NOMINATIONS
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SoFloPoJo BEST OF THE NET NOMINATIONS
for the 2024 ANTHOLOGY Poetry Nominations selected by Judy Ireland & Meryl Stratford CNF/Essay Nominations selected by Stacie M. Kiner Submitted by Managing Editor, Michael Mackin O'Mara |
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BEST OF THE NET NOMINATIONS for the 2023 ANTHOLOGY - POETRY
Nominations by Judy Ireland & Meryl Stratford
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ALFONSO SITO SASIETA
Why my beloved está equivocada: a family history
I am sitting on the sofa with my suegro watching a BBC documentary on the history of salsa when my even keel father-in-law leans forward subtly but eagerly, pointing his finger towards Ray Barretto’s oversized glasses & Roberto Roena’s bongos smiling at the both of them as though they are long lost brothers ¡y allí está Héctor! he says surprising himself with his own enthusiasm & proceeding to regale me his teenage years & how at sixteen he went to San Juan to see the very concert that we see on this screen, y es más, he goes on I saw Héctor Lavoe before he joined Fania All Stars which is to say, when the seedling of salsa was just taking root in New York & here & there & somewhere on the Panamerican highway between Lima & San Bartolo my own father is riding the green & white micro which is the small, crowded bus where he sways, where he stays vigilant for ladrones as he grips the chrome pole & quitely lip syncs the words to llorarás, llorarás as he turns his gaze from the Pacific on his left to the sand dunes on his right beyond which Oscar d’ Leon y La Dimensión Latina are performing en vivo en Venezuela where my suegra is preparing to leave latinoamérica for America & sensing perhaps the impending lack beyond Caracas, sneaks out the window of her Andean house & dances all night until she faints in exhaustion & the raucous around her rushes her to the hospital’s IV to replenish her body with vitamin B & who could blame her, really, I mean how was she to know that she would meet & marry the dancing boricua who is sitting on my couch right now y no, no, ¡es demasiado! I say to my beloved chronicling the long lineage of boleros from which we come, recalling the way her papi’s parents danced into marriage, the same way my papi’s parents did on that fateful night in Lima when la virgín maría told papapa that he’d meet his wife at the so & so building in San Borja |
but for now, let’s stay with Arsensio Rodriguez who with blind eyes & intuitive hands laid the brick-like template for salsa dura & who, from the rural of Cuba laid the groundwork for Celia Cruz to cement the clave & the tumbao into our psyches before shipping them up and down the americas for all the brown skinned like my father who found himself on the border of a sundown town in a sundown county perpetually working at dusk in a pizza restaurant where he is blaring ojitos chinos which, for all intents and purposes, seems racist to me, but in the long-ago memory etched in my mind seems to make my father feel seen for the Chinese Peruvian he is & I can hear my cousins greeting him now— Tío Chin, Tío Chin! as they step through the back screen door of la pizzería, where a few dusty drawers house Grupo Niche & Joe Arroyo & the Latin Brothers & it must be said that las caleñas son como las flores that blossomed into the music of my life amongst the many songs from Harlem & Havana & below the stacks of my childhood soundtrack, there is a hidden home video where my mother is puckering her lips & uncovering a secret sexiness that has just spawned from one of Chichi Peralta’s songs & her fast-forwarding is too late, for she, too, has been wooed into the million roots that are jutting & reaching their tentacles into the lush soil of our diaspora, preparing me for my first week in DC when only three days after we had met, my soon-to-be partner turned on un verano en nueva york & then grabbed my hand & then shook the ancestors awake & then said yes to salsa dancing as a Lenten practice & like all relationships we still argue about whether or not love is a choice or some other thing that spans decades & continents & hundreds of hands that hold the clave |
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KARA KNICKERBOCKER
Kill Your Darlings
before they even know what’s coming for them: / the woman, stunning as she is / dancing into another stanza / you must stab her in the back before the next line / & do it now / & after, the moon you should cut/open / sever every glowing piece / swallow it if you must but do it swiftly / let the beautiful departed face / d e f l a t e / like the last breath of night / & that precious moment cradling / with the newborn baby cooing / you must suffocate it in your sleep & / after you dream, (which you must strangle from / the ceiling,) you must / wake up watching a lover’s hand burst into flames, grabbing toward / the white hot center of you / but you must resist this. / Let loss choke / on the spiraling smoke / & in fact, let it burn / the whole house down. / You might think Oh god // but we must bury him too— every creation / just kill all the curious animals / quick like the darling dove hitting / the glass window, breaking / its neck instantly but even as you admire / how it splays below / soft feathers & still-plump chest / you must murder / the next thing / the loving / mother in the kitchen / knock her out cold / with a frying pan / shoot the father / coming in from the cellar / smash the bottles of alcohol before they can be drunk / forget / heat of summers / spring’s gentle song you must / wipe out the seasons entirely / along with the calendar so time is obsolete / pulverize any stars / all that shimmers & I / I will need you to gut the body / from this poem & all the others especially. / There is no metaphor for fruit / or trees you must starve / nature until she shrivels up every seed / & at last // put the soul & the heart in a car & drive it into a ravine / make sure it is good & drowned— // those darlings have a way of crawling out / from the mud & we must keep this poem spotless / empty of the beautiful dead. |
henry 7. reneau, jr. 2023 Best of the Net Poetry Finalist
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[*trigger warning] angry Black man is a trigger word in every government building. in the penitentiary, it is the way it has always been. if I write about what has been done to Black folks, by white folks, is a trigger warning to the editors of literary journals to claim solidarity with BIPOC writers, but wish you luck in placing your work elsewhere. trigger is the part of a gun that empowers white folks to decide when niggers will die. is the trigger word for every negro’s double consciousness. hey nigger! is the trigger word for feets don’t fail me now. is the trigger to get all Stepin Fetchit saucer eyed rabbit-in-the headlights stereotypical. every Black child dead in the street is a trigger for police to act like they ain’t the one who did it. Molotov cocktail is the trigger word for niggers only going to burn the wrong side of the tracks, is a trigger word for once the DOJ leaves it will be business as usual. justice under law & due process are trigger words for Black folk who are suffering from delusions of better than it used to be. blind bitch justice is white & racist, & not to be trusted. if I see that