not prattle. It churns and roils and swirls toward the sea.
The river flows
over all in its path making smooth the jagged rock
and changing course as it wills.
The river has grown full even dwindled down to streams. Yet
it can still push through bedrock
and produce thunderous
waterfalls. The river knows
that there will always be more salmon
and that one day rivers will flow
no more.
The course will then be set.
And the rocks,
well, they can be jagged again if they wish.
Prompt: Poem as Fable Write your poem as a modern-day fable. Choose two objects (animals, articles of clothing, household goods…anything) and personify them. Then tell your tale. Do you characters argue? Are they friends?Strangers? Allow the interactions between the objects to do the work for you. OR Use the fable template to start a deep rewrite of one of your poems.
Yvette R. Murray is an award-winning poet and writer. She has been published in ChestnutReview, Emrys Journal, Litmosphere, A Gathering Together, and others. She is the 2022 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellow, a 2021 Best New Poet selection, a Watering Hole Fellow, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She is a board member of the South Carolina Writer’s Association and the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. Find her on Twitter @MissYvettewrites.
A dim glow in the stable from the one light up in the corner whose cord runs down across the ground and into the house. The horses are writing their night philosophies, corrupting the youth of the moon. When the sun, distracted father, returns at morning, they will act no closer to the truth.
Prompt
In the subfield of mathematics called linear algebra, there is a frequently-given homework exercise that looks like this:
TRUE OR FALSE? If A and B are n× n matrices, then ABA-1=B.
A-1, here, is the inverse matrix of A. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether or not the statement is true, it is easy to see why it might be: surround something with another thing and its opposite, and maybe the first thing will escape unscathed. Maybe.
This prompt is to write a three-sentence prose poem, one sentence of which takes a detail from another work of art—a poem, painting, film, piece of music, anything amenable to the task — and inverts it in some way. My example borrows from this Elizabeth Bishop painting: instead of the cord going up along the ceiling as in Bishop’s original (& therefore being in the house to begin with), in “Care Of” the cord runs down across the ground and into the house.
Tom Snarsky is the author of the poetry collections Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water (both from Ornithopter Press). His book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming in 2025 from Animal Heart Press.
Notice the red tongues of cannas flowering at the front of the house, the dog’s slow arthritic rise as he wiggles over to lick your hand. Ignore the weeds sprouting from between the paving stones, no matter how often I tug them out. Come in and kick off your shoes. Or don’t, the floors never quite clean, littered with pebbles of gravel unlodged from the soles of my trainers after walking the path around the lake. We can visit there later, watch the herons wade majestic, stir the shallows with their legs then dart long beaks beneath the surface to catch their lunch. But for now, help yourself to a drink. Never mind the smudges on the refrigerator, the handle always just a little sticky, the odd dish in the sink. Sit anywhere—at the kitchen island, edges chipped by my son rotating back and forth on the metal chairs, or on the brown chaise that fits perfectly beneath the dining room window, part of an old sectional I couldn’t bear to discard. Come sit beside me as the dew burns away and the sun glides higher over the cottonwoods and pines. The dog will curl at our feet to warm his slow bones as condensation forms on our glasses of mint tea clinking with ice. Don’t bother with a coaster. A mark will remind me you were here .
Writing Prompt
Choose an abstract concept or emotion that might show up to visit, whether it is welcome or unwelcome. Using either second person and/or epistolary form, write a one-sided conversation with that concept/emotion about its visit. Try to incorporate images that illustrate or imply its meaning or feeling and how you are reacting to it. Use at least eight imperative sentences.
[If you hate writing titles (like I do), call your draft “When _______Comes to Call, I _________”]
Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
Being touched By a man who cares About my pleasure
Feels like being the softest kind of tofu— Hot broth boiling, silky & shivering Steeped plump with root and Meat and fungus—
Ready— When you bite into me—
To burst.
Poetry Prompt: The Body Comestible
Write a poem in which you reimagine your body as a specific food. What does it feel like to be that food? How do you smell and taste? What do you feel like to the touch? Do you want to be consumed, or left on the plate? What sensations might your body experience when it finds itself being eaten, digested, thrown out, put in the fridge?
Francesca Leaderis a writer and artist originally from Western Montana. She has poetry published or forthcoming in Hooligan, Broadkill Review, Sho Poetry, Cutbow Quarterly, Door is a Jar, Stanchion, Nixe’s Mate, Bullshit Lit, Streetcake, Literary Mama, Poetry New Zealand, and elsewhere. Learn more about her at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.
LIKE NOW by J-T Kelly. Subpress/CCCP, 2023. 32 pages. $10.
