MEET OUR GUEST EDITORS FOR ISSUE 211
JANUARY-MARCH 2022

Submit a Poem or Story via Submittable

Click the editor’s name to read their bio and a poem or story

LaWanda Walters, Guest Editor for Poetry

Michael Beadle, Guest Editor for Short Fiction

Note

Submissions for Issue 211, are open from July 1 through August 31. Prime Number Magazine has guest editors for each issue, to keep things fresh and interesting. If your story or poem is not selected during this submissions cycle, feel free to resubmit the same work to the guest editor for the next issue. Submissions are open the first two months of each quarter. Thank you for reading and for sending your work to Prime Number Magazine!

Guest Editor for Poetry, Issue 211, January-March 2022

LaWanda Walters is the author of Light Is the Odalisque (from the Silver Concho Poetry Series by Press 53, with editors Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root). LaWanda grew up in Mississippi and North Carolina. She earned her BA at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, an MA in Literature from California State University at Humboldt, and an MFA in Poetry from Indiana University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Cincinnati Review, Cutthroat, The Georgia Review, The Laurel Review, North American Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, and Sou’wester. Her poem “Marilyn Monroe” appears in Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (Dartmouth College Press, 2014), and “Goodness in Mississippi” was chosen by Sherman Alexie for Best American Poetry 2015. She received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020. She is the mother of two grown children and lives with her husband, John Drury, in Cincinnati.

Her Art

(from Light Is the Odalisque)

I’d like to cry on Elizabeth Bishop’s shoulder.
I lost my mother’s engagement ring, for one thing.
Not your fault, she’d say. So much seems to want
to be lost. Even if, one day, in anger or grief
you threw it across the room or placed it somewhere
safe, the fact is, now, it’s gone. Just read my poem. 

Remember? My mother’s watch was in that poem.
My losses are famous. Don’t cry on anyone’s shoulder—
even if I were available, I’m lost somewhere.
Find a nice shape and put your list of things
inside as you’d pack a valise. Be careful of your grief,
how you throw it around. People don’t want

a sight like that. Write about your want
as if it were an apple or a moth. A poem,
if you’re lucky, can help someone else’s grief.
It might be there to lean on like a shoulder,
though that should not be your intent. My things—
why should you care at all for them or where

or why I lost them? You saw me, somewhere,
painting Florida, transcribing my want,
that perilous view, into some other thing.
It is not a raft for you to climb on. The poem
might be about someone else’s shoulders,
how I miss them, perhaps, which is my grief,

not yours to worry over. Chart loss on a graph,
see how precisely rocks recall the wear
of tides and rain. Then think of those shoulders
you miss—pose them like a sculpture. The want
of arms made the Venus de Milo. A poem
is luck like that and discipline and things

you’ll never have again. See those things
as tiles in a watercolor tin. Grief,
set right, can flicker and stay, and then the poem
can stand in for your lost ring. I cannot say where
to look for any of this, or if the friend you want
will disappear. Step into loss as you should—

as you like to step in water, somewhere, your shoulders
cold until you’re swimming. My poem was a thing
I made, and it took some balancing, that grief and want.

Guest Editor for Short Fiction, Issue 211, January-March 2022

Michael Beadle is a poet, author, and writer-in-residence living in Raleigh, North Carolina. His short fiction has been published in BOMBFIRE, Apple Valley Review, and moonShine review. He won First Place in the Ruth Moose Flash Fiction Contest 2020-21. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Beasts of Eden (Press 53), and Primer (Main Street Rag), a finalist in the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Contest. His poems have been featured in Kakalak, River Heron Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina. Teaching, performing and writing throughout North Carolina for the past two decades, Beadle has served as a poet-in-residence at the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, an A+ Fellow for the North Carolina A+ Schools program, an instructor at Duke Young Writers’ Camp (Duke University), an emcee for the state finals of North Carolina Poetry Out Loud, and student contest manager for the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Bruce

(This story first appeared in moonShine review, spring/summer 2021)

Sycamore Falls is the kind of neighborhood where dog-walkers scoop poop into bright blue baggies as they yabber on their phones about their next kitchen upgrade or where to find the season’s best Cabernet. Neighbors try to outdo each other with holiday decorations—from hay bales and pumpkins to dangling skeletons, glow-in-the-dark tombstones, and sprawling spider webs that could swallow an SUV. Then come sparkling light displays, animated reindeer and inflatable snowmen. Street names honor New England colleges and dead white writers like Emerson and Hawthorne. One by one, the older houses disappear, demolished and replaced with gargantuan gray and white mausoleums with front yards laid in sheets of sod, lawns swept clean of twig and leaf. Plenty of mulch for prickly bushes shaved like poodles.

Walking by one of the older homes in the neighborhood, I pass a yard with a man’s name etched on a stone slab. The grass is cut extra low around the marker. No flowers or ribbons. My wife and I have our theories. I’ve never met or seen the owner, but I imagine an elderly woman, a widow who lost her favorite dog, the kind she keeps in framed pictures like tired relatives she no longer recognizes.

When I walk by her lawn, I whisper his name in a somber refrain. He’s the kind of dog who would run into a burning house to save a stranger. A big dog, loyal and kind. Golden retriever or German shepherd. I picture him buried in an urn with a box of medals and commendations. Even dogs that would stop to pee on his tombstone—it’s so close to the sidewalk—think better of themselves and pause out of reverence for their fallen comrade.

My wife, Katie, has more sinister notions. She thinks an angry wife slowly poisoned her husband after finding out from a jilted mistress that he’d been stealing from the company to pay for trips to Florida. Rather than confront Bruce, the wife plotted his demise with a dish best served cold. I tell Katie she’s been watching too many Lifetime movies—ones where the woman finds herself in a passionate affair only to learn too late her man has a dark past. Silky kisses and velvet promises turn to stalking and shattered glass.

In Katie’s plot, the wife slips a little something into the pies she bakes, a drop of death in the coffee creamer, a little extra spice in the sandwich spread. No one suspects her dutiful church lady cheer as she doles out the dark chocolate until chubby hubby feels a dull ache, pounding pains no doctor can treat. When he collapses at the office party, she vows to have him cremated, sets a tombstone facing the street as a tribute to all those men in the world who think themselves so smart and sneaky. 

Every time I walk by that house, shaded in drooping pines, I hope to see someone sitting on the porch. “Who’s Bruce?” I want to yell, dying for an answer to the riddle. But no one’s ever there.

Last week, a “For Sale” sign went up in the yard. I asked Katie, “How do you sell a house that comes with a Bruce?