Resources
From Category:
CRAFT Literary Magazine
CRAFT is an online literary journal exploring the art of fiction. They publish contemporary short stories accompanied by the author's notes on technique. Other features include book reviews, writing exercises, and a summer conference. CRAFT is open to submissions of flash fiction (1,000 words maximum) and short fiction (7,000 words maximum) year-round, and also offers contests on occasion.
Inside/Out
By Joseph Osmundson. This daring flash memoir, which can also be classified as a prose-poem collection, looks from multiple angles at the arc of an emotionally abusive relationship between the white author and his African-American ex-lover. Like a mosaic of broken mirror fragments, each sliver of memory reflects larger themes of exclusion, power exchange, personal and collective trauma, and the nature of intimacy, raising as many questions as it answers.
Don’t Call Us Dead
By Danez Smith. "Every day is a funeral & a miracle" in this award-winning poet and performance artist's second collection, a defiant record of life as a black gay man under the twin shadows of police violence and HIV. The pervasive image of blood links these poems and the boys, alive and dead, for whom Smith speaks: blood as kinship, as bearer of the memory of dangerous intimacy, as evidence of murders that white America wants to wipe away. Smith's honors include a Lambda Literary Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
3arabi Song
By Zeina Hashem Beck. Winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, this Lebanese poet in exile keeps her heritage alive through lyrical tributes to famous singers of the Arab world. These multi-lingual poems weave together phrases in English, French, Italian, Arabic, and the new hybrid language Arabizi, a creation of the younger generation to represent Arabic sounds in English-character text messages. These poems are hopeful elegies, political dance tunes, nostalgic manifestos.
Trip Wires
By Sandra Hunter. With startling breadth of vision, this short story collection reveals the raw and tender material of our common humanity across borders—from a Sudanese refugee in Glasgow, to the survivor of a Colombian paramilitary kidnapping, to young soldiers in the Middle East whose emotional armor is breached by defiantly joyful children. The standout tale "Brother's Keeper" channels Flannery O'Connor to expose the underside of white Christian benevolence toward Africans. For immigrants and wanderers everywhere, gratitude takes a backseat to homesickness, and rescue is not the same as safety. Hunter restores these displaced persons to the center of their own life story.
The Art of Invisible Movement
Maggie Stiefvater is the New York Times bestselling author of the Raven Cycle series and other award-winning fantasy and magical realist novels. In this blog post, she advises fiction writers to make the same scene accomplish more than one task. For instance, a quiet, transitional scene does not have to be filler; it should reveal something important about backstory, character, or atmosphere. The key to good pacing is to use a variety of scene structures: earn those quiet moments by interspersing them with higher-energy action.
TechRadar Recommends the Best Free Text to Speech Software
This 2018 article from the product review website TechRadar recommends various free programs to convert text to audio files.
Charley Says Give Me Your Heart
By Francine Witte
It is gentle,
and I want to know it.
First thought is run,
but I've been alone
so many months.
I stretch
my arms to see
if they still reach
another human being.
And they do.
Charley says
put out the light
and he swoops down
with a force
even time
doesn't have.
I'm a young girl
compared to the Earth,
and I've seen animals
shred each other's skin
in the name of hunger,
the one crime everyone forgives.
Next morning, light
tears me up like a canine tooth.
I am alone,
although Charley is here.
He turns to me,
and simply says give me your heart.
It is mine now
and later
I might
want it.
Readerly Privilege and Textual Violence: An Ethics of Engagement
In this 2017 essay from the LA Review of Books blog, widely published poet and critic Kristina Marie Darling advises reviewers how to be mindful of privilege and subjectivity when critiquing a poetry book, particularly one by a less-established author. She warns against inferring psychological or autobiographical details from authors' published work. The essay contends that the best reviews are those that situate the book in its own aesthetic tradition and point the book toward the audience most likely to appreciate it.
Honeysuckle Press
Brooklyn-based Honeysuckle Press is a small literary press affiliated with Winter Tangerine Review. Their mission statement says they are "committed to expanding and redefining human truths by prioritizing the narratives of unsung communities." The press accepts queries year-round for full-length poetry collections and short story collections, and also offers a free contest for prose and poetry chapbook manuscripts.