bitch caning her way down the street, I’m gonna push her mandatory minimum ass into traffic!! angry Black man is a trigger word on every daytime talk show, in every university classroom, at the Social Security office, is the trigger word for ban critical race theory, like it’s something that hasn’t been historically proven to have actually happened to us. knowing who we were, who we are, will trigger whom we come to be. trigger word is a warning to guilty cell-soldier racists who know Black folks ain’t forgot shit. angry Black man is a trigger word for chickens come home to roost. Black Lives Matter is a trigger word for radical militant outside agitator, for Panthers packing gats in the Statehouse, is the trigger for Ronnie Raygun better pray his feets don’t fail him now. are guns in Black hands the trigger word for Black folks have a right to defend themselves? what makes you think you will overcome by lawyering with their laws, praying to their God, non-violent protesting by permit, or waiting for due process to set you free? a trigger warning is July 1919 in Chicago, the Tulsa Massacre, the Rosewood Massacre, Trayvon, the Rev. Dr. MLK, Breonna, Michael, Tamir & every nigger lynched in the Red Summer of strange fruit. is a trigger word for Black folk there’s your fucking precedence—is the trigger warning of ballistic perforations. is the *Content warning for explicit language & examples of violence. |
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JOANNA FUHRMAN
330 College Avenue
After she dies, your mother moves back into your childhood home. Neither of you has lived there for 35 years but the birdhouse nightlight still lights up the dark of your childhood bedroom and in the living room the tiger flower sofa still blooms. Here there is another you: still a young child, she dances alone to scratchy records, while her parents dial the rotary phone or put away groceries upstairs. * The woman who was once your mother is no longer your mother. Is there another mother who has always lived in this house? Has she always been here, digging holes for crocus bulbs or sorting papers at her desk in the den? The other mother, the one who never left your childhood home was never your mother. The you who still lives there, the you who still sleeps with her binoculars under her pillow, she is not you. As your mother walks by the mirror in your childhood home, you see yourself within the gold frame. You are the age she was the minute before she died. Your glasses reflect clouds in the shape of a word. It’s a language neither of you understand. * In the sunlight on a cruise ship on the other side of the Earth, a mother is wearing a locket she never found a picture to fill. Or she is sitting in the backyard of your childhood home smoking a cigarette (though when she was alive she only smoked in the car in the garage with all the doors open). In kindergarten, you wrote a picture book called The Motherness of Mothers. At 6 years old, you didn’t care that “motherness” was not a real word. Or a real world. Neither did your mother. |
RIMMA KRANET
What to Do In Case of War
I was told what to do during a phone call from Dnepropetrovsk. It was Friday night. Tell them to stay off the main roads. There is a lot of artillery fire still. The soldiers at the checkpoints are very jumpy, nervous. Do not use video equipment or make any sudden moves. Make sure they put their passports in a plastic Ziplock bag on top of the dash, in plain sight. They will be asked to open their trunk and where they are going. The men will be asked to step out of the car, but not until they reach the border. Do not overload the car. What car are they driving, how much milage does it have, do they have enough gas, how many people are travelling, what are their ages, what direction are they headed, what route are they taking, did they map out the trip with caution to avoid the roads destroyed by the bombing. The bridges, did they take into consideration the bridges? Wear thermal clothing. Make sure they have a pocket full of plastic bags. If they have to get out of the car and walk, they need to wrap those around their shoes for warmth. Make sure they have a backpack in case they need to leave the car behind. Bring protein bars and peanuts. No hard-boiled eggs or kotleti. Do not bring food that takes up space. Tell your loved ones. |
ANDREA HOLLANDER
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Now That She Knows
Though it’s about to rain, she pins all her husband’s clean shirts to the line, white shoulder to white, white to blue, and so on, to the pale yellow one he wears only on special occasions, all of them lined up as if targets at a shooting range. The sky voices its deep warning once, twice. Its daggers of light pitch forth in the nearer and nearer distance, and she saunters inside to watch from the kitchen window. When the rain begins, the shirts shiver a little in unison, a kind of legless chorus line, torsos bending, tails slapping one another. |
In the downpour, sleeves lengthen, heavying at the cuffs, then swing wildly against one another, rain pelting, wind whipping them one way, twisting them another. The storm passes, the mud-splattered shirts motionless now, spent, a line of prisoners chained together, sagging, but as straight as they can lest the guard come by. She’ll leave them hanging there all day. She likes the way they look, as though their legs have been sucked all the way down into a bog. As though what’s left will soon follow. |
BEST OF THE NET NOMINATIONS for the 2022 ANTHOLOGY - POETRY
nominated by Associate Editor, Stacie M. Kiner
nominated by Associate Editor, Stacie M. Kiner
Traci Brimhall & Brynn Saito: Distance Ghazal - August 2020
Distance Ghazal
Almost music, the red-winged blackbirds and frogs in the distance
trying to summon a season’s love before summer’s distances.
A single violin singing in an empty square; necklace pearls
scattered over wet asphalt. Hard evidence, love at a distance.
The sound of the door handle, oh the beloved’s hands grow
close. The heart opens at footsteps. Even at a distance.
If I could box the wind, the warm dust, the echoing chimes
I’d fold this early summer for you, send it from a distance.
Scarves of smoke purled the grill, laughter sparking the yard.
We hail each other’s joy with masks on, keeping our distance.
Night songs: toads croaking, buzzing flies, low-pitched barking.
Poets know how to be alone: holy solitude and sounds in the distance.
The map above my desk measures shipwreck and mermaid rescue
by inches. And you, my friend, are only a thumb-width’s distance.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-18-august-2020.html
Almost music, the red-winged blackbirds and frogs in the distance
trying to summon a season’s love before summer’s distances.
A single violin singing in an empty square; necklace pearls
scattered over wet asphalt. Hard evidence, love at a distance.
The sound of the door handle, oh the beloved’s hands grow
close. The heart opens at footsteps. Even at a distance.
If I could box the wind, the warm dust, the echoing chimes
I’d fold this early summer for you, send it from a distance.
Scarves of smoke purled the grill, laughter sparking the yard.
We hail each other’s joy with masks on, keeping our distance.
Night songs: toads croaking, buzzing flies, low-pitched barking.
Poets know how to be alone: holy solitude and sounds in the distance.
