Author: Colette Sartor

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WWS Publication Roundup for September

It’s time for WWS’s publication roundup to celebrate all of our fantastic members who published in September. I’m awed by the talent in this group and the number of people who are consistently–and persistently–submitting and publishing their writing.

Congratulations to these WWS members who worked so hard to have their words heard and let’s celebrate them for their publication achievements!

Congratulations, Maylin Tu, on publishing the article “Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ Taught Me How to Surrender to My Anxiety” in EQ Magazine.

My coronavirus meltdown happened Memorial Day weekend when my roommate was out of town. Overwhelmed by the knowledge that no one would be coming home, I felt trapped and desperate.

Sometimes you have a good pandemic day and other times you just want to cry and listen to Taylor Swift’s new album.

Maylin Tu also published the article “If a Famous Model Can’t Control Her Own Image, How Can I?” in EQ this month.

In a groundbreaking movie of my youth, A Walk to Remember, high school bullies paste Jamie Sullivan’s face onto the body of a bikini-clad supermodel with the words “Virgin Mary?” and distribute the image on flyers all over school. Humiliated, she runs into the arms of popular rebel, Landon Carter. The message is clear: No matter how many ugly sweaters or buttoned-up flannels you wear, you can be sexualized and shamed without your consent.

A congratulatory shout out to Thea Pueschel for publishing her essay “Frankincense and Myrrh: A Promise to Live Fully” in Abstract Elephant.

My apartment in Northridge was still warm from the heat of the day, as it often was in September in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. I was a fresh film school graduate up late writing a screenplay taking the occasional internet chess break when a friend in Sweden messaged me on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) to ask if I was okay. It was three in the afternoon in Sweden, nine in the morning in New York, and three hours earlier in Los Angeles. I was confused about what danger might be lurking. I did a quick internet search (as quickly as one could on dialup) to see if I missed an earthquake. I hadn’t. My apartment was on stilts above the communal carport. Even a small quake felt like a big one in that place.

Also check out Sybilla Nash’s article “MC Lyte Made Hip-Hop Take Notice” published by The Gumbo.

Before there was Megan, Nicki, or Lil’ Kim, there was MC Lyte. 

It was 1988 when Lyte, born Lana Moorer, made Hip-Hop take notice with her debut album Lyte as a Rock. At the time you could count the number of solo women emcees on one hand, and when she came on the scene, she kicked down doors and paved the way as the first woman rapper to drop a solo album. Lyte accomplished a lot of firsts. She was the first Hip-Hop artist to perform at Carnegie Hall, first woman Hip-Hop artist to have a gold single and solo Grammy nomination for her 1993 track “Ruffneck,” and first solo woman rapper to be honored/inducted on VH1’s Hip Hop Honors.

From Désirée Zamorano, the interview “Now Is the Time: An Interview with David Heska Wanbli Weiden” published by LA Review of Books.

DAVID HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, is set to break out this fall with his stunning debut novel, Winter Counts. Weiden, a former lawyer and current professor at Metropolitan State University at Denver, is poised for a powerful second act as a writer. In his novel, we meet Virgil Wounded Horse, a paid vigilante. Along this swift and thrilling ride, we also get insights into some ugly realities about reservation life and politics.

Kudos to librecht baker, who published the poem “You Are Who I Love: Number Two or You Are Who Makes My Heart Rebel (Part 1)” in Cultural Weekly.

after Aracelis Girmay

You, Black people, Black Queer people, Black global people pulsating this struggle’s fulcrum
You are who I love
You are who makes my heart rebel

Congrats to Li Yun Alvarado, who published the op-ed “Please Help Today’s Welfare Babies” in the New York Daily News.

Papi used to call me his “welfare baby.” The nickname was never an insult in his mouth. Instead, it was a nostalgic memory, a sign of how far they’d come, a fact of life. I was their “welfare baby” because welfare paid the medical bills for my delivery. My brother was their “housing baby” because health insurance from Papi’s job with the NYC Housing Authority paid their medical bills for his delivery.

