Dos Gatos Press

07/11/2025

Deadline extended to July 31!

Call for Submissions: Southwestern Aubades and NocturnesEditors Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen of Dos Gatos Press (www.dosgatospress.org) are accepting submissions for the sixth book in our series, Poetry of the Southwestern United States.Submit up to three poems between June 1, 2025 and July 12...

07/08/2025

Four days until our July 12 deadline. Send us your poems!

Call for Submissions: Southwestern Aubades and NocturnesEditors Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen of Dos Gatos Press (www.dosgatospress.org) are accepting submissions for the sixth book in our series, Poetry of the Southwestern United States.Submit up to three poems between June 1, 2025 and July 12...

06/30/2025

July 12 DEADLINE: Southwestern Aubades and Nocturnes

Call for Submissions: Southwestern Aubades and NocturnesEditors Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen of Dos Gatos Press (www.dosgatospress.org) are accepting submissions for the sixth book in our series, Poetry of the Southwestern United States.Submit up to three poems between June 1, 2025 and July 12...

06/21/2025

REMINDER: Dos Gatos Press Submissions Open until July 12:
Aubades & Nocturnes with a Southwest theme/flavor
https://dosgatospress.submittable.com/submit

June 12, 1982, Arches to the North Rim

Driving across the Hopi reservation
at 3:30 in the morning
everyone
including the driver
woke
when the car bounced to a stop.

Headlights illuminated a saguaro cactus
limbs lifted
in either greeting or surrender.
Cooling desert air
crackled against our bare arms.
No Peterbilts barreling on
signaled the way back.

Never occurred to us
we could have driven
off a cliff
broken an axle
or that the car
might not get us to the Canyon

because we were invincible—
recent grads living it up
on a cross-country boondoggle
armed with enough cold beer
and leftover pizza
to outlast any darkness.

Alan Gann
from Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems
(Dos Gatos Press 2017)

Call for Submissions: Southwestern Aubades and NocturnesEditors Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen of Dos Gatos Press (www.dosgatospress.org) are accepting submissions for the sixth book in our series, Poetry of the Southwestern United States.Submit up to three poems between June 1, 2025 and July 12...

06/16/2025

Here's another nocturne for you:

For Amy, Telescope Operator, McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas

I train binoculars on Mount Fowlkes
sixty miles northwest, bring into focus
a silver dome that tonight you’ll open
then aim the eighty-ton telescope’s
thirty-six-foot mirror at nebulae,
galaxy clusters, and supernovae
ten billion light years from Earth.

Between us, the Chihuahuan desert
blooms with prickly pear and ocotillo—
luminous hues of raspberry, rose,
lemon. Stalks of century plants,
twenty feet tall, tower; their panicles
of flowers glow like sunlit clouds.

The sheer blue sky now occludes
neighboring planets; the moon
is translucent, a thumbnail’s worth
of torn silk. The remote cosmos
you’ll measure has evolved
into these immediate splendors.

Marilyn Westfall
Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems
(Dos Gatos Press 2017)

06/13/2025

A Nocturne as Haibun

Canyon Winds

Canyon winds howl through city streets rearranging our lives. The neighbor’s mail is blown to my house. Mine is strewn across his driveway. Tumbleweeds slow traffic at rush hour on Cerrillos Road. Tonight all major roads in and out of the city are closed.

sleeping city
held hostage
by midwinter snow

Sleepless at 2 a.m. You phone me. I crawl from my bed to find my journal. Read love poems to calm your nerves. In bed the cat leans deeper into my thigh. “When will you leave me?” I ask the telephone. “Never.”

your voice
across the wires
broken promises

Barbara Robidoux
Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems
(Dos Gatos Press 2017)

06/12/2025

A Nocturne to inspire you:

The Owl in the Saguaro

Dusk comes heavy with heat
and shadows lengthen like lies.
Across the arroyo, the saguaro
holds up its arms like the victim
of a Wild West bandido.
Cactus prickers shine in the slant sun.
Some woodpecker has notched out
an irregular hole in the body
of the saguaro, arms still in the air
catching the last casts of evening.
In the cavity sits a ferruginous
pygmy-owl, its eyes alert,
its wings trembling. Night
is coming and the owl is ready.
Small creatures will soon venture
out in the moonlight and the owl
in its fierce beauty will rise and fly.

CB Follett
Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems
(Dos Gatos Press 2017)

06/08/2025

At Dos Gatos Press, we are reading morning poems (aubades) and evening poems (nocturnes) for our next collection of Southwestern poems. Here's one to whet your appetite!

