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 in between our full issues.
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.
Nirali
rushing, night-
ride, dawn’s head sister:
let peace root
Discovering
wings explore
stamina; make friends
of each thorn
Monster
Back then, sometimes you’d take your homework into the backyard under the orange trees. If it was late spring, you’d be sprinkled by blossoms, but finals were coming up and with them your anxiety monster even with the sunshine and the sound of crows in the California sky.
That monster, which never left, makes you think what a thing it would be to go back and just read as blossoms drift down on you even though you know it was no better then, but you think maybe you could see it for what it was, maybe that would change everything.
Tragedy of the Common
pigeons opalescent & abundant
alight overlooked.
The Illusionist
The last thing you said wasn’t important.
But I think about it a lot now—
when I’m chewing food or
taking out the trash or
brushing my teeth.
I think about the person you were
when you said it
and compare to
Usual You.
There’s a difference, but actually?
We’re talkin’ crimson vs. scarlet.
Red is red is
all I see.
The words jumble between my ears
and change into other words-
related, relatable.
One after another after another…
relentless rumination.
It’s okay though.
Or—I think it is? Because Usual You said it was.
Which I trust. After all I am only
an apprentice to
the Illusionist.
Maurice Ravel’s Bolero
Heard on Late Night Radio
After a succession of woodwind solos,
the lone trombonist takes a turn
walking the musical tightrope:
entry on an extreme high note
after resting for an eternity
before repeating a melody
the audience has already
heard a dozen times.
Ten years into retirement
my pulse still races—
waiting waiting waiting
for the white-knuckle entrance,
like a wrestler taken to the mat
after chipping the opening high Bb.
Alexis Telyczka is an artist and writer creating out of New Jersey. Her work can be found on her website, www.alexistelyczka.com, as well as in previous issues of Ember Chasm Review (now known as Suburbia Journal), The Athena Review, and Pinky Thinker Press.
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John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. He is the editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder.
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Jolie Kaytes lives in Moscow, Idaho. She is a professor of landscape architecture at Washinton State University and her work explores how landscapes are represented. She is an NEH grant recipient and her writing has appeared in Terrain.org, Weber: the Contemporary West, Camas, and others.
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Mary Lewis is a writer, a lover of french fries, a woman on a quest to be published. She writes best while sharing silence with her dog Bud or tuning out the noise of strangers in a coffee shop.
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Gerry Sloan is a retired music professor living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Collections are Paper Lanterns (2011), Crossings: A Memoir in Verse (2017), and the “chapthology” Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry (2022). Recent work appears in Blood & Bourbon, The Midwest Quarterly, and Mid/South Sonnets.
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Pinned
a pelican in the
air pinned by trust and carrying spring in its bill
a heavy,
hopeful weight
I will see this season (and the next if
I am lucky) / the gratitude pours
out from me and forms a tether
the pelican and I weightless in the air
I am staying
here
I will stay
.here.
the pileated
his demented cry
announces his return
swooping wide winged
land in that maple tree
his red skull
immediately hatchets
where he’d left off yesterday
the cd’s and tinsel I’d hung
ward him off
for a while
and now here he is
not to be fooled
his cry of hilarity
the joke is obviously on me
A Pillar of Pink Hollyhocks
sways in the wind —
Some bloom
like cupped hands
raised to a purple sky —
Others bend
their heads in prayer
as their wrinkled robes
fall to the ground.
A Pleading
The sun-licked
and afflicted
pavement of my
living is littered
with the bones of
lovers and kin.
Consequence, a
stranger to intent.
The horizon,
rolling away over
cascading hillsides,
gouged by rain,
is distant
and indifferent.
I face the jury and
plead self-defense.
A Winter in Three Haiku
winter waking
check the thermostat
slide back under
lakes of fog
appear as light lifts
strange new land
sheltering beside
blasts of artificial heat
potted palm fronds droop
Jessica Cortez is a poet-librarian residing in rural Minnesota. Her long, rambling nature walks often provide writing inspiration as she listens to the wind and watches the seasons change with familiar unpredictability. She lives with the exact right number of children, more than enough animals, and too many mature cottonwood trees to count.
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Carrie Cantalupo Sharp writes poetry and flash fiction and has pieces published in Pike’s Peak, Making Waves, and Poets Night Out. She is currently working on a hybrid chapbook. Carrie lives in rural Northern Michigan in the Bohemian Wood and loves to hike, travel, and read.
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Patricia Cannon has been a Registered Nurse at UCSF since 2001. She has worked in cardiac critical care, neuro intensive care, hemeoncology, school nursing, and currently, in research. Her passion is her faith, photography, and the written word in all its forms. This poem was inspired by the artwork of Patti Mazzoleni and a poetry workshop conducted by Adam Wyeth.
