celebrating diverse gender expressions. Read a profile of the press at Jesus in Love Blog.
Awful Library Books
Michigan librarians Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner created this humorous blog to defend the necessary but controversial process of culling the library's collection to make room for new titles. Their motto: "Hoarding is not collection development." Some classics destined for the pulp mill include God, the Rod, and Your Child's Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents; Nazis in the Woodpile; Children's Head Injury: Who Cares?; and Eat Your Troubles Away.
Amends
By Eve Tushnet. This debut novel by a popular blogger on Catholic sexual ethics combines brilliant satire, heartbreak, and hope. A half-dozen alcoholics from all walks of life are selected for a reality-TV show set in a residential rehab clinic. When healing and repentance become co-opted into the postmodern performance of the "self", is transformative grace still possible? Sometimes, incredibly, it is, but not always, and not in a fashion that anyone associated with the show could control or predict.
The 19th Wife
By David Ebershoff. This multi-layered novel intertwines the story of Brigham Young's ex-wife Ann Eliza, a real historical figure who successfully campaigned to outlaw plural marriage in the United States, with a modern-day murder mystery in a polygamist Mormon splinter group. The narrative unfolds through fictional documents—correspondence, research papers, autobiographies—suggesting that truth is subjective and many-sided.
Calls for Submissions (Poetry, Fiction, Art) Facebook Group
This Facebook group features calls for creative writing and art submissions. Closed group, members accepted by request.
Conscious Style Guide
A project of Karen Yin, the writer/editor behind the popular "AP vs. Chicago" copyeditors' website, Conscious Style Guide is a simple and accessible community resource for anyone curious or serious about conscious language. In one place, you can access style guides covering terminology for various communities and find links to key articles debating usage. Categories include ability/disability, gender, age, appearance, ethnicity, and more.
Writing Women Characters as Human Beings
In this essay on the Tor Books website, widely published fantasy and science fiction novelist Kate Elliott discusses two-dimensional stereotypes and sexist tropes to avoid in fiction writing.
Jealous
By Laurie Klein
Morning, with your pillowed hands
twisting over the bed, do you envy
human desire, its midnight hinge,
covet our slack-jawed alpha waves
morphing to REM and then
a prance of neurons, an in-burst
of the invisible? All those covert
sleep spindles slowing the heart,
cooling the body—yes, we are
lapped 'round with rest: one delta
astride a deepening river, one dream
richer than silt.
Poor Great Ante Meridiem!
Another graveyard shift, the looping,
half-world commute—no wonder
you snap the shade on its roller,
muttering, headboard to folded quilt,
that this life-size space we share is our first
and final host;
you rise alone.
And we bend, drawing the linens smooth,
makers of beds moving in tandem
toward that omega breath, unfazed,
plumped and glowing,
skins fragrant as June, tattooed
with our storied nights—oh, to be taken in
again and again and then, limp, fading,
folded away: two prayer flags, unpegged.
Diversity Style Guide
The Diversity Style Guide is a resource to help journalists and other media professionals cover a complex, multicultural world with accuracy, authority, and sensitivity. This guide, a project of the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University, brings together definitions and information from more than two dozen style guides, journalism organizations, and other resources.
Family Cookout
By James K. Zimmerman
we sit in peace among bees
painting pictures of lives
we cannot know, like drinking
from a mountain stream
hands cupped to capture the flow
from springs erupting deep
in the body of the earth
stories steeped in brine and limes
for the chicken and the irony
of wine that opens only after
we drink the second bottle
recollections layered with fresh
Italian mozzarella, tomatoes
shipped from Mexico or Jersey
basil from the garden, salads
of onions, beans, and garlic or
cabbage laced with sour cream
recipes of long-dead generations
spiced and salted with their struggle
and pain, add a dash or two
of laughter, a pinch of bitterness
to taste
a potluck of childhood
memories slow-cooked over
smoky heat on the grill
and the bees hover
in the deepening shadows
waiting for the last drops
to fall
The Valley of Hearts Delight
By Mary Lou Taylor
From the vantage of lush hillsides
Santa Clara Valley unveils fields
of yellow mustard in wild disarray
between row upon row
of pale pink cherry blossoms.
Plum trees offer the first whisper
of spring, the valley bursting
with delicate, fruity scents.
A drought ended, brought on
the first celebration, the first
Blossom Festival, invitations
to view the blossoming.
Hundreds responded. Invitations
are out again forty years later
for this true celebration—music,
vintage cars, food, arts and crafts,
poetry—and memories of a peach,
pink and white world.
Loss and Blossom
By Jeanne Julian
Everything liquid and solid
simultaneously, thick trunks
and twigs encased
in dripping ice, and between us
and everything, fog
on the way to the funeral
home. She was dead young.
Her father wished out loud
to see her future,
which never was.
Why is this now
never enough?
Humbled by hints of ebb,
coax permanence from
summer's temporary embrace,
let an imagined hammock hold
you warm under magnanimous
sky, and dreaming of daisies, deny
encroaching marmalade-hued mums.