Please celebrate Jessica Ceballos y Campbell’s poem “Tonight, I’m both at home, and far from it. or We leave and we stay, all at once, or not at all or The seven things I learned from my father.” It appears in the 5th anniversary print edition of Dryland.

Let’s also celebrate Lituo Huang’s poem Contrapuntal Divine, which also appears in the 5th anniversary print edition of Dryland.

Also from Lituo, the poem “Leftovers” appeared in Middle House Review.

Watch these Americans, my father says to me.
How wasteful they are. We are Chinese.
We use everything.

Kudos to Mary Camarillo for her poem “How to Write” ( a book spine poem), which appears in Tab Journal.

How to write an autobiographical novel:
First, catch
the mirror and the light,
night blooming jasmin(n)e,
lost in the city.

Check out Amy Ma’s humor piece “Warner Media Job Openings at The Ellen Show” that appears in How Pants Work.

E-commerce Customer Service Rep

  • Process a high volume of “Be Kind” merchandise returns.
  • Ability to defuse angry customers.
  • Must be willing to work overtime.

Congratulations to Amanda L. Andrei who published the short story “Lolo’s Diner” in Hip Mama.

It’s hard to make loco moco, even now, because I’ll be pouring gravy over the burger patty and rice and suddenly, I start thinking of the blood.

The caution tape, the silent red and blue lights, the white cop in my face and the black cop standing outside the door. I don’t want to include loco moco on our delivery menu, but Rita says it’s one of our best sellers, since no one out here really knows what it is and it’s so simple to make.

There’s also Norma Mendoza-Denton, whose book Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies was published by Cambridge University Press. Says the book’s description:

Early in his campaign, Donald Trump boasted that ‘I know words. I have the best words’, yet despite these assurances his speech style has sown conflict even as it has powered his meteoric rise. If the Trump era feels like a political crisis to many, it is also a linguistic one. Trump has repeatedly alarmed people around the world, while exciting his fan-base with his unprecedented rhetorical style, shock-tweeting, and weaponized words. Using many detailed examples, this fascinating and highly topical book reveals how Trump’s rallying cries, boasts, accusations, and mockery enlist many of his supporters into his alternate reality. From Trump’s relationship to the truth, to his use of gesture, to the anti-immigrant tenor of his language, it illuminates the less obvious mechanisms by which language in the Trump era has widened divisions along lines of class, gender, race, international relations, and even the sense of truth itself.

And to Arlene Schindler, congratulations on publishing her review of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” with Watercooler Picks.

In an era (approx. 1958-1962) when women were expected to marry up and shut up and definitely not be funny (especially not funnier than men), Midge Maisel defies cultural norms, big time, by trying to be a stand-up comic. Recently divorced, she juggles being a good mother with working nights in smoky clubs trying to hone her comedy act, where she talks about her struggles as a single mother.

And another review by Arlene, this time of “Drunk Parents,” also published by Watercooler Picks.

On a night when I’d felt as though I’d seen everything on my streaming services, I came across a film that I knew absolutely nothing about: Drunk Parents. I looked at the stellar cast, and thought I’d give it a try, because, I said to myself, “Alec Baldwin always delivers.”  It turned out to be a gem of very dark humor, political incorrectness and imaginative situations.

Be a lookout for an online discussion with the Deschutes Public Library and Noriko Nakada on September 28th from 6 pm – 7 pm PT entitled “Know Us: Through Eyes Like Mine,” during which Noriko will discuss growing up multiracial in Bend in the 80s.

Kudos to Carla Sameth whose poem “Pandemic Pacing: 20 Steps in the Early Days and Each Day” appears in Mutha Magazine.

asking myself is it
Happy Hour yet? Today, only 3:50 pm
and I couldn’t quite get those 16th notes right.
Take it to the ninth* my trumpet teacher tells me
and when you don’t know if you’ll be wearing a mask
or hoping for a spare ventilator or simply scrounging for the right
ingredients, faring much better than those folks living
in the tent cities your wife steps around each day on the way
to work to her shit job–it seems we might all take
it to the ninth. And yet the lips tire out and the breath
gets short too short to hit the high notes, anything above an E,
really, let’s be honest.

