A wise friend once told me, “A writer is one who writes.” No one needs a special qualification, degree, or resumé to be a writer. Certainly, one does not need publication to be a writer. Not every needs to seek publication in a journal or should: writing can be its own reward, and there are many wonderful ways to share work with others (including Prose). Personally, though, I sought publication of short stories and poems in literary journals and have met with a small amount of success, and in this post, I will offer what advice I can for similarly-minded individuals—with a couple of significant disclaimers.

Disclaimer #1 – I have absolutely no idea how to make money at this. I’ve gotten four short stories and three poems published in various small journals, for which I have received a grand total of $20. (UPDATE: A few more now, I am happy to say - my website link in my profile has my publication list if you're curious.) Writing is not a career or even a side gig for me. If you want to know how to make a living with writing, read Finder’s post for this challenge – she’s done it (https://theprose.com/post/454789/inform-persuade-entertain). From what I understand, there are far more paid writers of advertising copy/website text/technical manuals than there are creative writers, and if you want to pay your bills with writing, that’s the path to follow. I’m also given to understand that the majority of creative writers out there don’t actually make a living with it: most have other jobs (notably teaching, which is most of the reason people seek creative writing MFAs). I’m a high school teacher who writes, rather than the other way around.

Disclaimer #2 – The "beginner" in the title of this post is me. I am seriously small potatoes. Odds are, dear reader, that you have never heard of a single journal where I’ve been published. In other words, I lack any real qualification to be writing this post, but perhaps the scraps of knowledge I’ve gleaned can get someone else started. (Thanks to Finder for nudging me to write this.) If anyone reading knows something that I don’t, please, please share in the comments. I will be grateful for the advice.

Alrighty – steps, as best as I know them.

1. Improve your writing. I started submitting pieces to journals when I thought I was ready; the reality was, I had more learning to do. How vivid are your settings, how clean is your dialogue, how condensed are your sentences? Sentences in published pieces are certainly not short, but they almost never contain extra words: each letter in a piece serves a purpose. This is a post of submission advice and not writing advice, so I’ll stop there, but growth in writing is a process that never really stops, and if you tell yourself “I’m there!” you’re probably cutting your journey short.

2. Wait to submit – you want to revise your piece again. Finishing a piece brings a rush of pride, but that is the wrong moment to dash off a submission to a journal. This should go without saying, but when you’re seeking to be viewed as a professional, “minor grammatical error” is an oxymoron. Never send out anything that could have so much as a single misplaced apostrophe. (Most common error on Prose, btw? it’s vs its.)

Good revision means more than proofreading. Revision requires time and perspective, and rushing your piece will only slow you down in the long run. Finding an editor—that is, someone whose skills you respect who is unafraid to slather red ink on your crap—is a godsend.

When I decided I was ready to submit to publications, I wrote a flash piece called “Inheritance” of which I was very proud: it was based on a story my father told me of my grandfather, but fictionalized in that the narrator-son felt confused about the tale’s meaning. It started at 750 words, and the ending was lackluster; an editor-friend helped me trim it to under 500 words, and a long-running dialogue with him helped move the ending closer to right, and I sent it off to some places. Several months and rejections later (a couple of them extremely helpful rejections – more on that later), I revisited, and I couldn’t believe I had overlooked its flaws. For one, the story was too sentimental. Here’s the original ending:

Tonight, a decade later, the brother I hadn’t seen for eight years dialed me with the one phone call the law gave him. I realized, when I clenched my teeth, what was passed to me, and what Grandpap fought in those flames.

I got my coat.

I kind of like that first line as a sentence, but as an ending to a story, it’s a forced a-ha moment: “And then the narrator discovered the meaning of brotherly love.” The Hallmark story has its place, but I was not submitting stories to Hallmark; I also did not want to write for Hallmark. My editor friend had tried to tell me of that risk – and he had indeed gotten me to improve the ending – but I was too close to the subject matter to see its sentimentalism until I had distance. The intervening months and writing growth revealed a second fatal flaw: it was still far too long. I edited “Inheritance” down to 300 words, less than half the original length.

