the herons return home to dead trees clouds boiling flocks of blackbirds
screeching at the forgotten orchard drooping rotting apples a Midas feast
in sudden snow a hundred geese take to the skies, electrify the clouds
with their frantic gossip but all I hear is the hum of road slush under tired tires
it’s getting dark colder
sky in a macabre dance with naked branches street lamps leer from the highway
a steady stream of white lights, red to the right sheet ice hushed in the snow
two curved bone lines lead into the night
Linea Jantz has worked in roles including waste management, social services, teacher, and paralegal. Among other adventures, she taught Business English in Ukraine (pre-invasion) and helped film a short documentary about women entrepreneurs in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Her writing features in publications including Palette Poetry, Josephine Quarterly, Beaver Magazine, and EcoTheo Review.
The rain started as a rumor in the maple tops, a soft friction that made the leaves look like they were whispering behind a cupped hand. From the ambulance bay we could smell it before we felt it, the first wet breath pushing under the rolling door. Someone said petrichor and someone else said geosmin and for a moment the room traded fear for science, which is one of our gentler forms of hope.
There is a difference between drizzle and downpour that the skin knows faster than the ear. Drizzle writes its name in small letters across your forearms. Downpour arrives already plural, a choir, a decision. Drizzle lets you pretend the day might continue as planned. Downpour says plans are objects that float for a while, then sink.
We were holding three hallway stretchers, two with coughing and one with a quiet man who stared at the ceiling as if he had been asked to memorize it. The storm readings crawled across a muted news screen. Somewhere to our south, lightning counted whole seconds off the power grid. Someone joked about the generator. Someone else checked the oxygen tank that had been left at a slant like a question. The floor shined in the way floors do when the world outside is dirty and insisting.
When the rain crossed the parking lot it changed color. The blacktop drank it and gave back a richer dark, the way a body drinks saline and pinks at the edge. I remembered the word pluvial and said it out loud, more to test if my mouth still had room for softness. No one answered. The triage phone rang with the clipped cadence that says a vehicle is coming with speed. The doors opened and the storm rearranged our air.
There is a physics to the way rain meets a building. If wind angles up, the drops tilt and tap the underlip of the awning like a xylophone. If wind angles down, the rain rides the pitch of the roof and leaves the entry dry, a kindness too small to celebrate. This storm wanted the threshold. The rubber mats darkened and the edges curled slightly, as if the building itself lifted its feet.
They wheeled in an older woman whose shirt clung to her in deliberate places. She had slipped on her back steps and could name exactly where the pain nested. She smelled of wet wool and lilacs that had gone green. Her daughter followed with a towel that had already failed at its job and would try again, because towels believe in second chances. When we moved the woman to our bed her breath hitched like a truck shifting down on a hill. We offered words, then silence, then the kind of words that are a map. Here is where we are. Here is what happens next. Here is the small place inside the storm where your body tells us the truth.
Outside the rain changed from round to needle. You can hear this if you listen for the difference between water and water plus velocity, which is a little like the difference between fear and fear plus time. The bay door rattled and we all looked up as if it were the voice of a person we knew. A tech wiped a trail of footprints that kept reappearing as if the building had made a decision to learn to walk. A nurse peeled off a glove carefully so it would not snap and startle the man in the hallway who had begun to think he was made of glass.
Years ago I learned that the first sharp scent on dry pavement is actinobacteria releasing geosmin when the rain wakes them. The body translates that chemistry into memory before it translates it into air. Children hear it as a bell. Adults hear it as a chance. Even in the emergency department, where bells mean something different, I could feel the room loosen as if we all shared a story about summers that ended in wet hair and towels on porches and the one book we were allowed to ruin.
The storm moved closer and the thunder stopped pretending to be distant. Our monitors flickered low then bright, a reminder that the line between protection and failure is sometimes a strand of copper thinner than a vein. I checked another set of vitals and watched the numbers settle into a rhythm that would not demand us. The woman with the lilac smell relaxed her jaw after the morphine. Her daughter leaned against the wall and closed her eyes in the way that is not sleep but is close enough to count.