Storyhouse Weekly Reader
The nonprofit Preservation Foundation was born in 1976 to encourage and preserve the "extraordinary stories of 'ordinary' people." Anyone can submit a personal life story or short fictional work for posting on their website. Their e-newsletter, the Storyhouse Weekly Reader, highlights one of the 1,000+ anecdotes in their archives.
Guide to Finding Your Published Poems at the Library of Congress
Have you had a poem published in an amateur or "vanity" poetry anthology, which you would like to find again? The Library of Congress website gives you tips and links to start tracking down your poem in various reference archives, as well as advice for avoiding contest scams.
Best and Worst Self-Publishing Services Rated by the Alliance of Independent Authors
The Alliance of Independent Authors maintains this Watchdog service that rates dozens of self-publishing services based on price, distribution channels, book design quality, and ethics.
OneLook Dictionary Search
OneLook is a search engine that aggregates word definitions from over 1,000 dictionaries. There is also a reverse dictionary search function, in which you can enter keywords to describe a concept, and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept.
Redheaded Stepchild
The biannual online journal Redheaded Stepchild only accepts poetry that was rejected by other magazines. During the months of February and August, submit 3-5 unpublished poems that have been rejected elsewhere, with the names of the magazines that rejected the poems. They do not want multiple submissions, so please wait for a response to your first submission before you submit again.
Barrelhouse
Launched in 2004, Barrelhouse is a print and online journal that bridges pop culture and literary writing. Fans of McSweeney's and George Saunders will appreciate Barrelhouse's offbeat recombination of cultural "flotsam and jetsam". Affiliated ventures include publishing imprint Barrelhouse Books and the Barrelhouse Amplifier, a $1,500 award for independent literary magazines/websites and small presses (no application fee).
On Not Noticing
In this 2018 essay from the blog of the literary journal Ploughshares, novelist and writing teacher Adam O'Fallon Price analyzes how fictional characters can be individuated by what they notice, and fail to notice, in the scenes they describe. Since perception is selective, a description with too many details can make the scene seem less realistic.
Narrative Magazine Directory of Writers’ Resources
Narrative Magazine, a well-regarded online journal, offers this free-to-access directory of links to literary conferences, books and articles with advice about writing, and degree programs in writing and publishing.
Night Fire
By Sheryl Clough
—inspired by a WWII spotter's cabin at Banba's Crown, Malin Head, County Donegal
The North Atlantic chops at the green shore
with white-edged knife blades. On the grass
far below, remains of chalk spell 'EIRE', marks
left by a hopeful people in that time of bombs.
On this wind strewn cliff still stands a concrete
spotter's hut. Inside the soot-black walls, small
traces remain of those who watched, huddled by night
around a feeble fire, longing for home, steamed
brown bread, flannel sheets. What thoughts chased
them, as engine roars graced the storm clouds?
Imagine a youth in a leather jacket, holding hands
clapped over his ears. So lately he held hands
with a hometown girl, their whispers stretching
long into the night. What plans they made! And
then the War, rending the gossamer dream fabric
as shrapnel rends flesh. He protects his ears, for
what else is under his control, pierced as he is
by shrieking propellers, by fear, by the ultimate
knowledge that only Providence can keep him alive,
suspended above the chalk, below the dark.
This poem first appeared in the anthology Embers and Flames (Outrider Press, 2015).
Sky Island Journal
Launched in 2017 in Luna County, New Mexico, Sky Island Journal is an online literary quarterly of poetry and flash prose (1,000 words maximum). Each piece opens in a read-only MS Word document, rather than a scroll-through webpage, to encourage readers to focus wholly on one thing at a time. The journal is free to read and has no advertising, but there is a $3 submission fee to keep this business model sustainable. Editors say, "The Florida Mountains Wilderness Study Area is our muse; its landscape is the source of our positive energy, our rugged independence, and our relentless tenacity."
American Prison Writing Archive
Founded by writer Doran Larson, the American Prison Writing Archive is a free online archive of personal essays submitted by currently and formerly incarcerated people, correctional officers, and prison staffers. The project grew out of an anthology of prison writing that Larson edited, Fourth City: Essays From the Prison in America (Michigan State University Press, 2014). In a 2018 interview in Poets & Writers Magazine, he called the APWA a "virtual meeting place" to "spread the voices of unheard populations."
