As a token of gratitude to subscribers and contributions to Unleash, we invite you to join us for a Creative Resilience circle on Friday, June 19th, 4-5 ET.

Theme:

Ekphrasis: a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art

This discussion and workshop will explore the ways art influences language and storytelling, inviting participants to explore their own interpretations in response to an artistic prompt.

Outline:

• Introduction

• Discussion and Q&A

• Ekphrastic prompt

About our presenters:

We will be led by guest teachers Alex Stolis and Catherine Arra, who have been featured in Unleash Lit and are the authors of the new Dos Madres chapbook The Razor Tip of an Arrowhead.

Poet: Catherine Arra is the author of four full-length poetry collections and five chapbooks. A former English and writing teacher, she now facilitates local writing groups. Her newest chapbook, Perennial Cosmology, was recently published by dancing girl press. Her newest full-length collection, Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself, was first finalist in the 2025 Donna Wolf-Palacio Poetry Book Prize and will be published by Finishing Line Press, September 2026. Arra lives in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York with her partner, Alex Stolis, and their dog, Daisy. www.catherinearra.com

Photographer/Poet: Alex Stolis’s photographs have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Ink in Thirds, San Pedro River Review, Unleash Lit, L’Espirit Literary Review, and Anti-Heroin Chic. His full-length book Pop.1280 is a poetry and photo collection, available from Amazon. His chapbooks Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife was released by Louisiana Literature Press, 2024; RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024; and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press. He lives in upstate New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra, and their dog, Daisy. He can also be found at https://alexstolis.myportfolio.com/

How to join:

RSVP here. https://luma.com/zjaejkzl

(We will limit space to keep this an intimate group.)

This is a free event made possible due to supporters of and .

Wishing you prolific days and creative clarity until then!!

Jen

Director / Founder

Unleash, The Resilient Creative

Your Old Afghan

You took a trip alone and dropped me at the house with the sunken living room and plastic sofa covers, the house where Grandfather rocked alone in a wood chair in the back bedroom, and the air hung in a smoky haze filtered through drawn window sheers. There were no toys at Grandma Rocky’s except the child-sized plastic dolls she dragged out of a basement closet when I showed up. No home-cooked meal, just what she spooned from a can. Sometimes I’d sit at her desk, slip her rubber finger-tip on my thumb, and add numbers on the oversized calculator with the trailing paper roll, pretending to be office-important. Shocking that you had a Band-Aid for every wound, a hug for every heartache, when you came from such icy beginnings. I found a carton of Fruit Stripe gum in the guest room nightstand. Chewed piece after piece until she asked me why I was so wasteful, but I feigned sleep under your old afghan full of holes.

Jodi Morton is a designer and poet based in Evanston, IL. Her poems have appeared in The Write Launch, Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Stay connected to Jodi on Instagtam @jodimortondesign.

This past winter/spring, Unleash Press partnered with the Leighton Art Centre in Millarville, Alberta on a land-based writing project. This project was created with the intention of encouraging visitors to slow down, explore their natural surroundings, and engage more deeply with both the landscape and the creative works they encounter along the way. By weaving writing into the land itself, the installation invites moments of reflection, curiosity, and connection between art, nature, and community. We received so many fabulous enttires (you’ll see many of them featured here at UnleashLit in the coming months) and thought we’d share the top five entries.

Words to Wonder, by Adele Bright

Did you think that you came to look?

Or is a gentle breeze/ ikinnai sopo lifting your hair and caressing your cheek?

Is the welcoming heat of the sun/ naatosi entering your being?

Are the Swifts accompanying you with their twitters and the insects insisting their busy repetition?

Can you rest down on the blanket of the earth/ kss’ahkom and sense your connection?



Did you think that you came to look?

Are the wild flowers and flowing grasses crashing into your vision?

Are you taking in the abundance that covers the earth’s verdant skin

Or are the steadfast mountains/miistakists winning your gaze?

Are the dancing Silver Birch trees fascinating you or the sacred water/ aohkii at the 

bottom of the hill drawing your rapture?



Did you think that you came to look?

Or is this land looking at you?

Is the intensity of the sky/ spo’ohtsim expanding this moment?

And are our ancestors/ niisitohkaa’ahssiks welcoming and holding you?





“Words for wandering” has led to “words for wOndering.”

In Blackfoot, one of the original languages of this land:

gentle breeze- ikinnai sopo

sun- naato’si. naato meaning sacred

earth-kss’ahkom

mountains- miistakists – the Rockies being regarded as the backbone of the world

water- ao’ohki

sky- spo’ohtsim

ancestors- niisitohkaa’ahssiks

Acknowledgements and gratitude to Siksikai’powahsin teachers generally and for checking these seven words.

