Issue: NiftyLit #20

Alahna Vallone

"To a young girl, certain that every step she took / changed the axis the Earth spun on, the flowers grew"

Noah Sparrow

"there are more rooms than i remember, here: / house born from paint / and silence / wearing his bones like a necklace"

Elaina Erola

"One end of the drive was full of the places and people that built me. The other is full of the beginnings, challenges, and ignitions that kept me going. I needed each to sustain the other. I went home, I went home, I went home." 

Dudley Stone

"Emily Dickinson reaches through eternity / to pluck my sleeve and say, 'Look – / is it not terrifying how You cannot turn / away from Your Fate?'”

Bobbi Sinha-Morey

"I'd nearly forgotten the scent of tea / and roses, the feel of ripe fruit, / the time my teenage daughter showed / me how to use a Bunsen burner."

Fred Johnson

"winter, may well always have been, / cardinals singing in the thaw except / it’s gone, the cardinals I mean, not the snow"