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Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction

This annual national short fiction contest features a first place $2,000 cash award and invitation to an awards dinner on Friday, October 13th, on the campus of Rosemont College; a second place cash prize of $500; and third place cash prize of $250. The first place story will be published in the print issue of Fall 2017 of Philadelphia Stories; the second and third place winning stories will appear in the Fall 2017 online issue. The Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction is made possible by the generous support of the McGlinn and Hansma families.

Contest Submission Guidelines:

  • Submission period: January 1-June 15, 2017.
  • Previously unpublished works of fiction up to 8,000 words. Please note, “published” includes any work published in print or online, including online magazines, blogs, public social media sites, etc.
  • Multiple submissions will be accepted for the contest only. Simultaneous submissions are also accepted, however, we must be notified immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
  • Only authors currently residing in the United States are eligible.
  • Submissions will only be accepted via the website. Please email contest@philadelphiastories.org if you are having any trouble with your submission.
  • There is a $15 reading fee for each story submitted.
  • All entrants will receive a complimentary copy of the Philadelphia Stories contest issue.
  • Winners will be announced by October 1, 2017.

    CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE CONTEST.

[img_assist|nid=20652|title=Robin Black|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=100|height=100]About the 2016 Judge: Robin Black’s story collection, If I loved you, I would tell you this, was a Finalist for the Frank O’Connor Story Prize and the winner of the 2010 Philadelphia Athenaeum Fiction Award. Her novel Life Drawing, was long listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the Folio Prize, and The IMPACT Dublin Literary Award. Her newest collection, Crash Course: Essays From Where Writing and Life Collide, has been called “an oasis for writers at any stage” by Karen Russell. Black’s work has been published in such publications at The New York Times Book Review, One Story, O. Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, and The Chicago Tribune. She was the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bryn Mawr College and will begin teaching in the Rutgers Camden MFA Program in 2016.

About the Previous Winners

[img_assist|nid=20532|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=48|height=86]2015 FIRST PLACE: Bob Johnson holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. His stories have appeared in the online journals Wag’s Revue and Winning Writers. He was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s 2014 “Family Matters” fiction contest and a 1st Runner Up in Pinch Journal’s 2015 Literary Awards. He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife Cindy and his retriever/lab mix Ellie. Much of his Monday-Friday career has been spent teaching, and in various creative capacities at the CBS affiliate in South Bend, WSBT-TV. Click here to read the full press release. Click here to see Bob read at the awards ceremony.

[img_assist|nid=20533|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=76|height=102]2015 SECOND PLACE: Oindrila Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University. She has worked as a journalist in Calcutta, India, and been the creative writing fellow in fiction at Emory University. She is a regular contributor to the Indian magazine Scroll, and is currently working on a novel set in India and a collection of stories about recent Indian immigrants in the US.

[img_assist|nid=20534|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=62|height=86]2015 THIRD PLACE: Larry Loebell is a Philadelphia-based playwright, fiction writer, filmmaker, and teacher. He is a four-time recipient of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in playwriting, and was a Barrymore nominee for his play, House, Divided. He wrote and directed the film, Dostoyevsky Man, and his second feature, Portrait Master, will premier in 2016. He has recently completed a short story collection, which includes “49 Seconds in the Box.”

About the 2015 Judge
[img_assist|nid=17854|title=Bonnie Jo Campbell|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=100|height=67]Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novels Once Upon a River, a National Bestseller, and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters (Autumn 2015). Her critically acclaimed short fiction collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP prize for short fiction; and Q Road. Her story “The Smallest Man in the World” was awarded a Pushcart Prize and her story “The Inventor, 1972″ was awarded the 2009 Eudora Welty Prize from Southern Review. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. Read the full press release about this year’s judge here.

About the Previous Winners

[img_assist|nid=13908|title=Chad|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=46|height=68]2014 FIRST PLACE: Chad Willenborg teaches writing at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, though his resumé tracks stints as a bartender, a gravedigger, a dry ice blaster, and a wild game packer. Click HERE to read Chad’s winning story, Stone and Paper and Vinyl and Skin, and HERE to hear judge Julianna Baggott introduce Chad and hear from his winning story at the award celebration.

