Joshua Robert Long: 4 Poems
Occasional Self Portrait, Pt IV
Green and gray turn into
poorly painted mural
The Simpsons staring at
Brewery Ken Kesey
and all his family’s yogurt money
cannot pull my fists back through the windshield
I’m walking in the almost-post-dawn
a parking lot patch of grass
beside the hotel car wash
and my dog shits and barks
at another dog
while a young white kid in slippers
does the storyline of a cigarette
Brushing in a bus stop across
the street
next to a Mexican restaurant
that never seems to open
Each time my eyes going
left-to-right
I hear another property management company
voicemail
telling me how we have no credit
or we have too many pets
or the threat of the dog is real
Back in front of the hotel room
the neighbor leaves half a pizza
and the rental car gets returned
while my wife learns to ride the bus
Outside at night I remember
what it’s like to be somewhere
around people
and the sorts of things they’ll offer
to you on their own roads
to finding peace
I start wondering how long we’ve been here
and we’re already starting to forget
Karen
You in a hospital gown
holding a pillow up in your fist
like a shield
as four grown men all stand around you
in fear
You’re screaming and you’re crying
and nobody can tell if it’s the good or bad kind
One eventually gets by you with a shot
sinking slowly down to your knees
My knight in shimmering armor
shackled to the bed
somewhere in Beavercreek
where a couple of geese used to fly
I Want a World
That looks like a world
like an imaginary field of sound
projected back and attached
to a conversation with a stranger
smiling
I want to feel
the kindness of an electricity bill
in a world that’s in my own name
The type of handshake
you get from a security deposit
rolling down sideways
down a hill
Riding
Struggling to hear through heat
the dry air walking down opposite sidewalk
and me
in the very back seat of the bus
but on the opposite side and out of the sun
I think about how many times I’ve seen you
and how there is an extra different kind of feel to this
with the heat of the engine going on behind me
as the fan blows out a sound that soothes in the same sense
as white noise
I hold my breath and smell
the stale sweat made of steeped cigarettes
as we stop and we stop and we stop
and I simply cannot
Joshua Robert Long is a writer, poet, journalist from Dayton, Ohio currently living in Eugene, Oregon. He has a wife and a cattlemutt and a tabby cat and a Siamese cat. He also has an MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso in Creative Writing.
Alexander Romanovich: 3 Poems
The Body Perfect
on the umbral mouth of a lake someone unwinds helming the bleached raft a daughter of the savage corona surrounded by the black floor of the sky
her eyes delighting in spates of shadowglass as the bandit fish nibble at the stars
a wind settles to sleep in the inky shallows warm with citronella to open the auric channels breeding asterism she draws a branch of fire
her eye flitting about the games of a blind thicket
the solid bones of the forest grasping at prowling night lamps
a tree twisting against the ashen nightshades she moves arm over arm leg over leg
architecture and balance throwing a lifeline to the twilights her column arched to the centerline of the sagittarii and poised like a pentaprism before the faint jewel box
releasing through the depthless bodyshell
open to the sky offering the heart naked as it is
she scatters all the tongues of her silvered sheathings one fears of losing but nothing is lost
what’s left when the body evaporates?
Danaë Downpour
there was a sudden loss of time under sweeping hands then the gentle flowing of fingers playing their ancient airs before a brief pause in the falling of gold
but now these wine-dark seas have churned far too long to still the watery dreams of your greening child
with its eyes barely upon the alpenglow
no, let it walk freely through the wilds of purple past the creeping violet fatigue of the rock faces
where the bloodstones ponder their naked transparencies
let it awaken with the ignition of hazy spumes the droning flames pollinating a frameless sky in airy coils of gilded ash
guide it safely between the magnetic panels of dusk under the lighted glass of luna moths
it must pass
like a clouded eye
like a storm without consciousness not accustomed to the incendiary effluvia that overturn the rains
let it cast a stone to the blaze of bearded altars ripe with their soft chimneys of grass
leaving alms to sting the virgin woods
reply in echo grant him a name
for already I hear the high-walled Earth
closing in upon the asphodel and screaming like a banshee
Alrescha
always we walk out into the evening with the mossy-eyed sleep of cedars
as the night rushes in to nurse great stars
taking these long voyages through grasslands starved of fruit through the mirrored underbrush past the
here-and-gone trees
together we invade the inglenooks with their gathering of ancient dusks
like the slow coupling of two rivers strumming the reeds of a detached dream
a dream of things that bear the depths alone waiting to pull themselves upward from the deep mists of the earth
there we find a night laced
with the haunting breath of greenery where the just fallen evening evaporates clear through the lunar nets
where we walk into the cold gaze of nightshades and pause in the cool breath of the mountain falls you and me playmates in the tall grasses
and if I ever fall away redshifted
adrift in the sleep of the living
you return amidst the calm whirl of signals from a far off place
so many things are written upon your cheek like words of snow drifting in from the sweeping wilds of night
your lips remain sealed burning
until that sole bird arrives to unzip this void
Alexander Romanovich is a New York City-based poet whose work is influenced by elements of mythology, Surrealism, and metaphysics. He previously published a chapbook, 'Mythopoeia,' as well as a volume of poetry entitled 'The Keeping of Lights' in early 2019 which was featured in the 2019 poetry showcase at Poets House NYC.
