Selfie in Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Garden

Poetry for Cordite 52: TOIL is guest-edited by Carol Jenkins

I’m looking to meet the lone toiler, the staff, whole professions, whole guilds.

What I want for TOIL are energetic and intelligent takes and insight into people at work, singularly and collectively; the jokes of the mathematician; the travails of plumbers; trade secrets and tricks; the mastery of crafts; the dance of deduction for detectives in all forms and the plied threading of making.

I’m looking for toil in its broadest sense, the quotidian tasks both paid and unpaid. I’m looking for poems that explore the fabric of working via wit and lucidity, and please consider yourself invited to make the most of that diphthong in toil, and whatever it rhymes with.

As to form, be my guest as to what that is. Set out hop-scotches of ideas that skip to it, send scintillating sestinas, quatrains, haiku, sonnets or be that agent of free-verse. I’d like to see landays and crazy coherencies of rhyme and rhetoric.

Work can be microscopic up to panoramic. Put that work toad to use.

Please submit only once, with a maximum of three (3) poems in one (1) document … but first, please read the submission guidelines.