 

2014 SECOND PLACE: Mary McMyne lives in northern Michigan, where she is an assistant professor of English and fiction editor of Border Crossing at Lake Superior State University. Learn more at marymcmyne.com. Click HERE to read Mary’s winning story, Camille.

2013: FIRST PLACE
[img_assist|nid=10792|title=Che|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=57|height=71]Che Yeun earned her B.A. in History & Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on biomedical ethics. She is currently an M.F.A. candidate at the University of New Orleans, and the Stanley Elkin Scholarship recipient for the 2013 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her short fiction received the 2012 Enizagam Literary Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be found in The Pinch, Enizagam and Kartika Review. She is working on a collection of short stories. Click HERE to hear Che read from her winning story. Click HERE to hear what judge Michael Martone had to say about her story (and hear his Push to Publish keynote address HERE).

2013: SECOND PLACE
[img_assist|nid=10797|title=Annam|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=90|height=74]Annam Manthiram is the author of the novel, After the Tsunami (Stephen F.  Austin State University Press, 2011), which was a Finalist in the 2010 SFA Fiction Contest and in the 2012 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards, and a short story collection (Dysfunction: Stories, Aqueous Books, 2012), which was a Finalist in the 2010 Elixir Press Fiction Contest and in Leapfrog Press’ 2010 Fiction Contest.

[img_assist|nid=9340|title=Adam Schwartz|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=75|height=100]2012 Winner of the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction: The winner for the fourth annual Marguerite McGlinn National Prize for Fiction is Adam Schwartz’s “The Rest of the World.” Board members reviewed more than 400 stories for this year’s contest. Nine finalists were reviewed by celebrated author and 2012 judge, Kevin McIlvoy. He was impressed with the quality of all nine finalists, but finally selected Schwartz’s “The Rest of the World” as the winner. McIlvoy desribes the piece as an “unflinching story, written with remarkable sensitivity and skill, [that] pours darkness into your heart at the very moments it pours in piercing light.” Read about the 2012 winner HERE. Hear Adam read from his story on WFTE’s “Tell Me a Story” program by clicking HERE for Part One and HERE for Part Two..

[img_assist|nid=7775|title=BG Firmini|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=50|height=66]2011 Winner of the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction: B.G. Firmani. After board members narrowed down 300 story submissions to nine finalists, renowned author and 2011 judge Steve Almond chose New York City resident B.G. Firmani’s story, “To the Garden.” Read the full announcement of the 2011 winner HERE. Click HERE to see a slideshow of the awards  ceremony held on the campus of Rosemont College. Click HERE to hear Ms. Firmani read from her winning story at the awards ceremony.

[img_assist|nid=6585|title=Allison Alsup|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=75|height=100]2010 Winner of the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction: Allison Alsup received the $2000 prize for her story, “East of the Sierra”, which was chosen by contest judge Ru Freeman as the winner. The story was published in the Winter 2010/2011 issue of Philadelphia Stories. Click HERE to hear Ms. Alsup read from her winning story at the awards ceremony held on the campus of Rosemont College, or visit  WFTE.org to listen to the podcast.

[img_assist|nid=8409|title=Katherine Hill|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=82|height=100]2009 Winner of the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction: Katherine Hill received the $1,000 prize for her story, The Work Boyfriend, which was chosen by contest judge Elise Juska as the winner. Her winning story was published in the winter 2009/2010 issue of Philadelphia Stories. Click HERE to hear Ms. Hill read at our 2010 Marguerite McGlinn National Prize awards celebration.

About Marguerite McGlinn
Marguerite McGlinn was the essay editor of Philadelphia Stories from 2004-2008. Her travel stories appeared in the New York Times, the Sun-Sentinel, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times. She edited The Trivium: The LiberalArts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric (Paul Dry Books, 2002). Three of her short stories won places in “Writing Aloud,” a program of dramatic readings that matches contemporary fiction with professional actors. She was an adjunct instructor at Saint Joseph University in Philadelphia, and her story “The Sphinx” appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Philadelphia Stories and the second volume of the Best of Philadelphia Stories (2009). Her mystery novel, Murder in the Yeats Castle, was published posthumously (TWM Books, 2014).

