Category Archives: Poetry

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Summer Poetry Contest: $500 Prize

Poetry, ,

The Julia Peterkin Award for POETRY:

South 85 Journal seeks submissions of previously unpublished poems of 50 lines or fewer for for the annual Julia Peterkin Literary Award for Poetry from June 1 to August 15 each year. The winning selection will receive $500 and publication in the Fall / Winter issue of South 85 Journal. Contest finalists will also be named and their work published alongside the winning selection.  Submissions are read blind by an outside judge.

This year’s judge is Ashley M. Jones.

Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She is the author of three poetry collections: REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press, 2021); dark // thing (Pleiades Press, 2019), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry; and Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press, 2017), winner of the silver medal in poetry in the Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, and The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among others.

  • Submit up to three unpublished poems of 50 lines or fewer. 
  • All submissions will be read blind. Please do not include personal information on your manuscript or file. Submissions that include identifying information will not be considered.
  • The winning poem will be awarded a cash prize of $500.
  • Four semi-finalists will also be named and published in South 85 Journal.
  • Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please withdraw your entry if your poem is accepted elsewhere. Partial withdrawals are allowed.
  • Multiple contest submissions will be considered as long as a separate submission fee is paid for each contest entry.
  • Work may be submitted in both Flash Fiction and Poetry categories as long as the submission fee is paid for each contest entry.
  • All winners must be over 18 years old and reside in the U.S. in order to claim cash prize.
  • Please use 12 point, standard font. We suggest Times New Roman.
  • We consider only previously unpublished work.
  • Current and former South 85 Journal staff members are not eligible for participation.
  • Current Converse College students and Converse MFA alum are not eligible for participation.
  • Results will be announced in October.
South 85 Journal does not publish work which has been previously published either in print or online. We acquire exclusive first-time Internet rights only. All other rights revert to the author at publication. Works are also archived online. We ask that whenever an author reprints the work that first appeared on our pages, South 85 Journal be given acknowledgment for the specific work(s) involved. Only the main contest winner will receive a prize.

Submit Here

Literary Contest Now Open: $500 Prize

Fiction, Flash Fiction Contest, Poetry, Poetry Contest, , ,

Submissions are now open for the Julia Peterkin Literary Awards in Flash Fiction and Poetry.

Established in 1998 by the Creative Writing program at Converse College, the Julia Peterkin Award is a national contest honoring both emerging and established  writers. The award is named for Converse graduate Julia Mood Peterkin, whose 1929 novel,  Scarlet Sister Mary, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in literature.

South 85 Journal seeks submissions of unpublished flash fiction of 850 words or fewer and previously unpublished poems of 50 lines or fewer.  We are especially interested in stories and poems that demonstrate a strong voice and/or a sense of place, but consider all quality writing.

The winning selection in each category will be awarded $500 and publication in the December issue of South 85 Journal. Contest finalists will also be selected and published alongside the winning selection.  Submissions are read blind by an outside judge.

Judges for this year’s contest are Cary Holladay for flash fiction and Ashley M. Jones for poetry.

Cary Holladay has published six short story collections, including Horse People, The Quick-Change Artist, and most recently, Brides in the Sky, as well as two novels and over 100 short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Arkansas Review, Five Points, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Tin House. Her awards include an O. Henry Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Memphis. She lives in Virginia.

Submit Flash Fiction Here

Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She is the author of three poetry collections: REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press, 2021); dark // thing (Pleiades Press, 2019), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry; and Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press, 2017), winner of the silver medal in poetry in the Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, and The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among others.

Submit Poetry Here

SUBMISSIONS CLOSE AUGUST 15, 2022

[Lately when sorrows come]

Blog, Poetry, , , , ,

by Susan Laughter Meyers

                                                —with a line from Sappho

Spring 2012

Lately when sorrows come—fast, without warning—
whipping their wings down the sky,
I know to let them.
Not inviting them, but allowing each
with a deep breath as if inhaling a wish I can’t undo.

Some days the sky is so full of sorrows
they could be mistaken for shadows of unnamed
gods flapping the air with their loose black sleeves:
the god of head-on collisions,
the god of amputated limbs,
the god of I’ll-dress-you-in-mourning.

Is the buzz in the August trees,
that pulsing husk of repetition, an omen?
I hear it build to a final shaking. I hear it build
louder and louder, then nothing.
Like a long, picaresque novel that’s suddenly over.
Like the last inning of kickball until the rain.