The map above my desk measures shipwreck and mermaid rescue
by inches. And you, my friend, are only a thumb-width’s distance.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-18-august-2020.html
Samuel Cross: In One Hand He Had a Pitchfork - Nov 2020
In One Hand He Had a Pitchfork
The hogs aren't having any birthdays
over here, they feel the same way I do: ripe
At times I get so hungry I could kill
and clean it up and kill again,
the smell notwithstanding, the fire
always threatening to run away with the help
of the ants and the cats and here comes rain
No one will mind if you sit and pick a bone with us
but if I'm honest: I can't see you
actually in our yard like a lost flamingo
afraid to put your other foot on the ground,
thinking what you know: we have a history
smeared on napkins, traced in chalk, cried into
needlepoint, shattered over tile only to be sopped up
and left at the curb where we have
no dominion, where we are only watching out for
trucks in the shadows of leaning trees,
our fences staked against an unraveling void,
every breath drawn through a punched hole
The life you see is all the trust I could muster
withering in this gummy heat: you're welcome, even if
you've got your own padlocked crawlspace which is
familiar enough with you, I wonder who is not here
to disappear and leave you to your own invention
Me and mine will remain arrested
by the chemical sermon of sunlight
pressing each electron into the other
in service of a kinetic truth
We have one eye, and
we'd like to see you over
to celebrate a second: all we have is yours
right up until it isn't
breathing.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-19-nov-2020.html
The hogs aren't having any birthdays
over here, they feel the same way I do: ripe
At times I get so hungry I could kill
and clean it up and kill again,
the smell notwithstanding, the fire
always threatening to run away with the help
of the ants and the cats and here comes rain
No one will mind if you sit and pick a bone with us
but if I'm honest: I can't see you
actually in our yard like a lost flamingo
afraid to put your other foot on the ground,
thinking what you know: we have a history
smeared on napkins, traced in chalk, cried into
needlepoint, shattered over tile only to be sopped up
and left at the curb where we have
no dominion, where we are only watching out for
trucks in the shadows of leaning trees,
our fences staked against an unraveling void,
every breath drawn through a punched hole
The life you see is all the trust I could muster
withering in this gummy heat: you're welcome, even if
you've got your own padlocked crawlspace which is
familiar enough with you, I wonder who is not here
to disappear and leave you to your own invention
Me and mine will remain arrested
by the chemical sermon of sunlight
pressing each electron into the other
in service of a kinetic truth
We have one eye, and
we'd like to see you over
to celebrate a second: all we have is yours
right up until it isn't
breathing.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-19-nov-2020.html
AE Hines: Bohemian Rhapsody, 1991 - Nov 2020
Bohemian Rhapsody, 1991.
“Mama, life had just begun.” Queen.
When Freddie Mercury
was sweating out the fever,
fire burning up his blood,
I was twenty-one, still in college,
and dancing in a back alley bar,
a place with no street number,
no name, a place hidden
behind a steel reinforced door
so the bigots of Carolina
wouldn’t send us all up in flames.
The boy pulling me to the floor,
big torch of a man, pulled off his shirt
to brandish his Navy tattoos,
then placed my quaking hand
on the sweaty vault
of muscle and skin that shielded
the bass of his throbbing heart.
Over Mercury’s yell, he spat
the news in my ear, said he had it too,
the fire in his blood,
asked if I cared, asked
if we could both burn up
together.
News we all feared — expected.
Freddie Mercury singing out
the last lines, his voice
vibrating in our chests, his words
pouring out our drunken throats:
we college boys and midshipmen,
we married men, our wives missing us
at home, all of us burning up
together in that back alley bar,
each one sure Beelzebub did indeed
have a devil put aside just for him,
that we’d all be dead by fall,
that nothing anymore
really mattered.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-19-nov-2020.html
“Mama, life had just begun.” Queen.
When Freddie Mercury
was sweating out the fever,
fire burning up his blood,
I was twenty-one, still in college,
and dancing in a back alley bar,
a place with no street number,
no name, a place hidden
behind a steel reinforced door
so the bigots of Carolina
wouldn’t send us all up in flames.
The boy pulling me to the floor,
big torch of a man, pulled off his shirt
to brandish his Navy tattoos,
then placed my quaking hand
on the sweaty vault
of muscle and skin that shielded
the bass of his throbbing heart.
Over Mercury’s yell, he spat
the news in my ear, said he had it too,
the fire in his blood,
asked if I cared, asked
if we could both burn up
together.
News we all feared — expected.
Freddie Mercury singing out
the last lines, his voice
vibrating in our chests, his words
pouring out our drunken throats:
we college boys and midshipmen,
we married men, our wives missing us
at home, all of us burning up
together in that back alley bar,
each one sure Beelzebub did indeed
have a devil put aside just for him,
that we’d all be dead by fall,
that nothing anymore
really mattered.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-19-nov-2020.html
Cynthia Atkins: A Goddess in Purple Rain - Feb 2021
A Goddess in Purple Rain
Behind glass, a lady is lit-up inside the laundro-mat.
She’s folding sheets, pink curlers of baroque
in her hair, singing and creasing
a t-shirt with sequins. Her arms and hips stretch out
to a body of air—the room filling with sound.
And I am humming inside her—inside her body,
burning for shelter from the abyss
of my alone. Rounding a corner
in a car, I am passing by, hearing “Purple Rain”
on the radio—I almost can taste
the sweat on the brow of the boy I danced with
so many years ago—It tasted like dry toast
or the brunt of hurting. Listen to the sky imploring,
Come as you are—Alone to the last concert, to light matches
in a spell-bound crowd—Remorse of loving
a rock star we can never own. And now the lady
in the laundromat is swaying, and I am swaying
with her from my car—Maybe she is dancing with her son,
going off to boot camp, or the ends of the earth.
I’m thinking of my son at three,
standing on the kitchen table in a wet diaper,
banging music from a wooden spoon.
This is that concert, where you lit a match
to your own bag of wounds. You felt like
you belonged, a citizen.
Alive as a hackle of girls at the May prom.
Look at the moon, hanging like a shoe
to throw its heel of light
on the page or an empty field.
We are all in the body of this night, cogent as a judge
who loves the law. The lady in the laundromat
carries the load to her car, unpins her hair.
I don’t want to be alone tonight. The stars allow
me to follow her— we are passing the town,
rooftops are hunkering down to sing
lullabies to the young, and the night
is a stranger touching my sleeve.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-20-feb-2021.html
Behind glass, a lady is lit-up inside the laundro-mat.
She’s folding sheets, pink curlers of baroque
in her hair, singing and creasing
a t-shirt with sequins. Her arms and hips stretch out
to a body of air—the room filling with sound.
And I am humming inside her—inside her body,
burning for shelter from the abyss
of my alone. Rounding a corner
in a car, I am passing by, hearing “Purple Rain”
on the radio—I almost can taste
the sweat on the brow of the boy I danced with
so many years ago—It tasted like dry toast
or the brunt of hurting. Listen to the sky imploring,
Come as you are—Alone to the last concert, to light matches
in a spell-bound crowd—Remorse of loving
a rock star we can never own. And now the lady
in the laundromat is swaying, and I am swaying
with her from my car—Maybe she is dancing with her son,
going off to boot camp, or the ends of the earth.
I’m thinking of my son at three,
standing on the kitchen table in a wet diaper,
banging music from a wooden spoon.
This is that concert, where you lit a match
to your own bag of wounds. You felt like
you belonged, a citizen.
Alive as a hackle of girls at the May prom.
Look at the moon, hanging like a shoe
to throw its heel of light
on the page or an empty field.
We are all in the body of this night, cogent as a judge
who loves the law. The lady in the laundromat
carries the load to her car, unpins her hair.
