journal of found poetry and art

swirls and shadows people from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us many say a cloudy day is when the day is elegant the world is changing but it's not stopping quite a journey

who are we now

we were all someone else yesterday

Source & Method: Taken from social media posts by Melissa Carter, Dale Edwyna Smith (Iris Murdoch quote), Ana Vargas, Community College of RI, Karina Santos, Gail Butters, Bob Cohen, and Omar Holmon. I first began making daily social media cento poems from my friends’ posts in 2011. I created daily poems from 2011 through 2016, and then sporadically, and made daily poems again during the pandemic from March 2020 through September 2021. These poems captured pop culture, daily life, and collective moments of celebration, and, at times, loss and tragedy. This poem was created during the pandemic and was one where I was striving to find beauty and joy in the words of my friends, as we all did our best to make it through each day of uncertainty and pain.

Wendy Grossman lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and writes poetry, memoir, and personal essays. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Mom Egg Review Online, and her debut poetry chapbook, Dreamcycle: (my days and nights with John Leguizamo), was published by Bottlecap Press.

Vidya Premkumar

Source & Method: After Dark, Haruki Murakami, Tr. Jay Rubin, Vintage, London: 2008, from page 198. I approached the novel as a site of excavation, not interpretation, isolating phrases that already carried compressed tension, philosophical unease, and social insight. The act of finding was intuitive and slow, guided by repetition, pause, and the sense that certain lines resisted being absorbed back into prose. After shaping the poems, I created digital collage artworks in Canva as a parallel compositional process.

Vidya Premkumar is an Indian poet and visual artist working with found poetry, collage, and hybrid forms. Her work explores domestic, urban, and psychological structures through compression, displacement, and image-text dialogue.

sheena daree romero

[how i wonder what we are]

we were going to that room to try and save a life together
to me, one silly task is like another
you can donate your body to science, or hunger
or wash it, if it must be drowned no more
this is moral beauty
all my lady parts in a metal bowl

it was supposed to be hollywood
i have a good bed, and no rifle
to rip out a heart when it is throbbing is hard

there are too many stars in some places, not enough in others
together, we look like poison dart frogs
the small worlds in us enlarging
bees flying like comets and goats
you can tell when someone was born outside

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream dear god, spare me the light of you—
bites this universe in two

to live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral

there was supposed to be shrimp
a galaxy of them twinkling
the stars went out and so did the moon
we’ve lived this all before

Source & Method: This cento was constructed with lines from Louise Bogan, “Cassandra”; Priyanka Bose, “Find Me in the Light”; Lydia Maria Child, “What is beauty?”; E.E. Cummings, "[what if a much of a which of a wind]"; John Donne, “I am a Little World Made Cunningly”; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground; Jeff Gundy, “Mud and Gravel,”; Vievee Francis, “I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again”; Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues”; June Jordan, Moving Towards Home: Political Essays; Dacious Kasoka, “When You Died”; Leah Newsom, “Horseplay”; Camille Rankine, “Self-Portrait as an Out-Fighter”; Nicole Santalucia, “Chicken à la King”; Alison Stine, “Eva” and “The Reformatory”; Adeeba Shahid Talukdar, “Ghazal”; Mark Twain, “Eve’s Diary”; and Fia Zhang Swanson, “Foreigner”.

Sheena Daree Romero is a humorist and doodler based in New York City. Find out more at bookofsheena.com.

Dixie L. Partridge

Almost a Song

Twelve elk sleepwalk out of the forest
Silhouettes, they lean against a ringed moon
In the blue dark
You know you’ve come back home again

No sound, the whole thing
Black and polished with light

You enter the forest, and it seals itself behind you

And sometime later in the lingering
Little by little
Goldlight enters a line of cottonwoods

It’s about the coming and going of hearts

Awaiting Diagnosis

This morning in the mirror
The terror of seeming weak
Always the same doubt
Like a spider web spinning
Judging the depth of every move you make

No one you ask knows
I fail at simple labors

I have my loneliness for company

To be a nomad in in a desert tribe
Follow the trail in a great circle until
Light dies in the west
Sun swells into the desert floor

The moon holds the night like a cup of water

The scent of questions linger
You breathe in measured breaths
Sometimes you meet an end of seeing

Water

Perhaps truth depends on a walk around the lake.
—Wallace Stevens

Among the pools below the falls
Winged insects stitch the surface
A willow bends to water
After a silence of drought, such speech

