Issue 216

Robert L. Giron
4 hours ago
21 min read

This issue features

photograph by Karel Bock,
poetry by Barbara Brooks,
photography by Wirestock,
poetry by Rafaella Del Bourgo,
fiction by Nishi Chawla,
poetry by Ben Hyland,
poetry by Ken Pobo,
photograph by Panfilov Sergey,
poetry by Rick K. Reut, and
fiction by Lisa Rhodes-Ryabchich

Karel Bock

Great Hornet Owl, Near the Nest, State National Park, Wisconsin

Barbara Brooks

Who Hunts the Hunter?

The owl sat in the middle of the gravel road;

its wings an umbrella over some unseen prey.

It was noon. I wondered what it had caught:

a field mouse, lizard or snake. I drove the car slowly,

the owl took off, I never saw its victim.

I was saddened by the demise of some small creature

but realized that the bird must eat, maybe feed its young.

But what hunts the barred owl. A great horned owl.

Who kills? We all kill; the reasons

are many but fear of differences leads the way.

Somewhere along our path, we will meet the great horned owl.

About the Author

Barbara Brooks, the author of the chapbooks The Catbird Sang, A Shell to Return to the Sea, and Water Colors is a retired physical therapist. Her work has appeared in Knee Brace Press, Remington Review, among others. She lives in Hillsborough, NC with her dog.

Wirestock

Black, Red & Worned Book. An Opened Book, a Black Camera & Pomegranates

Rafaella Del Bourgo

For Carl in Lichtenstein

Once, when he was doing research in Lichtenstein,

the veranda doors rattled

and Carl opened them to a quartet

of drunken associates:

a Bally shoe heir,

the king’s interior minister,

the representative of 400 shadow companies,

and Carl’s own physician

in a three thousand dollar suit.

He barred their entry

but they could see my red nightgown,

undisciplined tumble of hair.

It’s true we slept beside each other

although he never kissed my mouth or touched my body

the way he did with those brief affairs –

the 20 year old boys

he always yearned for.

He came back to bed, sighed,

and said maybe this would stop the gossip

for a while.

He told me about

working with a Central American hill tribe.

The villagers were frightened by him -- a giant

with blue eyes and hair so blond and fine

it was almost invisible in certain light --

and they thought he was the devil.

No one would give him information

and he had to abandon the study.

I loved the confession

that he grew to dislike those people

who, when he passed by,

pulled in their babies

and even the piglets

the women routinely nursed

sitting in the sunshine.

He reached for a pomegranate in a nearby bowl.

We broke it open and ate the fruit,

the tiny red hearts

both tart and sweet.

About the Author

Rafaella Del Bourgo’s work has appeared in journals such as Nimrod, The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, The Adroit Journal, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Caveat Lector, Puerto Del Sol, Rattle, Oberon, Spillway, The Bitter Oleander, in the anthology Chapter & Verse: Poems of Jewish Identity. She has won many awards including the Lullwater Prize for Poetry, the Helen Pappas Prize in Poetry, the New River Poets Award, a three-time winner of the Maggi Meyer Poetry Competition, winner of Grandmother Earth Poetry Prize from The League of Minnesota Poets, and was awarded the Paumanok Prize for Poetry. Recently she won first place in the Northern Colorado Writers’ Poetry Contest, the Mudfish Poetry Prize, and the Allen Ginsberg Award. Her first book, I Am Not Kissing You, was published by Small Poetry Press. Her chapbook, Inexplicable Business: Poems Domestic and Wild, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her new collection, A Tune Both Familiar and Strange (Regal House Publishing), won the Terry J. Cox Award.

Nishi Chawla

Handali’s Sky

Handali was ten years old when her world shattered. Nestled in the fertile, green hills of northern Palestine, Handali had only seen a peaceful and happy world. She lived in an orchard in the small village of al-Shajara. Like so many other children in her village, she had lived most of her life under the warm embrace of olive trees and the distant whisper of the Mediterranean wind. The children had once played in the streets under the Mediterranean sun, unaware of the storm that was gathering on the horizon. But those winds, once full of promise and the smell of the sea, had changed. The Nakba destroyed their home and their simple way of life. The Mediterranean winds now carried dust, the sound of gunfire, and the echoes of her father's last words as they fled.