Here are poems that invite you in with details of a life, and omit just enough of the narrative to drop you into a space of reflection. The implied stories in J-T Kelly’s new chapbook LIKE NOW are intriguing enough that the doors left open are impossible to avoid. We walk through them to ask: are we talking about betrayal? Lost love? Redemption? Perhaps all three.
I can’t afford to bring any love with me on the bus. Just look at me like that again and you’ll see. We line up as if. We sit quietly as if.
(from “This Life is Eating Me Alive”)
Pithy, pungent, and direct, J-T Kelly’s poems deliver a view into the profound as it is found in the quotidian, even the banal. House painters are compared to Caravaggio, in “Art History,” a poem mostly about the art of house painting and the mystery of drunkenness—as well as the appropriate saints.
In Kelly’s chapbook, vignettes about college life are interspersed with love poems and stories of a marriage, of griefs, travels, formative experiences, and strong opinions—all crafted with a deft touch and alive on the page, and told with humor – “I have turned the machine that babbles / to face the machine that archives everything” (“Keeping House”) – and a ferocious understated severity – “…Seventeen / seconds–that’s how much time / a driver should get between a sign / and the thing signified. Ideally. / Often it is less” (“Crossing”).
Mid-collection, two gorgeous sonnets face each other. The first, “Christmas Village,” evokes the scalding pain of a holy day turned plastic with consumer displays to the point of sickness and identification of one’s own well-being with the ability to purchase… what? Implied is the question: who would want what’s on offer in that world? On the facing page, “Squall,” by contrast, reveals a potently tender exchange that bears a loving kindness so abundant it spills over into anguish – the sonnet’s lines conveyed in homely detail, death an unavoided presence. I’d go so far as to say the pairing of these two poems is the heart of the collection. We are visiting that contrast between the falsehoods forced on us by the world and the felt realities of the human soul, the fleshly heart. Fear and its overcoming, generosity and withholding, lasting love and lasting anger all make their voices known.
Another of Kelly’s sonnets, “Strata,” demonstrates direct and uncompromised metaphysics, showing the large and small layers of a fallen world. (Amusingly, this poem faces the previously mentioned “Art History”.)
A sweet delight in Like Now is the generous sprinkling of very short poems. Of these tiny gems the shortest two are only nine words each; the longest is 22. I count eight of these, leaving out two or three that are maybe ten words longer. These micro bites cover much ground, and include at least three love poems (it’s a vague boundary; there are a couple more that might be considered love poems.) Here’s one of those micro love poems, “Love Song From a Marriage”:
I hope you know I love you even though. And I hope you love me even though too.
This is a great example of how leaving out the details can make a poem more powerful by orders of magnitude. Implied here is the thought, “even though… whatever! Anything!” which carries a greater weight than any list of marital grievances. The slight awkwardness in the final line break is sweet, like a bashful person digging a toe into the ground (“gosh”) but, you know, saying the thing anyway.
I think, though, that my favorite micro is the opening poem of the collection, “Unsolicited”:
I don’t like to give advice, but if I have to tell you something, it’s this: Don’t tell me what to do.
I’m not going to go into the poem behind the book’s title. I’ll leave that to you to discover and have opinions about, which I hope you will.
Kyla Houbolt has work in Sublunary Review, Barren, Janus, Juke Joint, Moist, Neologism, Ghost City Review, Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere. Her most recent chapbook, But Then I Thought, is now available from Above / Ground Press.
HUNGRY POEM
My mother prides herself on being a Good American
expresses anger when I dismiss myself for five years
first to South Korea, then to Spain; Korea is full of assholes
she says—references a long layover and a fistful of
cashiers that hated her face like I hate my face; you’ll see—
I didn’t see, but I did come back and I did come back to her strong
arm tracing around the kitchen island, a
secret in her pocket most of the time we aren’t sick with
what wouldn’t have been
there is a decrease in white
frontal brain matter in most diagnosed kleptomaniacs, meaning what—
meaning impulse control, meaning behavioral medicine for undone things
white lilies popping up in every yard, blooming refuse to refuse
and how else should I categorize my particular brand of cruelty?
Most of my time is spent thinking up different scenarios that
aren’t sensual, don’t feel sensual, and in every other episode
I’m only here because of that stupid war—insert unknown relatives’ faces
across the airplane’s aisle, my head resting on someone else’s backrest
pointing towards the Atlantic, pointed in any direction other than home
IMPACT SPORT
By age 15 I was a hungry, red wolf.
I worked at JoAnn Fabrics one
summer—scowling women forming
lines at the back of my hangover and a
terrible crush that kept blooming over
floral-patterned fabric beneath my palms.
I scanned coupons and resisted knowing
the definition of a window valance. So
many sighs from women in search
of a texture, a measurement, some small
tool that I could never afford. After I
learned the cameras were decoys,
it was over: stickers, hot-glue guns,
a bounty of expensive scissors I never used.
