Three Open Calls

Issue 6: Best Lyric Essays 
(includes the EIR Lyric Essay Award)

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PYP's NEW Mary Hunter Austin Book Award

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Monthly online
Fictions
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SmartApocalypse (Issue 5) Contributors

Arthur Doweyko (cover art & co-winner of the Editor's Choice Award), Daniel Link (fiction & co-winner of the Editor's Choice Award), Heidi Howell (poetry), Joan Connor (fiction), Meredith Stewart Kirkwood (poetry), Frank Brown Cloud (fiction), K Dulai (fiction), William Diamond (fiction), Jennifer Ruth Jackson (poetry), Daryl Scroggins (fiction), Alexandra Ledford (poetry), Jonathan Perry (fiction), Barbara Daniels (poem), Larry Lefkowitz (fiction)

Read it here!
A few samples:

​PETRICHOR
K Dulai


I had no reason to hate the dead. They stayed quiet in their need for me and quiet need was all I could handle. In those days, they’d let you stand in the alley while the bodies were prepared.  When they were ready, they came out on a flatbed and drifted into the back of a hearse with not so much as a mutter between the driver and the hands. It was all done swiftly.
 
But the stench of them bothered me. I’d turn the ignition and let the car’s exhaust float in through my rolled down windows. I preferred breathing in auto fumes between the city and the long country roads. How shamelessly those pieces of death continued to tantrum though, even with the car on and moving. They would do anything not to be forgotten.
 
Forgotten they were soon enough. Life was—and continues to be—a parent who won’t give in.
 
The last one I ever saw was the color of ash—like the alley I waited for him in, like the pigeon stools on my windowsill, like the ash of my own cigarettes (those particles of lost time nestled deeply in my lungs). 
 
That last transfer had been inelegant, a botched job, actually. Like that putrid being’s life had been, I imagine. Even in death, this guy came out on the wrong side of things. It was raining and windy and his toe stuck out from beneath the white sheet—we were never supposed to see the contrast of their skin to anything tangible in life, not even a sheet. I could see it, the beginning and end of a new world, the grey of the vanquished and possessed. 
 
So I couldn’t help it. It was the two of us alone between the alley and the pyre. No one clamoring to ride with him, no denizen of love to mourn him. We stopped at the side of the road for a little bit of color. I pulled some green leaves from a bush and ripped a bit of squealing grass from the ground. This one would not be sent off pallid. I covered each of his eyes with a leaf and bore the worst wind when I forced his lips open and covered his teeth with green grass. I had no flowers.  There are no flowers for the solitary. But now he would burn up just like the rest of us, with the memory of love scraping his gums. 
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K. Dulai is a non-profit development consultant and grant writer based in San Francisco.

after the war
​Heidi A. Howell


1. not remembering she thinks it. whenever there is a desire, a pause. she thinks it slowly blue, broken but not stars. (it can be more or less). something like a curve. or an after. she thinks it with or without the daughter. before or after the distance. a field and there isn't any wind. finally, she has not seen it. she just stands and thinks it.
 
2. the breath waits to happen. it pretends a separate movement. an open. a close. to refuse it is only wet feet. clothing. around the rain and after hold your hands up in the air. clasp it. asking. this always in the distance. and you not walking there.
 
3. "i tell you not lingering what is the intimate. departing she has watched and stepped through. over them stumbling like the unexpected stick or fold. high. near. let fall. always a gap and she was believing its benevolence. holding that space and feeling it filled. everything happened. now. she will not deny or suspend."
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Working loosely in the experimental/ language/Black Mountain/ NY School traditions, Heidi A. Howell has published poems in online and print literary magazines, including s/word, Psychic Meatloaf. Otoliths, la fovea, and the Washington Review, which nominated her work for a Pushcart. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and lives and works in Minneapolis. ​

Scream
Alexandra Ledford


​In the awful heat that bakes the flesh of the ground into dry red dirt that is et by panting wild dogs, in the awful setting sun the street lights wink on an awful warning. Across, the neighbors' yards are nothing but dust and scurrying animals—squirrels, why squirrels, the squirrels must be sleeping, these are larger, no hair on their feverish bodies, small-dog-size, aquatic paws replaced by hands—HANDS—it can't be right. They are grabbing humanoid, long squirming tails like monkeys—they are not supposed to be here. This is illegal. They scurry. They swarm. They look over. One forms words with wormy toothless lips, not English, not language, something older, something dead, my own mouth sticks itself in a tight ring, a letter O, a silent howl.
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Alex Ledford got her MFA from the University of New Hampshire. She lives, writes, teaches, and helps manage a fledgling journal, Outlooks Springs, remotely from her native North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Adanna, Euphony, So to Speak, Bop Dead City, and elsewhere.
Purchase Issue 3 (print version): Honoring the Lyric Essay
Why do your words sound like a song?

Kindle version
Our nominations for the 2018 Pushcart Prize

William Diamond for "The End of the World. Not." Issue 5
Cindy Lamothe for "You Will Have a Son" Issue 3
Andrea Marcusa for "Boulevard Mohamed Bouazizi*; Sidi Bou Zid, Tunisia, 2016" Issue 3
Luisa Kay Reyes for "My Border Crossing" Issue 4
Alan Steinberg for "My Father's Fiftieth Birthday" Issue 3
A J Tanek for "Counting Happy" Issue 4
Coming Summer 2018

"Best Lyric Essays Plus" print anthology

Top selections from Issues 1 - 6 + our online monthly Fictions category

Remember to always send us your very best!
​P.S. We especially enjoy short, pithy, language-driven work
​that makes sense.
Follow managing editor, Chila Woychik, on Facebook for occasional updates.
​Current status: active