Libby App
Libby is an app for smartphones and tablets, which lets you search and borrow e-books and audio books from any participating library where you have a membership card. You can also send the borrowed e-books to your Kindle.
Lives
By Lana Rafaela Cindric
Lives stick to me like the cherry lip gloss I find in
my grandmother's attic, right by the christening dress,
by the first braid I had cut off like shedding my skin.
I was so many things in so little time.
I was fury,
sweltering hot blistering rage summer kind of feral,
sweat pooling in your collarbone and skin sticky with want.
There was no ink-stained grace in how I forged my own gold
out of blood.
No one wanted to keep kissing the girl who only spoke of death, anyway.
(They pull you in and ruin you with their crazy, they do.)
I was the green line dripping down your family tree.
It's all in the genes, your mother's eyes, your father's nose,
how you put your fingers to the piano and Earth
shifts beneath my feet.
But pain, too, huh, did you notice that?
When you burn someone's house down you aren't just
destroying the walls.
You are destroying a history, too.
So put down the matches. Walk away.
This is not yours to ruin.
I was crazy, dirty, absofuckinglutely insane love.
The kind you only get when you've got a desperate soul and don't know
what to do with it anymore.
You've got to pour your heart into something, right?
But no one told you when to stop pouring.
When you bleed out, they step over your body
on the sidewalk.
Wildflowers will grow from your bones.
I was ephemeral, a fleeting moment in time,
now you see it now you don't, blink and you'll miss it.
Keep good eyes on the road and don't look back, find me
when you hear the music that wasn't supposed to be there. More feels like champagne bubbles
in your chest.
Your heart is a riot and you've got grease-stained fingertips
but your hands always looked good to me.
I was a peach orchard once, I'm sure.
I made something grow, light attracts light and man, oh man,
did the moths love me.
I was the summer you stole your first kiss, I was
a swelling symphony. I made something look beautiful and my trees
trapped sunlight.
I was a peach orchard once, I'm sure.
You don't forget that kind of joy.
It always makes the shadows a little less terrifying.
Queer in Color
Queer in Color is a site to showcase fiction books featuring LGBTQ characters of color. The founders are romance writers but the site is open to all genres. They will add books to the website for free, and charge a small fee to promote them on social media.
Screen Door Review
Screen Door Review's subtitle is "Literary Voices of the Queer South". Launching in Spring 2018, this quarterly online journal accepts submissions year-round of unpublished poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and comics. Editors say, "The purpose of the magazine is to provide a platform of expression to those whose identities—at least in part—derive from the complicated relationship between queer person and place. Specifically, queer person and the South. The topics of your work do not have to be queer or southern in theme, but we do ask that you as a contributor belong to the queer community and also identify as southern."
Authors Alliance Fair Use Guidebook
"Fair use" is the legal principle that determines how much of a copyrighted work can be quoted without a license. The Authors Alliance offers this free online guide to fair use for nonfiction writers, covering common scenarios and their legal resolution.
UCLA Children’s Book Collection
The UCLA Children's Book Collection online archive offers free downloads of over 1,800 digital titles, from classics like Little Women and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to lesser-known public domain works from the 19th century and earlier.
Lightness, High Desert
By Ruth Thompson
Here heat rides the horse of light, vaults
sun to sun, a glare that slams the eyes shut,
licks from morning's skim of clouds, cools
to coal in shadow. I forget how deadweight
darkness lies grave with unshed heat, nightlong
pall of wrestler sweat. In my tinder carapace
of borrowed roof and wall, quickness flies me
clean. Nothing adheres, even the sticky heart.
Blithe and volatile as sunlight on the morning
table, in dreams I sheer to grassland, burning.
LibraryThing: Name That Book
LibraryThing is a service that allows members to catalog and search the books they own. Members can also participate in discussion forums, such as Name That Book, which helps you remember the title and author of a book you can describe but can't name.
Literary Mama
Literary Mama is an online journal publishing poetry, fiction, personal essays, reviews, and articles about the many faces of motherhood.
Obsession
By Janet Ruth Heller
I walk down the hall at work
and my boss stares at my breasts.
I go to his office to ask a question
and my boss stares at my breasts.
I speak up at a committee meeting
and my boss stares at my breasts.
I teach a composition class in front of him
and my boss stares at my breasts.
I submit my letter of resignation
and my boss stares at my breasts.