Most nights I brought sneakers and ran
the four miles back to my childhood home,
happy to be moving in the dark from white light.
It was worse than McDonald’s, which in truth
was fun: working the butt of
every parent’s joke in the ‘90s, living the
worst-case-scenario at 16. Kind of
punk rock the way MJ and I figured out
how to deliver unrecorded beverages
in the drive-thru and pocket the
complicated math. Though it was here
where I found the limitations of my face,
where the fry guy would hold me
by the shoulders in the walk-in freezer
and plant a greasy mouth on mine. And
what else could you do but laugh about it
later with MJ in the same freezer
sitting next to the chilled cookie dough
with a fistful of nuggets, each of you
taking too long of a break, taking
mouthfuls of soft serve and the feeling
that we could never, ever truly die.
Fast-forward to college and I’m at the
campus bookstore, I’m at the library,
I’m cleaning professors’ offices and
watching their sick cats. But worst of all
I’m telemarketing, which was an unknown
quantity of death, a bait-and-switch
operation for selling car listings
with a scripted, ghost’s voice
though the phone. Later,
I’d be back alive and against
the clock trying to find a thrifted
shift that would everlast dancing
in New York City all night. The
origins of the phrase “go-go dancing”
derives from the French a gogo
meaning abundance, meaning galore,
which links to the word la gogue, or a
French word for joy. I don’t know if
I ever found happiness, shaking my
ass over glass cups and faces going
gloss. But most nights in that
mechanical suture I felt like air,
maybe freer than a walk-in freezer,
my time and movement in abundance,
like no one could ever clock me in,
like no one ever could touch me again—
not my face, not my hand, not my teeth,
my, what big—
my, what sharp—
like I’d never eat that red hunger again.
Jessica Q. Stark is the author of Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023), Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020) and four poetry chapbooks, including INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021). She is a Poetry Editor at AGNI and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Florida. She co-organizes the Dreamboat Reading Series in Jacksonville, Florida.
So remind me:
how did the companionable silence
flow between us? Describe,
if you can, the way the current
burnished the sharp rocks, settled
the roiling sediment
onto the stream bed. That gentleness
escapes me.
So many things written down
never happened, so many tides never turned
to wash away words
scratched in sand
and memory.
Jeannie Prinsen lives with her husband, daughter, and son in Kingston, Ontario, where she teaches an online course in essay writing at Queen’s University. Her writing has appeared in Reckon Review, Relief,Juniper Poetry, and elsewhere.
7am. Summer.
Wooden windows hold
negotiations with the
creeping swarm of sunshine:
We'll show you where
all the gaps and splits are.
We'll tell you all about
the carelessly drawn curtains.
But promise us this -
once you're done carving
flaming beams of
dust inside
you'll rush to the orchard
and talk to the mangoes.
Still raw.
Still green.
Shakti Swarup Sahu is a Co-Founder of Floating Canvas Company, an art platform based in India that is working towards making art more accessible. He currently divides his time between Mumbai and Bhubaneswar, his home town. You can find him on Twitter @thatshakti.
Eye level with the world,
we drink gold with the hills
in the morning too.
Something must aggravate our
urge to sneeze
and the memories of a season
the same colour,
or one that we hope is about to be —
Being on the edge of something so embodying,
whether waiting or longing,
is a swell rolling perpetually.
We gather speed. It seems like nothing
will gather us.
Other mornings
I don’t wake
with an ocean inside of me at all —
Sophie Rae-Jordan lives in Pōneke, Aotearoa. She has been interested in writing since she was a young girl and likes the way that it can make her feel both big and small at the same time. Her poetry has been exhibited at Thistle Hall and published by Salty Magazine, Poetry New Zealand, and Mayhem Literary Journal. You can find her on instagram @thatislandwillnotbeperfect.
there's a nightclub where the church used to be.
that's what happens when attendance is down
and electro swing is up – a natural
evolution, whatever the book of genesis or
the local parish community group might say.
it's not much different – thursdays
to saturdays are the sacrament,
a communion of 2-for-1 Jaeger bombs and boutique shots
with names like brain haemorrhage and
total forgiveness. tuneless chanting, organs
pulsing, people looking for somewhere to leave
their sins for a little while.
the stained glass is still there –
history is like blood, wine, your tongue
against mine. it's hard to wash out.
Henry St Leger is a poet and technology reporter based in London. Their work has been featured in Ambit, Agenda, bind, and the Live Canon International Poetry Prize Anthology. They also contributed a series of couplets to the murder mystery video game, Overboard!, which released in 2021.
Moist Poetry Journal 