Submissions now closed for Issue 8

The submission period for Issue 8, due out late July 2011, has closed. Please do not submit until further notice. No decision has been made regarding timing of future issues or when we might reopen for submissions. Please check back periodically.

The Chimaera’s 2010 Pushcart Prize Nominations

 

Good luck to all!

Alison Brackenbury — ‘Over the field’ http://www.the-chimaera.com/March2010/Poems/Brackenbury.html

Anna Evans — ‘Why I Am Attracted to Men with Dyslexia’ http://www.the-chimaera.com/March2010/Poems/Evans.html

Janet Kenny — ‘Last Danceֹ’ http://www.the-chimaera.com/March2010/Poems/Kenny.html

Ralph La Rosa — ‘Sauntering’ http://www.the-chimaera.com/March2010/Theme/Poems/LaRosa.html

Lance Levens — ‘Begging’ http://www.the-chimaera.com/March2010/Poems/Levens.html

Parker Tettleton — ‘The Living Lie’ http://www.the-chimaera.com/March2010/Theme/Poems/Tettleton.html
 

THE FLEA Bug Bash!

Come to THE FLEA Circus and Bug Rave — a cast of trillions!

http://www.the-flea.com/

Alan Gould, The Seventh Chimaera's Featured Poet

   
Amor Fati Overnight In Hospital

The wardsman shaving my pubic hair
is shyer than I am here.
We contrive to talk
from further selves for manhood's sake.

Amid sea-green professionals
I watch myself on screen.
The catheter probes my blood-vessels
like a mouse in a maze-experiment,

finds as they expect, no more.
The talon of arteries that holds my heart
erect to life has one weak claw.
I feel humiliation, not fear.

The plastic bottle they insist
I use to pee, I'll not use.
Courteous, desperate, I last
till two am, evade the night-nurse.

The triumph's paltry. Returning, I see,
huge on my inside thigh
my Viking blood has splayed and run
to a purple map of Europe beneath the skin.

My forbears went to the New World from that,
and sure, it's proper, says my heart
to face the thing and snuff it quick,
Grettir on Drangey, not liking the dark

but taking what comes and its loneliness,
strange elation at how exact is this.
But here are good professional staff
reading screens to make my future safe

who require no more than a stranglehold
upon the wild affections of my world.
For this is blockage, infirmity. This
is not me, but the mortal incubus,

the hobbler who
must walk beside me with his cue
of Now when it comes, it will hold no surprise,
a self watching my self with angel eyes.


—by Alan Gould, from The Past Completes Me 

The Seventh Chimaera will be online in March, 2010, at http://www.the-chimaera.com/

   

A Fresh Flea Fangeth Forthe (well Fyfthe actually)

A Flea moreover which transmuteth that which is base imperfect Mettle into Gold,  & whych projecteth many a Stone Philosophickal or Nugget Poetickal thereby; as witnesseth Philip Quinlan, Leo Yankevich, Joseph Salemi, Fr. Robert J. Pecotte, Geoff Page, Amit Majmudar, Rose Kelleher, Nigel Holt, Bill Greenwell, Alan Gould, Louis Gallo, Angela France, Nausheen Eusuf, Stephen Edgar, Ann Drysdale, Kevin Cutrer, Peter Coghill, C.E. Chaffin & Jared Carter.

http://www.the-flea.com/

Season of THE FLEA

You've got to pick up every stitch,
The rabbit’s running in the ditch,
Beatniks are out to make it rich,
Oh no! Must be the Season of the Witch...

http://www.the-flea.com

Thomas Zimmerman, Marly Youmans, Gail White, Timothy Murphy, Rick Mullin, David W. Landrum, Rose Kelleher, Clive James, Jan Iwaszkiewicz, Midge Goldberg, Richard Epstein, Ann Drysdale, Kevin Cutrer, Norman Ball, Gene Auprey, Mark Allinson, Mary Alexandra Agner.

Caratacus Rides Again!

My Domus Carataci personal blog on JournalSpace with years of posts was destroyed when JournalSpace's server crashed in 2007. Since then I haven't run a personal blog, channeling most of my energies into Shit Creek Review, The Chimaera and THE FLEA and their respective blogs. But some material fits better onto a personal blog than onto the more formal context of a literary magazine's blog; with that in mind I have revived Domus Carataci, now on Blogspot, and renamed it I, Caratacus. I will update it from time to time, whenever Bloggina, the Muse of Bloggers, inspires me.