There is a sociology to shared rain. Bus stops become small democracies. Strangers crowd under a church eave and invent a new congregation that lasts ten minutes. Parking lots ask us to choose between sprint and surrender. In towns like ours the grocery store becomes a study in permission. You can arrive soaked and no one will look away because everyone can see the sky that did it to you. Even inside the hospital, with its climate promises and sealed seams, the storm writes us together. We speak more softly. We hand each other towels in the tone reserved for birth and grief and the day after.
Between thunder and thunder there was a pause long enough to hear the soft percussion of gutters finally finding their purpose. The speed of sound turned the storm into a counting exercise. We tried to remember the grade school rule about seconds and miles. A paramedic said the rule was wrong and an engineer friend had proved it at a barbecue with a napkin and a pen. We believed both versions because the sky often allows two truths at once.
In the next bay a man argued with his own luck. He had driven straight through the worst of it with wipers that worked only on high and brakes that shuddered whenever the road asked them to trust. He had arrived whole. He did not want to be here since he had earned the right not to be. Rain gives us these strange victories. You arrive at the door soaked but upright and you want that to count more than it does. We let it count in our voices, which is sometimes the only currency the room accepts.
There is also the mathematics of bird flight when storms gather. Starlings fold and turn with an elegance that would make a surgeon jealous. In certain winds the gulls from the lake find their bravest selves and ride the gusts above the helipad. If I climb the stairs and stand at the window that faces north I can watch them hold a line that is not really a line but a conversation. Today there was no time to climb. Instead I watched the rain itself draft and lift, and tried to name the small relief that came from knowing everything falls, nourishes, and returns.
By late afternoon the edge of the storm showed its blue. The parking lot steamed lightly like a low fever breaking. The rubber mats released their grip and lay flat. The daughter with the towel laughed at a story her mother told about a childhood storm that ruined nothing and made everything better. We adjusted a sling and documented a plan and placed discharge papers on a clipboard that shined with a few clean drops, the last of the rain finding a way to name itself.
When they wheeled her out, the air in the bay felt new. The room exhaled the way rooms do when the worst has decided to be a neighbor instead of a guest. We stood for a minute and watched the sky return to a color we could misname as ordinary. I thought of how storms erase and write in the same hand. I thought of my children pressing their faces to a window at home, counting between flash and sound, learning a private arithmetic that will follow them for years. I thought of the first drop of any rain that turns the mind toward possibility, and the last drop that says something like, now, begin again.
Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician and mother of three in New Hampshire. Her work appears in One Art, Eunoia Review, Berlin Literary Review, and The Book of Jobs anthology. She writes about medicine, motherhood, and being human. veronicatuckerwrites.com | Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites
I remember how hopeful we moved the contents of my son’s life I anticipated sharing with him again
I imagined him sleeping peacefully in the sun-drenched room looking out to hills
Instead, it rained into the apartment The building hallways lined with buckets and cigarette butts
one of the cats did her business on his bed as I was left alone
broken spine
too open
with holes that couldn’t be patched
I thought LA was a desert where I could leave everything outside
Heather Romero-Kornblum is a former academic researcher, returning to poetry after several near-death experiences due to Long Covid. She captures the crumbling of her marriage following her near-death experiences in I’M NOT OVER YOU – the 2025 Four Feathers Press Chapbook Contest winner. She is published in multiple journals and anthologies. https://www.heatherkornbooks.com/
The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during October of 2025. Two of our committed members heard about their publication opportunity through WWS programming and/or another member.
I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take some time to celebrate yourself and your wonderful accomplishments. Thank you and happy submitting!
The IHOP® was a big warm hug of brown linoleum. I felt instantly at peace there and could lose my mind in the mathematical swirling of the blue printed upholstery. I was a little nervous when it came time to pay for my Special Limited Time Offer which was a key-lime pie pancake so rich it made my teeth hurt. I explained the gift card away to Sheri, my waitress who looked uncannily like my Aunt Mary even wore the same perfume. I said I’m Not Sure if This Has Anything Left On It. I Can Check For You, she said and she whisked away my check and came back with a receipt and a pen. She said it would say on the bottom of my receipt and I looked and it said: $∞.