Handali didn’t understand war. To her, war was a distant concept - something that lived in the stories her grandmother told, the kind of tales where heroes fought bravely and the sun always returned after the storm. But the storm had come, and there were no heroes. There were only shadows that stretched across the land, swallowing everything she had known. Now, as a refugee, she stood on the edge of a vast desert, holding her mother’s hand tightly. Her world had shrunk from the fields of Palestine to the confines of a crowded refugee camp in Lebanon, surrounded by tents that flapped helplessly in the wind. Her name, Handali, once spoken with affection and warmth, now felt like a whisper carried on the dust.

Handali had grown up in a small village near Haifa, where the hills met the sea and the fields bloomed with olive trees. Life there had a rhythm. She woke each morning to the sound of her father’s voice, the creak of the door as her mother prepared breakfast, and the soft hum of the village. There was always something growing - oranges, olives, figs - and she knew every tree, every patch of earth, like the lines on her grandmother’s hands.

It was a place of stories, where her elders spoke of the past and the future, of dreams intertwined with the land they walked upon. Handali had always felt safe, enveloped by that certainty.

But the world had shifted one hot summer afternoon. The men came with guns, shouting words she didn’t understand. They wore uniforms, their faces grim and unyielding. Her father, a proud man, had stood in front of their home, his back straight, refusing to leave. But as the crack of a rifle shattered the silence, everything fell apart.

Handali's mother grabbed her hand, pulling her away from the chaos. She remembered the rush of heat, the screams of her neighbors, the weight of dust and ash falling from the sky. There was no time for questions, no time for goodbyes. Handali’s small feet stumbled as they fled, her mother’s hand pulling her onward, farther and farther from the only home she had ever known.

They walked for hours, maybe days; she couldn’t tell. The sun hung like a cruel eye in the sky, watching as they crossed into unfamiliar lands. When they finally reached the camp, it wasn’t the end of their journey. It was just the beginning of a different kind of exile.

The refugee camp stretched for miles, a sea of makeshift tents and structures cobbled together from whatever the people could find. There was no longer the hum of the village, only the constant wail of wind through the canvas. In the distance, beyond the camp, mountains loomed, but they felt as distant as the sea she had once known.

Handali’s tent was small, shared with her mother and two other families. Privacy was a memory, something that existed in the life before. She often sat at the entrance of the tent, staring out at the horizon, where the sky bled into the earth, wondering when her father would come for them. She believed, with the fierce faith only a child could possess, that he would return.

But as the days turned to weeks, and the weeks to months, the reality of their new life sank in. Handali's mother worked tirelessly, gathering food, waiting in long lines for water, caring for the children who wandered the camp aimlessly. Her face, once full of life, had grown pale and lined. Her voice, once strong, was now quiet, as if she feared it would break.

One evening, as the camp grew quiet and the fires outside flickered under the darkening sky, Handali sat beside her mother. "Mama, when are we going home?" she asked softly.

Her mother didn’t answer at first, her fingers brushing through Handali's hair. When she finally spoke, her voice was full of sorrow. "I don’t know, Handali. I don’t know if we will."

Handali looked up at her, confusion knitting her brow. "But... we belong there."

Her mother’s hand trembled slightly, but she didn’t pull away. "Yes, we belong there," she whispered. "But sometimes, belonging isn’t enough."

As time passed, the camp became a world unto itself, a city of refugees who had nowhere else to go. Handali became familiar with its rhythms - the lines for food, the shared laughter despite the sorrow, the unspoken rule that you didn’t ask about the future. The children in the camp didn’t talk about school or games. They spoke in fragments, about the homes they had left behind, the families they had lost, and the constant hunger that gnawed at their stomachs.

There was a girl, Noura, who became Handali’s closest friend. Noura was older, almost twelve, with dark, intense eyes that seemed to carry the weight of the world. She had lost both her parents during their escape, and now she lived with an aunt who hardly spoke. Despite her loss, Noura had a fierce determination about her, a fire that refused to go out.

“We’ll go back one day,” Noura said one evening as they sat by the edge of the camp, staring at the stars that flickered like distant memories.

“Do you really think so?” Handali asked, pulling her knees to her chest.

“Yes,” Noura said, her voice firm. “They can’t keep us away forever. We belong there.”

Handali nodded, wanting to believe her. But deep down, a seed of doubt had begun to grow. The longer they stayed in the camp, the harder it became to remember the smell of the olive trees, the sound of her father’s voice. The world she had known was fading, replaced by the harshness of the present.