Calling a Wolf a Wolf
By Kaveh Akbar. This fierce, dazzling debut poetry collection describes the difficult path out of alcoholism and into the disciplined joy of being present in the moment. Simultaneously self-lacerating and grandiose, the speaker leaps from one aphoristic observation to another, through the ecstasies of Islamic mysticism, his devouring relationships with lovers both male and female, and self-annihilation as the ultimate extreme of pleasure. Yet he discovers that sobriety has its own nearly unbearable intensity, the rupture of his isolation by genuine connection with others.
The Child Finder
By Rene Denfeld. This beautifully written thriller goes deep into the minds of survivors of intergenerational trauma: some who become healers and heroes, pitted against others who pass on the evil that was done to them. In the snowbound mountain forests of the Pacific Northwest, a famed investigator with her own barely-remembered abuse history searches for a little girl who was kidnapped three years ago. Meanwhile, this resilient and imaginative child tries to maintain her sanity in captivity, by reliving her favorite fairy tale and forming a bittersweet survival bond with her captor.
Ancient Love
By Charlotte Mandel
Greek archaeologists find couple locked in millennia-old hug
Why disturb bones that lay in close embrace
six thousand years? Age twenty when they died,
strong limbs entwined, glow of youth in each face.
Might this have been a double suicide?
Intense passion blocked by society,
choosing hemlock that she may be his bride.
Or did some cataclysmic irony
befall them as they kissed—a volcano's
hiss and roar, as in Pompeii, a fiery
mass, or an earthquake avalanche of loam?
Were they aware of oncoming burial
or orgasmic peace in sudden catacomb?
Did they live their lives in material
comfort—not likely for they wore no gold.
Diggers uncovered no sartorial
clues, no Neolithic hoes, stone axe, household
chisels, pots. Remains hidden in a cave
suggest secrecy, illicit love, not told
to anyone in the village but saved
within pulsing vessels feeding the heart.
Did they long for afterlife, to engrave
their souls as each other's, love's martyrs?
Blanket these bones, let them not be parted.
Another Word for Sky Is Upside-Down-Understory
By Lynn Schmeidler
Sheena Queen of the Jungle I get you
you don't know how to act around men
but you can throw a bamboo spear like nobody ever orphaned you.
O lady of the jungle I ranked you 99th in 100 Sexiest Females
of All Time
and like you I prefer to be alone with my clench and dispossession.
I too speak with animals.
Sit your fiercely-proficient-in-knife-fighting self over here and give me something I can use.
Surprise me like you do your enemies.
What if there were someone to tell me not to pick my teeth
with arrowheads?
We heroines have to stick together in a grand but unembarrassed way
like an archipelago.
december Magazine
Founded in Iowa City in 1958, and now published in St. Louis, MO, december Magazine was a pioneer in the little magazine and small press movement. december accepts submissions October 1-May 1, and pays $10 per page (minimum $40-maximum $200). No simultaneous submissions. There are also annual poetry and prose contests with prizes up to $1,500. The journal has published early-career work by notable writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Donald Barthelme, Marge Piercy, and Rita Mae Brown, and was Raymond Carver's first professional short story publication.
Unforgotten
By Dean Kostos
A child steps from a silhouette of fire,
pleating paper into egrets of flame.
Tattooed with smoke, his selves a duet,
he grows into a statuette of flame.
He releases the singed kites & birds,
attempting to forget the flames
that cleansed nothing but branded
loss: fleshy rosettes of flame.
He breathes into tarnished mirrors,
coaxing embers from regret's flames.
Voices splinter like lightning, igniting
words' clatter: castanets of flame.
Dean pleats his ashes into a boy
who emerges, forever bearing the debt of flame.
2020
By Thelma T. Reyna
have you foreseen the decade 'round the corner,
looming with teeth fully bared,
partisans lined in gauntlets
with elephant memories of grievances deep,
guttural throats
growling reminders
of sick people crying in congressional halls,
of brown people dying in paradise lost
on the other side of the divide,
hoodless men with leather straps on chests,
with shields not board but military-grade,
boots of steel tramping city streets,
german cries with arms to skies,
plots to ram not once
but blocks and blocks and blocks
of protest signs
Reprinted from Reading Tea Leaves After Trump (Golden Foothills Press, 2017)
To Trope or Not to Trope
In this 2017 essay from the blog of the literary journal Ploughshares, Chloe N. Clark discusses four stories that self-consciously re-use common fictional tropes about women in order to subvert these tropes. While beginning writers are often told to avoid clichéd roles for their characters, it can be an effective postmodern literary technique to make the characters themselves aware of and commenting on the limited identities they are forced to embody.