*****

Seedling, by Arcana Shanks

I often imagine what it would be like

To be a seed

To be buried by loving hands

Beneath the damp, dark earth

Gently pressed down into the soil

And left to rest among the roots

To hear the heartbeats of all who came before me

To unfurl myself piece by piece

Guided by golden light and whispered hope



I wonder how it would feel

To be connected

To be a part of something greater

Transmitting signals like secrets

In a language only we could understand

To breathe my fears into the darkness

And have a chorus of voices echo back

To be loved by so many

Bound together and entangled as one



I dream of finding you there

Of opening my eyes

To feel your hands in mine

Clinging to each other in awe

As the dapples of sunlight sway above us

I imagine the way my name would tumble from your lips

Pouring forth like a river

I would rest my head in your arms

And know that finally I am home

*****

Traveling Mountain Bluebirds, by Kelly Kaur

Meander these winding pathways

marked by quaint

painted bird boxes

Migratory summer visits

mountain bluebirds return

every single year

Alberta’s blue skies summon

prairie green grass expands

crickets sing in curious delight

Transformation

resilience

immigrant hearts unite

Wandering feet firmly planted

grateful for this land

bird songs beckon my heart

Nature’s

genuine

welcome

*****

The Two Bird Feeders, by Kim Hanson

Harlow swung the bird feeders, one in each hand, in rhythm with her steps. Bird seed sprinkled the ground. The late afternoon sun filtered through the hazy clouds of this fault-less October day, illuminating the ethereal quality of the waxy, yellow leaves.

The ravine was just barely past its prime. Aspen trees abounded in this place, thriving in the mugginess of the high water table. Spruce trees, majestic, proud, and erect, modelled their year-round colour of deep evergreen. The fragrance of the bull rushes, so near the end of their life cycle, clung to the air.

My granddaughter noticed none of these things, intent only on finding the right spot.

Leaves already devoid of their life’s blood cloaked the asphalt in a slippery compost, as we made tracks to the old, wooden bridge. Two splintery benches beckoned all.

“This one!” she said.

Climbing up on the square, weathered railing, my hands around her waist, she reached as high as she could. Slipping the wire loop onto the branch, spilling a few more seeds, she jumped down onto the bridge. She looked up to admire her craft, and it was now my turn to hang my feeder. I reached a bit higher and strung mine just above hers.

Harlow is now in her mid-teens. Gone are those cherished days when she loved to craft, to paint, to dance, to walk, with me. All these years later, two empty bird feeders hang, one beneath the other, on the tall aspen tree, by the old wooden bridge, deep in the ravine. I can’t help but smile; no one has disturbed the feeders. All these years later, as I walk the path, my heart is full, reminiscing about a young, sweet child and her grateful grandma.

*****

First Spring, by Marcia Lee Laycock

Green. 
Green so fills my eyes 
I sway 
with spring 
a song 
alive and swelling 
out of winter grey and white

the colour 
in fields and ditches 
dances 
and I wonder 
was there life 
before this day?

Adele Bright is from Okotoks and think the Leighton Art Centre and setting is a beautiful space. I was inspired to write something as the views and lands are spectacular. I also wanted to make use of this opportunity to recognize the previous custodians of the land on which the center stands. Equally, I hoped to allude to a two way relationship with our earth, without being too strident.

Arcana Shanks is a visual artist and experimental vocalist residing in Mooniyang / Tiohtià:ke/ Montrèal, Canada. Her practice is inspired by the entangled connections between humans and more-than-human beings, particularly beings that exist beyond the traditional definitions of life such as fire, water, minerals, and other biological entities. Archetypes of nature are key elements within her artwork: the anthropomorphic “Mother Earth” and “Mother Nature,” the sacred and untamed energy of wild spaces, and the delicate relationship between creation and destruction are core concepts across her portfolio. Shanks’ work is characterized by immersive, multi-sensory elements fused with poetic narrative and storytelling, often creating artworks that cross the boundary between mediums and exist in liminal, hybrid spaces.

Kelly Kaur grew up in Singapore and came to Calgary to get her degrees at the University of Calgary. She is a writer, author, and speaker. She was recognized at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton for her writing and for honoring Punjabi Sikh heritage in her children's book, Howdy, I’m Singh Hari. She was awarded the 2025 South Asian Inspiration Award for Achievement in Arts and Culture (SAIA) and was a recipient of the Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award in 2024. She has a novel, Letters to Singapore. Kelly was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won Honourable Mention in the Creators of Justice Literary Awards, New York. She is a two-time TEDx presenter. Her poems, short stories and nonfiction have been published and landed on the moon, on beer cans, danced on stage, travelled around North Dakota and published in Canadian and international journals and anthologies. She is a reader for the International Human Rights Art Movement, New York.

Kim Hanson writes creatively from her home in Calgary, Alberta. She has come to her craft much later in life. Her debut children's picture book is scheduled for publication by Hancock House in 2027. She has published stories with children's magazines, essays with websites and in print, and articles and patterns for quilt magazines. Kim loves to write about nature and about children. In addition to writing, Kim enjoys spending time with her grandchildren, Jacob and Harlow, practising yoga, and walking her two dogs, Sophie and Bertie.

Marcia Lee Laycock is a prolific writer and speaker with 15 books now in print. Having lived a short distance from the Arctic Circle and a few degrees from the equator, her work is steeped in winter with a few palm trees tossed in for colour. Marcia's focuse is on paying attention and honouring this incredible world in which we live and the one who created it.

During his nighttime excursions out and about on Manassas Island, Artemus had overheard rumblings about degradation and death in the big city. The great horned owl—a truth-seeker and natural skeptic—determined he had to see it for himself. Anything less was mere rumor. He prepared himself for flight, thoroughly preening his feathers and expelling a pellet of fur, bones, and teeth, remnants of the rodent or small rabbit that had been his last meal. He set off at dusk on a field trip into Portland, charting a direct course above the Columbia River Highway, past the tidy but unremarkable burg of Linnton and the Northwest Industrial District, where railroad tracks, storage tanks, and warehouses dominated the skyline.

