"Language & Identity / Body & Borders"

Guest Edited by Millissa Kingbird and Angie Trudell Vasquez 

Our call is centered around our strengths. Our shared interest about exploring identity and language brought us together as editors. How does one inform the other? Neither of us is fully fluent in our original language though we keep trying, and yet we are very much part of our culture in how we live our lives and our values.

Please send poems on the themes of language and identity. If poetry isn't your bag, we welcome flash fiction or smaller lyric essays in the same vein. Please do not send simultaneous submissions or anything previously published. Send us your three very best poems, or flash fiction pieces, or lyric essays to editor@yellowmedicinereview.com by March 15, 2019. Multiple viewpoints and experiences are welcome.

How does language inform identity? How does place? What if you are from many places? We carry multiple identities, know snippets of other languages because of where we live or what we breathed growing up in the streets, the woods, on the reservations, and even more remote places.

We grew up in big extended communities, in crowded cities, but had solitary childhoods. Some of us moved all the time. We may have been fluent in our language, or could read and speak in multiple languages. We want to know what you think, feel, experience, see on the page how that influences your art. We welcome writing in other languages. We welcome indigenous writers and poets from all over the planet.

We would love to bear witness to the interrogation of a person's relationship with self, how language plays a part in identity. Inversely, how it doesn't. We desire to hold in our hands writing in native tongues, in mixed format, translated or not. We wish to know how a person identifies the borders of their body with borders of land.

We leave you with these brief moments that inspired us in this call:

C.D. Wright in her book, Cooling Time, writes:

The division between urban and rural is the only serious border left to us. One serves to undermine the other. One could just as easily serve to mine the other. I am a serious border crosser. I like the sticks; I am, if you will, of the sticks. I like the wreckage of New York City second only to the sticks of Arkansas.

Layli Long Soldier in her book, Wheras, writes in the poem, "Ȟe  Sápa,  Five:"

Born in us, two of everything.

As in, each born to our own crown--the highest part of the natural head.

And each born to our own crown--a single power, our distinction.

But I'm dragging myself, the other me, every strand up to the surface. I remember

very little. So I plunge my ear into the hollow of a black horn, listen to it speak.

Circuitous.

Not one word sounds as before.

Submit work as an email attachment to: editor@yellowmedicinereview.com

Please include a short bio as well as your physical mailing address.  

Deadline for Submissions:  March 15, 2019

Expected Publication Date:  May 10, 2019

Please adhere to the YMR submission format:

• Send work as a Word or rtf attachment to: editor@yellowmedicinereview.com

• Amend the subject line of your email to read as follows: YMR Spring 19 Last Name (ex: YMR Spring 19 Wilson)