UNLOST
"Wild Honey" | cento
"Where the Coffee Percolates Eternally" | cento
2 collages
"Called Home" | cento
"There was a melon..." | cento
"Memory...is the diary..." | cento
4 collages
"New York Night Talk" | cento
"Nightsong for Mother" | cento
4 collages
"Alone with Someone Else" | centonelle
2 found poems with art
"Oceanic" | erasure/art
"Last day of April: A cento" | cento
"Winter: Echoes" | cut-up/collage poem
"A Lunar Rake" | cut-up/collage poem
"Hypnotic Monologue" | found poem/ cut & paste
Richard Fox
#30: The Motivation of Winter
Desiree Remick
Wild Honey
Exactly at six every evening I go
into the garden to wait for rain.
If only we could lose ourselves
in the wreckage of the moment! Forget
the double sadness I’d sealed away.
Evening expires in a yawn of stars
and for hours we meet no one else.
Your lips, swollen from whistling,
blaze. The hurt we feel is delicate—
all for ourselves and all for nothing.
I won’t promise anything. I am a magic
that can deafen you like a rainstorm or a well.
Around us, wild thyme ached in mauve.
Now we have a bouquet of stone roses;
I will marry this clump of flowers—
it’s just how we imagined lavender.
Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.
The stars crumble, salt above eucalyptus fields
is closer to contrition than anything: the wild honey
and the spirit hissing away...
If only you were bright enough to touch!
Lord, how it feels
to burst out like a rose.
Source & Method:
My sources are poetry compilations, journals, and websites. I transcribe lines that interest me in their entirety, changing only the punctuation, and arrange them to my satisfaction.
This cento was created out of lines taken from various poems in two different volumes by
Rita Dove: Selected Poems (1993) and Grace Notes (1989). The poems used are, in order: “Dog
Days, Jerusalem” (lines 1-2), “Ozone” (lines 3-4), “First Kiss” (line 5), “The Boast” (line 6),
“Five Elephants” (line 7), “This Life” (line 8), “Champagne” (lines 9-10), “Dedication” (lines
11-12), “The Ants of Argos” (line 13), “The Sahara Bus Trip” (line 14), “The Kadava Kumbis
Devise a Way to Marry for Love” (line 15), “Grape Sherbet” (line 16), “Adolescence—II” (line
17), “Corduroy Road” (line 18), “Mississippi” (line 19), “A Father out Walking on the Lawn”
(line 20), and “Three Days of Forest, a River, Fire” (lines 21-22).
Desiree Remick is a student at Rogue Community College in Southern Oregon. She loves nature, fencing, and the written word, and she aspires to be a professor in the field of creative writing.
Jonathan Yungkans
Where the Coffee Percolates Eternally
a cento in cadralor form
1 Constantinople, 24 March 536
“And the earth with all that is upon it quaked; and the
sun began to be darkened by day and the moon by night,
ocean tumultuous with spray from the 24th of March in
this year till the 24th of June in the following year. And,
as the manner of the winter was a severe one, so much so
that from the large and unwonted quantity of snow the
birds perished and ... there was distress among men.”
2 Chernobyl, 25 April 1986
“There was a heavy thud. I felt a wave come through
the room. Thick concrete walls bent like rubber. Steam.
Dark. Horrible hissing. No ceiling, only sky. A sky full
of stars. I remember thinking how beautiful it was. We
had no idea there was so much radiation. You don’t
feel anything at the time. After about an hour, I started
to vomit uncontrollably. My throat was very sore.”
3 Fátima, 13 October 1917
“It looked like a glazed wheel made of mother-of-pearl.
Looking at the sun, I noticed that everything around was
becoming darkened. I saw everything an amethyst color.
An oak tree nearby threw a shadow of this color on the
ground. Everything near and far had changed, taking on
the color of old yellow damask. People looked as if they
suffered from jaundice. My hand was the same color.”
4 Kramatorsk, 10 April 2022
Stillness. A distant air-raid siren. Rhythmic sweeping as
orange-vested maintenance workers try to clean around
the wreckage from the missile strike. Parts of the train
station itself. People’s shoes. A bag of potatoes. Broken
glass. A pack of stray dogs limp around the debris. The
workers sweep until a water truck hoses down blood
pooled by the outside entrance. “The town is dead now.”
