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  • Making AWP Your Own

    It’s time again for the annual AWP conference and dozens if not hundreds of blog posts and articles are popping up everywhere offering advice on how best to network, navigate, or otherwise survive the three-day write-a-palooza.

    And for good reason.

    With 20-30 panels occurring simultaneously at any given moment and hundreds of tables and booths offering all types of free swag and publishing advice during the day and dozens of on-sight and off-sight readings, signings, and parties at night (not to mention hotel room gatherings), AWP is something like a child’s wildest Christmas fantasy, provided that child is a writer who spends most of the rest of the year isolated or with her nose in a book (or grading papers).

    This level of stimulation can overwhelm the new-comer and quiet-at-heart, or trigger a kind of high for the more gregarious, extroverted go-getters among us.

    Which is exactly the nature of AWP. It is both exciting and overwhelming, humbling and empowering, energizing and draining, and many things in between, too, so you might as well make the kinds of choices that are meaningful to you.

    Putting friends first, for example. You know, those people who comprise your literary community, both now and in the future. The ones who hold your hand when you receive a string of rejections and the ones who celebrate your successes, whatever the size, with glee? Friends who help you maintain perspective and are quick to buy you a drink when its lost? They are, after all, the reason you are here at all.

    Or attending panels because their subject matter seems genuinely interesting to you, not just because you want to meet the people facilitating or presenting (unless they are your friend, of course; then attend in a show of support). It’s pretty hard to make a meaningful connection at most panels, anyway. Might as well have some integrity.

    And speaking of integrity, remember to look at a person’s face before checking out their name badge. You can’t truly know how important you may become to one another until you spend time with, and get to know, one another. Choose meaningful connections over superficial.

    AWP is all about over doing it, so go ahead, but remember your career is worthless without your health, so take care of yourself, too.

    • Drink plenty of  water, especially if you are relying on caffeine and alcohol for energy.
    • Stop in for a daily restorative Yoga for Writers session if offered (they often are)..
    • Attend a daily onsite 12-step meeting (everyone is recovering from something).
    • Get outside for fresh air and take a nice walk (while being aware of your surroundings, of course).
    • Find one of the quiet areas often offered where you can gather your thoughts.
    • Fuel yourself with the best food you can manage (pack whole foods, avoid fast foods).
    • Plan a non-conference activity.
    • Wash your hands frequently.

    The best way to avoid the “post-AWP crud,” or any crud at all, is to pay attention to your limits. While it’s true you will be around a lot of germs, it is also true that you are always around a lot of germs. Becoming run-down is what allows them a chance to infiltrate and attack your weakened immune system. Stay strong. Stay healthy.

    Network wisely and sustainably. Don’t take it personally because your connection looks past you when someone more famous shows up nearby. Likewise, don’t break your connection with someone just because someone you think is famous appears behind them.

    And when it comes to meeting famous people, just be cool.

    Also,

    • Be sure to visit small press tables. They need and want your work more than the big guys. Some of them may even become a big press someday, and you will have been with them from the start. All of them are important.
    • Have real conversations. Finding an editor you mesh with, who likes your work and supports you, is invaluable.
    • Stop by booths and tables of the journals who have published you. Tell them thanks!
    • Like all disciplines, the literary world has it’s share of assholes. You don’t have to be one of them.

    AWP is all about fanning ambition, making smart connections, and furthering your career. Don’t leave your heart, mind, or soul behind.

    And Happy Conferencing!

     

  • Having Her Say by K.L. Frank

    This girl,
    burns past me in the Student Union.
    Her passing flash awakens memories
    of days dragging around more heat
    beneath my jeans than my years
    should have stoked. I longed
    to inflame the sky with shibboleths,
    and watch them flash like fireworks.
    This girl,
    who can’t be hauling around
    more than twenty years, wears
    black sweat pants low slung.
    The waistband straddles
    the curve of her hipbone –
    a circus rider performing tricks
    for her audience. ‘PINK’ appliqued in pink
    outlined in pink sequins glitters
    across her butt (the space between ‘I’ and ‘N’
    floats over her coccyx) twitching
    as she walks away.
    This girl’s
    hips affirm louder as they sway
    than the slogans burning my lips.
    No matter the cause, her bumper sticker
    assumes mythic proportions
    against a load-bearing bumper.
    Be she touting a balm against violence,
    a signature hue, a favored singer, or
    support for breast cancer research,
    whatever her say,
    this girl
    has my vote.