J. Bradley: How To Win Best Body During An Active Shooting Drill
J. Bradley is a Wigleaf Top 50 Writer (2016, 2018). Creative dabbler. Long time cat dad.
Sean Lynch: 3 Poems
A Distant Hill
Humans lined up for the kill
quaking before a trench
a preparation for innocents slaughtered
a trench dug by convicts trusted
more than innocents slaughtered.
The Urals are impassable.
Comrade, there's no need
to justify when you have vodka
and your pick of the floor cleaners
to fuck, with genitals only a little warmer
than their hardened knees.
Comrade Stalin himself says a soldier
who has crossed thousands of kilometers
through blood and fire and death
can have fun with a woman.
The Urals are impassable.
Comrade, why have a conscience
when there's the commissar
to give reasons? Confessions
excesses of humans, the Siberian forests
hold unknowable numbers, quotas
of timber and quotas of corpses
fill the hills surrounding the gulag
but there's one hill that's different
where numbers become bodies
and bodies become numbers
and humans collapse into holes
like they never existed.
The Urals are impassable.
The glades of Tambov woods
and the Meschchera nature reserve
are islands of nihilism scattered
across a sea of meaning.
Camps large enough to hold the millions
of reasons we fear monuments
for the forgotten. The state monopolizes
monuments. Auntie Pasha do not resell
the stockings you found in Chelyabinsk.
Don't you dare travel to Zlatoust to hawk
your wares. It doesn't matter
if your boys starve.
The Urals are impassable.
You'll only end up a floor cleaner.
One son dead on the front
another son maimed at home.
The Urals are impassable.
How one man can destroy
the lives of millions
and ruin an ideology.
Like they never existed.
All buried on the distant hill
that only the executioner
with his stone soul can reach.
A distant hill filled with nothing.
Blood Stained Plains
Driven from stone-walled
and thatched-roof hovels by the redcoats
with bayonet, but mostly by hunger
over the Atlantic
halfway across the world
by way of decaying wood
in broken vessels devastated by disease.
Killed before arrival by infections
and overcrowding and even more hunger.
Harassed in colonial cities
of New York, Boston, Philadelphia
by "Nativists" who formed mobs
to assault foreigners. Some fled west again
as settlers mimicking tactics conceived
by oppressors in the homeland
the punctured emerald isle.
Pushing farther west
in this new red land
to escape prejudice
by earlier conquerors
in the cramped suffocation
of east coast cities
to vast prairies
stained with blood.
The colonized transmogrified into colonizer
to nurture the ashen earth.
Bonus Army
Remember MacArthur's charge
against broke WW1 vets
camped out in protest in DC
at the height of the Great Depression?
Remember cavalry and tanks
running down old men
and women and children
on the lawn of the Capitol building?
The original Occupy movement
demanded due money
and was met with force
of the active duty
ordered to drive out
veteran soldiers.
Burn the Tents!
Snatch the rifles!
Fire and tear gas and gunshots.
A scene that will be repeated
in the future.
The Great Depression
will return.
And it will be the end
of the American Empire.
