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.
Dragonflies
Glittering dragonflies
like carnivorous helicopters
swoop in to drink from the pool.
Be glad the genetic dice
has not made them human sized
and us diminutive.
Winnowing the Harvest
The wooden ping pong table in the musty basement buckles under the weight of a neighbor’s forgotten life. Hoarded, boarded or boxed-rusted miscellaneous tools, orphan hangers, unsorted nuts and screws jostle with faded picture albums and jumbles of clothes in sealed plastic bags. More anonymous clutter molders under the warped legs, not important enough to make it up to the tabletop. Everything waiting, waiting for family members to go through the piles before the dumpster comes; a person’s life reduced to simple, quick decisions- recycle, reuse, refuse.
Altars
1.
My books have tumbled
Decades of collecting words
I begin again.
2.
A light shines above
fallen books, crumbling temple.
Words gather like dust.
Chasm
On opposite sides of the yawning fissure, we stretch toward one another. Firmly planted in our own versions of history, we fear losing our balance. If we lean far enough, could we grasp hands? But we would risk falling into the abyss, facing uncomfortable versions of each other’s stories, our trespasses against each other. Tearing open calloused scars, digging into old wounds. Maybe we could find each other in the darkness, pull out our entrails, examine them, then put them back inside, washed clean. We could crawl out together. Maybe it’s easier to stand here, reaching, and say we tried.
Difficult Summer
After a difficult summer
The lilies did not bloom
Not enough water . . . too much sun . . . not enough love
I have learned to give them
Room to breathe
They will bloom next summer
Wendy Blaxland is an award-winning writer. Her poetry has appeared in Australia, England, the United States, and Norway in publications such as Meniscus, Griffel, and Canary. She has also published over 110 books, mainly for children, both fiction and non-fiction. In addition, Wendy is a playwright with over 25 plays produced. Her small family-based theatre company produced her historically-based plays to tour in unusual venues. Wendy lives surrounded by bush near Sydney. Much of her poetry is inspired by the environment in which she lives. But she is a citizen of the world and is passionate about how poetry can vibrate the heartstrings of its people.
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Frank C. Modica is a retired teacher who taught children with special needs for over 34 years. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dust Poetry, New Square, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Lit Shark. Frank’s first chapbook, What We Harvest, nominated for an Eric Hoffer book award, was published in 2021 by Kelsay Books. His second chapbook, Old Friends, was published in 2022 by Cyberwit Press.
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Carla Schick is a queer, nonbinary social justice activist, educator, and writer. They received a 2023 Literary Arts award in poetry from Nomadic Press/SF Foundation. Their works have been anthologized in an RBG tribute chapbook titled when there are nine, Colossus: Body, and in Moonstone Arts Institute anthologies (Pen & Ink & Ekphrasis). They are published in Forum, Milvia St., About Place, A Gathering of the Tribes, and The Write Launch.
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Tiffany Doerr Guerzon is an award-winning freelance writer and nature enthusiast. She loves hiking, traveling, and playing with words.
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MD Bier is a binge reader, and you’ll always find a book with her. Her writing reflects her passion for social change and social issues. Being part of the Project Write Now Community is where she writes and studies. She has been published in the Burningword Literary Journal, Write Launch, Humans of the World, New Brunswick Poetry Anthology, and New Brunswick Windows on the World. MD Bier resides in NJ with her family and dog.
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Mile Marker 25
Too windy to sweat
A ruggedly beautiful day
defiant murmurations whipping
forth and back over wind turbine fields
giants, ever-need cyclops amid parallel
avian migrations and dinosaur trackways
beneath, a mother and child’s footprints, alongside, a six hundred
meter high tree uprooted by the wind, hitherto unnoticed by the populace
of a small town nearby, obliterating the house unwittingly lingering in its shadow.
The end of the earth church
just before I make the turn,
I see it,
the end of the earth
church.
the sign is huge.
the message urgent.
it’s like I’ve never been here before.
It’s 9 a.m., a monday. it’s about to rain.
it’s thundering,
the sky is churning.
the calendar says June;
it was just winter.
everything’s been frozen for years.
I am confused,
the seasons are out of order,
wayward sheep,
who have sensed danger and wandered
into some kind of fall.
nothing is safe anymore;
suddenly it’s the age of letting go.
I’m tempted to fling myself at the feet of the gods,
demand an explanation
from the end of the earth—
church for the almost dead,
the desperate
the forgotten,
lost souls who swerve past the signs
who only show up when it’s already over.
untitled
the only answer
to the questions in my heart
is rain falling down
from the clouds i’m walking through,
rain and what the rain portends
untitled
even way up here
in the Montana mountains
as the years pass by
and my children grow older
thoughts of home reach me with ease
Like a River
In this journey I have missed many boats;
even some of the same boats multiple times.
Some I missed by miles, others minutes.
Like an ocean, my regrets are vast, but not infinite,
because to experience regret is a capability
the absence of which would be worse.
Like a river, my regrets are never the same twice.
watching the office reruns with my son born july 2023
what is amazing about time is
across the mottled canvas you can go back
and add a swipe
of new paint
Haiku For a Lover #1
When you said your feet
Were nude in the wet
Grass all that I could
Born in Pewee Valley, Kentucky, Doug Bootes currently lives in New Mexico and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. His work has been published in the chapbook Heliotropic by Finishing Line Press, Poetry Northwest, On the Run Contemporary Flash Fiction, The Closed Eye Open: Maya’s Micros, World Literature Today, New Limestone Review, The Santa Fe Reporter, and others.
