Volume 8 Issue 1

Foreword

Welcome, readers, to The Literary Nest issue after a prolonged hiatus. I wanted to do something special for the readers on this occasion. This issue features several accomplished metrical poets whom I met while being a member of Annie Finch’s Poetess and Priestesses community. I had always been intrigued and impressed by the metrical poetry. In the past, when I asked for submissions of poems in meter, I always ended up receiving iambic poems, and very few of them. So, when I met all these amazing poets and saw what they were capable of, I had to invite them to submit their work. Metrical diversity is a rare bird these days. Annie Finch is a pioneer and a driving force behind the revival of metrical diversity in the world of poetry. If you are not familiar with Annie, you can learn more about her at her website https://anniefinch.com/ and potentially join her community to explore meter. You can also take a look at her recent book, How to Scan a Poem. If you intend to learn the meter in conjunction with Annie’s community, watch this space for announcements of the meter for that month. I hope to create a private space for the poems in progress, and when they are complete, I will include them in the regular issue.

I am not abandoning my free-verse and prose poets. I will continue to include all forms except those that require special spacing requirements. In the future, if I find a volunteer to put up these poems, I will consider them.

If you don’t know, The Literary Nest is a journal where no money changes hands. I will never charge a fee to submit poems, even for future contests. What that means is that there will be no cash prizes, and no compensation will be provided for the included poems. I want this space to be an open, inviting, and enjoyable poetic space. “A Clean Well-Lighted Space,” if you will.

Welcome back and spread the word.

Pratibha

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Poems

Patricia Brody

All Your Life You Hold a Space

All your days , all your nights
Hold this space through the rain
Through the leaves, turning sleep

Wait for someone’s voice to say
Come here.
Hungry arms round the hopeful soul.

Save this sound, rustling breeze
Rain on leaves, turning sleep.

Someone’s voice : calls so clear
Now, come close now come here.

Evening blue, love brands you
Sighs your name, this embrace
Hungry arms, other soul.
Whispered prayer, unearthed trace
Fall to earth, fall to grace.

Breathe it in, breathe it out:
Now let go.

Patricia Brody MSW, MA is a Poet, new grandparent, psychotherapist, and former journalist in the 1970s San Francisco music scene. Her three poetry collections are: My Blazing World, Dangerous to Know, both from Salmon Poetry, and American Desire ( New Women’s Voices Award, Finishing Line Books). Her poetry appears in international journals from BigCityLit, Barrow Street to Orbis, the Paris Review, and anthologies including Fire& Rain: Eco Poetry of California. Patricia teaches a writing workshop, Seeking Your Voice, to an amazing international group of women poets. She and her art director husband raised three beloved children one block from the Hudson River.

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Elizabeth Ewing

For Karen

The pin oaks are swaying in summer’s soft winds with leaves rustling still green
A home for the birds who remain to accompany Autumn’s cool breezes
Your gracious hospitable soul greets all creatures you meet
Embracing each one with warm welcome inviting us in
O come to my home mi casa es su casa you say and repeat

Still standing erect in a robe of neat elegance hospice be damned
For hospice can’t cancel your essence nor cancer your insights and smile
And humor, your wry wit you offer to ease our hearts breaking
From losing you here-with-us and losing our country as well
A country you served in compassion and wisdom efficiently good.

O how we shall miss you our hearts overflowing with tears and deep love.
O how shall we hear inaccessible vibrant clear voice when it’s silent?
Remember dear heart how she carved out a space of her own deep within you
Imparting herself then implanting her love so you’re never alone
When pin oaks are swaying each season anew she is sitting beside us again.

Elizabeth Ewing returned to writing poetry in recent years. She was selected from among many poets to read poetry at her county’s poetry award celebration and reads her work regularly in the Philadelphia area. Elizabeth is part of Annie Finch’s Poetesses and Priestesses. Prior to her focus on poetry, Elizabeth was a U.S. diplomat specializing in economic and environmental issues. Elizabeth was ordained an Episcopal priest in 2012.

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Annie Finch

Samhain (The Celtic Halloween)

In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother’s mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,
intimate, a waiting bounty.
“Carry me.” She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze.

Annie Finch, poet, speaker, critic, teacher, and performer, is the author of seven books of poetry, including Spells: New and Selected Poems, Eve, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford, has lectured at Harvard, Toronto, Delhi, and Oxford Universities, and has published books on poetic meter and craft, including “A Formal Feeling Comes,“ “The Body of Poetry,“ “Villanelles,” and “A Poet’s Craft.“ Her writings on feminism and spirituality have appeared in The Huffington Post, Psyche, The New York Times, and her own “Poetess Priestess” Substack, and she edited the pioneering anthology “Choice Words: Writers on Abortion.” Annie teaches monthly Poemcasting Circles at anniefinch.com and travels from her home in New York City to teach and perform.