One day, a rumor spread through the camp like wildfire: a wall was being built. It would rise between them and the land they had been forced to leave. The wall was to be a boundary, a final division that would sever them from their home once and for all.

Handali couldn’t believe it. She had always thought that one day, they would return, that their exile was temporary. But a wall? It felt like a cruel joke, as if the world was telling them that they no longer existed.

The children in the camp gathered at the edge, where the tents met the open fields. In the distance, beyond the horizon, they could see the beginnings of the wall, a shadow that stretched across the land. It was not yet finished, but its presence was enough to send a chill through them.

Noura clenched her fists, her eyes burning with anger. “They think they can keep us out with a wall? They’re wrong.”

Handali wanted to believe her, but the sight of the wall, even from a distance, made her stomach churn. It was a physical manifestation of the thing she had feared most: that they were being erased.

The day the wall was completed, Handali’s mother wept for the first time since they had arrived at the camp. She had always been a strong woman, a figure of resilience in the face of hardship. But the wall broke something inside her. It was as if, with its construction, the final tie to their homeland had been severed.

“We can’t let them do this,” Noura whispered to Handali that evening. “We can’t just accept it.”

“What can we do?” Handali asked, her voice trembling.

The sky above Handali stretched endlessly, an ancient canvas of bruised blues and purples, as if the twilight itself was mourning. Its vastness had always been a paradox to her, so familiar, yet now so foreign, like a once-comforting lullaby sung in a language she no longer fully understood. The sky was a witness, watching silently as her world crumbled and reformed, reshaped by borders she could not see but felt deeply in her bones. Tonight, the stars seemed shy, their light hesitant, barely piercing through the thick veil of dust that rose from the earth. They flickered like forgotten memories, faint sparks that had once burned brightly in the village she could no longer return to. The constellations, once traced by her father’s calloused fingers in the night sky, were now fragmented, as if the heavens themselves had been torn apart by the same hands that displaced her. Even the familiar stars felt distant now, as if they too had been scattered across unfamiliar skies.

The moon hung low, a thin crescent of pale light, fragile and waning. It had none of the fullness she remembered from the nights in her village, where it bathed the olive groves in soft silver. Now, it was a sliver of itself, casting delicate, thread-like shadows over the camp, its light barely brushing the tops of the canvas tents. It seemed tired, as if it had been watching too long, its glow dimmed by the weight of the grief it had absorbed.

The sky wasn’t just distant. It was layered, as if time and sorrow had woven themselves into its fabric. It carried the ache of too many stories untold, too many prayers unanswered. The wind moved through the camp like a sigh, stirring the dust but offering no relief, no cool promise of change. It was the same wind that once danced through the olive trees, carrying the scent of ripe fruit and the sound of her father’s voice. Now, it carried only the echoes of a life left behind, and the bitter taste of loss.

And yet, above her, a lone star broke free, streaking across the dark like a fleeting wish. It burned brightly for a brief moment, a reminder that even in this fractured, wounded sky, there was still movement, still some small defiance. Handali watched it disappear into the horizon, and though she didn’t dare make a wish, something in her chest tightened - a faint flutter of something she refused to name.

The sky above, indifferent and immense, held its breath as if caught in the same exile that gripped her. It offered no comfort, no promises. But in its quiet vastness, it allowed her to stand beneath it - small but unbowed, her spirit still tethered to the land and the stars that once belonged to her.

In that moment, Handali understood: the sky, like her, remembered everything. And though it could not bring her back home, it held her grief and her hope in its silent embrace. Handali’s sky watched over her with a sorrow that mirrored her own.

About the Author

Dr Nishi Chawla is an academic, a writer and a filmmaker. She has published nine plays, two novels, and seven collections of poetry. She has also written and directed four award winning art house feature films. She has also co-edited two global anthologies of poetry published by Penguin Random House: Greening the Earth and Singing in the Dark.

Ben Hyland

Anagram Blues

Call me the Ambler Man, the rambler-gambler man,

who slams and bangs the bar, demands Jack Daniels in his hand

when he hears the word anagram.

I couldn’t garble German, couldn’t slum it with numbers and algebra – a bungler, a fumbler,

a third Dumb & Dumber, a stumbler at samba and rumba.

I’m a failed poet who knows what of anagram?

