Sponsored by the Abortion Care Network & Split This Rock
Deadline: April 1, 2012 - Free to enter
The Abortion Care Network (ACN), a national organization of independent providers and prochoice supporters, and Split This Rock, a national network of socially engaged poets, announce a poetry contest in conjunction with ACN’s annual meeting, to be held in May 2012 in the DC metro area.
The experience of women who seek abortion and other reproductive services is as varied as the individuals involved. For some, there is safety, relief, and good medical care. For others, there is doubt, harassment, and stigma. For all, health care takes place in a politicized context in which even the most basic choices about our bodies, sexuality, and childbearing can be scrutinized.
The ACN and Split This Rock welcome the submission of poems on these themes. We will award the following prizes: First ($100), Second ($75) and Third Place ($50), and Honorable Mention. Judging will done by Split This Rock and ACN.
The first-place winner will read the winning poem at ACN’s annual meeting in May. The prize-winning poems will be published in the ACN’s quarterly newsletter, The Provider, in the conference program distributed to all meeting attendees, and on Split This Rock’s website at www.SplitThisRock.org.
Poets from any part of the U.S. may submit poems, but we regret that no travel funds will be provided so that the winning poet may read at the meeting.
Submission Guidelines:
· Simultaneous submissions accepted. Please inform us at info@splitthisrock.org immediately if the poem has been accepted for publication elsewhere.
· Poets must be able to be in the Washington, DC, area in May, 2012 to read the winning poem at the annual meeting of the ACN.
Questions? info@splitthisrock.org
Across the Street from the Whitmore Home for Girls, 1949
The Mad Girls climb the wet hill,
breathe the sharp air through sick-green lungs.
The Wildest One wanders off like an old cow
and finds a steaming breast inside a footprint in the snow.
She slips it into her glove, holds it close like a darling.
At night, she suckles the lavender tit, still warm
in her hard little hands. She drapes it over her heart--
the closest she will ever come to a Woman Thing.
She sleeps on her right side with the breast
tucked between her legs. Her eyes flutter like a rocked doll.
She dreams of Before the Father, when her body
was smooth as a crab, her fingers
tip-toe soft. Her mouth was a shining crown,
her hair moved like a hungry dog.
Outside her bedroom, the Lonesome Boys hide in trees
to watch the Father lift her gown.
In the morning, she is who she is again.
Her hair, a soft black brick, her body held together
by hammers. The breast is shriveled up. Gone cold
in her lap. A death-blue fish with one stone eye.
-Rachel McKibbens
Used by permission.
From Beloit Poetry Journal
Spring 2012 - Split This Rock Edition
Order this special issue now from the BPJ website for only $5.00. The issue will also be available for sale at Split This Rock's table at AWP and at the festival.
Rachel McKibbens is the author of Pink Elephant and is a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow. She was an Urban Word NYC mentor, teaching poetry at Bellevue Hospital through The Healing Arts Program, targeting at-risk youth. She teaches poetry and creative writing throughout the country. Her poems, short stories and nonfiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies including World Literature Today, The New York Quarterly, and The American Poetry Journal.
McKibbens will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!
Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!
Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210
The Street of Broken Dreams
The dog lunged at me and choked on its chain
guarding a house on the street of broken dreams.
What does it take to be safe? A sun-porch window
barred shut with a wood-spooled bed frame. Fradon
lock store down the block, a giant curlicue key
advertising sleep all night, sweet dreams. A bumble-
bee in the clover fumbling to find its damp-dirt home.
No way to tell who owns my neighborhood homes
until the for-sale-by-bank signs grow overnight,
and of course there's the bank at James and Lodi
with the blue light, CHASE, that stays on 24/7.
On my street some people harrow a vacant lot,
green turned under into small rows, they harvest
weathered rocks and pile those up in the corner.
In another city, some foreclosed people got so angry
the big finance company had to hide its sign, AIG.
The people were so angry. That makes me feel more
safe, the people come out of their houses to shout:
We demand. Not rabble and rabid, not shadow, not terror,
Minnie Bruce Pratt's most recent book is Inside the Money Machine, described by one reviewer as "anti-capitalist poetics." Her previous book, The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems, received a Lambda Literary Award. Her poems about her relationship to her sons as a lesbian mother, Crime Against Nature, were chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. A member of the National Writers Union, Pratt does anti-racist and anti-imperialist organizing with the International Action Center and its Women's Fightback Network. After 30 years of adjunct teaching, she is a part-time Professor of Writing & Rhetoric and Women's & Gender Studies at Syracuse University.
