In the barrel room

Yesterday, on our way to wine tastings a couple of wineries in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle, we stopped by the shop to check on the wine. When Tom pulled out the bungs, we could hear the wine crackling with malolactic fermentation.

I've spent the most part of four glorious days working on poems. I started by going through every poem in my manuscript (the one I wasn't going to revise for a while). Then I went through my most recent copy of Poets & Writers and some of the submission call information on Facebook and gathered all the links.

Now, I'm going through the poems in my "list of poems that are available to send," and some of them I'm sending to the barrel room. Looking at them through my time-has-passed and post-Lorna-Dee-Cervantes-workshop lenses, I can tell that they need work—and if I don't know quite what that work is, if I try a few or a lot of things and the poem still isn't working, it just needs more time to age. (It might be a lot more time. Some of those poems might never get bottled—but that's okay, and I'll probably learn something along the way.)

And now, for your submitting pleasure, here is my list:

Bryant Literary Review
http://bryant1.bryant.edu/~blr/2008.htm

Hanging Moss Journal
http://www.hangingmossjournal.com/submissions/

Mary Magazine
http://www.stmarys-ca.edu/external/Mary/submissions.html

Natural Bridge
http://www.umsl.edu/~natural/guidelines/guidelines.html

The Normal School
http://www.thenormalschool.com/guidelines.html

Paddlefish
http://www.mmcpaddlefish.com/submit.html

The Pedestal Magazine
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/submitguidelines.php

Third Wednesday
http://www.thirdwednesday.org/submissions.php

And the wineries we visited?

Nota Bene
http://www.notabenecellars.com/pages/first.html

O-S
http://www.oswinery.com/