Category: micro monday

Categories
micro fiction micro monday

The Mother Tree by Georgene Smith Goodin

The Mother Tree | Georgene Smith Goodin

On heat-burdened afternoons, Mama spread a woven blanket under the cottonwood suckling the breast of Lanker’s Hill, the spongy wood of its boughs drooping towards the creek. I napped there, the gurgling water and rustling curtain of leaves more somniferous than any lullaby. After Joseph was born, he napped there, too, until Mama’s strength waned too much to climb that gentle slope.

Daddy planted four suckers from that cottonwood in our yard to capture the roof run-off – how those thirsty trees could drink – but they were really for Mama, an arboreal family echoing ours. They grew ten feet a year, and I balanced across my favorite’s fragile limbs, spreading my weight so as not to split them.

During the years-long drought, Mama saved those trees even though watering was forbidden. At dusk, she dragged out the bright green hose, set it to slowly drip all night. She insisted on doing it herself and I followed her, carrying her IV bag because its pole couldn’t glide across the mat of dead grass our backyard had become. That watering was the closest she got to prayer.

Thunder announced the drought’s end while I stirred the thin soup that was all Mama could stomach. My father raced outside when we heard the crack, mud sucking at his bare feet. I went to tell Mama our trees hadn’t taken the hit but her dry, papery skin was cool, her warmth having slipped away while I stood sentry at the stove.

I went to Lanker’s Hill at dawn, walked along the now thrumming creek. The cottonwood’s crown was in disarray, branches downed and scattered by wind. The bark on the trunk curled back in a diamond-shaped gash but the soft, virgin wood beneath was undamaged. I laid my hand there and swore I felt a pulse. 

A watercolor illustration of a bee on a black circular background.
About the Author:
A woman with glasses smiling by a river, wearing a light-colored patterned coat.

Georgene Smith Goodin’s work has appeared in numerous publications and has won the “Mash Stories” flash fiction competition. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the cartoonist Robert Goodin, and their four children. Follow her on Bluesky, @gsmithgoodin.bsky.social.


Categories
micro monday poetry

Rain in October by Barbara Schmitz


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


Artistic watercolor illustration of a bee on a black circular background.
About the Author:
An elderly woman with short white hair, wearing a silver blouse and a long necklace, stands smiling in a home setting surrounded by indoor plants and a vase of colorful flowers.

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.

Categories
micro monday poetry

Homestead by Brad Anderson

Christian & Dorthea Marie Rasmussen Front: Theodore(Ted) August Rasmussen, Christian Rasmussen, Carl Alfred Rasmussen, Dorthea Marie Rasmussen(Christainsen), Marie Rasmussen(Ibsen), Second: Nels Peter Rasmussen, Harry Rasmussen, Helena Berthina Rasmussen(Helser), Anne Marie Rasmussen(Stienike), Clara Christine Rasmussen(Jensen), Back: Andrew Rasmus Rasmussen, Christian Oswald Rasmussen


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.

Artistic watercolor illustration of a bee on a black circular background.
About the Author:
A smiling man wearing glasses and a plaid shirt, sitting outdoors with greenery in the background.

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.

Historical land grant certificate from the United States, detailing the allocation of land in Nebraska, signed by officials and featuring official seals.
Categories
micro monday poetry

Love Fish to Wander by Jack Phillips


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


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

A poetic text exploring themes of Pisces symbolism, celestial connections, and the essence of love through astrological imagery.
Artistic watercolor illustration of a bee on a black circular background.
About the Author:
Side profile of a man with curly hair and a beard, wearing a blue headband and jacket, surrounded by a natural landscape with fallen leaves.

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. 

Categories
micro monday poetry

Witch’s Butter by Clif Mason

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.

Artistic watercolor illustration of a bee on a black circular background.
About the Author:
Portrait of a man with glasses and a beard, wearing a dark suit jacket over a black and white striped shirt, smiling against a light gray background.

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.

Categories
micro monday poetry

The Softness I Owe by Joemario Umana

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.

Artistic watercolor illustration of a bee on a black circular background.
About the Author:
A young man with short hair, wearing a blue and white checkered shirt, poses against a backdrop of vertical wooden sticks.

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

Categories
micro monday poetry

Her Shanghaied Sailors   |    Tarn Wilson

A poetic description of a female captain leading her crew on a metaphorical journey, emphasizing her unique style, wisdom, and nurturing role.
Artistic watercolor illustration of a bee on a black circular background.
About the Author:
A woman with long blonde hair smiles while resting her chin on her hand, wearing a dark sweater and earrings, with a blurred outdoor background.

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.

Categories
micro monday poetry

Valentine’s Night in County Clare by Dan Thompson

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.

Artistic watercolor illustration of a bee on a black circular background.
About the Author:
A man wearing sunglasses and a graphic t-shirt is taking a selfie outdoors, with a backdrop of mountains and trees.

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.