I don’t want to be alone tonight. The stars allow
me to follow her— we are passing the town,
rooftops are hunkering down to sing
lullabies to the young, and the night
is a stranger touching my sleeve.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-20-feb-2021.html
Beth Gordon: Hydrology (iii) - Feb 2021
Hydrology (iii)
One month after the first birthday you never had, fourteen new species of dancing frog were
discovered, the tiniest no bigger than a honey bee, as green as last week’s rain. Today a swarm of
dragonflies in a triangle, cerulean blue & buzzing like frogs & I cut a perfect rectangle of cake
while you blew out the candles. Next week or ten years ago & your mother planted marijuana
seeds in the science room terrarium where mud frogs hibernated all winter. I’m older today than I
will be tomorrow, reciting the names of cities & oceans, counting the times I’ve seen your blue
sky face in airports & subway trains, knowing somewhere those frogs are always lost & singing.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-20-feb-2021.html
One month after the first birthday you never had, fourteen new species of dancing frog were
discovered, the tiniest no bigger than a honey bee, as green as last week’s rain. Today a swarm of
dragonflies in a triangle, cerulean blue & buzzing like frogs & I cut a perfect rectangle of cake
while you blew out the candles. Next week or ten years ago & your mother planted marijuana
seeds in the science room terrarium where mud frogs hibernated all winter. I’m older today than I
will be tomorrow, reciting the names of cities & oceans, counting the times I’ve seen your blue
sky face in airports & subway trains, knowing somewhere those frogs are always lost & singing.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-20-feb-2021.html
Grace Cavalieri: The Birth and Death of It - May 2021
The Birth and Death of It
We knew from the beginning it was a glass factory refracting
fragmented versions of our bodies a hologram
splintered like crystals the sparkle the prism
then came music and then prose or prose first
words like the wind incarnating itself
to the very ends of obsession with
the breaking up of bodies but
always together in mind
with a rhythmic uncertainty silence then speech
the shaping of sound filaments and the experience of tiny blue flowers
in a white teacup this is the language of artists who are
always examining their work
we took advantage of the fact that we were human
with accommodations
butterflies in our pockets and images of butterflies
that could not last we traded in the dark
but the landscapes the dangerous desires
then the joys of sailing
what would we not surrender to get what we wanted
what moon would we not reach what natural mysteries would we not enter
sometimes we sat under a simple tree to be with the sun
and where else was there to sit
other times we had the habit of lighting up the sky red and blue
do not think what I say here matters
it is just that I am trying to tell you that a shared recognition
made us free of the world and we were walking in its water
until we were blind with it
and then what about whiteness and what is pure
and what is its vision and what dissolves into flesh
the impulse to make everything a dream
morning danger noon oranges warmed in the sun
night supper by a flawless lake
now I see the wit and energy of it all
the red carnations the house on the hill
the cemetery with its white teeth I realize it is unnatural
to talk about fallen evening trips or glorious ferry rides
a language of marriage looking for itself over and over
crystalline realities like paintings taking too long to finish
I am only saying there once stood a girl alongside the stream and she entered.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-21-poetry-may-2021.html
We knew from the beginning it was a glass factory refracting
fragmented versions of our bodies a hologram
splintered like crystals the sparkle the prism
then came music and then prose or prose first
words like the wind incarnating itself
to the very ends of obsession with
the breaking up of bodies but
always together in mind
with a rhythmic uncertainty silence then speech
the shaping of sound filaments and the experience of tiny blue flowers
in a white teacup this is the language of artists who are
always examining their work
we took advantage of the fact that we were human
with accommodations
butterflies in our pockets and images of butterflies
that could not last we traded in the dark
but the landscapes the dangerous desires
then the joys of sailing
what would we not surrender to get what we wanted
what moon would we not reach what natural mysteries would we not enter
sometimes we sat under a simple tree to be with the sun
and where else was there to sit
other times we had the habit of lighting up the sky red and blue
do not think what I say here matters
it is just that I am trying to tell you that a shared recognition
made us free of the world and we were walking in its water
until we were blind with it
and then what about whiteness and what is pure
and what is its vision and what dissolves into flesh
the impulse to make everything a dream
morning danger noon oranges warmed in the sun
night supper by a flawless lake
now I see the wit and energy of it all
the red carnations the house on the hill
the cemetery with its white teeth I realize it is unnatural
to talk about fallen evening trips or glorious ferry rides
a language of marriage looking for itself over and over
crystalline realities like paintings taking too long to finish
I am only saying there once stood a girl alongside the stream and she entered.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-21-poetry-may-2021.html
Best of the Net FLASH nominated by Flash Fiction Editor, Francine Witte
Sarah Freligh: You Come Here Often - May 2021
You Come Here Often
And often alone since your best friend joined AA though she still calls you on the regular to
remind you about her sobriety and how grateful she is to wake up in the morning without a SWAT
team swarming her brain. She swears you to secrecy, promise not to tell?, before she tells you about a
woman in her group who, since getting sober, often has sex dreams in Technicolor about a bag boy
at Wegmans who’s half her age—hell, he’s younger than her youngest son—and now the woman
can’t look the bag boy in the face when he says, hello, may I be of some assistance, without thinking of
fur handcuffs and the word throb, and your best friend tells you again that you can’t tell anyone, not a
soul, and of course you don’t because who would you tell?
You come here often and often you wonder why you do. The bar stinks of smoke and
polyester BO from the softball teams that hang out here from April to November, the draft beer is
always flat. Also, the television chops characters into legless torsos and topless legs and unless the
Phillies are playing, the television is always tuned to a Law and Order episode and there’s something
about a legless/headless Lennie Briscoe that always undoes you, maybe because Lennie, like your
brother, is dead but lives on and on in reruns.
You come here so often that Jeff the Bartender has your beer poured before you sit down, a
20-ounce draft with just enough foam to moustache your upper lip on first swig, enough sparkle to
scald your throat. You often think that draft beer is like so many of the men you’ve known--
delicious on first sip, lukewarmer thereafter, bitter toward the end—and yet you go on ordering
drafts hoping that the next one will be different, each sip as delicious as the first one.
You often don’t go home because what’s home about it anyway—a tiny apartment with a
sinkful of dirty dishes, fist of hair clogging the shower’s drain, a scraggly orange cat that hangs out
on your back stoop, howling his terrible need and hissing when you get too close. Often you find
mice guts or a bunny heads on the steps, bloody evidence of animal love. Sometimes, but not often,
you go home with a guy who smells like your brother did, of warm flannel and corn chips, a guy
who has the same nervous curl to his hair. Sometimes you’ll smoke a bowl on the roof deck of a
rowhouse and stone out on the Philadelphia skyline, on the red PSFS sign burning the night and
beyond it the headlights of cars on the bridges stitching states together, on the lightless dark that’s
the Delaware River. And often if you’re high enough, you’ll wonder out loud why it’s the Delaware
and not the Pennsylvania River or even the New Jersey, and too often the guy will say Because it’s the
Delaware, dummy, instead of tuning into his own high the way your brother would.
