Gnashing Teeth Publishing

| words that get in your teeth

Rag Pickings by Rebecca Dempsey

Let me tell you about the linen to wrap the dead / see how you can unbind desiccated limbs / pull apart the fibers / soak and flatten / turning cloth of death into a different kind of matter / imagine art from cast off waste / the knowledge we wear opens pages / material that clothed bodies in three dimensions / opens minds in all of them in libraries of patchwork ideas / Penelope unwinding and weaving the story of her endurance / scroll through the book of her life / so many old stories laid threadbare to sewn into new tales / yarns taken from pulling apart the work of generations / distressed thematic oddments / orphaned embellishments / I’m as guilty as any rag picker poking through frayed old works like experiences I outgrew / to reuse them as darts to give shape to personal history on the page / to become cloth to become pulped mush turned to paper processed for ink impressed upon them / decades later I cut them up and create an applique of recombined words / endlessly addressing how fibers became clothes became books became art / object then subject / interchangeably once we read what we wore and clothed ourselves in what we read

BIO: Rebecca Dempsey lives in Melbourne / Naarm, Australia. Her work has featured in The Ekphrastic Review, Mocking Owl Roost and Triggerfish Critical Review. Rebecca can be found at WritingBec.com

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Pushcart Prize Nominees for 2023

Gnashing Teeth Publishing is proud to submit the following poems for consideration of the Pushcart Prize. Each of these nominees had work published by us in 2023, whether online or

BOOK REVIEW: gossypiin by Ra Malika Imhotep

Roots, ancestors, bending limbs and time. Ra Malika Imhotep’s gossypiin is a harvest of the experiences and discussions of black women. The meaning of the title, like many of her

The Reflection by Nadia Nunez

What an obscurity energy there’s no serenity A smile is what you’ll never see All you’ll hear is “In memory” Not a single ring on the telephone All you see

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