Congratulations to Tanya Ko Hong, who was interviewed about winning the 10th Ko Won’s Literary Award ( Article in Korean). In addition, she was also interviewed by The Lunch Ticket in “The War Is Still Within: An Interview with Tanya Ko Hong.”

What is your approach to writing multilingual poetry? How do you choose the exact words?

I work hard to find equivalent words. I started writing in Korea. After immigrating to America, I continued to write in Korean. Poetry was an intimate language for me, and my American friends wanted to know what I was writing about, but I thought poetry could not be translated, because it has rhythm, sound, emotion. How do you deliver that in another language? I thought it was impossible. My friends wanted to read my poems, so I felt compelled to translate them, but the words could not be translated exactly. I had to find emotional equivalents and use sensory words, the six senses. Finding the right word is like a treasure hunt, an experiment. Sometimes, I have to think in two minds, Korean and English, but one at a time. And sometimes the two languages are melded in my mind. It’s a paradox.

Congrats also to Gerda Govine Ituarte, whose poems “Bloom,” “Crows,” “Early Morning in Jamul,” “Grit & Grief,” and “Momma Momma” appear in the anthology When the Virus Came Calling: COVID-19 Strikes America, edited by Thelma T. Reya and published by Golden Hills Press.

And to Valerie Anne Burns, congratulations on publishing her personal essay “Venice Vision” on HerStry.

All the colors I most cherish drifted by as I floated down the Grand Canal. Rich but worn shades of orange, pink, golden yellow and blues meandered by, one after another. The water I floated on was a Caribbean aqua. It wrapped me in moist, balmy warmth. I viewed beautiful architecture while swimming beneath a vivid sapphire Italian sky. I felt released from struggle, free to spread myself far and wide. All my senses filled with wonder.

Admiring the city, suspended atop the Laguna Veneta, swimming in its resplendency, I reached my arms out wide in front of me, graceful as a sleek mermaid. Unaware of my body being ravaged, I was shapely and confident in my swim attire. I could feel the ripples of the sea swirling as I pushed forward in a breaststroke.

Congrats to Crystal AC Salas, whose poems, “Nieta Heaven,” “triolet for bad news,” & “Clarita speaks to Serafin while pacing the house alone” appear in PANK.

Nieta Heaven

after “Pocha Heaven” by Sara Borjas

In Nieta Heaven, no one goes hungry because there is always some rice on the stove that perpetually refills itself so abuelita doesn’t have to break her relaxing to get up to feed everyone who walks in. She says mija, I love it and this is the truth but sometimes this is also bullshit because Love is a panza stuffed with mole but it is also exhausting and in Nieta Heaven, we don’t have to pretend like it isn’t anymore, that it costs nothing because it does.…

Also, to Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, congratulations on publishing the article “Not Quarantine Food” in Gastronomica.

On April 1, I texted Becca a photo of roasted pasilla chiles stuffed with quinoa, carrot, onion, and Queso Oaxaca.

“That doesn’t look like quarantine food!” she responded. Maybe she thought I was foolin’.

“Why not?” I texted back.

She recounted our conversation two weeks prior about people stocking up on canned goods, frozen food, and things we ate in college like peanut butter and jelly and Cup o’ Noodles.

I haven’t eaten those foods in more than 20 years. Why would I start now? Even on a grad student budget, I have standards. And I’m using this time to get creative in the kitchen.

Check out Stephanie Yu’s short story “Steak Diane,” which appeared in Carte Blanche.

She knew what they called her when she wasn’t there: Steak Diane. They were calling her that right now, as Diane imagined they had done countless times before. The barmaid began in a low whisper directly into the bartender’s ear, as if to a lover in a shared bed. “Steak Diaaaaaane.” Suddenly called to duty, the bartender tied a mottled bar rag around his head and began to limp theatrically around the bar. As if she actually looked like that, thought Diane, as she readjusted the knot of her scarf, which rested—tight as a noose—at the base of her chin.

And let’s celebrate for Jenise Miller, whose the essay “Hermana, Tu Nombre Lo Llevo Grabado” appeared in Dryland.