Always following the rivers
I step down and in
I breathe against the morning
A silence wells up
I could drown here

There at the other side
Where deer tracks enter, water’s erased them

The river has ten thousand tongues
It raises issues so deep
It lives on something deeper

The sky has fallen asleep
What draws us to reflections
When I find the answer I’ll send it to you

I always loved to look beneath things
Low sun on an inland lake
You should have seen that sky

Source & Method: "Almost a Song": Cento from an index of first lines, Poets of the American West, 2010. "Awaiting Diagnosis": First lines found in Southern Poetry Review, Winter 1988, and POEM, May 1996. "Water": From index of first lines, Fresh Water Anthology, 2004.

Dixie L. Partridge grew up in Wyoming and spent most of her adult life along the Columbia River in Washington state. Her poems and essays have appeared widely and won several awards, including the national Eileen W. Barnes Award.

Trudi Sissons

Source & Method: Trudi uses a long-discontinued software program to create digital collages.

Trudi Sissons is an Alberta-based artist who specializes in creating digital media. She aims to engage the viewer with a sense of curiosity through her art. Through her exploration of color, form, and texture, Trudi invites viewers to explore their subconscious and personal symbols. Her work has been published in magazines, books, and exhibited in art shows internationally.

J.I. Kleinberg

Source & Method: found magazine text from In Touch (Jan 2018), The Sun (March 2019), Orion (April 2017), Publishers Weekly (July 22, 2019).

J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, where she tears words out of magazines and stares at them until they turn into poems. Find her on Instagram @jikleinberg.

Amy G. Smith

Closer Than We Appear

I hummed a ghost of a wish—
all the threads of light gathered to me.

Ancient, this sound, the ocean reshaping itself,
patient as a panther on a branch.

Between sighing and awakening from the silence
of sleep, I wait for near darkness, my face

a mirror of the world. This is about change.
Dry from drought, the garden is thirsty

and the conifers bow and curtsy.
I try to find a reckoning for my life.

Source & Method: Cento from the following sources: "Cold Milk" by Martha Browning; "Love Sonnet XLVI" by Pablo Neruda; "At the Edge of the Pacific" by Sharon Pretti; "All I Want, An Ecstatic Death" by Nancy L. Miller; "Awakening" by Charlotte Ward; "To Leonard from Virginia Wolf" by Susan Wooldridge; "Crows Tell My Fortune" by Terry Wolverton; "This is About Change and Soy Sauce" by Kathleen Gunton; "California Dreaming" by Diane Funston; "How do I do the math" by Nancy Fowler. The Neruda poem is from the book, 100 Love Sonnets/Cien sonetos de amor, by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott. All the other poems appear in a single collection: Women in a Golden State, California Poets at 60 and Beyond, edited by Diana Raab & Chryss Yost.

Amy G. Smith writes poems in the face of, well, everything, because what else can a poet do? She has recently been experimenting with visual poetry, finding meaning in the dance between text and visual art.

LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Monosnap 4 erasure poems 2025-12-18 10-25-58.png

Source & Method: Erasure of "Fireflies" by Maya C. Popa. Silhouette drawing by LindaAnn.

LindaAnn LoSchiavo is a Native New Yorker. Poet. Writer. Dramatist. In 2024, she had three poetry books published in three different countries; two won awards. For 2025: Cancer Courts My Mother and Vampire Verses.

Margot Wizansky

Cento on Life and Love

The world, I think, was made by mistake,
a slick rock we’ve got to cross
I love not looking up into the measureless black,
which only makes me think
of the enormous darkness of the future

It has been said that something shines out
from every darkness, that something shines out
in the vast emptiness, where I’m never as wild or alone.

Life, it seemed pretty good to me,
though quiet, I guess, and unspectacular.

Are we in love, Life, are we exclusive, are we forever?

I live among deer. I sit out in the moonlight
and moonlight shines on my knees.

Already the moon was faultless behind the naked limbs,

Night fits down a tight lid over our valley, cauldron-deep

There are night birds in the garden below us, singing

sooner or later I would awaken in that green,
sweet-smelling garden, and I would begin to dream again.

Some poems exist still on the other side of our lives
I don’t understand how a line of verse can fall from the sky
From this vantage point, poetry can still be beautiful.
It can even be valuable, though never wise.
One lives one’s life in the word,
One word and a syllable, word and one syllable
Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe.
Unseen. World-long. Bone music.
God help us.