Sometimes but not often you tell him that your brother is dead, that he was shot in a holdup
at a 7/11, that his last words were Is Sierra Nevada on sale? That he died in a strip mall. Sometimes
you wonder how someone can be here one second and gone the next, and often you wish there were
reruns.
Always you cry.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-21-flash-may-2021.html
And often alone since your best friend joined AA though she still calls you on the regular to
remind you about her sobriety and how grateful she is to wake up in the morning without a SWAT
team swarming her brain. She swears you to secrecy, promise not to tell?, before she tells you about a
woman in her group who, since getting sober, often has sex dreams in Technicolor about a bag boy
at Wegmans who’s half her age—hell, he’s younger than her youngest son—and now the woman
can’t look the bag boy in the face when he says, hello, may I be of some assistance, without thinking of
fur handcuffs and the word throb, and your best friend tells you again that you can’t tell anyone, not a
soul, and of course you don’t because who would you tell?
You come here often and often you wonder why you do. The bar stinks of smoke and
polyester BO from the softball teams that hang out here from April to November, the draft beer is
always flat. Also, the television chops characters into legless torsos and topless legs and unless the
Phillies are playing, the television is always tuned to a Law and Order episode and there’s something
about a legless/headless Lennie Briscoe that always undoes you, maybe because Lennie, like your
brother, is dead but lives on and on in reruns.
You come here so often that Jeff the Bartender has your beer poured before you sit down, a
20-ounce draft with just enough foam to moustache your upper lip on first swig, enough sparkle to
scald your throat. You often think that draft beer is like so many of the men you’ve known--
delicious on first sip, lukewarmer thereafter, bitter toward the end—and yet you go on ordering
drafts hoping that the next one will be different, each sip as delicious as the first one.
You often don’t go home because what’s home about it anyway—a tiny apartment with a
sinkful of dirty dishes, fist of hair clogging the shower’s drain, a scraggly orange cat that hangs out
on your back stoop, howling his terrible need and hissing when you get too close. Often you find
mice guts or a bunny heads on the steps, bloody evidence of animal love. Sometimes, but not often,
you go home with a guy who smells like your brother did, of warm flannel and corn chips, a guy
who has the same nervous curl to his hair. Sometimes you’ll smoke a bowl on the roof deck of a
rowhouse and stone out on the Philadelphia skyline, on the red PSFS sign burning the night and
beyond it the headlights of cars on the bridges stitching states together, on the lightless dark that’s
the Delaware River. And often if you’re high enough, you’ll wonder out loud why it’s the Delaware
and not the Pennsylvania River or even the New Jersey, and too often the guy will say Because it’s the
Delaware, dummy, instead of tuning into his own high the way your brother would.
Sometimes but not often you tell him that your brother is dead, that he was shot in a holdup
at a 7/11, that his last words were Is Sierra Nevada on sale? That he died in a strip mall. Sometimes
you wonder how someone can be here one second and gone the next, and often you wish there were
reruns.
Always you cry.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-21-flash-may-2021.html
Robert Scotellaro-Chickens in the Parlor - May 2021
Chickens in the Parlor
Moat In Lieu of a Welcome Mat
When my mother felt her life had become drab and spark-smothered, her lipsticks became redder and redder.
And she built a moat around the house. Each day when my father came home from
scrubbing graffiti off subway station walls, he’d swim through a clinging storm of mosquitoes to
get to the front door with one hand paddling, the other holding his bottle of whiskey above the
brine.
Old MacDonald
Mother sprinkled feed on the rug for the chickens in the “parlor” (What she called that tiny room
with a convertible sofa in it.) The chickens hopped up onto the furniture knocking things over. I
was young and didn’t mind their ceaseless pecking. My father found a burial plot inside the
newspaper and started digging, so he never noticed the new dress Mother was wearing or the
candy apple red high heels. “This is what you get when you act like Old MacDonald,” Mother
said, sweeping her arm broadly and causing a few chickens to flutter feckless wings. “Ee-i-ee-i-
o,” she said.
Steam Scream
Mother rid the house of chickens, and Dad learned to cha-cha-cha. (It’s strange to think how old
they seemed then—how young they really were.) They were in the kitchen dancing when the
teapot started screaming. Father turned, but Mother said, “Leave it.” That she didn’t want to
stop for a single minute, that those red high heels were out of their coma. She was wearing a
flared sundress and Father had on his grey razor-creased trousers with high cuffs. I found a
quarter once in one of those cuffs as they draped over a chair. It was an archeological highpoint.
Father seemed to like the way that dress bell-shaped as she twirled, and the feel of it—the tea
kettle, not so much. A record skipped on the turntable, was stuck in a brassy repetitious snippet
over and over… Father turned again, sweating at that point.
“Leave it,” Mother said.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-21-flash-may-2021.html
Moat In Lieu of a Welcome Mat
When my mother felt her life had become drab and spark-smothered, her lipsticks became redder and redder.
And she built a moat around the house. Each day when my father came home from
scrubbing graffiti off subway station walls, he’d swim through a clinging storm of mosquitoes to
get to the front door with one hand paddling, the other holding his bottle of whiskey above the
brine.
Old MacDonald
Mother sprinkled feed on the rug for the chickens in the “parlor” (What she called that tiny room
with a convertible sofa in it.) The chickens hopped up onto the furniture knocking things over. I
was young and didn’t mind their ceaseless pecking. My father found a burial plot inside the
newspaper and started digging, so he never noticed the new dress Mother was wearing or the
candy apple red high heels. “This is what you get when you act like Old MacDonald,” Mother
said, sweeping her arm broadly and causing a few chickens to flutter feckless wings. “Ee-i-ee-i-
o,” she said.
Steam Scream
Mother rid the house of chickens, and Dad learned to cha-cha-cha. (It’s strange to think how old
they seemed then—how young they really were.) They were in the kitchen dancing when the
teapot started screaming. Father turned, but Mother said, “Leave it.” That she didn’t want to
stop for a single minute, that those red high heels were out of their coma. She was wearing a
flared sundress and Father had on his grey razor-creased trousers with high cuffs. I found a
quarter once in one of those cuffs as they draped over a chair. It was an archeological highpoint.
Father seemed to like the way that dress bell-shaped as she twirled, and the feel of it—the tea
kettle, not so much. A record skipped on the turntable, was stuck in a brassy repetitious snippet
over and over… Father turned again, sweating at that point.