What falls from the sky is not always rain
or any kind of weather. Call it precipitous.
I’m fooling myself, of course. Wearing sorrow
is nothing like skin shedding water.
It’s more like the weight of a cloak of crows.

And yet the sun still shines on the honey locust
arching its fringe over grass. Lit, too,
the pasture and its barbwire strung from post
to leaning post. See how the stump by the road
is rotting and how the small yellow leaves, twirling,
catch light on their way to the ground.

Susan Laughter Meyers, of Givhans, SC, is the author of Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press), winner of the inaugural SC Poetry Book Prize, the SIBA Book Award for Poetry, and the Brockman-Campbell Book Award. Her poetry has also appeared in The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other journals, as well as Poetry Daily, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column. Her blog is at http://susanmeyers.blogspot.com.

Shorty’s Cellarette

Poetry,

by Robert Gibb

Kutztown, 1969

Winter 2017

When we left we ascended into the light,
sun- or street-, depending. Outside steps
like stairs of the ladder, its heavenly
two-way traffic. My first semester back
from the Air Force. At 15-cents a draft,
I could spend the night for what felt like
pennies on the dollar, all on the G.I. Bill.
A horseshoe-shaped bar. The low ceiling
of tobacco smoke that spread its cirrus
above us—locals mostly, including Evie
and Althea, townie sirens bee-hived
and bluejeaned since their 1950s teens.
The neon script of beer signs lit the walls
beside Norm the bartender’s warning,
“ONLY L.C.B. CARDS EXCEPTED,”
which elicited Shorty’s sorrowful tsk.
We slathered slices of ring-bologna
with umber mustard, ate red-beet eggs
whose purples bled into golden yolks.
We were treated to a non-stop jukebox
among whose offerings were the same
two songs—Hendrix wah-wahing his way
through “All Along the Watchtower”
and Marvin Gaye’s bewildered plaints
in “I Heard it Through the Grapevine.”
Just two of the deaths blocking the way
back to then. A third: the bar-wooed lover
I saw off and on again for years
(her last house surrounded by cornfields,
whose hair was the color of their silk).
A letter sent to me in care of the Cellarette
actually got there, addressed by a friend
from Texas, who had misplaced my own.
Kuttstown his misspelling. First Street,
which didn’t exist. The place a cynosure
all that winter into spring. I even got
a big hug from Shorty himself one day:
“I love you, you goddamned hippie,”
which I wasn’t really, though I let it pass,
heavened at the foot of the ladder.

Robert Gibb

Robert Gibb’s books include After, which won the 2016 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and Among Ruins, which won Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize in Poetry for 2017. Other awards include a National Poetry Series title (The Origins of Evening), two NEA Fellowships, a Best American Poetry and a Pushcart Prize.

Humakind Needs Larger Birds

Poetry, , ,

by Justin Jannise

Winter 2022

Humankind needs larger birds:
red-tailed hawks scaled up
to pterodactyl proportions;
twelve-story great white egrets,
spear-sharp bills puncturing
our roofs like giant stilettoes;
a helicopter hummingbird or two
always hovering, thirsty for us
to make just one wrong move.
We need more natural predators
to humble us into greater regret,
more meaningful action. We share
too little of the terrestrial burden
that camels, mules, and antelope
bear. Let the crow outgrow
our bomber planes. Let the great
horned owl outsmart us.
And let them be, as we are,
locked doors unto themselves,
their hearts grand ballrooms
of sinew and mystery, their brains
locomotive engines of synapse
and being their own worst enemy.

—

Justin Jannise is the author of How to Be Better by Being Worse, which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd., in April 2021. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Copper Nickel, Yale Review, and New Ohio Review. Recently a recipient of the Imprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry and the Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast, Justin lives in Houston, where he is pursuing his Ph.D.

Delta Summers

Poetry, , ,

by Cody Smith

Summer 2016

So much of those summers scraped against cypress groves as we
paddled the pirogue and prayed against storms. The mud-bogged
Catahoula Lake bank would swallow James Larry’s pickup like
an egg in a snake’s throat. Days ended the same: heat showers,
catfish pliers and fillet knife in my hand, my father in his work
shop fumbling the knobs of an acetylene tank, him trying to talk
to me through the blue-pointed whirl of blowtorch, hunkering
down to his work, hood pulled over his face, his flame gutting
metal, labor and whatever wisdom I didn’t hear sifted through
the chokecherry, lifted crows from their perch in the red oak,
folded wasps and dirt daubers back into their nests while
momma and grandpa cooked yesterday’s catch in the fry shed
out back, the sizzle of cornmeal hitting grease, wet air battered
by fish musk, fried okra, the wild jasmine vine that ran the front
porch posts, and the lit citronella candles calling the dusk home.