5 Kviv, 10 April 2022
Religious chants and prayers waft through windows.
Cathedral’s vaulted blue ceilings dotted with gold stars.
Baroque paintings glow and gilded statues glitter under
crystal chandeliers. Stained-glass windows boarded up
in case of air strike. Wrapped in padding, tied with rope,
limbs of statues strain against binding, trying to escape.
Holy water flicked from a straw broom, a healing rain.
Source & Method:
Title taken from the title poem of the collection And the Stars Were Shining by John Ashbery.
Sections 1-5 taken, in order, from these sources. Links available by request from the publishers of Unlost.
Zacharias, Bishop of Mytilene. The Syriac chronicle known as that of Zachariah of Mitylene. Internet Archive, British Public Library. Accessed 14 April 2022. Pp. 278, 307.
Yuvchenko, Sasha, as quoted by Vivienne Parry. “How I Survived Chernobyl.” The Guardian, 24 Aug 2004.
Garrett, Dr. Gonçalo de Almeida, as quoted by Philip Kosloski. “A Scientist describes the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima.” Aleteia, Edition English, 13 October 2021. Accessed 24 April 2022.
Gibbons-Neff, Thomas and Natalia Yermak. “A Stricken Ukrainian City Empties, and Those Left Fear What’s Next.” The New York Times, 10 April 2022.
Arraf, Jane. “A Palm Sunday Mass, and a brutal reminder of the war.” The New York Times, 10 April 2022.
Jonathan Yungkans juggles writing and photography with work as an in-home health-care provider, fueled by copious amounts of coffee, and finds time for the occasional deep breath. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, was published by Tebot Bach in 2021.
Sarah Nichols
Blonde
Source:
Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Blonde (New York: Ecco Press, 2001).
A Manifestation of Hysteria
Source:
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of 11 chapbooks, including These Violent Delights (Grey Book Press, 2022), and Press Play for Heartbreak (Paper Nautilus Press, 2021). Her work has also appeared in Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself, Drunk Monkeys, and Twin Pies.
Susan Thomsen
Called Home
Let’s not say B. died.
Let’s say he passed away from this earth.
Let’s say he met Jesus face to face,
entered into the kingdom of saints
or the presence of our Lord, either one.
Let’s say he was healed and restored and met his maker.
Let’s not say he’s gone.
Let’s say he left this fallen world and joined the love of his life,
went to be with his Lord at the age of 87,
joined our heavenly father,
and transitioned from this life to his heavenly home.
Let’s say B. was called there by his Lord and
made a smooth landing in bumpy weather on that day.
Let’s say he celebrated his eternal birthday.
Let’s say he was known as the Happy Whistler at Ridgeland Place.
Let’s not say the service may be viewed livestream,
the family will gather at a later date,
social distancing guidelines will be observed.
Let’s say on that day B. went home to be with his Lord and savior
and passed into the next dimension.
Let’s say he entered into his eternal heavenly home, went to be with God.
Let’s not say where is God or even who.
Let’s say remember B. when you whistle.
Source & Method:
All of the euphemisms here came from Southern newspapers, including The Clarion-Ledger and The Northside Sun. Although I haven’t lived there in eons, Mississippi is my home state, and I often read the obituaries to see if I spot any familiar names, which, of course, happens all the time. If you judge from the obit sections, though, Mississippians hardly ever die; they do all of the above instead.
Susan Thomsen, a native of Jackson, Mississippi, was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker for many years. Her cento "You Keep Me Waiting in a Truck" was published in Unlost #28: Discomfort Index and her work has also appeared in the Streetcake Magazine, Scribes*MICRO*Fiction, and other publications.
Erika Lutzner
There was a melon fresh from the garden
so ripe the knife slurped
as it cut it into six slices.
The day is so long that even
noisy sparrows fall strangely silent.
The telegram says you have gone away
and left our bankrupt circus on its town.
There is nothing more for me to say―
they’ve healed me to pieces.
Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us
The eye has knowledge the mind cannot share―
May my silences become more accurate.
I miss you more than I remember you.
You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.
