journal of found poetry and art

there’s almost no one left who knows
sorrows much keener than these —
the stains of birth and afterbirth
chew a hole in a blue star
(what else could they do?)

bare-handed we scrape sand and gravel
repeating the motions of other women
silent the rest of the day we work

bound together like ravaged fields
pressed in a book after two hundred years

Source & Method: Cento gathered from the following six Jane Kenyon poems: "Not Here," "The Blue Bowl," "Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks," "Things," "Twilight: After Haying," and "Finding a Long Gray Hair."

Amanda Weir-Gertzog is a neuroqueer, chronically ill poet from New York who lives, writes, and edits in the American South.

To answer this question, I had to think myself out of the room,

back into the past. Everything was different. I listened to

what was being said, to the murmur or the current behind it,

which changed the value of the words themselves. Thought

of the shut doors of the library, and how unpleasant it is to

be locked out. And worse, perhaps, to be locked in. I thought

of the day, with its arguments and impressions and anger flashing.

Mirrors are essential. If she begins to tell the truth. the figure

in the looking glass starts the day confident, believing notes in

the margin of the mind: the dangerous and fascinating psychology

of the other sex. Her genius? To feed upon the lives of men

and women, study their way, measure the heat and violence

of the poet’s heart caught in a woman’s body, buried at some

crossroads. Now and again, words of pure poetry. What holds

them together? Holds every phrase, every scene to light?

Nature has traced on the walls of the mind a premonition, all

half lights and shadows, like those serpentine caves where

one goes with a candle, not knowing where one is stepping.

And I began to catch those unsaid or half-said words which form,

reminded of a force in things overlooked: a river which flowed

past, the dead leaves, a girl in patent leather boots, a young man.

The fact that the ordinary had power to communicate something.

It requires so much effort to see human beings. Not always

in relation to each other, but to the sky, the trees, Milton’s bogey.

And the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister.

Her forerunners, born again to live and write.

Source & Method: From phrases and lines from every 12th page and the final page of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (first published in 1929, a 1989 edition used for this cento). Every phrase and line is from the text, except for the title.

3 poems from A Room of One's Own

Cheryl Martone

After Another Debate About Gender Roles, I Ask What’s Next

Cheryl Martone lives and writes in Rhode Island, where she retired after a career in public service. Her poems have been published in River Heron Review, Gyroscope Review, drifting~sands~haibun, and other publications.

Flavian Mark Lupinetti

Virginia Woolf’s Undiscovered SciFi Novel

I wonder
if I can develop this:

I propose to tell
the story
of giant crabs who
broke into a sailing-ship,
men eaten and
sunk in waves.
The company went on,
set against the current.

A beast comes
towards Christina
into those foaming waters.
To Christina
it was a shock
to see the catastrophe.

Perhaps Christina,
soon to perish,
has anguish.

Perhaps her shabby dress
could be torn asunder,
nothing fancy,
the pattern homely.

The character might
burst out in scorn
at her gay life.

Of all the books,
this one seemed dumb.

Source & Method: Erasure from the first chapter of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. All words and order are as in the original.

Flavian Mark Lupinetti is a poet, fiction writer, and cardiac surgeon. His work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Cutthroat, December, Redivider, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Mark’s collection, The Pronunciation Part, won the Grand Prize in The Poetry Box’s 2024 Chapbook Contest. A West Virginia native, Mark lives in New Mexico.

Pamela Ahlen

[She picked a fine time to leave him,
laughing in his face]

As far as she remembers, she was at the door.
It was still autumn,
no lilacs hanging over walls,
the leaves still yellow and falling.

It was autumn.
She thought about what was truth and what was illusion,
the leaves a matter of indifference, yellow and falling.
She remembers he laughed in her face.

She thought about the twists and turns of this and that,
all the emotions she could name.
He laughed in her face [louder] than before,
bellows and shrieks and raw guffaws.