“Leave it,” Mother said.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/issue-21-flash-may-2021.html
Best of the Net Creative Non-Fiction nominated by Essay Editor, Freesia McKee
Yael Aldana: "How to Be a Writer: My Twenty-Year Plan" - Feb 2021
How to Be a Writer: My Twenty-Year Plan
First, Fall in Love with Writing
You might be utterly irritated when you fall in love with writing. You might be a sophomore in college hurrying to catch a bus at Grand Central Station back to school. Your mother might have given you a fifty-dollar bill that you need to change immediately to catch your bus to Massachusetts. You might run into the Barnes & Nobel and grab the cheapest book, a paperback Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, a whole $8.99, almost $10 with tax. Too much money, but you are in a hurry; the bus is coming any minute.
You buy the book and scramble to the bus stop with a few minutes to spare. You settle in for your five-hour ride to Massachusetts and crack open the cursed book. You start reading. This book is different than your usual Nancy Drew fare. Atwood’s words ebb, flow, and brush up against each other with an unfamiliar beauty. You love to read, but you read for the stories. Writing was just a means of telling stories and never stood out to you before. Atwood’s prose is breathtaking.
That same semester, you might be assigned Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a book so beautifully written it will shake you. You see that writing can be more than a story. Prose can have a beauty and power of its own. You might consume Atwood’s novels and stories: The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Life Before Man, Wilderness Tips. You might make some tentative forays into your own prose. If your university doesn’t have creative writing classes, you might cajole your favorite lit teacher into letting you do a writing independent study.
You might write a story about an awkward girl walking through the woods. You might write a play that is performed at your school. You might write poetry about rocks and water.
You might graduate with a painting degree and return to your Brooklyn neighborhood. You might keep writing, in a journal now, glowing descriptions of your everyday life, walking through dappled light in your park, your mother shuffling her paper bag full of laundry.
You might write on the subway coming home from your dead-end job at an art supply store. And then from your dead-end job at a bookstore. On a warm Friday in a sweltering subway car, you might scribble down, “I am a writer, how exciting.” But what does it mean to be a writer, besides writing in your journal? You don’t know.
Forget About Being a Writer
Life might be pressing on you. You might want to move out of your mother’s house. In New York City, that would mean leaving your dead-end jobs and making more money. You might parlay your painting degree into a graphic design career. You might still write terrible poems and stories that you never finish. You might move to Florida. You might start a DIY blog telling people how to refinish furniture and do small craft projects but forget all about being a writer.
Discover a Lost Grandmother
Your family origins might always have been murky. Both yourself and your birth mother might have been adopted with few facts available. DNA might lead you to a lost grandmother who had six children, lost two to death and two to adoption. She might have died ten years before you find her, and you might decide to tell her dramatic life story. She deserves that. But how could you? Where would you start? You might decide to go back to school, but for what? Her life wasn’t fiction, history maybe? While you are researching schools, you might be recruited by Florida Atlantic University’s Women Studies department. You could write about your grandmother there.
You might learn how to do research and write academic papers. Academic writing is notoriously dry and unappealing. But during the process, you might fall in love with writing again. You might delight in and sneaking unique and playful word combinations into your papers.
Decide to Be a Professor
Your professors might complement your writing, and one might suggest that you take some English courses and consider teaching English. But you might develop a plan to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology, write about your grandmother, and become a professor.
After you have been in graduate school for a year, you might sit down with your advisor to discuss your next steps and potential Ph.D. schools. She might ignore the list you have prepared, tilt her head down, and look over her glasses at you. She might say, “You are too good a writer for that.”
You might laugh politely and point out that your favorite program is in Florida, which means that you won’t have to move.
She might chuck one of your papers at you and say, “All of those lovely little turns of phrase you love to do are going to be trained out of you. You can’t write like this and do a Ph.D. You will quit because they won’t stop until all your little flourishes are gone.” She might sit back in her chair. “You are a writer. Look into creative writing programs. You can still write about your grandmother, and you’ll have more freedom.”
You might be shocked. You might sit in her office and cry from frustration. You might be crushed. You might have thought long and hard about your potential future, and you might have done a lot of research. You might be furious. You know what is best for you, don’t you? For the next few months, you might stew and think. Maybe you should listen to her. She has been around longer than you.
Write a Memoir
Meanwhile, you have a senior project to write. You might still be in the middle of researching your grandmother and not be ready to write her story. So, you might write a memoir about your fragrant childhood on a small Caribbean island, about your adopted mother who yelled because she loved you, your grandmother who made you sugar water and taught you how to sweep with a broom.
Compared to your idols Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison, your efforts might seem grossly inadequate. You might walk into the final review of your work, your thesis defense, convinced that your project won’t be approved and that you won’t graduate. Instead, your committee, three female professors who you revere, revel in the story you wrote. They ask you what happened to your birth mother. Is your grandmother still alive? They happily approve your project and graduation without asking you to change a word.
You are a writer.
Before you leave the room, Dr. B., the professor who had recruited you into the Women Studies program, looks at you and asks, “Are you going to continue this story?”
“Yes,” you say automatically.
“Good, the world needs it,” she says.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/essays.html
First, Fall in Love with Writing
You might be utterly irritated when you fall in love with writing. You might be a sophomore in college hurrying to catch a bus at Grand Central Station back to school. Your mother might have given you a fifty-dollar bill that you need to change immediately to catch your bus to Massachusetts. You might run into the Barnes & Nobel and grab the cheapest book, a paperback Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, a whole $8.99, almost $10 with tax. Too much money, but you are in a hurry; the bus is coming any minute.
You buy the book and scramble to the bus stop with a few minutes to spare. You settle in for your five-hour ride to Massachusetts and crack open the cursed book. You start reading. This book is different than your usual Nancy Drew fare. Atwood’s words ebb, flow, and brush up against each other with an unfamiliar beauty. You love to read, but you read for the stories. Writing was just a means of telling stories and never stood out to you before. Atwood’s prose is breathtaking.
That same semester, you might be assigned Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a book so beautifully written it will shake you. You see that writing can be more than a story. Prose can have a beauty and power of its own. You might consume Atwood’s novels and stories: The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Life Before Man, Wilderness Tips. You might make some tentative forays into your own prose. If your university doesn’t have creative writing classes, you might cajole your favorite lit teacher into letting you do a writing independent study.
You might write a story about an awkward girl walking through the woods. You might write a play that is performed at your school. You might write poetry about rocks and water.
You might graduate with a painting degree and return to your Brooklyn neighborhood. You might keep writing, in a journal now, glowing descriptions of your everyday life, walking through dappled light in your park, your mother shuffling her paper bag full of laundry.
You might write on the subway coming home from your dead-end job at an art supply store. And then from your dead-end job at a bookstore. On a warm Friday in a sweltering subway car, you might scribble down, “I am a writer, how exciting.” But what does it mean to be a writer, besides writing in your journal? You don’t know.
