Call for Submissions: LOST AND FOUND Poetry and Prose Series

Most of us have at one time lost something of personal value — or have found something of personal value to someone else. We’d like to hear all about it in our LOST AND FOUND Poetry and Prose Series!

PROMPT: Tell us about something you lost or found in a poem (any reasonable length) or prose piece (300 words or fewer — this word limit also applies to prose poems). We are looking for material about tangible items (for example, a lost ring, letter, watch — and NOT intangibles, such as lost hope).  NOTE: These tangible items can include living things, such as people, plants, and animals. We are NOT talking about “loss” as a concept, but rather about “lost” (or found) as in losing or finding a specific tangible object. Please limit the piece to ONE lost or found item.

WHAT: Submissions can be original or previously published poems or prose. You retain all rights to your work and give Silver Birch Press permission to publish the piece on social media. We are a nonprofit blog and offer no monetary compensation to contributors. If your piece was previously published, please tell us where/when so we can credit the original publisher.

WHEN: We’ll feature the poems and prose in the Silver Birch Press LOST AND FOUND Poetry and Prose Series on our blog starting in March 2017. We’ll also feature the work on Twitter and Facebook.

HOW TO SUBMIT: Email one poem or prose piece to SBPSUBMISSIONS@gmail.com as an MSWord attachment — and in the same file include your name, contact info (including email address), one-paragraph author’s bio (written in third person), and any notes about your creative process or thoughts about your piece. Please put all this information in one MSWord document and title the file with your last name (and only your last name). Write “LOST & FOUND” in the subject line of the email. If available, please send a photo of yourself around the time you lost or found the item — and provide a caption for the photo (where, when, what).

SUBMISSION CHECKLIST

To help everyone understand our submission requirements, we’ve prepared the following checklist.

1. Send ONE MS Word document TITLED WITH YOUR LAST NAME (e.g. Smith.doc or Jones.docx).

2. In the same MS Word document, include your contact information (name, mailing address, email address).

3. In the same MS Word document, include a one-paragraph author’s bio, written in the third person. You are encouraged to include links to your books, websites, and social media accounts — we want to help promote you!

4. In the same MS Word document, include a note about your poem/prose or creative process written in the first person (this is optional — but encouraged).

5. In the same MS Word document, include a caption for your photo (including where, when and/or date taken).

6. If available, send a photo of yourself at the age you were when you lost or found the item as a SEPARATE jpg attachment (not in the MS Word document). Title the photo with your last name (e.g., Jones.jpg). Also send a current photo to accompany your bio.

7. Email to SBPSUBMISSIONS@gmail.com — and put  “Lost & Found” in the subject line.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Friday, March 31, 2017

Atomic number seventeen, poem by Lee Parpart (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

Atomic number seventeen
by Lee Parpart

At seventeen we were briefly covalent. You were the
             slow-moving, stable Argon

to my twitchy Xenon, a soft-spoken athlete suddenly
             fixated on your

nerdy neighbor. All semester you studied me from two
             desks over, your

mind a slow transition metal exploring new boiling
             points and catalyzing

questions. I hear you like to write. Do you write every day?
             It sounds like you

work on your writing the way I work on football. I still love
             that image of us as

twin quarterbacks pushing ourselves towards literal and
             literary touchdowns.

It seemed to bind us together for a moment, like two
             hydrogens in search of an O.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Me leaning against someone’s Porsche outside the little bungalow we rented for two years in Durango, Colorado.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: It’s a common story: nerdy girl briefly attracts the interest of her high school’s football star, only to have him drift back to his natural tribe and her to hers. I was living in Durango, Colorado, with my mom, who was there for her first real academic job, and I was out of my element, a Boston girl totally unfamiliar with Western mores. For some reason, this star athlete, whose name I am ashamed to have forgotten, took an interest in me in chemistry class. I have never forgotten the sweetness and collegiality he showed with his comment about our shared work ethic in writing and sports.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lee Parpart has worked as a journalist and a media studies researcher, taught film studies, and published widely on Canadian cinema and visual art. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous Silver Birch Press series, and her story “Nancy drew” was published in Silver Birch’s Nancy Drew Anthology (2016). She won an emerging writer award for her short story “Piano-Player’s Reach” in Open Book: Ontario’s 2016 writing contest, What’s Your Story? Lee lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter. For more information, visit her website.

