Maya's Micros
As a supplement to our main issue of The Closed Eye Open, we have an ongoing feature called Maya’s Micros. As the name suggests, it will be curated by contributing editor Maya Highland and will exclusively feature short form writing.
Since it can be a long wait between issues, we’ve decided to keep the creativity rolling by focusing on the littlest form of creative writing—micros. Whether you consider them micro-poems or micro-fictions, they are welcome here…as long as each individual piece is 108 or fewer. (Why 108, you may ask? Have fun speculating…)
We like the idea of saying a lot in a small space–the complexity of self-expression in balance with an economy of language. And of course, since they are short, they can be enjoyed within a few moments–perhaps a line or phrase sticking with you to carry along for a while.
We will update Maya’s Micros in small “batches” a few times per month until our next full issue is ready for release.
If you like what you see and would like to get e-mail updates, please e-mail us at theclosedeyeopen@gmail.com.
Click here to submit your micros for publication.
Also, you may follow us on Instagram @theclosedeyeopen.
July 2022
Batch 039: 07/29/22
Zach Trabona
Painting
walking past midnight
watching lightning bugs stipple
the forest canvas
Trapper Markelz
The Longest Echo
I live in a world of air conditioning.
The world shudders—insects bite
above my elbow skin
—ruin the morning.
There are pests & there is pain,
& they both compete
in the world championships
of desolate.
The bird names I do not know
form a choir, the trees
a crowd of applause,
the sun a repetitive conductor—
swinging a hand
in four-quarter motion.
I’m good with pretty much anything.
I will move
at the pace of your direction.
This world is a piano chord held
with sustain pedal,
a long drone, all of us silent
waiting to break open.
Micah McGurk
The Diving Jade
One Ohio summer
Dad brought back
a jade keychain
from far away lands.
I took it with me to the quarry.
I swam with it
and dove with it all day.
I would loop it
onto my finger
and hold the cold
jade in my hand
like King Kong.
When I would rest.
I would read its cracks
and corners
in the sunshine
and watch dark lines
get darker and let it dry
to see it change.
Only to take it back
and hold it,
clutch it once more
and dive back into
the cleansing water of the world.
Mia X. Perez
To Be Born
Hidden among the stars,
there is a hive,
a ludic egg.
Its hum,
heard from below,
is a dirge:
grooves of perfect music
impressed in the broken shells of us.
We sink in kisses and dissonance.
Our spectral honey bodies weighted
like windows with morning light.
L. Ward Abel
Still
A short memory of winter
like childbirth they say
sustains this oval year.
A sleeping tree peers
through window-frost
still scares the children
but so-what to icy winds:
they’ll soon wither
at the sight of July.
That’s when the water
barely
moves.
Note: this poem was first published in The Whisky Blot.
Contributor Information
Zach Trabona graduated from Colorado State University with an English degree and a concentration in Creative Writing. He resides in North Carolina. His work has appeared in The Closed Eye Open. Instagram @poetrybyzvt
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Trapper Markelz is a poet, husband, and father of four, who writes from Boston, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in the journals Baltimore Review, Stillwater Review, The Moving Force Journal, Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, High Shelf Press, Dillydoun Review, and others. You can learn more about him at trappermarkelz.com.
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Micah McGurk is a writer from Kentucky. He studied screenwriting at UCLA and has an MFA from EKU. You can find a short story of his entitled “My Face Knows Winter” at Prometheus Dreaming, and his Twitter is @Micah_McGurk.
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Mia X. Perez is a Comparative Literature student at CUNY Graduate Center. Unfaithful to any one form of writing, she has published poems in The Grief Diaries as well as music reviews in BUST Magazine. She enjoys knitting and sitting in silence with her cat Marlowe.
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L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals (Rattle, Versal, The Reader, Worcester Review, Riverbed Review, Honest Ulsterman, and others), including nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web. He is the author of three full collections and ten chapbooks of poetry, including American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), A Jerusalem of Ponds (Erbacce-Press, 2016), and his latest collection, The Width of Here (Silver Bow, 2021). He is a reformed lawyer, he writes and plays music, and he teaches literature. Abel resides in rural Georgia.
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July 2022
Batch 038: 07/15/22
Alexus Brown
Cactus
planted in the sun
vigor and psalmist
punctured skin, weeping
joy in a dry, barren land
R. Olaf Erich
Coyote’s Howl
When you hear the Coyote howl
On a moonless night,
Beware the Wolf!
Everything is in shadow
When there is no light.
Gerry Sloan
Surprise Lilies
The “Naked Ladies” start their perennial
striptease as the summer slips away.
I doubt if my great-aunt named them,
though she certainly enjoyed repeating
the words, a vestige from Victorian times
when mere assonance could titillate.
Nary a leaf in sight, not even the lone
fig-leaf that once covered her King David,
pink pinwheel stuck on a long green stalk,
spinning into infinity.
Cameron Chiovitti
Peter Siegenthaler
Useless wonder
the useless wonder:
leaf winking among
thousands on gray
morning hillside another
no pattern no
seductive pragmatics these
days I have
trouble beginning
Contributor Information
Alexus Brown is a preschool teacher. She graduated from the University of South Florida (Go Bulls) with a B.A. in English (Creative Writing). She enjoys reading, writing poetry, and spending time with her family. She’s currently working on a short poetry collection titled, For the Boys I Call Nephews.
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R. Olaf Erich has been writing poetry as a hobby for over 4 decades. Since 1977, he has been published approximately 26 times by such generous publishers as Wingless Dreamer, Ravensperch, Poetry Press, and Wisconsin Review to name a few. Other poems have been accepted or added to anthologies. Most recently he was accepted for an anthology Turning the Corner published by Eber and Wein that will be released later this year. He has BS degrees in Philosophy concentration in Religious Studies and Philosophy concentration in Environmental Ethics.
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Gerry Sloan is a retired music professor living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His poetry collections are Paper Lanterns (2011) and Crossings: A Memoir in Verse (2017) plus five chapbooks, including one in Mandarin. Recent work has appeared in Nebo, Slant, Cantos, Arkansas Review, Xavier Review, Elder Mountain (featured poet), and Cave Region Review (featured poet).
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Cameron Chiovitti, born in Montreal, Quebec, is working towards their BFA in creative writing at OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario. They use poetry to explore what it truly means to be human through the context of their experiences. Each poem is a safe space for their inner darkness to live, which they hope to extend to any reader looking to feel seen. Cameron’s most notable publications include Lavender Lime Literary, Anti Heroin Chic, LSTW, and their self-published chapbook, Paint My Skin With Sweetness. All of their work currently available online can be found at https://linktr.ee/maskofpoetry.
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Born and raised near Boston, Peter Siegenthaler lived in Philadelphia, Hong Kong, Austin, and Tokyo before returning to New England permanently in 2019. Formerly an editor at The American Poetry Review, Zoland Books, and Oxford University Press, he teaches Japanese and world history and researches the paths historic preservation and heritage tourism have taken in Japan in the twentieth century and beyond. His literary work has appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Osiris, Compound Eye, and lift.
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June 2022
Batch 037: 06/14/22
Lilian McCarthy
Knitting
I write to weave –
Wrap sounds around my sweaty palms
Like skeins of wool –
I knit myself a
Sweater of the glorious space around me –
To hold it in
To feel it all
Edward D. Miiller
In Between
In homage to “Right and Left” by Yone Noguchi
To the left, a brown rock, a green boulder, a white stone.
A white-capped blue-green cove to the right.
In between, in haphazard handwriting, a gravel road.
Above, tracings of a silver jet against pure azure.
Browned pine needles, yellowed oak leaves, a silver beer can beneath.
In between, the wind enlightens bared branches.
Ahead, a white-tailed deer, a red clay cliff.
Red-wattled turkey behind, a brownish-yellow coyote further behind.
In between, my obliging shadow joins the omnium-gatherum.
Geoffrey Aitken
inherited
you don’t need to be
a thief
in chased immediacy
to shift means
from one place
to another
unexposed
for improvement
for gain
unnoticed
without discovery
or prosecution
sometimes
it takes generations.
Stephanie Fluckey
Glass
A painful thunk against glass, and I feel
My mortality. The bird, wings bent, is in
The garden bed. I am the arbiter
Of nature’s death.
Not a feather out of place, Eyes
Placid, peaceful. Death is
When we feed the earth again,
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
New life thrives in the past’s
Ashes. Tree’s burst from fallen
Mother’s that nurse them in the
Shade, until they reach the sun.
Thunk, and this time the bird
Shakes off shock, blinks,
Stretches, looks at me and
Realizes the divide between us.
Bill Pendergraft
Love’s Labor
we are in space turning like bees around color
gathering and returning to build
to and from our tasks as straight as sunlight
we do not bend or waiver
we do not know of this or that
we go straight to it
a memory our mothers whispered
as we fell upon our sleep
we have harvested honey
we have smoked the bee
and in her lethargy
stolen all she meant to keep
it is a dream
not of keepers or bees
but the milky sweetness of the work
the melt of honey on the tongue
Contributor Information
Lilian McCarthy (she/they) is a disabled, queer, nonbinary woman who lives in Boston, MA and Dublin, Ireland. She is a Masters candidate in Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin. She enjoys fabric arts, painting, playing with animals, writing, and translating French and Italian work. Lilian works primarily in free verse and short fiction. Her writing attempts to capture how it feels to exist in her disabled and queer body. She has been published in The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Matter Press: Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Ricochet Review, and others. Website: lilianrosemccarthy.me
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Edward D. Miiller has written two chapbooks of poetry, The Moment and the Sequence (2021) and The Rock in the Middle of the Road (2019). He is finishing a third book of poems. He is a professor at The College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Links to his creative nonfiction and poetry available online can be found at www.facebook.com/EdMPoetry. Born in Brooklyn, Miller lives now in the East Village with his husband and their Chihuahua.
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Geoffrey Aitken writes from the edges of mainstream in South Australia on unceded Kaurna land where he manages and shares his lived experience with local (AUS) and international publishers in the UK, US, FR, CN, and CAN). He has recently been published in State of Matter, Hole in the Head Review, Radon Journal, and Déraciné Magazine.
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Stephanie Fluckey is a writer and artist living in the Pacific Northwest. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lindenwood University. When she is not writing to the sound of Seattle rain, she is reading or gardening. Stephanie is the 2022 Guest Editor of Emerging Voices in Fiction at Oyster River Pages. He poem “Silent Night” was published in July 2021 on www.Survivorlit.org.
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Bill Pendergraft founded Environmental Media in 1988 to design and produce environmental education content for government and not-for-profit organizations. He lives in the forest of Caledonia County, Vermont.
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