Eredien's Journal

 My sestina, "Love in Graduate School," is now published in Issue #1 of Liminality Magazine! It's a double-issue chock-full of other amazing poems and some great artwork, so please give it a read!  This entry was originally posted at http://eredien.dreamwidth.org/4351.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Remember that sestina I finished in January? Well, it's going to be published by a new magazine! More details forthcoming. 

This entry was originally posted at http://eredien.dreamwidth.org/3998.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I finished a sestina.
It took me about six years but as I realized earlier, "that's one more sestina than most people write in their lives."
I do not know if it is any good or not.
I am looking for people to critique it.
If you are interested please contact me here. 

This entry was originally posted at http://eredien.dreamwidth.org/3563.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Ah, stop my throat
that I may cry no more
and no more speak
words, whose
existence on my tongue
reminds me of their kiss
a confusion of love
exploded into thought
sweet conversation
singing
and their breath at night
in and out my ear a story
wordless
as our laughter,

and all, all
needless of words.

Yay! Aqueduct Press' The Moment of Change feminist speculative poetry anthology is released and ready to order!

My poem "The Last Yangtze River Dolphin" is reprinted in it, but even if it wasn't, I'd be urging you to get this book. It's full of absolutely incredible poems by a hugely diverse group of people--women, men, genderqueer people, transgendered persons, straight people, queer people, people of color, and people who refuse to self-define.

The poems are mythic and simple; beautiful and complicated; bright and dark. Please read this book. If you are at Wiscon, you can get it there and go to a reading as well.

My poem "The Last Yangtze River Dolphin," originally published in "Not One of Us" #39, will be reprinted in the upcoming Aqueduct Press anthology The Moment of Change.

I'm really excited about this. Not only am I still fiercely proud of the poem and want to get it out there as far as it will go; I'm excited to be publishing with Aqueduct and thrilled that my work is going to be included in the first known anthology of feminist speculative poetry.

Also, Adrienne Rich quotes as titles are fantastic. I'll let you know when it comes out!

I just submitted a short story to the Machine of Death 2 anthology. It's the first original short story I've written in a while. They're open for submissions through July 15th.

Now off to run some errands.

Just submitted last week's rejected poem to another market. Yay.

I was listening to a slowish 4/4 song today while doing grocery shopping; it had a slightly disjointed melody and a singer that sounded deep and sad, like a basso profundo whose kitten had just died being run through a moog [the basso profundo's sobbing, not the kitten]. It kind of reminded me of the Magnetic Fields, but it was, oddly, too peppy. And I was hearing the backbeat without really listening to it, and thinking about the coordinating designs I am making for my website/twitter/lj reworking, and thinking about feeling less defensive about people and things, and thinking, "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," and then this image came into my head.

This is a song, not a poem. I hear the first verse in almost a chant, sort of a Days of Future Past Moody Blues-style

Glass House Rock Garden

Finely raked pebbles
patterns white on white
statue in the distance
panes letting in gray light

Stoop and pluck
and break the pattern
warm palm round cold stone
the garden's silent
rocks are silent
you are silent
and alone

Dusty fountains
dusted fingers
dusty door lintel
dust disturbed
across the threshold
your step
see the less gray place
where less dust fell

Try the lock/rusted broken
try the windows/bolted closed
white rocks in this
greenhouse garden
it's too quiet
you're alone

Now can't get out
how you got in then
the only key's
your stone

Try the lock/rusted broken
try the windows/bolted closed
just rocks in this
glass house garden
it's too quiet
you're alone

Zen rocks in your
glass house garden --
glass breaks easy,
is no home --
can't now get out
how you got in then
your key's palm-shaped
throw the stone

Lunge Line Exercise
for cristalia

Endless cold Saturdays of
sawdust gilding the floors,
the sun rising gold through gold.
The closet racists in their warmest plaids,
hair straggling free from hats, rubber-bands,
feathery round their faces, haloes
in some Dutch Masters' painting
in the now-brightening dark.

Refilling yellow buckets, rims coated
with yellow hay and lazy flies;
a lazy shifting waking of
a thousand pounds. A morning
piss, vile boring jokes,
the edges worn off, secondhand
tack. These barrel chests,
swift gaits, tossing manes,
power gentled by control:
the centaur metaphor's never subtle,
and girls eventually will move
from their horses, understudies
to their men.

That's the line they feed
like pastry stale as sugared soap
in the tack room;
these barrel chests,
swift gaits, old fast times
of horses in lithographs,
long-dead. Power gentled by control.

All those shades of brown learnt, forgot
from brown books, what passed for a childhood.
I'm not who I thought I'd be; self-gentling's
hard: you don't know
what to do when you throw yourself,
hold or let go,
and can't remember
which is best to praise.

[NB: this is so much ridiculously better than the first draft of this poem was. I'm going to bed happy.]