Submission + Aliens
So blogs are super annoying. This blog gives me this “can you explain this gap in your resume??” type feel. It’s been weeks since I’ve updated but it hasn’t been for lack of craft, which is great. After poetry month I set a goal for myself of submitting 50 different places by August. The current count is 6/50 and Rejections = 1 Acceptance = 0.
I’ve been trying to carve out more reading time as well, I just finished in the city which I loved you by Li-Young Lee which was honestly very heavy at the start, the first third or half of the collection felt like carrying moving boxes up a flight of stairs in an old apartment building but the last half was very tender and honest. It was a book that took me effort to read and embrace and I felt better for it. I’m almost finished with Tsim Tsum by Sabrina Orah Mark which is easily living on my bookshelf forever. It’s a collection that in the first page I knew I was going to love and draw back to and inspires me with the patterns of the words and the redundant imagery like a flash bulb that you know is familiar but every time it pops keeps causing your eyes to blink and see everything new again with little spots floating around. These aren’t well thought out book reviews but my to read pile is growing so I need to put a dent in it.
Ultimately I’m here, I’m a writer, I’m writing, there’s poems coming out of me onto the (unpublished) page even if Brain Dumpster here has a lapse.
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I just have one other big thought floating around in my head right now. I attended the McMinnville UFO festival which is a weekend worthy of its own essay but one speaker brought up a point that is sticking with me. Perhaps, the powers that be do not provide us disclosure because should we, the public, recognize that there are aliens living among us or visiting our planet from other places in the universe we would drop our nationalist ties. We would no longer be, Americans or Chinese or Russians but we would perhaps see ourselves as a species, as humanity compared to the rest of the world. I really like that idea, well not the part about the powers that be instilling nationalism to divide and control the masses, but that we are a species, the human race, and what’s stopping us from viewing ourselves that way is only a prescribed perception. I guess be human is a pretty good way to continue going about my day.