    —

    Karin L. Frank is an award-winning author who lives on a farm in the Kansas City area. Her poems and stories have been published in a wide variety of venues both in the U.S.A. and abroad. Her first book of poems, A Meeting of Minds, was released in April, 2012.

  • Praising the Familiar by Brian Fanelli

    We hardly write about each other now,
    comfortable in daily routines. You lean in,
    press your back to me each morning
    as we linger in bed.

    I scroll through my phone,
    share news over coffee.
    I used to karate chop the air
    over headlines I disliked.

    You taught me to uncurl my fists,
    put down the phone, find beauty
    in the familiar, such as the taste of blueberries
    at breakfast, their sweetness like thickened wine,

    or the way the cat dashes
    from window to window,
    trying to paw at birds, or how you leave
    lipstick prints on mugs once done.

    So here is a poem in praise of those routines,
    the warmth of your back pressed to mine,
    the groan of floorboards after you shower,
    the way you pull a chair out and always sit across from me.

    You showed me there is holiness in the everyday,
    the first morning light, the quiet of those hours.

    —

    Brian Fanelli’s poetry collections include Waiting for the Dead to Speak (NYQ Books), winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Poetry Prize, and All That Remains (Unbound Content). His work has been published by The Los Angeles Times, Verse Daily, [PANK], World Literature Today, The Writers Almanac, and other publications. He teaches at Lackawanna College.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • It’s Not Simple, the Heart— by Lois Marie Harrod

    artery-fisted, three-pronged aorta
    with its middle finger twisted up

    yours and better be. Brachiocephaliac
    to the right, left common carotid in the middle,

    and left, the left subclavian: the blood-draggled glove
    of a penniless troll, the knot

    of a neglected vegetable, fennel, celeriac,
    but the heart always left, left behind,

    left below, and common, that too,
    the neck, the head, and left again,

    and yet it keeps on beating, who could guess?
    Drum and drum skin, thick stick, complicit.

    The complicated heart because complexity’s simpler
    than simplicity? Think Bach:

    his great heart with mitral and aortic valves all throbbing,
    oh who loves him more than I, this year

    when no one is performing Brandenburgs in public,
    nothing now but the sound of the recorded heart,

    played to calm an infant, sound’s knotted beauty,
    septum, septum, do you not love the septum,

    the separation, the beat between the beats,
    dirt clot and fairy tubules, clenched face of an infant

    dismissing what fed him, the ventricles, the valves
    the Greeks thought we think with the heart?

    The heart’s a hollow muscle.
    Some days I want to think with mine too.

    —

    Lois Marie Harrod’s 16th collection Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016. Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis and How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth, in 2013.  Widely published in journals and online, she teaches Creative Writing at TCNJ. Visit her website: www.loismarieharrod.org

  • Mystic Jukebox by Andrés Rodríguez

    I can’t not hear your music
    that’s always blowing rifts,
    choruses, looping rhymes—
    all the self-encoded songs
    which tighten like bands
    around the soul’s small dance.

    You weren’t hatched, you wiggler,
    you demon, you shadow-god
    deaf to all but your own
    machinery of unbroken song.
    You were annealed in the torrent
    of fear’s forgetting everything.

    I used to stare at frozen creeks,
    absorbed by clarities of sleeping
    silt and the dreamless life beneath
    curled into icy crypts. Oh,
    I could kill you, grind you
    under heel, salt you like a slug,
    but I’d melt in the earth as well.