3. Find where to submit your piece. There’s really two phases here: understanding where one discovers journals, and determining whether a particular journal might be receptive to your work.

Lists of journals: As far as the where, there’s a big ol’ ranked list here: http://www.erikakrousewriter.com/erika-krouses-ocd-ranking-of-483-literary-magazines-for-short-fictionThat list is geared toward short fiction, but many journals would also take poetry or creative non-fiction (CNF).

Here’s a place I check regularly where some journals advertise their calls for submissions: https://www.newpages.com/classifieds/calls-for-submissions

Most journals will expect you to submit using Submittable (www.submittable.com) – signing up for an account is free, and if you click on the “Discover” tab, you can see submission calls listed by end date.

Speaking of Submittable, you’ll see that most publications on it require a small fee ($3-4); that’s normal. I won’t say I’ve never paid a larger fee, but generally speaking, I don’t think it makes sense to pay more than the nominal $3-4, and regardless, they add up. (Note that earlier I said I had “received” $20, and not that I had “made” $20, because the latter would be a lie; I am very much in the red thanks to fees.) If you’re looking to avoid submission fees, it will restrict your submission possibilities, but it can be done: a lot of journals offer free reading periods, and some never charge (particularly those that operate through email alone and thus don’t have to pay a submission management platform). I would also urge you never to fall prey to “publishers” who send enthusiastic acceptance notices offering to sell you a copy of their “anthology” for the low low price of $40+. Legit print publications usually offer contributor copies even if there’s no other payment.

Picking journals: Sending your work blindly will likely waste your time: you need to do some scouting. Every single journal will advise you to read their past issues; as a practical matter, you probably don’t have time to read that much. I always look for the “About Us” or “Mission” tab on a homepage for starters. For my own part, I never send work to publications seeking “experimental” or “cutting edge” pieces, as what I write does not qualify; other publications specifically seek work from women, or teenagers, or people of color, or LGBTQ+ individuals, of which I am none. Some journals are genre-specific.

I generally do read a piece or so from the journal before submitting, attempting to judge whether my general style and approach are in keeping or at odds with what they publish.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with submitting a piece to multiple journals at the same time, and most journals explicitly state that they “accept simultaneous submissions.” (A handful don’t, and you should respect that.)

Another word of warning: the overwhelming majority of literary journals state that they want “unpublished work,” and pieces posted on social media or elsewhere on the web almost always count as published. A piece you have posted to Prose is therefore ineligible for most journals.

4. Format your piece. Follow the directions the publication gives. Whatever information they want, or don’t want, or font or spacing or lack of italics or pasted in the body of an email or RTF format or cover page or anything, just do it. You’re asking the editors to do you a solid by reading your work: respect their wishes. Almost every journal wants something slightly different in the formatting, which means the process of submitting will take far longer than you expect it will, but give them what they want.

In the absence of specific formatting guidelines, double-space prose using size 12 Times New Roman; include a header on every page but the first with name, title, page. Here’s the one I used: (Love – “Inheritance” – 2). For better and more precise guidance, click on “Standard Format” here: http://www.erikakrousewriter.com/other-author-tools-and-resources Poetry is often requested to be single-spaced. Many journals permit submission of 3-5 poems at a time. Again, your submission format should be whatever the hell the journal specifies, but here’s a general example of a submission of multiple poems: https://www.shunn.net/format/poetry/

5. Write your cover letter. Cover letters for literary journals should not be long or fancy. As always, follow all directions. Be polite and direct: they usually need your name, the genre of your submission, the length, and a third-person bio. If the piece is a simultaneous submission, tell them and assure them you’ll notify them of acceptance elsewhere. On the rare occasion when I’ve submitted something previously posted on Prose because the journal did not rule such pieces out, I’ve identified the writing as having “previously appeared on my personal page at Prose, a site for aspiring authors to share their work with one another.”

