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.

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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