    Then she came and poured
    a new song into my blood,
    and the music listened back,
    bringing clear-headedness,
    a sleeping potion night,
    the crystal personality
    of a new bell ringing my fate.

    This thread of sound leads
    deep into a perfect clearing,
    where a cool pool cures,
    where ear and music kiss.
    No more raging or helpless
    weeping. I dive into myself,
    tunnel and spiral down
    to a place that echoes
    what I most want to hear.

    —

    Andrés Rodríguez is the author of Night Song (Tia Chucha Press) and Book of the Heart(Lindisfarne Press). In 2007 he won Poets & Writers’ Maureen Egan Award for Poetry. His MA in Creative Writing is from Stanford and his PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

  • Earthen Vessels by Ellen Young

    When I take life at a purposeful stride
    things get broken: the cheap
    wine glass or the crystal strikes
    the faucet, a mug loses its handle.
    It wasn’t a mugging, wasn’t
    a loose carpet caused my broken hip.
    Steep trail, view of the sea, a sudden
    acquaintance with a very rude rock.

    Too surprised to be insulted,
    with only one leg to stand on, I was
    dependent on the kindness of strangers,
    aides who came at my call, nurses
    dispensing pills I need not count,
    breakfast served me in bed, therapists
    who said, “Your work is to rest.”
    A novelty, this focus on myself.

    Home again, exercises blend
    with household tasks. A book
    is surprisingly heavy, the big skillet
    a challenge to lift. Adaptations
    must be made. Then one by one
    they are abandoned. Good progress,
    good progress: I go back on a trail,
    regain my purposeful stride.

    Recalling the gifts of care, as I choose
    a mug for tea, I must remind myself
    of pain, ice packs, unsteady feet, cries
    in the corridor, to quell my sense
    of loss in being “whole” again,
    the center of no one’s attention.

    —

    Ellen Roberts Young is a member of the writing community in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She has published two chapbooks with Finishing Line Press, Accidents (2004) and The Map of Longing (2009).  Her first full-length book of poetry is Made and Remade, (WordTech Editions, 2014).  She is co-editor of Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders Journal and blogs intermittently at www.freethoughtandmetaphor.com.

  • First Digest of 2018 and OPEN SUBMISSIONS

    Hello Dear Readers,

    This is the first time I’ve had a minute to put together a digest since September. I’ve been negotiating a number of major life events, including a few health challenges and a career change. It’s been trying, but I’m the better for having gone through them and am happy to return once again to my passion project.

    I am also happy to announce that submissions are once again open. In addition to taking poems for the weekly Zingara Poetry Pick, I am asking for poems to publish during National Poetry Month. If enough poems are received to post a poem every day, I will so. If not, I will just post however many I can. If, on the other hand, I receive more than I can fit into a month’s time, I will post them at other times of the year. So, please send your best work and tell all your poet friends. Open slots will fill quickly. Submission guidelines, which you should review, can be found here.  Please mention in your cover letter if you are submitting for National Poetry Month or for the regular feature.

    Now on to this month’s fine selection of  truly wonderful poetry by talented poets who have generously shared their work and talent with Zingara Poetry Review.

    Watch for February’s digest for a recap of January poems and definitely keep an eye out for more upcoming stunners.
    Thanks everyone, and WRITE ON!!
    Lisa

  • The Mystery House by Jim Eilers

    I find different identities for the house
    I go to in my dreams, where I wake up
    and wonder, worried, how to find
    my way from that beloved, empty house
    in the country back to my apartment
    in a distant city.  Then, fully awake,
    I see that I have been back all the while.

    With my increasing forgetfulness
    I wonder if the house I go to,
    that I love without understanding it,
    is the place where I will achieve
    a final, complete deconstruction
    of my remembered self.  I look
    at the house I go to in my dreams,

    and feel I am becoming a statue
    molded from sand.  I don’t need
    Edgar Hoover, or Edgar Allan
    Poe to see that, forgetting and
    remembering, I find in the house
    in my dreams my true and
    fitting home.  But is it my tomb?

