If You Love It So Much, poems by Rachelle Toarmino

Rachelle Toarmino is a writer, editor, and educator from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the founding editor in chief of Peach Mag, and is the author of the poetry collection That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 6/9/2020, PRE-ORDER) and the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Shabby Doll House, and other places online and in print, and has been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She lives in Buffalo, where she works on the staff of Arts Services Initiative and as a teaching artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Mutual aid projects the author encourages you to support:

La sed de los oráculos/The Oracle’s Thirst, poems by Nicole Cecilia Delgado

Nicole Cecilia Delgado (1980). Puerto Rican poet, translator, and book artist. In 2016, she founded La Impresora, an editorial studio specialized in small-scale independent publishing. Her latest books include: Apenas un cántaro: Poemas 2007-2017 (Ediciones Aguadulce, 2017), and Periodo Especial (Aguadulce/La Impresora, 2019), which explores the socioeconomic mirror images between the Greater Antilles in light of Puerto Rico’s ongoing financial crisis. Delgado is widely regarded as one of the leading Puerto Rican poets of her generation, and as a cultural worker bringing together artists, activists, and writers from across the Americas.

Photo of the author by Adál Maldonado.

Letter to a Young Black Conservative — Poems by Nikki Wallschlaeger

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Witness, Kenyon Review, POETRY, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses (Horseless Press 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof 2017) as well as the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (2019) from Bloof Books. She is also the author of an artist book called “Operation USA” through the Baltimore based book arts group Container, a project acquired by Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. Her third collection, Waterbaby, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2021.

Mutual aid projects the author encourages you to support:

Your Friend, The Wanderer

Hello,

My name is Colette Arrand. Awhile back, me and Raquel Salas Rivera ran this website, The Wanderer, which was, if you’ll pardon the expletive, incredibly fucking good. At least it was for me. I’ve always had a pained relationship with poetry. I love the art, I hate the iniquity of how that art is distributed, and I often struggle with the ways in which I am complicit in that system. Editing this site eased a lot of that tension, and while the world got too overwhelming to continue working on it, I’ve thought about The Wanderer every day since it closed.

I would like to re-open The Wanderer now.

I’d like to say that this isn’t in response to anything, but that’s bullshit—unless you’re one of those jawns who is like “plenty of time to finish my novel,” the art that’s being produced right now is scared, terrified, anxious, and pissed off, or at least it should be. I can’t participate with my poetry—I’ve tried, and it’s just not happening—but right now I can provide space and money, and I’d like to do so for as long as possible.

Here’s how this is going to work—

Sending Your Work: Please send 3-5 poems to wandererpoems@gmail.com. Please be generous in your patience with my response time—I am one person, and even though I hope this doesn’t happen, the moment someone shares this on a “paid call for poetry” list, I am going to get slammed with poems by people who don’t understand what this website is doing.

Editorial: Please read the editorial statement on the front page. While I abhor playing the gatekeeper, I acknowledge that in relaunching this page that’s what I’m doing. As a one-editor project it’s possible that this will look like a “poets and poems Colette Arrand likes” club, and I will do my level best to make sure that isn’t the case. I would invite others to join, but it is my belief that editors should be paid for their labor, and I can’t sustain that.

Payment: $30+ upon publication, or sooner if necessary, to the author or a mutual aid project of their choosing. Why the little plus sign? The Wanderer has a Patreon and I just never used it. Whatever The Wanderer makes per month on Patreon will be divided up and paid out to the authors. If you would like to throw in, please do: https://www.patreon.com/wandererpoetry

Previous Submissions: With apologies, work that was previously submitted to The Wanderer will not be considered for publication at this time. I am incredibly sorry for that. Feel free to submit again. It’s been two years, you have new poems.

How long will this last? In truth, I don’t know. I’m not big on budgeting, but the way I figure it I can go at least three months before I start stressing. But I love y’all and I hate that we’re apart, and if this means I get to feel connected to you in some way, fuck it, what’s money?

When does this launch? Friday, April 3.

If you’ve got questions, feel free to find me. I am very online.

xoxo,

Colette Arrand

A Tale of A Hungry Beauty, fiction by A.A. Balaskovits

A.A. Balaskovits is the author of Magic for Unlucky Girls (SFWP). Her fiction and essays appear in Indiana Review, The Southeast Review, The Madison Review, Apex Magazine, Shimmer and many others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief of Cartridge Lit. On twitter @aabalaskovits

Some children are born believing that there are monsters under the bed, witching and wheedling their way from their dark confines towards the light of a baby’s eyeballs. If they make it that far, past screams and parents armed with brooms, the monster will settle in the child’s head and make a gallery of terror and wonder to keep them entertained for the rest of their lives. “It’s only your imagination,” their parents will tell their weeping children, frustrated at the bed wetting and screaming once the moon rises, but it is only because they too forgot that they have monsters living behind their eyes as well, and have long grown used to the presence.