Pratt will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!
Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!
Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210
Uncivil
I am wearing a white tux with tails,
or a baby blue one with a ruffly shirt,
or decked out in classic black, or coolly
clad in a pearl-white dashiki embroidered
in gold silk, or my favorite pair of holy
blue jeans with a white tee shirt that says
I Heart Pussy, or the green one with the black
velvet fist raised in the air, & you're not
wearing a white dress at all but a wispy
wraparound, strawberry-red, that hugs you
warm & tight around the waist, cut low
at the small of your back, showing off
peek-a-boo cleavage & legs with no quit,
& our folks are here with tissues & hankies
bawling the way parents do at weddings,
& I won't be waiting for you at the end
of any aisle, but we will walk together,
arm-in-arm, hand-in-hand, our wrists
tied & bound with sheer purple scarves,
& we will be the only ones giving us away
under a moonlit sky abundant in stars,
& there will be no Wedding March
on the Steinway but Nina Simone
demanding Be My Husband & I'll Be
Your Wife or Aretha Franklin's luscious
You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,
& we won't exchange vows or rings,
but smoldering kisses & lingering hugs,
& there will be no parchment certificate
stamped with any State's approval
confirming we're married or in love,
but we will jump over a brand new straw
broom, we will light candles & pour red
wine into the earth where our ancestors sleep,
we will wash & anoint each other's heads
with frankincense & myrrh, & the women
will unwind butter-yellow kangas
from their hair & toss them on the ground
before us to cushion our feet.
Venus Thrash has had poetry published in Gargoyle, Beltway Quarterly, Torch, and the Arkansas Review, and in the anthologies Spaces Between Us: An HIV/AIDS Anthology, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, and Haunted Voices, Haunting Places: An Anthology of Writers of the Old and New South. She has read at the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Schomburg Center for African American Research, and The Library of Congress. She is a professor of fiction and poetry, and a mother.
Thrash will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!
Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!
Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210
We're in the final stretch for organizing the 2012 Split This Rock Festival and we need your help to make this work! Please consider volunteering during the Festival from March 22nd to March 25th. Some of the roles for volunteers include:
We are hosting three brief, fun volunteer training sessions to prepare you for your shifts! This is a great chance to meet our team and fellow poets & organizers. We ask all volunteers to please attend one of the following sessions:
If you are coming from out of town and can't make one of these sessions, please let us know. We're happy to accommodate you!
Volunteering has its benefits!
Volunteers who work two or more 2.5 hour shifts will receive a free pass to the festival and a free Split This Rock 2012 t-shirt. Plus you'll meet wonderful, fascinating people and be a part of a movement of poets working for a better world.
To volunteer or for more information, contact our Volunteer Coordinator Kaitie O'Hare at Kaitie.str@gmail.com.
In a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,
wearing the gloves of this song tightly over closed ears;
the bursting sun presses licks of flame
into our throats swelling with ghost dogs
nibbling on hands that roped off our footprints
keeping what is outside ours tucked
beneath the warmth of their feet cooling to zero,
as they swarm luminous landmines like gnats,
as thunder shakes white sand from wet hair,
as police sirens trickle from water jars onto squash blossoms,
as starlight, opened inside a darkened room,
begins to tell its story from end to beginning . ..................again.
Sherwin Bitsui is the author of two poetry books, Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a 2010 PEN Open Book Award and an American Book Award. He is originally from Baa'oogeedí (White Cone, Arizona on the Navajo Nation). He is Diné of the Todich'íi'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tł'ízíłání (Many Goats Clan).
Bitsui will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!
Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!
Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210
E916: How did poetry become so popular in Washington, DC? What makes DC a poetry or a poetic city?
Essex Hemphill
For over sixty years of continuous publication, the Beloit Poetry Journal has worked to expand American poetic language and vision through its publication of international poetry and of work that challenges social, political, and aesthetic norms.
The Spring 2012 issue of the journal is a chapbook of new poems of provocation and witness by featured readers at the 2012 Split This Rock Festival: Homero Aridjis, Sherwin Bitsui, Kathy Engel, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Douglas Kearney, Khaled Mattawa, Rachel McKibbens, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, José Padua, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Kim Roberts, and Venus Thrash. Robert Shetterly's probing portrait of Langston Hughes, from his portrait series Americans Who Tell the Truth, graces the cover. You can currently preview a handful of the poems on the BPJ website.
Order this special issue now from the BPJ website for only $5.00.
The issue will also be available for sale at the festival.