Jenny Wong

Cherry Tree is open for submissions through October 1. Send us your poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. All accepted pieces are considered for our special section of Literary Shade!

cherrytree.submittable.com

Those are so cool!! 🛶

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH PRAYING MANTIS Love Is a Wound that Will Happen The motel is from another era, its horseshoe driveway a half-loop of time. The wind beats the hills like carpets and orange pollen tumbles down. I wish you could show me again the black and white picture of your mother playing Juliet in Florence, the sleeves of her dress faring like trumpet flowers. It's summer. The stars come out; in what tense they shine, I've never been clear. Shutting my eyes, pulling the rough white sheet to my chin, I listen to the sparrows closing the trees, someone laughing, and in the leaves the rain picking up exactly where it left off eight years ago one August morning.

Chloe Honum 💙

from THE LANTERN ROOM (Tupelo Press)

“The stars come out; / in what tense they shine, I’ve never been clear.”

Day 8 - #SealeyChallenge

@tupelopress.bsky.social
@sealeychallenge.bsky.social

Author Interview * Josh Rountree Josh Rountree is a busy writer! His novel, The Unkillable Frank Lightning, is barely out of the gate and now his new novella, Summer in the House of the Departed (Psychopomp), is open for preorders…

New Q&A with @joshrountree.bsky.social about his upcoming novella, Summer in the House of the Departed!

I loved the setting & characters. Tension & compelling mysteries pulled me in -- I had to read straight through to the end!

@psychopomp.com

I can see you writing a story about this… 🌝

Author Interview * Josh Rountree Josh Rountree is a busy writer! His novel, The Unkillable Frank Lightning, is barely out of the gate and now his new novella, Summer in the House of the Departed (Psychopomp), is open for preorders…

Great interview with Josh Rountree from the brilliant @mynachang.bsky.social

mynachang.com/2025/08/08/a...

Happy #internationalcatday! Looking for just the right way to celebrate? Pick up a copy of my book of poems with #cats, Could Have Gotten a Cat. Mostly happy, a few sad, some just plain weird. You won't regret it and neither will the cats you read them to. #catsofbluesky #poetry a.co/d/bEGhk2x

Oh, this is so good!!

WHILE YOUR WIFE IS AT A MEMORIAL SERVICE Roblin Meeks She’ll be gone a good hour, maybe two. You’re happy, of course, to watch the kids while she pays respects. Don’t think, obviously; nothing good can come of that. Try to make yourself useful instead. Maybe look for the long blue spatula, the one good for flipping hash browns for The Boy. It was a friend of hers, younger than you both. You’re getting to that age where such things shock but no longer surprise. Keeps them crispy to flip them all at once. The hash browns. Funny phrase “paying respects,” as if respect were a kind of currency, with death calling in a loan. Also “paying attention,” though the expense of that seems to make more sense somehow. What language has us do. Speaking of which, the pencil sharpeners probably need emptying of their dust. And Q will always be up for a game of Crazy Eights or Go Fish, played, if

I have a new story thing in @havehashad.com. I'm grateful and humbled to appear in this amazing journal.

www.havehashad.com/hadposts/whi...

You’re very welcome, Anna! Happy Friday!! 🩵

I know! So good, right!! 🩵

Grateful to Bear Review for making space for my review of Bobby Elliott’s THE SAME MAN, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize & forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press! Such a beautiful book, friends! 🩵

Read the full review here: www.bearreview.com/bear-reviews...

This is so evocative and incredible @mizukiyamagen.bsky.social

“Now texting her husband, even a brief few words, is like sending her thoughts to an abandoned storage unit. A place for forgotten things. Never to be opened.”

Chance meetings and what-ifs. Congrats @anniejowrites.bsky.social on another @havehashad.com skull!!

If you missed this discussion on Tuesday night & would like to catch up with all the wisdom shared by @mynachang.bsky.social & @sharontelfer.bsky.social about historical & speculative fiction, the recorded version is now available for the bargain price of £4:

www.mattkendrick.co.uk/workshop-rec...

MY BROTHER STOLE EVERY SPOON IN THE HOUSE so we don't eat soup anymore. We tried. The bone broth fell right through our forks, our fingers, stained the carpets. We all learned to speak twelve languages but only the words for good morning and hospital. In Old Norse my mom learns the phrase Where are all the fucking spoons? Brian went outside, whispered swears to the poplars. They bent their necks to hear him. Brian went outside and left forever, took the rest of the silverware. Brian went outside and left a thousand doodles he drew, every happy animal that wasn't him. We crumpled them like origami roadkill. Stomped them under our feet until they became wine between our toes. We're still drinking it now, ten years later. I don't know how magnets work. If I tied a million together, could they pull him here? The cutlery turned ash in his pockets. Heavy metal in his blood.

More from Steven Espada Dawson 💙

“Brian went outside / and left forever…”

in LATE TO THE SEARCH PARTY

Against a background of a blue flower, in a white square, the text reads "Best of the Net Nominations. Guan Un. Sarah Freligh."