Do you love a living person absolutely? Tell them now.
You know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull
So much room for love and mayhem

The day reveals the prismatic systems of loss
Today I know I’ve lost no one. My loves are here:
wrists, eyelids, damp toes, all scars

Face I turn to, face I trust, face I trace with grateful fingertips

If your hands, if my thighs.
If your hands on my thighs, if your tongue.

I whisper to you through the hours
I think you can always hear me

This is what we sometimes get if we live long enough. If we are patient with our lives

Margot Wizansky’s poems have appeared in Missouri Review, Bellevue, and elsewhere. She edited What the Poem Knows, won residencies with Carlow University, Innisfree, Ireland, and with Writers@Work. Lily Poetry Review published Wild for Life. Kelsay Books, The Yellow Sweater, and her new collection Random Music in a Small Galaxy (2025).

Source & Method: Cento made of lines from the following poets in order of appearance, some more than once: Charles Wright, “Night River”, “Night Music”, “Charlottesville Nocturne”, “Lost Language”, “Looking Around III", “Body and Soul”, “A Short History of the Shadow”; Kim Addonizio, “Miniatures”; Katharine Coles, “Abandon”; James Richardson, “Late Aubade”; Elliot Weinberger, “The Life of Tu Fu”; Frank X. Gaspar, “There are Three Heavens”, “Do No Harm”; Mary Oliver, “West Wind”; Diane Seuss, “Poetry”; Brenda Hillman, “During an enchantment in the life”; Dorianne Laux, “Facts About the Moon”, “Face Poem”, “Music in the Morning”; Peter Gizzi, “Notes on Sound and Vision,” “Dissociadelic”; Jane Hirshfield, “If the Rise of the Fish”; W.S. Merwin, “At the Bend”.

Jeanne Carey

Source & Method: From The Magic Trail by Grace Moon.

Jeanne Carey is an architect and creative explorer living in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Jennifer Mills Kerr

At Her Table

My mother hands me wooden apples to eat.
Splinters caught in my throat, I try to taste
reassurances, try to say I love her. She points
to Tupperware with sand: the silences my father
swept into corners; she had to kneel, to crawl,
to gather what dreams she could. Hungry, I
sprinkle salt on her grit, taste it–not hemlock
as I had thought, not rotten, not black. To dine
on her dregs of turned honey, pleading for bread.

Source & Method: This is a cento, where I collaged various words from three different poems: Gwendolyn Brooks’ "my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell", Victoria Chang’s "Hemlock 1956", and
Cecilia Wooloch’s "Tiny Servant".

Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle

Think of the storm roaming the sky
uneasily, days that cannot bring you near.

How far north are you by now?

We lived in a pocket of time,
on the unbreathing sides of hills,
a celestial seascape, with white herons
got up as angels.

Of course I could be remembering it all wrong.

Summer is over. Upon the sea, dawn
an unsympathetic yellow–
wasted, wasted minutes that couldn’t be worse.

There are too many waterfalls here,

the crowded streams, a tumult in the heart.

In your next letter, I wish you’d say
the sun is blazing and the sky is blue and

the great light cage has broken up in the air.

Source & Method: I gathered the first lines of Elizabeth Bishop poems collected in Poems (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2011) to create this cento.

Jennifer Mills Kerr lives in Northern California. Her poetry has been recently published in January House, Neologism Poetry Journal, and SWWIM. She hosts art-inspired writing circles online and curates poems on the Poetry-Inspired Substack (@JenniferMillsKerr).

Sheena Graham-George

Source & Method: The Plays of J. M. Barrie - Peter Pan or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1928). I make artist books with found words and found feathers.

Sheena Graham-George is a visual artist based in Orkney who holds a PhD from Glasgow School of Art and an MFA from Southern Illinois University. Sheena has been the recipient of many grants, residencies and prizes.

Janina Aza Karpinska

Source & Method: The Charity Ball, Egon Hostovsky (Heinemann, London, 1957) first experimented on 20 years earlier; worked on page-by-page as a daily 10-minute project more recently, until entirely used up.

Janina Aza Karpinska is a multi-disciplinary artist-poet from the south coast of England. Her erasure-work has been exhibited in Twisted Fairytales, Brighton; Rebound, Site Gallery, Sheffield, and published in: Dwell Time, Three Drops Poetry, Aromatica Poetica, Coalition for Digital Narratives, The Woolfx, Mercurious, Rundelania, Kleksograph, and Vocivia, amongst others.