Cody SmithCody Smith is a Louisianian studying poetry in the Northwest where he’s an MFA candidate at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers. He spends most days lamenting creole food, sea level, and humidity. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, Permafrost, Glass Mountain, Cactus Heart, Belle Reve, among others. He is the editor-in-chief at The Swamp Literary Magazine.

It’s Not Just the Cat

Poetry,

by Jessica Barksdale

Fall 2013

You find yourself lost in a city block, the same streets
where you ate hamburgers with your teenaged boys,
the greasy taste still on your tongue,
their boy teases, their young laughter in your ear.
And then you are idling at a stoplight in another city, in another block,
and you are pushing a second-hand stroller
up toward the grocery store to buy the food
you can barely afford.
Then you are speeding
in your 1972 Volkswagen squareback, the window open,
you laughing against the rush of air,
your friend speeding alongside
you in her Datsun, both on your way to the college
you will later flunk out of but now teach at,
the same road you drive on now,
window closed.
Here you are again, an unhappy,
married woman nearing middle age,
staring up at the Eiffel tower, not wondering how it was constructed,
but how you will leave your marriage.
The circles push you out and away,
pull you back,
you on a bench on the first platform,
Paris spread out like a picnic blanket,
a new husband beside you.

—
Jessica Barksdale is the author of twelve novels, including Her Daughter’s Eyes and The Instant When Everything Is Perfect. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Mason’s Road, The Coachella Review, So to Speak, and Salt Hill Journal. She is a professor of English at Diablo Valley College and teaches online novel writing for UCLA Extension.

Remnants

Poetry, , ,

by Holly Day

Summer 2019

The snail shell lies on its side on the ground
empty save for a few dried curls of flesh, the weight
of something solid somewhere deep inside.

I place it in the middle of my palm, feel that sad, solid weight
what’s left of a snail tricked out of the shadows
by afternoon thunderstorms and cool, summer nights.

Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Plainsongs, The Long Islander, and The Nashwaak Review. Her newest poetry collections are A Perfect Day for Semaphore (Finishing Line Press), In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing), I’m in a Place Where Reason Went Missing (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.), and The Yellow Dot of a Daisy (Alien Buddha Press).

Equinox

Poetry,

by Jim Minick

Spring 2012

Again, I miss it,
the calendar sliding by,
yesterday a million years old,
today too late

so that equinox becomes
equidrops-equiknocks-equipox,
the equation   un   balanced,
equal sign tilted askew.

Meanwhile, the sun and stars
scroll across the sky in a language
we have forgotten, a dialect
embedded in our bodies.

—

Jim Minick is the author of The Blueberry Years, a memoir about one of the mid-Atlantic’s first pick-your-own, certified-organic blueberry farms, and winner of the Best Nonfiction Book of the Year from Southern Independent Booksellers Association. Minick is also the author of two books of poetry, Her Secret Song and Burning Heaven, a collection of essays, Finding a Clear Path, and editor of All There Is to Keep by Rita Riddle. Minick has won grants, awards, and honors from many organizations including the Southern Environmental Law Center, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Virginia Commission for the Arts, and Radford University, where he teaches writing and literature. His work has appeared in many publications including Shenandoah, Orion, San Francisco Chronicle, Encyclopedia of Appalachia, Conversations with Wendell Berry, The Sun, and Wind. Recently, his poem “I Dream a Bean” was picked by Claudia Emerson for permanent display at the new Tysons Corner/Metrorail Station. He lives in the mountains of Virginia with his wife and three dogs.

The Smell of Heights

Poetry, ,

by Katarina Boudreaux

His eyes closed,
feet on automatic,
he lifted the child
and held him,
humming softly
a tune he heard
once in Rio
when he had
watched the sun
rise religiously
before the belly
came, the circles,
and now the ten
of fingers and toes
to trap him sweetly,
bitterly, late nights.

Katarina BoudreauxKatarina Boudreaux is a New Orleans based author, musician, dancer, and teacher. Her first novel, Platform Dwellers, is available from Owl Hollow Press. Alexithymia is available from Finishing Line Press and Anatomy Lessons from Flutter Press.