In every place I’ve watched caravans of sorrow.
I like to believe that people are good.
Sometimes in the spaces, there is fear.
Winged creatures lurch
and soar.

The voice rises on a storm of grackles,
then returns—half elegy, half serenade.
Kids know the difference.

Source & Method

Cento composed on Mother’s Day with lines from the poems published May 7-10, 2024 on The Slowdown (episodes 1112-1115): “Egrets, While War”, Tishani Doshi; “The Mothers”, Jill Bialosky; “Frame Six”, Cheswayo Mphanza; “Sl(e)ight”, Alice White.

Simona Carini was born in Italy. She writes poetry and nonfiction in Northern California, where she lives with her husband. Learn more about her at https://simonacarini.com.

Sara H. Wenger

Each Precious Life

Our brief bout of life,
nestled between two darknesses,
does not rise or fall

upon the granting
of a wish. There is no trick
to being grateful.

Peel the rugged armor,
the easy facade of self
and speak of life as valuable,

as precious, because
the rainbow shines equally
for all who care to look.

Source & Method

Lines taken from The Healer of Shattered Hearts by David J. Wolpe.

Observations from the Outer Edge

A slip of light was jousting with long lances
while I stood here, in the open, lost in myself.

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
all I was doing was breathing.

I can tell by the way the trees beat
I have fallen like a fish into deep water

trapped for life in the closing of the sweet flower.
Great humility fills me.

I am stuck in the mud of my life––
somewhere in space hangs my heart.

Source & Method

Lines taken from 110 Poems of Love and Revelation, edited by Roger Housden. Poets: Jane Hirshfield, Denise Levertov, James Wright, W.B. Yeats, Mirabai, Rilke, Hafez, Anna Swir, Rumi, Edith Sodergran, David Wagoner.

Sara H. Wenger teaches a poetry seminar for first-year students at Arcadia University, Glenside, PA. She also facilitates writing workshops for adults with developmental disabilities and senior citizens at local social service agencies. Sara has been published in Mothers Always Write, Poetica, Poetry Quarterly, Highlights for Children, and Wilderness Literary Journal. She writes a daily haiku.

Tracy Morin

you got high sometimes

Source & Method

Little Engines issue #8 (https://www.littleengines.pub/p/issue-eight-contents-and-a-note). I received this literary magazine as a gift, read it cover to cover, and chopped it up to create a found poem/collage. All text and images were found in this single issue.

Tracy Morin is a Mississippi-based writer and editor who has been a hand model, rock-and-roll drummer, and boxing ringside reporter. Her work has previously appeared in The Rumpus and Necessary Fiction.

Sharon Suzuki-Martinez

The Traffic in Okinawa

According to Google Translate

Heading to Naha,
four to five cars intertwined.
I’m pregnant because of it.

The car is turning over
taking a nap because I’m driving.
I’m having a break.

All the vehicles are rotating
almost across the border
focused on easy steaks, etc.

I don’t have a gun, but
be careful parking.
Beware of the rise.

Due to a military vehicle burst,
the flow is bad in the river.
Protests have begun at the base.

The truck has mounted a rock.
Chaos is to be expected.
There is a storm in the making.

Heading to Yamari,
a meeting between a car and a bike.
I’m so jealous of it.

For beauty,
an accident occurred.
Fire pollen is flying so be careful.

I’m in the middle of the road.
The effects of the pregnancy marathon.
In the middle of the storm.

It’s a lone accident.
Meeting point for deliverance.
There are no lies.

An accident has occurred
in all directions.
Slowly falling apart.

Time to go home is over.
The road is gone.
The wheel is turning.

Source & Method

After a trip to my maternal ancestral homeland, Okinawa, I started following their transit system’s Facebook page. The Google translations of the posts are usually baffling. I took “sentences” from particularly resonant and ominous posts and arranged them to resemble haiku. This process made me wonder if most translated haiku might actually be terrible translations.

Sharon Suzuki-Martinez won the Washington Prize for her latest book, The Loneliest Whale Blues (The Word Works), and the MVP Prize for her first book, The Way of All Flux (New Rivers Press). See more at SharonSuzukiMartinez.com.

Karen Neuberg

Heart of Sight

—a cento

The light called
and I come to the heart
of sight where I ask
what I’m doing here,
ask what I’m going to do
with this ball of string
unravelling
while all the ten-
thousand things
billow, so trusting
I could weep.
There’s a price
for living
and there must be
a word for how light
finds me speaking to the trees
as if I were a birch
among birches
while everywhere
everywhere
everywhere
terrible things
and beautiful things
continue to happen
beside each other.

Source & Method

I keep a document of lines and phrases that I find particularly moving, making a note of the authors and titles. I culled this poem from the document, making slight tweaks to person and tense. The lines are from “Skin-Light”, Natalie Diaz; “Benthos”, Jennifer Spector; ”Pantone 71-4c”, Shayla Lawson; “Syrian Girl Crossing the Border from Greece”, Rustin Larson; “Ancient Air (39)", Li Bai; “The Connoisseuse of Slugs”, Sharon Olds; “Unsigned letter to my stillborn daughter nine years later”, Chelsea Dingman; “Sitting on a Fallen Cedar”, Michael Johnson; “Epistemology”, Catherine Barnett; "What they did yesterday afternoon”, Warsan Shire; “All Night No Sleep Now This”, Jeffrey Morgan.

Karen Neuberg is the author of the full-length poetry collection, PURSUIT (Kelsay Press) and the chapbook, the elephants are asking (Glass Lyre). She lives in Brooklyn, NY and is associate editor of First Literary Review-East.

Jesse Norman

We don’t know how to be here, do we?

—a cento

Are you there, still watching
the wolf at the door?
We’re all of us at this ill-fitting party; bring your longing
but don’t press too hard against a stranger’s.
On lost porches, far off, you are being stitched into a storyline
in the smooth lobe of another’s mind, and there’s too much
of you to see it. How far is it? I can’t
undress from the pressure of the leaves:
I have eaten hotdogs in ballparks under the surge of the blue, moved
because the clouds are bruises. What to want? You are small
and looking, outside Fresno, rattling from the whiskey,
and if you vomit this time, I will hold you. Take the dog, go
through poplar deeper into hills.

Are you there, still watching
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
in the windy dawn, where the heart lay
in a gray lace of unborn moth eggs? Thru all the cities
and all the scenes desire sways ascent into me: me?
I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying
on each passing town for size: what subways what taxis
what cafes! I hear you’ve moved house to Fathom
Lake, under the aurora borealis. How far is it?
This is it everything leaks we draw heavy
to make it speak. What to want? God, just to sleep
in your car while you’re driving, lay in your lap
when I’m crying. At four in the morning, I went to this temple,
and all these monks were chanting, and I didn’t feel anything.

Are you there, still watching
these pink fish among mountains? I kneel
by the pond and ask where I am going; desire doesn’t
attempt to define, it simply responds, with a burgeoning
singleheartedness, to the lure: a crow among scarecrows searches
for a partner, then turns into a 200-watt bulb that shines
its light on me. Isn’t that what we want? In dense fog,
thinner than any keyhole, you could walk into a name
for yourself: your legs are cold, there’s frost on your shoes, and
the cabbie calls impatiently from the street, how far is it?
Someone far away texts: My favourite church sign in a while: Transfigure it out.
…I really want that, I say, quietly. Through whom? A horizon of buckwheat flowers?
There are only animal trails, and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe.

Source & Method

With select themes in mind, I took my poetry bookshelf, my favourite songs, and my favourite films, to task to make this cento, eager to see how each would come into conversation with each other and the rest. For the citations of the lines in this cento, click here.

Jesse Norman was born in Comox, on the unceded territory of the K’ómoks First Nation. His poetry is published in CV2, as well as Drift: Poems and Poets from the Comox Valley. He was the 2022 recipient of the Philip Pickering Award in Poetry.

Nina Nazir

Zenith

Source & Method

I search for tiny phrases that I turn into longer lines. I then highlight these by drawing/painting around the selected text, often with imagery inspired by the words.

Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani poet, artist, and avid multi-potentialite based in Birmingham, UK. She's had work published in various journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Sunday Mornings at the River, to name a few. You can usually find her writing in her local favourite café, on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir or X (Twitter): @NusraNazir. She blogs regularly at www.sunrarainz.wordpress.com.

Bob Lucky

Windows

lovers in search of myths
don’t belong here
why travel in search of
new places of exile
to see our love waiting
in a family photograph

we travel in search of windows
in every language
the songs of love
are the songs of distance
scrawled on train windows

Source & Method

An erasure poem of the second section of Mahmoud Darwish's “Four Personal Addresses” in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, translated by Munir Akash and Caroline Forché (with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003.

An Observation

in the present age
murder
best seen from space
and then smelled
is nothing remarkable
a dirty thing
coloring all suffering

Source & Method

An erasure poem of Gertrude Stein’s “Cranberries,” in Tender Buttons (Claire Marie, New York, 1914). The title is part of her original poem.

Bob Lucky lives in Portugal. He is the author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), and My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019).

Emma Dandy

Distemper

I.

Grinding, historically relegated,
casting back and forth, drowning realm, people
marked by failure to adapt, powerful
void at its centre. Haunted by bygone

wealth, a museum. In a neglected
corner, distinctive inquiry crumbled.
Now inactive it often looked, sighted
unexpectedly from far, like my home.

Soon it will seem far more distant. Spirit
of the place sluiced out and no hint of what
was happening below us. Glowering
mausoleum, sinister, alien.

While you saw it with something that was like
affection, it was a blight.

II.

I’ve no axe to grind, but the red, the white,
the atmosphere aggressive, government
even more than usual a disaster.
Due to be decommissioned and shut down,

engulfed by spoil heaps visible for miles.
Protests rise and surge. Imagine the mood,
gloomy, and the global implications
of trampling the delicate. A sort of

righteous sanctimony. The biggest loss,
it's virtually impossible to earn
a living wage. They will say that I am
irresponsible, ill-educated,

whatever, whatever. You learn not to
worry. It’s a wonderful place to live.

III.

Isolated. I want to tell you how
desperate people are. We hope a heavy
cloud will be lifted, anything to which
we can fasten our dreams. I’m terrified,

overshadowed by our ambivalence.
Cut off. Unable to face destruction.
Too painful, the loss of place. To object,
having your peace disturbed, is an attack

and the ruin of all that’s beautiful,
enough to make you gasp. Matching your worst
imaginings. A comic, accused of
not caring, goes on to talk of brewing

ugliness. Its scale not accidental.
An academic gets too close to see.

IV.

Myself, born and raised a problem, chose to
speak into the red zone, the nightmare depths,
this maze. I could not survive the journey.
Energy expended, cooling, cooling,

cooling, spent and discharged into the sea.
The riddle impossible to perceive
let alone interpret. And the sheer noise,
a mystery. To look up was dizzying

to look down, dizzying, the whole experience
was dizzying. A part of me was screaming
with terror. This quiet stretch of the coast.
I understood, as I had not before,

days from the end, that if there was a choice,
but that was the point. There was no choice.

Source & Method

I found this poem in an article in Granta magazine titled "On Sizewell C" by William Atkins by circling words and phrases that spoke to me of our contemporary social condition.

Emma Dandy is an emerging poet with an interest in exploring what it means to be human through a fracturing of language. She is an alumnus of the Out-Spoken Academy.

Sarah Nichols

she was anesthetized delivering

Source & Method

The sources for this piece is Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Blonde. I tend to sit with individual pages of a text for a while, and look for a skein of a poem to emerge. The images I use for the collage feel more random and could have nothing to do with the poem.

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of eleven chapbooks of poetry and non fiction, and recently completed a full length manuscript.

Susan Barry-Schulz

dark splendid flower

geraniums, soft with light

Source & Method

Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway inspired me to engage with the frequent inclusion of flowers throughout this source text. I used pastels, colored pencils, ink, and collage elements, working directly on the book's intact pages.

Susan Barry-Schulz is a poet and collage artist who grew up just outside of Buffalo, NY. Her work has appeared in SWWIM, Bending Genres, Stone Canoe, Heron Tree, and in many other print and online journals and anthologies.

Dagne Forrest

Cento of Unknowns

Not the bell, but the smaller sounds, barely noticeable
and sometimes like blackout, all that time wasted sleeping

I want to know why the clouds
will begin, certain and with nothing—

what is it like to catch up to light?

I am planetary with sugar & double vision
Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

I want to shake and let myself go loose and double like a cloud
the color of dust & tremor, the soft meat
a scattering of white doves.

After 24 days, I am still trying to be a noun
floating between the speechless reeds I always wake like this

I know there are steep exits all around us
and the sky is a net that can’t catch you

I don’t want to love that blue anymore

or the dark shoulders of the trees
but I don’t do it. I want to live.

I could say it was light from stars
and a dark I have not seen before—
aren’t they beautiful enough

Cling and remind me – we are the weeds
the last light and the dark stretch ahead.

Source & Method

Cento: “Stop Shaking”, Carl Phillips; “I Have a Time Machine”, Brenda Shaughnessy; “A Five-Year Old Asks His Mother”, Eve Joseph; “Bird Left Behind”, Sophie Cabot Black; “Before Completion”, Arthur Sze; “November Song”, Wanda Coleman; “My God, It's Full of Stars”, Tracy K. Smith; "Captain Lovell, ["My eyes are shaky and glimmer like the stars"]", Gabrielle Calvocoressi; “Salt to Make a Sea”, Renee Ashley; “Miracle Mart”, Wisława Symborska (trans. Adam Czerniawski); “Untitled (2004)”, Victoria Chang; “Severed Head Floating Downriver”, Alice Oswald; “Portrait of a Couple on a Cliff After Twenty Years Together”, Kelli Russell Agodon; “Counting”, Michelle Boisseau; “OK, Earth”, Jason Schneiderman; “Just Lying on the Grass at Blackwater”, Mary Oliver; “I Go Back to May 1937”, Sharon Olds; “White Clover”, Marvin Bell; “What the End is For”, Jorie Graham; “At Night the States”, Alice Notley; “On a Pink Moon”, Ada Limón; “The World in the Evening”, Rachel Sherwood.

Fever Dream Cento

I remember you there like a fever of heartache,
always awake, acres of swaying
oozy pink, infected apricot.

I wanted to make myself like the ravine
sentenced to an exile that sees, hears, and thinks,
What are we without this?

Trails are beginning to fray already:
the night is full of holes and we
admit that there is nothing left to do.

I knew I should make myself get up,
taste pain, roll it on my tongue, it’s good
the first time you see the sun,

you who have made bright things from shadows,
you’ll need your wits about you.
It is serious, it is irreversible, it is going, going.

Unfurling its cape of blackbirds,
day after day breaks
in a faint line.

Source & Method

Cento: “Song on a Dark Night”, Norman Macleod; “We Would Never Sleep”, David Hernandez; “The Brilliant Fragments”, Hadara Bar-Nadav; “I Wanted to Make Myself Like the Ravine”, Hannah Gamble; “Darkness of the Subjunctive”, Paul Hoover; “The Empty Glass”, Louise Glück; “Skywriting”, Charles Tomlinson; “Push the button, hear the sound”, Helen Mort; “Flatirons”, David Yezzi; “Dust”, Dorianne Laux; "Daffodils”, Alicia Ostriker; “Elegy for a Gopher”, Ellen Bass; “Birds Appearing in a Dream”, Michael Collier; "Mrs. Adam”, Kathleen Norris; “Go”, Kathleen Ossip; “Truant”, Margaret Hasse; “Blood Honey”, Chana Bloch; "The Story of the End of the Story”, James Galvin.

Dagne Forrest is a Canadian poet with recent work forthcoming or appearing in The Inflectionist Review, Pinhole Poetry, december magazine, and On the Seawall. She belongs to Painted Bride Quarterly’s senior editorial and podcast teams.

MJ Mello

Voices all gone quiet

Source & Method

A postcard with collage and cut-up text from old books.

MJ Mello, a New England writer and collagist, has poems published in Heron’s Nest, Modern Haiku, and Snapshot Press, among others.

Unlost is edited by Dale Wisely, Ken Chau, Howie Good, and Tom Fugalli. Roo Black is founding editor emeritus. Our staff osteopath / astrogastronomist is the Reverend Doctor Curgent Udex, O.D., Ph.D. Our thanks to the contributors to this issue and all who submitted their work.

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