So many suitcases

Issue 11 of NOÖ Journal is up, and I’m very happy to have my story, “Everyone the Same, But Not At Once,” included. It’s an awesome issue altogether, including work from Donna Vitucci, Sasha Fletcher, Erin Elizabeth Smith, Dennis Cooper, and a collaboration between Dobby Gibson and Matt Hart.

Chinchillas

Chinchilla is one of the most costly and fragile of furs, and is best suited to a brunette with a good complexion.

It’s upsetting.

Over the moon

My poem about expiring, “LA Confidences,” is a semi-finalist for Flatmancrooked’s Poetry Prize, and will be published in the Flatmancrooked Volume of Contemporary Poetics along with the 44 other semi-finalists plus a few well-known poets like Li-Young Lee, Eleni Sikelianos, and Forrest Gander. I am beside myself, and so happy for ana c.‘s original inspiration.

MABEL

I have a new story, Even the Smallest, up at the always fresh Wigleaf. Plus a postcard.

Beehive is sick of all your poetry bullshit

Beehive Magazine has sent out a new call for submissions, and it goes a little something like this:

We need stuff to publish on the website and we are sick of all your poetry bullshit.

Here are the new guidelines:

If you think your piece of writing is profound or beautiful or zen or ironically unimportant or whatever, we don’t want it.

What Beehive is seeking is the stupidest irrelevant bullshit you have ever written/drawn/taken a picture of (whatevs). This means your dumb drawings during class, the syntaxy drippings of your blacked-out mind, space aliens, blood splatter, stuff you obviously didn’t write, pictures of your children (or other people’s children), pornography, scanned objects, failed craigslist ads, essays with all your teacher’s corrections scribbled on top, a list of all your bathroom contents, blueprints, schematics, graphs, charts, crayon drawings.

Really just anything you don’t care about.

The deadline is right now.

Sounds good. I like a lot of the stuff they have already, by folks like Alexandra Lukens, Michelle Puckett, Alexandra Ran, Kyle Hemmings, and especially Theresa Stefeniak of which I further post a sample:

Disfortunate
Theresa Stefaniak

tell me about your osmosis

about getting gobbled up by weather

I want to breathe wet

a slight chance of rain showers

in the end, bacon won the prize

katana swords make men (into) dinner

he’s going to bring cool catness back

baby loves digable planets

what about the assemblage of gingerbread?

Shakespeare takes a brand new job

if nothing foes wrong against horse thieves

or the dignified quality of an opera box

the Adult Services of a California blonde

indulge & unwind- New York Style

This understated crunch

NOÖ Journal: Rad poetry

Perfect strange

Andrea Shear

Self-Portrait
Cami Park

Hot and perfect strange.
A blue island of
coral days
fathomed nights

a wreck of desert cities.

Her even rot

Two things that have one thing in common but are great by themselves:

Black by Andrew Borgstrom at Abjective

AND

Ohey! by Darby Larson at Wigleaf

Body hack

3 monks and a priest

I wrote Last Meals of the Saints for for every year. I’m not meaning to hog the 16th century or anything, but Crispin had a contributor drop out at the last second, plus I was inspired by Henry VIII‘s mass execution of 3 monks and a priest in that year, 1535.

Also, Travis Kurowski was my excellent HTMLG Secret Santa for X-mas, and he got me a subscription to a poetry journal I wasn’t familiar with, The Lumberyard, and I just got Issue #5 in the mail, and it’s a sumptuous, gorgeous, letter-pressed thing. This particular issue is dedicated to truckers, and it reminds me a bit of Forklift, Ohio (my favorite) sensibility-wise. A CD from Seclusion is enclosed -Three Bridges -Hostile Impetus. I haven’t listened to it yet, because honestly, the whole thing is just too pretty to take apart. With poetry by Brett Eugene Ralph, Kathleen McGookey, Dan Pinkerton, Yikilo Hiskiss, Tiffany Turner, M. Bartley Siegel, and Derek Mong individually and carefully formatted, it’s a complete treat to see and feel and read.