All the emotions she could name, anger lurking among them,
to be told one is inferior,
[the little man’s] bellows and raw guffaws.
Was she of no importance whatsoever,

told one is useless, inferior,
an apparition without significance?
Was she of no importance whatsoever?
She would have to decide

she was significant.
She would have to rouse the demon anger within,
decide this matter of the little man
[with] the force of her own burning gift,

the anger explained and done [away] with.
A taste for words drove her to it,
the force of her own burning gift.
A book might be made of it.

Her taste for the truth of words,
what once was hurt and shame, now nothing.
An amusing book might be made of it,
her genius for facts made fiction.

It was still autumn, no fact-changing the season.
As far as she remembers she actually opened the door.
A breeze had risen from the southwest to be exact,
the leaves falling, if anything, a little faster than before.

Pamela Ahlen is the author of the chapbook Gather Every Little Thing (Finishing Line Press) and co-author with Anne Bower of Getting it Down on Paper, Shaping a Friendship (Orchard Street Press).

Source & Method: Pantoum/collage culled from pages 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, and 84 of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, found on the internet archive’s PDF edition published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, Tavistock Square, London. Any additional words of my own (specifically the 12-word title) are in brackets.

April Woody

For a Homecoming

Time to wipe bugs off his windshield,
the closest thing Montana has to mayhem.
How often driving down those roads
a space is opened, sparking, live.
The muse brushes by like a dangling scarf.
Fragrant tuberose, lily of the valley.
The dawning of his homecoming, yet still
when birds call they call to their own kind.

Source & Method: Composed of lines from poems in The Best American Poetry 2024 (Mary Jo Salter, guest editor; David Lehman, series editor): Andrew Motion, "The Explanation”; Jacqueline Osherow, "Fast Track: Bejing, Montana, Harlem”; Maya C. Popa, "What's Unsaid”; Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Strike Into It Unasked”; Grace Schulman, "Night Visitor”; Jane Shore, "The Hat”; A. E. Stallings, "Crown Shyness”; Eliot Weinberger, "from The Life of Tu Fu”.

April Woody is a poet living in Virginia. She enjoys exploring various forms, both old and new. Her work appears, or is upcoming, in contemporary haibun online, drifting~sands~haibun, The Pan Haiku Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.

Roger Camp

Ghost Figure

Peeling Grafitti

Source & Method: Photographs of graffiti that incorporate both text and visual art, as well as multiple artists. The resulting layers often introduce unintended visual and textual interpretations.

Roger Camp is the author of three photography books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002).

Seth Hagen

there are these things we can speak of only in writing

you tell me to read the poets to remind myself
they must be forgiven I beg of nothing I loved
many great things if the earth must perish
I imitate a blade of grass if each word
in our writings is born of absence it makes intervals
immense wind falls from the remaining light
the earth and its rocks lift up the essential thing
is what is believed the body the ears and eyes
the doors and windows the waters a river
carries time one hears the tinkling my wise mother
beside the fire is quite strong her thinness paints itself
in our tragedy I look behind mirrors imitate winter
love everything that does not burn through splendor
dreams children everything that diminishes
in the telescope the microscope we have seen words
groping to their birth the place where I do not remember

Seth Hagen lives in Atlanta, where he teaches English. His work has been featured in Verse Daily and has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Sugar House Review, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs Review, LIT, Unbroken, Right Hand Pointing, and Anacapa Review.

Source & Method: Erasure from The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (NYRB Classics, 2005), translated by Paul Auster. The excavated text, subject to heavy erasure, was harvested from the notebooks for the years 1783-1796; The title is from an entry by Joubert in his 1819 notebook.

The nature of the Notebooks is to contain short passages and meditations on disparate topics over many years. In some sense, they contain their own erasures — whatever passed through the mind of Joubert between entries but was not written down. I was drawn to the text as a source for erasure because I wanted to pull together Joubert’s words from an expansive range of time and weave them into a poem where Joubert’s themes (and my own preoccupations) — extent and latent might sing through.