At Seventeen, 55 South Eighth Street by Jeannie E. Roberts (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

At Seventeen, 55 South Eighth Street
by Jeannie E. Roberts

     “Like wildflowers you must allow yourself to grow in all the places
     people thought you never would.” ―Lorde

Can a plant nurtured for its blossom, shaped and refined,
cultivated for the sake of appearance, become anything more
than an ornament?

Are the hollow gardeners, those who praise and pay tribute
to the ephemeral qualities of physical beauty detrimental
to one’s character and internal growth?

Before college, I was enrolled in Estelle Compton Models
Institute and Career School, where girls were groomed
for print, runway, and commercial modeling work.

Though I excelled in most of my classes, I failed miserably
at weekly weigh-ins. The presence of scales and tape
measures, accompanied by the harangue of reprimands,

weighed heavily on my mind. Like squads of creeping
marauders, weeds rooted where wildflowers once rose.
Oh, but for guidance and redirection! Below the noise

and thicket of self-reproach, an ancestral well echoed,
punctuated, over and over, again and again, You’ve been
planted in the wrong garden! Uproot. Unearth. Reveal

your golden center. Having led a hybrid life, pivoting
from cosmetic orbits, where illusory bouquets withered
and fragrance faded on severed stems, my wisdom grew.

Advancing inward, tilling and turning, digging deeper,
my interior ground awakened to a bright-eyed field
of blooming abundance.

So, how does the unseen become seen? Can the invisible
become evident if the visible remains in focus? Is it possible
for society to release the stigma placed upon human beings
who’ve been labeled “beautiful”?

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Me, posing at the Estelle Compton Models Institute and Career School (Minneapolis, Minneapolis, summer 1974).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: As with most experiences, there are positive aspects. That said, I’m grateful to have attended one of the premiere modeling schools in Minneapolis, and to have learned about the fashion industry. My classmates were kind and I’ve often wondered about their career paths, if they remained in fashion, or if they decided to follow other creative or more intellectual pursuits.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 
Jeannie E. Roberts writes, draws and paints, and often photographs her natural surroundings. Her fifth book, The Wingspan of Things, a poetry chapbook, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Romp and Ceremony, a full-length poetry collection, is also forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She is the author of Beyond Bulrush, a full-length poetry collection (Lit Fest Press, 2015), Nature of it All, a poetry chapbook (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and the author and illustrator of Let’s Make Faces!, a children’s book (2009). An award-winning poet, her poems appear in online magazines, print journals, and anthologies. She holds a bachelor of science degree in secondary education and a master of arts degree in arts and cultural management. Born in Minneapolis, she divides her time between Minnesota and Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley area. Learn more about her at www.jrcreative.biz.

Turkey, story by Zoë Ramsey (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

Turkey
by Zoë  Ramsey

When I was 17, I secretly defied my father and boarded an airplane bound for Turkey, where I spent one amazing month of the summer before my final year of high school. Ten years later, he still doesn’t know.

I never considered myself particularly rebellious. Independent is how I’d describe myself. My parents split when I was quite young, just two years old. If you knew my parents, you’d wonder how they even got together in the first place. I spent the school year with my mother on one side of the country and visited my father during the summer holidays on the other. As I got older, I realised my summer holidays could be used for things I wanted to do, rather than just the obligatory family visit.

So at the age of 16, I participated in my first foreign exchange. I spent the summer in Brazil, a decision my father supported both eagerly and financially. I was always going to be a traveller and he was happy to encourage my dream. It was my first taste of travel and I latched onto it and never let go. So when the opportunity presented itself to go on another exchange the following summer, I jumped at it. Dad wasn’t so pleased. Turkey was different from Brazil. It was farther away, more dangerous. I remember the phone call perfectly.

“I…don’t plan on sending you,” he had said.