I landed in Panama’s Tocumen International Airport, not sure I would recognize my sister’s face. She was fourteen years older than me and we had only met and learned about each other three years earlier. That year, Panama celebrated one hundred years of independence and Panamanians who lived abroad journeyed back to the beloved country they had not seen in decades. For my parents, it meant reuniting with distant relatives and loved ones, hair full of “las hojas blancas” El Gran Combo and Rubén Blades sang about. For me, it meant visiting their home country for the first time and meeting the sister and brother I didn’t know I had. It felt strange, being introduced as adults, by our father who left Panama and didn’t return for thirty years. That short meeting would be the only time I saw them. 

A shout out to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, whose poem “Battlegrounds” appeared on poets.org.

Motorcycles and white tour vans speed 
between behemoth granite shafts, shove
my body by their force, leave me roadside
and wandering fields. Little is funny
when you’re Chicana and walking 
a Civil War site not meant for walking.
Regardless, I ask park rangers and guides 
for stories on Mexicans soldiers,

receive shrugs. No evidence in statues 
or statistics. In the cemetery, not one 
Spanish name. I’m alone in the wine shop. 
It’s the same in the post office, the market, 
the antique shop with KKK books on display.
In the peach orchard, I prepare a séance,
sit cross-legged in grass, and hold
a smoky quartz to the setting sun.  

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WWS Publication Roundup for August

It’s time for WWS’s publication roundup to celebrate all of our fantastic members who published in August. Submitting work and publishing it are daunting tasks, even during the best of times, which these aren’t. So all of our WWS members should be applauded for their determination to get their words out into the world.

This month, let’s celebrate these WWS members for their publication achievements!

Congratulations to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo and Jenise Miller, whose collaborative video poem “For the Love of LA” appears on YouTube courtesy of The Music Center.

More congrats to Jenise Miller, whose poem “Right/Isthmus” appeared in PANK.

On a black machine in the exam room,
I read the words right/isthmus.
I only knew isthmus, as narrow body
of land, water on two sides, home
to my great-grandparents, their bodies
black machines that dug the canal
where two oceans now meet.

I carry that isthmus in my body.

Congrats also to Norma Mendoza-Denton, whose book, Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, was published by Cambridge University Press. Here’s a brief description:

Early in his campaign, Donald Trump boasted that “I know words. I have the best words,” yet despite these assurances his speech style has sown conflict even as it has powered his meteoric rise. If the Trump era feels like a political crisis to many, it is also a linguistic one. Trump has repeatedly alarmed people around the world, while exciting his fan-base with his unprecedented rhetorical style, shock-tweeting, and weaponized words. Using many detailed examples, this fascinating and highly topical book reveals how Trump’s rallying cries, boasts, accusations, and mockery enlist many of his supporters into his alternate reality.

A shout out to Isabella Rose for publishing the chapter “Self-Love: A Valuable Gift” in the anthology Life is a Gift: Loving You. From the description of the anthology:

Each co-author shares their inspired wisdom and wealth of experience to guide readers to enhance and heal relationships with others as well as within themselves. What has been described as the “Self-Love Bible”, Life Is A Gift: Loving You reveals methods to becoming self-aware, shares poetry and stories to reveal the truth of life and teaches to look at life from a different perspective.

Kudos to Teresa Reilly Keesan, who published the essay “Til Death” in the Summer 2020 issue of Joo Magazine (pp. 24-27).

I can’t remember when I first met Dr. Patil and I don’t know what my brain looks like inside. He does.

My memory is shot these days, but I remember the bananas and almonds I’d eaten the morning of my accident. And how, an hour or so later after weight training at the gym, I got on an elliptical until my stomach started to ache. Somehow — maybe I fainted or perhaps I just slipped — I fell and cracked my head against another exercise machine. Blood from a bisected meningeal vein blossomed into a catastrophic epidural hematoma, the growing pressure rising up against the bone. The force of the fall ricocheted by brain inside its cocoon, resulting in a seizure, a contrecoup concussion, and a subdural hematoma: a second pocket of blood fizzling on the brain.

