Last night I had a discussion with a friend. She and I are both interested in getting work published in small magazines, that sort of thing. When discussing briefly this blog, she expressed concerns about whether or not publishing something in a personal blog would be considered publishing by those small periodicals. After doing some (hardly any) research, the answers I found were mixed. Some people claimed that it didn't really matter and, if a publisher has a problem, the simplest solution is to remove the piece from the blog. However, some suggested, quite simply, that publishing is publishing, no matter what. Magazines are interested in things that they can claim to have had first-- if something is available for free on the internet, no matter how good, they won't be interested in it.
Now, this doesn't mean that I'll only be posting stuff from 2007 and 2008. I also found that, after publication, most publishers don't seem to mind if something ends up on a blog, so long as it's a few months after publication. So, hopefully I'll be posting newer stuff in half a year or so. Until then, old stuff. And maybe very, very rough drafts of new stuff. Maybe (but probably not).
2007, I guess. Read on a bridge once into a bottle of whiskey, surrounded by friends.
A Porch, Summer Night
I've seen all seasons
Press the wood of this deck‒
First the fall,
With fading dead leaves
Swirling through the rails‒
The winter with its white piles
Coming, melting, coming again‒
Then spring with the terrible violence
Of reawakening storms
Second-hand through above‒
The summer with hotness and air
And oppressive water wall.
I've known the place
Through one full cycle‒
I'm transplanted here,
The age sloughed off
And left layered, dead skin
On the once-living boards,
An imprint, thumb-print, shadow of self.
An obscured view of city night,
Orange glow haze,
And the day-time-all-time-no-break brightness
Of parking structure,
People working on my shift.
Sleepless night.
Big building windows lit,
Arrow pointing towards
The last lingering lost,
Fellow travelers on concrete
Long past bar crowd‒
Those fake patrons of moon,
Regularly scheduled broadcasts of interaction,
Auto-pilot motion, Polo shirts and beer
And girls in skirts
Displaying all of their virtue at skin level
For weighing and consideration over bar stools,
A drunk squeeze test for ripeness.
They don't know the sky
Stays creamy like orange milk
As perfume fades from the sidewalks,
Or the true night people
Who squeeze sentences from empty footsteps,
Suck down the late night cigarettes
Held in fingers alone,
Listen to the unmanned hum of nocturnal machinery‒
The crickets, the power plants, the neon lights.
A city too bright for stars,
Constellations born from still-lit windows
In towering apartments,
Trace the shape
Of the lone hunter‒
Two lights and a line,
A belt and a bow,
The wind a star-lit quarry,
Kissing each summer leaf in its evasion.
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