Poem

Update: Lumiere Review disappeared themselves and their magazine in 2024 after holding a call for a new issue earlier in the year. Note their GoFundMe is still active. They offered no explanation to the community and their editor refused to answer queries. This was very sad, as it was a promising ‘zine that myself and many others supported. It’s also sad when your important grief work is discarded so callously. I am not the only writer who was publishing about suicide and other difficult topics. I will be writing more about writing, publishing, and grief in the near future and updating this page. Alternate Thanksgiving was published in December (uncannily) in Chiron’s ’24 winter issue. Lumiere Review is now some kind of girly game/gambling site, so if you also published there, I recommend removing your links so they don’t redirect to the site. Also, dead links hurt your Google ranking (that was how I discovered this–analytics)!

Pleased to have two pieces from One for Sorrow published in The Lumiere Review today. “Alternate Thanksgiving” is the first piece in the book. “Twelve Past Dead” appears in a different form (two consecutive poems) in the book. Know that each contains references to grief and/or suicide. There are other poems in the issue that do as well. Note the content warnings in headers, a great idea that I’d like to see other journals implement. Links removed because Lumiere Review is now some kind of girly game site. However, you can find “Alternate Thanksgiving” here or in the winter ’24 issue of Chiron. I also have an indigenous Thanksgiving piece published in this issue called “Giving Thanks.”

Rogue Agent has released issue 72, which includes poetry by:

Jen Yáñez-Alaniz
Cassandra Griffing
Katie Darby Mullins
Melissa Fite Johnson
Alix Perry
INTERVIEW: Jessica Abughattas
Paula Ethans
Justin Vicari
Koss
Sara Luisa Kirk
Andrew Kozma

What a great list of contributors. My somatic poem, “Shoulder Story” is a song to my deformed shoulder. I know I’m supposed to be writing erotic landscape poems as a queer, but I prefer to bitch about things. In a universe where most thoughts have been had, I am pleased to be the only human to have called a psoas muscle, “rubber labile bitch band snapper.” On a more serious note, if Western medicine knew more about the psoas, there’d be fewer back problems and surgeries. It’s a very emotional muscle.

We are quite slammed with snow today, but I thought I should take a minute and update this page as I’ve been enjoying a publishing windfall and thought I should share it with you. I received my contributor’s copy to Five Points recently. I have extra copies of the issue if you want to trade me (yes, I know it’s weird to share this on a blog, but make me a trade offer for something cool). The poem was a list-type poem about Max who completed suicide in 2018.

Today is William Burroughs’ birthday, so I added a sound file to my listen page of a recently published poem (in Outlook Springs). I wrote this to a boss when I was a sexetary in a really hostile hospital years ago.

Last week, I also had a bad lesbian dating poem I wrote in my youth published in The Racket, a very cool zine out of San Francisco. Noah Sanders, the editor, is unbelievably kind.

Three poems went up today at Anti-Heroin Chic, all about suicide, mental illness, and the aftermath of suicide. Suicide Suit, I believe, is one the strongest poems in One for Sorrow, my book due out this year. Suicide poems have been a very tough sell, but I persevered and many have been published. Once the book is released, I hope to write more explicitly about suicide, grief, and what culture does with it, which is, generally speaking, really fucked up.

Update, Tuesday 2/9/2021: And just when you think it’s over, one of my favorite journals, Bending Genres publishes a suicide/grief piece, “Not On the Railroad Tracks,” unexpectedly this morning. This is a fabulous issue and has a range of edgy writers including Lannie Stabile and Tongo Eisen Martin, both really unique voices you need to check out, if you haven’t already.

Also out on the 15th of February from Up the Staircase Quarterly is a piece called You, Earth, also from my book, One for Sorrow. There are between 30 and 35 published poems in my forthcoming book, but the good thing is there are many unpublished poems, photographs, art brut and, well, visual/word things in the book. Plus, most of the poems have been transformed since the original publication. I’m kind of geeked about reincarnated poems, actually.

As of today, the book is a bit over 200 pages, so that’s plenty to binge on over a weekend. Think of it as a literary replacement to whatever that TV series is . . . I’m hoping to have pre-orders on the site in a week or two. Thanks for reading this and I promise I’ll have more to say that’s not me in the near future. Once the book is off to the press, I’m taking a break to read, think, and do non-poetry writing.

Surprised with a Spoon River Poetry Review update today. The issues have arrived and can be ordered on their website for only ten dollars. I have a dark poem, “Giving Thanks” in here, which I wrote years ago to honor my Cherokee ancestors. This was the only poem to date that won a contest (a college contest), although I don’t enter many because my work is too experimental and, therefore, not contest material.

It’s a simply written poem that addresses imperialism, destruction, and gluttony. I’ve wondered my whole life about the holiday as a mixed white/indigenous person. How can we not ask, “whose abundance” or even “whose America.” I will update this with a photo of the poem when I have the issue in my hands, and yes, I did intend for this photo to look like blood and meat and red, white, and blue. And if it also conjures Tommy Hilfiger, that is probably OK. This, I believe, is it for February. Lots more coming in March, however.