If you know a specific editor or two who will be reading your work, address the letter to them rather than the general “Dear Editors.” When I submitted “Inheritance” to The Blue Mountain Review, it fell under their microfiction category by word count. I found the name of the microfiction editor, then googled him to ensure I could have his proper title or pronoun – it turned out that he taught at a university. Here’s the full text of my cover letter, which I pasted into the proper field in Submittable:

Dear Professor _____:

Thank you for taking the time to read my microfiction “Inheritance,” which is 300 words long. A childhood memory my father described inspired the story. It is a simultaneous submission; I will notify you immediately if the story is accepted elsewhere.

Here is my bio:

Ryan F. Love teaches high school English in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, where he earned a degree from Alfred University. He lives with his wife in a Victorian with pairs of daughters, beagles, and guinea pigs. His work has been published in Blue Lake Review, The Copperfield Review, Sleet Magazine, and Blueline.

Thank you very much. I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Ryan F. Love

6. Bring on the rejections – and read them. If you’re seeking publication, you will receive rejections. You will receive so, so many rejections. It’s normal. Rejections mean you're trying. I read a blog post by a writer whose stuff has appeared in journals I only dream about, and she said her acceptance rate was about five percent. I make a ritual of it: before I open any email from a journal, I say the word “rejection.” A rejection could mean that your piece wasn’t really ready, but it could also mean that they published something else similar recently, or that it didn’t quite suit the journal’s style, or it just couldn’t quite fit in the issue. Exact words from a rejection email I received: “Though I won't be taking this piece, it is lovely.” I deeply appreciated the encouragement.

There’s no need to keep feverishly refresh your email or Submittable page to see if you’ve heard anything yet. The Submission Grinder (https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/) gives quality estimates of response times (more accurate than the journals give themselves, in my experience). If you see a light blue “In Progress” flag in Submittable, it means precisely diddly squat: you still might not hear anything for six months. You might also get a rejection (or acceptance!) without the flag ever having moved from “Received” to the pointless “In Progress.”

Keep track of your submissions and rejections: Submittable will do this for you on a basic level, but you should note when you get some kind of tiered rejection that’s more encouraging. If you’re told to send more work, you should try to do so and mention the previous interaction in your cover letter. (If you’re not sure whether you got a standard rejection or a higher tier, check out the journal’s samples on the Rejection Wiki - https://www.rejectionwiki.com/).

A rejection with personal note from an editor is a high compliment. It can also be extremely helpful. An editor rejecting one story of mine wrote, “We love the humor and the sense of place, but flash fiction has to start quickly. This one just didn’t grab us.” I didn’t yet realize how much it meant to get a personal note, and that one felt discouraging when I read it; it was actually exactly what I needed to hear. I was taking too long to get my flash fiction started. The criticism rang around in my head a few months before I processed it, and then that advice prompted me to take an axe to the beginning of “Inheritance.” The finished result was a vast improvement: it still got rejected twice, but that 300-word version is the one that got published. Finished version here, if you want to read it: https://issuu.com/collectivemedia/docs/bluemountainreviewjune2021/286

7. Keep writing. This is the part where I say things about improvement, practice makes progress, etc., but writing is inherently valuable in and of itself, whether a journal accepts it or not. Don’t let the quest for publication, or the inevitable rejections, stop you.

I first submitted to a journal way back in 2014. The essay was the best thing I had written up to that point. I made a lot of mistakes with the piece itself and with my submission process, but the dumbest mistake of all is easy to identify now: when that essay got four rejections, I stopped writing essays, stories or poems for five years.

Don’t do that.

When I’m working away at a draft of something that I’ve already revised three times, I quite frequently pull up a Prose challenge and post. There’s joy in writing; there’s joy in sharing writing; there’s joy in a writing community. If you choose to pursue publication in a literary journal, I wish you all the best, but publication is not purpose. You have reasons why you write; remember them, always, and keep at it.

