WWST

I'm unfamiliar with Wild West Standard Time. If I'm a few minutes late, I'm sure you'll pardon me, sheriff.

I've uploaded my nonsense to Google Docs. It says 12 PM. Success?

High Noon

Okay, so it's not quite the moment of atonement yet. But let it be known that I've loaded my quick fiction onto the googledocs account. I'll be on the lookout for yours. Bring on the literary shootout.

Re: The Penultimate Post

Katie Moulton,

I don't know a lot about doing readings, having never done one myself. However, I do know one really important thing about this reading in particular: You'll be just fine.

You've got material. Even if you revert back to some tried-and-true lines from your days of Gasson Hall glory, so what? And hey, slip in a few new lines and see what happens.

Tell your anxiety to shut its filthy mouth and ask your gut a few questions. Is this poem ready? If yes, ask it where it thinks the poem should go. If it says second-to-last, don't ask it why (or even lecture it on expanding its vocabulary with "penultimate"). Just trust it. And if it gurgles in response, that's still the anxiety talking. Take a Tums and try again.

And the bio is just a nano about yourself. If you were a nano, what would you be?

Writer Power,
Tom

About the Author:
"Tom Forsythe, born in a land of deer hunters and pregnant teenagers, has since escaped to Boston where he writes and does 50 pushups each day. Embarrassingly, he has no upper body strength and consistently lies about his ability to do push-ups."

Performance Anxiety

I just got asked to fill in at a reading tomorrow night put on by the lit journal River Styx. It's my first time reading in St. Louis, which now seems very, very far from dear old French Press, Gasson Hall, and Brookline Booksmith. ...and I may be freaking out. Just a little.

I have ten minutes, and now, suddenly, it seems, no material.

How do you decide when your work is ready to be read to an audience, if ever at all? How do you order them? How do you write a two-sentence bio, including one sentence which reveals some tragic or embarrassing element of your nature? (Seriously.)

Please help. S.O.S. (Save Our Sonnets?)

Ok, so it's not Poetry...

I just got a piece in my first paying publication, and wanted to share:
http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/atoz/

(Yay!)

The Quick and the Read

Today, for only the third time in my life, I received a submission response within 24 hours of initially sending my work. It was a rejection, so I'm batting .333 on short turnarounds at present, but I'm not bitter. Instead, I remain in awe of the efficiency and pizzazz of these quickdraw editors. Therefore, in honor of speedy reads, I hereby declare a showdown. I challenge all of us to complete a short-short story (let's say 500 words or less) by no later than this time a week from today (okay okay, we'll say by high-noon on Tuesday for good measure). Bring your six-shooters and your spurs.

Hell Week

An example: my car has broken down every day for four days. And that, friends, is one of the better things that has happened to me this week.

I too had photos to share, but needless to say, the powers that be wouldn't let them upload, no. While thwarting my attempt, the powers that be also erased them and the hundred or so other pictures stored on my camera and noplace else. To me, they are now the powers that be-otch.

I've been thinking about my very-recent writing under the term Living Expenses. I will now spew some barely-formed poetry into the blogabyss.

What kind of karma do you think that will warrant?

Shelter

If we are always in danger
Of being No one, No where,
Then why are our Selves so
Inescapable, like waves spiking the lifeboat,
Towered and internal as nausea,
While we cling to the closest huddled body:
A pink face in a yellow slicker, a finger curling for ours,
Our finger providing the placehold in space
For a Some one who might be Any one, but is
Beside us, for now.



Service

This is what I am talking around.
The pile of speckled ice and the plastic cup
Around it. Another example: the stewardess’
Hand on the lip of aluminum, and yours
On the other end. How her eyes don’t
See yours, how you notice.
Though you keep the window shade
Pulled open, its oval slot of light
Her eyes stay wide
Buttons unbuttoned down her front jacket panel,
While you have always found it hard
Not to blink in others’ faces.
Look again, look harder
When she sweeps the aisle soundless
In recycled air, and just so,
Just so, reproach yourself
With remembering how she harkened
To every ding of every blue vinyl-back seat. For two hours
She is your mother overhead
And don’t you think she gave you all
She could? After all
Ginger ale
is fine, please,
Thank you.



Misplaced Rib

I handle the baby like I’ve caught him
mid-fall. Fingers spread like
a glove, careful with his right
half-shoulder, the tiny red patch
where they told the mother
she’d broken his collarbone.
Careful not to touch, to protect
without touch, to circle the memory of
Your deep-creviced shoulder
blades, fingerholds
in the wooden fence.
He’s lived through four days now.

My palm cradles his skull,
soft as old peaches you’d
toss for impromptu batting practice:
a branch, your gathered hands,
juice streaming over the backfence.
I held your head this way
and tried to feel us growing,
that first April, in borrowed beds.
Fingers mapped the pitch of bone,
walked the chalk lines inch by inch,
traced curves through your dusting
of hair, tried to feel where I’d fit.
I was new. And then

I was new again.

The baby’s not mine
until I hold him, then
I’m ready to steal
anything he cries for
over the wall, through the stand
of pine to the opened-up ground
where I hear they play ball now,
and his little up-down chest
cleaves into mine. There between us
is your breath falling and your breath
rising, your pleated canyon,
your misplaced rib
(did you give it to me? did I lose it for us?)
and baby, the sun is shining
on all the scars we were born with.