Month: July 2009

lily-livered wouldn’t look through the lens

Read Write Poem is doing a pretty neat prompt this week: you choose two words, and then go through the dictionary for words between those words (so in the example by Matthea Harvey — who has written more about this method here [pdf] — the words are “terror” and “future” and almost all of the words in the poem start with s, r, q, p, o, n, m, l, k, j, i, h, and g, in that order). Neat challenge.

I’ve had a few publications since my last post: My Poem Rocks published my poem “Self-Sufficiency“; the twitter zine Tweetthemeat published a “horror nanofiction and Nanoism published the first in a three-part serial.

Also, a few market notes:

  • I’m still looking for short fiction and poetry of 140 characters or less for Seven By Twenty. I encourage reprints, and that length is perfect for haiku, senryu, and most cinquains. I also want prose poetry, and honestly if a line or two from a longer poem stand alone and you want to submit them, I don’t care if they’re part of a longer work – and your bio can link to the longer work if it’s been published online. The point of this for me is to expose people to some cool work and authors, not to be the first to publish something.
  • The editor of Rat’s Ass Review mentioned to me yesterday that he’s still looking for poems for his second issue.

Twitter Zines

You know what I love about publishing online? It’s so fast. I found out about the existence of twitter zines (that is, zines that use twitter as their distributor, thereby limiting content to 140 characters) on Friday last week, wrote and submitted a bunch of stuff on Saturday, and have already been published in escarp and have two more twitter fiction pieces due out in August in picfic. How effing cool is that?

I’ve also decided to start a twitter zine. Because, you know, what the hell. It’s called 7×20 and is open to submissions now… if you can shoehorn a story or poem into 140 characters. (Bio information will be posted nearly simultaneously in a separate tweet, so it must also be limited to 140 characters.) For now, there’s no payment, but I do take reprints. I’d be interested in seeing haiku and tanka and very short prose poems as well as microfiction.

Women in Iran

Excerpts from Niloufar Talebi’s Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World.

From Reza Farmand’s “My Mother Did Not Become Beautiful”:

My mother was not able to
Avoid bearing children
Or secretly
One night
Feed her uterus
To dogs.

My mother
Could not scour away
The thick crust
Of human ignorance
As she could the burnt
Hardened rice
On the bottom of the pot.

My mother was not able to
Win her wings
And breathe the boundless
Air of knowledge.
In her,
Stews repeated themselves
Teas repeated themselves
And the bubblings of meat soup.

….

My mother was not able to
Learn a spell
Become a bird
And one dawn of day
Break out
Of the kitchen window.

…

Granaz Moussavi’s “Post-Cinderella”:

I have gone so far for you
that my foot does not fit in any lone shoe
but has to,
so much has to have gone from me
to fit into you.

shameless self-promotion

Dead Mule‘s Summer Sabbatical Issue is up, with three of my poems (“The Language of Waiting,” “Fuel,” and “Sonic Crochet Hook”). Don’t miss the Southern Legitimacy Statements of the various contributors.

June Cotner has reprinted my “Prayer for Perspective” in her anthology Serenity Prayers: Prayers, Poems, and Prose to Soothe Your Soul. Haven’t seen the book yet, but the check arrived last week, and it will pay for lunch with friends tomorrow and Friday. 🙂