Linda Eve Diamond

What's your racket?

Linda Eve Diamond is an award-winning poet, photographer, and creator of the free Art of Listening Anthology, which features more than 60 contributors. Visit her website and find the book here.

Source & Method: A snippet of dialogue (which includes the title) from “Come Live with Me” (1941, MGM, written by Patterson McNutt and Virginia Van Upp). The typewriter was sketched and the words were typed.

Vic Pickup

Use pencils only please

Ensure your hands are clean and dry. Place items flat

on the desk, give them the space they need.

Keep everything in the order they have been presented to you.

If items are in protective sleeves DO NOT remove them.

Consult one file at a time. One name. One week. One month.

DO NOT knock pages on the desk in an attempt

to level them. Turn pages carefully. DO NOT lick your fingers.

Use snake weights when the fans are on in hot weather.

Do not pile the files or their boxes. Always wear purple

nitrate gloves to handle photographic material.

Use a light box for slides and negatives DO NOT hold them

up in the air. Use designated collection weights at the edges.

Roll items steadily and ask for help if needed. Never trace a drawing.

No bags. No food. No drink. No viewing unless pre-booked.

Permissions licences must be granted. Your files may be dusty.

Please vacate the premises to sneeze. No bags. No hats.

No phones. No flash. No ink. No lunch. Bring just your open eyes,

your heart, your hands. Do you have paper and a pencil?

You may begin.

Vic Pickup is based in the UK and is the author of three poetry books and editor of one anthology. She is a postgraduate researcher, working in the Mills & Boon archives held in Reading University’s Special Collections. She is the co-organiser of Poets’ Café Reading and Reading Stanza group. See more at vicpickup.com.

Source & Method: Poem based upon the printed guidelines in the Reading Room at the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), where the University of Reading’s Special Collections archives are held. More information can be found here.

Bob Lucky

In the Rain in Spain

There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain

For we have thought the larger thoughts

I know monks masturbate at night

The sea desires deep hulls

A porcupine skin

You come to Spain but do not remain

One lady poet was a nymphomaniac and wrote for Vanity Fair

Some came in chains

Drummed their boots on the camion floor

All of the Indians are dead

Soldiers never do die well

In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain

The mills of the gods grind slowly

Workingmen believed

The age demanded that we sing

Sing a song of critics

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want him for long

He tried to spit out the truth

In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain

Bob Lucky is the author, most recently, of Careful Not to Startle the Yaks (Cyberwit, 2025) and My Wife & Other Adventures (Red Moon Press, 2024). He lives in Portugal.

Source & Method: Cento based on the Collected Poems of Ernest Hemingway, pirated edition, San Francisco, 1960, with the first line from every poem (the first sentence in the case of a prose poem) in the collection. One line was repeated a few times as a kind of free-floating refrain.

Lucien Levant

Last Words No. 35 (Memorial for a Drowned Girl)

Leaden reef, crystal quiver,

and river my grief. Its cause:

under water, troubled daughter.

Life was the dark.

Candles lit shall sit,

the park we withhold of

this perfumed artifice.

They fold the green twilit hour;

the flower is seen.

Lucien Levant is a Southern California-based businessman currently pursuing an MBA at Pepperdine University. His experimental and erasure poetry has been featured in DON’T SUBMIT!, dadakuku, and Backwards Trajectory.

Source & Method: Erasure using the last two words of each line from “For My Father” and “Public Garden” by Marion Strobel.

JDG

To Mark a Friend’s Remains These Stones Arise

I wish I could write an elegy for my sadness

because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it

in a thin voice,

sun-water in the earthen jar,

sunflower seed I planted in my chest.

But this flower does not want

to be named. Does not want to be owned.

Farewell, my pelf, farewell, my store,

A thing unknown before — the human form.

