Cover image: “Carousel” by Tara Barr
Below, we have featured a small selection of work from Issue VII. The full issue is available for online viewing with the link above.
In addition, you may offer a “tip jar” contribution to our PayPal account.
If you like what you see in the issue, you may also want to check out our ongoing Maya’s Micros feature. As the name suggests, it will be curated by contributing editor Maya Highland and will exclusively feature micro-poetry and micro-fiction pieces.
If you are a writer or artist and want to be considered for upcoming issues, see our Submittable page for the current submissions that are available, including an entry for the cover and artist feature of our next issue.
E-mail us at theclosedeyeopen@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram @theclosedeyeopen.
“Let language shape the world. Let it break the faith of conventional re-creation.”
“Language lives in everything it touches and can be an agent of redemption, the thing that delivers us, paradoxically, from history’s flat, thin, tight and relentless designs, its arrangement of stark pages, and that allows us to find an unconstraining otherness, a free veer from time and place and fate.”
“Language exposes the past to painterly textures. There is pleasure to be found, the writer’s, the reader’s, in a version of the past that escapes the coils of established history and biography and that finds a language, scented, dripping, detailed, for such routine realities as sex, weather and food, for the ravel of a red thread on a woman’s velvet sleeve.”
― Don DeLillo, in “The Power of History”
Featured Selections
Michael Anthony
Pat Phillips West
What Crows Say
Out here forage wherever you can.
Pull every morsel from the soft ground.
Steal what you want. Forget
about fair. Feel certain only
your hunger matters.
Use gravity. Drop things—
snails and hard-shelled nuts from the air.
Stay close to home. Remain
family focused. Hold funerals, sing
a paean for your dead—
solo or as a cacophonous gathering—
a murder, an envoy of grief.
Keep vigil for days.
Let the world pass without worry
about how you are cast—
trickster, thief, nefarious, opportunistic.
Use tools as necessary—
a twig as hook or bread as bait to fish.
Fly, soar, float.
Recognize faces—
especially those who bring harm.
Hold their image in your mind,
hold them accountable
band together scold
and mob them should they return.
Stand up to bullies, regardless of size.
Remember,
we are wise advisors to the gods.
Guliz Mutlu
Sarah Karowski
Not Quite Rock Bottom
It’s not a fall
so much as a sink, gentle
course of water
dispersing around
my thick, heavy form. Like
a feather cascading
in the wind—
delicate descent.
Like the microorganisms
cradle me,
carefully, support
my head, kiss
my crown, protect
my frame when I reach
the bottom, sand
softly misplaced.
Makes me want to stay,
rest, awhile.
Anthony Afairo Nze
Sophia Falco
Yours
Across the grassy field all possible directions seemingly
the same as she walked away becoming a tiny dot on the
horizon with a red umbrella in her left hand to be
relieved from the relentless sun so tiny becoming
a pixel strolling away she twirls the red taking
my heart as she glanced back to get the last
words declaring: “You have the ocean.”
this seemingly infinite source while
her and I our hours limited in this
plane of existence even though
we traveled to the beyond and
back now this disappearing
act, and when she faded
away it was as if I was
hit by a wave that
swept me off
my feet.