journal of found poetry and art

Cheryl Martone lives and writes in Rhode Island. Her poems have been published in River Heron Review, Gyroscope Review, Drifting Sands Haibun, Yellow Arrow Journal, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and other publications.

Sarah Nichols

Source & Method: Erasure/collage, using Edith Wharton’s travelogue, A Motor-Flight Through France.

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of twelve chapbooks, including A Cool Empty Silence (Ghost City Press, 2025) and These Violent Delights (Grey Book Press, 2022). Her work can also be found in Scavengers Literary Magazine, Action, Spectacle, and Bleating Thing Magazine.

Luke Bradford

Memorial

Again and again,
I remember
one cold morning.

A glimmer.
Of a dream.

And a longing,
like a coin being dropped

From a broken necklace.

December
ink, color
of iron filings.

The reflection of the moon

In the mirror.

Inside:
the girl
lost in herself,
the skies, the tilting dome of time,
the folds of her dress,
the silence.
The letting go.

The fog is in the fir trees.
The moonlight steeped in
silentness

is desire, if not
mourning,
the knife
edge of the
lost.

In the morning,
glint of frost,
nesting minks;

phenomenon
of red pines

phenomenon
of softness—

Still, still I seemed to see her, still
I did not stop
turning us, turning us, turning us
in the midnight light
until I unhooked
something from me, something
like
desire
from the surrounding medium.

Love is itself unmoving,
even the river
of ourselves,
rushing on.

You think you know your history

But
do you?

Here’s the catch:
after five years
her beauty,
the way she
surfaces,
is the fish

at water’s edge

a bleached weed

edged gold

blazing

Again and again,

in my hand.

Source & Method: A cento: every line is quoted, unaltered, from a different published poem: Adamshick, Carl, “Loss”; Eliot, T.S., “The Waste Land”; Hansen, Tom, “Fallen Apples”; May, Wong, “Moving K. to Glendalough”; Cruz, Cynthia, “Guidebooks for the Dead”; Simic, Charles, “The Partial Explanation”; Willard, Bruce, “Family Portrait”; James, Clive, “Against Gregariousness”; Shepherd, Reginald, “Roman Year”; Pastan, Linda, “Eyes Only”; Bök, Christian, “Experiment #1”; Cowles, Kathryn, “Moon. Eleanor Eleanor. Oil on canvas. 2018”; Cruz, Cynthia. “In This Light the Junk Undergoes a Transfiguration; It Shines”; Mullen, Laura, “White Box (notes)”; Gregerson, Linda, “Narrow Flame”; Harrison, Jeffrey, “Girl Carrying a Suitcase”; Wilner, Eleanor, “Moon Gathering”; Strand, Mark, “The Garden”; Cruz, Cynthia, “Deathscape Lullaby”; Dickinson, Emily, “After great pain a formal feeling comes — (175)”; Eliot, T.S., “The Dry Salvages”; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; Murphy, Miguel, “The Sunlight”; El-Kurd, Mohammed, “War Machines Dress Up as Drag Queens”; Pastan, Linda, “Mosaic”; Starbuck, George, “A Tapestry for Bayeux”; Hewett, Greg, “It’s obvious”; Rappleye, Greg, “A Path Between Houses”; Johnston, Devin, “Aubade”; okpik, dg nanouk, “Found”; Moore, Marianne, “Black Earth”; Teare, Brian, “Convince me you have a seed there”; Warren, Noah, “Wind”; Thompson, Francis, “Daisy”; Perkins, Charles, “Dangerous and Frozen Rain”; Major, Clarence, “Sand Flesh and Sky”; Cabico, Regie, “Daylight Saving Time Flies Like an Instagram of a Weasel Riding a Woodpecker & You Feel Everything Will Be Alright”; DeColo, Kendra, “Why in Some Hospitals They Don’t Let You Hold Hands During Labor”; Quintos, Danni, “Ghazal for Dogeaters”; Cagney, James, “Interview with a Rose”; Armantrout, Rae, “Natural History”; Eliot, T.S., “Burnt Norton”; Riegel, Katherine, “Snow White”; Doty, Mark, “A Green Crab’s Shell”;Maultsaid, Deirdre, “Winter: Helmcken Falls”; Maultsaid, Deirdre, “False Dilemma”; Eliot, T.S., “The Ad-dressing of Cats”; Armantrout, Rae, “Care”; Armantrout, Rae, “Skill Sets”; Bidart, Frank, “California Plush”; Pastan, Linda, “In the Happo-En Garden, Tokyo”; Figman, Elliot, “Riding In”; Starbuck, George, “A Tapestry for Bayeux”; Armantrout, Rae, “Care”; Mohammad, K. Silem, “Considering How Spooky Deer Are”; Martinez, J. Michael, “White”; Pickard, Tom, “winter migrants”; Bidart, Frank, “California Plush”; Cagney, James, “Personal Forest”.