There is only the sound of falling, quiet and remote,

For it is not so much to know the self

As to know it is known

responding — its increments of awareness — a

slow progression.

my life, ah my alien life,

But I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes you just want

whatever agrees to stay alive. Do not dwell in the foyer,

the fleeing deer’s shape.

The sun will not blink shut

For several song-filled minutes

And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me.

The sky has given over

Its bitterness

remembering

we were never meant to survive.

Underneath all this there’s a song

Capable of happiness.

Deer sniff lifeless fawn before leaving.

i leave revenge

hopelessly to God.

I move to save the breakables from the wreckage.

JDG (they/them) is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY, and a member of the New Haven Writers' Group. Their work has been published in Cleaver Magazine, Prospectus, Prairie Schooner, and other places. You can find more of their work at JustinDGoodman.com.

Source & Method: Cento of 23 separate poems read around the same time frame. Title: Lord Byron, “Epitaph To A Dog”; 1-2: Chen Chen, “Elegy for My Sadness”; 3: Anne Carson/Sappho, “If Not, Winter”; 4-5: Octavio Paz, “A Tale of Two Gardens”; 6-7: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “Corpse Flower”; 8: Anne Bradstreet, “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666”; 9: Ovid, The Metamorphoses; 10: Donald Justice, “Absences”; 11-12: AR Ammons, “Gravelly Run”; 13-14: Lyn Hejinian, “Elegy”; 15: Sonia Sanchez, “I Have Walked a Long Time”; 16: Ada Limon, “Lies About Sea Creatures”; 17: Anais Duplan, “The Foyer Forever”; 18: Irene Mathieu, “compassion”; 19-20: Charles Rafferty, “The Prediction”; 21: Bob Kaufman, “I Have Folded My Sorrows; 22-23: William Carlos Williams, “The Spring Storm”; 24-25: Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival”; 26: Luis Chavez, “Moving”; 27: Wislawa Szymborska, “A Word on Statistics”; 28: Nicole Sealey, “imagine sisyphus happy”; 29-30: Danez Smith, “summer, somewhere”; 31: Robert Fanning, “Staying the Night”

Robin Turner

[the moon had long been]

Robin Turner's poems, prose poems, and flash fiction appear in numerous publications, among them Pithead Chapel, Rattle, Rust & Moth, The Texas Observer, and Bracken Magazine. Her chapbooks are bindweed & crow poison (Porkbelly Press) and Elegy with Clouds & (Kelsay Books). She lives in Dallas, Texas.

Source & Method: Erasure/collage made from the pages of Edith Wharton’s 1911 novella, Ethan Frome (Popular Classics Library edition). Erased by hand with black Sharpie, then digitally collaged with a copyright-free found image.

Taylor Powers

weather report: may

sunday morning, 5 a.m.

the muddy sermon and rented

cowboy. I cross a hayfield

of half-dressed beer cans,

a cheerful highway, a pile 

of god’s mercy. it’s like summer

stirring up wind, the old

hymn parked inside.

a clock that keeps star-time

at dusk, as rain

hurried the bells

all became still.

on the horizon: heat

lightning and abandoned

ballgowns, yellow jackets,

fast clouds

the first time

unfolding before me

like an old map.

weather report: january

I am unfolding,

exposed  

by the sudden

thaw

and speaking 

of a world in which

the rain is

always new.

Taylor Powers is a poet and independent zine editor based in Chicago. Her debut chapbook, collateral damage when the big one hits, is available now from Bottlecap Press.

Source & Method: Centos composed of words, lines, and phrases from Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris.

Unlost is edited by Dale Wisely, Ken Chau, Howie Good, and Tom Fugalli.

Roo Black is founding editor emeritus. Our cat dental insurance broker/numerologist is Mr. Kay Chapman.

Our thanks to the contributors to this issue and all who submitted their work.

The editors of Unlost and all the Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press journals encourage you to find yourself and stay alive. You are needed.