My inner bluesman should join a glam band, stop being a bagman and put a manager’s hands

around my panaram – like I give a damn! –

just park my Sunbeam and crank The Bangles album ‘cause it’s a manic Monday, man.

Goddamn anaramamammogram.

Gotta get those embers low and blue,

burn these poems, write something new.

About the Author

Ben Hyland has published four chapbooks – most recently, Shelter in Place (Moonstone Press, 2022) – and has been featured in multiple journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Hawai’i-Pacific Review, and Tipton Poetry Journal. As a career coach, he has helped hundreds of jobseekers find employment, even throughout the pandemic. Visit: www.benhylandlives.com.

Ken Pobo

Lenny Growing up in Covington

For seven years dad worked

for the IRS. He managed

money well—his kids

never added up. Mom’s apron

strings flew up to heaven.

She hoped an angel would

grab on and rescue us

and that we’d have

“beautiful” lives. I couldn’t

picture a beautiful life. Maybe

the Ohio River would carry me

away, no destination. Every

address I’ve had is a ghost.

I’m haunted

wherever I go.

Edges

Yesterday I edged

a little closer

to death. Today

I’ll do the same.

At seventy, I remember

parts of twenty.

I kept edging

closer to death

even then—

it seemed

like a newspaper

held miles away

from my eyes.

I couldn’t read

or even see the paper.

Now reading the paper

requires no glasses.

I turn the pages,

the last one blank.

About the Author

Kenneth Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and most recently, At The Window, Silence (Fernwood Press). His work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Amsterdam Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.

Panfilov Sergey

Reindeer Grazing in Lappish Forest-Tundra in Early Spring

Rick K. Reut

Through the Snow

…falling again. The snow

is wiping the city clean

out of sight, but you know

that it can still be seen.

You close your eyes and look

inside yourself as if you

were an old picture book

to be published anew,

or a fresh photograph

polished in a photo shop

window where you laugh

through the snow that won’t stop…

…falling again. The snow is wiping the city clean out of sight, but you know that it can still be seen. You close your eyes and look inside yourself as if you were an old picture book to be published anew, or a fresh photograph polished in a photo shop window where you laugh through the snow that won’t stop…

Sea of Snow

…seeing a sea of snow.

It looks like a prophesy

of some kind. You slow

down your eyes to see

it become as clear as

a sea that’s totally calm.

It can be in a glass

of ice freezing the palm

of your hand on a beach

that looks like a backyard.

It seems out of reach,

but it’s still not that hard

to touch the face of the earth

hidden behind a mask

of snow. It’s giving birth

to what you fear to ask

about. What does it mean

to fear hearing a voice

that can never be seen?

It leaves you little choice

but to cross the skyline

that separates the past

from the future – a sign

of a present that’s passed.

Hear the sound of a fright

train of thoughts in your head

crossing your line of sight.

As this train goes mad,

it gets loaded with fear,

and that fear overwhelms

you. It is getting near

all the possible realms

you don’t want to go to,

trying to tell which one

is which out of too

many. In the long run,

they encompass the same

end of an empty street

that has a scary name.

It’s too hard to repeat

it, watching another night

freeze in the window frame.

You can hear that fright

train type your first name

on the railroad track,

making it easy to spell

it out all the way back

to the first farewell.

GOD is certainly GOOD

and undeniably GREAT,

but somehow you still brood

over your own fate …

…seeing a sea of snow. It looks like a prophesy of some kind. You slow down your eyes to see it become as clear as a sea that’s totally calm. It can be in a glass of ice freezing the palm of your hand on a beach that looks like a backyard. It seems out of reach, but it’s still not that hard to touch the face of the earth hidden behind a mask of snow. It’s giving birth to what you fear to ask about. What does it mean to fear hearing a voice that can never be seen? It leaves you little choice but to cross the skyline that separates the past from the future – a sign of a present that’s passed. Hear the sound of a fright train of thoughts in your head crossing your line of sight. As this train goes mad, it gets loaded with fear, and that fear overwhelms you. It is getting near all the possible realms you don’t want to go to, trying to tell which one is which out of too many. In the long run, they encompass the same end of an empty street that has a scary name. It’s too hard to repeat it, watching another night freeze in the window frame. You can hear that fright train type your first name on the railroad track, making it easy to spell it out all the way back to the first farewell. GOD is certainly GOOD and undeniably GREAT, but somehow you still brood over your own fate …

These two pieces above are excerpts from the author’s manuscript Around A Word, which is a collection of cyclic verse that presupposes a poem having no beginning or end and working in both rhyme and prose.