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Lori Landau is an interdisciplinary artist whose work lives at the intersection of poetry, art, and phenomenology. Collectively, her practices aim to challenge the structures that keep us separate from one another, and reconnect us to the sensorial, spiritual, elemental aspects of life. Her work is grounded in practices that perceive, experience, translate and communicate the energetics of emotional exchange between humans and ecology as a means for generating emergent, flourishing futures. Landau holds a Masters in Interdisciplinary Arts and Decolonial Praxis from Goddard College, and she is a PhD student at Southwestern College’s Visionary Practices and Regenerative Leadership program. She is putting the finishing touches on her first full-length book of poems, What a flower knows.
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Scott F. Parker is the author of the poetry collection Possible Logics. He teaches writing at Montana State University.
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Julie Benesh is author of the chapbook About Time published by Cathexis Northwest Press. Her poetry collection Initial Conditions is forthcoming in 2024. She has been published in Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, and many other places. She earned an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and received an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She teaches writing craft workshops at the Newberry Library and has day jobs as a professor, department chair, and management consultant. She holds a PhD in human and organizational systems. Read more at juliebenesh.com.
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Steve Barichko is from Connecticut. His work has most recently appeared in The Bangalore Review. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His first full length poetry collection, Apocrypha, is due out early 2024. Find him on Instagram and X @stevebarichko.
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Jones Irwin teaches Philosophy and Education in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. He has published poetry most recently in Espacio Fronterizo. He has been working on a long series of metafiction which is published with The Decadent Review. His poem “What Will Happen Then?” won the Tofu Ink Press Poetry Prize for 2023. He is currently working on a new book of haiku poems based on the “American Haikus” developed originally by Jack Keroauc. His first poetry chapbook, Ghost Town, was published by Moonstone Press in 2022. His second chapbook, Deep Image or a Painting by Jeffrey Dahmer, will be published by Tofu Ink Press in 2024.
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Sappho Brushes My Hair After I Break Up With My Boyfriend
Someone almost plucked me at the root
Will of love tangible, but
Remember, larkspurs never grow back the same
Us violets have no flowers in our first season
I just wanted to be harvestable
Say sweetness in my scent even when I infect you with ionone
Even in love I forgot what I wanted to be.
In marble carving I offer a final rubbing of stem
Another necessary pollination that halts
Time, so I can enjoy the taste of honey between my teeth.
The Wild Garden
When I speak of my mother there is only silence, and no voice, and nowhere to go, no ship to steer, no anchor to weigh down, no pillar to uphold, no stem to blossom. And I had my weed garden, the little green plants, the trees and saplings that grew wildly in the shadows, along the edge of our yard, repeating patterns of leaves, nothing to stop them. That was my refuge and I wanted it wild and unkempt, not following any rules, not planted in rows, though once in a while I would put in some pansies for color, profoundly purple ones.
Moser’s Worm
no known solution
for the area — rotated or translated
as needed — to cover a tiny annelid’s
tedious ergodic gyrations
and the ten martinis offered
for the answer to an even
more obscure conundrum —
were they ever collected?
to pin abstract thought to skin
fix cognition into clay
Hofstadter’s butterfly must display
itself pressed into graphene
fists of air should grip earth
shadow be sewn to toe —
otherwise only points with no
part, lines with no breadth
A Journey for One Standing Intently Measuring Margins Without Milk
when you decided
that marginal existence
measured in coffee rings
on paper cups was no
longer acceptable,
did your energies dissipate
and become meteoric ice dust that passed
with that comet you watch so wistfully.
The window you’re touching
is opaque when
your eyes don’t see farther
than yesterday,
and the future’s secret isn’t
patterned in dried coffee grounds
ringing the styrofoam cage you’re in.
Movement away requires movement.
Caught and Consumed
What happens
if these words consume me
And I stop living
anywhere but the page?
C.E. Oldham is full of curiosity and a love for poetry, speculative fiction, and fantasy. They graduated from Long Beach State in 2023 with a BA in English Creative Writing. Oldham currently lives in the Bay Area and is an MA student at San Francisco State University.
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Pamela Butler is a neuroscientist who lives in New York City. Her research examines the fragmented ways in which people with severe mental illness sometimes perceive the world and how this plays out in social interactions. She contributes poetry and essays to the World Women in Neuroscience Newsletter.
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E. R. Lutken, a family physician, worked for many years on the Navajo Nation, then taught science and math in rural Colorado for a few more. Now she spends time fishing in Louisiana swamps and mountain streams of New Mexico. Her poems have appeared in Mezzo Cammin, Prime Number, Think, and other journals. Her poetry collection Manifold: poetry of mathematics (3: A Taos Press, 2021) won the New Mexico First Book Award in 2022. Website: www.erlutkenpoetry.com
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Laine Lubar is a West-of-the-Hudson New Yorker. She lives in the hills of Central New York with her partner of 13 years, his daughter, and an assortment of pets. She enjoys hiking, writing, and snow.
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Cynthia van Golen is a neuroscientist, educator, and advisor. She has written poetry on and off her entire life, but she has recently been writing more frequently after beginning a research project investigating the use of poetry therapy in neurological disorders. The project reminded her how much she loves to write and was the spark she needed to begin again. She is also an amateur photographer, particularly enjoying black and white, minimalist, and abstract photography, and frequently uses her photographs as writing prompts for her poems.
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