The elderly cock was careful to fly low, with as few wing-beats as possible, to preserve his energy. He took a westerly hop over the copper-colored bridge connecting the suburbs to the island, then headed due southeast. Smoke from the city’s northeast industrial section choked him and further slowed his journey. He exhaled relief when the tree line above the largest, most popular park appeared in the distance. Though the annual fall leaf display was past its peak, he marveled at the fading oranges, reds, and yellows. It was his favorite time of year. The chill morning air. The best hunting. And winter nesting season was nigh.

He soared beneath the small group of black helicopters hovering above him, ready to zigzag if one of them started to drop. Their rotors moved in time with his wing-flaps. The copters might’ve been feds, possibly homeland security. The raids had picked up steam. There were reports that masked agents had shown up at Kramer’s farm and taken an entire family of seasonal workers away. That much was in the local paper, the Manassas Island Bugle.

Spying the Salmon Street Springs fountain, Artemus felt he was close to the point of engagement. His exceptional hearing, ears that picked up sounds from up to ten miles away, would stand him in good stead. He settled on a high branch in a Gingko tree off Naito Parkway. A perfect perch for discovery. What he witnessed while keeping vigil above the waterfront, more than anything else he’d encountered in his twenty-five years as a rural forest-dweller, stunned and staggered him.

A kyphotic man—black skin, thick salt-and-pepper hair—fell to his knees on the sidewalk, bending over a rectangular plastic bag. It had a zipper on the side with a “Jane Doe” tag attached. Artemus could make that out. The bag’s top was open, revealing a dried-up face. He could hear the man keening. “My wife! My Nelle!” he cried, repeatedly, in a high-pitched wail that seemed to come from the very deepest place inside him. The man’s stooped shoulders shook.

The owl turned his head right, then left. There were hundreds of body bags lined up on downtown streets, functional pouches containing the leftovers of old people who had lost their homes, their health insurance, their dignity, and—at long last—their very right to exist.

These unfortunates had died in poverty, without reasonable end-of-life care or even, it appeared, a second thought. No federal disaster relief personnel had been dispatched. A cadre of fired former employees showed up to fill bags, catalog and tag who they could, and notify families when information was available, preparing the corpses for loading onto refrigerated trucks and, later, gargantuan transoms for disposal.

Downriver, to no one knew where.

Cleanup people in hazmat suits that protected them from cadaver-borne diseases collected the bags. Their company van had a “Where Trash Becomes Treasure” logo on its side.

“Irony is doing some heavy lifting there,” one volunteer was heard to say. She scratched her dreadlocked head and kept on attending to grisly tasks.

Zip. Tie. Tag. Lift.

Flies buzzed around in the mid-autumn air, lighting on this bag and that, looking for a way in. Folks with money, on their way to brunch and business appointments, stepped over the unfortunates laid out on Northeast Hawthorne and Southeast Grand and Northwest Burnside, their Jimmy Choo slingbacks and Cole Haan oxfords making dust marks on the bags’ plastic edges.

The Portland Spirit steamed up the Willamette River, its fancy passengers drinking Italian champagne at midday, oblivious to the carnage.

All the while, Artemus watched and listened. The owl trained his asymmetrical ears on conversations between paramedics and police officers drifting up from the grid below. Not even one spoke honestly or directly about what had happened—they didn’t dare!—but the bald truth was this: across America, from east to west, scores of people died from new and more virulent strain of influenza that hit like a tsunami, the frail elderly left vulnerable and helpless after a cadre of toadies gutted the government’s social welfare programs and immunizations went the way of the dinosaur.

Health care for the poor? Such a joke. Medicare ended in 2030, replaced with personal savings accounts that barely covered aspirin. Pay-to-play rich folks got their stem cell infusions for wonky knees—not to mention brow lifts and Botox—while the have-nots suffered and perished.

“To the victor …” one white-suited do-gooder began, no need to finish. His comrades knew the rest of that story.

Flu deaths were just the tip of the iceberg. Who among the elderly could afford care at the tail end of their journey? Even a middling nursing home room cost upward of ten grand a month. The 250-year plan to abolish democracy made sure of that.

Demeaned, dismissed, and consigned as collateral damage, America’s old folks paid the ultimate price. Spotty access to vaccines meant no protection. No health care meant little opportunity for life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Programs that had kept citizens healthy, fed, clothed, and housed over the generations—imperfectly, but also with intentional care and appropriate empathy—were history.

“The least of these,” Jimmy Carter had called them, biblically so. After a hundred years of living, he hung up his hammer at just the right moment, December 2024, so at least some flags flew at half-staff on the morning of the orange one’s second swearing-in, a tawdry festival of self-congratulatory backslapping.

Artemus’ panoramic view showed him who the people were, the ones who merited saving the most as forests and whole towns in southern California burned because of climate change; books were banned and libraries were defunded; trans people were terrorized; immigrants were rounded up without due process and deported to countries they knew nothing about; journalists were investigated, harassed, and jailed for telling the truth; and women were made to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or die trying to get reproductive health services in certain politically unrepentant red states.