I walk into the bathroom and stare into the mirror. I look at my stomach, my face, my chin, my arms, my hips, and my lips. I wonder how anyone could love me, this thing i’m looking at in the mirror. This flawed barely human thing that I'm looking at. I don’t understand how someone could love me. I'm overweight, I'm dumb, I cry at everything, I either eat too much or don’t eat enough. I’m practically a child, a burden on anyone who tries to love me. I give up easily, I never try hard enough, and I constantly fail. When i look in the mirror all i see is the bad, but when my friends look at me, when my family looks at me, they see a strong, funny, intelligent, brave-hearted, and loving woman who’s struggling with her life, they see me and they believe in me, and most important of all they love me. They see the pieces of me falling and they pick them up one by one and sew me back together. They love me more than I believe I deserve.

I'll probably take this down in a few weeks, but this challenge seemed like a good time to share an excerpt of the novel I finished. The Ghosts on the Glass follows the career of engraver-turned-photographer William Mumler from 1862 to 1875. This page comes at the end of chapter one.

I hope, someday, that my novel finds its publishing home so I can share it with you all.

“You may use the camera, if you wish,” Hannah said, “and lock up when you have finished.”

“Thank you… I think I shall,” William said.

“I will see you in the morning, Mr. Mumler.”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Stuart.”

She left to heal the supplicant woman. He stood for some minutes before passing to the room with the window facing the sky.

The sun had passed the prime position, but he knew sufficient light remained. He had learned by watching these six months. The gallery had chemicals to organize, glass plates to clean, prints to mount and roll: much more than enough for a woman running her own business, let alone one who was also called to employ her strange gift. He had seen a man faint who had felt her life-giving magnetism. He had doubted, at first. But what is electricity? A force that passes silently and invisibly over the wire and performs its work. Hannah places her hands on a patient’s body, the current courses through the tissue, and another sufferer heals. It is scientific; it is wonderful.

The machine waited for the command to capture light. A box with a lens, a black cloth, a piece of ground glass for viewing. Hannah had shown him its workings, revealed how the same elements he handled in his shop could engrave the world itself on glass, smoothly, without the touch of any blade.

He ducked beneath the cloth to make the focus right. In the dimmed light, he could see on the ground glass viewer what the camera could see. The lens cast the image upside-down, floating. The colors appeared so rich they belonged in a dream: a tied cord held a blue curtain behind a table and a handsome chair, deep coffee brown with woodworked curves decorating its top rail. The camera circumscribed and transfigured all.

He had grown ineluctably from helper to hobbyist. For all his skill with a graver, this was something else. He remembered the first daguerreotype he’d seen, as a boy, at the Historical Society on Tremont Street. His father had taken him. It had shown the portico of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, each column stark in silver. He had asked how a man could make such a thing.

Clean the glass plate with solution of rottenstone, wipe away the calcium carbonate, coat with collodion, bathe in silver nitrate. Carry the plate in the shield, which sits in the opened camera. Pull the dark slide out from the shield, remove the cap from the lens and expose the glass to the light.

He would stand. The photograph would illustrate a man at work in vest and sleeves. William’s hand would rest firm on the chair, his beard in strong relief against the white wall. He would meet the lens’s gaze, and he would hold the cloth in one hand to show what he had done.

Mumler yanked the black cloth from the camera.

In the Silence, there was only Cowardice. My own. Bared like a tribal death mask. It is to be sure not the romantic soul that one would hope to uncover behind the clawed vitalistic marks-- but instead the calloused workaholic who casually admits that the Heart has many loves within the Universe, and just one Master: the Work, Itself. Indeed it seems almost criminal. And that is where my tongue has faltered. Upon this desktop alter, I want to say how much I admire the private initiative... The self-sacrifice of the performance Artist, the fight of the Entrepreneurial Spirit! If this speaks to you-- please be humble, and gentle with those unalike. Yes, you are among the proud few. Many would stand as firm if they could, and then won't, for arbitrary reasons. I know because that is me. Ninety-nine percent in, and unwilling to commit to taking that self-lit path to wherever it leads. It is a fundamental lack of Faith (in self, in the greater Good, and in the Almighty). It is my Silent shameful grief, the grasping at the Emptiness, that is Me. True, in this wilderness where I am adrift I am seeking a bond of the like minded, and better yet of those who are striving to advance beyond this dissonance. And I'd like to believe that there is a friendly soul or two here who understands me beyond the confines of the sketchy script. That's it. I have said too much out of hand. I return to blank inward Silence, with its soul splicing Loudness.

