I am I.
I swallow love.
I am cruel, truthful‚ a little god.
I meditate on the pink.
it is my heart. it flickers darkness.
Now I am a woman. Me.
Searching for what she really is.
liars reflect me.
I am important.
me a young girl, and me an old woman
day after day
terrible.

Source & Method: Erasure of Plath's "Mirror" (1961).

R. Bremner has been writing of incense, peppermints, and the color of time since the 1970s.

Kenneth Boyd

Tears of Blind Lions

Observations from the Outer Edge

Source & Method

The source material is a poem, “The Captives: A Psalm” by Thomas Merton. In the book The Tears of the Blind Lions. New Directions, New York, NY (1949).

Kenneth Boyd is a poet and jazz musician, recently in Of Poets & Poetry, Wayfarer and Flora Fiction. He won the Royal Palm Literary Award. His book, Grasshopper Dreams, was published in 2023. He’s completing the UCLA Extension Creative Writing Program.

LeeAnn Pickrell

Cento: The only sign of something said

Beginning with dust and the footprint
there was a way of living in the woods
promise of another Spring and Summer
in the dappled shade of leaves
the calmness of this slow-paced scene
Piano notes are a ladder
that holds the sound of rain

Source & Method

A poet passed along part of her collection of chapbooks. I took all the lines from seven of the chapbooks. From Patricia Dienstfrey, “Membrane”; Kate Pepper, “I was not mistaken”; Jabez W. Churchill, “The Thread”; Chansonette Buck, “Small Song to a Beloved”; Sherry Love Sheehan, “Dennison Lagoon”; Evelyn Leah Belvin, “Ascension”; Fritz Eifrig, “Familiar Dark” and “Ceasura”

LeeAnn Pickrell's poetry most recently appeared in Unbroken. She is the author of the chapbook Punctuated, published by Bottlecap Press. Her collection Gathering of Pieces of Days is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in April 2025.

Nina Nazir

Source & Method

Nina loves the hybrid space where art meets text and how one informs the other. She usually forages the text first then the drawing / painting / collage comes later. She finds that if she stares at the page long enough, the poem will show itself to her. Her visuals are inspired by the words, or whatever ideas arise within the moment.

Nina Nazir is a British Pakistani poet, writer and artist based in Birmingham, UK. She has been published widely, online and in print. She is also a Room 204 writer with Writing West Midlands. You can find her on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir.

Allen O'Leary

Man must move

Source & Method

My game is that I take all pictures, words and the title from just one book, usually found in a charity shop. I make a zine, or rearrange to make a single work. I find myself using books that could have been from my own childhood make an entertaining but critical work that engages with my personal feelings of nostalgia and the overt sexism of the time. The source material for this work is Man Must Move: The Story of Transport by Lee, Laurie and Lambert, David Published by Rathbone Books London, 1960

Originally from NZ/Aotearoa, Allen O'Leary is a long-term resident of London in the UK. Primarily a playwright he has recently rediscovered a love for poetry and likes working with found and 'unpoetic' texts. He also writes and performs music and spoken word.

Amy G. Smith

Pillars of Heavy Light

Someone I love is dying, which is why
crows strike their bargains with the breeze.
This is the truth: that we begin here––

embracing the ghost gowns of the past,
a fluid holiness
of spirits wrapped around the world.

The woman who left the house this morning
soon will be no more than a passing thought
through the layers of atmosphere.

I find my way by following your spine,
a tender tapping at the skin.
More and more we slip

into the shimmering air
implicit to the movement,
the flowing of the river––

Source & Method

A cento with lines taken from poems in A Book of Luminous Things, An International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Czeslaw Milosz. Poets: Antonio Machado, Wang Wei, Emily Dickinson, Tu Fu, Jean Follain, Linda Gregg, Anna Swir. Some of the lines have been changed for consistency of person and tense.

Amy G. Smith is a poet living and writing in Northern Nevada. She is currently pursuing her MFA degree in poetry through the low-residency program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.

Nina Nazir

Zenith

Source & Method

I search for tiny phrases that I turn into longer lines. I then highlight these by drawing/painting around the selected text, often with imagery inspired by the words.

Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani poet, artist, and avid multi-potentialite based in Birmingham, UK. She's had work published in various journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Sunday Mornings at the River, to name a few. You can usually find her writing in her local favourite café, on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir or X (Twitter): @NusraNazir. She blogs regularly at www.sunrarainz.wordpress.com.

Bob Lucky

Windows

lovers in search of myths
don’t belong here
why travel in search of
new places of exile
to see our love waiting
in a family photograph

we travel in search of windows
in every language
the songs of love
are the songs of distance
scrawled on train windows

Source & Method

An erasure poem of the second section of Mahmoud Darwish's “Four Personal Addresses” in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, translated by Munir Akash and Caroline Forché (with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003.

An Observation

in the present age
murder
best seen from space
and then smelled
is nothing remarkable
a dirty thing
coloring all suffering

Source & Method

An erasure poem of Gertrude Stein’s “Cranberries,” in Tender Buttons (Claire Marie, New York, 1914). The title is part of her original poem.

Bob Lucky lives in Portugal. He is the author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), and My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019).

Emma Dandy

Distemper

I.

Grinding, historically relegated,
casting back and forth, drowning realm, people
marked by failure to adapt, powerful
void at its centre. Haunted by bygone

wealth, a museum. In a neglected
corner, distinctive inquiry crumbled.
Now inactive it often looked, sighted
unexpectedly from far, like my home.

Soon it will seem far more distant. Spirit
of the place sluiced out and no hint of what
was happening below us. Glowering
mausoleum, sinister, alien.

While you saw it with something that was like
affection, it was a blight.

II.

I’ve no axe to grind, but the red, the white,
the atmosphere aggressive, government
even more than usual a disaster.
Due to be decommissioned and shut down,

engulfed by spoil heaps visible for miles.
Protests rise and surge. Imagine the mood,
gloomy, and the global implications
of trampling the delicate. A sort of

righteous sanctimony. The biggest loss,
it's virtually impossible to earn
a living wage. They will say that I am
irresponsible, ill-educated,

whatever, whatever. You learn not to
worry. It’s a wonderful place to live.

III.

Isolated. I want to tell you how
desperate people are. We hope a heavy
cloud will be lifted, anything to which
we can fasten our dreams. I’m terrified,

overshadowed by our ambivalence.
Cut off. Unable to face destruction.
Too painful, the loss of place. To object,
having your peace disturbed, is an attack

and the ruin of all that’s beautiful,
enough to make you gasp. Matching your worst
imaginings. A comic, accused of
not caring, goes on to talk of brewing

ugliness. Its scale not accidental.
An academic gets too close to see.

IV.

Myself, born and raised a problem, chose to
speak into the red zone, the nightmare depths,
this maze. I could not survive the journey.
Energy expended, cooling, cooling,

cooling, spent and discharged into the sea.
The riddle impossible to perceive
let alone interpret. And the sheer noise,
a mystery. To look up was dizzying

to look down, dizzying, the whole experience
was dizzying. A part of me was screaming
with terror. This quiet stretch of the coast.
I understood, as I had not before,

days from the end, that if there was a choice,
but that was the point. There was no choice.

Source & Method

I found this poem in an article in Granta magazine titled "On Sizewell C" by William Atkins by circling words and phrases that spoke to me of our contemporary social condition.

Emma Dandy is an emerging poet with an interest in exploring what it means to be human through a fracturing of language. She is an alumnus of the Out-Spoken Academy.

Sarah Nichols

she was anesthetized delivering

Source & Method

The sources for this piece is Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Blonde. I tend to sit with individual pages of a text for a while, and look for a skein of a poem to emerge. The images I use for the collage feel more random and could have nothing to do with the poem.

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of eleven chapbooks of poetry and non fiction, and recently completed a full length manuscript.

Susan Barry-Schulz

dark splendid flower

geraniums, soft with light

Source & Method

Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway inspired me to engage with the frequent inclusion of flowers throughout this source text. I used pastels, colored pencils, ink, and collage elements, working directly on the book's intact pages.

Susan Barry-Schulz is a poet and collage artist who grew up just outside of Buffalo, NY. Her work has appeared in SWWIM, Bending Genres, Stone Canoe, Heron Tree, and in many other print and online journals and anthologies.