About the Author

Rick K. Reut was born in the USSR. He studied philosophy at EHU in Minsk, Belarus, and literature at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia. For most of his life after graduation, he has worked as a translator and a tutor of English as a foreign language.

Lisa Rhodes-Ryabchich

Yarla the Entrepreneur

It was a relief and a major victory of the ambitious actions of Yarla, a spitfire student from

Harlem who found herself at the top of her class in literature and writing after winning the all-

state championship for creative writing in the 17-year-old category. She managed to write a

manuscript exploring the differences in cultural nomenclatures of religious scholars and how

they perceived the future for women. Women in her study were found to suffer in the future

from unusual discrimination as they progressed toward old age, even though many of them

were wiser and more educated than their male counterparts. The discrimination was odd in

its application, so new jobs were created such as time traveler, mind reader, alien

interlocutor, visionary, dream weaver, sky cleaner, heavenly artist, naturalist, and more.

After getting accepted into Harvard on a scholarship, Yarla was thrilled as to how she was

able to achieve such a feat. Her first semester there she created a club for entrepreneurs

looking to make a billion dollars in their first year after graduating from college. Yarla, a

master mathematician spent time solving intricate problems in trigonometry and computer

science as well. She made math look easy and simplified equations within seconds of

receiving them. It was a natural function of her ease in complicity to get things done fast.

Her mind worked in ways that she hardly understood, and she didn’t see herself as others

saw her. Or maybe it wasn’t enough for her to have mathematical talents, and she despised

her peers for not encouraging her to indulge in her other talents. And one of those talents

was being a time traveler. Not the typical type of time traveler, but one which could inhabit

the soul of a deceased person and travel back in time through the deceased to relive their

lives and erase their negative experiences. It was a second chance for many of the deceased

to undo bad karma and to juggle their opportunities for rebirth.

One wouldn’t have to repeat their life if a voluntary time traveler fixed all the errors for them in their past lives. Yarla even created a software program for training others how to do

this. It was part of her plan to fix the bad karma of millions of lost souls and to learn from

their mistakes and find ways to reinvent societies that were disastrous, reverse botched

operations, rekindle dead romances, and store invaluable knowledge inside artificial corpses

that could be retrieved by future generations. Rethink the atom bomb. Undue polluted

waters, insert the love hormone into everything and destroy the gene for self-destruction

and hate. With these attributes fully functional and artificially instilled in every newborn, life

would continue in an organized fashion without the ugliness witnessed in the 21st century,

where war permeated almost every continent.

This was Yarla’s goal, and her rising in the morning lifted her out from the bedraggled world of lost sleep and dreams sometimes unfounded, tangled in the hurry of waking. But

perhaps she could find solace in the grieving of lost souls, and revisit the channels of the

afterlife, and awaken their master's little god-helpers, who formulated a theorem for how

they would live, and sometimes tried to redo these formulas once they found they

didn’t create perfection.

And it was often a thought, what should perfection look like given the ever-changing

moods and mindsets of humans on the planet, constantly varying with each new star born,

and diseases causing havoc with their DNA. There was forever this need to alter the genetic

pool and create indestructible lines of DNA that revitalized damaged cells once they

were corrupted. If one looked into the eyes of the newborns and saw how their gaze was

deeply hidden, as if they had to look thorough a kaleidoscope of thoughts, each producing

a different image and aura on the world, and see what each meant, the world would have

created a time capsule to envision a better future for each individual, but there seemed to

be weather and climate changes sometimes invariably unpredictable that scared people.

Would there be rain and snow together within a balmy day, almost 95 degrees? How

could such things happen? The same way crying was like laughing sometimes— emotions

were fused together as if an alien creature had hidden-itself inside each newborn, and was

trying to figure out how to be human. Humanity was at its most vulnerable. New lives were

hanging in mid-air, breathing the thinness of kindness stroking their souls—their wounded

eyes alien-like, scared and saddened, knowing they were coming into a fragile world,

knowing they are the future— the new seeds for change, the faces of humanity who want to

be here alive, and vital— the preservers of the last ounce of humanity. They have arrived to

save the world from complete annihilation. Their faces are haunting. We shall not forget how

humans arrived here millions of years ago. Our seeds are within the Earth and shall never

be eradicated. How do I know this? You can just look at the technological advances of the

world and what was unknown 100’s of years ago, but which we are doing today. For

example, stem cell treatments are reversing strokes and giving paralyzed muted souls back

their voices, their dignity, and their ambulatory powers to roam the Earth freely.

