Literary Starts

So, tonight was the launch party for our university's fifth literary journal, in which I have a couple of poems and a short story published. This isn't the first time I've been published in the school's journal, and actually I was the prose editor for the first one. It was a eclectic gathering of collegiate literary types, both students and faculty, with an opportunity for me to read, again, for an audience. More and more now I'm trying to take advantage of those opportunities to speak in front of people with the hopes of working through the fear. It's not a celebrated journal; my school is just a small, state university south of Atlanta. But besides it, my work has not been published anywhere else. So I just wonder, is this how the literary greats get their start, on small, obscure college campuses? Let's hope so.

One of the poems published was the one I began this blog with:

Summer, 2006

Twirling, whirling,
A rotund, spiral of rainbows
Culminating in a fuzzy, memorial blur of
Burning ashes dangling from waxy,
Bubble lips, stained with Crayola red lipstick,
Back porch bar-b-ques, chicken and ribs
Piled high on Mama’s good platters,
And, Uncle Poindexters greasy fingertips beneath
Her dress pinching her chubby butt.

She used to be a fat lady in a circus,
With all her deformities readily on display
In the bemused, clash of colors that Miss Millie patched
Together from the drapery of the old Majestic Theatre
In Jasper County, and the discarded
Sparkling, scraps of the skinny girl on the trapeze.
Sewn in too was the memory of Hillard’s
Bucked teeth, mocking her interest in him,
And, panties with the days of the week
Not in her size.

~sbnl