Published! – Andy Havens

I drive the two miles or so across town to come to the Starbucks at Barnes and Noble, passing at least five other Starbucks on the way. It’s not because of the books, not because of Betsy, who’s been serving my coffee for at least three years here, and not for the increased likelihood of having my car window smashed for the nickels in the cupholder while I quaff an americano. It’s because it’s quiet. My goal – and I’ve been succeeding – is to be more comfortable with proximity. Sharing a table with a stranger at a coffee shop, for instance. Still, my preference is for peace. I am the sole customer here this morning, 9:36, March 20, 2017. Over my headphones is the oddly comfortable cadence of Betsy moving chairs around while she wipes them down. The scoot on the floor, the light knock against the big disc on the floor at the base of the table’s central mast. It’s domestic and expansive. The sound of things having been done since there were things to do. The peace of nothing new.

Things that are new:

A Kindle Voyage. It’s nice. I’ve had the Paperwhite for years and love it, but I want to bequeath it to my daughter for her birthday. The Voyage is an upgrade, and there’s only so much you can do to an e-reader without making it too much more than an e-reader, so it’s hard to get excited about it. But like I said, it’s nice. A little sharper in the contrast, nice page turning buttons to make one-handed reading work better. Nice.
Sunshine. I think we’re done with it for a while, but yesterday was epiphanous. If you never knew anything about Spring or that it even existed, yesterday would have taught you everything you need to know. I mowed, I fertilized, I took down a huge shrub that had been damaged in our one big snow this winter. Using Spring to clean up what winter broke. I’m working on a poem about things like that. Which brings us to…
Poetry competitions. Specifically, doing well in them. I looked at my phone yesterday to see a missed call, a voicemail, an email, and a Facebook message. All from my South Seattle College Creative Writing teacher, Michael G. Hickey. “I have some news you might be interested in hearing.” (A moment of silence, please, for the official death of understatements) He submitted two of my poems to a competition held by The League for Innovation in the Community College. It’s a National literary competition among all of the community colleges in various cities – Dallas, Phoenix, Miami. He even mentioned Canada, so I guess it’s technically international. Obviously all of the Seattle Community Colleges – South, Central, and North. One of my poems earned an honorable mention.

The upshot is that I’ll get a plaque, and…wait for it…wait for it…a check. I wrote a poem that’s good enough to get paid for it. That, friends and neighbors, is new. Published at Seattle U, and now earning cheddar in a competition. Time to frame those letters I wrote you. They liked the other poem, too, but evidently got a little freaked out by it. Thought it was too creepy or too dark or something. Which is funny, because I was anything but dark when I wrote it. It was this one, The White Noise of Prophecy. That’s a pretty awesome poem, and while there is a dead girl buried in the woods, I was probably making PB&Js and playing Connect 4 right before I wrote it. As for the other, the honorable mention, I don’t know what to do. There are odd rules for publication, and I don’t know if it is being published at all. I also realized that I have two versions of the winning poem, and I’m not sure which one I submitted. I guess that doesn’t matter much, though. Heck why not – it’s this one. I think. Might be the other version, but they’re not very different at all.

Who won, and with what poem? I don’t know. I have a hunch that it will be someone from a protected class – person of color, etc – who wrote a poem about oppression or THE ELECTION. In a way I hope I’m right. I’ll have a clear understanding of why it beat me out, instead of worrying that someone might have actually written a better poem. Which of course is as likely as anything else, but I’m too fragile and petty to handle that.

How does one go about celebrating one’s first publication? I say, I do it with lofty, rather British sounding English. I’m quite chuffed, and all that, even if it makes me sound a bit toff.

Dear Andy Havens,

Thank you for submitting to Fragments. We have decided to publish The Whole Sky, All at Once in this year’s edition. You will be invited to read/present your piece at a later date, this May. We look forward to seeing you there.

I’ve already made the obviously poor decision of wondering whether mine was the only submission, and that took some of the wind out of my sails (or took the piss, if I’m to stay on the British thing). But it’s an annual publication, so I have to believe that at least a few poems were dropped in the queue over the course of the submission period. I don’t know how long that period was, as I saw a notification for it just 2 days before it closed.

They have given me email addresses to contact concerning this whole thing, and I certainly will, what with that whole part about “read/present your piece.” Maybe I’ll do the ugly thing and ask how many other submissions there were. Maybe I’ll save myself the disappointment. I don’t know.

Here’s the big winner. It’s not the first time I’ve posted it here:

The Whole Sky, All at Once

You can’t look for the lightning
Dad said
or you’ll never see the flash.
He would pull the Buick out to the street
and we sat like crooked teeth
in the yawning maw of the garage.
A storm coming deliberately at us
and the tornado siren
wailing with a bored urgency
like the ambulance of the great plains.
We pulled over.

You can’t look for the lightning
Dad said
or you’ll always just miss it.
He would talk about seeing the whole sky
and we sat like crooked teeth
in the yawning maw of the garage.
We tried to look at nothing and everything
while the old corn across the street
whispered with a quickened urgency
like the dying secrets of the great plains.
We closed our ears.

You can’t look for the lightning
Dad said
or someone else will see it.

Tag: Published!

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