great weather for MEDIA is delighted to announce our nominations for the next Pushcart Prize – Best of the Small Presses Series.
These nominations are for work published in 2018 and were chosen from our anthology Suitcase of Chrysanthemums and the poetry collection Where Night and Day Become One by Steve Dalachinsky.
Pichchenda Bao - Arranged Marriage
Steve Dalachinsky - Giverny - trial & error # museum
Ernestine Montoya - The Clinic
stephanie roberts - now is probably a good time to say i love you
Kelly Terwilliger - Painting the Rhinoceros
yes - always is a corn maze on fire
Want a taster? Here are the first few lines...
“The entire living world is bound
by a four-letter code.
A T, G C—repeating pairs
on a sugar backbone,
cavorting, inverting,
rearranging themselves
along a restless length,
the teeming, persistent
language of DNA
linking our vast anonymous past
even to the year 1977
when the Khmer Rouge assigned
my mother, to my father, in marriage
and gave them a hammock.
Their task—
replace the dead.”
“i travel to Giverny for my father
who never heard of Monet
who never stood in front of the water lilies
& sighed
i travel to Giverny for Ryoko
who yearns continually to be an impressionist painting
an impassioned summer walk through a grand garden
on a Sunday afternoon
i travel to Giverny
despite my desire to stay in bed
despite my losing against myself time & time again
despite the changing Paris sky
the Eiffel Tower’s tip
i travel to Giverny
in order to blur the boundaries between urb & suburb
tombstones & circuit breakers along the way”
“I always remember hair. I haven’t been back in Havre de Grace since October, but that doesn’t matter. Amie and Sheronda can only speak of the shooters’ voices, their heights. They don’t understand that hair is more personal. Change the color, hack it off, burn the texture at four-hundred degrees. It’s dogged. It grows after you die. It is incapable of hiding. ”
“rain is the horseblind
that gentles this mustang city.
what fool wouldn’t welcome
an overlay of shine
on a grey start to day’s
garbage truck alarm
and crunch
of existence without love?”
“The canvas is rough.
It is what you’d want, for a rhinoceros,
even if you’d never seen one or couldn’t remember.
If all you had was a sketch from a boat in a storm,
or a story from someone you had never met.
Yes, the canvas is our rough beginning.”
“the only people who have ever told me always, have left
always is amethyst on an open wound: wishful thinking
always is the eye of an ice storm, of the ice storm,
and i am a trunk in the road—
i am a speed-bump and the aftertaste of copper,
and maybe your tongue is a penny now”
Congratulations to all our nominees and good luck! It was so hard choosing just six out of the immensely talented writers we have published this year.
Remember, we are currently accepting poetry and prose submissions for our next anthology. Send us your fearless bestI Deadline January 15 2019. Be sure to check out all our books. We look forward to reading your work.