For the children who grew up in the village surrounding the high tower on the top of the hill, they knew the monster did not wait under their beds or behind their eyes, but was biding its time.

The Wanderer, etc.

Oh hey,

This is Colette. Over two years ago now, I started The Wanderer because I felt that there weren’t enough spaces that showcased the poetry I love in a way that didn’t feel exploitive. At the beginning, I thought it was going to be interesting enough putting trans poets, who were (and in a lot of ways still are) vastly underrepresented in “mainstream” literary magazines, in conversation with cis poets, unburdened by the notion that trans poetry in specific needed to be cordoned off into its own section or issue so that the reader *knew* the work they were engaging with was trans and could react accordingly. The only other things I knew about The Wanderer is that I wanted to pay people for their labor, I wanted to publish on a regular schedule, and I didn’t want to charge people for submissions.

The Wanderer would have been successful in all of that, but it would have folded after its first year were it not for the now former co-editor of this space, Raquel Salas Rivera. They gave The Wanderer a shimmering, urgent energy, be it in the form of the people they were soliciting, the poetry they were translating for the site, and the work they found in our e-mail queue. When Raquel told me they had to step down, I didn’t know whether or not The Wanderer could keep going. There is, in fact, a different version of this post in my Google Drive, where I announced that we were closing for the foreseeable future. It’s been there for two months. I sent it to Raquel. We both cried. But, obviously, it never went up, and here I am, writing this post about how The Wanderer will keep going. Here’s what’s up:

Editorial

Joining me as co-editors are June Gehringer, Sara Bess, and Prairie M. Faul. I’ve been privileged to publish all three in the past, and I’m stoked beyond words that I get to work with them in this context. Their bios, should you need them:

June Gehringer is the author of “I love you it looks like rain” (Be About It Press 2017) and “I don’t write about race”, (Civil Coping Mechanisms 2017). She is the winner of the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and other games. She tweets @june_gehringer.

Sara Bess grew up in the rural mid-south but they don’t live there anymore. They were a 2017 Lambda Literary Poetry Fellow and a recipient of the Bryn Kelly Scholarship for Trans Women/Trans Femme Writers. They keep a little garden and release their music at sarabess.bandcamp.com.

Prairie M. Faul is a Cajun poet and flagrant transsexual currently living in Philadelphia. She is the author of In the House we Built (bottlecap press) and Burnt Sugarcane (gloworm).

Publishing Schedule and Payment

For the time being, The Wanderer is moving from once a week to once every other week. This will allow us more lead-time for editing, coding, and promoting work via social media. It will also allow us to raise what we pay from $25 to $35.

Submissions

Are closed for the time being. We have a massive backlog to get through and don’t want to keep you waiting. We’re not super concerned with genre distinctions. Poetry might be on the marquee, but we’ll publish your fiction, your essays, your comic strips, your field recordings, whatever it is that currently moves you.

I’m pretty sure that’s everything. I cannot tell you how grateful I am to everybody who has read this site, sent their work, or published with us. The Wanderer has completely changed the way I look at and engage with literature in a way that goes beyond my own work as a writer and an editor. That it’s meant as much as it has to a lot of y’all wasn’t something I anticipated. I hope you stick with us. Let’s find out what happens next.

xoxo,

Colette Arrand, co-editor

don’t ever play yourself, poetry by mica woods

mica woods teaches at Columbia College Chicago, where they are an MFA candidate and editor for Columbia Poetry Review. She received the Merrill Moore Prize for Poetry in 2015 from Vanderbilt University. Her most recent and forthcoming works can be found in Juked, Foothill, Hollow, Pretty Owl Poetry, Heavy Feather Review, Yes, Poetry, The New Territory, and Minute Magazine.

I Have Lain in the Dirt and Known this Bed, poems by Michelle Lin

Michelle Lin is a poet, community arts organizer, and author of A House Made of Water (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program and of the University of California Riverside’s Creative Writing program. She is a Kundiman fellow and co-curator of Kearny Street Workshop’s reading series “KSW Presents.” Recent work can be found in Underblong, The Margins, and HEArt.

Americana, three poems by Lindsay Maruska

Lindsay Maruska was born in 1985 in Princeton, New Jersey. She has a graduate degree in World History she very rarely uses. Her poems have appeared in The Furious Gazelle and Rising Phoenix Review. When not writing or playing with her cats, you can find Lindsay on Twitter @ellle_em.

“My kin,” poetry by Noah Burton

Noah Burton was born in Kansas, grew up in Virginia, and now lives in New Hampshire. His poems have appeared in the PEN America Poetry Series, Yes Poetry, Paperbag, among others. He is a recipient of the 2015 Dick Shea Memorial Prize in Poetry judged by Tanya Larkin. His forthcoming book, Look Out Animal (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), is due out in June. More at www.noahburton.com. (Photo by Tristan Labrie)