Abridged 0-28: Once a Railroad Submission Call

 

Time Transfixed - Rene Magritte

 

Abridged 0 – 28: Once a Railroad explores the destruction of the dream. The world that exists where ‘reality’ is presented as something to aspire to, something other than the real; where every emotion is public and quickly perishable, where expectation has replaced hope and where love and fear are the same thing.

 

Once we built a railroad and now what is left? What dreams are there still to dream? And the only lines we lay take us up from the void and lead us back down again. Once the future blinded us, strident as a mid-day sun, now the tempered day is old, stooped and shuffles. Once we built a railroad guided by a dream, and what is left? People stark as death, anxious with absence, on crowded paths murky with limitation. No longer hearing the warning whispers or seeing the signals, voided in a theatre of happy endings and perfect fates. Not a future here, so what is left? Burned out stars left to linger in a dusty limbo.  Gone are the soft watermarks of the dream.

Abridged, the poetry/art magazine is looking for submissions for its Once a Railroad issue. A maximum of 3 poems may be submitted of any length. Art can be up to A4 size and can be in any media. It should be at least 300 dpi. Submissions can be emailed to abridged@ymail.com or posted to: Abridged c/o The Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU. Deadline for submissions is 19th October 2012.

…forget the many steps to heaven it never happened and it ain’t so hard…

Abridged 0-25: Silence Submission Call

Fortress of Solitude

"To those who have ever known sound, true silence can be but a myth. It is a phantasm, and something to be feared, for in silence we are vulnerable to our own conscience and its persistent echoes of memory, desire and confusion; we lose the means of dismissal and voluntary ignorance and become vulnerable. In silence we are naked, stripped of the sound layers we have used to define ourselves to outside eyes, a defensive muffling of truths. Today we abjure silence, avoiding its solitude. We are in a constant conversation with an ultra-social and info-overdosed humanity repeatedly relaying sculptures of mundane phrases that numb us to the experience of meaning. We dare not lie still enough to stir or coax the phantom film reels of our past from their shadows. Instead we light fires, shouting and stamping our feet to drive back the dark and its inhabitants. It is our fear of the silence of the void, the vacuum. Humanity cannot see nothingness but we run from it, choking the subtle sound of our own breathing with the bustling of contemporary life where everything is virtual and reality utterly abandoned. We convince ourselves we grow by sponging up the noises of the clattering world that engulfs us. In silence we are trapped as we are made to face the cold starkness of what we feel is missing, or the fierce jab of what we long to erase. We stand in silence and we stand in a room of mirrors. A ticking clock is a heartbeat.

Abridged, the poetry/art magazine is looking for submissions for its Silence issue. A maximum of 3 poems may be submitted of any length. Art can be up to A4 size and can be in any media. It should be at least 300 dpi. Submissions can be emailed to abridged@ymail.com or posted to: Abridged c/o The Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU. Closing date for submission is Jan 14th 2012.

…lay me down the long white line, leave the silence far behind…"

http://abridgedonline.com/abridged-0-25-silence/