Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Hello and Welcome!

If you're one of the five people I imagine will visit this site at least once, I'm glad you're here!  A couple of notes:

  • Please bear with me re: any formatting issues.  It's been at least four years since I've messed around with Blogger.  I imagine that my theme and fonts will be less lame in the future.  I just want to get things up and running asap or this will be one of those passing fancies I'm too busy for mid-February.  If you see any obvious problems, let me know!
  • I imagine that I will update at least once a week, probably more to start.
  • Most of these poems were written during weekly meetings of the Schaumburg Poetry Group (hi, guys!) in response to prompts, so much of the content is purely fictional and not about YOU or HIM, per se.
  • I don't care about meter and have never cared about it, even when it was my business as an English major to care about it.
  • I have been writing creatively for about as long as I can write, yet SOMEHOW continue to languish in complete obscurity.  I am proud to say that my work has been rejected by many of the best publications in America, and I look forward to collecting new rejections from poetry magazines and websites in the future. 
  • If you would like me to link to your creative endeavor, leave me a comment!
  • Questions?  Concerns?  I can do almost nothing about the current American political situation.  I will delete spam comments with joyful abandon.  I will obsessively check for comments.  I am already filled with self-doubt.

First, Some Good News!

Hi everyone,

I just thought I'd take a moment to toot my own horn, as it were.

My poem "Home" was selected to be read at the Jersey City Writers' "Genre Night," on April 21, 2018, which kicked off the Jersey City Art Council's Poetry Festival Week. 

My poem "What Gets Left Behind" has been published in the Summer 2020 issue of Kaleidotrope.

My poem "The Last Girl" has been published in Issue 4 of Arsenika.

You can now read my poem "Lethargy" on The Pangolin Review.

Also, my poem "Maida Vale" has been accepted by The Wells Street Journal for their April 2019 issue.

One verse of a haiku series, "The T-12 Chronicles" will be published in Issue 74 of Leading Edge Magazine as an "Honorable Mention" in their "Sci-Faiku" (sci-fi haiku) contest.

My micropoems "Tethered" and "Horsehead Nebula" have been published in Issue 2 of Black Bough Poetry. (page 37!)

My poems "Diagnosis" and "The First of the Plagues" have been published in Issue 4.2 of Mineral Lit Mag.

My poem "Stasis" was recently published at Pendemic. And you should submit your pandemic-related work there too!

"The Xi Movement" has been published at Rejection Letters.

You can find "Zoom" at ang(st)'s Distanced 2.0 project.

"Cotton Candy, 1983" has been posted in the inaugural issue of Perhappened Mag. I'm thrilled to announce that this poem has been nominated by Perhappened for Sundress Publications' "Best of the Net" Award for Poetry!

"bean sí" will be published in Twist in Time Mag.

"External Beam" has been published in the "Heatwave" issue of Perhappened Mag

My poem "Uninhabited" will be included as part of the Tales from the Trail YouTube project.

My micropoem "Momento Mori" has been published in Versification

My poem "A Bit of a Meltdown" recently found a home with Crow and Cross Keys, which was posted on my birthday, November 21, 2020.

My poems "First, the Rules" and "Mastectomy" have been published in Sledgehammer Lit.


My pieces "Sophomore Year" and "Tarot Reading" will appear in the pop-up "coming of age" issue of The Journal of Erato.

I'll be sure to post links to my work as they get published!

Also, if you'd like to follow me on Twitter, here I am.  I am not, in real life, a dog.  I should probably have some kind of professional author Twitter profile, but that's more work than I want to put into that site right now.

--Karen

Buy me a Ko-Fi?

Hi everyone,

I drink a LOT of tea at the Corner Bakery every week to produce these poems that you (hopefully) enjoy!  If you are interested in sponsoring my tea-drinking/poetry production, please visit my Ko-Fi site at https://ko-fi.com/karensteiger.  Please don't feel obligated to do so, even if you know me in real life.  :)

Karen

Independence Day

When we selected instruments 
to play for school band,
I unwisely selected the drums.
A fourth-grade feminist breakthrough, sure,
but everything was too heavy for me,
the smallest girl in my grade.
The band teacher was too Whiplash-draconian,
and I had no concept of commitment 
to any kind of extracurricular activity.
For the next three years,
the Fourth of July was a torment,
sweat pouring in rivulets down my back
underneath my uniform shirt
as I struggled to carry the tenor drum 
strapped to my shoulders
down the parade route,
Broad Street in Griffith, Indiana,
lined with proud parents 
and children hunting candy handouts.
We inched down the street,
behind floats and in front of fire engines,
the St. Mary/Our Lady of Grace School Band,
the drummers never getting a break
but playing cadences between songs,
which I can still tap out to this day.
But once the parade ended, I was free!
Free from the oppressive sun and the noise,
free from my teacher’s scrutiny,
free from the harness that bruised my shoulders and hips.


Survivor Naani

Me, a one-breasted woman, 
walking Horus, 
a three-legged dog, 
each day such a gift. 

Crane Fly

Something that looked like a mutant mosquito
was climbing on our ceiling last night
with long, spindly legs and large wings strapped to its back.
You would think it had drunk some super-soldier serum
from a comic book and now had a ridiculous size and strength
for a reedy-looking insect.
“But it’s not going to suck our blood right?” I asked,
eyeing it with trepidation.
“Oh no, no,” my husband assured me,
“it’s not even a mosquito.”
It was a crane fly (he looked it up).
Harmless to humans, its only purpose in this life
is to be,
to reproduce and to be eaten by something else.
I briefly wondered how it had gotten into our living room,
concluded that it must have moved in as I was calling
out to our dog in the front yard,
scolding him for excavating the flower bed.
The crane fly is gone now,
perhaps a feast for the spider that resides in the corners of our ceiling,
perhaps weary of this life, it fell to the ground,
and was swept up with the dust and lint and dog hair 
of my furious cleaning,
or perhaps it made its escape 
and is quietly, invisibly saving the world
from an insect super-villain.

Fog

It was unnaturally still in the woods that day,
no fellow hikers crashing along the trail,
no birds chirping love songs and war cries,
no squirrels scurrying up the grey bark of a tree.
The cloud hung low among the trees and the vegetation,
masking the horizon
softening all the edges,
inviting me into the silver mist.
If I had heeded its call,
I would have been drawn deeper and deeper
to the blurred horizon.
I would have vanished along with the haze
when the sun peeked through the canopy of leaves,
warming the tender green plants rising to meet it.