The best of Writer Beware: 2021 in review
We’ve lost Joan Didion
JK just won’t leave it alone
Vampire Chronicles author Anne Rice has died
The most important skill is failure
New imprint, Winning Team Publishing, launched by Trump acolytes
Recent Fiction
Paper Nests, by Laurel Miram—Pale yellow pads are best. They contrast well with black Sharpies. No one can miss a bumblebee.
Recent Poetry
Three Prose Poems, by Kathleen Rooney—This day could use the excitement of receiving a surprise package. Even better if that package reads THIS SIDE UP.
Recent CNF
Thank You, Girls!, by Dvora Wolff Rabino—I’m culling needless items from kitchen, baths, and linen closets. I’m curating friendships. Now it’s your turn to go.
Love for Sale
by Benjamin Aleshire
I travel around the world and strangers pay me to write poems for them on a typewriter in the street—that’s how I’ve made my living for the last eight years.
There, I Said It
by Tori Malcangio
In the dark, from my twin bed, I listen to Romy and her latest visitor in the sheets.
Crashing
by Alle C. Hall
She was eight and at the beach and she felt like a movie star.
Lunchtime at the Café Buade, Quebec City
by Barbara P. Greenbaum
There is a woman in the booth next to us. / She looks at me as I remove my new hat.
Elegy for a Living Mother
by Renee Agatep
When she finally dies / she’ll meekly ask God why was it all / clattering highchairs, whiskers on stained sinks
Jenner Stones
by David Watts
At Jenner-by-the-Sea we scurry / over boulders to the place / where the breakers bear down
Abeyance
by Rebecca Foust
I made soup tonight, with cabbage, chard / and thyme picked outside our back door.
Why I Froze My Ass Off in a “Frozen” Costume on a Street Corner Just before the Election
by Melissa Hart
On the Friday before Election Day, I shivered on the side of a busy street in Eugene, Oregon wearing a costume from the Disney film Frozen and holding a giant orange sign that read “Do You Want to Build a Democracy?”
The Figure
by Joseph Fasano
You sit at a window and listen to your father / crossing the dark grasses of the fields
On the Diamond Behind Garfield Elementary, Melvin White Proves There Is But One Boog Powell
by Roy Bentley
When Dave Wheeler fielded the hard one-hopper / to short, he fired the ball to Melvin White
It all began around a campfire…
Beautiful language
is meant to be heard as well as read, and in fact words were vocalized eons before they were ever committed to clay or parchment. Storytelling began around campfires. We seek prose and poetry that continue the tradition.
Contributor Spotlight:
Difficult Joy
by Brian Glaser
Open Contests
by Stephen Parrish, with the editors of The Lascaux Review
Lascaux Vol 7