Philadelphia Stories Beginner Fiction Workshop

Philadelphia Stories Beginner Fiction Workshop:  An 8-week fiction workshop from the area’s popular magazine designed to offer inspiration, writing prompts, and peer critique for beginning writers.


The course:  This class focuses on writing short stories.  Students will write two short stories during the 8-week course.  No novel excerpts please as they are difficult to critique in a short course.  The goal of the workshop is to provide a safe and fun environment for beginning writers to delve into writing and learn through the peer-critique process.  



Moderator:  Susan Barr-Toman earned an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Bennington College.  Her debut novel When Love Was Clean Underwear was selected by author Ann Hood as the winner of the Many Voices Project.  She teaches creative writing at Temple University.

Fee: $200.
 
Schedule: Mondays, September 27 – November 15, 6:30-8:30PM.
 
Location: Trinity Center for Urban Life, 22nd and Spruce Streets in Center City
                      
For more information, please email Christine@philadelphiastories.org.

Good Beginnings

[img_assist|nid=841|title=Aimee Labrie|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=86|height=100]Every two months, I sit down with a stack of short fiction submissions to read for Philadelphia Stories. I am asked to go over each story carefully, to evaluate them according to a grid of basic storytelling techniques and then to give general feedback about the story. I know that behind every piece I read is a writer anxious to have his or her work published, so I try to keep an open mind, from the first page to the last. But, if I’m honest, my overall opinion is largely influenced by how the story begins. If I’m hooked in the first paragraph, I am more likely to give the writer the benefit of the doubt on page three, when he stumbles on an awkward bit of dialogue. If, however, the story opens with a mew, with an alarm clock going off, for instance, my guard is up—I’m girding myself for a “day in the life” story, one where nothing much happens up until the very end, when the central character realizes that it was all a dream! 

Think of the beginning of your story as similar to how you tell a story in real life, like how you might give a toast at your friend’s second wedding. First, you start by getting everyone’s attention—you crush a champagne glass under your heel or pull up your skirt or give a holler on the karaoke mike. There’s a lot going on at weddings, just as there’s a lot happening in your reader’s life, so you have to make your opening startling.

Once you’ve gotten their attention, you must also recognize that you have a limited amount of time, just enough to tell maybe one or two key events in the fated meeting of the bride and the groom, so you must focus immediately. You can’t give every single detail of their courtship and you certainly don’t need to start with their disastrous first date. Instead, do as Kurt Vonnegut suggests and start as close to the end of the story as possible.

In short fiction, you have an economy of space and you must use it wisely. This means that your opening should establish the who, what, where, and when of the story. We should know pretty much immediately who the central character is, what the conflict involves, where the story is set, and when it’s taking place. If your reader is floating in space, unanchored in any particular details of the now of the story, she is going to tune out and go make herself a cheese sandwich.

And here is where my wedding toast analogy breaks down, because a good beginning also has to start with trouble, whereas a nuptial speech should probably not mention any previous illicit affairs or indiscretions. We should know from the very first sentence of a story that something is amiss, perhaps even gravely wrong.

But don’t just take my word for it. Let’s take a look at first lines of a few of the short fiction published in The Best American Short Stories 2009. The twenty stories in this collection are culled from thousands published in literary journals across the country. Somehow, they stood out from the rest, and I believe it’s in large part because the first line delivers:

“‘Never take you back, son, hard as it break my heart,’ Aunt Cleoma had told Rubiaux. ‘This is the last you come home like this—we don’t break this demon now.’”

                                                            “Rubiaux Rising,” by Steve de Jarnatt

“After my little brother died, we moved from the house on the lagoon to a two-bedroom apartment near I-95.”

                                                            “The Farms,” by Eleanor Henderson

“The girl, unlike most people photographed for fashion magazines, was not beautiful.”