Luke Bradford is an experimental poet living in Brooklyn. His books have been published by Penteract Press, and his poems have been featured by The Blasted Tree, Timglaset, No Press, Eunoia Review, and aswirl, among others.

Joanna C. Migdal

A Woman Who Writes Feels Too Much

It's four in the afternoon, time still for a poem.

I want to choose words that even you would have to be changed by,

Words that are luminous in the dark.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

A silence opens

And I shall stand here like a shadow under the great balanced day.

Why there is still all this space inside me, I don't know

I’d like to fit the words, but I’m disabled; that’s a fact.

But, the mind is an enchanting thing,

So, let evening come,

With the damn wonder of it.

I dwell in Possibility.

Yes, for that most of all.

Kind of Blue for Miles Davis

I awaken in the blue hour before sun up,

stars still shivering in the distance

like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow.

In rushes the world.

I stay stubbornly under covers,

sinking in a blue for which there is no word.

My eyes dare to open.

Like the sky, they’re vague blue and change all the time

and my moods sometimes swing to blue

in the tall, starry strangeness of being here at all.

Source & Method:

"A Woman Who Writes Feels Too Much": Cento, title from Anne Sexton's "The Black Art", text from Phyllis McGinley, "Public Journal"; Adrienne Rich, "Implosions"; Eleanor Wylie, "Pretty Words"; Emma Lazarus "The New Colossus"; Amy Clampitt, "A Silence"; Louise Bogan, "Medusa"; Wislawa Symborska, "A Large Number"; Jean Garrique, "Doggerel of a Die Hard Who Sleeps in a Nest of Newpapers"; Marianne Moore, “But the Mind Is an Enchanting Thing"; Jane Kenyon, "Let Evening Come"; Lucille Clifton, "There Is a Little Girl Inside"; Emily Dickinson, "#657"; Denise Levertov, "The Secret".

"Kind of Blue for Miles Davis": Cento, text from Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda, Theodore Roethke, Denise Levertov, Joanna C. Migdal, Robert Hillyer, Joanna C. Migdal, Frank O’Hara, Joanna C. Migdal, Franz Wright

Joanna C. Migdal, published My Quicksilver Lover (2009), a collaborative book of artworks and poetry, while living in San Miguel de Allende, a vibrant artists' & writers' colony in Mexico. She is presently working on a collection of centos entitled Wild Nights (after Emily Dickinson, among others).

Nina Nazir

Source & Method:

"Evolve": gel pen on paper, text source: Moby Dick, Herman Melville, p.33

"Incarnation": gel pen on paper, text Source: Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky, p.15

"Scripture": various pens on paper, text source: Moby Dick, Herman Melville, p.44

Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani poet, writer and fine artist based in Birmingham, UK. She has been widely published online and in print and is a Room 204 writer with Writing West Midlands. You can find her at her blog: www.sunrarainz.wordpress.com.

Drishika Nadella

The Groans of a Winter Flume

But this morning we wake to pale muslin vacuums

between the stars

I suck them from the quenching dark

lilac fingers disrobing the dark sky like a sigh

of relief at finally being allowed to yield

Edges of place are only temporary,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space,