Janet Ruth

A Glittering

lovers are everything iridescent—
swarms of buzz, sweat and bone
pollen and blossoms.

no strangers to the holy,
they congregate to save themselves,
birth dazzling colors.

they gather primroses to build secret nests
in hollow reeds or empty snail shells,
only release pollen when shaken.

some don’t know how to be seen—
reduced to the risk of extinction—
the story of knowing where to look.

in the meadow the bees just show up,
looking for verified sightings of the missing,
each body curled like a comma in its sarcophagus.

it takes a certain kind of obsessive,
looking for lovers’ favorite places—
golden dust on their faces.

how did they find their way
into the book of mysteries?
questions for every answer.

beauty captured in stacks of sacred days—
the simplest story—these creatures—
our world in bloom for a long time to come.

Source & Method: Erasure from an article titled "This Intrepid Team of Bee Lovers are Doing Everything They Can to Save Rare Native Species from Extinction" in Smithsonian magazine (April/May 2025).

Janet Ruth is a New Mexico research ornithologist and poet whose writing focuses on connections to the natural world. Just like she was excited to find a grasshopper sparrow in a tangle of grass, she's always excited to find a poem in unexpected places.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya

The Dry Spell

In English, we stress the departure of birds.
Maybe we’re just tired.
The question might be asked,
What must always be begun anew?

Last night I dreamt everything in the world.
What was it all about?
How I enjoyed that young man’s singing.
I didn’t know what the words were.
It is his turn to cry,
said the horse sadly

He tried to rouse himself to do work.
His soul was in a bottle on the sill.
After the daily sweeping,
all debts are paid.

All will take place under cover of night.
Maybe we’d better go to sleep.
These people we saw every day
do not talk to the flowers.
A line of smoke rising
covered them as with a thin cloak.

He longs to see the dead.
They were people we saw every day.
Now all he does is read.
We get the stories we deserve.

Source & Method: Cento from The Violet Fairy Book, The Haiku Form, Reading Rilke, and Best Words, Best Order. I pluck books from the shelves, the unlikelier the better. Browse and record wherever my eye lingers. Move them around until something is going somewhere.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a retired psychologist, former German major and reviewer of restaurants, and, three-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. The Beautiful Leaves (poems about her late husband) was published by Bamboo Dart Press, as was Eve the Inventor, a collection of persona prose poems.

Nancy Haskett

News Photos

Like the cities themselves,
we are bombarded and assaulted
with images
of rubble,
old and new architecture
demolished,
people in the streets
with faraway looks tinged with hunger,
hopelessness,
numbing despair,
violence and destruction.
But if we search for other photos,
we can find
a bride
in Gaza
in a veil and white dress,
a groom
in jeans and hooded jacket,
surrounded by tents and hanging laundry,
friends and family
who clap and dance,
silhouetted against the border fence
topped with barbed wire
and in a Syrian
refugee camp,
a green-eyed girl
remains, somehow
hopeful,
writes on her hand
in English and Arabic
one word
love

Cento

The sound of her voice rises and falls,
just a lot of little sparkles in the infinite dark;
he can tell something is burning her tongue,
the way she shapes her mouth around it now,
pressed among strangers in front of a funeral home

Source & Method: "News Photos": This “found” poem contains words and phrases from a Yahoo Travel story published on September 5, 2014 from an interview with photographer, Mimo Khair. References are also made to a photo taken in Gaza with accompanying news story, posted on reuters.com, January 19, 2024. "Cento": The lines in this poem come from numerous poems by Joseph Green, in his books What Water Does at a Time Like This and The End of Forgiveness. He gave permission for the lines to be copied and rearranged into a new poem.

Nancy Haskett is a retired educator whose work has been seen in more than 40 publications, including Ravens Perch, Poem, Monterey Poetry Review, and many more. A collection of her poems, Shadows & Reflections, is now available on Amazon. Nancy enjoys reading, traveling, and spending time with her family in Modesto, California.

Unlost is edited by Dale Wisely, Ken Chau, Howie Good, and Tom Fugalli.

Roo Black is founding editor emeritus. Our cat dental insurance broker/numerologist is Tuberius Frendcaster.

Our thanks to the contributors to this issue and all who submitted their work.

The editors of Unlost and all the Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press journals encourage you to find yourself and stay alive. You are needed.