                                                            “A Man Like Him,” by Yiyun Li

“Because Paula Blake is planning something secret, she feels she must account for her every move and action, overcompensating in her daily chores and agreeing to whatever her husband and children demand.”

                                                            “Magic Words,” by Jill McCorkle

Addiction, death, the unexpected, a secret—each opening sentence promise us something interesting. They start with conflict and an implied question we want answered—will the addict kick his habit? How did the little boy die? Who is the girl in the photo? What is the woman hiding (and will she get caught)?

So the next time you’re getting ready to send your story in to a literary magazine, look very carefully at the opening. Because though I promise I read every word as an editor, I am influenced by the beginning. I also can’t speak to the rest of the publishing world—those who see a wobbly start to a story and move on to the next manuscript without a second glance.

Aimee LaBrie received her MA in writing from DePaul University in 2000 and her MFA in fiction Penn State in 2003. Her collection of short stories, Wonderful Girl, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction in 2007 and was published by the University of North Texas Press.Other stories of hers have been published in Minnesota Review, Pleiades, Quarter After Eight, Iron Horse Literary Review, and numerous other literary journals. Her short story, “Ducklings” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Pleiades.

Memoir Excerpt: The White Deer

I can’t exactly say why I went to church on Saturday for the five o’clock mass, but that’s just what I did. I don’t know why that feels like I’m confessing to some dirty impulse–maybe it’s just that I’m still drawn to the liturgy–the music, the patterns of it–in spite of my exasperation with the Church. I hadn’t gone to church by myself since my teens, and as I walked into the sanctuary, I thought, okay, I’m home. When I’m with someone else–for Christmas Midnight Mass, or a funeral–I usually feel some tug of loss, a loss I can’t quite explain. But not this time. Maybe it helps that the church is a progressive church–many gay and lesbian parishioners, people of all ages and nationalities. Think of it as a Unitarian Church–but with communion. 

I’m usually not so big on homilies. I usually think of that as the time when the celebrant makes meaningless noises in order to fill up some space; time to look at the songbook, but this was different. He was talking about hospitality–what does it mean to welcome the people we love? I was thinking on that, my arms outstretched on the back of the pew, when a line of his jumped out at me: "The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom." Every molecule in me was turned to him. He said it once more, as if he wanted it to sink in. "The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom." What on earth could such a thing mean?

Later that night a friend told me about a white dog showing up at another friend’s house. The other friend looked at the dog’s tags–the address was three miles away, all the way on the other side of town. There were fireworks in town, extravagant fireworks, and it was likely the dog had run across woods, marshes, highways to get to the friend’s house. The friend looked out the door and saw what she thought was a white deer. But it wasn’t any white deer. It was a dog, a white fluffy dog, who walked right into her living room and dining room, muddy paws and all. The dog looked around a bit, submitted to the friend’s petting, then slumped, turned on his side and fell asleep.

The friend called the numbers on the dog’s tags. No one answered at the numbers. The friend left a message, and when she didn’t hear back after a while, she started to get suspicious. Maybe the dog was hers, the mystery beast coming up the street in the dark, out of the briars, the woods.

The next day the phone rang. A terse, gruff boy on the line, and the story comes darker, clearer. The dog’s human, his protector, his mother, drowned in the pool the night before. Did the dog see it happen? Did the dog jump in the water after her, try to rescue her? Was it a suicide, a heart attack, a slip off the side while she was heading back into the house with armful of dry clothes? The friend didn’t feel she had the right to such questions, but she did ask the boy–the woman’s daughter’s boyfriend–if he’d be willing to let the dog stay with her for a while. "He seems so comfortable here," she said. And the boy agreed to that, if reluctantly. And who could blame the friend if she started to make plans, if she thought about driving to the store for dog food. Life with the white dog, the white deer–and wasn’t she already relieved that she had a reason to keep herself from going so many places? A root in her midst. Finally, after so much running around.

I suppose I don’t need to say that the family wanted the dog back the next day. I suppose I don’t need to say that the friend was inconsolable, as the dog jumped in the back of the family’s car, so grateful to be back with his familiars. Of course his mother wouldn’t be there at the house when he jumped out of the car, but he didn’t know that yet. And all the losses of the friend rose up before her like ghosts turning to flesh, needing to be dealt with.