It had been a dark time of dispiritedness and despair. A season out of which could only come redemption, if anything better at all was to rise from the ashes of a country in retreat from itself, from what it had allowed itself to become.

Such unnecessary suffering. Up from Artemus’ throat came an involuntary whistling noise as he hovered over the sad avenues and boulevards and thoroughfares, mourning for humanity. There were fewer red and blue police car flashes. The authorities had dispersed. Dusk was coming. Tonight, the veil would be thin. He left his temporary roost and started back toward his beloved island. The flight home would take less time without daytime distractions.

On his silent approach, the flickering yellow lights of farm workers’ ofrendas came into view, intricate altars memorializing their ancestors, beckoning them back from the next realm, if only for a few hours. Artemus saw them, but the migrants in their homes didn’t see him. Nothing could give him away in the hours of deepest night, not even the bright pink band the animal rehabilitators fastened to his talon after his fierce fight with that big bald eagle. He might have lost his life that day if not for humans with good intentions. If not for the timely phone call and the rush of the ambulance. The skillful folks at Cascades Owl Rescue cared for him in his time of need, nursing him back to health before releasing him back into the wild. Eight weeks of confinement.

Like hundreds of fireflies glowing at once, the ofrendas illuminated the darkness. Artemus breathed in their magic, their mourning, as he descended, He landed without a sound and stumbled around for a safe spot to rest.

It was Día de los Muertos, the day of the dead.

In the morning, at first light, he would go and find Carson McClintock, an ordinary man with an extraordinary dream to save everyone he could from an atrocious end they did not deserve. McClintock, who was meeting the present moment with everything he had to give.

From the author: I'm an essayist and novelist living on a floating home west of Portland, Oregon. This submission is an excerpt from my second novel, CARSON McCLINTOCK IS NOT DEAD YET, an exploration of what could happen to the impoverished elderly at the end of their lives in a near-future America.

My debut novel SUNSHINE GIRL, a lived-experience journalist story, was published by Heliotrope Books of New York in 2025. My writing has also appeared in Newsweek, Hippocampus, The Big Smoke, Nailed magazine, the Timberline Review, Elephant Journal, Mountain Bluebird Magazine, and several anthologies.

Echoes of Puglia

At the top of a narrow stone staircase,

in the white-washed bedroom

of a crumbling farmhouse,

she lay in a wooden platform bed,

shutters unlatched and knocking

in the late afternoon breeze,

echoes of mumbly Italian from

the olive trees beyond,

a lullaby on her heavy eyelids.

It doesn’t matter that she spent the night

face deep in a porcelain toilet,

expunging the bug-eyed shrimp

she ravaged at yesterday’s lunch,

or that she felt too weak

to swat mosquitos off her cheek.

In this moment, she’s celestial,

as close to beautiful as she’s ever been.

For many summers after, she would remember that day,

the fragrant air blowing through the open windows,

the divide between life and death thin as the

percale sheet draped over her bare legs.

Jodi Morton is a designer and poet based in Evanston, IL. Her poems have appeared in The Write Launch, Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Stay connected to Jodi on Instagtam @jodimortondesign.

Mallet & Bloom

My heart became tender

with the mallet of grief and grace.

Not shaped by silence,

but by every echo I tried to bury

and called strength.

Shaped on an anvil

made of storms I never named.

On the spine

of unfinished apologies

that still know my posture.

Each crack,

a lesson.

Each bruise,

a doorway.

opened to the ache of others.

Ash fell like lullabies

on the fields of my chest.

And the wind,

once full of knives,

learned to touch me

without asking for blood.

Moons slept in my throat,

whispering languages

made of salt.

I walked barefoot through mirrored forests

where every branch remembered

a name I forgot.

I drank from a rusted cup,

still warm from the sun that left

without notice.

The stone in my stomach dissolved into soil,

and wildflowers,

uninvited,

grew softly along my ribs.

Grief wore the mask of a lion

but laid its head in my lap.

Now silence sits beside us.

I stay

just to listen.

Dayanna Almeda is a poet based in Tucson, Arizona. Her work explores intimacy, memory, chronic illness, resilience, and the emotional terrain of survival through precise imagery and sensory detail. This is her first submission to a literary press.

American Medical Billing Dept.

They do not call it a body.
They call it an opportunity.

Light pins him open.
The ceiling keeps its distance.

No one has asked yet.
His face waits.

I promise someone will come.
Circles replace what he is called.

Lines decide where he is cut.
Someone measures the noise

inside his chest.
Someone else measures the silence.

A small machine learns his birthday
and deletes it.

Metal enters.
Paper follows.

His mouth opens.
Something inside him agrees.

In another building
a number puts on his coat.

The table hums.
The walls listen.

Outside, he walks out carrying
a second name he did not choose.

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and lifelong New Englander. Her writing explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, memory, and the human experience. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, with work appearing in ONE ART: a journal of poetry, The Berlin Literary Review, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook is forthcoming this spring. Visit her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com or on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.

Water of Life

You’d follow me to the bathroom, 
like 3 baby ducklings, 
all squeals and fleshy rolls.
I’d toss in squishy letters 
and candy-colored finger paints.
You’d plop one at a time
in the lukewarm water, bubbles in the air,
in each other’s hair, best time of day
was let’s get ready for bed.

