CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

THE MADRONA PROJECT: VOLUME IV NUMBER 2

“Image of the Engine, 1”   by George Oppen

 Likely as not a ruined head gasket
Spitting at every power stroke, if not a crank shaft
Bearing knocking at the roots of the thing like a pile-driver:
A machine involved with itself, a concentrated
Hot lump of a machine
Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with the valves jumping|
And the heavy frenzy of the pistons. When the thing stops,
Is stopped, with the last slow cough
In the manifold, the flywheel blundering
Against compression, stopping, finally
Stopped, compression leaking
From the idle cylinders will one imagine
Then because he can imagine
That squeezed from the cooling steel|
There hovers in that moment, wraith-like and like a plume of steam, an aftermath
A still and quiet angel of knowledge and of comprehension.

Currently, the subtitle for the next edition of The Madrona Project is Brautigan’s, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” Overused, though it may be—I learned there’s a band called “Machines of Loving Grace”—and suspiciously prescient about AI, please take it as an invitation to send your best poems, prose and artwork regarding the machines that affect you or have affected your life, machines you love or those that love(d) you. I hope to see work that describes machines in action, that does indeed warn against human dependency on machines; that suggests proper and/or improper monkey-wrenching of those machines we find insidious; that shows how machines sustain us—this one I’m writing these sentences on, for instance; the beauty of letterpress machines whose books and broadsides we’ve come to love; the long history of the sewing machines I’ve learned from my wife’s close work repairing old Singers; machinery to dam and undam our rivers; native technologies for fishing, planting, the hunt; tools we need to travel to and from the best places, or our workplaces, and those that keep us warm, fed, clothed and cool in summer. Likewise, the machinery of planet earth revolving with no help from us in a system so well-tuned we can barely hope to emulate.

Simultaneous submitting okay. Sharing this Call for Submissions encouraged. Reprints okay.
Send no more than 3 poems, 1 essay of no more than 1000 words, 3 black and white images.
Poems single-spaced, essay double-spaced. High resolution images, please.
No bio statement or cover letter needed.

DEADLINE: APRIL 30, 2024

Send work as a Word file attachment to Michael Daley: emptybowl1976@gmail.com