The following is a poetry excerpt from issue 33.1 (Spring 2009) of the cream city review. It appears on page 43.

THE LOLA DADS.
Pablo Tanguay

They stay at home. They carve
from plastic foam the os and as and glue
them to the ls the Lolas make the Lola
Moms carve before they leave for work. They paint
the Lolas pink, and ask the Lolas where
the Lolas want their Lolas hung. The Lolas
traipse about the house, and point to barren,
Lola-less space. They hang the Lolas there.
And then they stand a few feet back, and then
adjust the Lolas. And then, and only then
(because they are—the Lola Dads—less
than optimistic), they check the time. It’s only
1:01. The Lolas pine for more
Lolas. They’re asking Daddy, is there time?

The following is a poetry excerpt from issue 33.1 (Spring 2009) of the cream city review. It appears on pages 150-1.

PISTOLERA RECOLLECTIONS
Luke Daly

After seeing a photo of me painting
a house I’ve never seen robin’s egg blue,

I aim to learn how memories persist or
perish so I ask the moon.

White moon utters its private,
dead-thing language and hangs

in blinking, beeping star fields
from a crumbling ribcage and harpsichord veins.

I’m planted in waiting for a return transmission.

Ten million lightyears away in the Sombrero Galaxy
a lunar translation has bloomed

but the translator speaks only in flowers
and the flowers refuse to speak—

There’s the bucket of yellow photos
of my aunts and of my cowboy boots

and of my aunts in yellow cowboy boots.

They’re drinking alligator wine.
They’re honking like men at football matches.

Shall I trust these photos too? I can almost
pluck each one; they float here in the waiting

room. But like a stone on my tongue
I cannot photosynthesize by toothlight.

I am part of this blind chromatic ritual
of light me up with beet dye,

light my chest for everyone to see.

UPDATE: We have extended our contest deadline for 2009 from December 1st through December 20th, 2008.

This year’s judges:

Kelly Link (fiction), author of the short story collections Magic for Beginners, Stranger Things Happen and Pretty Monsters, Link’s stories have won three Nebula, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. Link lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press, co-edit the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and play ping-pong. In 1996 they startd the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Lee Martin (nonfiction) is the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Bright Forever; a novel, Quakertown; a story collection, The Least You Need to Know; and two memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones. He has won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, a Lawrence Foundation Award, and the Glenna Luschei Prize. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he directs the creative writing program at The Ohio State University.

Arielle Greenberg (poetry) is the author of the poetry collections My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) and Given (Verse, 2002) and the chapbook Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). Her poems have been included the 2004 and 2005 editions of Best American Poetry and a number of other anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers (Sarabande, 2006), and she is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship and other awards. She is the poetry editor for the journal Black Clock, a founder and co-editor of the journal Court Green, and the founder-moderator of the poet-moms listserv. She is an Assistant Professor in the poetry program at Columbia College Chicago and lives in Evanston, IL with her family.

cream city review sponsors three annual contests judged by established writers: the A. David Schwartz Fiction Prize (sponsored by Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops); the Beau Boudreaux Poetry Prize; and the David B. Saunders Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

Deadline for current year’s contest: December 1 December 20.
Fee: $15/story (no longer than 30 pages) or 3-5 poems, payable to Cream City Review
Each entrance fee includes the Spring 2009 cream city review wherein the winners will be published.

Prize: $1,000.00 plus publication.

Address your submission to one of the following:

The A. David Schwartz Fiction Prize
The Beau Boudreaux Poetry Prize
or The David B. Saunders Award for Creative Nonfiction

and send your entry to:
cream city review
Department of English
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
PO Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201

Submissions must be typed, double-spaced, and include the author’s name and address plus an SASE (for results only). Simultaneous submissions are acceptable as long as cream city review is notified in the event the manuscript is accepted elsewhere. The reading fee, however, is non-refundable.