Dagne Forrest

Cento of Unknowns

Not the bell, but the smaller sounds, barely noticeable
and sometimes like blackout, all that time wasted sleeping

I want to know why the clouds
will begin, certain and with nothing—

what is it like to catch up to light?

I am planetary with sugar & double vision
Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

I want to shake and let myself go loose and double like a cloud
the color of dust & tremor, the soft meat
a scattering of white doves.

After 24 days, I am still trying to be a noun
floating between the speechless reeds I always wake like this

I know there are steep exits all around us
and the sky is a net that can’t catch you

I don’t want to love that blue anymore

or the dark shoulders of the trees
but I don’t do it. I want to live.

I could say it was light from stars
and a dark I have not seen before—
aren’t they beautiful enough

Cling and remind me – we are the weeds
the last light and the dark stretch ahead.

Source & Method

Cento: “Stop Shaking”, Carl Phillips; “I Have a Time Machine”, Brenda Shaughnessy; “A Five-Year Old Asks His Mother”, Eve Joseph; “Bird Left Behind”, Sophie Cabot Black; “Before Completion”, Arthur Sze; “November Song”, Wanda Coleman; “My God, It's Full of Stars”, Tracy K. Smith; "Captain Lovell, ["My eyes are shaky and glimmer like the stars"]", Gabrielle Calvocoressi; “Salt to Make a Sea”, Renee Ashley; “Miracle Mart”, Wisława Symborska (trans. Adam Czerniawski); “Untitled (2004)”, Victoria Chang; “Severed Head Floating Downriver”, Alice Oswald; “Portrait of a Couple on a Cliff After Twenty Years Together”, Kelli Russell Agodon; “Counting”, Michelle Boisseau; “OK, Earth”, Jason Schneiderman; “Just Lying on the Grass at Blackwater”, Mary Oliver; “I Go Back to May 1937”, Sharon Olds; “White Clover”, Marvin Bell; “What the End is For”, Jorie Graham; “At Night the States”, Alice Notley; “On a Pink Moon”, Ada Limón; “The World in the Evening”, Rachel Sherwood.

Fever Dream Cento

I remember you there like a fever of heartache,
always awake, acres of swaying
oozy pink, infected apricot.

I wanted to make myself like the ravine
sentenced to an exile that sees, hears, and thinks,
What are we without this?

Trails are beginning to fray already:
the night is full of holes and we
admit that there is nothing left to do.

I knew I should make myself get up,
taste pain, roll it on my tongue, it’s good
the first time you see the sun,

you who have made bright things from shadows,
you’ll need your wits about you.
It is serious, it is irreversible, it is going, going.

Unfurling its cape of blackbirds,
day after day breaks
in a faint line.

Source & Method

Cento: “Song on a Dark Night”, Norman Macleod; “We Would Never Sleep”, David Hernandez; “The Brilliant Fragments”, Hadara Bar-Nadav; “I Wanted to Make Myself Like the Ravine”, Hannah Gamble; “Darkness of the Subjunctive”, Paul Hoover; “The Empty Glass”, Louise Glück; “Skywriting”, Charles Tomlinson; “Push the button, hear the sound”, Helen Mort; “Flatirons”, David Yezzi; “Dust”, Dorianne Laux; "Daffodils”, Alicia Ostriker; “Elegy for a Gopher”, Ellen Bass; “Birds Appearing in a Dream”, Michael Collier; "Mrs. Adam”, Kathleen Norris; “Go”, Kathleen Ossip; “Truant”, Margaret Hasse; “Blood Honey”, Chana Bloch; "The Story of the End of the Story”, James Galvin.

Dagne Forrest is a Canadian poet with recent work forthcoming or appearing in The Inflectionist Review, Pinhole Poetry, december magazine, and On the Seawall. She belongs to Painted Bride Quarterly’s senior editorial and podcast teams.

MJ Mello

Voices all gone quiet

Source & Method

A postcard with collage and cut-up text from old books.

MJ Mello, a New England writer and collagist, has poems published in Heron’s Nest, Modern Haiku, and Snapshot Press, among others.

Unlost is edited by Dale Wisely, Ken Chau, Howie Good, and Tom Fugalli. Roo Black is founding editor emeritus. Our staff osteopath / astrogastronomist is the Reverend Doctor Curgent Udex, O.D., Ph.D. Our thanks to the contributors to this issue and all who submitted their work.

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