Also check out Elline Lipkin’s poem “Two Braids” published in the Winter/Spring 2020 edition of the Notre Dame Review.

And there’s also Thea Puschel’s flash fiction “Safer at Home,” which was a winner of The Abstract Elephant’s 2020 Summer Fiction Contest.

No one ever thinks it will happen to them. Those things you see in the news. The bolt of lightning that strikes a person. The body left charred. The car that drove through a living room and knocked the house off its foundation. The child hit as he crossed the street, leaving behind red streaks of blood where he once stood. It has always happened to someone else. Not to me. Not to my family.

From Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, the flash fiction “What He Needs to Know” published by Toho Publishing.

It takes all my energy to focus on my cafeteria cups: soup, coffee, and a gelatinous blob that calls itself dessert. The lunch crowd is long gone, and the easy listening music overhead echoes in the emptiness. I’ve been at the hospital since 5:00 a.m., and this is my first meal. Without looking up, I feel her standing across from me, see her hands on the opposing chair.

My ex-husband’s new girlfriend clears her throat.

And to Flint, congratulations on publishing the creative nonfiction piece “Avery” with Erotic Review.

I’m not proud to admit this, but eight years ago I went through this phase where I was suddenly attracted to men. Or if you prefer, persons with a non-detachable penis. So I went straight to the source, and posted an ad on the Craigslist W4M personals in Los Angeles: Kinky Queer Chick In Heterocurious Phase & Wondering What All the Fuss Is About. I was a very popular W.

Eileen Cronin’s article “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Identity” was published by AWP.

Although we do not refer to them as disabled writers, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and Flannery O’Connor had traumatic brain injury, depression, and lupus, respectively. We could dedicate an encyclopedia solely to American writers with mental illness, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sylvia Plath and William Styron to David Foster Wallace, and more recently Esmé Weijun Wang. The list is endless, but of these writers only Wang, whose first book was published in 2016, has directly addressed her identification with the word disability.

What is the cost of keeping this identity hidden?

Congrats to Lisbeth Coiman on publishing the poem “Poesías de la soledad y la inmigración” with Resonancias Literarias.

VOZ EN LA OSCURIDAD

No recordaré
El silencio de aquellos que me dejaron sola
Recordaré
Las voces que sostienen mi mano en la oscuridad
Susurrando
Estoy aquí contigo

A shout out to Arlene Schindler for publishing the essay “Dread Jet Lag? Drip Therapy Makes Travel Distress Disappear” with Business Traveler.

Jet lag, long and difficult flights, and sleepless nights are only a few of the afflictions endured with frequent travel. For most travelers, these are managed in myriad ways – from adjusting clocks a week ahead of flying, drinking endless glasses of water, imbibing cherry juice, downing bottles of melatonin, cutting caffeine and alcohol, upping the Xanax doses, or taking a chance porting THC products across international boundaries.

To Ryane Nicole Granados, congratulations on publishing the essay “Love Letter to My Soon to Be 13-Year-Old Black Son” with Pangyrus.

Dear Sonshine,

That’s what I call you because the mere sight of your go big or go home smile is like the sun filtering through our shutters on a bright California day. It’s the summer before your 13th birthday but for months now you’ve been reiterating that you’re taller than me, that you can almost fit in your father’s shoes, that your dreams are ever-changing: soccer player, drummer, paramedic. You are just as strong-willed as you were as a toddler, but to my delight your personality has also emerged as outgoing and kind. You are compassionate to strangers, concerned about world issues, and you are constantly, unabashedly questioning. It is usually in these moments of inquiry where my enchantment with you turns to frustration and fear. You see son, I have lived in this Black skin longer than you have. I have learned to walk a fine line between approachable and articulate, between joy and rage. I know that the difference between coming home alive or becoming a hashtag might be the stifling of my understandable need to question someone’s unjust begrudging of my humanity. So your father and I usually exchange a glance and maybe a sigh and in the small window before you disappear into your video games with friends, we try to explain to you the terrifying duality of being Black and being perceived as an adult in America.

Lituo Huang’s microflash “16A” appeared in Daily Drunk Posts.