Now the tub is mine alone, the paints 
long spoiled, the bubbles bad for my vulva. 
Just Epsom salts for my weak ankles 
and lavender oil for my menopausal moods. 
One arthritic toe at a time I ease in, 
my baggy belly a life vest.

Jodi Morton is a designer and poet based in Evanston, IL. Her poems have appeared in The Write Launch, Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Stay connected to Jodi on Instagtam @jodimortondesign.

Darkness

The cliché moment of the cave tour –

when lights click off and the crowd gasps

in awe as suddenly everything is gone.

Few of us see dark like this, so profound

that we must breathe hard or slap ourselves

to believe we are still here.

Our ancestors feared the dark, fought it off

with firelight and a bed of seething coals,

feeling safe within its bright perimeter.

Our comfort is the blinking horde of tiny bulbs,

those wakeful guardians, the night watch

assigned to each electrical convenience.

Small, friendly dots of light decorate the darkness,

prevent the black devouring, allay our mute

terror of flicking suddenly into nothing.

Sharon Scholl is a retired college teacher (Humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website, freeprintmusic.com, that donates her compositions to small Libeal churches. Her poetry collections, Seasons, Remains,Classifieds, Ghosts, are availabe via Amazon Books. Her poems are current in Sligo Press and Sea Crow Press periodicals.

Waterlogged

800 steps from my creaky kitchen door to the warm sand,

to the sun’s glistening runway cast down the center

of Lake Michigan. Past the Friday Morning Swim Club,

congregated as usual, toward the desolate north end of the beach.

No spectators for this swim. Just me and my detritus.

Me and my too-skimpy one-piece, leg cut stretchmark-high.

Down the catwalk I head, one step at a time, into the still,

chilly water. First at my knees, then the hips, over my breasts,

until I rest at the bottom of Lake Michigan, body submerged

like a middle-aged shipwreck, my crusty treasure box

buried with all its wasted gifts.

Jodi Morton is a designer and poet based in Evanston, IL. Her poems have appeared in The Write Launch, Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Stay connected to Jodi on Instagram @jodimortondesign.

Recycling

When Dad had his easy operation
he quit smoking, cold turkey,
and Peggy and I traced and crayoned

the encyclopedia’s glossy plates.
I gave him a cardinal, a goldfinch,
a blue jay and still know those basic colors,

their cocked depictions. Today, near
blind, he’s ready to hand over whatever
can’t be moved—some ’20s textbooks,

Grandpa’s elaborate camera, the table saw
that hasn’t cut much in years and years.
And, newly single, I’m trying to feel sad

about now but grope toward another
notion instead: I should settle again,
start collecting for sons who, in another

thirty-five years, will need to help
clear out a house, haul away quaint
power tools, Mom’s inlaid table, old

floor lamps, a love seat, a junk box
of dusty cup hooks and nails, and
several odd poems featuring birds.


	—first published in Oberon
 

Great Blue Heron

Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.
—Mary Oliver, “October”

Busy inhabiting my world—
blazing car, radio blather,
coffee buzz that wouldn’t last—

I somehow caught a left-hand glimpse,
so quick I didn’t see you flinch,
yet so outstanding, you could’ve been

a plastic cousin to the prank flamingos
that another morning
enthralled my neighbor’s lawn.

Stark still, ankle-deep
in that transitory water,
only the one side, one-eyed,

wide as disbelief, you looked
just like you looked, posed
in the Natural History Museum,

1963: for again,
all those slender angles,
the spear of your bill,

that deathless intensity
marking your stick-form way, only
now in a mid-May puddle poised

between the intersecting rushes
eastbound, 196, southbound, 31.
And you, still doing

what you’ve never known
you do, still finding your life
wherever you find yourself—

Great Blue Heron, cont’d.

while I, still fixated as always
on finding myself,
as if that were to find a life,

saw again how wildly
I am alive—
how I always want to know it.


	—first published in Ruminate

D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press).
https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

Forensic Files

Not my preferred TV fare, and yet

it confirms my faith in the power

of persistence. The plots lure me

into a tightening noose of evidence

that inch by inch secures the perpetrator.

Every program builds a bulwark

of protection for the truth to be revealed.

Every killer gets his just desserts

and mitigates my horror of what

can happen suddenly to anyone.

With such dogged detectives on each case,

guaranteeing that reason will prevail,

it’s easy to forget how threat of capture

provides no restraint against the worst of us

who come disguised as the best of us.

Sharon Scholl is a retired college teacher (Humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website, freeprintmusic.com, that donates her compositions to small Libeal churches. Her poetry collections, Seasons, Remains,Classifieds, Ghosts, are availabe via Amazon Books. Her poems are current in Sligo Press and Sea Crow Press periodicals.

Flowers

I think of each life as a flower

—Mary Oliver

Please don’t hate me for telling you this, but I’ve never much cared for flowers.

Oh, not because I sneeze and wheeze and choke and fuss whenever I’m near them, though that’s certainly a factor, and unlike Baudelaire, I don’t see them as mal

it’s just that (and I’m almost afraid to admit it)

I’ve never quite felt the rapturous rhapsody or drunken delight or blissful beauty or beatific grace that others, especially those who spend lots of time with their chapped hands in the muddy earth, get when prattling on about foliage, perennials, and open buds (the secret women’s places that were O’Keeffe’s raison d’etre)

and it has always made me a little sad.

