I’m thrilled that my poem “Memorial Day” has been selected to appear in Eclectica Magazine’s 20th-anniversary “best-of” poetry anthology, scheduled to appear in spring 2017. If you are at all inclined, please consider donating to their Kickstarter Campaign to make this possible. The campaign ends, I believe, on January 31.

Memorial Day

Arriving at this point
without knowledge of the journey,

the slow collapse and internal
dampening – the shutting down, the closing in – lost

in the shadowed veil, my eyes flutter open to find
everything in its place, yet

altered, as if viewed from a single step
closer at a different height, offering a disturbing

clarity. Looking up, I wonder that she wakes me
from a dream of dogs on this, of all days,

only to detect under me linoleum in place of the bed,
my glasses skewed from the impact,

the floor and left side of my head wet. You looked
like you were reaching for something, she says,

and perhaps I was, though with hand outstretched
I found nothing to hold but the darkness.

Here’s what they say about the campaign:

“Eclectica Magazine has been online for two decades, publishing work by authors from around the world. We’re taking our 20th anniversary as an opportunity to share the work of 250 of those authors in four “best of” anthologies, including volumes for poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and speculative literature.

This Kickstarter campaign is designed to raise, at minimum, $6,500, which is just enough funding to publish all four volumes through Amazon’s CreateSpace program, covering the rewards and providing a contributor copy for each of the authors, artists, and editors involved. However, the campaign is also designed to exceed that minimum goal.

If we can raise our “stretch” goal of $21,750, we will be able to pay a competitive (for small, independent presses) rate of $20 per poem and $50 per short story or nonfiction piece. Over twenty thousand dollars sounds like a lot of money, but if the more than 250 people involved with the project are able to recruit three $25 donors each, we will meet that goal.

This is an exciting project. The quality of the work we’ve selected for inclusion is exceptional, and many of our authors have enjoyed major publishing successes since appearing in Eclectica. If we can raise our “ultimate” goal of $58,000, we will do offset print runs through Lightning Source, which will enable us to distribute the books to brick and mortar stores. And if we sell out the first run of any of the four volumes, we will double the payments made to the authors appearing in those sold out volumes.

We have pursued a single-minded goal all these years to publish the best, most unique work we could find in a clean, easy to access format available for free to everyone on the planet. We still believe in that goal. We also love books, and above all we want to do something to honor the authors appearing in these anthologies and the over two thousand others who have helped Eclectica thrive over the years. That is what this campaign is about for us, but we’re also hoping our efforts will help shine a positive light on online literature in general. We’d like to demonstrate what can be accomplished without corporate or academic sponsorship, banner ads or $23 submission fees.

One measure of what can be accomplished is our performance over the years in the storySouth Million Writers Award. In the twelve years the award has been active, Eclectica has scored twice as many notable (54) and top ten (11) stories as any other online publication, beating out such luminous competitors as Narrative, Carve, Blackbird, Clarkesworld, Agni, Barrelhouse, and Anderbo. Those are some great venues for online literature, and there are many others deserving of recognition. We want to draw attention to Eclectica’s amazing body of work, and then we want to say, look at all the other amazing things to read on the Web.

Whether you are a friend or relative of one of the authors in question, or you’re a reader and supporter of online literature, or you just love literature–online or not–we ask you to help make these anthologies a reality, and the best reality they can be. Help us make our goal of getting these books made, or if we’ve done that, our stretch goal of paying our authors, or beyond that, our ultimate goal of seeing these volumes in your local bookstores.”