I remember exactly what my mother said when I repeated his words. ‘So just go and don’t tell him,” she had said with a shrug.

So that’s exactly what I did.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Me at seventeen (my eyes most unfortunately closed) with my host mother and host brother standing in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: When I first saw the “Me, At 17”  prompt, I racked my brain for something I did at 17 and was disappointed that I was coming up with nothing. Then I almost laughed out loud when I realised that was the year I took my secret trip around the world and knew immediately that’s what I was to write about.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Zoë Ramsey attended the University of Edinburgh and received her MSc in Creative Writing. She currently resides in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she’s working on her first novel. She can be contacted via twitter @zoe_writes_.

At Seventeen, poem by Bethany Rivers (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

At Seventeen
by Bethany Rivers

The mirror shows a blurred reflection
in the ladies’ toilet of the Faversham.

The usual crowd drinking
shandies, coke and half pints
in our college lunch hour.

The pool table draws us again.
The addiction of not potting balls enthrals.

I came in here to cry.
You follow me in.
Tell me I’m overreacting. The knife drives
in a little deeper. Of all people —
I expected you to understand

The boy taking the next shot
at his final red
does not know my world has
cracked seismically
because of him.

I dream of my body
under the tyres of a lorry.
But you told me
I was overreacting.

He pots the red
into the black hole.
Tomorrow will be
another day, another girl.

PHOTO: “Heart Break” by Angela Chaney. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bethany Rivers’ debut pamphlet, Off the wall, from Indigo Dreams Publishing,  came out in July 2016. Previous publications include: Envoi, Obsessed with Pipework, Clear Poetry, Cinnamon Press, Fair Acre Press, Bare Fiction, Picaroon Poetry, Three drops from a cauldron, The Ofi Press, and I am not a silent poet.  She has taught creative writing for over 10 years and mentors writers from the kernel of an idea through to publication.  She runs poetry inspiration and healing days. Visit her website at www.writingyourvoice.org.uk. 

Author photo by Brian Carroll

Blink, poem by Maria Pascualy (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

Blink
by Maria Pascualy

seventeen is a poisoned well
a stuck lock a tongue like a razor
a tree trunk a carved heart I can still touch
chump change but beginner’s luck

PHOTO: Roulette 17.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I like to write longhand in the morning in a cheap composition book. I do quick drafts then do some editing down. This particular piece speaks to who I was at 17 as I look back, rather than how I saw myself at that age.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Maria Pascualy hides out in Tacoma,Washington. She recently had work accepted by the Mulberry Fork Review and Panoplyzine. She works in a museum.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Selfie snapped in my Honda Fit.

AUTHOR PROFILE: Kathleen A. Lawrence, writer featured in the NANCY DREW ANTHOLOGY

The 97 contributors to the Nancy Drew Anthology (Silver Birch Press, October 2016) are sending photos featuring the book in their home environments for a series we’re calling “Nancy Drew Around the World.”  Author Kathleen A. Lawrence provided this photo of herself standing in a snow drift in Central New York at the junction of NY Route 81 and Cortland Route 13 in front of the welcome sign to Cortland, New York. Kathleen contributed the poem “Detecting Nancy Drew,” featured below, to the collection.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kathleen A. Lawrence is an emerging poet who especially likes the challenge of the abecedarian. She grew up in Upstate New York and is from Rochester, the home of the Garbage Plate, Kodachrome, and Cab Calloway. She has been an educator for 30 years, remaining in Central New York in the shadow of the seven hills as a communications professor at SUNY Cortland. Five of her abecedarians recently appeared in the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day countdown.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: I live in Homer/Cortland, New York — a couple of hours by car to just about anywhere else in the state! SUNY Cortland, the college where I teach, is just about five minutes from where I’m standing.

Find the Nancy Drew Anthology at Amazon.com.