    —

    James McColley Eilers. Verses, translations, essays, photographs published in Subtropics, San Francisco Reader, Modern Words,  Haight Ashbury Literary Journal; on websites, InTranslation, Poetry Ark, and Subprimal;  in the books, How to Bury a Goldfish and Imprints.  His play, Turning, was performed in San Francisco in 2001.

  • 14 No Fee Chapbook Publishers

    Found this handy list of no-fee chapbook publishers on Trish Hopkinson’s WordPress site and wanted to share. Lot’s of other great information here, too:

    trishhopkinsonpoet's avatarTrish Hopkinson

    The individual listings below are the chapbook publishers I found which do not charge submission fees, reading fees, or contest fees. The majority of chapbooks are published via contests and do typically require a fee from $10 – $25. Research each market thoroughly and make sure submitting is worth the fee. Many will provide prize money along with several copies of the chapbook for you to sell and otherwise promote your work.

    The Chapbook Review is a great resource for all things related to chapbooks–including listings for:

    They also provide online forms to add listings to their database, including your own published chapbooks.

    For information on putting together your chapbook file to print some yourself or to have them printed, click here.

    To check out my online chapbooks, click here.

    14 NO FEE Chapbook Publishers…

    View original post 1,282 more words

  • Legacy by Terry Severhill

    We accumulate our past as though it were a treasure horde and we forget in the moments of passing down the family history to dust off the layers and the contributions of generations of liars and lawyers. We can’t seem to shake loose that thought that everything is important . . . to someone, so great-great Aunt Maggie’s recipes for stewed Uncle Franks hangover remedy is still passed around at Christmas gatherings . . . 1] Yell shrilly into either ear. . .  2] Bang pots and pans with a Metal spoon. . .  3] Serve two day old, ice cold bitter coffee . . .  4] Repeat until he gets his lazy ass up and working or until the sheriff stops by. The remnants of wedding dresses and military medals are enshrined in the collective attic of our family tree which no longer has leaves, although some think that the bats in the belfry are there to remind us to eat lots of garlic, some of us have a rational fear of vampires. We don’t have any generals in our family line. . . . none that we are allowed to speak of. . . . something about being on the wrong side of history. . . which may be akin to being on the wrong side of gravity. The best thing about having a family history is family . . . . if only we didn’t have to try and explain.

    —

    Terry’s work have been published in a variety of venues, awarded “Art Young’s Poetry Prize 2016.” He is pending publication in several journals and anthologies. His first collection, from West Vine Press, Beneath the Shadow of the Sun is due out late 2017. Terry is a member of the Veterans Writing Group of San Diego. He lives and writes in Vista, California, reads at several open mic events in San Diego County monthly.

     

  • Of Things Past by Lenny Lianne

    A long time, too long, since we have done — this,
    he said and plopped a fat bottle of Mateus
    and two small paper cups from the bathroom
    onto the table. He took out a maimed box
    of Jolly Time Blast O Butter popcorn
    from a grocery bag, and grinned at her.

    She could tell that this was a campaign
    to coax her to laugh, to forget
    about the future. The distant past
    would be the tactic tonight, the way
    they used to take turns telling
    each other about what had come before

    — about those freakish Christmas gifts
    from screwball aunts, sibling pranks,
    his teen summer by a cirque-cupped pond.
    And after a third refill of new wine,
    they spilled out stories of lapsed romances
    as though, by sharing their own secrets,

    they’d earned whatever alighted afterwards.
    Shag carpets, concrete block with wood
    plank bookcases and black beanbag
    chairs, each had departed by now,
    passing away for better or worse,
    like something familiar that’s lost its way.

         after a line by Lucia Perillo
    —
    Lenny Lianne is the author of four full-length books of poetry. She holds a MFA from George Mason University. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, California Quarterly, Third Wednesday, The Dead Mule of Southern Literature, and others.

  • If You See Me Dancing by Jan Day

    If you see me dancing don’t let me drive
    he said back when he drank
    till he could do the two-step with his eyes shut.
    I followed like a blind woman
    who lived by touch.

