Folks:

Tomorrow, February 5th, is the last day to submit nominations for the storySouth Million Writers Award for Fiction, which honors the best story published exclusively on the Internet. Y.P.R. does not ask that you waste your vote on something from this silly site, because very little of Y.P.R.'s fiction even reaches the 1,000-word minimum height required to ride their attractions. Also, because we would expect an award such as this to turn its snooty nose up upon encounter with the foul stench of satire, and instead choose to honor something all serious and shit. But that's O.K. The Y.P.R. mantle is already overflowing with World's Best Grampa trophies.

If you have not already done so, we implore you to vote for something from eyeshot, or Pindeldyboz, or (parenthetical note), or the Konundrum Engine Literary Review, or Sweet Fancy Moses, or Opium Magazine, or Haypenny, or Surgery of Modern Warfare, or Exquisite Corpse, or Hobart, or Reinventing the World, or Dicey Brown, or Word Riot, or Monkeybicycle, or Small Spiral Notebook. These are some good people running some very good lit.

Rock the vote.

"Wardrobe Failure" by Janet Jackson's Jealous Left Nipple.

WRITERS-ON-WRITING MONTH: "Poets on Poetry" Dep't: AN ASSORTMENT OF LOVE POEMS WRITTEN WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF A PAMPHLET ENTITLED “HOW 2 WRITE LOVE POEMS THAT DON’T SUCK” DISTRIBUTED BY DELIAS.COM, A CLOTHING COMPANY THAT CATERS TO PRE-TEEN GIRLS BY WHITNEY PASTOREK Write a poem that is only seven words long. Your girlfriend is a freak-ass. Dump her.* * hyphenate = 1 word Choose something you associate with your cutie (the color blue, the letter x). Go for a walk and notice everything that is associated with that thing. Return home and write a poem that includes all the things you noticed. The rat skitters out of the dumpster the virus drifts across the city on a stale wind in the form of cups and papers and flyers and cigarette butts picked through by the hungry crawled over by the infested dripping down the streets in a river like the sludgy brown of your eyes and the matted fur of your legs and the addled brain in your trashed out head, love. Write a poem that uses “diminishing rhymes,” that is, a poem in which each rhyme sound contains that rhyme after is (heartthrob, throb, rob). No longer my heartthrob. You make my bad knee throb and I think I’m in love with your brother Rob. Cut random lines from a newspaper. Write a love poem that alternates between those words and your own. Palestinian officials quickly condemned Israel for acting like a “state above the law” in its continued use of assassinations to eliminate Palestinian militants. Which is kind of how I feel sometimes when you yell at me. Mexico has plenty of natural gas and oil in the ground but lacks the technology and money to exploit them fully. But you exploit me fully every day. Many economists have said Congress can rarely pass tax cuts quickly enough for them to affect downturns, which usually last less than a year. I do hope we can pull through this little downturn, dear. The roundworm is a little tube of a creature with a body of 959 cells, of which 302 are neurons in what passes for its brain. Humans have 100 trillion cells in their body, including 100 billion brain cells. I used to love you a lot more, I think. Write to Y.P.R. Write for Y.P.R. Right on, Y.P.R.