Homeless Girl, poem by Sera Waters (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

Homeless Girl
by Sera Waters

Empty streets when the bustle has gone
Cold pavement step or doorway as home
Shuffling my feet trying to keep warm
Sinking a bottle to remind me I’m done
No more hope yet I carried on

Two pints of sherry sunk before one
Warming belly and warming tongue
I have no hope yet I carried on

Sifting through rubbish in shiny blue bins
Refuse dining on take-out remains
Longing for a sandwich or something still warm
There is no hope yet I carried on

“Spare some change
I need to phone my mum”
People pause and look down upon, me
And say “No, get a job. Go away”
Then ring the police to come
There is no hope here, yet I carried on

No warm breath beside me
Or hand to guide me
No place to call my home
Part the invisible masses
Walking alone
I find no hope yet I carried on

From two until four
I sleep on snatched bench
In railway station
Then am moved on
Warm floor of public convenience room
Doorway, alleyway, passageway my home
Huddled only in clothes I stand up in
Choking on the vomit that society brings
Who would miss me when I am gone?
Yet courageously I carried on

Each day the same day
Same early rising
Same alleyway
Same pint of milk
“Borrowed” from same doorway
Same wait and waiting
For hope to come
And for my sweet Father
To carry me home

IMAGE: “Alley Cat” by Rachel Christine Nowicki. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My creative process was to simply step back into the shoes of the young person I was using memory and imagery as well as true life encounters to express the hardship, faith, and courage of the situation. I wrote this piece stream of consciousness and shared it openly although somewhat emotionally at poetry open mic evenings. This helped me build confidence in my story and in my voice as a person of worth with something to say, something easily masked by the brutality of the experience itself. It’s trendy now to help the homeless but back then, people were spat on and squats set on fire. This piece was written as a need, a healing need to speak up and out. I feel it has managed to reach its audience but has allowed me the free expression so denied me at the time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sera Waters is a new innovative writer with heartfelt passion for poetry, and the gritty reality of life. She discovered the power of healing through writing and now uses this to inspire others through her words we can see a darker shade of life and of trauma survival. Her work is filled with faith and hope both as a writer and in social comment. She has published her own poetry blog The Voice of Sophia, where much of her work can be viewed and is enjoyed widely by an international audience. “Homeless Girl” was written as a reflection on her experiences when she was a young homeless adolescent in Brighton and the south west of England at the tender age of 17 in 1989.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: There are no photographs of me at this time, but safe to say the waif that arrived at the train station in Wales, stomach shrunk, unkempt and unable to sleep for fear of what the dark would bring is an image never far from my parents’ mind. It took 27 years to heal that child and she lives well cared for in me to this day. This photo is from a different period in my life.

The First Year, poem by Vicky Morris (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

The First Year
by Vicky Morris

She found new homes for the contents of her two bin bags
and a box. Her blue rabbit took up residence on the single bed
by the window where she slept. The other left the room
feeling empty. She began keeping a log of her money,

counted pennies, shopped in indoor markets, made
big pots of veggie stew and froze it. She got a job
as a glass collector, went prickly-heat red, but said nothing
the times she got her bum squeezed. Any spare coins

filled phone boxes. She got nervous at night. People tried
to break in a lot. She lived above an off-license in a row
of shops. Once she watched a man walk past in the early hours
carrying a video recorder. A police van pulled up,

and the man spit in the face of a female officer. All three
wrested him into the van where a police dog barked.
They drove off, before the penny dropped. It was the first
of many times she’d see people act this way.

She tie-dyed everything, worn German Army boots,
drew black flicks on her eyelids, went into Manchester
when she could, getting lost down side streets,
discovering secondhand shops. She got her nose

pierced near Affleck’s Palace, felt she belonged there
in the Northern Quarter among the hippies, rockers, goths,
the punks, the grunge kids. Monday nights she’d go to the Ritz.
£1 in and a free pint. She avoided the mosh pit, but learned

to head bang, lost parts of herself on the dance floors
of the Banshee, 42nd Street, Band on the Wall. She smoked
spliffs, dropped tabs, stayed up late fixing the world, listening
to Syd Barret, The Chameleons, The Smiths, Ozric Tentacles.

She painted pictures exploring the inside of her head, welded
a metal sculpture of her ribs, the spine on wheels, filled it
with found bits, Ritzla packets, test tubes, dolls arms and legs,
quotes from the Doors of Perception and Brave New World,

about how we are island universes, and words are x-rays.
Once she rode a bike through a rich suburb at dawn, her skin
painted green, weaving in and out of people’s drives, across
lawns, laughing into the sky, her face a satellite dish

listening for answers. She always closed the curtains at night,
watched out for oddballs, walked as near as possible
to streetlights. She got restless at night. The fish and chips
weren’t the same here. She thought of the shoreline,

the seagulls nicking scraps, the tang of vinegar in salt air. Here,
the newsprint was blank, the fish smaller. In bed she imagined
her mum downstairs dragging a metal mop bucket along the floor,
across from her, her sister sound asleep.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Me, at 17 in college, South Manchester (1991).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This is a poem that documents the first year I left home, discovering my independence and early influences at the age of 17. Being on my own so young wasn’t easy. I moved from a small town to the outskirts of a city which was at times alienating and isolating. The poem looks at these things from a distance in a third person narrative, and at leaving behind my childhood, and my sister (who got me through difficult times growing up in a volatile family situation). This key time in my life had a profound effect on the adult I became and my career path. For 19 years I’ve worked primarily as a creative facilitator and enabler of young people, supporting them with their development and paths into adulthood.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Vicky Morris writes poetry and short stories and has been published in places like Butcher’s Dog, The Interpreter’s House, Matter, Pieces of Me, Slim Volume, and Ink, Sweat and Tears. She has two poems forthcoming in the anthology Moons on the Glass (Valley Press, 2017). Vicky won a Northern Writers Award in 2014 for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Jerwood/Arvon Scheme for poetry 2016/17. Visit her at vickymorris.co.uk.

The Dress Mother Didn’t Mean to Gift You, poem by Christina Marrocco (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

The Dress Mother Didn’t Mean to Gift You
by Christina Marrocco

The sun comes in our windows even when we fight
and the motes are many between my mother and me.
The dogs and cats watch as she grounds me for the last time.
Or thinks she does.
I’m seventeen—and a mother—I cannot be grounded!
You cannot ground someone’s mother!
The cat sighs.
What Mother knows is this: the boy is back in town,
back and at least as frightening as Thin Lizzy ever was,
Oh, yes, him—fired from Circus Vargas—she hisses,
ran off to the circus to escape you and now you want to see him?
preferring to shovel elephant shit and never sending a red cent?
Fired for pickpocketing and high on pot!
She’s underestimating his crimes but I’m not talking.
I don’t love him; I don’t like him; I don’t want to “play house.”
I just want to introduce him to his child because he’s asked and it’s right.
Absolute certainty that it’s right hangs a banner across on my face.
Despite it all, I’m still grounded.
I pack my bags.
I pack my son.
I load my rusty 210 Hatchback
and
I hurry to finish before Dad gets home.
Off we drive, baby and I, bags of diapers wedged into the front seat,
A mesh-walled playpen jammed in the trunk.
Future unknown for a few hours
until it goes the only way it can—
me married in my mother’s white wool suit.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: I’m seventeen and my son is nearly one year old. We are at a family party at my aunt’s house—I’m very much a mother and very much a child on the cusp of making a fateful stand.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Christina Marrocco is an assistant professor of English at Elgin Community College in Elgin, Illinois. There, she teaches Advanced Fiction and Poetry Writing and various Literature and Composition courses, and has facilitated the Creative Writing Club and acted as the Assistant Director of The Writers Center. Christina holds a BA in English, an MA in Professional Writing and Rhetoric, and a PhD in Rhetoric and Late American Literature with a certificate in Women’s Studies, all from Northern Illinois University. Her poems “Buckle” and “Driving the Bicentennial” appear in the 2015 Laurel Review. She is currently working on a large series of prose poetry and a book of creative fiction. Christina grew up in a working class, Italian-American environment during the 1970s and 80s and became a teen parent and high school dropout. She did not begin her pursuit of academics until her mid-thirties, enrolling at the local community college. Though since that time she has attained much, it is the neighborhood confines and beauties, as well as the difficult experiences of her early life, that inform much of her creative work.