07.16.2008
Spring 2008, Volume 32, Number 1
If you want to get to know a woman, put on her fat clothes and kneel down to scrub her floor tiles or crane your neck to dust up inside the light fixture in her dining room. That’s what we decided in our Sunday group. There were four of us: Margot of the high ceilings, crumbled crayons, and spackled butter cream thighs; Natural look Sally, who hailed from a childless A-frame deep in a tick-infested forest; Catherine the Cold, frosty blonde wife to an overheated furniture mogul in a modern ranch house full to bursting with stock and teenagers on the prosperous side of Boonslick; and me, Della Sue, salt-and-pepper duchess of all the taxidermy and wood paneling I survey. For years, our husbands had been carousing together Fridays, claiming that they’d be happy to stay home with the kids, dogs, laundry, telemarketers, PC, if there were really anything we wanted to go out for. “I can’t even remember what I used to do for fun,” I told Gerry, one night after he came in and made a sandwich out of the leftover casserole that had hardened into cheese crust at the sides of the baking dish.
“Chase beef cake, I believe. Now you got enough to stock a freezer, what else do you need?” His jaw worked over the tail end of the sandwich as he stripped off the ShowMe State Games T-shirt I’d washed special for the evening’s festivities and put his familiar muscles on parade. There’s one with a stretch mark, one with a birthmark, one with a tasteful tiger tattoo. I’d had the benefit of them all, it was true, and with two school- age boys to boot, male attention was hardly a pressing need.
Besides, what are our options, four women attached like bubbling mushrooms to the wrong side of forty? No one wants to see a middle-aged woman enjoying herself—dancing, drinking, laughing so hard she pees.
(more…)
07.10.2008
Spring 2008, Volume 32, Number 1
| I start thinking of flammable material, the kind | ||
| we buy cheap from India | ||
| but then I remember my grandfather’s story | ||
| about a chapel carved out of salt. White steeple, white | ||
| door, white people. We’ve been here way too long. | ||
| So when the light changes, I speed | ||
| until you and I glide | ||
| over the freshly laid road, the smooth road | ||
| we fucked into existence, only you | ||
| are not in the car and the white line that splits | ||
| the road in half, reminds me of how | ||
| we cannot live without salt. But this all has to do | ||
| with the road. I light a cigarette, change | ||
| the subject, only I do not have cigarettes | ||
| and don’t smoke. The road is black | ||
| like someone else’s lungs. The cilia grow | ||
| hard, like art, from the tar. Sculptures, scars, bread. The road. | ||
| The turn I made at the light is illegal. But it’s the one | ||
| that brought me | ||
| to you. I’m illegal not because I’m too young | ||
| or because I’m a virgin in some country | ||
| where virginity is collateral for land, or wine, | ||
| or salt, a country in which you are not a king or a pirate | ||
| washed ashore a beach whose shells tongue your ear | ||
| when you’re not listening. | ||
07.03.2008
This fall, we are seeking playfulness and comedy for our “Humor” theme. Connect with the citizens of cream city whether by making us laugh, cry, wince, or smile — regardless, you have to make us laugh. We are not seeking simple satire, narratives and poems with characters and narrators that serve as mere setup for gratuitous punchlines. We want your most humanizing humor: serious humor; dark comedy; playful, nuanced and vivid writing that also makes us laugh.
Per usual, we will be accepting submissions for our theme issue from August 1, 2008, to November 1, 2008. New this year, we will also be accepting non-themed submission during this time. Please clearly mark theme submissions as “humor” on the outside of the envelope. Therefore, our Fall 2009 issue, in which submissions from 1 Aug 08 to 1 Nov 08 will be published, will feature humor-themed content and general submissions.
For more information on how and where to submit, visit our guidelines.
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06.20.2008
The Spring 2008 issue of cream city review is now available at booksellers across the nation or, preferably, by direct subscription of single issue order. Click here to order. This 236-page volume has been completely redesigned with new fonts, page gutter iconography and features sixteen pages of original comics by European artists. As always, cream city review is perfect bound, printed on high-quality paper stock with full-color internal artwork and a durable cover.
The new issue features the work of local artist A. Bill Miller, poetry from Jennifer Perrine and Terita Heath-Wlaz, fiction by Andrew Mortazavi and Trudy Lewis, nonfiction by Derek Mong and an interview with Pam Houston. Check back here or subscribe to our feed for a regular stream of excerpts from this and other issues.
Annual Literary Prize Winners
Thanks to the hard work of our judges, Michael Martone, A. Manette Ansay and Josh Bell, we are please to announce the winners of our Annual Literary Prizes:
The winner of the A. David Schwartz Fiction Prize is Jeff P. Jones for “The Night the Winter Palace Was Taken”.
The winner of the David B. Saunders Prize for Creative Nonfiction is Anne Kornblatt for “The Writer of the Body”.
The winner of the Beau Boudreaux Poetry Prize is Sara Wallace for “You”.
In addition to our generous sponsors, the Beau Boudreaux Foundation, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops and Carol Grossmeyer, and the family of David B. Saunders, we’d like to thank all of the writers who submitted their work for consideration in our 2008 Annual Literary Prize competition. This is the first year we offered the $1,000 prize level and an issue to everyone submitting the full entrance fee.
Check back soon or subscribe to our feed for announcements of the judges for the 2009 Annual Literary Prize Competition and the focus (formerly “theme”) of our fall reading period.