Looking for some good summer reading? Have a look at this fabulous collection of pieces published in July by Women Who Submit members:
From Noriko Nakada‘s “Mother of All Bombs” at the Rising Phoenix Review:
Last night’s
nightmare
ripped my
family apart
flesh from bone
forcing me
to choose
my life or theirs.
Also from Noriko, “Final Days” at Linden Avenue:
In the days when your departure
was imminent
but your outcome was still unknown
as machines pressed air
in and out of your lungs
and triggered your heart to beat
I whispered in your sedated ear
From Margo McCall‘s “When the Membrane Splits” at The Write Launch:
Anton and I were walking down a dark side street searching for my lost car when I spotted something weird. It was the same L.A. urbanscape as always—rows of parked cars, thick-rooted ficus, dumpy apartments and houses with yards and more parked cars in driveways—all identifiable, bathed in the sick tangerine glow of streetlights.
Also from Margo, a book review of The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen at Four Ties Review:
In The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen continues his exploration of war’s effect on Vietnam and its people. The characters in these eight intimate, densely woven stories are scarred in a multitude of ways, psychologically damaged from their traumas, yet doggedly soldiering on in their daily struggle to survive in a strange land.
From “Gestured to and Not Yet Quite: An Interview with Muriel Leung” at The Common:
In my cultural and familial upbringing, ghosts are part of everyday life just as one’s ancestors are always with us even when they aren’t physically present. In every social and historical violence, I believe too, the residues of those harms linger far after the events themselves have passed. They take on other forms like PTSD, abuse, disassociation, new economic structures, pervasive military presence, etc. What happens when we apply absence to these conditions? If anything, I hope that “In Absentia-land” is a place against erasure. It’s a miserable-as-hell place, but that’s part of the conditions of refusing amnesia, of survival.
From “Where I’m From” by Carla Sameth at Hometown Pasadena:
I am from slugs and bumblebees,
mildew, Lake Washington, Puget Sound and “the mountain is out.”
I am from pick up games (football, baseball, basketball),
Peter Collin’s knees mashing my lip split when I rush.
I am from classrooms made of portables
that fill the playground and rites of passage girl fights, “tear her hair out.”
Only one not Black in my Brownie Troop,
I am Norris Washington’s hero in fourth grade.
They called me Sammy Boy
From Melissa Chadburn‘s “Mothers Who Leave Their Children” at LitHub:
The night before Amanda’s children died she was inside a house with a 16-year-old guy. She was 19. Someone in the house said they heard the kids crying and asked her to bring them in. She chose not to. “Must’ve been drugs,” my partner said. Because who would leave their children alone in the car for so long, were it not for drugs?
My mom.
Also from Melissa, “5 Tactics that Fight Gentrification While Boosting Community Development” at Everyday Feminism:
The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe so many things— top knots, beards, an influx of microbreweries or cheese shops. What’s downplayed is how absolutely threatening and dangerous it is.
The pervasive threat of violence hangs in the distance between the kitchen tables of hurting families who are being pushed out of their homes and the boardrooms of corporations where these destructive housing policies and urban renewal planning is devised.
Congratulations to Elline Lipkin whose poem “Catholic Boarding School, Six Years Old, 1943,” was published in the Winter/Spring edition of Calyx. Elline also received a California Writing Residency and will be spending two weeks in Lake Arrowhead to write.
Congratulations to Linda Ravenswood who had three pieces published in A Room of Our Own: The WAVES Book Project and a piece published in The Cantabrigian Magazine and won a poetry residency with The Melrose Poetry Bureau at The Melrose Poetry Bureau.