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.
I Am Starting to Sleep Like My Mother
When a daughter is unlike her mother in most ways, she’ll be like her mother’s absence instead. No walks in the park, or storybook retellings. No sleep either. Strange that a woman you do not recognize in yourself: in your eyes, your voice, your stature, will find her way into your sleep patterns when she cannot find her way into your being. Funny how a barn owl looks nothing like a black bat and yet they sleep the same.
Dropping Out of School
The shattered coffee cup, a full notebook
Lines and pens scattered across the floor
An open, overturned medicine bottle
The yoga mat, forgotten next to running shoes
That copy of Infinite Jest I have to give to Lara
Still bleeding on the floor
Five separate color swatches from Home Depot
A belt, a caution sign, a wooden birdhouse
Some empty boxes like toothless mouths
The coffee pot is on, dripping, dripping, dripping
Half-done crossword puzzles on school papers
The hair tie, the rotting food, the orchid in the window
Mistranslations and Meteorites
You text me amore, but autocorrect spits
armor, and isn’t that more honest?
A shell, a clink,
a heavy thing worn with too much war.
Your hands — percussion instruments,
clumsy maracas rattling my bones,
shaking loose a song I wasn’t ready to hum.
I dream of you as a half-melted candle,
a soft-bodied planet spiraling,
crashing, leaving
impact craters on my lips.
Love is an outdated map of a city
that burned down years ago —
yet here I am, following street signs,
knocking on your door like a lost meteorite,
half ash, half impossible light.
A Rose for Gertrude Stein (in Paris)
No matter
the continent
No matter
the country
No matter
the village or city
No matter
the house or table
Even among
the kitchens in
the opulent
City of Light
Where kings
and queens
and emperors
commanded
And where
conquerors
stood and fell on
her cobbled streets
A potato is
a potato is
a potato.
Non-attachment (moving day)
The porch is sagging and rotten in places. It’s full of crap, leaves, boxes of junk and all manner of flotsam. A lifetime accumulation. Someone hands me a high-powered hose and says I can just wash it all away. I hesitate only a second. Watching where I step, I turn it on full blast.
Ariel Ambers is a writer based in Laguna Hills, California. She uses her work to highlight queer experiences and girlhood, as well the ever-evolving mental health epidemic. She enjoys crafting worlds of lyricism in unexpected places, and creating space for unfiltered girls to truly express themselves. When she’s not writing she’s either at her service job, pouring wine and getting to know customers, or enjoying California’s coastline. She’s previously been published in Quibble Literary Journal, The Stonecoast Review, and 22 West Media Magazine. She was the Welter University 60 Words for 60 Years micro-fiction winner. She graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in creative writing and was the nonfiction editor for RipRap Literary Magazine. Instagram: @ariel.ambs / Website: arielambers.com
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M. Anne Avera is a writer and kindergarten teacher from Auburn, AL. Her literary interests include horror, speculative fiction, free verse poetry, and creative nonfiction. She has a passion for open conversations on mental health, cosmic monsters, the cryptids of the world, and her dog, Iris.
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Carla Botha holds a BA in English Literature and an MFA from New York University. Her career in higher education has taken her across borders, and she currently resides and works in the United Arab Emirates. Her poetry and prose have appeared in LitNet (South Africa), Writers Block Lit Magazine (Amsterdam), PANK Magazine, and Big City Lit. In 2022, she published her debut Afrikaans poetry collection, Geleende Seisoene, in South Africa.
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Daniel Thomas Moran, born in New York City, is the author of sixteen 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. His collection Looking for the Uncertain Past was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2005. He has had more than four hundred poems published in over to twenty different countries. In 2005, he was appointed Poet Laureate by The Legislature of Suffolk County, New York. His collected papers are being archived at Stony Brook University.
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Kevin Browne’s poetry and micro stories have appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Book of Matches, Kelp Journal, The Metaworker, A-minor, Otoliths, cattails, and other publications.
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12:01am, January 1, 2000, onboard the sailboat Infinity
Heat is important.
I’m not so lucky tonight
a tattered quilt
a propane heater
and a red knit beanie
the pompon
a furry brick
on my head.
Sleep comes easy
to those with no worries
only thing weighing on them
is wool.
The Secret
“Then you shall sit alone
like a boat moored and never bilged,
slowly sinking in your righteousness.”
“So be it,” I proclaim, and slink
back into my anatomically correct
doll house, where everything
looks normal, but the doll
never wears panties.
Mycelium
Please leave me
to this patch of dirt,
this dark potential
that appears as grit and loam
looking lifeless but teaming.
If only you could see
the particles that touch, rub, caress
one life of incredible smallness.
They love without thought —
their only consequence
connection —
send shivers to the next
and the next, until the grand eruption
of fibrous fingers
fold in on each other, share
what must be so sweet.
If only you could hear
the murmurs of affection
trilling forward
as they hold on to
their dear lives.
Precipice
That season of paperback novels
and pizza, I reached, poised to touch
the pose of adulthood, and toppled
to my knees off-stage
but every year offers the reprise,
that next chance at adolescence,
that pride before the fall.