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Daniel Thomas Moran, born in New York City, is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. In the Kingdom of Autumn, was published by Salmon Poetry in Ireland in 2020, who also published his previous collection, A Shed for Wood in 2014. Looking for the Uncertain Past was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2005. In 2005, he was appointed Poet Laureate by The Legislature of Suffolk County, New York. His collected papers are being archived by The Dept. of Special Collections at Stony Brook University. He is a retired Clinical Assistant Professor from Boston University’s School of Dental Medicine, where he delivered the Commencement Address in 2011. He is Arts Editor for The Humanist magazine in Washington, DC. He and his wife Karen live in Webster, New Hampshire.
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Iris Lowe lives in Canberra, Australia with her partner and plants. She writes poetry, personal essays, and articles. Her work has been published in a number of publications including Creatrix Poetry, Burley, and The Canberra Times.
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Bee Charmer
Those smoky, funk notes
Drug me, like a toke.
I put on my black-gold coat.
[You’ll follow what I wrote.]
Not wild swarm,
But my flight from this harm
Sends up flares of alarm.
[Revolt? My wings are torn.]
Bee Keeps
They gather the dead
& dessicate bodies
In windrows, like a fallen crop.
Bead eyes are a dystopic
Harvest’s black seeds.
I must be
Human again—no more
Anthropomorphism.
Can’t wrap my feelers’ feelings
Around this as-if; as if I got
Drunk on honeymead
& dreamed.
That was some primal time:
Perfervid thought in reality over-
Kill. I feel quite human, in my disbelief,
& less free, though I recover
the right to be
what I imagine.
Halved
Peeling a whole orange, skinned
into an eclipse. The tendons
stick to my fingers
as I babble
about hospitality.
Recalling him, whole
a new moon. The habit
of loving him drying out of my pores
as we continue to deny
the loss of it.
Wet Socks
I hate you
like I hate red lights when I’m in a hurry
to sleep away what I never faced yesterday
today I walked around the places where you
flooded my shoes with words I never
reciprocated I am asking you to be quiet but
all I can hear is the sound of my socks wet
with the letters of your middle name for no reason
other than I cannot stand to think of your first.
the cactus
the cactus
is the 7-Eleven
of an alternate universe
where they like their milk oozy and poisonous
and from a dangerously prickly container
in the midst of a cold, remote night
it’s why aliens keep showing up in New Mexico
at odd hours
Smoke
The boy watched his old man’s Pall Mall
Resting on the lip of the ashtray embossed
With the photo of Niagara Falls
While the old man sipped from his
Glass of beer, his morning shot empty
He thought of the smoke as water
First a torrent flowing heavy from
the source before morphing into
A loopy river then dumping into
The ocean
The boy knew it was only a smoke cloud
Coming from his old man’s grit
Temporarily filling ethereal space
Some emptiness, stealing time
Not a means to leave this place
Watching the smoke and wondering . . . is it a blessing or a curse?
Coco Owen has published two chapbooks, Scar let Woe Man (Tammy) and Dress Forms (dancing girl press), and she has been named a finalist in several book contests. Her poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, 1913: A Journal of Forms, CutBank, The Journal, Small Po[r]tions, and Tidal Basin Review, among many others. She works as a psychologist and divides her time between Los Angeles and the Big Island of Hawai’i.
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Lindsay Donovan is a New England poet who graduated from Emerson College in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts in Writing, Literature, and Publishing with a minor in Political Communication. She has been published by Knight’s Library Magazine, Touchstone Literary Magazine, and Wild Roof Journal. She currently works at Milton Academy as part of the Upper School Performing Arts Department where she teaches public speaking, drama, and poetry. Lindsay lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with her partner and three cats, Bowie, Helena, and Tusk.
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Cassidy Fesmire finds herself deeply concerned with the human experience and wishes to communicate her own lived experiences in a way that helps her audience feel less alone inside their souls. Cassidy craves to influence and impact the lives of those who are fighting the battles she continues to face each day, for she never was afforded the chance to find community inside her sufferings.
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David Lott’s poetry has appeared in the earthly periodicals Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Arlington Literary Journal, and Aethlon, as well as in the anthology This Is What America Looks Like (Washington Writers Publishing House, 2021) and in his bilingual (English/Spanish) collection New to Guayama (Finishing Line Press, 2017).
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JD Clapp is based in San Diego, CA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Wrong Turn Literary, Café Lit, The Milk House, Fleas on the Dog, The Whisky Blot, among several others. His story, “One Last Drop,” was a finalist in the 2023 Hemingway Shorts Literary Journal Short Story Competition.
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