Flowers are living things and we all want to live, now more than ever, and suddenly I’m basking in a photosynthetic glow. And I think to myself, maybe this time they won’t droop and die so quickly. Maybe they’ll stay around awhile.

(And then she had an epiphany!)

I vow to be partial to peonies à la Mary Oliver. Like the good doctor W.C. Williams, I will kiss every asphodel I meet in all the backyards of Rutherford, New Jersey. I will pray to the heavens about that mighty force that through the green fuse* drove that flower. I will chant, chant, chant to the sunflowers that William Blake adored (and that Allen Ginsberg co-opted while perhaps inhaling them a bit too deeply in his tenement haze).

And as for those resplendent open-mouthed tulips, so cherished in the Netherlands? Yes, yes, I can almost hear them breathing, just as Plath** did from her godforsaken hospital bed.

But without the melancholia.

*Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”

** Sylvia Plath, “Tulips”

Cindy Hochman is the founder of “100 Proof Copyediting Services,” the editor emerita of the long-running poetry journal First Literary Review-East, and the author of Telling You Everything (Unleash Press, 2022). Her newest book, I Am the Girl, is slated for publication in 2026 by Rain Mountain Press’s Cassandra Series. Cindy resides in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where she meditates, does tai chi, and studies the Russian language.

On Wishing Wisely 1

Your friend in the frozen wasteland, though not plausible, is true to you. It’s for the love of logic you may defer equally to estimable and inestimable depths. An undamped oscillator, you rise to a point of order or move to amend. Between the Planck time and the fabrication of unnatural intelligence the boundary between real and imaginary interlocutors is blurred. There’s no rotation like the slow rotation of the disbelief that you suspended like a mirrored ball. As one Nastasya Filipovna nestles in another, you only regret what your attention spans. Consider the Beethovens in their heart-shaped boxes. Know they disapprove of what your young have done. The image of the visage of the paragon is suitable for framing. In how many ways will the identical quintuplets be arranged? Does every designated subset of seafarers have a patron saint? Does the inventor of the clarinet at least reside outside of space and time?

On Wishing Wisely 2

One butterfly has the best of intentions therefore all have plausible deniability. Should thy dichotomy prove false just add another option and or change the subject. Should your circumstances baffle or fall flat just add a laugh track. Nature hates a vacuum with a passion then Damascus happens. Beards are brought to breakfast. How wide-eyed am I how wide-eyed am I how wide-eyed am I. The equipage, the archipelago, the random and abandoned, seven of those of whom there might have been ten, they also Doppler shift for whom there is no heavenly reward.

On Wishing Wisely 3

As the revision returns nightly to its chrysalis so every celebration short of heavenly reward is premature and every celebration after that unseemly. Extreme sport the enemy of ordinary sport, I say acceleration do to gravity as gravity would be done to, then guess which expert witness will be called on next. When hope bereft of feathers finds no purchase in lieu of the quantity of quality the quantity is inverse to the quality. If seven pray that I be damned and seven pray that I be saved I’ll have a dozen precedents to point to and be rehabilitated daily. To approach is to repel so to withdraw is to attract. There but for the moving averages go I, but for the ratio of love to loss.

On Wishing Wisely 4

The president will see you now. The president will hide then find your keys. There is no monster underneath the bed of nails, no accidental rapture past the barefoot path of glowing coals. Antipathy be accurate or default to approval. Give a man a large prime number and be happy for a day but show that man an algorithm and be happy for an hour. I say, Damn the fatuous beatitudes. Don’t red shift angry. Where the bats and hats leave off the heads of hair begin. Have no imaginary friends before me, said the angel to the innocent bystander, What’s an innocent bystander like you doing in a post apocalypse like this. With veterans of foreign wars as with imaginary friends, you’re innocently gliding on the ice, i.e., as by moonlight propelled.

On Wishing Wisely 5

Attractive nuisances converge conditionally and when rearranged appropriately they may sum to what you want. I’ve been completing sentences so you don’t have to. Fear is the thing without feathers that the influencers hold over the heads of ninety-seven percent of the population. Broken eight-hour clocks are right three times a day. Explanatory variables are continuous not categorical, the salad, entree and dessert are served concurrently and the phenomenon is quantum that confirms the rule of thumb. What is created is not necessarily in nature’s way. I’m shouting crowded theater and crisis actors because speech is free. Neither stability nor entropy may grant to consonance the dissonance’s wish, i.e., to be as happy to be happy as they’re happy to be jostled frivolously. As I say to every astronaut who isolates, The past catastrophe is not a guarantee.

Heikki Huotari wrote his first poem the morning after the major died in the adjacent bed. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published more than 500 poems in literary journals, including Pleiades, Florida Review and The Journal, and in six chapbooks and six collections. He has won one book prize (Star 82 Press) and two chapbook prizes (Gambling The Aisle and Survision Press). His Erdős number is two.

Only I Can Prevent the Collapse of Society

The morning is a whizz of cardamom grinding with espresso. Whiffs of extravagance. I begin the day sipping an oat milk latte with rose water. Journal, scroll, discover I have read both of my free Harper’s articles for the month. Sit in my armchair, legs atop a heating pad atop a pillow atop an ottoman. The inbox warns there is not much time for me to prevent the collapse of society and save every nonprofit or media organization I’ve ever encountered. Support the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s commitment to building international understanding, ensure dear Kenyon Review’s pages continue to represent a wide range of perspectives (though not my perspective) (which they’ve rejected) (...four times) (!), join Lambda Literary in preventing LGBTQ+ lives from being erased from public life entirely. I check, yup, these emails were indeed intended for me. I don’t click to learn more. What in this world can be done with knowledge alone?

