Litmag Loot!
A weekly selection of poems from the lit mags that I loved.
Hello there,
It has been submission season and with that reading season as well. I have been submitting a lot more and been reading lit mags to understand their preferences, style and what is being published to stay abreast of the scene. I have been saving the poems I really liked and thought to start sharing them weekly. So here is the first edition of lit mag loot. I have four lovely poems for you today.
Photo by James Sestric on Unsplash
Work Will Brewer Growing up in a family that owned a meat company I mistook for most of my early years the meaning of the word MEETING. When a parent abandoned me to go to work, to a meeting, I envisioned adults standing among great piles of marbled flesh, observing it, discussing it, kneading it with their selfish hands. WE ARE MEATING! I imagined them saying to each other, all at once, together, without me. MEATING! MEATING! Sometimes people would unzip their skins to become more meat, enhancing the meating’s purpose, and sometimes with a blade they’d transfer a chunk of themselves onto the pile while wearing a smile as wide as the one I wear when I gather now in the name of work with other workers around a table to exchange mostly empty speech, and this phantasmagoria returns, and nothing that I see before me changes. Magazine: The Yale Review Death Said Emily Hoffman I have many children; they are all named loss. That is also the name of my father and my mother, and all of my sisters and brothers. But I am named death. If you drew a map of my relations, they would appear like the constellations in the night sky. And I am the brightest star, the North Star, and always at their center. My favorite tree is the conifer, or evergreen, because of the smell of the resin in the summer. The cypress is beautiful as well. Of the arts, I prefer the dance: saraband, chaconne, bransle simple, bransle gay, the pinwheel, the ring, the horse and rider, the loom and shuttle, lightning and the steeple— The orchestra plays on a distant planet. The others are always dancing; the earth is ground for their repeated form. Magazine: The Yale Review The Rules Sam Bailey This faucet coughs up a frail, whitish water and my glass swallows. I push the handle down. Now it’s off. Silence hovers at my back. I look down at this glass’s oval rim, its incandescent gaping mouth, and remember the carp lying brainless on the glistering river Julys ago. Sun clawing, sun held down by the muggy water. And that carp with its eyelids sprung back for good. Pure night pouring out of its eyeballs, unstoppable. All of it right there, in all its obvious wonder—and what vowel is it, the one lodged in the back of its jaw— I do not care what the black flies say. Magazine: The Boiler Journal The Whole Story Sam Bailey Radically speaking, here is my room. The chair right there, brown, with a small back. And the small glass, opening with a candle. And the water pricked with light outside—there is an outside—insignificant except for the clarity it gives the windows. And clarity— let’s just do it—is life. * This blue chair is not angry, just soft and half a couch. The wall spreads up but will not go too far. And the ceiling pushes it down, gently, and these socks— no not today these socks. I have no need to tell you my wish that is already mine. * And if poetry, if poetry is anything, then anything. And the light in here has terrible posture. Like its mother I will tell it. Magazine: The Boiler Journal
I really enjoyed all these poems. I love word play in general and the play on meeting/meating in Work by Will Brewer was fantastic. I was wondering if we can find more of these words or we can perhaps find some overlaps in Indian languages, that might be fun too. I also absolutely loved the last lines of The Whole Story by Sam Bailey ‘and the light in here has terrible posture/like its mother I will tell it’. It is so intimate and so visual.
I hope these poems serve as a bent ray of light in your day. If you have any poems you read in litmags and loved, please do share those with me. I will add them to my growing collection and also share them here. Happy reading.
warmly,
Yashasvi


Enjoyed reading this!
Interesting, I have heard of them but don't subscribe to these magazines. You have tempted me with these awesome poems though!