Jackie Joyner-Kersee, winner of six Olympic medals, is considered one of the 50 Greatest Athletes of All Time by ESPN, and was voted Greatest Female Athlete of the 20th Century by Sports Illustrated for Women. She is the first woman to win back-to-back gold medals in the heptathlon, the first African American woman to win an Olympic medal in the long jump, and the first woman to score 7,000 points in the heptathlon.

Born and raised in East St. Louis, Jackie is committed to ensuring that all children have access to high quality after-school programs, safe recreational places within their communities, and caring adults to help them achieve their dreams. She started the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation. She is the heart and soul of this organization, and serves as living proof that kids in East St. Louis can dare to dream big and if they have the drive and determination, they can accomplish anything they desire.

We are thrilled that Jackie is reading the poem, “Eads Bridge, St. Louis,” by Lawson Inada from Vol. 4 (1963), for our Poetry with Purpose social media project, designed to get more people into poetry. We encourage you to post your own reading, tag it with #december_mag and any of the hashtags below…and ask your friends to do the same. We’re hoping to make this like the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS…but with poetry! @december_mag #decembermagazine #decembermag #poetry #poetryofinstagram #writersofinstagram #poet #instapoetry #poetrycommunity #poetlaureate #jackiejoynerkersee #eadsbridge #JJK

This poem was originally published in december, Vol. 4 (1963).

Jam with Jazz St. Louis president and CEO, Gene Dobbs Bradford, as he reads the poem “Jesse is Back This Summer,” by Albert Goldbarth featured in award-winning, St. Louis-based december Magazine. Gene’s enthusiastic reading is part of december’s social media poetry project to get more people into poetry and grow readership of december (decembermag.org). We encourage you to post your own reading, tag it with #december_mag and any of the hashtags below…and ask your friends to do the same. We’re hoping to make this like the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS…just with poetry. @december_mag (Instagram) @decembermagazine (Facebook) #decembermag #poetry #poetryofinstagram #writersofinstagram #poet #instapoetry #poetrycommunity #poetlaureate #jazzstl

Join us Monday, June 29 at 6:00pm for a virtual poetry celebration with UrbArts! We’ll be celebrating Sarah Abbas the St. Louis Youth Poet Laureate and the newest issue of december magazine. Join us online here: https://www.facebook.com/UrbArts/live/

It is with deep appreciation and much excitement that we announce Carl Phillips as our next poetry contest judge! Phillips will select the winner, honorable mention, and finalists for our poetry contest this fall. Submissions will open on October 1, 2020.

Carl Phillips is the author of 14 books of poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field. Since 2010, he has been the judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In 2011, he was appointed to the judging panel for The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards. His collection of poetry, Double Shadow, was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award for poetry. Double Shadow won the 2011 Los Angeles Book Prize for Poetry.

Phillips was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2008 to 2012, was nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize for Silverchest, and was the 2013 recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. Carl is currently a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, and he also teaches creative writing. To learn more visit https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carl-phillips.

december is honored to present audio recordings from our winner and honorable mention for this year’s poetry contest. These poems are featured in Vol. 31.1; to purchase or subscribe click here.

Kimani Rose — 2020 Winner, River

River

I went to the river and was told to pray
told to sink myself into the ocean’s favorite runaway memory
and breathe
inhale the seawater and exhale the salt that remains

my grandmother’s grandmother was the daughter of a water woman
mami wata sueña que sus chicas recuerdan de dónde venían
soak our feet in the rich earth and step into the clay
hunde
down to our necks to harden and make our skin soft copper again
make our hands clean of the scars we cannot remember getting
turn into grip
and hold

only here do I know where home is
only here do I know the ways to put me back together
after I am away and I forget that I was once a water baby too
after I handed the crossing guard a penny for my thoughts,
a dollar for what I had inside
we traded and I carried my ocean’s memories
I carried her legacy branded dreams
yet I was still not empty
still not free

las diosas suplicaban se oídas
escuchar el río
remember who you were
and pray

Carolyn Foster Segal — 2020 Honorable Mention, The Mirrored Room

The Mirrored Room*

I knew the legend — how
Theseus, saved by the love
of a good woman, turned, how Ariadne
was left, spinning in circles
at the heart of the labyrinth. And still,
on that January day,
I went with you. We were coming
from Niagara Falls — I thought only later
how funny it was that we started there — where couples go
long after first desire, when everything has already begun
to turn into something else. The falls
were stopped, shut off for repairs —
all that exposed rockface, the frozen rivulets,
a cliff at the end of the world
as we knew it — but as I said earlier, I wasn’t thinking
in symbols that day — and, anyway, we continued on,
to the museum with the Mirrored Room. It was like
a house in a fairy tale, and you made an awkward bow,
a parody of a gentleman, and let me go first. And when I crossed
the threshold, and stepped onto the glass floor, I saw — felt —
it fall away, and as I fell, the walls turned
into other walls, further and further away, until
it was impossible to gauge the distance
I had already traveled. Years later, when you say
you don’t remember, when, breathless with panic,
I try to retrace our path
to that day for you, here is what I recall: You took
my hand in that room as I fell and fell, and when
we left the room, left the museum, it was late
afternoon, it was already growing
dark — you were still holding
my hand — and the trees
along the walk
were covered in ice
and shining,
shining.