shadows of buildings sieve your sleep

as its smooth dark wave bends

under its glassy weight

as the echo of a fallen peach

When grief weighs you down like your own flesh,

haul its strange cohesion the way the body

burns, part by part, particle by particulate,

the spine won’t remember its wings

until you exhale their bones and then

the landscape grows black

Source & Method: Cento made of 18 beloved poems saved in an e-mail thread: "Lines for John Berryman on the Bus from Little Mogadishu", Benjamin Gucciardi; "Early October Snow", Robert Haight; "Variations on the Word Love", Margaret Atwood; "Antidotes to the Fear of Death", Rebecca Elson; "Aubade Ending with the Death of a Mosquito", Tarfia Faizullah; "November for Beginners", Rita Dove; "Vermilion", Molly McGlennen; "Burning the Old Year", Naomi Shihab Nye; "Elegy for the Four Chambers of My Brother’s Heart", Steven Espada Dawson; "Variations on the Word Sleep", Margaret Atwood; "Ice Storm", Robert Hayden; "Emptying", Aaron Zhang; "The Thing Is", Ellen Bass; "From a Window", Christian Wiman; "Divergence", Diana Khoi Nguyen; "Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong", Ocean Vuong; "Wanting, Waiting", Ami Patel; "The End of Landscape", Randall Mann.

Drishika Nadella is a student and poet.

Sara Lynne Puotinen

Four Inner Colors

1. Inner Red

I thought I knew what

red looked like, believed

I had seen the flash

of a red fox

along a fence line,

2 red cardinals

leaping in fresh snow.

But I knew nothing

of red, only the

memory of it

leaking. And as any

flame begins losing

oxygen, it blued

into a purpled dark.

2. Inner Purple

True color of the

atmosphere, luminous

air between eye and

object, the instant

before the brain fully

settles the scene.

Violet. A dark light

word, an adjective

for edgelessness, a

bottomless dusk. Here

at ear pressure depth

where the simmer of

headache dwells, the brain

goes indigo.

3. Inner Indigo

Of distance, of last

lights, of blueprints, of

late nights turning

deeper and deeper,

steeping from the top

like green tea. I want

to see indigo

now—now! You stolid

blue. You scrap of sky

with wings navigating

at night by reading

the stars. You stars,

all blink and glam-

glow and glitter.

4. Inner Glitter

A rush of gold to

the head. Glittered like

a dime, stunned bronze and

copper, radiant

and bright. What shifting

water does with light —

a surface scene, a

seen surface pierced and

parsed, sharp-edged with now

& now. A snared light

as if the thought SHINE

had let itself be

noticed then scattered

in silver-blue.

Source & Method: Due to central vision loss, I see color strangely or not at all. I'm collecting and combining other poets' words to build up my sense of inner color: "Goldenrod", Maggie Smith; "Crown of Yellow", Sarah Audsley; "Blanket of Daffodils", Linda Nemec Foster; "Turkey Vultures", Ted Kooser; "A Tiny Little Equation", Shuri Kido; "The Squatting Sun", Nikky Finney; "Lost in Plain Sight", Peter Schneider; "Statement of Teaching Philosophy", Keith Leonard; "Red Shoulder Hawk", Margarita Pintado Burgos; "Doxorubicin: Infusion", Lauren Paul Watson; "The Bruise", Jenn Givhan; "On Color", David Scott Kastan; "Nobody", Alice Oswald; "Interview with Water", Alice Oswald; "Blue variations", Lubna Safi; "I Went Out to Hear", Leila Chatti; "Hallucinations", Oliver Sacks; "The Secret Lives of Color", Kassia St. Clair; "Indigo Bunting", Cornell Lab: All About Birds; "Interview with Poets", Aimee Nezhukumatathil; "Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?", Tracy K. Smith; "Dart", Alice Oswald; "Like Coins, November", Elizabeth Klise Van Zerneck; "Night Comes and Passes Over Me", Carl Phillips; "North Rock Edge", Susan Tichy.

Sara Lynne Puotinen lives in Minneapolis, near the Mississippi River Gorge, where she conducts experiments in writing while moving, moving while writing, and doing both while losing her central vision to an eye disease.

April Woody

Cento for Rebuilding

For those of us who live at the shoreline
with its people and animals, struggle and wind,
life is short, though I keep this from my children.
We have planted schools and churches,
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath.

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
let us gather in a flourishing way.
Loud laughers in the hands of Fate, suspended
like scales between your sorrow and your joy:
to make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.