Kudos to Diosa Xochiquetzalcoatl who published “Out with the Old” and “To New Beginnings” in The Sand Canyon Review: Crafton Hills College’s Art and Literary Magazine, as well as “The Night My Forefathers and Foremothers Spoke”in Fresh Ink, the IE California Writers Club Newsletter. Her three poems “Just a Typical Day in Downtown LA in 1996,” “Como Comet / Like a Comet,” and “Noem-mames” appeared in the City of Los Angeles’ Latino Heritage Month 2025 Calendar and Cultural Guide (see excerpt of “Just a Typical Day in Downtown LA in 1996” below).
He was just an 18-year-old kid trying to do the right thing.
Un chilango was drafted to war by way of Mexico City.
He flew into LAX, arrived at his tia’s in Huntington Park.
Not a lick of English, did this kid comprehend, yet they sent him right on in.
Shoutout to Dilys Wyndham Thomas whose poem “a museum of waxwings” was featured in Chestnut Review. She also published fiction piece “Bellybutton Baby” in X-Ray Literary Magazine. See excerpt of the latter below:
I have this recurring nightmare in which I swim through amniotic fluid. Poppies litter the fluid, and a baby is lost somewhere amongst all the falling flowers, out of reach, beyond my thrashing hands.
To keep the nightmare at bay, I lay awake in yet another hotel room, avoiding sleep. The man in bed with me has his back turned, constellations of freckles scattered on sunburnt skin. It’s obvious from the way his body teeters on the edge of the mattress that he has decided I am a one-night stand. I run my fingers along the map that is this new back, find a replica of Cassiopeia on his shoulder. I will remember his skin long after I have forgotten everything else about him.
Slowly, I reach for the discarded condom on the floor, cup it in my palm. It is satisfyingly heavy. I tie another knot into the latex and slip out of bed.
Huge congratulations to Elline Lipkin whose poetry collection “Girl in a Forest” was recently released by Trio House Press.
Kudos to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo whose creative nonfiction piece “How to Write a Love Poem” appeared in Cleaver Magazine.
My first poem was a love poem.
To write a love poem, one must be brave enough to speak directly to a “you.” It’s not easy work. It takes vulnerability and the threat of humiliation. Society likes to say that such endeavors are trivial, childish, and girlish. bell hooks writes in About Love: “Whenever a single woman over forty brings up the topic of love, again and again the assumption, rooted in sexist thinking, is that she is ‘desperate’ for a man.” When I was teen, all my poems were about boys and heartbreak. When I became a “serious poet,” my inner critic said such things were silly. It didn’t stop me from writing them, but I did worry, why would anyone care?
In a time where Berndnaut Smilde can make clouds inside, ephemeral art in cathedrals and coal mines,
like the heavens reclined I’m reminded of how clouds are made sky-high. Clouds are made with the sighs of birds,
their response to sunrise and sunsets and the power to forget the land below them, even if only for a little while.
Clouds are made when nearby plateaus are leveled by the wind blown from another time, not yesterday
or tomorrow. Clouds are made by the braiding of tears shed by a forgotten bride
and the first laughter she makes at her new lover’s smile. Clouds are made during the silence that comes after
we’ve passed into the eye of depression’s storm. Clouds are made when we drive too fast
over dirt roads in our excitement to return home. Clouds are made in that tome online
full of old photographs and notes to self.
Clouds are made from the fist-fulls of ash
we scatter in our late loved one’s honor. Clouds are made by grey matter,
forming nimbuses of rumination that shade our heads like awnings.
Clouds are made when fog yawns and retreats back up to bed.
Clouds are made as the moon waves away stars like horse flies.
Clouds are sent, special-made by the sun for our protection.
Clouds repent for their lightning spent with a performance of iridescence
the color like soap bubbles washing away thunder’s echoing refrain.
Clouds are shaped by the cookie cutters of angels, baked at temperatures of repeating numbers.
