Redux Open to Submissions September 10 -- October 15

Redux is accepting submissions of fiction/poetry/essays during its annual open reading period: September 10 to October 15.  We’re looking for literary work of high quality that has been previously published in a print journal but that is not available elsewhere on the internet.  Our mission is to bring deserving work to a new, online audience.  Preference will be given to older pieces (i.e. published before 2010).

No novel excerpts, poems that appear in chapbooks, or pieces published in anthologies…even if these books are presently out-of-print.

Please read our guidelines for important submission information.  If your work is accepted, you will also be asked to write a short “story behind the piece” essay a la the Best American series.

Authors we’ve published in our first two years include Margot Livesey, Sandra Beasley, Robin Black, R.T. Smith, Michelle Boisseau, Kelle Groom, Erica Dawson, Walter Cummins, and C.M. Mayo.

We look forward to seeing your work!

Redux:  http://www.reduxlitjournal.com/

Submission guidelines: http://www.reduxlitjournal.com/p/submission-guidelines-for-redux.html

Questions: reduxlj AT gmail DOT com

#95: "The Three Weisses" by Michael Salcman

                                                                 

~ This poem was originally published in Aries  (2012).

THE THREE WEISSES

Shades and graces come in threes: my cousins in Queens

were aunt and uncle to me,

the first I knew as elderly

rich with sandpapered faces

and thin-rimmed glasses they wore like monocles.

My first lesson in the upper classes—

a tinted portrait above the mantle,

Hettie and Syd and Uncle Carl posed as kids

in white smocks and puffy sleeves

as big as their heads, and a favorite spaniel for color.

Upstairs their sentient mother lived in solitary splendor,

my father’s Aunt Rose, a hundred

when I was five, whose backside routinely greeted me

freshly bathed and powdered

with a faint smell of garlic and uric acid in Queens.

Syd’s husband I never knew

or can’t remember, and soon after he died

she moved back in with the other two

and seemed as much a spinster as they ever did,

eternally wed to brother and sister.

Of the past not a word was spoken—

one could never know how Hettie’s young heart

had been broken or why Carl with a smile like Coolidge

never pursued a bride

or wore sweaters in summer until the day he died.

*****

#94: "In the Empire of Cetaceans" by Pedro Ponce

~This story was originally published in Arroyo Literary Review (Spring 2011).

            The annual Pheasant Lake Psychic Fair draws upwards of 300 attendees. Most are curious if not entirely content with their fates divined via crystals, numbers, and totem animals. A great deal invest in products claiming to cure everything from insomnia and stomach upset to the human condition itself. A smaller number, believing that anxiety, aggression, and disappointment are terminal, peruse book bins containing startling revelations about the true meaning of Mayan ruins and presidential assassinations, or accounts of alien abductions by celebrities from decades past.

            Those in attendance during the first weekend of August, 2008, might have missed one of the fair’s most unusual offerings. On Saturday morning, a single placard, printed modestly in black letters on a white background, advertised

WHALES: THE SILENT THREAT

followed by a time that afternoon and a room number. The placard’s starkness caused a mild buzz over that morning’s continental breakfast, but it also led to some uncomfortable moments as the dozen in attendance crammed the listed venue, a hotel suite four floors above the designated meeting rooms. Roughly half the audience read the whales as threatened, humans the likeliest culprits after centuries of environmental neglect. The rest read equivalence in the intervening colon, relishing the prospect of a fair and balanced rejoinder to animal lovers. As the sides recognized each other over the murmur of respective platitudes, a young auburn-haired woman checked her watch and straightened several piles of literature for sale on a round table next to the minibar. Five minutes past the scheduled start time, she stood and knocked hesitantly at the door to the bedroom. Hearing no answer, she cracked the door and spoke through the narrow opening. Her smile as she walked away stiffened with resignation.

#93: "The Art of Killing the Birds" by Martin Cloutier

 

 ~This story was previously published in Natural Bridge (2011).

Jared needed to be fucked, fueled and reconfigured, but mostly, he needed to be inspired, which was why he invited Richard to his studio. While Richard wandered around his windowless loft, Jared stood by the radiator and listened to the floorboards creak. His canvases were propped against the wall, facing out, as if he was onstage and his paintings were watching him. What would they see? – these women, these figures culled together from paper and plastic, bodies jagged with industrial shapes, their natural curves forced into the right angles of credit cards and subway passes?