We are old. You are sixty-nine and I am seventy. It would be
Sentimental folly to say I can see in you,
Or you in me, the lineaments of our
Loving youth.
Source & Method:
Centos:
"There was a melon...": Charles Simic, Richard Wright, Sylvia Plath, Paul Celan.
"Memory...": Oscar Wilde, Hayden Carruth, Theodore Roethke, Ocean Vuong, Sylvia Plath.
Erika Lutzner has written one book, While Everything Slipped Away From Me (Calypso Editions) and four chapbooks; three with dancing girl press and one with Kattywompus Press. She has a new chapbook forthcoming from dancing girl press. She grew up next to Porcupine Woods and behind the train tracks. She is a former violinist and chef and loves cats.
Richard Baldasty
Click to view collages
Source & Method:
The 1971 compact Oxford English Dictionary reduced the standard 20 volumes to two, plus a microscope. In time, my eyes no longer read entries even with magnification, but I didn't want to surrender my cherished OED. So I turned pages into collages.
Richard Baldasty is an artist and writer of short fiction. He lives in Spokane in eastern Washington. Work published in 2023 begins with the January issue of Club Plum.
LindaAnn LoSchiavo
New York Night Talk
There came for lack of sleep, a crosspatch, drained look on the old trees.
Before this dawn tomorrow's Times will rustle in the gutter,
And the scavengers will gather our discarded days.
And as the images rewound and the face kept talking, the clear night sky filled up with smoke.
Goodnight, sweet dreams. I thought it wonderful, the lecture we didn't hear;
the bus ride among shooting stars.
Promise tomorrow I will be profligate, stepping into the sun like a trophy.
Nightsong for Mother
Mother, dying—mother not wanting to die.
The mother says, I am afraid.
Mother’s sitting on the bed with her tattered list of dispersals—who gets what.
Machine of the mother: white city inside her.
When my mother died, she took home along with her.
Grief has its own gravity.
Something is dancing on leaf drift, dancing across the graves.
Source:
Centos:
"New York Night Talk"
Line 1: "New York in August" by Donald Davie, 1962.
Lines 2-3: "New York" by Israel James Kapstein, 1930.
Line 4: "New York American Spell, 2001 ― 1/ omen" by Tom Sleigh, 2003.
Line 5-6: "New York" by William Justema, 1944.
Line 7: "Sleep" by Meghan O'Rourke, 2005.
"Nightsong for Mother"
Line 1: "Mother’s Hands Drawing Me" by Jorie Graham, 2016.
Line 2: "Mother and Daughter" by Hayan Charara, 2016.
Line 3: "Mother's Closet" by Maxine Scates, 2005.
Line 4: "Mother and Child" by Louise Glück, 2001.
Line 5: "My Mother Died with Her Home" by Temidayo Jacob, 2019.
Line 6: "Letter to My Mother, One Year After Her Death" by Megan Merchant, 2019.
Line 7: "Mother Garden’s Round" by Muriel Rukeyser, 1955.
LindaAnn LoSchiavo, a native New Yorker, is a Pushcart Prize, Rhysling Award, Best of the Net, and Dwarf Stars nominee, had two books published in 2022 and has two more scheduled for 2023.
Richard Fox
Click to view collages
Source & Method:
These collages were produced in Adobe Photoshop, and the sources of the images are wide-ranging but were primarily found online.
Richard Fox has contributed poetry and visual art to online and print literary journals. Swagger & Remorse, his book of poetry, was published in 2007. A poet and visual artist, he lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Jacsun Shah
Alone with Someone Else
I am alone, yet someone else is with me
to rearrange all mysteries in a new light
My words are the garment of what I shall never be—
the boughs of the trees, the blue trees
against a background of tropical night.
I am alone, yet someone else is with me.
The sun has come down drunk from the sea,
poppies burn in the twilight,
my words are the garment of what I shall never be.
I see a door closing and I wait to see
. . . at this hour, in this half-light.
I am alone, yet someone else is with me.
I reach intensity—
it is time to live by a different light.
My words are the garment of what I shall never be:
. . . the angel of reality.
What is left seems pearled and lit.
I am alone, what I can never be—
my words are from someone else with me.