Clouds are made to mislead each other: it’s just a few miles up ahead, trust me!
Clouds are made to house the castles
we’ll retreat to after this.
Clouds are made as stepping-stones for the gods and goddesses.
Clouds are made by Mother Nature to use as pillows and for the Nephologist’s bliss.
Isabel Grey holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Colorado University. She is an assistant editor at Terrain.org. Her work can be found at Twenty Bellows, new words {press}, and elsewhere.
I am asked to write about clouds and all I can do is think of the bombs that missed our home that by the grace of prayers we survived the plane rides through continents that we arrived here safely where now I see students who are scared of masked strangers tearing families apart.
But in this place they are protected or at least that’s what we tell them here, we have cloud wall papers that post job opportunities so these students can help already over-worked and under-slept parents these students who are expected to be guardians of siblings and translator for uncles and aunts, are just children, caught up in high school gossip and sweetheart dances.
I am asked to write about clouds and all I can do is think of Katie who earned her wings too soon, sitting on the fluffiest cloud, with mis-matched socks, reading a book while I am here among students letting them know their rights—that their body means their choice, that No is a complete sentence. That one day we will all be free.
Karineh Mahdessian loves hard, reads books and eats tacos!
The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during September of 2025.Four of our committed members heard about an opportunity through WWS programming and/or another member.
I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take some time to celebrate yourself and your wonderful accomplishments. Thank you and happy submitting!
Kudos to Elizabeth Galoozis who published the poems “I keep falling asleep in the motherland” and “they made us” in Santa Fe Literary Review. See excerpt of the former below:
I came into this world landlocked. They pulled me out by the same ankles the sea now circles, pushes my feet to the edge of the land I came from. The waves tug at my blood,
lulling me, slowing me, whispering why would you ever leave.
I don’t like guided tours I’m not a joiner or a follower I’m not good with large groups I’m not a regular person I want to pause, linger, drift, where others march in lockstep and I want to keep going, where others want to stay
Kudos to Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin whose poem “As Mexican as a Nopal” was announced as a short list finalist for the 2025 Four Feathers Press Chapbook Prize. Her poem “Mother and Child From Gaza” also appeared in the 2025 Southern California Haiku Study Group Anthology.
is he coming or going slamming of a screen door angry or rushed in or out her or him idling in front of a fridge hunger or thirst boredom or pleasure is it the beginning or the end I tell her I can’t remember a time before
Kudos to Carla Rachel Sameth for her publication of the poems “Everything Here Is Broken,” “A Magpie Soars Across the Sky,” “The Darkest Water,” “Like My Skater Son” and “Ghazal of the 3 PM Wall,” in Cholla Needles 105. Excerpt of the latter available below:
They asked me, What do you do when you hit the 3 PM wall? I don’t know but I can’t even remember the age of my baby.
It was after a faux rave, a celebration for a movie about a rave. A 2 AM breakfast, the question came at me, I was a sage with a baby.
I’ll be up by 5 AM, I said, uncertain if I’d be nursing or playing. All I knew is that I had six never-born, a raging ex-husband, and one baby.
What do you do when you hit the wall? they laughed the question again. Strangely awake, what happens after being up all night, I was a rampage, a baby.
Shoutout to Michelle Otero who poem “Birthright” was featured in American Poetry Review. She also published the memoir piece “Stepson, I have been writing to you in my head since we met…” in Letters to Our Children: an Anthology.
