words for thinkers, parents, activists, dreamers
“Woman of an Era,” inspired by my writing process and Adrienne Rich, is now live in Issue 1.4 at Riddled with Arrows. Please give it and the wonderful work included in this journal a read. Many thanks to Shannon Connor Winward for including my poem!
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322 Review is now defunct, but before that, they published this (no archive available):
Implicate Knitting
First appeared in 322 Review (2010)The warm bamboo needles slide mathematically
within the curves of my practiced fingers:
snick
through
under,
loop back lift.The pear-green wool links to itself
in the recursive continuum of a single knot
any physicist would recognize—
string theory.
Somehow,
a scarf emerges.The equations of warmth are indecipherable to me,
like the dozens of people who call me friend
but who wouldn’t know the heavy stitches
that bind me together
if they tore them out personally.
Some of them have tried, seems like.
The names they use for closeness
are scratchy like the wool, and odd—
their friendship, mis-stitched and holey.On these cold days,
I’m divisible by zero.
I knit, and watch my stash of scarves grow.
“(Un)Married: A Sestina in Temperatures,” “Aerodynamic,” and “For a boy to die” (trigger warning, child suicide) are up at Eunoia Review. Many thanks to editor Ian Chung for including my work. Please take a moment and peruse these and the others published on this fine online journal. Support the arts, they are trying to support you.
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Accountability check-in-with-a-vengeance! But first, what is #100rejections anyway?
I have decided to set the literary goal of accumulating 100 rejections this calendar year to facilitate sustained efforts toward publication. Submitting multiple poems to one market and having them all rejected counts as one rejection. Having any number of poems in the packet accepted means that submission counts as one acceptance.
November, 2017 — 14 Rejections, 6 Acceptances, 16 New Submissions
Year to Date, 83 / 17-1 / 85
** Ghost rejection, hashtag sad-face.
*** A personal rejection, also known as a tiered rejection is sort of like a half-way point between a rejection and an acceptance. It means the editors passed on the work, but otherwise left a positive commentary of some kind in the rejection notice that was unique to you or your work, or added a personal note of appreciation. This is the first one I’ve thought to make note of, and definitely the first one I’ve received in a while. I’m excited about this one because I’d love to be published in this journal, so it feels like one little step closer! Also, they liked one of the poems that I really like, too, so that was just plain nice.
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Tune in after the new year for December tallies and the FINAL COUNT of rejections for 2017, to see if I made my goal. Happy submitting!
“Anatomy of Under,” “Sparking,” “Thoughts while digging in a patch of barren earth,” and one of the poems I have cherished for a long time, “the gift of no guarantees,” are all up at Anti-Heroin Chic today. Many, many thanks to James Diaz for the kind words and for including those babies of mine with that baby of yours. ❤
“The Laureate and the Lothario” and “Grand Falls, AZ” are now live in the freshly-minted print edition of The Wildhood Project‘s second volume, your voice in the wilderness.
Thank you so much to Cristina Falcone for including me in this beautiful volume!
** EDIT, April 2018 **
As of this edit, it appears as though this fledgling market has gone defunct (it happens often, sadly). My poems are therefore reprinted below. Hope you enjoy!
The Laureate and the Lothario
First appeared in Wildhood Project (2017)I ran into James Dickey once
(in a campground, not the afterlife).
The Congressional Librarians—
academics, all—
put up a rally-in-the-woods,
a well-formed senility
Chronus could really get behind.
*snortchuckle* frogs and crickets
bowled their raucous caucus
into our ears, yeah,
the reckless blood
was in us all
(deliverance from gall).
Guitar tones and trails wound off into trees,
all the options of darkness and firelight,
songteeth wide, the jawing, the brews—
the glories, oh, the stories!The dandelion head moon
puffed up white behind
its cloudseed blooms—
yeah, all that midnight jazz
the poets write about,
playing their trills and saxy tones
while the jerry-rigging scholars
rocked and rolled their way
into the holy hag stones’
time-hewn silence:
mossed, pitted, and
certain as sex.
Grand Falls, AZ
First appeared in Wildhood Project (2017)It sneaks up on you in summer.
Driving, you will think you’re in the wrong place,
that this is not the place for a magnificence of water.
There are the known rocks and gravel,
and the long view will be all ruddy brown and hazy,
a martian landscape of high desert under Arizona sky,
which is not a sky but a verb—
the blue a borrowing of depth,
an IOU to the lungless black behind it.So there is the gradient:
blue to dust-blue to orange to brown,
a paradox of flatness that curves itself
from sun-hot roof to dust-borne wheels,
and you will turn that one corner
near the oddly Bradburian, solitary bench
with the requisite shelter and garbage can,
and you will turn that corner,
and there it begins.You thought the earth was a table here,
but it was legs,
and suddenly they open and open,
and you are looking down into a scrappy kind of eden,
tough where it’s green, and
where the strange math of erosion
worked its long division with water
turned cocoa-brown from dust.
