Welcome! This Submittable account accepts submissions for our family of journals Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unbroken Journal, Unlost Journal, and first frost. Be sure to select the correct category.
Thanks. If you need anything, email Dale at dalewisely@gmail.com.
Friends,
Thanks for getting this far! To know if your work fits with moral injury as our theme, you need to know--if you don't already--what we mean by moral injury.
First, the experience of trauma, no matter how severe, does not necessarily (or even usually) lead to moral injury to the victim.
Moral injury occurs in two categories of circumstances.
In the first, an individual engages in an act that is a transgression of that person’s own moral code and which has serious, even grave consequences. Or, the individual fails to do something when their moral code demanded they act with, again, serious consequences. In the second category, a person is morally injured by seeing others engage in bad, abusive, immoral behavior (with serious consequences). For example, combat military may have seen their colleagues or their superiors do egregious things.
In any case, moral injury occurs when the trauma causes a loss of faith or trust, or even hostility, toward authority, institutions, and even one’s perception of human morality. It has psychological, social, and spiritual aspects.
The field of moral injury has been applied to combat veterans. Consider a Vietnam veteran who kills a noncombatant. Or who sees his or her own military leaders engage in incompetent, careless, reckless behavior that got people hurt or killed. That doesn’t just cause PTSD. It is an assault on the person’s moral faculties.
Or consider a police officer whose line of work exposes him regularly to the worst kinds of conduct in human beings.
Another: Someone works for a government child protection office. They also see very bad human behavior, victimization of children, but also work in a system that doesn’t necessarily take good care of children and families.
Another: A driver engages in behavior in their car that distracts them and they cause an accident in which an innocent person is severely injured or killed. Subsequently, the driver realizes they had a moral duty to be attentive when driving and due to their negligence, terrible harm is done.
We have no length guidelines for poems. Previously published work will be considered, as long as we can quickly resolve any permission to reprint issues.
Questions to Dale at dalewisely@gmail.com.
Thanks for submitting!
Dale