Source & Method: Cento composed of lines from the following poems included in 100 Poems That Matter (Poets.org): Audre Lorde, "A Litany for Survival"; Nazim Hikmet, "On Living"; Maggie Smith, "Good Bones"; Carrie Law Morgan Figgs, "We Are Marching"; Ada Limón, "Instructions on Not Giving Up"; James Weldon Johnson, "Lift Every Voice and Sing"; Juan Felipe Herrera, "Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way"; Langston Hughes, "My People"; Kahlil Gibran, "On Joy and Sorrow"; Emily Dickinson,"To make a prairie”.

April Woody is a poet living in Virginia. She enjoys exploring various forms. Her work has most recently appeared in Right Hand Pointing, Presence Haiku Journal, The Pan Haiku Review, hedgerow, Blithe Spirit, and Raining Rengay.

Winifred Mok

New York, New York

I entered JFK with a red suitcase and no one to greet me.

Gaze at my world, Manhattan—I am

new york city of blood / police and fried pies

its ant cars, little yellow taxis,

curtains forcing their will against the wind.

Out in the sky, no one sleeps.

Out of some subway scuttle, a grove of steel pillars—

everyone writing poems

about and inside and outside the subways.

I could take the Harlem night and wrap around you

the man I love who loves me not.

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel

more adventurous and night like a purple cloth unrolled—

Give me my confetti of flesh, open

the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight.

Lines of lamp-light splinter the black water.

As you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry

with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;

time to go home & cook supper & listen to the romantic

war news on the radio.

At the door at last we said good-bye;

“bolt” is to lock and “bolt” is to run away.

That’s how I think of New York

in the timeless sadness of existence

make friends forever

& go away

Source & Method: This cento takes lines from the following sources: Imogen Wade, “The Time I Was Mugged In New York City”; Allen Ginsberg, “My Sad Self”; Jayne Cortez, “I Am New York City”; Maya Angelou, “Awaking”; Federico García Lorca, “Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne)”; Hart Crane, “The Bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge”; Charles Reznikoff, “Walk about the subway station”; Terrance Hayes, “New York Poem”; Langston Hughes, “Juke Box Love Song”; Sara Teasdale, “Union Square”; Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”; Lola Ridge, “Manhattan”; Amy Lowell, “May Evening in Central Park”; Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”.

Winifred Mok is a poet and filmmaker based in the UK whose work explores the spaces of language, culture, and identity.

David P. Miller

But There Is, There Is That

Originally, there is breath, clean and convincing.
Gratitude was spitting and polishing. It showed substance.

A table, more chairs, and a place to put them.
A violent kind of pleasure, refusing to believe nonsense.

A little calm under the bed, a little groan, such a sweet singing.
Kindness comes out of an eye: a single image.

Dirty coffee, dirtier coal, the same message, too late.
Pleasure is not amusing, supposing distress more likely.

Not to shatter soap, silk, cotton lining. Melody, mercy and relaxation.
There is color, cunning, adventure and courage. All this is a system.

Lilies do this. They need a large box. One is on the table. The other
is open, closed, in summer and winter, silver brighter.

If the party is enough, gather a whole church. Cut more cake, the only necessity.
Suppose the rest of the message: actual, present, constant.

What is this. What is it. Dark place not a dark place. Is that an argument.
There is a piano waving, standing in shadows. No sign in that spectacle.

A whole barn in the darkness. Is there no release. Not a bit, not green,
not straw. That is all. What was the use. The lesson is to learn nothing.

The bite within the cut, filled by squeezing the center of angels.
Supposing a hair: does it show strength, show eyesight, meaning sudden.

Water in extra places. The charm in the pine, the dark, crystal.
Spread into a winning of no worry, cool and pink.

Collapse a little less, between curves and seasons.
There is a light that is tall. All is trimmed by the light, true.

Source & Method: Extraction poem, a variation on the erasure form in which extracted words and phrases are presented in the same order as they appear in the source texts. Punctuation and capitalization are free, and titles are supplied by me. Source text extracted from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons — “Objects”.

David P. Miller’s collections include Bend in the Stair (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021) and Sprawled Asleep (Nixes Mate Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in journals including Meat for Tea, Jerry Jazz Musician, Second Coming, and The Ekphrastic Review.

Rachel Lutwick-Deaner

I’d Like to Tell Someone

after “Summer on Gist” from the East Silver Spring Civic Listserv

I saw a lone goose up by the Wheaton Mall.

They mate for life, but

It was alone. I know this is minor in the world today, but it’s stuck with me.