Murmur over and over to the ominous
dark crickets crouched under cobwebs
that cling to the flowerpots,
"The cosmos blossoms
by the rotting stump."
Remembrance
By Mark Fleisher
A granite slash black as onyx
slices across the earthen path,
seemingly endless in the morning light,
names carved and chiseled into the stone,
58,307—the populations of Royal Oak
and Dearborn Heights in Michigan,
of Federal Way in Washington.
Rick is present and accounted for
on Panel 40e, Row 12
19 days from home;
There's John, Row 54 on Panel 40e,
a month served, recently graduated
from his teenage years.
I know them, I know the others,
not by name, but by kinship.
They gave me a medal,
a star of bronze suspended
from a red, white and blue ribbon,
then they took the medal back,
not enough to go around, they said.
The numbers game, again.
They insisted I fill out
a hometown news release,
even when I said my
big city newspaper wouldn't
give a damn about my medal.
And who cared about
the trauma embedded
forever in my mind
or the poison
sprayed into my cells?
The numbers game, again.
Rick and John,
they got medals, too
P as in Purple, H as in Heart,
PH for Posthumous,
No hometown news releases
to California—Sun Valley for Rick,
Redwood City for John.
Didn't know John came from Redwood City
until I looked it up the other day,
found his name on a war memorial.
I didn't know any of that when
we drove into town that October day,
parked the car, had a coffee at Starbucks,
then drove away...I wish I knew.
A couple of guys among the many
caught up in the damned numbers game.
The numbers don't tell the stories
of how many more with
shattered minds and broken bodies
struggled with their aftermaths
Uncle Ho and Uncle Sam arm wrestled,
slogging through rice paddies,
slashing through jungle,
sloshing through Delta swamp
And Uncle Ho won the struggle—
Hey, It's not JFK City,
It's not LBJ City,
It's not RMN City,
It's Ho Chi Minh City
Now more than 6,800 from new conflicts
await their monument proclaiming
their sacrifice to an uncertain cause,
heroes absent from Christmas dinner tables,
Chanukkah festivities, Native feast days,
celebrations of Our Lady.
Only 6,800—how dare I say only
for each is a lost treasure
known to me through kinship
and by a father's grieving eyes.
We excel at building monuments
to failures, convincing our conscience
absolution is granted.
Reprinted from Obituaries of the Living, co-authored by Mark Fleisher & Dante Berry; email the author for purchasing information
Speaking of Marvels
Edited by award-winning poet William Woolfitt, Speaking of Marvels is a blog that features interviews with authors of chapbooks, novellas, singles, and other shorter forms. Past interviewees have included Allison Joseph, Karen An-hwei Lee, Rajiv Mohabir, Carl Phillips, Cecilia Woloch, and many other notables.
Thoughts on Structure
In this 2011 essay from the Ploughshares blog, poet and writing professor Weston Cutter urges writers of free verse to give more conscious thought to the reasons for their structural choices. Visual components such as stanza breaks, line breaks, and margins should be chosen to enhance the meaning and sound of the poem.
Speed (Sean)
by Gil Fagiani
When a three-day bender
costs me my bank clerk's job,
my mother makes the sign of the cross
and calls me Good-Time Charlie.
I'm her last-born and she dotes on me,
so I laugh, wave her words away
tell her not to worry
I'll lay off the lush
and find another nine-to-five.
But work's a grind.
I'm into fun, high times
and along with Nicky De Vito,
start messing with crystal meth.
Our veins hum like high-voltage wires
moonlight melts into sunshine,
motion becomes our devotion.
At home I clean the upstairs crapper
twenty times,
the bowl blazing
the pine soap and ammonia scalding my lungs.
My mother says enough already
and swats me with a toilet brush
after I scrub out the grout between the floor tile.
At his house, Nicky sits by a basement workbench
polishing a new pair of shoes
until he wears through the soles,
breaks off heels,
hiding the ruined footwear from his father,
who dishes out bare-knuckled discipline.
Once at Nicky's place,
we mainline two hype sticks of meth,
guzzle all the guinea booze in the liquor cabinet:
Strega, Compari, Frangelico, Anisette, Grappa.
Nicky flips on the new Motorola TV
complains about snowy reception
and begins taking the TV apart,
swearing he can fix and reassemble it
before his folks return home.
We spread all the screws, springs,
wires, tubes, and knobs across the carpet floor,
the first thing his parents see
when they open the front door.
Bricklayer by profession,
his father can haul a hod of cement
like it's a foam cushion.
He flattens Nicky with one blow,
knocking over a lamp,
killing the light.
I rush the front door
weave between cars
until I reach my house,
my ticker feeling like it's going
to tear through my rib cage,
my mother throwing holy water on me
as I run up the stairs.
Jim Landwehr
Jim Landwehr is the author of Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir (eLectio Publishing, 2014) and Written Life: A Poetry Collection (eLectio, 2015). His poetry and essays have been published in MidWest Outdoors, The Tattooed Poets Project, Parody Poetry Journal, Torrid Literature, Wisconsin People and Ideas, and numerous other journals and anthologies.
