God Is In by John Tustin

God is in
the exhalation
of her breath
as she stands
shivering
on the elevated train platform,
Sunday morning,
eight A.M.,
2011.

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SUBMISSIONS TO THE STARFISH BROOMHANDLE by John Tustin

Please feel free to submit to The Starfish Broomhandle.
Be sure to read a few issues and then try to recreate what you’ve read.

Submissions are open from September 1st to September 3rd.  Any submission received before or after this date will be pointed at and mocked by our staff before we shred it and use the shredding to line the floor of one of the pens in our alpaca farm.

We are looking for the very best poetry, whatever it may be. We’re wild and edgy and provocative.
But please, nothing erotic, negative, positive, creative, confessional, egocentric, romantic, bromantic, homophobic, xenophobic, zoophiliac, chauvinistic, or racist.

If you hate heterosexual white men, that’s okay (please indicate in cover letter).

Poems must be left-centered on chamomile-scented rice paper.
Only number the odd pages, put an octopus-shaped cocktail sauce stain in the upper right corner of every third page
and do the hokey-pokey for thirty nine seconds in front of the mailbox (only mail your submission from streets with names, not numbers) before you drop it in.

No submissions from New York, New Jersey, Ohio, or New South Wales, Australia.

Neatness counts.

Give us a list of publication credits, any awards, whether you were in the fifth grade hall patrol, where you received your MFA, where you teach creative writing, who your pen pals are, what hand you use to wipe, and especially what magazine or online journal you currently publish or edit.

Please write like Lorca, Yeats, Dylan Thomas or the editor.

If your submission resembles the work of Sandburg, Poe, Whitman, or William Carlos Williams, it will be returned without comment.

If you write like Plath, Sexton, or Ginsberg, your manuscript will be folded into origami and sent floating down a public toilet.

If you even mention Charles Bukowski we will curl up in the fetal position and wait for the police.

And for some reason it will help if your name is Lyn Lifshin.

Lastly, good luck placing your manuscript elsewhere, er, I mean just good luck!

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