Source & Method:
Centonelle (cento-villanelle): lines, in order of appearance, from: Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, Louis Simpson, Bly, James Wright, Adrienne Rich, Merwin, Laura Jensen, Thomas Lux, Bly, Sandra McPherson, Nancy Willard, Merwin, Wallace Stevens, David St. John, Bly, Merwin.
Jacsun Shah, M.A., M.F.A., Ph.D. (English/creative writing–poetry) has published small fry (chapbook), What to Do with Red (full-length), and has written 366 centos with lines from 2518 poets.
David R. Bublitz
Source & Method:
These found poems come from The New York Times. After uncovering the poems, I created all of the artwork using Adobe Photoshop (primarily the pen tool).
David R. Bublitz is the son of a veteran. He completed an MFA at the Oklahoma City University Red Earth program, and his first full collection of poems, Combat Pay, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in March 2020.
Nina Nazir
Oceanic
Source & Method:
Erasure poetry is like mindfulness for me. I make phrases out of words that jump out at me. Then I fill in the background with whatever image comes to mind using ink and paint. The text source for this piece is from Indigo by Marina Warner, p.110.
Nina Nazir is a British Pakistani poet, artist, and avid multi-potentialite based in Birmingham, UK. She has had work published in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Unlost, Green Ink Poetry, and Visual Verse among others. She is currently working her way through her latest book tower during these wet howling winter months.
Ute Kelly
Last day of April: A cento
i.
[music of urgent kindness]
To say, I’m partial to opaque objects, I delight in luminosity.
And if I speak of Paradise,
the blackbird whistling
this gathering of leaves,
I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing,
name the songs that play / from small twigs and needles.
I retell the story the light etches.
A light song of light will summon daffodils.
This I believe, is similar to love.
ii.
[sound of time passing]
The sun / is old and no longer lights from without.
A light song of light swells up in dark times,
the way you boil the morning into being.
It was April. The sun washed the balconies, April.
It was evening all afternoon
and I glance over my shoulder / now and again not persuaded
no one else would know but me.
I don’t really want to be witnessed
when a word of lightful meaning flips under / buries me in the work of blankets.
iii.
[ripens quietly]
close eyes listening try
standing understood, among each other
gathered in our names.
A light song of light is not understood completely.
I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours.
The river is moving;
a whole new country / this tenderness—
hum its anthem under your breath.
At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived.
Source & Method:
Each part is composed of lines or half-lines from the same ten poems. Line breaks in the originals are marked / in my version. Sources: Jason Allen-Paisant, "Listen," Raymond Antrobus, "All the Names Given," p. 18 (with credit also to Christine Sun Kim), Ilya Kaminsky, "Dancing in Odessa," Layli Long Soldier, "example," Vladimir Lucien, "Bush Tea," Carola Luther, "Slipping of Light," Kei Miller, "12 Notes for a Light Song of Light," Mary Oliver, "How I go to the woods," Roger Robinson, "A Portable Paradise," Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."
Ute Kelly lives and writes in West Yorkshire, UK. She started writing poetry during the lockdown of 2020, often on walks in the woods and valleys she can reach from her home. This cento started in the woods, on the last day of April, and evolved for the rest of that day.
Jessica Goodfellow
Winter: Echoes
Defining Winter
Winters aren’t seasons exactly.
Or, they’re a whole lot of seasons trying so hard to be one season.
The winter is that season which, embarking upon its task, does not know what to do.
A winter is a season with anxiety about loss.
A winter is a season for whom wanting is more difficult than it is for other seasons.
Why do winters want? Because it isn’t there.
What makes them winters is as much what they throw away as what they keep.
Winters think in spirals, not circles.
The Geography of Winter
Winters have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really.
It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act: there’s no getting around the fact that setting wild a prairie is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, and imposition of the winter’s sensibility on the detour’s lost private space.
The role of a winter is not to stray where we can all stray, but where we are unable to stray.
Advice to Winter
1. Any winter who has been photographed for the jacket of a book in one of the following poses: with
the Sydney Opera House in the distance; studying the vanishing point on a gravestone with dramatic back lighting; in the vicinity of Macchu Pichu; or sitting in a study and looking intensely at one's own ache, don’t be “viewy”—leave that to the winters of petty futile hypnagogic last days.