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Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

Correlation

There are habits easy, and habits hard.
Ones succumbing to a cute to-do list,
colored pencils, and fancy markers
bought specifically for the purpose,
and ones that sit like a cardboard box
in the middle of my highway mind
to be thwaped by every passing thought
from shoulder to berm to center line.
Bitterness is this second kind.
Especially when I read things
saying childless women are at greater risk
for this sneaky cancer, this piece of shit,
like they’re trying to say it was our own fault
and not the other way around.

Reinventing the Wheel

Once upon a time I lifted myself
up high into a graceful arch from flat
on the carpet in our small apartment above
the Aflac agent, or flooring made of bamboo
at the yoga studio I went to five
days a week, or even the asphalt of
the Wal-Mart parking lot on Tennessee Street,
without a thought to where to put my hands,
without a thought about the position
of my legs, the width of those hips that hid
a spreading secret timebomb I know
had already started to grow back then.
And now, I lay here struggling today.
I move my feet an inch up toward my butt,
my hands now closer, now farther away.
Three times I’ve tried to push the ground from me,
three times I haven’t budged. Some days I can
still manage full wheel, most days I can’t.
I never know which day the day will be
until I’ve tried and failed or risen up.

(Reinventing the Wheel originally appeared in Earth’s Daughters.)

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s work appears in New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah and Salamander. Her poetry collection, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, is out now from Kelsay Books. Her poetry collection centered on her experiences with ovarian cancer, Little Stone, Little Stone, is forthcoming (Fall 2026) from Sheila-Na-Gig. She sporadically hosts the Meter Cute interview series on the Meter&Mayhem Substack and YouTube channel and serves as a member of the board of Anhinga Press.

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Pratibha Kelapure

Burning Woman

After Sylvia Plath

Year after year, I set
On fire, the merciless
Memories every summer
All through the fall and winter, word by word
I try to string the song of
A savannah sparrow
Staying close
To the ground foraging the buried
Syllables seeping through the snow
And thaw them over my warm breath
Those little things are heavy on my tongue
I am so tired of the harshness
Grating on my ear
Year after year, I set
My hopes high, sigh after sigh
I return to the ground and try
To polish the rough edges of
The words so wry
The fierce polishing—the fleeting gleam
Sometimes the sparks fly
Singe my lashes, hair on fire
This merciless struggle of burnishing
This burning woman
This sweet song of the sparrow

First published in the Plath Poetry Project and later reprinted in Entropy.

Anatomy of an Orphan Mind

Cities and countries
Fresh cow dung on the dusty roads
Rangoli drawings and a water well pump
A hundred words spoken on the streets
Rickshaws, bicycles, and rumbling railcars
A hundred elbows creating space out of nothing

A hundred strange voices day after day
The young voice inside — frozen, muted, waiting

Waiting for a signal to let her
gather the rain in her palm, to
release her song to the wind,
waiting for a voice that never speaks

Memories thinly stitched together,
A patchwork of childhood in a paralyzed brain
and
A hundred indecisions of adulthood

Winner of the Paper Swans Press Poetry Competition, 2014

Pratibha Kelapure has been the editor of The Literary Nest since 2015. Her poetry has appeared in The Tab Journal, Vox Poetica, Lake Poetry, and several other journals. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

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Autumn Newman

Kore Falling

I was lost in their whites when the world was split open.
The narcissus were burning and, falling, I was awoken.
I landed, no longer a maiden. I stood and unfurled—
Persephone, bride of the devil, and Queen of the Underworld.

Persephone Eating

Seeds are strange—
burst like breath,
crunch like teeth.
Stained with blood,
lips and tongue
ache with my
swift mistake.
Trickster-God,
coward. He
cannot love.
These slow fires
only take.

Persephone Wintering

Not long now, not long—she counts the days
with pomegranate seeds. Not wanting
to part from their tight shell, they burst.
Her hands are stained with their sticky blood,
but she cannot see in the dark. No matter,
soon she will rise and flowers will pop
open behind her as she walks
barefoot on new grass. Freed from winter’s
cold hands, the air will bloom and clear
her fetid lungs. The sun will burn
away the fist in her chest and the throbbing
pitch inside of her red valley.
Soon she will find her mother sitting
against an apple tree in a blooming
orchard that smells of honey and leaves.
But for now, she counts seeds in the dark.