It’s flowing easily, playfully—
slow and gentle for falls,
on vacation from the flooding spring—
over rocks flat and large enough for sun-bathing.There are rocks and all the
familiar elements of surface down here,
tumbled among the exposed monolithic mysteries
in this untoward tecton footprint,
where depth is not itself but a verb—
and it’s a secret of the snowmelt,
that it can do this to the earth
the way the outbreath rim of cosmos
can do it to the sky.
I AM OVER THE HUMP from the Summer of Transition (spoiler alert, November activity picks back up as predicted!). I am including this blog post for the sake of continuity and accountability. Until then….
What is #100rejections anyway?
I have decided to set the literary goal of accumulating 100 rejections this calendar year to facilitate sustained efforts toward publication. Submitting multiple poems to one market and having them all rejected counts as one rejection. Having any number of poems in the packet accepted means that submission counts as one acceptance.
Despite several months of literary inactivity, I decided I still wanted to make a run for the full 100 rejections by the end of the year. My tactic for November is to focus my efforts on submissions to the “Top 100 Fastest to Respond” Markets as listed on Duotrope. The tricky balance here is that many of them do not accept simultaneous submissions (given the fast response times, this seems fair to me), so it will be metaphorical game of chicken with the end of the year as I try to collect 31 more rejections in as little as 61 days. It will require regular activity, but I feel up to the challenge!
Side note, as part of my return to literary activity, I cleaned house on several submissions, including a couple of markets that went defunct, which I will not count toward my rejection tally. Crazy news is that one of the markets that went defunct had previously accepted a poem! So it goes.
October, 2017 — 1 Rejection, 1 Acceptance, 0 New Submissions
Year to Date, 69 / 11 / 69
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Tune in next month for November tallies (including another Acceptance!). Happy submitting!
STILL RECOVERING from the Summer of Transition, so literary activity has come to a screeching halt out of family necessity. In fact, any activity I’ve had in recent months has been from submissions earlier in the year, but hey, it counts. I am including this blog post as a way of creating a through-line until November, when I anticipate ramping back up. Until then….
Accountability check-in! But first, what is #100rejections anyway?
I have decided to set the literary goal of accumulating 100 rejections this calendar year to facilitate sustained efforts toward publication. Submitting multiple poems to one market and having them all rejected counts as one rejection. Having any number of poems in the packet accepted means that submission counts as one acceptance.
August, 2017 — 3 Rejections, 0 Acceptances, 0 New Submissions
Year to Date, 66 / 10 / 69
September, 2017 — 2 Rejections, 0 Acceptances, 0 New Submissions
Year to Date, 68 / 10 / 69
*The journals marked with an asterisk (*) satisfy my secondary literary goal of submitting to as many top-tier journals as possible. See my January Totals post for details.
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Tune in next month for October tallies (including one Acceptance!). Details on that and my strategy for making a comeback by the end of the year in the next #100rejections post. Happy submitting!
Amphibi.us is now defunct, but before that, they published this (no archive available):
The aroused scientist
First appeared in Amphibi.us: Watterlogged Words (May 2010)The aroused scientist
walks bow-legged across the crisp split
of her wanton wholeness,
stepping spider-oblique
among her nettle-spring dreams
and the crisis/opportunity of motion.The green burr-sparks stick
in odd, arrhythmic places,
collect in the overlapping buzz of crickets
until she is 12 again,
coarse and brash,
curved in time and space,
picking at her socks
against the persistent seeds,
or running on sidewalks that rhyme,
wearing tomboy-striped shirts
and eating pepper-weed to see if it’s poison
and she never gets sick, she is alive—
animal all loose in her
and divine.
Note: Life continues to throw me for summer loops, so literary activity has come almost to a screeching halt out of family necessity. I am including this blog post here as a way of creating a throughline until the Fall, when I anticipate ramping back up. Until then….
Accountability check-in! But first, what is #100rejections anyway?
I have decided to set the literary goal of accumulating 100 rejections this calendar year to facilitate sustained efforts toward publication. Submitting multiple poems to one market and having them all rejected counts as one rejection. Having any number of poems in the packet accepted means that submission counts as an acceptance. I’m aiming for 120 submissions by September 30 to accomplish this.
July, 2017 — 7 Rejections, 0 Acceptances, 0 New Submissions
Year to Date, 63 / 10 / 69
*The journals marked with an asterisk (*) satisfy my secondary literary goal of submitting to as many top-tier journals as possible. See my January Totals post for details.
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Tune in next month for August tallies (such as they may be….)!
samara powers poetry