My moment of indulgence ends, I have to go. I pocket a crumpled five-dollar bill, my keys. Bop down two flights of stairs. It’s too early for noise, yet my left knee yells. A teach yourself SQL in 24-hours manual sits in the landing. Does it contain secrets that could steer me towards treasure, stability, purpose? Yesterday the university invited a good percent of staff and faculty to separate. Voluntarily. Years back, for a class project, my nephew interviewed my mom about our ancestors. She told him they were slaves. Huh. He stared. Like volunteers who never signed up to volunteer—volunteers separated from their family. Oohh. He’s never about our ancestors again. A colleague calls the voluntary separation offer ‘consensual decoupling.’ We’re on reality TV. We could, perhaps should, take our silly prizes, head our silly ways. But optimism, delusion, sunk cost fallacy, and an awareness we are unlikely to ever be cast elsewhere convince most of us to continue competing for opportunities to continue competing for opportunities, despite knowing the producers might boot us off at any moment. Leave us involuntary penniless.

This might be the last season.

Someone huffs the train ain’t running because some fool jumped in front of it and didn’t even fucking die. Through dog dump, empty potato chip bags, and the contents of many garbage cans, I hopscotch to another station, where, down more stairs, it rains on the platform. Broken caution tap drowns in pools of brown water. One day the 1-train will no longer run. A woman sings ‘Killing Me Softly’ with her whole body. The Lauryn Hill version. I love New York City. That five-dollar bill passes from my black hand to her black hand, leaving me nothing to offer the next three people who, like the institutions who email me all day and myself and my colleagues, urgently need individual support. I regret not grabbing that SQL manual. We could have passed it back and forth. We could have arrived at our destinations with confidence, demonstrated skillsets, and fluency in whatever SQL is.

Sheena Daree Romero is a humorist and doodler based in New York City. Her words have received a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship, won the Miriam Chaikin Prose Award, made the Longreads Best of: Reader Favorites list, and been published in outlets such as Taco Bell Quarterly, Autostraddle, and Passages North. Sheena’s visual art has been exhibited at the Massillon Museum and is forthcoming at the Urban Arts Space. She’s currently [pretending to be] writing her first novel.

Home

The place I carry

like a camel’s hump

so enmeshed it is in memory.

Details like the floral wallpaper

the pitch of a stair tread creak

a familiar rumble of water pipes

wind whistling past my window –

all of it stored behind my skull.

Once a farm house on a country lane,

it was swallowed by a city,

its gardens turned to islands in the concrete,

chickens still clucking in the yard.

It was my life, my childhood world

that vanished like a dream,

turned to landfill and chimney smoke.

Sharon Scholl is a retired college teacher (Humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website, freeprintmusic.com, that donates her compositions to small Libeal churches. Her poetry collections, Seasons, Remains,Classifieds, Ghosts, are availabe via Amazon Books. Her poems are current in Sligo Press and Sea Crow Press periodicals.

Iterations of the Insidious “I”

In this initial iteration it is my intention to instigate the ill-advised vertical pronoun.

In this iteration I will investigate all instances of the irascible and ill-fated vertical pronoun.

In this iteration I will try to interest you in my impish and illicit impulses.

In this iteration I will not be idle, even when I’m iffy, ill, impaired, or invisible.

In this iteration I will insist that idioms are idiosyncratic icons.

In this iteration I will invoke intriguing illusions, even if idiotic, inane, or irrational.

In this iteration I will indicate my impatience with iPhones, iPads, iPods (and their ilk).

In this iteration I will include the incantation “isn’t it ironic?”, which I just heard on iTunes.

In this iteration I’m in Iran, Ireland, India, or Idaho.

In this iteration I’m in Istanbul, Inverness, Innsbruck, or Indianapolis, Indiana.

In this iteration I’m inside my irritable ileum.

In this iteration I’m impetuously imbibing an inspiring Italian intoxicant (Salute!).

In this iteration I’m in the isolated intensity of my itinerant imagination.

In this [ibid.], and in the interim [ad infinitum] … inter alia …inter alia … inter … in …

Cindy Hochman is the founder of “100 Proof Copyediting Services,” the editor emerita of the long-running poetry journal First Literary Review-East, and the author of Telling You Everything (Unleash Press, 2022). Her newest book, I Am the Girl, is slated for publication in 2026 by Rain Mountain Press’s Cassandra Series. Cindy resides in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where she meditates, does tai chi, and studies the Russian language.

Alewives

We’re digging a moat
elbow-deep, for C & T’s castle
near the tide-wash line

where sand’s moist enough
to shape, and the overnight
die-off has scattered.

The odd one’s still silver & shiny,
really pops against
all those grayed-off with rot,

sunbaked as shmears of mayo.
The trench fills, fingers claw & scrape
buried rocks & pebbles,

flecks of sediment & shells
that wedge under my thumb
nail. The stench of die-off kicks up,

& the waves—refill, recede, refill,
cloud it all up into a stirred broth
that settles to a floating lattice.