"The White Deer" is from a memoir-in-progress tentatively titled, I’D SURE LIKE TO SEE YOU, and first appeared in the online literary journal Sweet.

Paul Lisicky (www.paullisicky.com) is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming books The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, StoryQuarterly, The Seattle Review, Five Points, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and many other anthologies and magazines.

Local Author Profile: Paul Lisicky

[img_assist|nid=6501|title=Paul Lisicky|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=182]Paul Lisicky is the keynote speaker for the fourth annual Push to Publish event at Rosemont College on October 16, 2010. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Lisicky’s works have been published in many journals, including Ploughshares and StoryQuarterly, and he currently teaches at New York University. Lisicky is the author of a novel, Lawnboy, and a memoir, Famous Builder. He has also written two forthcoming books, the novel The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012), a collection of short stories and essays. 

Your website says only that The Burning House is "a novel about the complexities of longing and desire." What else can you tell us about the story?

The story is about a man whose life unravels once his sister-in-law moves in. She evokes for him all the qualities that once drew him to his wife, and he’s a wreck about it, because he doesn’t want to tear up his settled life, doesn’t want to hurt his wife. On another level, the story is about the relationship between home and community life; the community where the story takes place is undergoing redevelopment, houses torn down right and left, houses turned into commodities. How does all that affect the life at home?

From where do you draw inspiration?

The moment in front of me, the moment ahead of me, the wish to transform that moment into something felt, active, remembered.

As the keynote speaker for Push to Publish, you will be sharing advice and wisdom with aspiring writers. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

I spent years writing what I thought I should write, what I imagined to be publishable. Things changed once I was given permission to write what (and how) I needed to write. I think that’s when my real writing began.

What made you want to write a memoir? How did you approach this project differently than your fiction?

I didn’t want to do another version of the novel I’d just written, and the shift in voice and stance helped me to access aspects of my character I’d never put on the page before. I don’t mean to be disingenuous, but it didn’t feel so much like a decision. I just happened to be writing an essay for fun one day, a piece about my childhood next door neighbor, who happened to be both an avatar of style and a bit of a nutbasket, and the voice that came out sounded looser than anything I’d done before.

How much do your novels reflect your real life?

I’d say they’re emotionally autobiographical but they’re not literally autobiographical. The feelings are certainly real, but not the facts.

You are releasing a collection called Unbuilt Projects. Given the similarity in titles, is there any connection to Famous Builder? What binds the pieces together into a unit?

The thread of building and community planning certainly binds all my books. And I deliberately wanted Unbuilt Projects to talk back to Famous Builder. Famous Builder is my attempt to locate my family in time, to think about how a certain historical moment informed how we thought about identity, memory, social aspiration, art. Unbuilt Projects, on the other hand, deconstructs the family narrative. My mother developed senile dementia in the last years of her life, and once she lost the major signposts of her memory, the whole family story seemed to go down with it. We didn’t know that her allegiance to story was in fact holding us together, and once her mind went, who were we?

Read more about Paul Lisicky and his work at www.paullisicky.com.

Waiting for October 8th

From my window in the forest
I look out at a canopy
so thick I need candles in the
day in order to read or write.

There is one hole in the dark leaves
through which I see beyond my world;
today a red tail hawk flew by,
a mouse struggling in its talons;

the day before, a murder of
crows, shiny black and loud, filled my
hole, and three days earlier a
jetliner. I found it in my

book of airplane silhouettes, an
Airbus 300A. In seats
eighteen A and B a couple
hold hands, speaking in soft low tones,

heading for St. Petersburg where
his mother is dying; twenty
six C, an old man nods and dreams.
All this I see from my book. Once

a year, on October 8th, the
sun shines through my hole, a bright beam
fills the room and hitting the prism
I carefully placed, breaks into

shards of jangling light. Within a
month autumn leaves will have fallen,
the open sky crossed by gray limbs
and their terrible ragged branches.