Sean Lynch is a leftist poet and editor who lives in South Philly. His poems have been published in various journals and he is the author of four chapbooks, the latest being On Violence, published in 2019 by Radical Paper Press. You can find out more about him on swlynch.com
Aakriti Kuntal: 3 poems
Sea
The sea sleeps in its eternal blackness.
I throw a stone
And the sea eats it.
I throw an arm,
A body, a smile, a tear, some cough
And the sea eats it.
The sea stretches from the horizon
To the cold forehead,
Covering everything in its feverish grey light.
I throw a clot of blood
And the sea, like a snake,
Coils into a watery dream.
Shivers like a serpent
With its scales falling off,
Scales like cotton skies
I throw a lie
And the sea catches it;
Giggles and throws it right back at me.
The waves splash in my face;
Their sounds endlessly hiccupping in my ears.
I throw myself to the sea
And the sea inhales me.
Sea,
Giant God of everything.
Sea Anemone
Your mouth swims in the dark sea.
Pulsating between currents.
Shifting like a Scorpio in shadows.
I hold your tongue
And it has the sweet, liquid shape
Of departure. We knew it would happen.
That moment the wires crossed
Each other and over the static
Our hearts beeped into a Fibonacci
Sequence. We knew that love extinguishes
Between two gasps. Quickly as a breath.
That is the time we live, we too would
Pop open like the anxiety in our heads.
Today, your eye is a sea anemone
From where I drink my sorrows.
Today, your eye is Jasmine itr
That has opened my senses
And the nose is bleeding in a conflagration
Of fragrances.
Today, your eye,
Your eye,
Is a capsule of white light
And in it, our lonely faces search for each other.
Itr: Hindi word for perfume or scent
Uncertainty
Words juggle in my belly.
They have lost the entirety of punctuation.
They float as a language in its neo-natal state,
language unborn.
What lay before a word, before you could spell?
Did everything disintegrate but you had no notion
of disintegration?
My lips twist around my tongue and my tongue slips
in the valleys of the jaw.
There is nothing as seismic as uncertainty.
It bounces on and off the chest like a tiny, orphaned lump.
I calculate days on my knuckles, count months.
Test reports and Lab IDs spill between them.
I wait. I wait endlessly. I'm always waiting for something
to happen.
This wait has filled me up and I have filled it.
I float inside it now.
Flowers pickle in my ears.
I roam like a lump of mass that rows in the night sea,
on and on. Where does this end?
This, this unwavering trepidation. I pluck clouds
with my eyes and chew twigs in my head. I am semi-solid,
floating in bits and pieces, unable to make sense of wholeness.
Wholeness is strange. Wholeness is absurd.
I only know shards, shards as they glow beneath the night
sky. I stand quietly in the balcony, not uttering a single word,
always wondering which of these days death will come back,
swooping in, feathered and beautiful, armed and ready,
to collect what it didn't the first time.
Aakriti Kuntal is a poet and writer from Gurugram, India. Her work has been featured in Selcouth Station, RASPUTIN: A Poetry Thread, Poetry at Sangam, Mad Swirl, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Hindu, Madras Courier, Pangolin Review, and Visual Verse among others. Her poem Lilith was recently nominated for the Best of the Net awards 2018-2019 by Pangolin Review. She was awarded the Reuel International Prize 2017 for poetry and was a finalist for the RL Poetry Award 2018.
Julie Ortegon: 3 Poems
Today
I am an
achy beast
roaring and roaming
in incomprehension.
A bb magpie
huddled in the warmth
of blankets + pillows
of my nest.
Gradually
graduating
into an expert human
forming an opinion.
SOMETIME BETWEEN FEBRUARY AND JUNE
The actions and time:
Standing on a corner waiting.
Thumb touching fabric.
Hair is growing.
Shoulders curbing comfortably forward.
Staring at screen.
Blue.
I step outside and my eyes cannot see
the textures around me.
The ambiance.
The messages.
Where is that secret?
The beauty?
I miss it,
the distance.
My eyes are blurry and sweaty.
Face is dropping and
settling
into the warm folds
of the future.
Little Anthem
Grinding of the front teeth,
chipping away
The Healer says:
Where are the words
and
the space?
Maybe I have nothing to say at all.
Complacency pays my bills
I feel dumb and outnumbered.
Diplomas and confidence.
But, dammit.
I thought I was fine.
I really did.
I do sometimes.