Categories
micro fiction micro monday short fiction

House Party by Dory Rousos Moore

House Party | Dory Rousos Moore

I start on my second coat of Red Hot, the boldest color of nail polish I could find, carefully painting each nail. Aviva and I sit on our apartment balcony, our shiny legs long on the railing, hot air balloons in primary colors floating above us as everyone starts to arrive. When her new boyfriend’s black Grand Am swerves into our complex, she jumps up, her drink spilling over the edge. The way she falls in love is with a whoosh, like she’s being sucked into a vacuum, and the way I fall in love is by pretending not to. 

Moments later, Raj crosses the parking lot from his apartment to ours with long strides, grinning up at the balloons and clouds drifting toward the horizon. With graduation next weekend, we soon won’t be living close to each other for the first time since college started, and we became friends, walking to classes together and talking the whole way, drinking Red Bulls while studying for our physics exams, our laptops set up on his beer pong table as the sun rose purple-orange outside his front window, a meeting of chemistry and wonder.

In the living room, the roar of the music, bass turned up, vibrates the walls. Conversations punctuate the air with exclamation points, and the strawberry Boones Farm fills my body with soft static. Aviva is making out with her boyfriend in the middle of the room with one hand in the air, like she’s on a rollercoaster or praising God. 

Refilling my solo cup, I look at Raj across the crowded room, watching everywhere his eyes land, his irises the whorls of a fingerprint that I want to press into me. I’ve kissed boys I don’t know at parties, but never the one that I love. When his gaze finds mine, instead of glancing away, I hold on, walking toward him.   

A watercolor illustration of a bee on a black circular background.
About the Author:
Close-up portrait of a smiling woman with long dark hair wearing a blue shirt, sitting inside a vehicle.

Dory Rousos Moore lives in Ohio with her husband, three rambunctious sons, and opinionated rescue dog. This is her first prose publication. Her poetry is forthcoming in Modern Haiku. A dedicated daydreamer, she loves reading for hours and letting her optimism lead the way. You can find her at dorywrites.bsky.social.


Categories
micro monday micro nonfiction

The Taste of Absence by Bethany Bruno

The Taste of Absence | Bethany Bruno


My father drank black Maxwell House from a repurposed Big Gulp cup, the kind with a faded NASCAR logo and a plastic straw he never used. Every morning, long before the world stirred, he filled it to the brim and cradled it between his knees as he drove to work. No cream. No sugar. Just heat, grit, and something close to devotion.

He called it fuel, though he never rushed through it. He sipped slowly at red lights, windows cracked even in July, letting the scent of burnt coffee mix with wet palm air and the steady hum of morning sprinklers. The South Florida sun always rose early, golden and mean, but he met it with caffeine and stubbornness.

On weekends, he used the “Grumpy” mug I bought him when I was twelve. We were at Disney World, sweating through a heat advisory, and I picked it out with the kind of glee only a child feels while gift shopping. Grumpy had always been his nickname. He was famously irritable before his first sip of coffee, muttering through breakfast like the day had personally offended him. 

The mug was heavy, white ceramic, with Grumpy’s furrowed brow and crossed arms printed on the side. I wrapped it in tissue paper and held it behind my back like I had smuggled treasure. He drank from it for years, even after the handle chipped and the cartoon face faded to a ghost of itself.

He died in 2016. Six months from diagnosis to gone. Cancer took his voice first, then his appetite, then the rest. His work boots stayed by the door. His Big Gulp cup stayed on the counter. Some mornings, he still made coffee, but by the end, it was mostly untouched, the steam rising while he slept through the daylight. The bitterness outlasted him.

Since then, I have tried every method of coffee making. French press. Pour-over. Chic glass carafes with wooden collars. None of them feels right. They are too clean, too careful. They don’t know what it means to keep going. The smell of Maxwell House from a plastic tub still carries more weight than any hand-picked Ethiopian blend ever could.

Each morning, I make coffee. I press the button and wait. I listen for the sputter, watch the steam curl into the quiet. I pour a cup and drink it black.

It is not good coffee.

But grief has a way of anchoring itself in the ordinary. It clings to routines, disguises itself as habit. Sometimes I open the cabinet just to look at the Grumpy mug, still tucked behind the others, its handle glued back together with a crooked seam. I never use it. I am afraid the crack will not hold. I am more afraid it will.

Love, when it lingers, finds its voice in the bitterness. It slips into the places we thought we had cleared out. I drink, and he is there.

Still warm. Still rising.

An artistic illustration of a bee in shades of amber and gold against a black background.
About the Author:
A woman with long, wavy hair smiles at the camera, wearing a colorful top and a black cardigan, set against a neutral background.


Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author and amateur historian. Born in Hollywood and raised in Port St. Lucie, she holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her writing has appeared in more than seventy literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, The Huffington Post, The MacGuffin, McSweeney’s, and 3Elements Review. More at bethanybrunowriter.com.