Santa Rosa Sunrise

It all comes back to me now, almost
near enough to touch—a young girl
standing on a bridge, muddy red
water of the Pecos roiling below,

traffic swooshing by, the sun rising
behind her, smell of automobile
exhaust, sweep of desert, mountains
rising in the hazy distance.

Hitchhiking blindly toward her future,
imagining unbelievable freedom, she
turns, steps lightly, and enters into
the sweet music of the open road.

Sometimes I see her small boyish body
in my rearview mirror. I wave to her
trying to save what can still be saved
of that bright August morning in 1952.

Dorothy Alexander
Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems
(Dos Gatos Press 2017)

Editors Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen are accepting submissions for the sixth book in our series, Poetry of the Southwestern United States.

06/07/2025

Send us Southwestern Aubades and Nocturnes. Deadline: July 12
Link below. AND here's a poem to inspire you:

Desert Aubade

Lying awake in the small hours of the morning,
I listen to you breathing.
Coyotes that sang in the darkness are quiet.
Birds, even the white-winged doves, are quiet.

Bees that feasted on mesquite blossoms last evening,
filling the yard with their humming, are asleep.
Bats with their sharp-edged wings are going to sleep—
and great pale silent owls—while other birds awake.

Some hunters still prowl—bobcat and coyote—
while their sleepy prey stumble and scurry
into the pale light of beginning,
time of hunting and hiding, time without shadows.

The sweet breath of acacia drifts through open windows.

Victoria Stefani
Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems
(Dos Gatos Press 2017)

Editors Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen are accepting submissions for the sixth book in our series, Poetry of the Southwestern United States.

05/31/2025

As of tomorrow, June 1, Dos Gatos Press will be open for submissions. Send us aubades and nocturnes for the sixth anthology in our series, Poetry of the Southwestern U.S. Details here:

Editors Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen are accepting submissions for the sixth book in our series, Poetry of the Southwestern United States.

03/01/2025

March 11
Scott Wiggerman will present Place Picture Poems, Lee Desrosiers’ exercise from Wingbeats I. In-person at Albuquerque’s Books on the Bosque, 6221 Riverside Plaza Lane, 6:00 p.m. Bring pen and paper.

12/29/2024

2025 WINGBEATS WORKSHOPS

January 14
Scott Wiggerman will present his adaptation of Line Dancing, Jessamyn Smith’s exercise from Wingbeats I. In-person at Albuquerque’s Books on the Bosque, 6221 Riverside Plaza Lane, 6:00 p.m. Bring pen and paper.

February 11
David Meischen will present What to Write as the Apocalypse Approaches, adapted from Wingbeats II exercises by Alan Birkelbach and Keith Ekiss. This workshop presented via Zoom.

March 11
Scott Wiggerman will present Place Picture Poems, Lee Desrosiers’ exercise from Wingbeats I. In-person at Albuquerque’s Books on the Bosque, 6221 Riverside Plaza Lane, 6:00 p.m. Bring pen and paper.

April 8
David Meischen will present The Poem as Slinky, from a Sandra Soli exercise in Wingbeats II. This workshop presented via Zoom.

May 13
Scott Wiggerman will present Birds in the Classroom, Abe Louise Young’s exercise in Wingbeats I. In-person at Albuquerque’s Books on the Bosque, 6221 Riverside Plaza Lane, 6:00 p.m. Bring pen and paper.

June 10
David Meischen will present Letter to Self, adapted from Wingbeats II exercises by Melissa Kwasny and Veronica Golos. This workshop presented via Zoom.

July 8
Scott Wiggerman will present Entering the Conversation of Poetry, Gretchen Fletcher’s exercise in Wingbeats I. In-person at Albuquerque’s Books on the Bosque, 6221 Riverside Plaza Lane, 6:00 p.m. Bring pen and paper.

August 12
David Meischen will present The Magic of Tercets, adapted from his exercise in Wingbeats II. This workshop presented via Zoom.

September 9
Scott Wiggerman will present The Bop, Afaa Michael Weaver’s exercise in Wingbeats I. In-person at Albuquerque’s Books on the Bosque, 6221 Riverside Plaza Lane, 6:00 p.m. Bring pen and paper.

October 14
David Meischen will present What’s in a Name, adapted from a Joanne Diaz workshop in Wingbeats II. This workshop presented via Zoom.

November 11
Scott Wiggerman will present Mind is Shapely, Hoa Nguyen’s exercise in Wingbeats I. In-person at Albuquerque’s Books on the Bosque, 6221 Riverside Plaza Lane, 6:00 p.m. Bring pen and paper.

December 9
David Meischen will present Borrowed Line, Transformed Language, adapted from a Wingbeats II exercise by Pablo Miguel Martínez. This workshop presented via Zoom.