Forget About Being a Writer
Life might be pressing on you. You might want to move out of your mother’s house. In New York City, that would mean leaving your dead-end jobs and making more money. You might parlay your painting degree into a graphic design career. You might still write terrible poems and stories that you never finish. You might move to Florida. You might start a DIY blog telling people how to refinish furniture and do small craft projects but forget all about being a writer.
Discover a Lost Grandmother
Your family origins might always have been murky. Both yourself and your birth mother might have been adopted with few facts available. DNA might lead you to a lost grandmother who had six children, lost two to death and two to adoption. She might have died ten years before you find her, and you might decide to tell her dramatic life story. She deserves that. But how could you? Where would you start? You might decide to go back to school, but for what? Her life wasn’t fiction, history maybe? While you are researching schools, you might be recruited by Florida Atlantic University’s Women Studies department. You could write about your grandmother there.
You might learn how to do research and write academic papers. Academic writing is notoriously dry and unappealing. But during the process, you might fall in love with writing again. You might delight in and sneaking unique and playful word combinations into your papers.
Decide to Be a Professor
Your professors might complement your writing, and one might suggest that you take some English courses and consider teaching English. But you might develop a plan to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology, write about your grandmother, and become a professor.
After you have been in graduate school for a year, you might sit down with your advisor to discuss your next steps and potential Ph.D. schools. She might ignore the list you have prepared, tilt her head down, and look over her glasses at you. She might say, “You are too good a writer for that.”
You might laugh politely and point out that your favorite program is in Florida, which means that you won’t have to move.
She might chuck one of your papers at you and say, “All of those lovely little turns of phrase you love to do are going to be trained out of you. You can’t write like this and do a Ph.D. You will quit because they won’t stop until all your little flourishes are gone.” She might sit back in her chair. “You are a writer. Look into creative writing programs. You can still write about your grandmother, and you’ll have more freedom.”
You might be shocked. You might sit in her office and cry from frustration. You might be crushed. You might have thought long and hard about your potential future, and you might have done a lot of research. You might be furious. You know what is best for you, don’t you? For the next few months, you might stew and think. Maybe you should listen to her. She has been around longer than you.
Write a Memoir
Meanwhile, you have a senior project to write. You might still be in the middle of researching your grandmother and not be ready to write her story. So, you might write a memoir about your fragrant childhood on a small Caribbean island, about your adopted mother who yelled because she loved you, your grandmother who made you sugar water and taught you how to sweep with a broom.
Compared to your idols Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison, your efforts might seem grossly inadequate. You might walk into the final review of your work, your thesis defense, convinced that your project won’t be approved and that you won’t graduate. Instead, your committee, three female professors who you revere, revel in the story you wrote. They ask you what happened to your birth mother. Is your grandmother still alive? They happily approve your project and graduation without asking you to change a word.
You are a writer.
Before you leave the room, Dr. B., the professor who had recruited you into the Women Studies program, looks at you and asks, “Are you going to continue this story?”
“Yes,” you say automatically.
“Good, the world needs it,” she says.
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/essays.html
Bryon Cherry: "Interior Reflections from the Outskirts" - Feb 2021
Interior Reflections from the Outskirts
The blank page. No smudges from sharpened pencils or a favorite gliding pen. Or perhaps it’s the electronic blank page. No etchings from the ones and zeroes of programming transmitted from electricity in brain through fingers onto computer keys. This is where we writers are equals. It is of desperate import for my psychological make up to lay words end upon end until they wrest a reaction out of humans who I know or do not know. I often wonder how much of this drive toward expression is due to expressed genes from the folks that I am descended from. I know that I write on the fringiest fringe of writers. Part of it is that I dip into many creative outlets like music and visual art (very bad visual art) so I think I tend to feel like an outsider in each one.
I feel untethered. I do not have a natural cohort in trying to organize letters into meaning through force of stubborn will. Until three years ago, I had never shown anyone else my work, never mind thought about reading poems or stories out loud to an audience. A chance encounter with a woman at one of my music gigs changed that. When I got done playing my show, the random woman randomly asked if, in addition to making music, I also made poems. How could she have known that I did? I told her that I did and she invited me to read at a show she was curating. Since then I have become a small part of beautiful community of writers in the amorphous and striving, big yet small city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’ve gone on to peddle my poems in dank jazz bars, cultural institutions like Woodland Pattern and I’ve even guest lectured at a few colleges around Wisconsin. Yet, even now with so many readings behind me, I can feel like I somehow got to the party too late. I feel like I’m playing catch up. Playing catch up to what, I don’t know but if I am being vulnerable (and more than anything, I want to be vulnerable in my offerings) that is often how I feel.
It might turn out that any ambition aimed at the writing life may be foolish. It cracks the door wide enough for failure to saunter in. Almost makes some form of failure foreordained. I’m old enough to know that failure and success are mainly self-imposed concepts but young enough to still place myself at the mercy of those ephemeral notions to some degree anyway. I often dig into the ideas of Buddhism. Those ideas whisper in koans, that attachment is the root of all suffering. Intellectually, this makes irrefutable sense. In day to day practice, I am hopelessly attached to meaningful and dynamic expositions rolling unencumbered from the about three-pound mass of matter that rests in my head into this reality. Attached to making something where once the blank page screamed nothing. Attached, clenching and unceasingly to creativity.
There is a large amount of ambiguity and serendipity in regards to creative success anyway. Yes, there are National Book Awards, but what does that even really mean? That a particular group of divine and flawed humans liked your work, or that your work just happened to poke at some zeitgeist? In the end, it seems to be a competition against the most recent ghost of yourself as a writer who looms with importance. Even that though seems shortsighted to me sometimes. A life evolves and folds onto itself and the universe has little concern for your idea of betterment. That is all to say that sometimes just writing a non-sensical list of words feels like I’ve become Michael Jordan in 1998 sitting with six championship rings. I try to convince myself that it is hard enough to write without the added pressure of a goal. Especially if one is unsure that once that goal is achieved, there will still be the clarity to be bold enough to forget about that goal and keep writing from truth.
Then there is the navigation of the gatekeepers. It’s not only that there are gatekeepers, it’s more so that it seems like these gatekeepers also speak a different language from me. Then there’s the very real idea that I’m not sure if the honeyed land they guard will make me a better writer. I mean, after all, is that not what this is about? Otherwise, why the torture of blank page after bemoaned blank page if not for the belief that some effort, any effort really, will take you further along some indecipherable track where words become subjugated to the writer’s persistence? One must believe that they are improving in some way in order to continue. There must be a belief that letters and words and phrases will, on occasion, dance conscripted under the iron reign of the writer’s ornamented magical scepter, namely their expanding mind. Dance conscripted so that the writer’s interior becomes real like a statue carved delicately from unforgiving stone.