S.D. Dillon has an MFA from Notre Dame and lives in Michigan. His poetry has appeared recently in SORTES, Last Leaves Magazine, and The Shortlist: Best of BarBar 2024, and he received the 2025 Visual Poetry Award from Bacopa Literary Review. He can be found on Instagram at @sddillon50.

Look, you can see it right over there. You can wave to us at midnight!

It was New Year’s Eve 1985. My mom was pointing out the Sheraton Hotel. You could see it from the second-floor balcony of our house. My oldest sister was 15, my middle sister, 13, and I was 11. My mom and dad were going to the Ricky Nelson concert that night, and they were staying at the Sheraton.

We were excited. We thought this concert would save their marriage. Our happy household had become hugely depressing with closed doors, whispered fights and dad sleeping on the couch. Of course, they thought we had no idea. But we did. Kids know.

A month ago, to everyone’s delight, Dad had pulled a Hail Mary. Ricky Nelson was coming to Dallas. Ricky was my mother’s teen idol, her biggest crush. My Dad came home from work and tossed two tickets to his concert on our kitchen table. Mom screamed like a teenager unhinged. It was the first glimpse I ever had of my mother before me. That she existed before I did. That she had been a teenager before she became Mom. I was embarrassed by her girlish outburst. I wanted to remind her who she was. And then again, I didn’t. It was charming for a minute. She was happy and so was my dad. She flung her arms around him. Was this what they used to be like?

The day of the concert, I sat on the counter in my parents’ master bathroom with my legs dangling over the side. My mom stood next to me in front of the mirror which stretched the length of the wall. We played Ricky Nelson songs; we both knew them all. She had sung them to us starting when we were babies as lullabies. I watched as she carefully applied her makeup. She was glorious and glamorous, like a movie star. She spritzed some perfume in the air and walked through its mist to catch its essence. She spritzed the floral cloud in the air for me, and I floated through its light rain just like my mother, I so wanted to be.

The phone rang. My mother and I thought nothing of it. My dad picked it up downstairs. it was James. James was part of the couple my parents were going to the concert with. He asked my dad if he’d seen the news.

No. my dad replied.

Well, we’re not going to the concert. Ricky’s plane crashed. He died. Concert’s canceled.

My Dad called my mom down to the kitchen where he’d put the phone down. The color had drained from his face. He whispered something in my mother’s ear. She let out a gasp.

Who told you that? she accused my dad.

James. He’s on the phone.

My mom picked up the phone. James put Cissy on. Now! Cissy…..

I could hear Cissy wailing on the other end of the line. And then my mom’s wailing mixed in with hers.

My poor Dad, who’d once been the hero, was now the odd man out. He put his hand on my mother’s shoulder. She quickly swatted his affection away.

Mike, Open the freezer. I have some homemade daiquiri in the plastic tub. Just made it yesterday. Pour me one. No, two. There’s plenty. That’s if somebody hasn’t gotten into it already.

I shrank back. We both knew who she was referring to. Me. My mom made daiquiri once a month and she let my sisters and I taste it. She told us we now knew what it tasted like, but it was only for grown-ups. My sisters followed the rules, but I really liked it. I didn’t know it had alcohol. All I knew was it tasted like the Grape Ice I got at Baskin Robbins after church on Sundays except it was lime. And I knew that in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep after the stress of being 10 or 11, the daiquiri tasted wonderful and helped me sleep. It made all my troubles disappear.

Sure enough, my dad scooped out a scoop with deeply lined finger trails. My mom let it cool to a slush and began giving herself a buzz and a brain freeze to forget the pain. I could relate.

My oldest sister told us to go to our rooms, but I stayed,

Did Mom know Ricky Nelson? I asked my oldest sister.

Yes, she said she was going to his concert.

But, I mean, did she know Ricky Nelson? Had she ever met him?

No, He’s famous. When would she have met him?

Then why is she so sad?

My sister sighed and told me again to go to my room. I walked away more disappointed and confused.

Later, I heard my mom’s crying subside into lonely, fragmented lyrics of Garden Party. I heard the stairs creak over my head as my dad carried her up to bed.

I couldn’t sleep. Was this plane crash the end of my parents’ marriage? Why was my mom so heartbroken? My dad’s hero dream had burnt out with a fiery end. I was mad at Ricky Nelson. I was mad at his plane. I was sad about the pain.

The house went quiet; I snuck into the kitchen. I opened the freezer. I pulled out the tub of daiquiri. I sat in front of the closed freezer door on our kitchen parquet floor. Barefoot in my nightgown, tub in my lap, our family dog came and sat next to me. I dipped my fingers and dragged them through the frozen lime ice, freezing and burning them at the same time. That familiar pain before the numb. Alone, I half-sang and hummed to my dog:

I went to a garden party

To reminisce with my old friends

A chance to share old memories

And play our song again…..

Sara Castaneda is a poet/writer. Her poetry collection, Underdog Bet, was published in 2025 by Pegasus/Vanguard Press. Her work has been featured in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Morsus Vitae and Space & Time Magazine. She is a contributor of poems and flash fiction in A Pot Of Basil, edited by Lorette Luzajic published by The Ekphrastic Review imprint. Sara lives in Dallas, TX with her husband, Scott. They are proudly owned by their dog and three cats.