Hunger
By Kym Cunningham
You said I was unfit
for human consumption
that promises had spoiled me
saturating my skin with
lies neither of us could keep
I don't want to be our escaped goat
bucking at the slaughter
I don't want you to
disembowel me like tree fruit
letting my seeds dehisce your mouth
I never said I could be selfless
I never said I had the answers
I never said I'd give you my life
let you churn me up, skim me alive
spread me on soured dough
Now you've left me out and
the butter's curdled, the jam's attracting flies
you've begun to mold
one of us must clarify
we can't trick the starving into eating us anymore
Food Timeline
Food Timeline is a free open-access archive and research service about culinary history. It is maintained by Lynne Olver, a reference librarian in New Jersey. Fiction writers can use the site to fact-check historically accurate cuisine for their book's setting and time period. Email questions are typically answered within 24 hours. Read a feature about Food Timeline on the blog of the literary journal Ploughshares.
Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s How to Do It Frugally
Carolyn Howard-Johnson's "How to Do It Frugally" website is the portal for her award-winning series of books on marketing, editing, and book proposals. Her guides for indie authors have received honors from USA Book News, the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the Global Ebook Awards, and others. The Frugal Book Promoter and How to Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically feature strategies for free or low-cost book publicity. The Frugal Editor and Great Little Last-Minute Editing Tips for Writers will ensure that your self-published book or manuscript submission looks professional. The Great First Impression Book Proposal: Everything You Need To Know To Sell Your Book in 30 Minutes or Less covers pitching your manuscript to editors and agents.
Out of Malibu: An American Exodus
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Malibu commemorates the young son's
birth. The sculpted balsa family spends
Christmases here in a lean-to
on a bluff. A star leads others to them,
then and now.
In that time of times—no light
guided law abiding
citizens on their trek, only warm
sandy days, bitter desert nights.
No intention of becoming myth
or graven image but here they are.
A likely place to settle. Like Sinai,
familiar palms, near a sea, hard winds
weather them, still as stones,
hearts hardened to wood,
feet statue still. Exiles altered
from folk to revered. Their design
never to be worshipped, they ask
this night for compassion
and so it was.
Their feet quickened
from carvings to flesh. The choice
to stay or leave now theirs,
they travel interstate byroads
at night when they will not frighten
other sojourners, they—homeless,
shoeless, unfamiliar robes, faces
still immobile from decades
practicing the art of crèche. This new
adventure across rocky peaks, great
plains. An arch marks a river, mighty
as any they had seen, this monster land,
roads like veins, Mapquest's
blue design. As Chaucer's pilgrims sought
redemption they trudge East, leave
behind those who thought they loved
them but imposed burdens beyond
imagination, less urgency than before,
their son born, free of civic bondage.
New-turned pine aches not like ancient
flesh. In weather they had not known
earlier they walk and rest, idols
unnoticed in the snow, part of December's
pageant.
This time they follow no light
but their own, come upon an open swath,
Washington's obelisk, rotunda like Rome's,
somehow their kin, erected for the ages.
Beneath their feet the Post, sodden, headline
bawls War. Fine drizzle diffused
by starlight they stand before another,
newer wailing wall, a granite gash.
This, this! Their destination.
Rain turns to doilies (as this small
tribe turned from human tissue
to wood and back again), decorates
their cloaks, caps, hoods, slides
down the polished façade
before them. Wet-white punctuation
attach themselves to incised
names on this family's
own reflected images. They
reach to touch them
to quench the flow.
When the Day Lilies Open
By Mary M. Sesso
She awakens sleep-deprived
on the oncology ward
offended by the cloudy light
that's opening the day lilies
in her back yard.
Cancer has again pruned away dreams not about itself&mdash
it wants to own her breasts,
dream about spreading
its wings.
She's angry at the malice
of bruises that crowd
her arms like flower buds,
gaudy shades of purple,
green, yellow.
And she's growing tired
of the middle and wonders
how it will end, weary of that face
with dark socketed eyes
straining to see the impossible.
