Month: August 2019
Visual Poem Series: The D Axed from the Dream (8 of 8)
by Nance Van Winckel
[Editor’s Note: Click on the image below to view it at full size.]
Nance Van Winckel’s fifth book of fiction is Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook (2014, Twisted Road Publications); her eighth book of poems is Our Foreigner (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series). A book of visual poetry entitled Book of No Ledge appeared in 2016 with Pleiades Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Field, Poetry Northwest, and Gettysburg Review. She is on the MFA faculties of Vermont College of Fine Arts and E. Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of this series? What always surprises me when I (digitally) enhance my photographs of walls is the way the words themselves arrive. My conscious mind works on the images and the wall, tweaking and torquing. Then suddenly some words arrive and want to belong on the wall too. by Amelia Clare Wright When I am twenty-one, I grow out my pubic hair. I have never before seen what it looks like; I don’t know the color or the length or the way it curls. I began shaving as soon as my first hair grew in. It was blonde. And that was the last I saw of any hair somewhere other than my head for six years. When I was nineteen, my boyfriend told me he wanted to see me “with hair down there,” so I tried to grow it out for the first time. It was itchy. I made it two weeks before shaving it all off again, didn’t know hair growing in would itch so much. Prickles like cactuses poking through my thin underwear and I couldn’t take it. But I am twenty-one now, and I am determined to learn what it is to feel natural. To my surprise, I love the way it looks. The thick bush of hair, not blonde this time, is a reminder of my humanity. I feel real in my body. I feel like a woman, like someone who belongs to herself. Like someone growing and shedding and making room. It still itches. This time I last for months before I can’t take it and shave it all off again, meticulously, painstakingly, centimeter by centimeter, clearing the growth. When I am finished, my first thought is that I feel like a naked mole rat. I feel bare and fake—plastic. I am Barbie-doll clean again, and I am itch-free. I don’t know — as I sit here writing this, trying to decide if I should grow it out again — which is more important. What does it mean to “feel good”? Psychologically, long pubic hair grounds me in a way my body never has before, like I can look at myself as something more than a tool for others, like I have accepted my womanhood and chosen to honor it instead of clear it away. Physically, I would tear them out one by one to relieve the itching. The question is one of priority. I am always telling myself to do things because of the way they make me feel, not because of the way they make me look. But this has always been easy, clear-cut—body helps mind; mind helps body. I remind myself in the gym that I am there to build a comfortable home in my body, not for the way it tones and slims and makes me desirable to others. The visceral improves the cerebral. I fill my acrylics every month because it is a part of the persona I am creating for myself. There is no negative bodily consequence. I haven’t had to negotiate between the comfortable psychological and the practical physical before. Here I am, the physical challenging the psychological, the psychological disagreeing with the physical. Here I am, flourishing mentality, and a landscape that makes me feel powerful, a desire to scratch. Here I am on shaky ground, a smoothness that makes me uneasy, physical relief. Where do I want to be? I am inclined to follow my mind. I am inclined to put my mental well-being over corporeal comfort. But that means I have to unwind my taut perception that a body at ease is a mind at ease. It means admitting that the way I look (or the way I feel about the way I look) is more important than the comfort of my skin. When I am twenty-one, I grow out my pubic hair. I shave it off. I grow it back. Amelia is a recent graduate of Emerson College with a degree in Communications Studies and the intention to pursue an MFA in nonfiction creative writing. She grew up in Baltimore City and now lives in Boston, Massachusetts where she is currently working on a memoir about her body. This is her first publication. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Mind Over Matter”? This essay began as a piece of a larger memoir about my body. As I’ve been living with this concept in my head, I’ve noticed all of the noteworthy things about my body— places of discomfort, of ease, of contradiction. I knew as soon as I shaved off my pubic hair again that it was something I needed to write about, both as a tool of reconciliation within myself and as a place to join a larger body of people who feel these innate contradictions between body and mind. by Suzanne Verrall my grandmother gave us she said they were but I’ve seen Suzanne Verrall lives in Adelaide, Australia. Her flash fiction, essays and poetry appear in Atlas and Alice, Flash Frontier, Archer Magazine, Lip See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Gift”? I was thinking about family and generations and sacrifices when I wrote this poem. I almost wish Charles Simic had written it just so I could see Photo by Meg Boscov In the signed postcard I have from Muhammad Ali, he drew a picture of a boxing ring, then wrote The Greatest of All Times. With a smiley face. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see. This image asks you to be inspired by the man who floats like butterflies, stings like bees. Braggin’ is when a person says something and can’t do it. I do what I say. Take on an impossible battle. Brag a little. Create a rhyme about yourself. Take back your name. Give away your titles for something larger. I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was. by Nance Van Winckel Nance Van Winckel’s fifth book of fiction is Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook (2014, Twisted Road Publications); her eighth book of poems is Our Foreigner (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series). A book of visual poetry entitled Book of No Ledge appeared in 2016 with Pleiades Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Field, Poetry Northwest, and Gettysburg Review. She is on the MFA faculties of Vermont College of Fine Arts and E. Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of this series? What always surprises me when I (digitally) enhance my photographs of walls is the way the words themselves arrive. My conscious mind works on the images and the wall, tweaking and torquing. Then suddenly some words arrive and want to belong on the wall too. by Tyler Friend after H.D.’s “Evening” We pass light to ridge & flower to flower, become. We grow & lost, our hearts— & shadowed. We & turning away from Tyler Friend is a non-binary poet & designer from Tennessee, and they received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Tyler edits the online magazine Francis House and designs for Eulalia Books. See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Even We”? This piece comes from a series of rewritten H.D. poems. I’ve long felt very attached to H.D. and found much of my own self in her work, so this practice feels a little bit like collaborating with myself, or a past-self. Some poems retain more of their original language or meaning than others; often there is a we; they all seem to end up in couplets. by Nick Ackerson Nick Ackerson is writer and comedian based in Chicago. He served in the Army from 2009 to 2015. He sent the first four years of his career jumping out of airplanes as a paratrooper. His final two years in the military were spend doing other, less impressive things. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Stories I Don’t Know How to Tell”? The original “Stories I Don’t Know How to Tell” list was exactly that—a list of events from my time in the Army that didn’t feel like full stories to me. I wrote this list as part of a brainstorming session for a storytelling class I took in my final semester at college. These were all things that were on my mind — but I didn’t know how to present them as stories with a beginning, middle, and end. They were just occurrences — the only thing they had in common was that I didn’t know how to talk about them. This turned out to be the unifying theme. I’ve read this piece aloud to a few audiences. Eventually the point of the list stopped being “can I make these stories make sense to the audience?” And became, “can this piece help the audience understand why it’s confusing for me to tell these stories?” There are two moments that stick out to me from these readings. Every time I read the line, “I have tinnitus,” the audience laughed. It’s a quick succinct sentence, and it is also has considerably lower stakes than the items on the list in the front of it. When I would read the line, “Every one in the army keeps an unofficial list in their head called, “Of Course It Would Be a Tragedy if Any One in Our Platoon Died — But it Would be Less of a Tragedy if it was this Person.” There would be chuckling and elbow nudging. You can’t escape it. Every group of people has some one who is a pain in the neck—even groups of people who are in life or death situations. em>Photo by Meg Boscov “Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything dances.” — Maya Angelou Dance! Dance carelessly. According to Sweet Dreams, “You are going to achieve success in life, if you dream of yourself dancing alone!” So dance alone: freely, crazily, without constraint. “Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.” – Anne Lamott This Sunday, take your eyes off your feet and follow the lesson of the pitcher plant. Just dance. by Nance Van Winckel Nance Van Winckel’s fifth book of fiction is Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook (2014, Twisted Road Publications); her eighth book of poems is Our Foreigner (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series). A book of visual poetry entitled Book of No Ledge appeared in 2016 with Pleiades Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Field, Poetry Northwest, and Gettysburg Review. She is on the MFA faculties of Vermont College of Fine Arts and E. Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of this series? What always surprises me when I (digitally) enhance my photographs of walls is the way the words themselves arrive. My conscious mind works on the images and the wall, tweaking and torquing. Then suddenly some words arrive and want to belong on the wall too. by Karie Luidens Karie Luidens is a writer of criticism, commentary, current events, and semi-connected musings. The word-made-flesh λόγος is her first tattoo but surely won’t be her last. Follow her ever-evolving body of work at karieluidens.com. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Word Made Flesh”? I often find that I have grand creative visions but am too much of a perfectionist to follow through—I know the final version of any endeavor will never be as polished as the version in my mind’s eye. Tattoos pose a particular challenge to someone with that tendency. You can’t rework the draft endlessly in cycles of idea and doubt; either you have the tattoo, or you don’t. I figured if I could take the leap and commit ink to a permanent form in my own skin, that could help me commit ink to permanent forms in publication, too…even forms as imperfect as my own penmanship. by Steven Ostrowski Some say dandelions Isn’t it a mistake Lay down in the wet bladed green Steven Ostrowski is a poet, fiction writer, and painter. His work appears in literary journals, magazines and anthologies. He is the author of five chapbooks — four of poems and one of stories. He and his son Ben Ostrowski are the authors of a full-length collaboration called Penultimate Human Constellation published in 2018 by Tolsun Books. His chapbook, After the Tate Modern, won the 2017 Atlantic Road Prize and is published by Island Verse Editions. He teaches at Central Connecticut State University. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Dream of the Bright, Wet Lawn”? “Dream of the Bright, Wet Lawn,” in its original form was one of a series of poems in a chapbook-sized volume I am calling Rainlight Meditations. People seem to want to rid their lawns of dandelions, and truth be told, I’ve tried to do the same. But I always secretly wondered what was wrong with them, and found them beautiful. On another scale, the poem seems to be about staying around to try to understand those things in our lives that persistently appear. Finally, earlier versions of the poem used fewer internal and slant rhymes. Photo by Meg Boscov “Poets don’t draw,” writes Jean Cocteau. “They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.” To do, we often first must un-do. What looks like the unravelling end of something might actually be just the beginning. “The human race is a very, very magical race. We have a magic power of witches and wizards. We’re here on this earth to unravel the mystery of this planet. The planet is asking for it.” — Yoko Ono And what is this Sunday’s message? Take up a loose end. Pull it. Unravel the ravel. And begin anew. by Nance Van Winckel Nance Van Winckel’s fifth book of fiction is Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook (2014, Twisted Road Publications); her eighth book of poems is Our Foreigner (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series). A book of visual poetry entitled Book of No Ledge appeared in 2016 with Pleiades Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Field, Poetry Northwest, and Gettysburg Review. She is on the MFA faculties of Vermont College of Fine Arts and E. Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of this series? What always surprises me when I (digitally) enhance my photographs of walls is the way the words themselves arrive. My conscious mind works on the images and the wall, tweaking and torquing. Then suddenly some words arrive and want to belong on the wall too. by Sara Elkamel Turns out, heaven is only the future Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist, living between Cairo, Egypt and New York City. She holds an M.A. in arts and culture journalism from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in The Common, American Chordata, Jet Fuel Review, Winter Tangerine, Nimrod International Journal, Anomaly, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019) and elsewhere. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “[Heaven]”? I started writing [Heaven] about an hour before sunset* on a small concrete patio outside my hut at a beach camp in Sinai, Egypt. It was late April, and I had just crossed the Red Sea from Jordan, where I was attending a film festival in Wadi Rum—an otherworldly desert valley furnished with red sand and massive sandstone mountains. What ideal writing conditions, right? Well, as I was two-thirds of the way through the draft—the sky almost completely sunless now—a friend and her two kids joined me outside the hut, and excitedly described the day’s excursion to a nearby five-star hotel (the antithesis of our modest, unostentatious camp). They squealed as they exhibited their new, gas station-bought sunglasses. Entertained as I was, I was also panicking: I usually need to finish a full draft in one sitting; otherwise, it becomes impenetrable once I return to it. Thinking my escape would go unnoticed in the raucous, I slipped into the hut and locked the thin door behind me. “SARA, SARA…” They weren’t done telling stories. I wrapped up the piece, but I knew that its last third was weaker than the rest. I will admit I was disappointed, mostly because I had very high hopes for [Heaven]. I had to edit it for a month to repair the damage that the unsolicited sunset show left. In the end, I got rid of that last third of it entirely. *I may have started writing it way before then. While searching for this [Heaven], I stumbled upon another a piece titled “Heaven” that I had apparently drafted in June 2017. Though it is very different in form and—frankly—quality, I think it was actually trying to say the same thing. Some words both Heavens have in common are: imagine / plastic / boxes. by Callista Buchen The husband brings his sadness out to show her. Look, he says, how big! The mother hates the husband’s sadness, wants to stab the sadness with the steak knives, to cut it up into little pieces and feed it to the dog, only they don’t have a dog, but she would get one just to eat up his sadness. He squints and holds it up to the light, shakes it until bits of sadness cover the mantle, sprinkle the counter, float in the daughter’s cereal. They are all coughing. The mother says, I need some air, and picks up the shovel and goes outside to try to bury her sadness like a bone or a body. She watches the husband and the children through the window the whole time. Callista Buchen is the author of Look Look Look, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in October 2019, and the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Double-Mouthed (dancing girl press, 2016). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals, and she is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award and DIAGRAM’s essay contest. She teaches at Franklin College, where she advises the student literary journal and directs the visiting writers’ reading series See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Sadness”? “Sadness” is from my forthcoming collection of prose poems, Look Look Look. The poems of the book explore the early days of motherhood, and in doing so, consider how one’s identity changes and even disappears. As I wrote “Sadness,” I thought about how the members of a family are intertwined, how they often have specific roles and how these roles invite a certain kind of connection, but also how maintaining these roles can keep them isolated and separate. Photo by Meg Boscov Some eggs for your Sunday morning brunch? Did you know that Oomancy, divination by eggs, was once widespread? According to Rachel Warren Chadd, “The white (albumen) of the egg would be dropped into water and various predictions would be made according to the shapes it formed.” In fact, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams were just some of girls of Salem who practiced reading omens using an egg and a mirror (“Venus glass”). “There’s a patch of old snow in a corner,” writes Robert Frost, “That I should have guessed / Was a blow-away paper the rain / Had brought to rest.” He is perhaps asking us to “read” Nature, if not for divination, at least for the news of the day. And what is this Sunday’s message? Go ahead. Read your eggs, your gardens, that pile of rain in the corner. And do tell us what it says. by Nance Van Winckel Nance Van Winckel’s fifth book of fiction is Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook (2014, Twisted Road Publications); her eighth book of poems is Our Foreigner (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series). A book of visual poetry entitled Book of No Ledge appeared in 2016 with Pleiades Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Field, Poetry Northwest, and Gettysburg Review. She is on the MFA faculties of Vermont College of Fine Arts and E. Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of this series? What always surprises me when I (digitally) enhance my photographs of walls is the way the words themselves arrive. My conscious mind works on the images and the wall, tweaking and torquing. Then suddenly some words arrive and want to belong on the wall too. CNF: Mind Over Matter
The Gift
a set of knucklebones
to play with
from last night’s
mutton stew
the way
she wrings her hands
Magazine, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Australian Poetry Journal, and others. www.suzanneverrall.com
what he would have called it. I envy the way he uses an unexpected title to add an extra dimension to a poem. I’d ask him, but I don’t have his email.Sunday Focus: Float Like Ali
☄
Meg Boscov is a photographer who lives and works outside of Philadelphia where she continues to pursue her careers in animal-assisted education and dog training. She can be reached on instagram at megboscov.Visual Poem Series: The Sloth Dotes on Don’ts (7 of 8)
Even We
back & forth, from ridge
flower. We ourselves
faint, reach inward, blue
blue. Our buds are still
root, leaving leaves
the glass, at last. CNF: Stories I Don’t Know How to Tell
Sunday Focus: Dance
☄
Meg Boscov is a photographer who lives and works outside of Philadelphia where she continues to pursue her careers in animal-assisted education and dog training. She can be reached on instagram at megboscov.Visual Poem Series: No Telling (6 of 8)
Word Made Flesh
Dream of the Bright, Wet Lawn
spoil the lawn. Maybe.
Until you get right up
beauty-close.
to break your back
over something
that grows so sun-colored
and keeps coming back?
amid the wavy yellow faces
and have a daydream is what I say.
I say lay down and
overgrow your stay.Sunday Focus: Unravel
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Meg Boscov is a photographer who lives and works outside of Philadelphia where she continues to pursue her careers in animal-assisted education and dog training. She can be reached on instagram at megboscov.Visual Poem Series: Arrows in Bird Feelings (5 of 8)
[Heaven]
just these bodies
becoming something else.
I’m not sure
you’ll understand
I found no silver sheets of water.
No towers
of pink boxes carrying plastic babies.
No white. None of it.
This morning
I climbed black mountain
after black mountain.
Imagined a lover and had him
imagine me
for an hour.
Maybe I could bury our bodies in sugar,
have them wash up on the shore
of the desert.Sadness
Sunday Focus: Sunny Side Up
☄
Meg Boscov is a photographer who lives and works outside of Philadelphia where she continues to pursue her careers in animal-assisted education and dog training. She can be reached on instagram at megboscov.Visual Poem Series: Items Overhead May Have Shifted (4 of 8)
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • TBD
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD