Category: micro monday

Letter I Wish My Mother Wrote from Virginia | Daniel Lurie

Son, I watched dusk spring a leak into dawn. I only knew it was morning when the cats woke up your sisters. The chemo has been rough, but I thank Hashem they caught it before it was too late. You have to advocate for yourself at the hospitals. Especially with the doctors. You know the mold that you scraped out of the windowpanes with steel wool? It’s started to grow back like frost. I can’t lift my head to see, so Ivy painted birds onto the glass in acrylics. She made it look like the scene from our backyard in Montana, down to the green paint flaking from the old feeder. It has the bluebird duo, the towhee with its demon eyes, the rafter of turkeys, the tanager looking comically out of place… She must’ve used glow-in-the-dark, because I woke in the night and saw a million beating heartbeats. Unsettling, yet comforting, the way they’re there to hold me. The moving company broke all the dishes, so Dana replaced them with plastic ones from Dollar Tree. She gathered the shards and cemented a mosaic pathway leading to the garden, which I have to believe I’ll walk one day. The kitchen is full of such life when your sisters sing off-key and the walls sweat with whatever’s in the oven. They made friends with a kind gentlemen from next door who still has all his hair. I think he’s sweet on me. I never dreamed someone would be interested after your father died, but he rubs my feet while we watch American Pickers, and we don’t say a word, other than that one time he said he’d need to take me dancing.

About the Author:

Daniel Lurie is a Jewish, rural writer, from eastern Montana. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho and is co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, and other publications. Daniel won the 2026 Mississippi Review Prize and phoebe’s 2026 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, selected by Diane Seuss. He served as the 2025-2026 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a 2026-2028 Wallace Stegner Fellow. Find him at danielluriepoetry.com

Rain in October | Barbara Schmitz

In the holy holy holy
            hush now time
autumn sky lets herself
                                   cry
for all that was
for all that was taken
and all that will not come again

About the Author:

Barbara Schmitz taught writing and literature at Northeast College for thirty years, initiating the Visiting Writer Series. She has six books of poetry (two that won the Nebraska Center for the Book Award) and a spiritual memoir. She is a recipient of an Individual Writer Award from the Nebraska Arts Council. Husband Bob and she live on Highway 81.

Homestead | Brad Anderson

My great-grandfather was a homesteader.
President Chester Arthur signed his deed
in eighteen eighty-three.
By that time he had lived there five years,
carved a small farm out of open prairie
and started a young family.
I am proud of how he moved from Denmark
to the Great Plains of the United States.
How with hard work and sweat
he made something out of nothing.

But it wasn’t nothing.
It was land taken from the Pawnee
either by war or broken treaty or outright lying.
A fact we conveniently misremember
or forget entirely.
Colonize is another name for conquest,
for taking something that was not given.
What makes us think we can colonize the stars?
Don’t we think the current residents might object?
Are we the invasive species that will destroy their ecosystem?

I have happy memories of my grandfather’s farm
not far from the original homestead.
Memories not complicated by the absence
of the Pawnee or the buffalo they hunted.
Memories of family gatherings,
of aunts, and uncles, cousins and food.
Grateful for our bounty, for our good fortune.
Unaware of the ghosts on the land around us,
what was lost for our gain,
what was forgotten…
for our happiness.

About the Author:

Brad Anderson started writing poetry as a means of survival during his late wife, LuAnne’s, journey through Alzheimer’s. Poetry helped him deal with her loss. Brad’s poetry has been published in Voices From The Plains, The Gilded Weathervane, and The Sugar House Review. His forthcoming chapbook, Water, Flour, Salt, and Time, from FarmGirl Press, will be released in July. Brad lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and enjoys volunteering at Larksong Writers Place.

Love Fish to Wander (footnoted one-line haiku)  | Jack Phillips

Pisces¹ loves the night to wander² and my soul³ the whole fish.⁴

About the Author:

Jack Phillips is a naturalist, poet, nature writer, and founder of The Naturalist School, a nonprofit organization devoted to wild creativity and poetics of place. He is a Pushcart nominee, a poetry editor for Magpie Zine, and his poetry has appeared in The Dewdrop, Amethyst Review, Wild Roof Journal, Canary, EcoTheo Review, and others. He lives in the Missouri-Kicakatuus watershed and teaches ecopsychology at Creighton University School of Medicine. 

Witch’s Butter | Clif Mason

Yellow brain fungus curls & coils
on wind-toppled, black-dappled,
decaying white birch boles. Look closer.
These luscious, translucent lemon
pudding folds do not feast on the tree itself,
but slowly consume the mycelium
of the rosy crust fungus
directly engorging the rotting birch.
Quiet fête: What eats is eaten in return.

About the Author:

Clif Mason is the author of two full-length poetry collections, AS JAGUARS DREAMED ON THE EARTH’S DARK FACE (a magical realist novel in verse, Cathexis Northwest Press) and KNOCKING THE STARS SENSELESS (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), as well as three chapbooks. His work has appeared in Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, The Classical Outlook, Poet Lore, and Orbis International Literary Journal (UK), among many others.

The Softness I Owe | Joemario Umana

—after Michael Imossan

Because, Michael, when you said you must gift all your tenderness
to the women who planted flowers in your body, I understood.
Because I carry, too, the debt of tenderness to the women in my life.
Unlike you, every man I’ve known has lingered,
bone-deep in presence. They handed down what time had taught
them, and time, through them, keeps teaching.
But where they tried molding a wall, where they tried turning me
into the opposite of tender, the women made me
a garden. Where they taught me to shut the door, flowers
pressed through the hinges, bloomed and held it wide open.
Look, I know how to hold a butterfly and not tear its wings.
I know how to water a flower without drowning it. I know how
to cradle ache and not mistake it for the end. Once,
I almost lost it, my hands curled into the shape
of a tangerine, to summon red out of a man
who called me fruity and laughed. But softness arrived
on time and rescued me, my anger peeled back
into fingers. Not everything needs to be responded
with violence. This, I know, because now, my rage smells
like lavender when it comes. I owe this to the women,
to the supple beings of nature, this softness of mine.
Look at me, velvet as nature. Look at me, not hardened
but held.

About the Author:

Joemario Umana, Swan XVII, is a Nigerian creative writer and performance poet who considers himself a wildflower. A Fellow of the SprinNG Writing Fellowship (2023), he is the co-winner of the Folorunsho Editor Poetry Prize (2025) and the second-place winner of the Rhonda Gail Williford Poetry Prize (2025). He made it into the finalist pool of the Brooklyn Poets Fellowship (2026). He tweets @JoemarioU38615

Her Shanghaied Sailors   |    Tarn Wilson

About the Author:

Tarn Wilson is the author of the books The Slow Farm, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (Wandering Aengus Book Award), and 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. She is taking a break from prose and shamelessly flirting with poetry. She has recently been published in Only Poems, Pedestal, Potomac Review, Rattle, Sweet Lit, and more.

Valentine’s Night in County Clare
by Dan Thompson

Walking away from O’Connor’s pub
on a cold February night in Doolin,
each step further away from the music –
the same jigs and reels already here
two hundred years ago tonight
in this place of austere beauty,
the crashing Atlantic forever tackling
the rocks below the village –
it wasn’t the cold that froze me there
or anything else that might have prepared me
for what I saw when I looked up,
the crystals so thick against the black
I felt I could reach up and grab a handful
without any need for a getaway.

Transfixed,
I called out
Look up!
and just as I,
you stopped
in mid-stride.

A “Wow!” of wonder escaped your lips –
As Above, So Below –
your breath repeating a foot in front
the milky midnight way above.

There we stood,
Herd Boy and Weaving Maiden …

gazing forever across the sky
at all that is and might have been.

About the Author:

Dan Thompson (PhD) is a U.S. Army veteran and former editor-in-chief whose creative and critical work has appeared in a wide range of literary and scholarly journals, including, within the past year, issues of Feral, Canary, Eclectica, The Raven Review, Black Coffee Review, and Jerry Jazz Musician, among others. In an earlier life, he worked as a music producer for educational videos and as a DJ at a country music radio station.