The woman on the bed, with hair like brown shoelaces over her scalp, says, “I told you to never trust anyone who puts on shoes to get the mail.

Congratulations to Antonia Crane, whose article “Quarantine Stripping For Strippers” appeared in Knock.

Nurses, grocery clerks, postal workers, Lyft drivers, and the folx who deliver your quarantine snacks — they can all wear masks at work without raising eyebrows. But strippers all across the country are required to wear zero (or tiny) clothing in order to perform in tight, sweaty quarters in close contact with strangers. At some strip clubs in Los Angeles, performers even sign contracts agreeing to be naked on the floor. If they break the rule and wear a single article of clothing, they are fined up to 80 dollars.

When COVID-19 raged across the United States, strippers, massage therapists, nail salon technicians, and many other workers who rely on human touch watched our livelihoods vanish without any warning — and for thousands of us, the possibility of any federal or state assistance remains frustratingly out of reach.

And from Melissa Chadburn, the article “‘Hansel and Gretel’ in LA County” was published by the New York Review of Books.

Over the last five years, I’ve studied all of the child fatalities in Los Angeles County with open Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) investigations. To some, this research might seem grim, but I’ve found comfort in unpacking these redacted files. The files trickle in from my public records requests, five or ten at a time. I spend hours identifying the blacked-out information. I start by checking the child’s age and date of death in one of these case files against a Los Angeles Times homicide report. Then I search the Internet for other clues, the dark boxes slowly revealing some of the facts of their story.

Doubtless, one of the things that draws me to the files is the short spell I spent in the child welfare system. It’s a club you join and never leave. There is no loneliness like the loneliness of being taken from your mother. I’m forty-three now and grieve that loss again and again.

A profile of Melissa also appeared in the NYRB newsletter.

On Thursday we published “‘Hansel and Gretel’ in LA County” by Melissa Chadburn. The title we came up with, I realized only later, was an unconscious homage to Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Janet Malcolm’s great book about a murder trial involving a child custody battle that took place in Queens. There is a genuine thematic link, in fact, with Chadburn’s story—which, though based on her empirical research into welfare services investigations of child deaths, also draws on the mythic roots of the violence and horror that occur inside families.

And to Noriko Nakada, congratulations on publishing her essay “Community in the Time of COVID” in Cultural Weekly.

Several days each week in my neighborhood in South Los Angeles I head out for a run. When my family and I moved here in 2018, the neighborhood was already shifting. It was the summer before teachers were preparing to go on strike, before the spring when Nipsey Hussle was murdered just a few blocks away. It was a year after Alton Sterling was killed by police and two years before Ahmaud Arbery.

I run through the neighborhood captured by Lynell George in After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame. She writes about these streets as the veins and arteries of her childhood, and now this is where I run in pleasant weather: up 59th Street to Alviso, across Slauson, and up the hill.

Let’s also celebrate Anita Gill, whose essay, “My Father’s Language” appeared in Kweli.

On the first day of Hindi class, I learned the word for “vomiting.” Not one of the words I would have introduced had this been my language class to teach, but in returning to the classroom as the student, I kept my criticisms to a minimum. The textbook was to blame. The authors organized the chapters to provide handful of the characters in the Hindi alphabet, known as Devanagari, and then provide a small vocabulary list of words including those recently-taught letters. “A” is for “apple” and so on.

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WWS Publication Roundup for July

This is my first post as the new publication roundups editor. Thank you, Laura Warrell, for being such a fantastic editor for the past four and a half years.

For many of us, it’s been difficult to stay focused on writing during the ongoing crises that define our everyday lives. Time and again, Women Who Submit has been a touchstone, a reminder that creativity matters; that our words make a difference in the world.

To witness WWS members continue to submit their work and publish far and wide is an inspiration. So let’s join in celebrating this month’s literary successes of our community members!

Congratulations to Donna Spruijt-Metz, whose poem “Pebbles Along the Labyrinth- Psalm 31” was published by The Cortland Review, along with an audio recording.