I want to believe that this fringe writer’s life does not leave me frayed, frizzled, and frazzled, but I still fight the notion that writing is an elusive lover. In fall of 2019, I made a big decision to try to go back to school to get my MFA. This was to be an investment in my word progression possibilities. I actually did not harbor any illusions that an MFA would grant me a career in writing. I did, however, want to have focused time to learn and plumb the depths of my attempts at art. Then came March of 2020 and we all know what a minuscule viral contagion did to many best laid plans worldwide. With the uncertainties of the pandemic, I made the decision to be a stay at home dad, and with that, I said goodbye to the MFA, hopefully just for now, to care for my two children who are both careening and bubbling beautifully under the age of five. Obviously, there is much joy in that arrangement, but it is tempered by wistful feelings for the other totem outside of my family that elicits feelings in me.
Yet, through all of that sadness, I have not stopped writing. In fact, writing is the uninterrupted, invisible chain that I’ve held myself breathlessly against when mountains crumbled into sand around me. It was there in joyous times where words almost made me levitate, when I could feel the ancestors communing with me. As fringe and at times frayed that I may feel as a writer, I must remember the truth of the situation. Many of those ancestors were not allowed to read or write by codified laws. I have a voice and a clarion call that I am following. I have no desire but to utilize those blessings in holy service to untold numbers of people who were silenced, whose DNA runs through me to say, “Here I am. Someday here and gone but I, too, lived.”
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/essays.html
The blank page. No smudges from sharpened pencils or a favorite gliding pen. Or perhaps it’s the electronic blank page. No etchings from the ones and zeroes of programming transmitted from electricity in brain through fingers onto computer keys. This is where we writers are equals. It is of desperate import for my psychological make up to lay words end upon end until they wrest a reaction out of humans who I know or do not know. I often wonder how much of this drive toward expression is due to expressed genes from the folks that I am descended from. I know that I write on the fringiest fringe of writers. Part of it is that I dip into many creative outlets like music and visual art (very bad visual art) so I think I tend to feel like an outsider in each one.
I feel untethered. I do not have a natural cohort in trying to organize letters into meaning through force of stubborn will. Until three years ago, I had never shown anyone else my work, never mind thought about reading poems or stories out loud to an audience. A chance encounter with a woman at one of my music gigs changed that. When I got done playing my show, the random woman randomly asked if, in addition to making music, I also made poems. How could she have known that I did? I told her that I did and she invited me to read at a show she was curating. Since then I have become a small part of beautiful community of writers in the amorphous and striving, big yet small city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’ve gone on to peddle my poems in dank jazz bars, cultural institutions like Woodland Pattern and I’ve even guest lectured at a few colleges around Wisconsin. Yet, even now with so many readings behind me, I can feel like I somehow got to the party too late. I feel like I’m playing catch up. Playing catch up to what, I don’t know but if I am being vulnerable (and more than anything, I want to be vulnerable in my offerings) that is often how I feel.
It might turn out that any ambition aimed at the writing life may be foolish. It cracks the door wide enough for failure to saunter in. Almost makes some form of failure foreordained. I’m old enough to know that failure and success are mainly self-imposed concepts but young enough to still place myself at the mercy of those ephemeral notions to some degree anyway. I often dig into the ideas of Buddhism. Those ideas whisper in koans, that attachment is the root of all suffering. Intellectually, this makes irrefutable sense. In day to day practice, I am hopelessly attached to meaningful and dynamic expositions rolling unencumbered from the about three-pound mass of matter that rests in my head into this reality. Attached to making something where once the blank page screamed nothing. Attached, clenching and unceasingly to creativity.
There is a large amount of ambiguity and serendipity in regards to creative success anyway. Yes, there are National Book Awards, but what does that even really mean? That a particular group of divine and flawed humans liked your work, or that your work just happened to poke at some zeitgeist? In the end, it seems to be a competition against the most recent ghost of yourself as a writer who looms with importance. Even that though seems shortsighted to me sometimes. A life evolves and folds onto itself and the universe has little concern for your idea of betterment. That is all to say that sometimes just writing a non-sensical list of words feels like I’ve become Michael Jordan in 1998 sitting with six championship rings. I try to convince myself that it is hard enough to write without the added pressure of a goal. Especially if one is unsure that once that goal is achieved, there will still be the clarity to be bold enough to forget about that goal and keep writing from truth.
Then there is the navigation of the gatekeepers. It’s not only that there are gatekeepers, it’s more so that it seems like these gatekeepers also speak a different language from me. Then there’s the very real idea that I’m not sure if the honeyed land they guard will make me a better writer. I mean, after all, is that not what this is about? Otherwise, why the torture of blank page after bemoaned blank page if not for the belief that some effort, any effort really, will take you further along some indecipherable track where words become subjugated to the writer’s persistence? One must believe that they are improving in some way in order to continue. There must be a belief that letters and words and phrases will, on occasion, dance conscripted under the iron reign of the writer’s ornamented magical scepter, namely their expanding mind. Dance conscripted so that the writer’s interior becomes real like a statue carved delicately from unforgiving stone.
I want to believe that this fringe writer’s life does not leave me frayed, frizzled, and frazzled, but I still fight the notion that writing is an elusive lover. In fall of 2019, I made a big decision to try to go back to school to get my MFA. This was to be an investment in my word progression possibilities. I actually did not harbor any illusions that an MFA would grant me a career in writing. I did, however, want to have focused time to learn and plumb the depths of my attempts at art. Then came March of 2020 and we all know what a minuscule viral contagion did to many best laid plans worldwide. With the uncertainties of the pandemic, I made the decision to be a stay at home dad, and with that, I said goodbye to the MFA, hopefully just for now, to care for my two children who are both careening and bubbling beautifully under the age of five. Obviously, there is much joy in that arrangement, but it is tempered by wistful feelings for the other totem outside of my family that elicits feelings in me.
Yet, through all of that sadness, I have not stopped writing. In fact, writing is the uninterrupted, invisible chain that I’ve held myself breathlessly against when mountains crumbled into sand around me. It was there in joyous times where words almost made me levitate, when I could feel the ancestors communing with me. As fringe and at times frayed that I may feel as a writer, I must remember the truth of the situation. Many of those ancestors were not allowed to read or write by codified laws. I have a voice and a clarion call that I am following. I have no desire but to utilize those blessings in holy service to untold numbers of people who were silenced, whose DNA runs through me to say, “Here I am. Someday here and gone but I, too, lived.”
https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/essays.html
Best of the Net Artwork nominated by Visual Arts Editor, Kristine Snodgrass
Dixie Denman Junius: "Random Thoughts" - Feb 2021 https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com/mainphp.html
