Redheaded Stepchild Magazine

The Inaugural issue of Redheaded Stepchild Magazine, a home for rejected poems, is online now, so take a look at the poetry, all of which has been rejected, no doubt numerous times, by other magazines. I know my two poems have been, by Arts & Letters, Appalachian Heritage, Poetry, and ---I've lost count.
Here is one of them.

MODEL


In drawing class the day before
Thanksgiving break,
our instructor called one of us up
to pose. Fully clothed, I should hasten
to add. This was a woman’s college,
deep in the Bible Belt South,
where all of us good girls wore Madras
and Villager skirts, underneath which
our Bass weejuns plodded respectably.

The model du jour
was an unsmiling beauty
whose long neck our virile instructor
admired, her hair teased bouffant
in the style of the period.
She set her stare hard against
us, then turned her face
into the afternoon light
of the windows through which
she’d have seen the flag still
at half-mast after JKF’s murder.

She moved not a muscle for almost
two hours. Nor did her face soften
when she surveyed
what her classmates had rendered,
our two dozen versions of Modigliani’s
signora tricked out southern belle-style.

She transferred at term’s end
to the state university,
got married,
lived in Atlanta,
a lawyer’s wife,
till she was killed
in a car wreck on I-85.

Judith,
that was her name.
She of the coldest stare ever
I withstood.
Whose swan’s neck I grudgingly
memorialized.
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The editors' statement:


Malaika King Albrecht and Deborah Blakely are the poetry editors at Redheaded Stepchild Magazine. We know that a lot of kickass poetry gets rejected, and we thought it would be fun to publish only previously rejected poems. We like rejects. That being said, receiving a rejection note from us doesn't say anything about the quality of the poem(s). If it doesn't work out here, submit elsewhere.


Malaika has been featured on our ncarts.org website. Malaika’s poems have recently been or are forthcoming in Kakalak: an Anthology of Carolina Poets, 4am, Hiss Quarterly Review, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second Floor, The Pedestal Magazine, Poetry Southeast and other online and print magazines. She has taught creative writing to sexual abuse survivors and to addicts and alcoholics in therapy groups and also volunteers teaching poetry in schools. She lives in North Carolina.



Deborah Blakely lives in Los Angeles and is currently a graduate student at California State University Northridge. Her past occupations have included: Melrose Avenue hairstylist, commercial p.a., switchboard operator, and volunteer at the Los Angeles needle exchange.