Silence challenge @Midnightstars

*I will need to be brief, like a piece abridged. Apologies in advance!

It seems to me that works which are "sanitized," are tampered with not to be made "clean," but to be made "quick," eliminating the "messy" bits, which would require/ and build-up our mental muscle. Such exercise is not much desired, because a strong audience has greater demands and asks for more (more nuance, more originality). These are attributes which poorly suit mass-production for mass-consumption, and the prescribed uniformity that follows.

Absence doesn't teach... The gaps remaining create anxiety, not a bridge to understanding. Fat, ugly, dumb do not disappear. Instead, each concept is apt to fester as a sore on the self-esteem, becoming doubly hurtful without proper wording to define "it." We are better advised to name it, identify it, and ask why its distinction is of such importance to us.

On a personal note, I have been teaching at Head Start since 2019... things have been rough as teacher/ psychologist to traumatized tots with families suffering from poverty, homelessness, and all forms of abuse. These children enter preschool minimally verbal, their first language being physical aggression (hitting, biting). Instinctively, they are protecting their little selves from the “unknown.” As they gain words, they very soon banter "stupid," "ugly," and assorted profanity, articulating an underlying fear-of-worthlessness as reflected by their closest adults. Would removing these words from books change children's vocabulary??? No, their daily life has more influence than any language trapped in books—books incidentally which they might never read at all.

The bruises and behavior reports got so bad in our classroom that we side stepped prescribed curriculum (God bless!) and read aloud Sleeping Ugly, a spin on Sleeping Beauty featuring beautiful Princess Miserella (who is selfish and cold on the inside) and her counterpart Plain Jane, who treats everyone the same— in fairness most becoming. The kids gasped at every pointed use of Stupid! and Ugly! that spilled ungraciously from Princess Miserella's mouth, asking to see the pictures again, and again, in fascination. And then, in what is called Choice Time play, they would balk when a peer "forgot" the lesson, saying "Him/ Her actin' like Miserella!" It is a slow go, but it's a start. (*We're working on the grammar too, sigh, but is not the priority*)

Books can only have value if there is some depth of discussion around them. The authors, and their content, are resultants of an upbringing, too, worthy of respect and evaluation in context. We love Roald Dahl at home. The BFG is one of Rémy Niko's favorites, especially when read with theatrical gusto by his Papa... and Mama makes sure to take an opportune moment to question the whys and examine the "we don'ts." Like we don't call people names; and violence of any form is not okay.

Even ripping out words from a page.

Contrast teaches us who we are. We most easily recognize our gifts—or our shortcomings—as we recognize how we stand apart from others.

I learned about my gift in a longstanding series of early morning, Mountain Dew-fueled arguments.

Derek and I loved to debate, about anything. We were bright high school kids, he two years older than me, and after we met, we each realized we had found a sparring partner. We’d argue about morality, politics, economics, whether or not that movie we just saw sucked. When we really got going, our friends would sit back and spectate; it was apparently something to see. We’d agree on the big things. If anyone else challenged one of us, Derek and I would meet on our common ground long enough to claim the field as ours, and then we’d retrench and relitigate the minutiae of our disagreement. But for all our accord and shared love of debate, our brains worked differently.

Derek has the quickest mind I’ve ever had the pleasure of observing. In comparison, I am a more deliberate thinker. I explained it to people this way—

Virtually all individuals, it seemed to me, could trace a path of thought from A to B, and a lot could then proceed from B to C. Some could then make the final step to D all alone, some more could see D with assistance, and others would never be able to reach that final conclusion. I was generally able to move along the steps efficiently, A to B to C to D. But Derek was special: he didn’t need all the steps. Show Derek point A, and with barely a moment’s thought, he would fully understand point D.

