author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Just a short note today, because my day started late and went slowly and now I'm tired. But there is Actually Writing content, so yay for that.

Way back in April, I woot-wooted over having a poem newly accepted: "The Ascent of Inanna", originally a short-short then reimagined as a 22-line poem, was purchased by Dreams & Nightmares for publication in Issue 116, then-upcoming in September 2020. I am happy to report that my contributor's copy reached me safely despite this year's postal wonkiness, and it has been added to my Happy Shelf. While I wish I could just give you a link you could click to go read the poem (and the rest of the issue), there's something kinda fantastic, in an old-school way, about having a copy I can hold with pages I can riffle through. (Exceedingly affordable copies are available for purchase from the editor at the link above.)

Captain Holland, of course, has demonstrated a predilection for chewing on things made of paper. To keep the production of the above photo tragedy-free, I put my copy of the magazine inside the clear-sleeve front cover of a three-ring binder.

I am reminded by my colleagues on Twitter that it's time to make Awards Eligible posts. That is, to list all the things I had published this year, so that you can go read them and, if you wish, nominate them for awards. The very thought makes all the brain-weasels in my addled pate rear up and holler, "Who the hell do you think you are, suggesting that people nominate your drivel for awards? The nerve! The effrontery! The very idea! Hmph." So, OK, here is a list of things I had published this year, so that you can go read them. If you wish. The end. OK? *Nervously glances at brain-weasels* OK. (And I'm only including the word and/or line count to give you an idea of how much of a time investment reading each involves.)

Short stories

"The Rarest of Prey" in Daily Science Fiction (102 words)

"One Story, Two People" in Community of Magic Pens, print anthology, Atthis Arts (2600 words)

Poetry

"The Mardi Gras Tree" in Eternal Haunted Summer (34 lines)

"The Ascent of Inanna" in Dreams & Nightmares, print journal, see above (22 lines)

Reprints

"The Soup Witch's Funeral Dinner" in ep. 431 of Cast of Wonders (980 words)

I do not think that reprints are award-eligible. But this is not an Awards Eligible list. It is a list of stuff I had published in 2020, that's all. So "Soup Witch" belongs on that list.

So now I have fulfilled my promise to blog about Actually Writing "tomorrow" and thus may go to bed with a clear conscience. Huzzah! (There'll be more in days to come, of course; this was all I had the oomph for posting tonight.)

Wow, I suck at this Social Media Self-Promotion thing. I keep forgetting to tell you about my latest poem publication. It's "The Mardi Gras Tree," and you can read it in the very latest edition of Eternal Haunted Summer--the Summer Solstice 2020 issue, whose theme is "Holy Days."

The holy day being commemorated in "The Mardi Gras Tree" is, as you might expect, Fat Tuesday. But it's not about the day of festival and celebration so much as it is about the hangover and mundane clean-up duty of the afternoon after the parades have all passed by, and the morning after when it's time to get back to work. The transition from one to the other happens much sooner than you might think. New Orleans natives know how the unofficial final floats in any parade are the police cars whoop-whooping at spectators to let them know the show's over, and after that the huge street-cleaning trucks with the round brushes and the jets of water scouring the street. Many a child raised in the area knows better than to leave before those vehicles show up--it ain't over until it's over, after all--and many a parent disappoints their kid by yanking them away before that happens--gotta get to the car and vacate your parking spot ahead of everyone else, for fear of having to sit bored in your car waiting for your turn to leave.

(That latter impulse I see at concert venues, with drivers fleeing after the last song proper but before the encore so as to spare themselves the inevitable traffic jam.)

I really like what editor Rebecca Buchanan has to say about my poem: that it illustrates "just how hard it can be to leave sacred space and return to mundane reality." I hadn't thought of it that way--Mardi Gras as sacred space--I'd thought of it more as a drunken Bacchanalia out of which we stumble blearily with a hangover and a certain dread of being confronted with whatever stupid shit we did while the rules of society were temporarily suspended. But that suspension of rules really is a liminal zone, a place where reality is on hold, a "time that is not a time, a place that is not a place" as we Wiccans often say about the magic circles we construct for the purpose of ritual. It was quite normal for a kid growing up in the area to have the entire week of Fat Tuesday off, which made it that much harder to return to everyday life the following week.

(Many of my friends and their families used the week to head up to Colorado ski resorts, a choice I found baffling. Why, I thought, would anyone leave New Orleans during the week of Mardi Gras? Didn't they know Mardi Gras was the best time to be a New Orleanian? Now, ironically enough, I'm in Colorado full time. I still haven't really learned to ski, though.)

Anyway, thanks to such neighborhood monuments as the titular crepe myrtle tree on Bonnabel Boulevard--and I'm sure there are landmark trees like it all over the Greater New Orleans Area; that's just the one maintained in my particular stomping grounds in Metairie--pieces of sacred space celebrate Fat Tuesday all year round. Come spring and summer, they rain petals and pollen down on unsuspecting passersby while their perennial plastic fruit clinks and clatters. "Throw me something, Mister." There are also the barely hopeful idiots in the French Quarter who'll half-heartedly offer anyone presenting as female a string of cheap beads if she should "take it off" and "show your tits"; I guess they're part of the year-round ritual space of carnival, too. I prefer the trees.

I wrote "The Mardi Gras Tree" this year as part of a Codex contest called "Victory in Verse." The contest ran four weeks. The first week called for short poems, twenty lines or less, which were otherwise unrestricted. During the second week, we wrote short formal verse. The third week was all about visual poetry: erasure poems, concrete poetry, found poetry, and other experiments. And the fourth week, dubbed "Take your best shot" (although I seem to persist in misremembering it as "Do Your Verse") featured whatever the hell you wanted to do at whatever length you chose.

The contest facilitator gave us a lot of prompts to spark contestants' imaginations, both pictoral and verbal. One of them was the photo I've included here. Given where I'm from, it was inevitable that it would catch my eye. Thus was born my poem "The Mardi Gras Tree," which I'm so proud to see featured in Eternal Haunted Summer, and so pleased now to share with you.