A little publishing sunshine in the midst of June Gloom. Congratulations to all the Women Who Submit who had work published this month!
From Noriko Nakada‘s  “Swing” at Thread:
The violence contained within the motion of that bat would have made more sense if he took to our world with his bat, shattering the silence and destroying the façade of sanity. In that chaos, I might have understood the kind of crazy that came home with my brother from the hospital. Instead, there was the whirl of metal cutting through thin mountain air and the rhythmic rush of his breath.
From “Passenger” by Lituo Huang at JMWW:
It was the third day. Things had begun to unravel. We’d slept poorly, and both of us had missed our breakfasts and bowel movements. I watched Ripley feel his stubble as he drove, his unwashed hand brushing over the bristles that peppered the broken vessels on his round cheeks. At eleven a.m., the shimmer already rose two feet off the road. The car’s A/C was dying, blinking its green and orange lights and spewing air the temperature of a fever.
From Arlene Schindler‘s “From Russia with Love” at purple clover.:
In a world where smart women make foolish choices, I said yes when my friend Heather told me she had a guy for me.
At dinner in a Japanese restaurant, Jim, a Sam Waterston lookalike, only had eyes for me. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly taken with him. He had a bushy, unkempt beard and pink sweater that looked like a hand-me-down. But his deep, seductive newscaster’s voice slowly began to draw me in.
From Diana Love‘s “Cloth Box” at Literary Mama:
In a cloth box underneath the bed I
keep my father’s sweaters
there are three I love especially
old boiled wool
in blues and greens
bright like him and sturdy
From Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo‘s “Ghost Interview in the Peach Orchard” at Exposition Review:
In your final moments, whom did you think of?
Was this someone waiting for you to return?
I worry I will never find that someone waiting
behind a thick front door of a home we made together.
Was your front door always locked or opened?
Was it left open for you even after you were gone?
Congrats to Xochitl for being the featured Poet in the Park at the National Parks Conservation Association!
From Leilani Squire‘s “Building Understanding Between Veterans and the Community Through Playwriting” at HowlRound:
I wanted to offer the wounded soldiers something that would help them heal; I didn’t want them to be shunned and labeled as baby killers like the Vietnam veterans had been, forgotten like the Korean War veterans, or silenced like those who fought in World War II. They didn’t have therapists or counselors or support systems to help them talk about what they experienced. What better way to aid these wounded men and women than to empower them to write their story?
Also from Leilani, “The Courage to Create” at bookscover2cover:
When I read the words The Courage to Create, the title jumped out at me. That day, I found a copy in the library, checked it out, and read the book in a couple of sittings. I felt as if someone finally understood me, or maybe I finally understood myself.
From Kelly Shire‘s “Guera, Where You Going” at Memoir Mixtapes:
¿QuĂ© onda gĂ¼ero?
What’s up, white boy?
Do you know the way to Santa Fe Springs? Bordered to the west by the San Gabriel riverbed and its namesake freeway, and to the south by ever-congested Interstate 5, it’s a Southern California city of heavy industry and commerce, with strip malls and neighborhoods and new condos thrown into the mix. The condos are mostly built over old oil fields; as a child I’d stare out the back windows while our car drove down Telegraph Avenue, lulled by the slow dip and rise of the derricks.
From Arielle Silver‘s review of Ana Maria Spagna’s Uplake at Brevity:
Ana Maria Spagna immigrated in the opposite direction, from the urban sprawl of her southern California childhood to the Pacific Northwest woods. Her descriptions of her adopted home in Stehekin conjure feelings of sparseness, far-off neighbors, evergreen-scented air, crackling autumn leaves, whispers of snow. Though Long Pond is on the other coast and I’ve never been to Washington, Spagna’s accounts of Stehekin in her newest book, Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going, echo of my old home, the one I pine for when it rains or in the noise of daily living.
From Rachael Rifkin‘s “Emotional Labor is A Lot of Hard Work” at The Outline:
I pointed these things out to him recently during our first-ever discussion about the concept of emotional labor, or the work required to manage your feelings and the way you express them in varying aspects of life. My husband initially thought doing emotional labor was a bad thing. He said it sounded like something you don’t want to go through, like childbirth or hard labor.
It’s only a bad thing when one person in the relationship is doing most or all of it, I explained.
Congratulations to Peggy Dobreer whose collection of poems, “Drop and Dazzle” came out this month!
Congratulations to Chandra Graham Garcia whose story “Farm Business” came out this month in the New England Review!
Congratulations to Siel Ju whose story “Hands” came out this month in Conjunctions!