This Week's Poem

Power Outage

Tonight a piano
counters the chill
and silence
of a house still standing.

Limbs
and lifeless power lines
snaking paths
through the frost.

Candles upon which
we love tenderest
lining like a runway
the edges of things.

And the somber keys,
black upon white,
warning us
of an icy landing.

-published by Pure Francis

100 Publications!

With word that Cutthroat: a journal of the arts will be publishing my poem A Sign on the Road in their Summer 2010 edition, my poetry and fiction has now been displayed in 100 publications!

My first publication was an Eastern European-inspired short story called The German Board (was reading alot of Kafka at the time) in Collected Stories in 2001. Unlike most of my youthful fiction, it's one of the few stories that still reverberates with me. My initial experiments in poetry began in 2003 with the publication of rather immature poems like Crocodile Tears and An Empty Pillow (published in Typically Unusual). It wasn't until 2007 that I began to understand the nuances of poetry and to devote my full creative drive and passion to its study and composition.

Now, 3 short years later, I've traveled quite a bit and written in many styles, from direct narrative to experimental/conceptual poetry, and am pushing to publish any of my (presently) 5 chapbooks. Hasn't been that long a ride yet, but a good one...and the future is very much looking in one direction...

This Week's Poem

Flowers

I’m handed a disheveled bouquet
as gypsy as its collector,
stalks nearly bare and browned by a sun
preferring everything adopt that sand-fleshed
Turkish tan, everything be of sand.

One bouquet takes the place of success, happiness.
The one given me replaces love.
The courtyard faucets splash in bird-play.
Going and coming back they draw their curves,
glowing red in the cold
and now quietly mumbling white.

I carry the flowers out to the canal.

Everywhere something in a foreign tongue
is sold, recycled, sold,
purchased with differing currency
then left on café tables and balustrades.

Perhaps it is such half-objects
fully illuminated by summer
that hold together like a mouth
the hard sea, harder earth,
and what falls from our hands
along the way.


-previously published by and nominated for 2009 Pushcart Prize by The Shine Journal.

Write to Publish Flash Fiction Contest Winners!

Ooligan Press is proud to announce the winners of the 2010 Write to Publish Flash Fiction Contest.

First place: “The Woman and Her Steed” by Traci Schatz
Second place: “Assumptions” by Erin Popelka
Third place: “Esophagi” by Meredith Barrett

We received many strong stories with unique voices, imagery, and characters, but these three writers stood tall amongst their competition. You can read all three winning stories at www.ooligan.pdx.edu.

Each winner brought a different strength and focus to the contest. “The Woman and Her Steed” creates a thoughtful, mysterious mood with touches of artistic imagination and magical realism. “Assumptions” brings us to a lonely station in Antarctica where food, and friends, are in short supply. “Esophagi” uses rich, detailed description to paint a truly emotional scene.

The prizes for all winners include a Write to Publish full-day pass (5 workshops) to Workshop Day, May 22, as well as two tickets to the open house. Each winner will also receive a copy of You Have Time for This, Ooligan’s book of contemporary American flash fiction.

Ooligan supports the art of the short story, with the previous compilations Do Angels Cry?, The Survival League, The Weight of the Sun, and You Have Time for This. All books are available at our website.

Write to Publish promo video

As our annual Write to Publish conference approaches this weekend, Ooligan created a promotional video...please check it out! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrMfwUsMN_g

This Week's Poem

Stone Sagas

In Reykholt his statue inspects the old church’s
slight movements, doctrinal pauses before light
warms the wood pews, its garden of crosses
shaved from the hillside, also the sun-bleached
lava fields, fluttering mountains, awkward streams
keeping back the fjord’s distant glare, overseeing
the various separations.

The colorful doors of the scattered houses all close
in greeting. Winds panic from all sides,
graying the sky. My eyes stone in response
as I read the great sagas of our time,
those even history cannot shame.

In the margins I note such fear
solitude bears, its proximity to stone.
No music whistles from the land. No overtures.
No warnings. Only the brash noise
used to startle time into progressing.
The misspelled experiences. The old tongues
buffered by unyielding monuments
hands could never write or, in a definite image,
reshape.

-previously published by The Journal and Poet's Ink

Weekly Poem

Kafka

Around the same time he affixed feathers, wings,
so too a wire-meshed pen,
and hunched over his meager seed allowance
commenced to peck at his cage.

Years forgot themselves
as housecats their missing claws
and though he pecked still
well after he’d razed the pen,
savagely attacking empty air
as if it held his freedom,
this ongoing dust worship
finally took the place of flight.

-published by Cadillac Cicatrix

This Week's Poem

Autumn Rain

From the leaf-choked gutters,
from café awnings and streaked glass,
the sky is falling,
buffered by our thousand canopies,
softer than a gentle rain.
Seeping inside, soft, steady,
to ring stains upon the wooden ledges
and upon the trees that fare better
but for heavy limbs draped lower over the road
and those broken snapping underfoot
as we race home to close the windows
and water the flowers
thirsting in their clear vase.
High above the ceiling cracked and bowing.

-published by The Journal