"The Dark Prerogatives"

Each of these fairly young online journals just launched a new issue. Excellent site navigation, clean graphics. Definitely worth your time to go have a look...

CERISE PRESS: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, ARTS & CULTURE - Vol. 1, Issue 2, featuring poems by Yusef Komunyakaa, Dorianne Laux, and Victoria Chang.

Their mission: "Cerise Press, an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works. Co-founded by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Sally Molini, and Karen Rigby in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience."

A sample poem from this issue:

"Elegy as a Strand of Hair"

The woman’s skin says: childless.
Her eyes still white, the iris still slight.

The wind takes a strand of our hair.
We leave one here, one there for someone to

misunderstand. A child will find
the imposter. A child will toss it out.

Babies are snoring in strollers.
One arm up in mid-air, mouth open.

I am half-alive. I am half-dead.
Maybe more.

Imagine it, the love the mouths will have when
we are no longer needed.

Childless selfish mouths.
Lucky mouths. Lucky lips that will moth them.

-VICTORIA CHANG


& from down south...


WACCAMAW: A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE - Number 4, featuring poems by Brian Barker, Camille Dungy, and John Hoppenthaler.

Their mission: "Welcome to Waccamaw, an online literary journal published at Coastal Carolina University. We take our name from the Waccamaw River, which runs through Conway, South Carolina, home of the university....Waccamaw is proud to have published poems, stories, and essays by some of the best authors writing today, including Jack Gilbert, Natasha Trethewey, Paul Allen, Sonny Brewer, Robin Ekiss, Barbara Hamby, Paul Cody, Kevin Wilson, Linda Gregg, David Kirby, Joshua Poteat, Katrina Vandenberg, Rebecca Barry, and Chad Davidson."

A sample poem from this issue:

"Leda"

In the most beautiful rape story
he comes as a swan.
Above her, wings beat hard,
spreading the scent of muck and lake.
Then there’s a parting squawk,
arc of his neck almost apologetic
as he takes off.

But in the worst—and this
will always be the case—
she is shivering and has
your little sister’s face,
an old pillow pressed
into her mouth: musty taste
of feathers, mildewed heat,
choking cough.

No longer do they break
with gravity—no lift,
no odd, consoling courtesy—
nor do they feign
the half-shyness of those
who metamorphose
for cloaked purposes
yet still take the shapes,
the dark prerogatives, of gods.

-JOANNA PEARSON