Emmet Cohen playing Round Midnight
Silence
between
each
note
the
next
one
provides
light
to
the
chorus
Jennifer Karp won honorable mention in the 2023-24 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize and was a winner of the 2022 San Diego Reader Poetry Contest. In 2025, she is published or forthcoming in San Pedro River Review, The Haibun Journal, Loch Raven Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Writers Resist, Half and One, Moonstone Arts & Press, New in Chess, Festival for Poetry, San Diego Poetry Annual, and others.
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Billie Jean Stratton has been published in Comstock Review, Sulfur River, and Lost Orchard: Prose and Poetry from Kirkland College Community. Resurfacing after many years, the poem “Brodsky” was published by Ibbetson St. Press and was nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize.
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Lucinda Pinchot is an old lady (and proud of it) who has identified as a witch for 60 years. She has been writing poetry since 1965. She loves all forms of poetry and in retirement teaches children how to grow organic vegetables.
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Julie Benesh is author of the poetry collection Initial Conditions and the poetry chapbook About Time. She has been published in Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, and many other places. She earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College and received an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She currently lives in Chicago and holds a PhD in human and organizational systems.
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Nathan Nicolau is a writer/poet based in Charlotte, NC. His fiction, poetry, and essays have been featured in numerous publications. His debut novel, TWO, is available now on Amazon. Find out more at nathannicolau.com.
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Monterey Moon Tree
We spent an afternoon under the Monterey Moon tree.
Midlife moths sunbathing in the dappled light.
You always said you loved me to the moon and back.
We drink in the shade and float above the roots.
Jar our vows, bury it under the earth.
Marvel at the green leaves, alien-born.
The wind has something to say:
We are all dust, moon and moth.
Roughening the Rainbow
Our internal cameras
aren’t riveted to rigid poles;
we can roll in and out of position
to tell what has truly happened,
not a crude reenactment,
or an airbrushed rainbow,
hiding its imperfections of color
and shape, requiring tools
of sensory exactitude
to replicate what could make
Wordsworth’s heart leap up.
What’s written on the brain
is unseeable, unsayable,
’til immersed inside a sealed
container of poetic astringency,
to desiccate,
roughen the rainbow,
expose subdermal wounds
in personal or shared history,
places where, Rumi says, light enters.
Pink
Pink is the sun dying in winter
The Virgin Mary is church-pink, bashful
And toilet seats, lip gloss, oxycodone
Pink and red are careful cordial cousins
In Wyoming there is no pink
You can get the blues, but never the pinks
Pink is a whisper, a kiss that
Never bites.
Troll
I think, therefore I’m wrong. My gut leads me to the truth while my heart — the grey
coward — retreats in its cage without rattling the bars. My brain is the policeman behind
which my mischievous impulses are sneaking out — one by one — giggling loudly as they
slip my tongue. I will show you how precious nature is — more cryptic and immediate
than sheer numbers and statistics. I will empower you to stick your neck out as far as it
goes to take a dance on the edge of the world only to realize that it is — indeed — round.
Forage
I have hardened and harbor
low expectations for pressing matters,
my eyes blind to signs, your subtle
arrival. You push through
hardpan a little more each day
until I trip over your green resilience.
Slender stems blade the clay
as you emerge, vertical despite herbicide
last fall’s mowers and this stretch
of drought. Are you here to teach me
with your wordless determination, lack
of fanfare, your tender resolution?
O cold season grass, you never surrender,
but spear willpower to sprout
finding you are not alone.
Hailing from Michigan, Amber Penney currently resides in a Chicago suburb with her husband, Andrew, and their son, Jude. A self-taught mixed-media artist, she works out of her home studio. Penney is also an accomplished poet; her poetry collection, Phases of Flight, was published in by Bottlecap Press in 2023. Website: amberwaaavesart.com
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Alison Jennings is a Seattle-based poet who taught in public schools before returning to her first love, poetry. She has had a mini-chapbook of 10 poems and 100 other poems published in numerous journals, including Burningword, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meat for Tea, Mslexia, Poetic Sun, Red Door, Sonic Boom, and The Raw Art Review. She has also won 3rd Place/Honorable Mention or been a semi-finalist in several contests. Website: sites.google.com/view/airandfirepoet/home
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Gordon W. Mennenga has had work featured on NPR and published in Epiphany, North American Review, Epoch, Bellingham Review, Chicago Tribune, and Hamilton Stone Review. He made his first appearance on Spotify this year with his story “Last Words.” These days, he spends a lot of time with Johann Sebastian Bach.
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Sylvia Niederberger is a Swiss-Canadian lecturer, avid reader, theatre nerd, and language lover. She currently lives in Switzerland.
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Kathy Pon earned a doctorate in education, but in retirement turned to her lifelong passion for writing poetry. Her husband is a third-generation farmer, and they live in the middle of an almond orchard. Her poems have been/will be featured in Euonia Reivew, Wild Roof Journal, Passengers Journal, Canary, RockPaperPoem, The Tiger Moth Review, and others.
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