Except when my feats are compared.
But fuck I’m alive!
I’m having fun!
I wear red with confidence!
I have ears that listen!
And wrinkles that billow up and down.
It’s pretty straightforward.
I taste the sky,
I drink the air,
I sing loudly
and I eat clouds.
I learned that from:
Train hoppers,
Scientists,
Book makers,
Teachers,
Lovers,
and myself,
my gut.
It’s mine.
I am worthy
and alive.
Julie Ortegon is a Colombian-American visual artist and poet living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work aims to present an unabashedly honest portrait of a woman and immigrant coming to terms with race, gender, and class divide in the context of an American life. Her most recent chapbook “15 Poems” is hand-made and available now.
Larry Narron: 1 Poem
Larry Narron's poems appear or are forthcoming in Tilde, Bayou, Hobart, Phoebe, Booth, Dialogist, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. They've been nominated for the Best of the Net and Best New Poets. Born and raised in Southern California, Larry currently lives in Philadelphia. He studies literacy at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
Anastasia Jill: 3 poems
dna
I rescued her after awhile,
this darling living in my asylum.
Even the blackest hole
can feel love,
I suppose.
There are instructions in her bones,
how to build me, how to demolish.
She is thymine hard
cytosine soft.
I forgot,
she don’t react well
with other elements.
pancakes
The cheek of her ass is in my shirt
and her lower back tells stories
of good morning newscasts:
cloudy with a chance of lavender;
traffic on the 108.
Mornings are the worst
but her legs ain’t,
not in my kitchen.
Her gaze fits around me twice
like rotations of the sun
while she makes me food
and asks if I’m celebrating Lent.
I tell her I’m not a Christian.
She fucks up breakfast
and sits in my lap,
gorging on the skepticism
juices dribbling
down my chin.
cold beer
Moon deathrops out of sky,
outside’s the coldest it's been
since July.
We were on the news that night,
looking like a loving couple
and it was magic, sparklers and booze.
She remembers fourth o’fireworks,
chinese pagodas, jars of wine
and I remember her,
the poise of her mouth before the boom,
but this ain’t a holiday; this is downtown
and we’re December babes now.
Smog wears the glint of midnight
and sticks parade as trees,
bouquets of buildings are flanked
by roof rats and panhandlers
are asking for a dollar fifty.
She cleans up misty bottles
lined around her eyes because
she hates crying in public.
She hates me like a lawyer,
like the winter and the night.
She lights a cigarette to cloud
her PBR dreams.
We drink. Not to us.
But to something more grand.
Anastasia Jill is a queer writer living in the South. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fiction Anthology and has been featured with Poets.org, Lunch Ticket, FIVE:2:ONE, apt, Anomaly Literary Journal, 2River, Gertrude Press, Minola Review, and more.
Ryan Torres: 2 Poems
PSA From The Price is Right
My cat went into heat
for the first time.
She kept walking around the house,
screaming for a lover,
and searching every room.
Looking for love in all the wrong places.
Begging for the sweet release of sex.
Pleading for an end to this primal urge.
I tell her, “I’m sorry, Sweet Pea.
But, for what it’s worth,
I know what it’s like.”
I am Bob Barker’s
mortal enemy.
The Salem Satan
Satan lives in Salem, Massachusetts.
He dresses in black and red holy orders
with a cape.
His eyes are black and empty,
and there is a hungry grin
permanently fixed on his masked face.
The evangelicals line up
outside the clinics,
or outside the Satanic temple,
or in the commons
waving signs.
And they promise the things
that only Satan can deliver.
So, Satan shows up to these gatherings too.
And he carries a sign of his own.
The sign reads:
“Free hugs from Satan.”
And the sinners line up to do so.
A warm embrace
that we all desire.
One day,
on Satan’s Facebook page,
he posted a picture
of a grey-haired man
who was overweight,
Clean-shaven,
wore glasses,
and had a tattoo on his right arm.
Seemed like an okay guy.
Someone I would sit next to at the dive bar.
Someone with whom I would shoot the shit.
And the post read:
“This is the real me.”
And Satan told the world
about his social anxiety.
That some days it’s hard to leave the house.
That he had accepted his weight.
And that he feels sad in the same way
that all his followers--
and unfollowers--
do.