Listening for mercy – 
           I place                           pebbles

along the labyrinth  –  smooth

           in YOUR hand

against
           the cutting nets
                                   of trust

Congratulations to Amy Shimshon-Santo, whose chapbook of erasure poems, Endless Bowls of Sky, was published this month by Placeholder’s Press’s Flashbulb!

Check out Li Yun Alvarado’s poem “To the White Parenting ‘Expert'” published by La Parent as part of “LA Parents Weigh in on Racism:”

My naivete: the
presumption
that your concern

for designing presence
& peace included

peace for black babies.

For Tammy Delatorre, her essay “I Want to Fuck Your Poem” appeared in the Los Angeles Review.

Everything you said about poetry, I wanted to get naked with. You quoted the immortals: W.H. Auden saying we’re making a “verbal object,” Carl Sandburg claiming a poem was “an echo asking a shadow to dance,” and Howard Nemerov stating that poetry was “a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them.”

Check out Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s essay “Forget About the Rap Star and Choose Me,” out now in PANK.

At 32 I fell for a man I met through OK Cupid. Still a couple of years before the dating app deluge, I joined the site determined to end my history with short-lived, non-boyfriends.

Congrats to Tanya Ko Hong, whose poems “Journey (여행)” and “What I Really Want (내가 간절히 원하는 것은)” were published this month in The Global Korean Literature Magazine (Anthology 3).

Congratulations Arielle Silver, whose musical album and companion book, both titled “A Thousand Tiny Torches,” were released this month.

From Colette Sartor, the interview “Excerpt & Q&A: ONCE REMOVED by Colette Sartor” was published by Angels Flight literary west.

Now, more than a century later, I find myself amidst a deadly pandemic, worried about keeping my family safe while staying afloat financially. I dread that we will wind up where my grandmother’s family did: ravaged by loss, fighting to rebuild in the outbreak’s aftermath.

Also from Colette, the interview “Cultural Attunement and ‘Otherness’: A Conversation with Aimee Liu” appeared in The Rumpus.

Liu’s novel succeeds not just as fine-tuned historical fiction but also as an insightful portrait of individuals determined to understand and embrace the humanity of all. The book is set within the context of the British colonial system’s arrogant dehumanization of anyone perceived as “other.”

Congrats to Soleil David, whose poem “Xyliphius sofiae” appeared in Coal Hill Review.

I, a human being with eyes that swim
in aqueous humor, hold a hand out

in absolute darkness and cannot see it.

From Désirée Zamorano, her short story “Norma” was published by PANK.

She could not stop being his mother; he made his own decisions. That was how it should be. What she needed to do was sip and enjoy the wine, his presence, their shared meal. She did not need the addition of the locura in her mind. Calmate, she told herself. To be a parent was to have expectations. To be an adult was to release them.

Congratulations to Laura Warrell, who published her essay “Writing While Black” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

To write as a Black person in America is to sustain a barrage of gut punches from a community and industry that don’t do a great job transcending the larger inequities of the culture surrounding them. Writing is difficult and publishing hellish, but the path for Black writers is laden with unique indignities.

Congratulations Lisbeth Coiman on publishing her poem “A Rosary for Venezuela” in La Bloga.

I am a radical atheist relearning to pray.
Kneeling to conjure devotion, I hold my motherland between the palms of my hands, to protect her against all evils. My words, the beads of the rosary slipping through my fingers.

Also from Lisbeth, the poem “Allyship,” published by Cultural Weekly.

Identify the hair root-cause of self-hatred
Mother washing my hair with chamomile tea
To make it blonde
But she only made me a “bachaca”
“Yellow”
All throughout my childhood
I never understood why
A woman who despised Black people
Married the son of a Black woman

Congratulations to Melissa Chadburn, who published “The Archive” in The Paris Review Daily.

One quiet spring morning, as a plague engulfs America, I awake, brew coffee, and shuffle to my computer. Outside my windows, a cordillera of snow-thatched roofs. I feel rooted, glooming in grief and rage. The need to stay in place. In the place of our wreckage. In other homes, I imagine children in nightshirts, and daddy flipping pancakes, and some things still good. Meanwhile, the world continues to break in the ways that it has always been broken.