Three Squares a Day

You eat food, don’t you? You write poetry, don’t you? So send us your poems about food and eating for possible publication in an upcoming anthology. See our Call for Submissions, below.

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Rejected, Dejected

Scratch almost any poet and you’ll uncover a sad trove of rejections from poetry journals. What does it mean when a journal says no (or anything other than yes)? Liz Kay addressed that question not long ago in her blog. A founding editor of Spark Wheel Press and burntdistrict, a journal of contemporary poetry, Kay divides rejection notices into four dreaded and not-so-dreaded categories:

1. The Form Rejection
2. The Encouraging Form Rejection
3. The Non-Form Rejection with Specific Feedback
4. The Conditional Acceptance

You can read her advice on how to handle all four here.

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One Day to Live

Beth Isham is a woman with stories to tell. A nurse in World War II, she cared for Japanese POWs with tuberculosis and contracted the disease herself. Beth went on to nurse and teach nursing for years. And to write poems and memoirs. Here’s her rumination on the mayfly, a characteristically sharp piece of observation:

Mayfly Mayhem by Beth Isham Awake, sleepers! Arise! Up and about! Your day has arrived. Climb from your deep sleep. Rise up and join the horde lifting to the sky. A huge army about to attack. A cloud of mayflies darting this way and that as they hurry to mate. To stroke each others’ translucent, transparent wings, to wriggle twin tails. Drop your fertilized eggs to the water’s surface and let them sink to a year long sleep. Fly away toward the light at the end of the tunnel. To the street lights, the marque lights, the neon lights, the headlights that will end your day, your final day, leaving your lifeless body on window sills, spider webs, curb sides and in the path of oncoming cars to mash you to a crackly nothingness as the automobiles skid in your juices and trade fender dents with each other. Your day has come and gone. These two or three hours have turned you to dust. In the depths of the pond your progeny await one day to live.      Next year.           Same time.                 Same place.

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Call for Submissions

We’re planning an anthology of poems about food and eating, to be published in 2015. We’re defining the theme loosely and welcome a chance to read poems on everything from the sublime to the delicious. Here’s the drill:

• Send up to 3 original poems to poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere. Previously published poems are fine too—we’ll credit the original publisher.
• Please give your full contact info, plus the titles of your poems and a brief (50-75 word) bio, in the body of the email.
• Attach your submission to the email as a .doc, docx, or .rtf document, one poem per page, with your name and email address on each page. No fancy formatting, please!
• We will review submissions as expeditiously as possible, so please don’t query us unless you haven’t heard from us in two months.
• Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2014

We’re looking forward to your poems.  

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This Writing Life

Haven’t we all felt it? The frustration of staring at a page where the words refuse to take their right places or, worse, take any place at all. Poet Brent Scott puts it well:

Frustration
Brent Scott

I destroyed a notebook.
Threw it across the room.
The papers
Fluttered around the spiral.
Ripped free.
Until the cardboard covers creased.
It hit against the wall.
I put my hand to my head.
Poems scattered on the floor.
They cowered as I approached.
One swallowed. Asked,
"What have we done?"
"Nothing.
I'm sorry.
It's me."

Brent Scott recently completed an MFA in Screenwriting at the University of New Orleans and just finished a year of teaching English in Korea. He spends a lot of his free time in the kitchen, creating new recipes.

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Women of a Certain Age

Persimmon Tree has people like me in mind. Billed as “An Online Magazine of the Arts for Women Over Sixty,” Persimmon Tree publishes fiction, nonfiction, art, and, yes, poetry. A piece of mine made it into the summer issue’s collection of poems from the southern states:

On Seeing an Unfamiliar Bird at the Feeder
Sally Zakariya

Was it you, dickcissel, with your finch
beak outside on the feeder today?

What I noticed was your slender grace
the gentle bob of your head as you pecked

the perfect seed, the flourish when you raised
your pale bill, seed displayed, prize among prizes.

How much of your small spirit you expend
each day, seed by hopeful seed, feeding

your heart, your beating wings. Was
it you, strayed off course, or your spirit

that stopped by here on your way
from one unknown to another?