Soon they will have a shell of ice
and snow as hawks and planes fly by,
and crows sit watching, silent in
the early winter dusk. There will

be days when sunlight hits these trees,
loosening their frozen cover
which, thawing, will drip to the ground,
tears in the cold dead of the year.Wilson Roberts was born and raised in Newtown, Bucks County. His novels, The Cold Dark Heart of the World (2008), The Serpent and the Hummingbird (2009), and Incident on Tuckerman Court (2010) are published under the Fantastic Books imprint of Wilder Publications. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in a number of small journals. A certified mediator, he works primarily in small claims court and with a pilot program mediating between state agencies, the courts, and families whose children have been placed into foster care. His short fiction, "Against the Dying," appears in the current issue of the Massachusetts Review.

Atlantic City

Blues emerge from the Jersey shore’s
salty spray, spitting white froth on boardwalks
lit up from Atlantic City. I close my eyes to neon
glow and gamblers’ stumbles. When you died,
I could hear reverberations of the weeping
tears that Shah Jehan spilled at the absence of his lover,
howling out from a counterfeit Taj Mahal.
Lying under tattered covers as a child, I never knew how
the miles of weathered wood here would hold
reminders of all we could lose to the restless waters –
recurring spilt sorrow that dampens the cracked planks
we once trampled over.Jean YeoJin Sung was born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in Cherry Hill, NJ. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University – Newark. She received her BA from NYU’s Gallatin School where she was awarded the Herbert J. Rubin Award for Poetry and her MPA from NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. She has previously published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Contrary Magazine, The 322 Review, and Salome. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Esopus Spitzenberg, 1927

By mid-October, there are so few from the old
yard left, those leaf-bright orbs, here yellow
and russet, wind-stroked but wormfree:
apples. Even the word is firm
on your tongue, tart, oversweet and old.

You’re hungry.

They go like this: one, for when you fell
out of the tree, every fruit loosen’d
from your grasp by the time you bent
over a broken wrist. You were
eight. No, younger. This fruit is cool
to the core; so good.

And oh, two: the day you saw the depth
of your father’s ache. He wouldn’t last
a year. Three for all the exams
you passed without having heeded
the lecture, and four for the baby’s
breath shed from your double breast

like all this world’s long, tired days,
every bough bent as a burrow. The fifth
is for the road. Weigh it in your palm, shroud
it with warm fingers; save it for a while. Think
on green-white flesh pocketed by seeds: dark
arsenic hearts naturally formed, and knowing.Gwen Wille lives and works in West Chester, PA. She studied writing at the University of New Mexico. Her work has appeared in Crow Toes Quarterly, Writers’ Bloc, previously in Philadelphia Stories, and others.

Early Rising on a Fall Morning

Frost is still a wonder
this October morning, an excuse
for suspicion—to think about age,
seasons replacing seasons in small stages
the way a book progresses a page at a time
until you’re in the middle of it,
letting the words into your body
like inhaling a deep winter breath
before you realize how cold
the world has become.
I wish it were that simple.
Watching things change and move on—
her small body, small puffs of breath on my arm.
My shoulders unwilling to unbind.
A corner of the yard greens and softens
as the sun rises.
Birds not yet ready to migrate
scour the warmed patch for insects.
I’ll chop wood today for winter,
thinking of warmer things
my hands clenched tight across the ax.Grant Clauser is a medical magazine editor near Philadelphia and freelance technology writer. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Hatfield, PA. Poems have appeared in various places including The Literary Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Wisconsin Review, The Maryland Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and others plus a TV show about bass fishing. Read his blog at www.poetcore.com.

Slicing It Open

I want a fruit that cleaves
               as cleanly as butter, and if
                               its barbed skin

grates my lips with an animal
               scratch, no matter.

Give me one with salmon-
              colored flesh
                             even if its nectars

mask its burrs
                and snares.

Is there no succor
                in the bite that
                               lodges inside,

in the sound
               of a device

that could
                cut me, slowly
                                whirring to life?

Dilruba Ahmed’s debut book of poems, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2010 Bakeless Prize for poetry. Ahmed’s writing has appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. Web site: www.dilrubaahmed.com.