Collage was the best description of Jared’s work. He made large painted canvases onto which he glued scraps of paper. Any kind of paper so long as it was discarded: newspaper, paper cups, sugar packets, movie tickets. If someone threw it away, it could very well end up on one of Jared’s portraits. Women emerging from garbage: a feminist manifesto or a misogynist’s vindication. He let the viewer decide.  

            Right now his work was stalled. He hadn’t made a new piece in months. Every day he would comb the streets, picking up cigarette packs and sales receipts, examining fast food containers and wet magazines. He would bring these findings back to his studio, spread them on his work table and wait for inspiration.  

He tried to give Richard space, but eventually found himself walking a few steps behind, pretending to scrutinize. Richard put one hand on his face and scratched his stomach with the other. His belly separated the fabric of his button-down shirt; black hairs peaked out like fungus.

Richard put an arm around him. “Good stuff. Good stuff.” His wet armpit stuck to Jared’s shoulder.

Richard was a lawyer with an art history degree, not a full time dealer. He had sold a few things of Jared’s before, and even bought some of his earlier work. One of Richard’s clients was Catherine French of The French Gallery. He told himself if Richard sold a piece to French, it might jump start his creativity.

#92: Two Poems by Todd McCarty

~This poem was previously published in 580 Split: A Journal of Arts and Letters (2006).

Nancy Series, 1972

Nancy—so girl. So girl & more girl than most.

In color or black & white. Beyond charm,

Beyond ashtray or postage stamp.

Nancy—so Nancy you are. On paper,

A sexy blond. In an afro.

An afro you seem unsure of.

And not blond.

As an old Kleenex, you are Nancy.

Nancy Santo Nino de Praga.

As a ball or boy or Bright’s Disease,

Nancy of Nancy. The Nancy you are.

All of these you are, in yellow & green

Or Andre Breton at eighteen months.

Nancy—so girl.

Well hung & framed.

*****

#91: Two Poems by Scott Wiggerman

~This poem was previously published in Southwestern American Literature (2011).

At the Paisano

            Marfa, 1955

James splashes across bathroom tiles,

steps past a pile of dusty clothes

reeking of too many takes,

and plops his damp body across the bed

that takes up most of room 223.

The bottoms of his feet cool

on the bed’s iron frame; his arms

splay as though resting on that rifle.

He glances at the radiators, the iron

desk—like a goddamn prison.

His balcony looks onto an alley.

Rock’s room looks onto the indoor pool,

where he can keep an eye on the boys.

James wishes he had one now.

A flotilla of teenage girls shrieks

every time he passes through the lobby,

inching their breasts forward in trade

for a smile or an autograph.

Not one of them can give him

what he needs.  Sal would like to,

but he didn’t even rate a room

at the Paisano—goddamn Hollywood

hierarchy, even in this shithole town.

He lights a cigarette, takes in a long drag,

laughs at how Liz calls them fags.

He thinks of the hired hand

who has been teaching him how to lasso—

real hat, real boots, no need for wardrobe.

Those calloused cowboy hands,

those sun-crinkled eyes.

His hips stiffen.  His star rises.

Ride, cowboy, ride.

*****

#90: "After a Stroke, My Mother Examines a Picture of the Icon of Our Lady of Guadelupe" by Tom Daley

~This poem previously appeared in Rhino (2011).

After a Stroke, My Mother Examines a Picture of the Icon of Our Lady of Guadelupe

Lady, why is your countenance

the color of vole feet

draggling from the jaws of a cat?

What tribe of mud daubers

stung stars onto your mantle?

Who names the fumbles

that topple from your breasts?

Your counterspell blunts

the jagged crescent

of every campesino’s

charmed and smoldering scythe.

Your spooled mouth waits to unfurl

the ticker tape of your vow.

In torchlight, your eyebrows

fly to heaven on thin wings of soot.

Only the moon survives

the crush of your heel.

Virgin of Guadelupe, I pray for your handshake,

I pray for your ribs, I pray for your hips,

the ones tugged dry

while expelling that bountiful head

ordained to gnaw

all the hangnails of history.

Steer me, Lady, through the lightning

that browns the mountains.

Drown the infections

that flush my cough into a gargle.

Virgin, who never burned a supper,

strip me of strangles, grizzles,

knots, of scratched jazz

skipping the shadows

out of my sleep.

Princess of the Aztecs,

thread my poncho with roses this winter

that I might adorn that tomb slab

where even cayenne would cool,

where your son’s brain was looted

of its chemical salves,

and where his feet, which stretched the sea

smooth as a conga head,

refused to rest

at right angles to the ground.

Kiss me, mother of Mexico’s hope—

your little mouth

is still rusty with smoke.

*****