It’s hard to believe how quickly the first month of 2023 has flown by. While many of us are still trying to comprehend that we’re officially one month in to the new year, these Women Who Submit members have already been out there publishing their work in amazing places.
The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during the month of January. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available) or a blurb (if available) if the publication is a book, along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in January!
Congratulations to Elizabeth Galoozis, whose poem “Dispersal” appeared in Sweet: A Literary Confection.
a symposium of seeds
climbs on the gusts
shaking the cypresses
and satellite dishes,
land to be flattened
by a work boot.
Congrats also to Tanya Ward Goodman, whose article “What Should Happen to this California Filk Art Landmark?” appeared in Atlas Obscura.
The women seem to be waiting for something or someone. Paint peeled from their knees and elbows and cheeks, revealing gray concrete below. Their expressions were lifelike, but they had the bodies of dolls: hands and feet a little too big and no angle to mark the bend of joints. Still, it was hard to resist the idea that they were about to begin a conversation.
“That’s Aunt Lorraine and Lovely Louise is my mom,” explained Marsha Klophenstein.* “They’re dressed like dancehall girls, which was right out of my grandfather’s imagination because they didn’t have a fancy thing to their name.”
Kudos to Ariadne Makridakis Arroyo, whose essay “Black Candles for Bad Men” appeared in Tasteful Rude.
Most of my shifts began or ended in the parking lot. I made my way to the back corner to gaze at the sunset, dreaming about the opposite of labor. Cruising and smoking weed with my friends. Twerking. Watering my plants on a hazy morning.
During especially bad shifts, I smoked a cigarette.
While walking from the basement parking lot to the main floor, one coworker, a woman younger than me, brushed past me and said, “God, Brad is being such a fucking creep today!”
“What’s new?” Brad’s gaze tended to linger on me for too long. He also joked too enthusiastically about making me his sugarbaby.
A shout out to Ashton Cynthia Clarke, whose poems “The Women in Between” and “Two Love Poems” appeared in Spectrum Love Lines. Here’s an excerpt from “The Women in Between:”
The coil-haired, unknown woman
arrives in my dreams
from many generations closer to our baobab roots of Western Africa.
She is my great-grandmother’s great-
grandmother maybe
last in our maternal line to bear a child while still
enslaved in the Caribbean. I see that child
—a daughter—
snatched from warm mother’s arms and sold
away from all the love she had
known and may never know
again.
And here’s an excerpt from “Two Love Poems:”
You chat me up in bed pelting me with precious palabras in English and Spanish “Cinthia” you intone my name wet lips parting wetter lips con el sonido español of your i’s:
“Seen-thee-a,
ven ahora.”
Then your love rushes in like a swollen rio floods the jagged lines of my parched soul slakes a longing once as enduring as desert.
In addition, Ashton’s essays “The Trojan” and “One Hundred to a Box, Size Large” appeared in The Storytelling Bistro: Stories, Poems, and Reflections, published by StoryMasters.
A shout out to Kat Kambes, whose poem “The Russians Took Out The Funny” appeared in the first annual issue of Charter For Compassion.
Congratulations to Valerie Anne Burns, whose essay “Flaming Ottoman” appeared in Sea to Sky Review.
It was in early spring when an unusual weather system produced one of the windiest and coldest days and nights I’d ever experienced. Living in Santa Barbara—or as I like to call it, living on a cruise ship that is called Santa Barbara—doesn’t offer much in the way of severe weather. But the cold conditions entered my bone marrow.
One thing I’d become keenly aware of while on my breast cancer adventure was how important it is to be kind to myself with small rituals like sipping steaming tea with my hummingbirds. I also found if I could keep moving there was a chance of chasing away the blues—if only temporarily. There were plenty of times where a walk down the long driveway to the mailbox was all I could muster, but enough time in between surgeries and recovering got me back to power walking.
Congrats also to Hazel Kight Witham, whose book review “On Bearing Witness: A review of Melissa Chadburn’s A Tiny Upward Shove” appeared on the Women Who Submit blog.
The title of Melissa Chadburn’s debut novel comes from a flashback in which young Marina, the main character, attempts to rescue a bird stuck in the drain valve of a water heater. Her mother, Mutya, comes along, in a hurry to get to the beach with her boyfriend. She needs Marina to abandon the girl’s vital mission, but Marina is too worried about the bird to leave it. Mutya, not to be slowed by some doomed bird’s plight, first tries to pull it out, but cannot get a good grip, and instead shoves upward, breaking its wing, and not so much freeing it as mortally wounding it. The bird flaps in pained circles before falling still. Marina is crushed, but Mutya brushes it off as “helping a hurt thing” along with a “tiny upward shove.”
Kudos to Carla Rachel Sameth, whose poem “Split Open” appeared in Poetica Review.
What you taste
is what you crave. Because you seek the ripped edges, you are drawn
to the brokenness,
the hurting scent.
In addition, Carla’s poem “The Family Stories” appeared in Mutha Magazine.
This is not tragedy. You know what tragedy is, I’ve written
about a neck wrapped by hands, what should be called choking,
nose splintered into little pieces, what should be called police brutality.
Blood seeping down leg, more times than you want to know,
what you might call my lost children. Yes, I would have been that old lady.
So many children, I miss them all.