Alan Catlin: Editor's Note

As we progress with our misfit adventure, learning as we go, we have decided that future issues will be larger and less frequent.  I am expecting that we will settle upon two, perhaps three, issues a year from this point on. Part of this decision is based on the editor’s need to have the major winter holidays free and for future travel plans for 2015. Therefore, with this issue, we will be basically closed for submission until the first of the next year where I will again be entertaining your poems based on a theme this time: Deadly Sins. I had already planned this to be our Lucky Thirteen Issue given one of our regular contributor’s submission of Seven Deadly Sins poems. Rather than break up the poems over a couple of issues, I decided to add to them. Hence Joan Colby’s Seven Deadly Sins poems will be the featured selection for issue 13.  I will attach a poem at the conclusion of this notice as a preview for what is to come and as a guide for one way to look at the theme.  Again, I am interested in any and all interpretations of the theme provided they are not overtly obscene or unnaturally violent.  We all know what this means, don’t we? 
           
Issue 12 would have been the themed issue but I had already accepted pieces for it that didn’t fit the theme and I want to not hold anyone’s poems any longer than absolutely necessary. The reading period for Issue 13 will be from Jan. 1-March 15 th.  So send in early as I need to finish this issue for a mid-April release. I reserve the right to maybe not make my informal  two week deadline for responding to poems.  This, of course, will depend upon you and the quality of the submissions.   As an Interim, given our travel plans, I am thinking of doing  a 13 ½ issue of English Journals, probably in two parts. I expect to be reading again for a regular issue, #14 by June 1st.

 

LUST

Traps love in a well pit
or stalks like a stranger in a park.
Ardent as a surveyor
in unmapped territory. The wolfpack
harrying the bison calf
while its mother bellows and paws
the red earth. The pupils of lust
are wide as bullseyes. Its arrow targets
the heart. Cruel as a hostile takeover.
It wears leather and ties you to the bed
of attrition letting kindness wither,
Denying intimacy and yet you’ll bristle
to its touch like a porcupine.

Lust is salt and vinegar.
A switchblade in its boot.
A rose in its black glove. A thorn
to pierce the tongue with
bad language. Its severe hand
caressing your willing body.