Daily Prompt <3 A Question I Need To Ask
What are you afraid of? Make art about what you fear.
The Broke Bohemian Spring Edition
Deadline: March 14, 2017
The Broke Bohemian is now accepting submissions for our Spring Edition! Get wild. Wear your activism proudly. Bare your teeth. Rise up, and rave in the name of Beauty. We commit ourselves to fostering the voices of all people, especially those who’ve been disenfranchised and unheard among the ever-booming holler of the bourgeoisie! Up to three poems, flash fiction, art (photography, digital media, illustrations, paintings), prose, microfiction, nonfiction. We publish pieces at the forefront of unconventional thought and outlandish perspectives.
Be sure to read our submission guidelines before submitting. brokebohemian.com
These last few months, the upheaval, uncertainty, not only in the world at large, but in my own life, with the loss of my sister, knocked me back on my heels a bit. Things–actions–activism–I knew I had to do took over, but now I feel I have found a rhythm, found my feet, and so much of what I’ve worked through, thought through, clarified for myself in these last weeks, has been about what I will not surrender.
Art is at the heart of what I refuse to surrender, making it, sharing it, learning from it, from those with the courage to make it. Nope. No amount of fear-mongering will move me to abandon the making, or the makers.
Make art about what you will not surrender.

1/10/2017
“…darkness is but a ghost of an idea, the least
remembered, most estranged prayer, and your fear

1/9/2017
My daddy was a sweet, gentle, and wildly imperfect man. But one thing that we all knew, without question, was how much he loved our mama. And lest we forget, periodically, he would sit down and write a letter to each of us kids, telling us how much, and all the reasons why. We all lived in the same town, for so many years, but these letters would arrive unexpectedly in the mail, missives of fierce and eternal Love.
Make art about an unexpected letter, or about fierce Love.

Clare L. Martin is a graduate of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and lifelong Louisiana resident. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies both online and in print, including Avatar Review, Blue Fifth Review, Literary Mama, Louisiana Literature, and Poets and Artists, among others. Her poems have been included in the anthologies The Red Room: Writings from Press 1, Best of Farmhouse Magazine Vol. 1, and Beyond Katrina. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2012), Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web (2011), Best New Poets (2009), and Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net (2008 and 2011).
Visit Clare’s website here: https://clarelmartin.com/
Buy Clare’s beautiful books!
Eating the Heart First
http://www.press53.com/BioClareLMartin.html
Preorder Clare’s new book Seek the Holy Dark!
http://www.yellowflagpress.com/_p/prd15/4592458541/product/clare-l.-martin—seek-the-holy-dark
Seek the Holy Dark available for pre-order. Trade paperback, 66 pages, only $10. Pre-orders will ship in early February.
Praise for Eating the Heart First
“Clare L. Martin pulls off an impressive balancing act in her debut book of poems Eating the Heart First. In this collection, divided into three sections, she manages trust of her intuitive powers while she tats her findings onto poems built with technical expertise. She is a believer of dreams, and the whole of the work can be read as an oneiric treatise guided by the powers she believes in: the power of memory, the power of water, the power of moons, the powers of longing, and the power of love. In one of the late poems a crow in a dream asks, ‘Let me be a whorl of darkness— / Let me be a fist in the sun.’ All of the poems in this collection have the impact of that crow’s call and of the trope it creates. Gradually the poems reveal richly textured revelations of a heart tied to human experience in that ‘dream we cannot know completely.’ And, while we may not ever know the dream completely, Ms. Martin hands us a guidebook to dreams and to the art that uses dream and dreaming as the scaffolding from which to make something beautiful, and useful, and mysterious all at the same time.”
— Darrell Bourque, former Poet Laureate of Louisiana and author of In Ordinary Light, New and Selected Poems
“Clare L. Martin is a fine young poet whose work is dark and lovely and full of a deep organic pulse. Like the landscape of her beloved Louisiana, her work is alive with mystery. You could swim in this hot water, but there are things down inside its darkness that might pull you away forever. It is an exquisite drowning.” — Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Queen of America
Praise for Seek the Holy Dark
From the holy dark of horror storms and freedom in the hand, to starving wolves and old women who live in woods, Clare Martin’s poetic imagery seeks in myth to locate depth of soul. She incants salvation “bone by bone” up from the shadows. Her writing has a beautiful fury, a hard questing and secret exultation that keep the reader poised and intoxicated. “Do you seek the heart too” the opening poem asks, and of course, we answer Yes and read breathlessly on. These poems “drop through this world/into dark awakening.” The strong-hearted will understand.
~Rachel Dacus, author of Gods of Water and Air
Seek the Holy Dark is a book of revelations in poems. Clare L. Martin sees the richness and the poverty that are bedmates, proffers them as gifts, lays them at our feet. Her poems suggest we join in the quest to be both humbled and exalted. Martin, who never looks away, fully understands the duality of nature, its light and darkness, exploring both in this lush and lyrical new collection.
~Susan Tepper, author of dear Petrov and The Merrill Diaries
Visit Clare’s beautiful litmag: MockingHeart Review!
https://mockingheartreview.com/
Read More from Clare Online
http://wewantedtobewriters.com/2014/01/excerpt-from-clare-martins-poetry-collection/
https://referentialmagazine.com/contributors/m-o/clare-l-martin/
http://www.eclectica.org/v12n1/martin.html
http://www.unlikelystories.org/12/martin1212.shtml
http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue15/poetry_martincl.
Hear Clare Read!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yx32YG96f8
Happy Reading!
xo
Mary
We’re still reading, but closing in on final selections for our April issue, so send us your best–poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction.
Website: http://www.heartwoodlitmag.com/
Guidelines: http://www.heartwoodlitmag.com/submit/

January 8, 2017
Make art inspired by the hands of the ancestors.
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“A 6,200-year-old indigo-blue fabric from Huaca, Peru has been found by a researcher, making it one of the oldest-known cotton textiles in the world and the oldest known textile decorated with indigo blue.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160914150426.htm

1/7/2017
White snow, black treeline. Make art that’s a study in contrasts.

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