*Lucas Samaras, Mirrored Room (1966),
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

Artist/scholar Buzz Spector is looking forward to his survey exhibit of works on paper that will open at the Saint Louis Art Museum later this year. Known for his installations made of books, Buzz’s works include sculpture, photography, papermaking, and drawing. He is also the recipient of countless honors and awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts.  As Art Editor of december, Buzz offered to read “I Move Through Space As Other’s Move, Am Moved by Them.” by H.L. Hix from Volume 24 for the Poetry with Purpose project. Post your own reading, tag it with #december_mag and any of the hashtags below…and ask your friends to do the same. We’re hoping to make this like the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS… with poetry, for poetry. www.decembermag.org @december_mag #decembermag #poetry #poetryofinstagram #writersofinstagram #poet #instapoetry #poetrywithpurpose #poetrycommunity #poetlaureate #buzzspector www.decembermag.org

Some of us write about real experiences, even in fiction. Some of us engage in absurdity, full-on imagination based on nothing more than an idea. The rest of us fall between, writing about hopes and dreams, fears and nightmares. Those fears can be compelling subject matter; at least, that’s what we thought when we published C.J.’s Spataro’s prescient virus story, “The World As We Know It” in Vol. 30.1 last year. With its eerie opening line — “We live in a season of viruses.” — the story boldly predicted some of what we’re all experiencing right now. As Spataro recently told us, “I feel like the story is haunting me. When I wrote (it), I was sort of doing what we all do when we write, playing a game of what if.” What if, indeed. We decided to post this story again on our website now not to create yet another trigger or to dwell on the scariness of viruses and pandemics, but as a reminder about the power of literature to help us make some sense of what’s going on around us and inside of us. 

Here at december, we are grateful for all our contributors. One way we show that gratitude is by nominating our contributors for prizes and by sending our journals off to all the contests we can. Pushcart is one of those contests. When the time comes it’s never easy to select our Pushcart nominations because we love everything we print. After much deliberation between our advisory editors and staff we’ve chosen our nominees for 2020. Major congratulations to these writers and major thanks to everyone who is part of the december community.

You Enter Milk Run — Jennifer Atkinson – Vol. 30.1 (Poetry)
The Land Behind the Fog — Andrea Eberly – Vol. 30.2 (Fiction)
Re-Wind  — J.I. Kleinberg – Vol. 30.1 (Poetry)
Three Recordings — Christopher Merrill – Vol. 30.2  (Poetry)
I Will Not Be Requiring the Services of a Sherpa  — Jeremy John Parker – Vol. 30.2 (Fiction)
Gumball Electric  — Sarah Treschl – Vol. 30.2 (Nonfiction)

december Vol. 1.1 — 1958

Greek Gods

The old gods are now unkempt
As pastured goats.
They bleat sick song when passing pendants
Twist their tales,
Sit sulking, dream of unbroken temples,
And fight listlessly among themselves.

But I have read of their one-time rage
And the lightning in their eyes:
They ate at great table,
Chased frighted falcons from the skies,
Made awed poets sing,
And laughed loud
With the women of a king.

Then
Neglect locked
Like an iron door
On doctored philosophy’s hysteric gods,
And left men quiet
With remembering.

Throughout his career, Edmund Skellings was a cutting edge poet and artist, combining poetry, visual art, sound, and computer technology in new and innovative ways. As Poet Laureate of Florida from 1980 until his death in 2012, he worked diligently to bring poetry and literacy to young people.

Skellings earned his BA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his doctorate in English from the University of Iowa, where he taught prosody and metrics in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In 1963, he founded the Alaska Writer’s Workshop at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and also organized the Alaska Flying Poets, five professors from the Workshop who flew a small airplane around Alaska and the Midwest to talk to high school students about the value of learning to write well. In 1967, Skellings joined the faculty of Florida Atlantic University; in 1973 he became Director of Florida International University’s International Institute of Creative Communication, which brought poetry to more than 100,000 children in South Florida.

The Evans Library of the Florida Institute of Technology is currently digitizing Edmund Skellings innovative multimedia archives. To see more work by Skellings visit http://research.fit.edu/edmundskellings/