Rebecca Resinski is one of the founding editors of Heron Tree, an online poetry journal. She also designs and produces hand-bound chapbooks and pamphlets under the imprint Cuckoo Grey. A professor of Classics at Hendrix College, she lives in Conway, Arkansas.
Please describe Heron Tree and your duties as editor:
Heron Tree is a poetry journal founded in 2012 and online at herontree.com. We aim to publish a poem weekly, and all of each year’s poems are also collected in a volume. I read and weigh in on all of the submissions, as do the other editors, and in addition I prepare the accepted poems for publication on the website. Formatting the poems for publication is an especial pleasure because it gives me a chance to inhabit them, to notice and appreciate every word and line break.…
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He wakes to the assimilating weight of his wife on top of him and the sound of Portuguese blooming in his head, her lips feathering his ear, pouring in a steady stream of sinuous vowels and indulgent consonants. They glide down his spine and enter her, creating an elliptical rhythm duplicated in every one of their cells. He wonders how this woman can still surprise him after so many years and if it is a sin to be so happy before he has thanked God for another day. What would his congregation think if they knew their minister’s faith, shaken by the absence of God in his daily rituals and devotions, is revived so readily by a conjugal act that, at this point in their marriage, has nothing to do with procreation?…
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1.
Blurry I blink open
to Madonna in tacky tiara
and low-riding jeans, time-stop
dancing in a blue-red sepia swirl
before the stars and stripes
skinny arms sprawling bare
exposed hips swirling
bye bye Miss American Pie.
I don’t realize it’s the TV
until the doctor rolls in,
feel needles stiff underskin
sticky circles sucked to my chest
reading faint signs of life.…
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When you were five
And I was six,
We would hold hands
Just like this.
When you were nine
And I was ten,
We made a pact
To never tell, and then:
You began to tell me every word
That escaped from your lips, with cold secret stares.
A look or a glance through long
Fingertips. Your beautiful face.
…
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This morning she saw you tumble down
the stone wall. She scrambles to inspect
for scraped knees, soft blood. You are
perfect, unmarred. No scar to tell.
She scoops you back up. You straddle
the bridge rails. Toss pebbles
that ripple across her taut skin.
A picnic of fried chicken and cool
sweet tea, how easy to forget the sun
can slow burn, reflect off the heavy marsh,
and make murky the foretelling:
how fragile this bassinet of bone and blood.
– Rebekah Keaton…
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I hate the pain. I hate the mindlessness torture of loving someone. I hate the meaningless of it all.
– Leza Cantoral, Cartoons in the Suicide Forest
“Spawned” in 2013 as an imprint of JournalStone Publishing, Bizarro Pulp Press has quickly become a major name in the realm of speculative prose, as it specializes in offering “dark pulp fiction for readers who enjoy art that challenges the boundaries of ‘normal’ in the literary world.” With over two dozen wonderfully weird works under its belt, it’s fair to say that B.P.P. champions the bold, unusual, and fearless, which is why its newest release, Leza Cantoral’s Cartoons in the Suicide Forest, feels perfectly at home next to its twisted siblings. As an editor at both CLASH Media and Luna Luna Magazine, Cantoral is no stranger to hard-hitting explorations of topics like sexuality, femininity, abuse (be they physical, emotional, and/or mental), subjugation, and identity, all of which she touches upon here with poised eccentricity, imagination, and valor.…
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