My comparatively slower mind did have one advantage over Derek’s, though. He could have difficulty explaining his conclusions. With a touch of think time, I could do more than move from A to B to C to D. I could explain all the steps to others. I could find the right words, comparisons, examples, parallels, or whatever else I needed to guide another along the path. I could help people learn.

Derek got a job with the Department of Defense. I got a job as a teacher.

The English teacher who secretly dreams of quitting his job to write bestsellers is a cliché. It is also not me. I love writing and I work at it, but my true gift is for teaching.

Have you ever had a cup of coffee you remember years later? Was there flavor, or was it just hot water? I think as a writer, I want to leave burn marks on readers’ tongues. I want them to see my name and think, oh, this cup will have some bite to it.

My inspiration comes from gut feelings. My best writing is usually accompanied by bourbon, never wine. Wine, especially red wine, makes me a special kind of emotional being. Unrecognizable. Someone once said on a writing website, your poetry isn’t profound. You’re just drunk. Not to me, just to the general writing population. I strive to be better than that, but sober, I’m rather stunted.

I take my feelings and put them in a mason jar, like fireflies. I access them and deem them worthy of a poem or not. Sometimes, believe it or not, I decide not to write about them. It’s a hard choice every time, to set them free. But as Hobbes said to Calvin, if we could keep rainbows in museums, we would. I try not to think of myself on that grande a scale. I let the fireflies go, watch them disappear into the dark.

Writing, for me, is inspired by people. I take conversations and weave them into poems. I am fascinated by language, the nuances and inflections. How to produce a good poem with these pieces can be like completing a 1000 word jigsaw puzzle, and honestly, sometimes I’m not patient enough to sit with my thoughts. But people need to be seen. I need to reflect on what people say, and sometimes that happens in a transparent glass.

Writing, basically, defines who I am. Who are you when the coffee gets cold, when the bourbon wears off? No one. Keep writing, keep going. Immortalize those feelings in your own personal mason jar.

People being people, and unable to leave anything alone, “they” have put a fountain in our pond.

It is a beautiful little pond that I have written about before. When I sit to write it is directly outside my window; 10 or so acres, spring fed, an overflow creek on the far side. The people who owned the land before it was “suburbanized” stocked the pond with perch, bass (some of which are as long as my forearm), and other fish that are too smart to ever get pulled out. One such of that sort are a dozen or so carp that Pooky-Bear bought and had me unnaturally introduce because some guy at work told her they would eat algae and help keep the pond clean. Well, the pond is no cleaner. The surface does manufacture a thin layer of algae in the hottest times of summer, but despite the fact that those carp have grown two feet long now, the pond still gathers about the same amount of algae every year. As a boy will acquire dirt in summer, I suppose algae is part of being a pond. I like the carp though. They really have gotten huge, and will occasionally surface, rolling in the sun, their fins raised like sharks. If you startle them they turn with such power that you would think someone had thrown in a cinder block. They will not bite a line, but I see them, and sometimes the predator in me is tempted to get a bow and arrow, but I do not. Pook is touchy about her animals. That might not play well.

For several years there were two Swedish Blues on the pond, domestic ducks, easily spotted amongst the mallards and gadwalls by their larger size. Now there is only one. Pook put them in, too (or should I say had me do it). Occasionally one would disappear and Pook would have to drive to what we refer to as “Duck Holler” to purchase another for company, but I finally convinced her to stop. The one seems happy enough swimming with the wood-ducks mallards, and not at all lonesome.

There is a Great Blue Heron who fishes constantly, even under the midnight moonlight, and who drives away other invasive blue herons and egrets. Their slow motion, airborne battles are amazing to watch as they drift over the pond in pursuit of one another like giant kites, and then there are smaller green herons who watch it all disinterestedly. There is a kingfisher who also watches from the surrounding branches, chit-chit-chitting at them as they swoosh by as though he were manning a machine gun. There is a red-shouldered hawk hunting frogs and snakes, and an osprey who dives after turtles, or perch, and there is a pair of owls who take over for them at night.