    Last call we’d spin out the door
    so dizzy we saw stars on saguaros
    and coyotes in trucks. He sang their lament.
    He knew it by heart.
    I found the keys.

    We drove without headlights until there was no road left.
    It seemed like a lifetime dancing in the dark
    from coast to coast and back again. Then we stayed home
    till he dared to climb
    the deep part of night alone.

    It was like a cave with airless walls
    where I searched for him. Only once did I hear
    his shuffle on stone,
    the scuff of a boot to a western song.
    I can’t forgive him. Not now.
    He knew I’d never learn to dance on my own.

    —

    Jan Day says she is fortunate to live in interior Florida where water and light come together to create a lushness, not only of the earth but also of the imagination. She writes in several genres including fiction and plays and has written five children’s picture books published by Pelican Publishing.  Her poetry was most recently published in Peacock Journal. She resides in Okeechobee, Florida.

     

  • Eight of Cups by Toti O’Brien

    now the measure is full
    all drunk
    all sunk in

    (countless horses
    raced
    over my chest

    fine dust
    lifted
    from crumbled ribcage)

    the sun
    bled itself lavishly
    to the final drop

    hot wind
    licks
    my parched skin

    —

    Toti O’Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. She was born in Rome then moved to Los Angeles, where she makes a living as a self-employed artist, performing musician and professional dancer. Her work has most recently appeared in Circleshow, Fire Poetry, Paper Earth, and Fishfood.

  • Careless by Andrew Clark

    It’s careless:
    your back arching across time
    the way you drift across miles
    to stand in front of me.
    We circle
    in the snow
    humming hymns, cheeks close.

    It’s careless:
    the way we smolder in the frost
    a quiver between the trees
    ice splintering around us.
    We are stars
    fallen from a fire
    once bright.

    It’s a walk to the barn
    in the biting cold
    it’s a place to hide
    from wind and world.
    It’s the two of us:
    a warm secret
    on the hay.
    —
    Andrew Clark is a poet whose work has appeared in The Ogeechee, The Miscellany, and The Pregnant Moon Review. He is the recipient of the Roy F. Powell Creative Writing Award from Georgia Southern University. He is a native of Asheville, NC, and is querying his Southern gothic magical realism novel. He is active on Twitter at @theandrewkclark. He is a contributor to Hilton Head Monthly magazine.

  • Barnwork We Didn’t Talk Much About by Charles A. Swanson

    Manure was the word we used, or barnyard
    muck. Not that manure was elegant,
    but more so in the cattle stalls.

    I still remember Christmas holidays,
    the manure spreader parked,
    ready, between two open doors,

    and long-shafted pitch forks,
    one with four tines, one with five,
    the wood worn smooth in the handles,

    the metal burnished and gleaming,
    and the litter (isn’t that a nice word)
    mixed with hay coming up in layers,

    almost like thin-rolled well-baked pastry.
    Cow manure smells sunny
    compared to pig. Cows eat grass,

    breathe grass, pass grass,
    and something, though faint, lingers
    of clover and sun and vegetable life.

    Outside, around the doors, where sweet rain
    fouled manure—imagine such a thing!—
    the cows’ stomping and milling

    made a black mess, a true muck—
    this is what shit looks like, I always
    think, even now, something fetid,

    fecal, foul, black as tar, suck-
    deep and miry. I walked through that,
    too, as barefoot country boys do,

    in summertime. But in winter,
    straining to pry and peel up
    a thin layer, a towel-length sheet

    of cow manure, I sang (whenever,
    I could find, a breath, between forking,
    and tossing) every Christmas carol I knew.

    —

    Charles A. Swanson teaches English in an Academy for Engineering and Technology.  Frequently published in Appalachian magazines, he also pastors a small church, Melville Avenue Baptist in Danville.  He has two books of poems:  After the Garden, published by MotesBooks, and Farm Life and Legend, from Finishing Line Press.