The Welkin Writing Prize is pleased to announce our nominations for Best of the Net:

@thisisguan.bsky.social for "A Parable of Slow Songs"

and

@sfreligh.bsky.social for "Nine One One"

Congratulations both! Such brilliant writing!

Story links in the thread below.

Ado Hibana - Psychedelic Fever Dream Experience Of A Lifetime

open.substack.com/pub/liyer/p/...

Abeyance Today my friend told me of her girl's hand-dug coffin; how in Antarctica, training to stay alive meant to pickaxe, crack, and cut, until a furrow the size of a brown bear appears and her graduate school daughter descends into a trench barely length-wise enough for her sleeping sac; eventually sealed-off with a brick of snow. An ice coffin, the mother told me, gently recalling how her offspring slipped beneath the crust of the world. How the hours spent warming hands in armpits was worth it. To survive the woman relied on her own muscle work— a lacey box of molecules and the animal beat of her heart. At dusk with the exercise completed, the men disappeared to hot showers, a dinner of ribs in the ranger station, but her daughter remained underground. She had labored for hours and was determined to sleep beneath the ice. And then suddenly, the next morning as she climbed up-solidly alive, stunned by the machinery of her own body. I like to believe she knew herself as different— changed as Persephone had changed, into a new woman— lifted into a blue abeyance-beyond the self and climbing.

This incredible poem from Susan Rich in BLUE ATLAS 💙

Day 6 - #SealeyChallenge

@susanrich-poet18.bsky.social
@redhenpress.bsky.social
@sealeychallenge.bsky.social

twenty-four — Tiny Molecules

Thrilled to be included in the Summer Issue of Tiny Molecules, amongst these incredible writers! Thank you
@sdobbie.bsky.social for giving A Moonroof Full Of Stars the perfect home! Shoutout to @sfreligh.bsky.social in whose wonderful workshop it was born. 🙏🏼💙 ✨
www.tinymolecules.com/issues/twent...

Thank you, Maria! 🩵 I went to a local garden. Much in bloom there!

The chapbook “A Glimpse” by Debbie Robson sits against the back of an old wooden bench made of smooth twisty branches that form an ‘x’ pattern. Behind the bench is a green garden with pink and orange flowers.

The chapbook “A Glimpse” by Debbie Robson sits against a green metal fence covered with light green vine leaves.

✨ Today’s book mail! ✨📚📬

I found the perfect bench and the perfect fence to enjoy @debbierobson.bsky.social’s latest poetry collection ‘A Glimpse’. I had the honor of blurbing this book, so I know just how good it is!

Red Room Poetry Insta post with #30in30writing prompt “Visit one of the world’s galleries online. What impresses, surprises, angers or otherwise intrigues you? Look for what unsettles you. Lean into the discomfort. Write about it. - Amy Crutchfield

Picture of “Yellow Cow (Gelbe Kuh)” by Franz Marc from the Guggenheim Museum. The notes say “His vision of nature was pantheistic; he believed that animals possessed a certain godliness that men had long since lost” and “yellow, a “gentle, cheerful and sensual” color, symbolized femininity, while blue, representing the “spiritual and intellectual,” symbolized masculinity.” I don’t see any of that

#RedRoomPoetry #30in30
This living beauty/reduced to cuts of meat/by the palette knife/thickly spread with the the voyeur’s bloody need/the gallery colluding with this theft in their sycophantic notes

You’re very welcome, Sudha! I think this is one of my favorites of yours!

Pipevine swallowtail butterfly enjoying my red/orange/yellow lantana.

Summer seduction:
Butterfly cannot resist
Flowers' brilliant #charm

(My 📸) #vss365 #haiku #Bloomscrolling #FlowerReport

This is how I did. #breeze #video karenpiercegonzalez.substack.com/p/easy

Wonderful, Amy! Love the surreal ending!

In May, I made a phone note: swarm of lavender bees. I carried the bees until Kathy Fish's summer immersive when "Lavender Bees, Dilly Dilly" was born 🐝Thank you to the @themerseyreview.bsky.social editors for seeing something in my purple micro fiction haze. www.themerseyreview.com/issues/7/lav...

“Living was like trying to guess where lightning would appear next in the sky.”

An in between time and a little bit of Italy. Brand new @andrewbertaina.bsky.social in @theforge.bsky.social!

LITANY OF BROTHER'S HEIRLOOMS The fear of birds, but not their music. The small explosion of gunpowder inside a toy rocket, but not its parachute down. The ash limb Tío lathed into a bat. It's always resting by the front door. The pocket Gideon and enough spit to cradle a joint in its thin paper. But not the match that burned it sermon-quick. The butterfly knife you found nested in a rain gutter. The plastic telescope you stole from a mall kiosk just before my birthday. The night sky, but not the moon.

Steven Espada Dawson ♥️

from LATE TO THE SEARCH PARTY (Scribner)

Day 4 - #SealeyChallenge

@stevenespadaw.bsky.social
@sealeychallenge.bsky.social