Deer come for the corn that Pooky puts out for her duck, along with skunks, possum, raccoons, and muskrats. Even the turtles, some twenty pounders, venture from the water for a nibble of corn. It all happened outside my window as I type, only now there is only a fountain.

The fountain is three days old, and isn’t really pretty. It is too small for the size of the pond, and is too near the south end. It has an angry roar that bellows below it’s cascading water, which I imagine frightens the fish. There have been no wild ducks since it was installed, and I have not seen the heron. The deer still come because they must, but even the young fishermen seem to have been at least temporarily discouraged by the new monstrosity. I have considered complaining, but assume mine would be the lone dissenting voice, as the others around the pond have probably never even noticed the osprey diving on a grey, gloomy morn, or heard a carp turn in the darkest of night. They have never stood on the porch at three in the morning and watched as the blue heron, shadowed by moonlight, pulls a fish from the inky shoreline and dooms it down an outstretched neck. No, they probably think the fountain pretty.

But I am not the type to stand idly by, so I have convinced my dog, General Sherman, to run for President of the neighborhood Home Owner’s Association. He is the only one who could win, as he is insanely popular, while I am notoriously stand-offish, and Pook too demanding.

Unfortunately The General has not shown much interest in the fountain one way or the other, as there is a pretty new doodle-dog across the pond who has caught his eye. It may seem shallow, but I think I will follow his lead. A fountain is a small thing in the grand scheme, and there are bigger worries, as I now see that the neighbors have bought kayaks for their young boys… ugh.

The cart barricade shunts us

suspects past the wary checkout lord.

No one sane buys salad at midnight,

so management routes us to chips, beer,

and night-checkout man, tall and fifty.

We of the early morn file through

his glare that roves our

pockets for bulges and

rolls a teacher-poet

into the hoi polloi so that

for a time I do belong here,

for a time I am not marked

by education and station in

this low wage GED town,

my politics temporarily

indistinguishable from the camo-clad

MAGA man who also heads for beer:

comrade of twilight hours,

brother of the empty fridge.

They shelve the Bud and Keystone

an aisle apart from oatmeal stouts

and wittes. I meditate on pairings

for spinach-artichoke dip.

Nothing shouts out privilege

so much as the desire to doff it,

like a handcrafted cap.

My compatriot carries Coors

toward the self-checkout machine

that declines his card; he curses,

night check-out man scowls.

I pay and pass unobserved.

The truth is, I lack

sufficient they to feel

a bona fide we.

The truth is, I moved

to a town that will never forget

I’m from elsewhere.

The truth is, my beer

tastes delicious, and I deserve

dislocation and scorn.

"Mom, what is...carra...geenan gum?"

"Oh, does that have carrageenan in it? Put it down. Grab that one instead."

"What about this?"

"Let me see the label. No, it has canola oil in it."

"Is that bad?"

"It's inflammatory."

"What does that mean?"

"It...creates inflammation. It's bad for your health and makes you fat."

"Ooh! Mom! I saw a commercial for this! Can we get it?!"

"What's in it? Oh, honey. This has three artificial dyes. Look, there's a naturally flavored version right next to it. It's non-GMO. Go ahead and put it in the cart. Now let's go ahead and get out of here. The family yoga class is at seven and we still need to pick your sister up from her conscious kids crafting class.

------

"Alright ma'am...your total is...$347.62."

"347...oh. Hm. Okay. Can I take this, this, this, and this off of my order? Thanks. Isaac, honey?"

"Yeah, mom?"

"Do you see these items here? Will you run back and get the store brand versions?"

"But I thought they make you sick."

"Not this weekend, they won't. Hurry up, I don't want to hold up the line."

"Yes ma'am."

"Oh, and Isaac-"

"Yeah?"

"Grab a box of Cheez-Its on your way back. Your father will be happy to see them in the house."