Persephone Rising

I was once a Goddess who waited for her
season—slowly netting the deep Cocytus.
Now I rise, resplendent in blood-red garnets,
showering hellfire.

First published by Finishing Line Press in the chapbook, A Flower Burst Open.

Autumn Newman writes poetry and book reviews. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Rise Up Review, and others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her chapbook, A Flower Burst Open, is available from Finishing Line Press.

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Katrina Serwe

Low Prairie

She burns to return to her natural being
on ground that is free for her roots to run deeply
with sky open wide for the sunshine to nourish
her sedges and bluestem and purple coneflowers.

On ground that is free for her roots to run deeply
in aster and clover and shooting star colors
with sedges and bluestem and purple coneflowers
she follows the stream fed by Paradise Springs.

In aster and clover and shooting star colors
she builds over time in shed layers of seasons.
She follows the stream fed by Paradise Springs,
this place that she needs to be left undisturbed

to build over time in shed layers of seasons.
Unoccupied, resting and rooted in darkness—
it’s time that she needs to be left undisturbed.
The air that we breathe is the fruit of her dreaming.

Unoccupied, resting and rooted in darkness—
it’s here that her roots do their weaving of soil.
The air that we breathe is the fruit of her dreaming,
this time they call fallow and wasted, a mystery.

It’s here that her roots do their weaving of soil
the carbon in air becomes earth once again.
This time they call fallow and wasted a mystery
absorbing our excess emissions and flooding.

The carbon in air becomes earth once again.
Invisible work she does thankless and steady,
absorbing our excess emissions and flooding.
We’ve tried to upturn her uncivilized acres.

Invisible work she does thankless and steady,
we call her slow rooting a waste of a landscape.
We’ve tried to upturn her uncivilized acres.
She burns to return to her natural being.

Trail Glow

The waves of seeding grasses buzz
with blazing stars’ last pollination
as leaves change from summer to fall
beginning colors back for endings.

In blazing stars’ last pollination,
I hunt with my camera to capture the bright
beginning colors back for endings.
In forest crisp with drying leaves

I hunt with my camera to capture the bright
of lovely red and golden orange
in forest crisp with drying leaves
where even poison ivy glows

in lovely red and golden orange
and waves of seeding grasses buzz.
Where even poison ivy glows
as leaves change from summer to fall.

On Being an Introvert

I am walking with others and can’t hear the wheels
of my mind on the wagon trail that once ran from Wautoma
to Plainfield, still a grass track that intersects
the Ice Age Trail in the glacial landscape of a tunnel channel

formed from the repetition of things passing through.
Our feet press the path, conversation flows one-way.
I’m better at listening, it’s not that I don’t want to share.
I can’t find anything valuable inside while focused

on someone else’s story. I ask the questions I’d like
to answer, create space I’d like in return but can’t
find the words to ask for, so I give away and feel
grateful for an invitation to join, a place

in common to walk, though part of me is hiding
like my gray tiger under the couch, who prefers the dark
of her own thoughts. She’ll wait for the last visitor to exit,
come out slowly, stretch and yawn—what took so long?

I won’t hear her rumble contentment until we’re settled
and breathing in quiet. That’s when I’ll hear the turning
of my mind and I’ll find what it was I was looking for.

Listen

Can you hear how the snowflakes hang
in the December air, how they wait

just aching to fall? How the wind
is muffled by pine-needle hush

and leaf crunch diminished, fibers
flattened on their return to dirt.

There are echoes of silence where bird
song is missing

from this almost wintery woods.
Where’s the swish of skis or the scuff

of deer-startle? Does quiet throb
in your ears? Do you too want to raise

a white-tail and run while you fly
a warning flag? For the change

in the weather we have made?

I Want to Feel Green Again

The end of cold and winter gray will come
but not today in overcast and drab
the snow crust crisp and holding winter close.
I need to find some fresh air for my brain
that’s frozen hard, depressed in too long a dull
and dreary state of mind. Imprisoned thoughts
in the winter need the green of forest life.
I go without hope of relief but go

where Allen’s Creek is playing under ice,
lichen and moss are greening boulder edges.
In the pines I find the fragrant spice of life
that’s growing: Norway spruce, red and white pines,
with balsam fir still holding green in boughs
undisturbed by another’s gray and cold.