Hell...
who knew Satan
is just like
one of us?
Keith Moul: Rivers Moving: Photos
Synopsis
Keith Moul needs only the slightest tic of interest to take pictures and then examine them for the most interesting content. Moving rivers are wonders to feel through all the senses. When he collects enough to group thematically, he does. That's about it. Enjoy!
Keith Moul is a poet of place, a photographer of the distinction light adds to place. Both his poems and photos are published widely. His photos are digital, striving for high contrast and saturation, which makes his vision colorful (or weak, requiring enhancement). http://poemsphotosmoul.blogspot.com/
Rachel Tanner: 3 poems
my forever is a map that only you can read
When it seems there is
nothing left but murky oceans & catastrophe,
there will still be you. Your lighthouse heart.
Your aching. Your magic. When the blood
of the earth drowns cities, I will find you,
pull your hurt into my heart.
When the skin of the planet burns & burns & burns,
I will become a torch. I will show you the way out.
I've been painting my nails with brimstone for years;
it's a good look on me. God promised a fire,
but I promise a different kind of heat.
Take my hand. The flames are coming.
That Night After Workshop
You meet me in the parking lot of a local bar, me
sweating in the October air, hardly
believing you’re here. Hardly believing
you’re you.
Write I what know? Well, what I know is I can
dry swallow nearly every pill you dare me to.
What I know is now I’m three drinks deep & barely
getting started. What I know is you kiss me
between dart throws & I am unsteady enough
right now to admit to you that I don’t have
as much experience with this as I claimed I did.
This?
Us. You. Mouths that are sloppy
& sure of themselves. Nights with
no futures. Me with no clothes. I’ve
lied my way into arms before, made hands
think that I know hands. I don’t know much.
Acting isn’t hard. People believe what they want.
The bar is closing & I live down the street.
No roommates. But no. You want to stay here,
make my car into a bed. That’s fine. It’s cooled
off outside & early morning radio is the best.
I can see the tattoo parlor from here that years ago
etched teenage rebellion onto my skin, now your
skin. Our skin.
CW: suicidal ideation
Dark Source
This week, I didn't want to die until Wednesday.
My therapist says the goal isn't “remission” but
fewer days I want to die. Fewer spirals. On the day
the first picture of a black hole became public,
I decided an exit bag was easier than a short drop.
I researched water pumps. I researched cars.
I sat outside on the porch and didn't move
for nearly an hour. Got my first sunburn of the year.
Imagined life without life. If things are ending anyway,
why not spare god the burden of one more person?
If we have fucked up this substantially,
what's one more fuck up made by one more fuck up?
On the day the first picture of a black hole became public,
I chose to stick around.
Rachel Tanner is a queer, disabled writer whose work has recently appeared in Videodame, Porridge Magazine, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. She tweets @rickit.
Nathan Wilkins: Spoken word
We tend to revisit previous readers of our readings and we have a good one for you today. We were enchanted with his work for TWP #29, so here is a spoken word performance by Nate Wilkins. Enjoy!
Based out of Knoxville, TN, Nathan Wilkins has been writing for 7 years and is a fan of live readings. He's big into the Boston Celtics and puns. He read for Thirty West on TWP #29.
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella: Better Bones teasers
This past Thursday, we had our 30th Thirty West Presents reading. No small feat in the least. We also had a little surprise for everyone in attendance: a cover reveal for our newest title, Better Bones. We may have (slightly) surprised Janie with this one! Below are some sample readings we took that night, including the pieces, “A Citadel Made of Human Bones”, and “Couches I Knew in My 20s”. Click the cover image below to pre-order or click here
Better Bones, a collection of hybrid stories, out 8/30
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella is a writer living in Philadelphia who is haunted by ghosts of her past—all of which are barnacled sailboats.
Hannah Litvin: Same, But Different
Ross sits in the dark with the TV on, volume off. He lets a movie play on repeat, staring off into the corners of the room. As he lights a cigarette, he thinks back on his mom’s stroke two years ago and the days after. As the words “persistent vegetative state” escaped the doctor’s mouth, floating around the room as in a cartoon, he had decided not to pull the plug. Hoping for the small chance of recovery, Ross had dedicated himself that day to the role of caretaker. The dutiful, loyal son.
