round-up: 10/7
reading recs, quotes, submission opportunities, & more
Happy Friday, all!
Hope all is well with you.
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Love letters
Reading recommendations
To read
Quotations
Submission opportunities
Call to action
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I have my first essay (!) out in Copper Nickel this week. & look how good the lineup is! What an honor & privilege.
Love letters:
I love y’all. Let’s hang out in person after the plague dies down.
Reading recommendations:
The newest issue of The West Review, obviously.
Here are some excerpts:
Anyway,
if you live in the US, I hope you’ll consider buying 5 books for $30 from us. The proceeds go straight into the ~contributors fund~, which allows me to pay writers (what little I can!) for their work.
& read the full issue here:
To read:
Quotations:
In the beginning, in a hospital in north Mississippi, a mother holds her new baby, calls this day her happiest. The baby is you. The mother is surprised you’re here with only a heart murmur.
-K. Iver
In the beginning, there’s much holding. There’s not enough holding. In the beginning, a father says you’re beautiful because you are.
-K. Iver
Here, a beginning: a small house on a wooded hill where dogwoods bloom when they’re supposed to. If you’re wondering what the cardinals would do for you besides moving bright color around, you’re twelve. If you’re wondering what parts of life are survivable, you’re fourteen.
-K. Iver
In the beginning, he looks at you the way someone must have when you were born. Here, in the forest, a ripeness both of you can eat but somehow shouldn’t. A fruit bored with sinless afternoons and aching for teeth.
-K. Iver
I’m told your atoms
are still atoms. Somewhere you’re sitting
by a pool picking apart the physics
of swimming.
-K. Iver
This poem
may unfold, in detail, a husband’s violence
toward a wife. May run time in a circle.
May reveal the husband’s plush
red hands abbreviating his wife’s neck
on a crisp November afternoon, their child
watching from the porch. The husband
is my father. Is the dreaming boy. The wife
is my mother.
-K. Iver
This poem may mention sexual abuse
in the abstract. This poem doesn’t know
why it must tell you. It wants you
to resist brightsiding its tragedies.
It’s tired of hearing that everything
worked out, didn’t it? Tired of hearing
the mother loved the child. So much.
Everyone says so.
-K. Iver
It wants to swaddle the impossible
contours of joy. It’s tired of hearing
joy is possible. It wants joy.
-K. Iver
From our speakers:
soft synth, a baseline, a choir
reverbing, a guitar riff that rises
and falls, asks and answers.
-K. Iver
Somewhere, bodies
like ours are pulsing under the same
pink neon.
[…]
Torsos like ours
are touching and strangers watch
only because they’re gorgeous.
Let me pretend you’re back in my
bedroom, before my mother found us.
-K. Iver
I almost once believed a god
could hold me with words.
That was during a time when you,
a blond boy forced to call
himself a girl, stood in my driveway
under a glazed moon,
saying one day you won’t be scared
which meant one day my mouth
would touch the mouth our church
couldn’t categorize.
-K. Iver
Zoom in on the toned forearm. The goldenrod rushing by.
-K. Iver
No one with lips this pillowy needs to deliver ice. And here you are, lifting bags and saving up for a weekend in Memphis at the Motel 6. There’s no time for dialogue about class or gender. No room to signal that your time with goldenrod is limited. Your time awake is limited. Look how awake you are.
-K. Iver
Soon enough I’ll have someone
to undress for.
-K. Iver
Somewhere, not far, you keep
jumping from a mountain. Once,
you talked me from the same
smooth edge.
-K. Iver
I’m trying to unwrite these grassy hills they made so dangerous. When my lover was alive, my touch could unslaughter a calf.
-K. Iver
Only the beautiful are worth rescuing, and they are never desperate for long.
-K. Iver
In the room of my beloved’s
body, no pictures. Only
carnations. They spill over
his box like misplaced grief.
-K. Iver
Lord,
in the room of my beloved’s
body, your men won’t admit
the fact of his body.
-K. Iver
Lord, when I loved you,
I didn’t know
so many of your men
would exile so many of us.
-K. Iver
There, I can see you leaning on the blue wall,
saying you’re alive and so sorry.
-K. Iver
My acupuncturist says
you enjoy this, don’t you.
She’s talking about my grief.
-K. Iver
Instead of staring at each other on the landing
you touch my face and lean in.
-K. Iver
I want the impossible. Another
genre. Time for opening shots
of gravel, a small brick house
where my beloved comes of age.
-K. Iver
The uneven recovery of the lesbian and gay past—gay historiography—has tended to reproduce rather than actively challenge existing lines of race, class, and gender dominance.
-Scott Bravmann, Out/Look 1990
In recuperating the past, modernism posits a [problematic] linear development model of history in order to root present identities in a stable and coherent personal and social past. The coming out process produces the secure illusion of a unified self.
-Scott Bravmann, Out/Look 1990
The lesbian of color is not only invisible, she doesn’t even exist. Our speech, too, is inaudible. We speak in tongues.
-Gloria Anzaldua
For some of us there was no particular place, and we grabbed whatever we could from wherever we found space. […] Each of us had our own needs and pursuits, and many different alliances.
-Audre Lorde, Zami
Self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford to settle for one easy definition, one narrow individuation of self.
-Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldua demand a reconsideration of the ways in which historical theory has unified or undercut fragmented identities. The requirements of modernist lesbian and gay historiography have disallowed the articulation of these identities precisely because they refuse to—indeed, cannot—stand still. This fundamental diversity necessitates a way of writing history that is itself fragmented, unfinished, and self-critical. This means looking at richly complex cultural experiences through a theoretical lens that allows a mapping of multiple historical narratives, rather than one overarching account of historical development.
-Scott Bravmann, Out/Look 1990
Submission opportunities (& they all pay!):
Zoetic Press: Family // Details here.
Ninth Letter: Constellations // Details here.
Arc Poetry Magazine: 100th Issue Celebrations // Details here.
Abandon Journal: Abandon Love // Details here.
Consequence // Details here.
Orca Lit // Details here.
Call to action:
Submit, baby! Send your work to the six journals listed above, if you qualify.
Tweets:
That’s all for today!
Please buy things so that I can pay my rent. Love you.