round-up: 4/13
a new poem out, where to submit, what i'm reading, & some quotations <3
Happy Monday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Where you should submit this week
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets I’ve enjoyed
Housekeeping:
I have a new poem out at Zócalo Public Square! You can read it below, or you can listen to me read it here.
Where to submit this week:
Baltimore Review
What: Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Deadline: May 31
Pay: $50
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
Mammoth, Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
Quotations:
Your hands are starfish clung to my coral hips, reliant on / crash, coil, the kinking of light through liquid.
-Dawn Lonsinger, “Famine of Hands”
chronically I am wind through the bowl of your skull
-Kelly Weber, “Auto / Immune”
my voice a creek bed bloated / with stones
-Kelly Weber, “Auto / Immune”
I am trying to push daylight through my skin
-Kelly Weber, “Anti / Body Sequencing: Elegy”
i am excruciatingly aware that many contexts cannot support the weight of [my] alienness, and thus i often shave off my idiosyncratic edges to accommodate the access of others
-nessi alexander-barnes, “Esoterica/Ethos: Critique; For Personal Use When Editing the Work of Others”
i am selfish; i am ravenous; i am starving; i have been hungry for so long;
-nessi alexander-barnes, “Esoterica/Ethos: Critique; For Personal Use When Editing the Work of Others”
my job as someone who is critiquing someone else is *not* to impose my voice on them, but to listen for their voice, and to help them make that voice more resonant.
-nessi alexander-barnes, “Esoterica/Ethos: Critique; For Personal Use When Editing the Work of Others”
It was April, and the spring sun shattered the window with a strong gust of suspended life. The white-hot glow made me feel fertile.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
My whole body reeked of warm algae of sweat and pond scum, of stagnant water in which tiny militias of egg were seething.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
I’d been raised to meet the needs and expectations of others. Is this how women are brought up? Now and then I pictured myself as a rodent dwelling on the forest floor, a tireless mammal designed to feed larger animals of all species.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
Friday morning. Blue, windswept sky. The sun, an oil spill.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
In late June, the whole city oozed with swelter.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
The streets, always vicious and never calm, sheltered legions of larvae who had all been coerced into the same enclosed life.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
People can be persuaded to do just about anything when they’re exhausted. Eight, nine, ten straight hours of work for a lousy paycheck can reduce anyone to survival mode. You lose the ability to think of anything but the basics: hunkering down in one place for as long as it takes to eat and then, when the day is done, sheltering in some hole from the dark and the inclement weather. Thousands of years ago, we referred to these holes as caves. Now we call them leisure, exercise, social media. We retreat to our depressing cells and feel smug, convinced we are the lucky ones.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
Being near the mountains, I realize, makes me restless. The forest and rocks make me feel alive, incredibly corporeal—head fused to body, thoughts spilling inwards and reaching every cavity and spongy organ red with blood before turning into howls. I’m all unfiltered instinct, like a fallow deer or a wild boar.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
Although outwardly my body is still, inside me is a thundering arena, and I’m at the point where I have no idea what I want, but I do know what I need. Right now, any one of my species would do.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
The sky above me, colossal. The landscape dips at the end of the field and vanishes into the sea, shedding everything, only to resurface a great distance later, blue mountains rising up seemingly without end. I will live up here, cleaved to the rock like a root, sucking up nutrients until every finger, every tooth, every last one of my thoughts is worn through.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
A woman’s mouth is a powerful thing—it can either set you right or set you free. Hers is the artery that calls the body to order. I’m helpless against it.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
I don’t trust states or legislation, but I do believe in life, in land, and in the freedom to become smarter, more wilful, and stronger than anyone.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
Guilt is a useless emotion, a finger that points and ruins everything.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
I wanted daytime to last forever, to lose all belief in night. I was scared loneliness would strip off in front of me and tender me the void. I was violently afraid of losing heart.
-Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
Tweets:
