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.
traced in graphite
or pen
weathered with rote
until another’s thought
treasured as my own
is found to be
an echo of
what was not without
but the absence within
This Source I Drink From
half-seen
and half, concealed
becomes
a million spilling
streams
still is one
floods, filling furrowed fields
with shimmering silver
thins to a
brush-choked rivulet
that disappears
seems clear
in shallows
where it laves
flat sun-skimmed stones
but, like a vein
through the secret heart
of night,
runs deep
To “Vision is Meant to Bring Truth”
He was told, he was loved, he would have loved me. Or,
we all needed a visual of loving in our hearts, making up
a time of innocence. Arduous in the blink of an eye, the fate has
deceived him. We overcome the blooming universal language
of essence resurfaced with gestures merely taken down
by misfortunes. The city wants Love, beguiled beyond
the mystery of magic. You have already written this poem.
Bloomingdales’ is selling “Face Masks.” The very bewitching time of
night, the deep cut into the earth’s center, we all know it. Wander
by the sea, wonder about it, looking in the crystal ball of life that is happening.
Marble
I hold a green and blue
swirled marble in
the palm of my hand.
This fragile sphere
is a miniature
earth—I am larger
than life.
Don’t Whisper
27 emotions are written
on these blank cards, but
no kings, no queens, and no jokers.
I construct a house, but even
a whisper of truth
will collapse these walls.
Antbots
Antbots all over my workshop, in various stages of assembly. I’m drowning in antennae and mandibles. Endless repairs and custom jobs. People love their antbots like they love their pets. We’ve taken on three new technicians: Antonella, Anthony and Anton.
Antonella’s the most skilled. She grinds microlenses for an ant’s mind. Photons: focused, diffracted, reflected through porous nanocarbon, a quantum computer interpreting it all. Antbots are uniquely identical—individuals focused upon contributing to the good of the colony, AKA us—their human overlords.
I watch Antonella at work and realise with a shock of inevitability that we are engineering our replacements. Antbots will inherit the Earth.
George Bandy’s publications include War, Literature & the Arts (USAF), New Millennium Writings, Subprimal Art Poetry, The Baltimore Review, The Saturday Evening Post, and guest commentary for The Boyne City Gazette. His poem “Return from War” won the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Award and was published in Icon. He lives in metropolitan DC and has many friends in low places.
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Melissa Cannon is an old, queer poet who writes in many forms and on many subjects. She has a special interest in tarot, qabalah, mysticism and all aspects of the occult. Some of her recent work appears in Indefinite Space, Sinister Wisdom, and Slant. She lives in Nashville.
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Ann Huang is a Chinese-born, Mexican-raised and US-based author, poet, and filmmaker who published four award-winning collections, most recently a Shaft of Light. Huang’s lyrical poetry speaks of a dreamy state of being by melting present into its past and future, with surrealistic gestures permeating space and time across multiverses. Visit Ann Huang’s poetry site at AnnHuang.com; and her film site at SaffronSplash.com.
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Sophia Falco is the author of her debut poetry chapbook, The Immortal Sunflower (UnCollected Press, 2019), a winner of The Raw Art Review Poetry Chapbook Contest. Falco recently graduated magna cum laude from The University of California, Santa Cruz along with the highest honors in the Literature Department. Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Matters Project, The Esthetic Apostle, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Indolent Books, Wingless Dreamer, among other journals. Instagram @poetsophiafalco1
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Gavin Boyter is a Scottish writer and filmmaker living in London. He has published two travel memoirs about running ludicrously long distances, Downhill from Here and Running the Orient. The latter, to be published in August 2020, charts his 2,300 mile run from Paris to Istanbul, following the 1883 route of the Orient Express.
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Obsidian
Volcanic Glass
Black & Shiny—
All at once.
Peering deep into the
darkness of one’s soul.
Shedding
light
on it.
Evolution
I’ve seen Earth’s sky from space.
We are still fish.
Way
Tao is a home
with many windows –
hallways spacious
Marigolds on a Terrace
What remains in fog
illuminates.
Hollywood Beach
There is no glamour in this.
No substance
says the seagull
pinching at ice cubes on sand—
a momentary heap of lies
discarded by a tourist—
where is the glamour in this
glinting in the sun
like fish so close to the surface
they beg to be consumed.
Transparent shiny bits.
Nothing to nourish the scavenger
who stakes his claim
on this fleeting prize,
protects it from the other birds
while it diminishes,
astonishes.
An Afternoon in Bonny Doon
We slept in a house of screens to keep the bugs out to keep us inside to tempt us with stars crowded in the midnight sky and redwoods that whisper and smile—trees don’t speak. When I woke up, I found that the spiraling labyrinth never really ends. Things atrophy and fall apart, spent leaves drift to porous ground. Suffering persists, demands space, permeates like air. We don’t see our own breath because we can’t possibly waste time. But we might listen in the gully and sigh, green, alongside death.
Bits & Pieces
I long for the blessings of tiny things.
I have wrestled the whole for too long now;
The awe of it is lost to me.
Up and out must go!
It is down and in for me.
I’ll stick my truffling snout where it will do the most good.
In the dirt and dry leaves are treasures –
Brilliant bits and precious pieces;
Already I tingle.
David Eldridge began writing poetry in 1995. From 1995 to 1998, while living in New Orleans, he was inspired to write a lot. But, from 2000 to the Spring of 2020, he wrote relatively little. While staying at home due to Covid-19, he started thinking about his writing and compiled his poems (including an old manuscript and other works) in a new manuscript. He has been writing with much fervor and through that writing has discovered a renewed soul. Professionally, David is an attorney. Personally, he resides in Springfield, Illinois, with his wife and their two daughters.
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Words woven by Erica Waters appear in Weber: The Contemporary West, The Sun Magazine, Camas, CALYX, and The Fiddlehead International Literary Journal, among others. She is commonly spotted in Colorado where she owns and operates Held Space Healing and teaches at Colorado State University (under her maiden name, Airica Parker).
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Kathy Ackerman’s most recent collection of poems, A Quarrel of Atoms, won the 2019 Lena Shull Poetry Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her other books include Coal River Road, The Heart of Revolution, and three poetry chapbooks. She serves as Dean of Arts and Sciences and Writer-in-Residence at Isothermal Community College in Spindale, North Carolina, and lives on a loblolly pine farm in the smallest county in the state.
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Emma Schmitz studied Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz and currently lives in Truckee, California. When not content marketing for her day job or studying to be a beer sommelier, she likes to play outside, ferment all the things, and stitch stuff together (figuratively or not).
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Francis Flavin is a poet, writer and author. In his writing he draws upon his experience as an educator, hockey player, fish and game field worker, public interest lawyer, investigator, and adventurer on four continents. He was the first Alaska State Ombudsman, founding member of the International Ombudsman Steering Committee, and former Director of the Alaska Commission on Judicial Conduct. He is Faculty Emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno. His work has been published in Poetry Quarterly, Poets Choice, Blueline, Pacific Review, Blue Collar Review, La Piccioletta Barca, Three Line Poetry, WestWard Quarterly, and on the website of the Society of Classical Poets. He has received recognition for humor (2017 and 2018) and flash fiction (2018) in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, and in the social impact category of the 2019 Chicagoland Poetry Contest.
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