Call for Poems: The Day After

Deadline: August 2, 2012

On The Issues Magazine, the online magazine of progressive, feminist thinking, seeks poems on the enduring issues and challenges that women and progressives will face, no matter who wins the fall election. Four sub-concerns that define the topic a bit further are:

·       health care and reproductive rights;

·       economic security and parity;

·       peace, safety and security (including international issues, violence against women, civil liberties, LGBTQ rights and concerns, and prisons); and

·       the presentation of women in popular culture.

We welcome poems in all styles, approaching these issues in all sorts of ways.

Please send up to 3 poems (no more than 2 pages each) to Poetry Co-Editor Sarah Browning at ontheissuespoetry@yahoo.com by midnight, August 2, 2012. Please do not send to Sarah’s Split This Rock email.

Guidelines:

 ·       Send the poems in the body of a single email. Attachments will not be opened. If your poem is chosen for publication we will request a copy in Word in order to insure that the formatting is correct.

·       Include a cover note with a 2-3 sentence bio.

·       Previously published in print is acceptable, but not on the web.

·       Simultaneous submissions accepted.

·       We regret that there is no financial compensation.

·       All are invited to submit.

We look forward to seeing your poems!

Sarah Browning

ontheissuespoetry@yahoo.com

www.ontheissuesmagazine.com

Current Issue: 

Split This Rock Director, Sarah Browning, in On The Issues

Split This Rock Director, Sarah Browning, is featured in On The Issues Magazine this month with a personal essay: Food For the Soul: Poetry that Pierces Injustice.

"Like many white, middle-class poets coming of age in the early-to-mid-1980s, I was told by my poetry teacher not to write political poems: "The poet must love language above all else." He liked my poems about families, about fathers' ambivalent feelings about fatherhood. When later that semester I heard him read a whole series about his own father's ambivalent feelings about fatherood, I should have been tipped off to the unfortunated truth that poets too often try to refashion their students in own images. Instead, I was chastened.

But I couldn't seem to stop writing political poems. I had been raised in a political household - one that also deeply loved language - at a very political time, the late 60s/early 70s, in a very political place, the South Side of Chicago. My father was an English professor and a political activist. My mother and grandmother were both poets. Two of my earliest memories are marching down State Street with my father, protesting the Vietnam War, and playing hide-and-seek with my friend, Jill, at a teach-in, tumbling over the legs of stoned and outraged hippies, sprawled on the floor. At age nine, I sold bumper stickers for McGovern outside the A&P - my first presidential campaign."

To read the full article, click here.

Women, War, and Peace - Curated by Sarah Browning

The following poem excerpts are samples of what can be found in the latest edition of On The Issues, of which Split This Rock Director Sarah Browning is the Poetry Co-Editor. Please click over to read the rest.

There is misery by the busload. Mothers scrounge
for bits of bread. Children lose the race with flames.
We can't make sense of paper, rock or scissors
or velvet political games.
- From "All There Is, Washington DC" by Carmen Calatayud


piestewa is survived by two young children by her mother and father in lieu of flowers jessica lynch who was a long-time ally and confidante applied to abc's extreme makeover home edition to fulfill lori's dream of a home where her entire family could live together and be happy and so while the piestewa family was sent off on a paid vacation to disney- world ty pennington and his crew went to work purchasing land and building a home for them when a hopi is deceased she comes back to the home mesas
- From "piestewa, lori" by Meg Hamill



I kick this dream over
like a kerosene can,

galloping flame. I reach
for medicine, sleepless mare.
- From "Horse and Fire Dream" by Kathy Engel


No is the perimeter of stubborn cactus
springing up around destroyed villages.
You can bulldoze houses, evict or kill the inhabitants,
but the thorns of memory can’t be eliminated.
 - From "No" by Lisa Suhair Majaj