Early morning sun yellows a grey mist that lifts up to the window ledge, sending shafts of weak sunlight into their kitchen as he stands at the deep sink and fills the kettle. The kettle is moved to its base, its lever gently pushed, as he walks to the cupboard. Out of the cupboard comes her most colorful jarrito, which he warms under running water, adding two teaspoons of sugar to the bottom; she prefers sweetness to bitterness. Setting a well-used single serve coffee filter on top of the mug’s mouth, he meticulously measures a level scoop of her cinnamon café de olla. When the kettle softly sings its readiness to add to the reverence of this ritual, he pours the water over the scented grounds and waits patiently for the water to trickle down and for cinnamon and sweet coffee aromas to fill the air. The light in the room silently shifts upwards while he bides seconds. Opening the refrigerator to get the glass cream bottle their milkman delivered that morning, he hums quietly. When the water from the coffee filter has emptied, he removes it and adds just enough cream to make a beautiful shade of brown, stirring so softly. He pads into another room on socked feet to place this lovingly prepared liquid in front of her. She is sitting at her desk, writing, as is her morning ritual. Wordlessly, she sips, closes her eyes, smiles wistfully as he pads away to start his day. When the light in the kitchen has shifted again, to full sunlight or rain, when the mists have disappeared or reappeared, when the sun has lowered on the other side of the house, she will take her great grandmother’s cast iron pan, hold it carefully in two hands, warm it over moderate heat, and lovingly lift from the kitchen stores a meal to nourish. The meal is served at their old oak table, set with plates and utensils, glasses and wine. He will close his eyes, breathe in the scent of cumin, garlic, chillies and family history and then smile at her as she sits across from him, with her own plate too. The sun will set, the shadows will lengthen and consume, but they will not notice.
Elisabeth Contreras-Moran is a Xicana environmental scientist turned poet. She has an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and further science degrees from CUNY. Currently living in England, she creates at night, when the world is quiet. Her poetry has been in Litro Magazine, Moss Puppy Magazine, Equinox, The Ascentos Review and the Somos Xicanas anthology from Riot of Roses Press.
I have hidden in houses with thick curtains, slept through sunrises on purpose, and called it survival.
I have dimmed myself to match the shadows in someone else’s room, forgetting that I was born a soft blaze.
But still— light finds me.
It slips through the cracks of my resistance, paints my eyelids golden before I even wake, reminding me I’m still here.
Light doesn’t ask for permission. It arrives, regardless. It shows me what I didn’t want to see— and what I’d forgotten to celebrate.
Even the body glows from the inside. Even grief throws a reflection.
And maybe that’s the lesson:
Some part of us always remembers how to shine back.
Melba Morel is an author and poet based in South Florida. Her work explores grief, identity, and healing through the lens of nature, memory, and personal transformation. She is the author of Unplanted Yet Flourishing: A Poetic Journey Through Infertility, Loss & Healing and founder of Poetic Nectar Collective.
I walk to the end of the butte just as Grandmother Moon begins to rise over the mountains. She is a glorious orb cresting the horizon. As she rises, the barren desert landscape comes alive around me, like another realm illuminated by her phosphorescence. Long eared jackrabbits scatter wildly amongst the glowing sagebrush, searching for shadows in which to hide. Raising my arms skyward, I draw her down, rejoicing in her tenderness and grace. In a short time she will fade into eclipse, but for now she fills the sky with the ripeness of her belly and covers the landscape in ethereal light.
Two owls scream with haunting cries which deflect and echo off the looming cliffs, their enormous wings bearing them from one hunt to the next. They too feel the power of the moon. A third plummets upon its prey with a screech that pierces the night. There is no longer a cover of darkness under which to shield the little ones. A pack of coyotes cry and yip and sing, a mournful chorus in the otherworldly light. And as Moon rises higher in the sky, the mountains and cliffs beneath her seem to rise as well. There is great magic in her fullness; it is the magic of light.
I lower myself onto the asphalt, my back resting against my front tire, wrapped tightly in a woolen shawl. The eclipse has begun and I fall into the dreamy space of in-between, surrendering to a feeling of timelessness as the moon begins to disappear. Her shadowing mirrors my own repetitive journey into the darkness and then once again into the light.
This night is mine and I sit within the inky blackness by myself, watching, waiting, winter lying upon my shoulders, cold and crisp, until Grandmother reappears in the sky. I leave her with a prayer and a bow, holding the vision of her journey so closely in my heart.
Jennifer Germano, storyteller & poet, draws her inspiration from nature and from her own relationships and spiritual journey. Dreamer, stargazer, firewalker. Weaver of words. Believer of magick, she wanders between the deserts of southern Ca and the mountains of northern New Mexico.