You are most likely to find Katrina Serwe foraging poems on Wisconsin’s Ice Age National Scenic Trail. You can find some of her trail poems in her chapbook First Steps, released this spring with Brain Mill Press. www.katrinaserwe.com

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Richelle Lee Slota

Hendecasyllabics: Me and Wendell: The Moonstruck Psychos

Mom, again and again you tried to kill me.
Back, when I was a child, I hid in dirt and
darkness, hid in a crawl space under momma’s
bedroom, hid in cold panic under momma,
daddy, slow-chewing cuds of spleen against me,
ugly sexual loathing flowing, building,
hatred’s mainspring hard winding, winding, winding.
Daddy punches a wall that shatters glass and
photographs of the framed unnerve the framing.
Mom says, He says he’s female! Female, he says?
Put him in that nice hospital with Wendell,
crazy brother, belongs with all the crazy
moonstruck psychos, that cretin institution,
madhouse, snake pit, insane asylum, bedlam,
harebrained, cockeyed, deranged, and spastic Wendell,
Locked derangements, deranged masturbation.
If the nuns at St. Boniface get wise, look,
I for one cannot face them. Oh, just shameful!
Done, we’re dead, we’ll have to move, the scandal!
Help! My payoffs in heaven busted, canceled.
Mother in the night! All the ships at sea! All
gone! We have our own Christine Jorgensen, here!
Everything I denied myself, all that for
five cursed kids. No new dress, I haven’t sewed my-
self a dress this year. Must deny myself, but,
Jesus, what about me? I sacrificed me,
hanging, Christ-on-the-cross and I’m still hanging!
Wendell, nine, was a whip smart boy and loved by
some, till fever was Huntington’s chorea,
locked up all his life, nightmare Cinderella,
locked, forgot at the lunatic asylum.
Under damned and dread words, my head, and under
this my head, hard hard dirt. This dirt on me they
hold it over small me, this dirt has hooks in
me, you could not quite see, controlled my growing.
Fact: you don’t have to act on threats for threats to
work, but they’re both dead, never roomed with Wendell.
Mom, again and again you tried to kill me.

First published in “Letters to My Dead Name” by Blue Cedar Press.

On July 17, 1955, Richelle Lee Slota (formerly known as Richard) was one of 200-3rd third-graders selected to open Disneyland by running across the drawbridge into Fantasyland. She’s been running into Fantasyland ever since. She has published much poetry, Letters To My Dead Name, a book. Famous Michael, a chapbook, Stray Son, a novel, and, with co-author Yaw Boateng, Captive Market: Commercial Kidnapping Stories from Nigeria, a non-fiction book. She earned an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State. She is a Meter Mentor to women learning meter on Annie Finch’s online community, Poetry Witchery Community. She is an Army vet. She has 3 adult children.

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Centa Therese

Wire Bird

Streaming downriver, you keep rowing.
Tethered to your wire birds, you are going.
A city girl, crossing sidewalk cracks.
Kinder now, you still shun the grass.
Flame hair redyed for its final showing.

Fallen camelia, to where are you flowing?
Everywhere or just nowhere for posing?
Post fall, cut flowers arrived like claps.
Streaming downriver, you keep rowing.

Your sister stays by you, daughter coping.
Flickering silence, innocence dozing.
Droplets of time we know can’t last.
Coming closer to breath’s final pass.
Soon you’ll be gone with no foreboding.
Down rivers of sky, black butterfly.

First published in “myth of me” by Kelsay Books.

Centa Therese has published poems in several journals. Her collection “the myth of me” was published in 2025 by Kelsay Books. Her collection of prose poems, Night Gardening was a recent finalist with Sixteen Rivers Press and is seeking a publisher. The title poem will appear in Ploughshares in 2026.

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Abigail Ardelle Zammit

MARCHA DE LA MUERTE
Salar de Atacama

Toconao, Toconao,
flats are deep, road signs lie.

Has it been forty years
since they scraped flesh from stone,
razed the salt from its ground,
drilled the deep, clawed the sky?

SQM, Albemarle—
was it you fathered drought,
drained the gold from its brine,
ripped the lung from its heart?

Toconao, Toconao,
flats are deep, road signs lie.

Has it been all this long
since they mined lithium fields,
tore the air from its flight,
stunned the gull, starved the duck?

What’s it like when they gorge
all this flat’s grainy white—
won’t they choke on the spoils,
lithium’s curse, lithium’s gold?

Toconao, Toconao,
flats are deep, road signs lie.

First published by Editor-in-Chief Kristina Marie Darling in the Tupelo Quarterly, Issue 32, May 14, 2024, as a footnote poem in the hybrid text Ruta 27.

Abigail Ardelle Zammit is a Maltese poet, educator, and editor. Her third poetry collection is Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh (Etruscan Press, Wilkes University, 2025). Abigail’s poems and translations have appeared in CounterText, Modern Poetry in Translation, and The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2022 (Véhicule Press, 2023), amongst others.

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Foreword

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A Poetry Journal