Blended & Beyond… like your collection of best sweatshirts. Your neon pastel, robustly sequined, gaudily embroidered, and epically storied. Your Where did this even come from? Your hems that have definitely seen moth activity. This is a call for your polyblends. I think there’s dried cookie dough on your sleeve… and I’m totally into it.
Aged compost is my comfort zone. Sleeve-deep in sweet soil from the choicest scraps. Send your queering of institutional conventions. The blended-genre, beyond-genre, eclectic, lumpy, campy, grungy, normcore, dark pastoral, and tragicomic. Work that isn’t an effort of emulation, but a trust placed in the mysterious arrival of a wholly new creative fertility seeding your wildly incubating belly. Or work that totally is an effort of emulation because great is great but you saw room for you. Or go simple. Go sloppy haiku. Just go. Go get it and send it to me.
If coming-of-age-y, try it through the bulgy eyes of a bedroom goldfish. If eco-something, decenter humanity and incite urgency. If fiction-ish, I don’t need those perfect punchy endings. Don’t put bows on gifts that distract me from your lovely repurposed wallpaper. In poetry, that ageless irreverence. Poetry as humble pottery. Let’s see upcycled tropes, dry humor, juicy mundane, and fibrous origins.The one you had to cut from your chapbook because it didn’t fit the theme. Themes creep me out. I like being creeped out. I like being out.
This isn’t to say I’m expecting experimental or avant-garde. You might be crawling towards the nearest genre’s oddly placed desert phone booth. That’s hot. It’s not unrecognizable, but what’s its new function for all those dangling wires? Are they braided? Nonlinear? Nonbinary? Morning mop? Puffy eyes? Puffy paint? Send. Just don’t mistake this category for Pollock painting. Yours might be a million-dollar masterpiece but our earnest WordPress skills can’t splatter words as beautifully as you can. An image might do the trick. But writing. Or writing beyond alphabets. In the end, a collection of the best sweatshirts from every era. Looking swell, smelling strange. No previously published work. I can only read so much before I have to go hide under a tree, so please limit to a few poem-ish things or a couple thousand words of prose-ish things, etc., etc.
Submissions open February 1, 2023. To submit your work, go here.
Bradley David
Bradley David’s poetry, fiction, essays, and blended/beyond genre works appear in Terrain, Allium, Rougarou, Exacting Clam, Always Crashing, Anti-Heroin Chic, and numerous others. His creative nonfiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Living in Southern California, he gardens year-round, runs a backyard poultry rescue, and takes inspiration from compost. Selected work at https://linktr.ee/bradleydavid. On Twitter @strangecamera and Instagram @mystrangecamera
JMWW 