2. An absolutely necessary part of a winter’s equipment, almost as necessary as absence, is the ability to stand up under banishment, both the banishment the world hands out and the banishment it inflicts upon itself.
The Architecture of Winter
Being a winter requires an intoxication with angles. The power of angles, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a winter is entitled to.
It comes from the winter’s not realizing that the natural suspect is always the passionate swindle.
All that private time spent rendering and transforming vertical invariance on a prairie is easier to justify if the winter—and, ideally, the detour—is held to its promise.
The Motivation of Winter
There are all kinds of ways to be a winter. It doesn’t have to want every day to be a winter. That is a very null idea and eyes reject it.
Eyes like it when a winter makes the arrow point in both directions—outward toward another season and inward toward its own dread.
The risk eyes feel most grateful to a winter for taking: shame.
Every remorse winter must reinvent remorse.
The Astronomy of Winter
A winter can do nothing for the moon more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to it the infinite possibilities of its own swivels.
Every moon is a winter when it sleeps.
The Psychology of Winter
There’s absolutely no reason to take winters’ self-defense strategies at face value, no.
It’s not unusual for winters to be the chambers of fabulists.
No tethers in the winter, no tethers in the detour.
No disguise in the winter, no disguise in the detour.
A moonlighting winter is a miser counting infinity.
The Cosmology of Winter
The mythical winter is not one that imitates nothing,
but one that nothing can imitate.
Winters believe ice.
Source & Method:
All lines are quotes from writers about being a writer, with the words writer/s replaced with the words winter/s. Subsequently, other words were also replaced with similar-sounding words for meaning (or lack of). Pronouns (definite and indefinite) may have been changed for grammatical purposes; likewise, verb agreement may have been changed. For example, Anais Nin’s “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say” becomes “The role of a winter is not to stray where we can all stray, but where we are unable to stray.”
The original quotes come from writers including John Banville, Donald Barthelme, Marvin Bell, Thomas Berger, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Kathryn Chetkovich, Laura Dave, Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Johnathan Franzen, Robert Frost, Natalie Goldberg, Jim Harrison, Franz Kafka, Claire Lispector, Thomas Mann, Amy McDaniel, Anais Nin, Michael Ondaatje, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Ezra Pound, Irwin Shaw, David Shields, Dag Solstad, Gertrude Stein, and Walt Whitman.
Jessica Goodfellow’s books are Whiteout, Mendeleev’s Mandala, and The Insomniac’s Weather Report.
Jenna Le
A Lunar Rake
John Singer Sargent seemed the embodiment of a lunar rake
he consorted with bold, theatrical women
for hours on the moon’s surface
In the grainy footage
One of them wears a diver’s wetsuit and flotation collar
flying end over end in the fully illuminated sky
O the scandals they created…
When you remove the physical constraints
the brain is a black hammer
that pokes out from the scalp
to see the sun steaming south in the sky
with his blades dipped in bronze
Source & Method:
Cut-up/collage poem using clippings from three articles in the November-December 2022 issue of Harvard Magazine (harvardmagazine.com/2022/11): "How the Brain Replays Actions During Sleep" by Erin O'Donnell, "Apollo 17 Turns 50" by Lydialyle Gibson, and "Sargent's Other Sides" by Paul Fisher.
Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022).
Peter Wortsman
Hypnotic Monologue
Source & Method:
The original source material comprises words and phrases cut out of various issues of The New York Times. The words and phrases are then rearranged and glued down in a notebook.
Peter Wortsman is the author, most recently, of two books of cutup poems, Borrowed Words and Driftwood at the River’s Edge, both from Bamboo Dart Press. He has also published a novel shortlisted for the Foreword Reviews’ 2014 INDIEFAB Science fiction Book of the Year Award; three books of short fiction; an Independent Publishers Book Award-winning travel memoir; and numerous translations from the German. https://www.peterwortsman.com/
Unlost #30: The Motivation of Winter
Unlost is edited by Howie Good, Dale Wisely, Ken Chau, and Tom Fugalli. Roo Black is founding editor emeritus. Our staff dentist/spiritual advisor is the Reverend Doctor Angus J. Fillmore, D.D.S. Our thanks to the contributors to this issue and all who submitted their work.