They mate for life.

It was looking— sad,

I know, this is minor in the world today, but it’s stuck with me.

It was looking at its reflection in cars. Sadly,

It was looking sad.

I’d like to tell someone.

It was looking at its reflection in cars. Sadly,

I’d like to tell someone who could possibly do something.

I’d like to tell someone:

It was alone.

I’d like to tell someone who could possibly do something that

I saw a lone goose up by the Wheaton Mall.

Source & Method: A post from my sister's neighborhood listserv, The East Silver Spring Civic Listserv. I transformed the post using the pantoum form.

Rachel Lutwick-Deaner has been teaching college composition for over 20 years. She has lived in many regions of the country, from California to New York, and she currently resides in Grand Rapids, MI. You can find her on Instagram @professorld.

Kimberly McElhatten

Supple Rock

One of the hardest things to remember is that
here wasn’t always here. As I look at the swallowtails
drifting through the hemlocks,
everything looks so permanent. But
this little piece of the Appalachians was once
floating well below the
equator. Same rock, different location. With an enormity of
time as slippery as an eel.

We see the universe the way it is because we exist or if it had been different, we would not be here

Out of a singularity come a beginning and an end. Out of the particles comes the infinite. Photons. Electrons. Neutrinos. Out of vibration comes heat. Out of gravity comes attraction, comes hydrogen, comes helium, comes lithium, comes beryllium. Out of a million years comes spinning, spinning, come galaxies. From cooling and collision come nuclear fusion, come stars. Out of supernovas come bodies in revolution. Out of carbon and oxygen come monkeys hammering away at keyboards. Out of one second comes a bang—a universe expanding.

Source & Method:

"Supple Rock": Cento with source text from Mountains of Heart by Scott Weidensaul

"We see the universe the way it is because we exist or if it had been different, we would not be here": A found poem (mostly) using rhythms, words, and phrases found in “The Origin and Fate of Our Universe,” A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

Kimberly McElhatten is a poet published at South 85, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Bridge Lit. She’s on the editing teams at Brevity and Fourth River and chairs the WCoNA Book of the Year.

Elizabeth Farris

Plunge down

The silence, the blank, white glittering sublime
takes her in
through the still waters
in the clear body of the sea.
Notice how she shines —
body swaying like a suddenly visible song.
The stiff waters once more begin to kick and flow.
Glow
important world, and just float away.
And no time no precious time to think of anything else
for the rest of your life.

Source & Method: This cento poem is taken from the last lines of poems that appear in Mary Oliver’s collection What Do We Know. My method was to transcribe every last line of the poems into a list and then see which ones related to any others.

Elizabeth Farris holds an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. A dual US/NZ citizen, she makes her home in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, USA. See more at authors.org.nz/author/elizabethfarris/.

Barbara Leary

The Unbroken Line

Here. Here. Here.

This is all we have:

Adventure and anxiety and love and confusion

Waves of chaos and magic

This weird caravan of people who learned to belong to each other without needing to match

Out of the motion comes:

Meaning.

The weight of a promise.

A voice, an echo, a poem.

Once you’ve been baptized by those sounds,

your heart stays up late so no one is forgotten.

That’s the thing about love:

It doesn’t take a miracle.

Love doesn’t grow because life is easy; life feels easier because love grows.

So keep a door open—wide enough for strangers

to walk through and leave as something new:

a thread in the same unbroken line.

(This line retains the belief there is always time for new dreams.)

Time is a thief. I have dreaded this moment, but it’s time.

Give me everything you’ve got for the next 60 minutes.

Here. Here. Here.

We’re still on the road, and

we’re bringing each other home.

Source & Method: This cento poem was created using lines from speeches written by the seven students in my graduate speechwriting class at Georgetown University — Téa Anderson, Braeden Arthur, Zoe Manoussos, Violet Nikolova, Jen Peters, Abby Walker, and Ronan Williams — to show them (and my colleagues) that beautiful language often hides in plain sight.

Barbara Leary's work spans multiple genres and forms, including nonfiction, short stories, flash fiction, poetry, and children's books. Her writing has appeared in anthologies, newspapers, magazines, and on public radio. She teaches graduate-level writing and communication at Georgetown University.

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 Tuberius Frendcaster.

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.