***
All the movie houses were switching over to digital these days. Ross’s job was to sit in the dark projection booth and launch movies from the hard drive. Gone were the days of splicing, lacing, clicks, and whizzes. His only value now was extensive knowledge of new and coming-soon films, so he was able to customize movie trailers by a simple drag and drop function. He adjusted his belt, sat back, and pushed the play button. The theatre went dark and the trailers rolled on.
***
Ross’s first trip to a movie theater was with his mom. He was five and they were road-tripping through a storm to visit cousins by Mount Rainier. Mom thought it best to pull over in a small town and let the storm pass.
“We could try to force our way through the storm, but this is more fun,” she said. “Let’s go to the movies.”
***
On a cigarette break, Dan from the box office, asks,
“Hey Ross, how’s your Ma?”
“Same as always, but different than before.”
“It’s a shame, man. I don’t know how you…well, I just couldn’t deal. My wife’s mom went into hospice a few years back. Grateful the kids didn’t have to see her much like that. Do the doctors come much?”
“Nah. Hope of recovery has flatlined, but she hasn’t. I just can’t pull the plug, Dan. It ain’t my decision, y’know?”
Dan sighs and shakes his head, stubbing out his cigarette.
“It’s a real shame, man.”
Ross shrugs.
***
After work, Ross stops at the bar, downs two beers, then drives the rest of the way home. Turning the key of his front door, he inhales deeply and steps inside. The lights are off. The smells of cigarettes, dirty carpet and empty TV dinner trays assault him.
“I always know what’s coming, but it always takes me by surprise.”
He looks around the house, disgusted by something he can’t see. The coffee table is littered with a growing tower of his mother’s magazine subscriptions, the corners of which rustle under the ceiling fan’s whir. The outline of his mom’s recliner is completely unchanged, save for a stack of sticky Styrofoam takeout boxes perched on one arm.
“This weekend I’ll hire a cleaner.”
Ross doesn’t bother to turn the lights on. He walks through the dark hallways, guided by a faint glow into the bedroom where his mom lay in bed, attached to half a dozen computers and blinking lights—all this machine, and not a single task Ross was meant to do. He returns to the living room. As the credits from a Romero film turn over, the TV goes quiet, and Ross listens to the machine’s steady metronome.
Gsssh…woooo. Gsssh...woooo.
Hannah Litvin is a writer and former-Texan living in Philadelphia. She holds a BA in studio arts from University of Houston, and works full-time. Her poems have been published narrowly online and in print since 2015, but today she writes primarily fiction. Her short story “Rugsweeping, and Other Lost Arts” won Runner Up in the 2019 San Miguel Writers Conference, and is forthcoming in the Painted Bride Quarterly.
Alexis Christakes: 2 Poems
Lugh
the risk of working with something
precious is squandering it;
the risk of working with something
you love is hating it;
and working with something
lukewarm causes stasis.
the danger in working with hate
is deep and wasteful anger, but
there’s certainty in idleness;
it’s uselessness, it’s hopelessness.
such unending humanness
running in our wheels, studying
all the circles (but our own),
and every time that I kneel,
my armored skin peels.
does the fire make me real?
this being alive is not to be
satisfied, but questioned and
quarreled, quibbled and nibbled at
to be kept alive, just to have some fight:
always to continue and never to arrive—
as far as legs will carry then
farther, sputtering on burning vernal
urges to survive. running on fumes
and the backs of good friends,
gassing out, guessing at the black:
still full of questions, maybe more.
I hope more.
put it off; put it off.
Solstice
There is a humming
inside me, outside me,
enveloping each nerve,
bubbling a light quiet boil
in my strawberry blood.
It’s behind my ear now.
I take the dirt in my hand
like a prayer. I am dirt
recreating itself, tasting
itself, pretending to be
something more, so I am.
My hand moves to my mouth
like an infant’s, and
earthworms marry my
intestines, squirmy-happy-
nesting at my center where I
smell like raspberries,
taste like rum,
and look like a red giant, but
feel sometimes like a black hole.
Alexis Christakes is a nature-inspired poet living in Huntsville, Alabama. She studied horticulture and herbalism in Pennsylvania, and now works at a wine bar, a coffee shop, and doing freelance social media/marketing work. She writes and handmakes miniature books of poetry.