But the sky turns cerulean blue,
heaven blue, and hope
puts down a tiny root
even as a poppy bruise
flowers around the I.V.
It Would Rain on that Saturday
By Ken Allan Dronsfield
absent of pearls in a grand ocean mollusk
crying self righteousness without salty tears
seeking to find truth in an unrelenting fervor
see the dark drifting during a twilight crescendo.
dancing in the dark, or waltzing in a whirlwind
depraved and decrepit as a one legged snake
sweet tea from its spot in a cherry wood box
steeped in red clay pots amongst the ingrates.
lightning strikes throughout the lower treeline
disturbing thoughts of ambivalence in dreams
hoods in mourning whilst a crypt-like fog lifts
gates of iron grasp upon the spirit deep within.
rain hits upon leaves making a steady tapping
bare feet hit the road, a slippery slope aghast
a poncho saves the day, in a simple pious way
for we all knew it would rain, on that Saturday.
Damonza Book Design
The design team at Damonza offers a variety of packages for book cover design, print and e-book formatting, and book trailer videos. They have experience in both fiction and commercial nonfiction. Check out their 800+ samples on their website.
A Field Guide to Falling
By em jollie. This poetry collection is like a stained-glass cathedral window: even in scenes of suffering, the glorious colors give joy and uplift. Much of the book processes the aftermath of breaking up with a beloved woman, though at the end, the narrator seems to find a new beginning with another partner and a greater sense of herself as complete and sufficient. But this therapeutic summary can't do justice to the mystical meaning of her journey. The speaker bravely walks up to the edge of everything we consider permanent, looks into the clouds swirling above the bottomless gulf, and finds a way to praise their ever-changing shapes. These poems imply that the value of falling--in love, out of love, out of Eden into a world of loss--is in how it challenges us to keep our hearts open, to say Yes despite it all.
How Novelty Ruined the Novel
In this 2017 essay from Current Affairs, Brianna Rennix takes a skeptical look at popular experimental devices in contemporary literary novels. She argues that these tricks have become cliché, interfering with the genre's unique potential to entertain and provoke empathy. For fun, test your MFA syllabus or this week's New York Times Book Review against the Postmodern Novel Bingo card: "Entire chapter is just a list of ironic brand names"; "Tepid marriage ruined by unsatisfying infidelity"; "A lumbering comedic setpiece is suddenly interrupted by horrific violence"; and more.
Merriam-Webster Ask the Editor Videos
These lively short videos from dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster discuss the origins of words and resolve common questions of grammar and usage. Is "irregardless" a real word? What is the correct plural of "octopus"? How do you use singular "they" grammatically? Now you will know.
Chant of a Million Women
By Shirani Rajapakse
My body is a temple, not
a halfway house you enter for
temporary shelter from
the heat and dust swirling through trees.
It's not a guest house to book a room, spend
a night on your way to someplace else.
Not a transit lounge
to while away the hours until
your next flight to fantasy seeking
greener pastures.
My body is my temple.
Enter with reverence.
Keep your shoes at the door your
hat on the step. Bring flowers as offering.
Garlands of jasmine wound tight, pink
lotus piled up high on a tray, petals opened,
lips inviting, alluring.
Place oil lamps on the floor.
Let the light guide the way, chase away
shadows trying to hide in gloomy corners.
Burn sweet incense, let the perfume linger
on the air, climb on the tail of a
gust of breeze
and travel unhindered.
Murmur sutras to supplicate.
Sing songs of praise.
Call out my many names amassed
down the ages.
Place those trays of fresh fruit,
succulent, ripe and oozing, at the side.
My body is my own.
Not yours to take
when it pleases you, or
use as collateral in the face
of wars fought for your greed, or zest to own.
Not give to appease the enemy, reward
the brave who sported so valiantly in the
trenches, stinking of blood and gore.
It's not a product.
Not something to bargain, barter for goods
and services, share with friends,
handed around the table,
a bowl of soup, drink your fill,
use and abuse as you please.
Don't adorn me in expensive silks and gold,
and gift to the Gods, or
wrap me up in a shroud,
imprison me, maim my thoughts
that shout to get out.
No religious decree, no social pressure,
you have no right to own.
It's mine and mine alone and you have
no authority to take it away from me.
