Submissions for are open until December 15.  Visit our website (www.clockhouse.net) for guidelines and to order a copy of our current (or past) volumes.

Please visit our website to order copies of Volume Nine and past volumes, and to submit for 2023's Volume Ten!

While you consider submitting to CLOCKHOUSE Volume Nine, here's something to read from Volume Eight. Submissions are open until December 15, and the guidelines and submissions upload button are on the website.

from Laura Ruby's "Our Last Kiss"

Maybe it started with an octopus named
Amelia, who chucked rocks and bad shrimp
out of her tank, clocking her handlers one by
one, then vanished through a drain the size
of a dime.
 
Or maybe it was the squirrels, little
hangnails, chattering a litany of
losses—nuts, kits, trees. The dolphins
in no mood for tricks. The deer arranged
on the frosted lawn like the angriest Christmas
pageant after eating the poison set out
to keep them from the holly. 

from Monet Lessner's "Midnight in the Garden"

I remember a night from my childhood with such unnatural precision that I can recall the number of scuffs along the floorboard I saw when I woke. There were three. Dark smudges at different heights. Two to the left of the door and one to the right. I can’t remember the name of the rabbit I owned briefly that year, or the face of my third grade teacher, or why my mom threw away all my candy the day after Halloween, but I know that my window curtains didn’t meet completely in the center; just enough moonlight entered to give everything a worrisome glow. Sometimes when I walk into my daughter’s room at night, the string lights cast shadows around her bed, and an overwhelming melancholy fills me. Old visions rise up, and I have to push them away, kiss her sleeping forehead, pray that her youthful musings will always be sweeter than mine.

There was a little table beside my bed with an ivory lamp. The shade was worn pink, probably something passed down to me from cousins. I can hear the click as I turned it on in semi-darkness, a distinct sound in the paranormal silence. It was winter; my sheets were cold, but I felt a sickening heat, starting in my stomach and coming out like dew along my body. And I remember the dream. 

While you consider submitting to CLOCKHOUSE Volume Nine, here's something to read from Volume Five.  Submissions are open until December 15, and the guidelines and submissions upload button are on the website.

from Helene Barker Kiser’s poem, Bathsheba, to Her First Child:

The moment I tilted my face to the sun,
hot, even sinking, I felt the king.
Or rather, felt eyes sharp as a crow’s.
Heat like touch, like a wall
of film around me, a substance, heat
of his hands but not his hands
. My body a fever--
blood-red bloom of a cactus--
the bath water evaporated,
surprised by the burn.
Strangely calmed by the attention,
I loved the early evening,
the beginnings of shadows. The sun,
I thought it the sun still,
unrelenting. I didn’t know
there were men around, the war
raging on. I didn’t know
there was something the king had to do.

The CLOCKHOUSE Volume Nine submissions period opens on August 15.  In the meantime, here's an excerpt from Volume Three:

from Jennifer Pullen’s Little Red Riding Hood(s), a work of fiction:

                                                                             I

Little Red Riding Hood isn’t really named Little Red Riding Hood, her name is Elizabeth, or Mary, or some other good English name. Regardless of whether her name is Mary or Elizabeth she always loves the smell of her mother’s baking, the way she can wake up as dawn wipes gray out of the sky, and even though she has to go milk the cows, gather eggs and pull water from the well, she’s happy. She’s happy because the smell of bread fills her nostrils and makes her feel loved and cared for. Everyone acknowledges her mother as the best baker in the village. Everyday her mother sends her down the path to the edge of the forest to her grandmother’s cottage with a loaf of bread in a basket, because her mother says that a daughter’s duty (she looks pointedly at Mary/Elizabeth as she says this) is to take care of an aging mother. So, Mary/Elizabeth walks down the path every day and brings a loaf of bread.

But one day she gets a riding hood of bright scarlet from the church charity bin, and the story starts to swallow her name. If you watch carefully you might be able to see the story lurking in the dusty corners of that church waiting to envelop her. The hood is red and soft and warm and looks like nothing her family could ever afford. Red dye is expensive, red dye belongs to the rich, red dye screams for attention. A grown woman might have one red kirtle for feast days, but only a rich person would make a red riding hood for a little girl. But Mary/Elizabeth gets the hood and then wears it on the walk to her grandmother’s. Wolves can’t see the color red (lacking the appropriate cones to do so), but that doesn’t stop the wolf from seeing the girl and smelling her blood in her veins—hot-alive, and also red. That doesn’t stop the story from going on, doesn’t stop Mary/Elizabeth from getting eaten, it doesn’t save her grandmother, and it doesn’t stop that beautiful bread from going to waste because the wolf is sated on so much red bloody-person-meat. Sometimes a woodcutter saves them, cutting open the wolf, and the grandmother and the girl emerge, probably covered in nasty smelling stomach acid, and hug the wood cutter and everything turns out okay. Sometimes they both get eaten. Sometimes just Mary/Elizabeth. Sometimes the wolf is clever, sometimes the wolf is stupid. But always Mary/Elizabeth ends up as Little Red Riding Hood and always a wolf eats someone. The versions where no one gets eaten aren’t real, and everyone knows it.