Chris Semansky Spinach We will not accept poetry about poetry. Poetry about post-prandial encephalitis, however, delphinium buds, garlic toast, and hamster wings is welcome, though frowned upon between June 1st and August 31st, when it will be summarily disdained by committee members, ignorant of the wonders of technology. Cover letters and variegated phlegm disgust us. Bio notes are crude. Please leave lists of awards and degrees received (unless the third) curbside. We know what we like. Don't bother reading our minds for clues. The fossil record does not support notions of summer vacations much earlier than the Middle Minoan period, when tiny hieroglyphs terrorized manna makers and brick builders alike. Write about what you know. Avoid slobbery confessions of childhood sexual abuse, workshop exercises in the first through third persons, abstractions that tell more than show quarterly results exceeding analyst expectations. There will be a reading fee for free. We don't read but we do eat, couscous mainly, prune danish on Sundays, the usual pre-minimalist fare. No lutefisk. Paper bathroom walls with abandoned efforts. leave them in a drawer for a week, a month, a mouse. Wave them in front of your dead mother, tattoo them to your breasts, take a neurosurgeon to a lunch of urine samples. Be sincere. There is no circle like tomorrow. Finally, I want something that will do for me more than little blind Sartre ever did for Beauvoir's good eyes, than Gertrude's bucks ever did for Alice, than the left behind coffee bean ever did for its fellow beans and beanettes as they plunged through the grinder unaware of their soon-to-be personified anguish at the hands of an anguished coffee drinker with trembling hands. Stop your yawning immediately! After so much wanting to want finally I want--fucker that I am-- what I really want to want, something more robust than yesterday, closer than tomorrow, more palpable than sleep, less exhausting than the screaming zero at the heart of inner-city yogis vacationing in the Aleutians, something memory won't mind, Aunt Doris won't attack, something I can sink what's left of my teeth into without harming anyone I know too well too much. Stranger wants there have been. You name them. I'm too tired. This pounding want, this always something this promise to self and others--goddam them-- forever having to have to be to want, to put up or shut up. Chris Semansky poems, essays, and stories appear in journals online and off, including American Letters & Commentary, Mississippi Review, Poetry New York, Rain Taxi Review, American Book Review, and The Oregonian. His first collection, Death, But at a Good Price, received the Nicholas Roerich Prize and was published by Story Line Press, and his second collection, Blindsided, is out with 26 Books. He has a chapbook online with Mudlark. He teaches and writes out of Portland, Oregon, and is publisher of Dhazie Books, a small press specializing in literature and cultural ephemera.