What does man want from this life? Are we truly appreciative of our ancestors and all that

they have given us? Are we respectful of their legacy? Are we going forward with a plan for

bettering the world and dedicated to making people be better people and more soulful?

That is the solution to helping people utilize their empathy and compassion to

heal wounded hearts and minds. Cosmic regeneration of souls infused with hope, strength,

logic, and love is the goal.

What is love you ask yourself? How do we compare it? Can we taste it on our tongues

early in the morning? Is it the sustainability that keeps our blood flowing through our veins,

the invisible power that connects us all together? Yes, this is it. The power to forgive and go

forward. Ease tension. Create walls of strength. Manage. Remember all the epiphanies? The

cigar shaped pink cloud in the sky, the one that calls for you to look at it through your

window, to ride on its soft slumberous back and to see the world through its eyes. Feel the

gentle earth and universe spinning in delight, like children in their first bubble bath. We

can't leave the earth bare. We must procreate and bring the little children’s voices home to

a world of joy.

Five geese fly by quacking joyfully, a chord of music runs through Yarla’s brain. It’s

beautiful. She is listening to acoustics to match the visuals of the glorious birds riding

happily across the sky. And Yarla could feel and smell the sleek clean air and leaves after it

rained, the potpourri of the Hudson River and sink her feet into the soft sand by the river’s

shore. Her idea was to indulge in the childish joys’s of comfort, and create a footwear that

reflected the sensual experience of walking along the earth by the beach, and sinking one's

feet into the moist sand and indulging in that joy— that feeling of gliding and floating

through life with ease. This would make a million happy people. How does one create such

a footwear?

Just imagine with one's mind-bending sneakers on, one can feel the soft comforting earth

bringing joy, massaging their brain, allowing them to permeate love inside their soul. This

would be the ultimate solution from feeling depleted after a life of boredom and apathy

and the correct medicine to alter one's consciousness into doing a complete backflip away

from negative thinking and erase any brain damage from years of self-abuse and

disgruntlement with a society that had forgotten how souls shrivel up that haven’t been

stroked. These sneakers would create harmony within the universe like a kind of natural

inexpensive love hormone, yet stylish and sensual that within a second of wearing them

immersed you into an experience like no other.

No continual need to keep purchasing a specific drug or signing up for a doctor's

appointment to renew their prescriptions, but a one-time independent purchase of a

sneaker to transport you to a world of freedom from pain and social disassociation. At last,

one would be able to experience what one always craved, a constant desire to be soothed,

stroked and loved from the souls of one’s feet all the way to their brains, reaching out to all

their dying neurons for rejuvenation and replication.

Surely Yarla’s invention would save the world and bring it closer to the goal of cosmic

inter-connectivity. All the aliens of the universe would rejoice and send pinging vibes to the

recipients of the sneakers, thanking them for doing their part to save the world. Love at last

would become as synonymous as the sun spreading its warmth the second one put on those

magical sneakers.

END.

About the Author

Lisa Rhodes-Ryabchich is an adjunct English professor at Westchester Community College, the author of the short stories “Wednesday's at Salvatore’s Pizzeria” from ArLiJo; Retribution On Cash Street" by Not Your Mothers Breast Milk and from Kairos Literary “Sunday’s at Yankee Stadium,” and “Moving On” by Drunk Monkeys and elsewhere. She has two poetry chapbooks “We Are Beautiful Like Snowflakes” & “Opening the Black Ovule Gate” a full-length collection of poems "Breaking Out of the Cocoon" all from http://www.finishinglinepress.com. Another full-length poetry book "Peripeteia" was published in 2020 and a third full-length collection "How You Get to There" in 2021 with a fourth full-length collection “Dear Blue Harp Strumming Sky” published in 2022 all from CyberWit.net. She is writing her second novel “The Yellow House of Unpardonable Ghosts.” She was a 2016 fellow at Martha's Vineyard Creative Writing Institute. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize for “Igloo” by OyeDrum. Visit her blog https://www.lisarhodesryabchichpoetryblog.Wordpress.com