Literature & Poetry
Beauty in language and the art of storytelling.
Control
“Control” by Florence Joy Francisco, winner of the NH Witty Poets poetry competition on the theme “Laozi: Humility and the Way of Following.”
Ówàmbẹ̀ & Portrait of the Yuletide
Ówàmbẹ̀ documents Yoruba celebratory culture through food, dress, music, family, memory, and community; Portrait of the Yuletide reflects on Christmas and New Year celebrations in southwest Nigeria.
Deceased Estate
In the quiet ritual of Saturday garage sales, Victor finds escape from a life grown colourless. But at a deceased estate in Wavell Heights, an old piano awakens ghosts of music, loss, and the possibility of beginning again.
A Star Is Born: Winners of the Ninth Heaven Summer Short Story Competition
The winning and shortlisted stories from Ninth Heaven's first Summer Short Story Competition — with the editor's foreword, the judge's selections, and the full anthology, “A Star Is Born.”
Live As You Exist
Live as You Exist highlights the common struggle of chronic rumination and the cruelty that is its often-cyclical nature. Winner of the 2nd NH Witty Poets Competition.
Percy Shelley to Teresa Viviani
A sequence of twenty-two sonnets in the voice of the poet to the imprisoned Italian noblewoman who inspired his last great work.
Charity at 11
A nocturnal meditation on guilt and charity in Oxford’s winter hush. The poem follows a speaker wandering Little Clarendon Street, caught between pity and self-reproach, where an act of giving becomes a reckoning with solitude, privilege, and the limits of goodness.
I Wish I Still Had Time to Ask About The Camellias
"This piece focuses on the realization that I can no longer ask my grandmother, who has dementia, about the details of her life when she was younger; it's a reflection on memories being lost within a person."
3 Poems
Fib, cue, xyz, both individually and as a combination of imageries, tells about how we or our senses are expanded into the unseen dimensions of the seen.
The Little Pilgrim
Bailey's sensual evocation of a young woman’s attempt to re establish a stable identity after the devastation of unforeseen betrayal, heartbreak and a near death experience.
Office Maid by Julia Clark
This poem juxtaposes the mundanity of contemporary office work with the fantasticality of supernatural mythology for a surreal take on modern work culture and its often obscured ties to environmental destruction and capitalism exploitation.
Ancient Whispers: A Mythic Poem Sequence
These poems are drawn from a sequence entitled “Ancient Whispers” that utilize themes from classical or Slavic myth. Each poem deals with the irony and vicissitudes of human experience.
Auxier Ridge Trail
“Auxier Ridge Trail” is a lyric meditation on emotional exhaustion, intimacy, and the erosive beauty of shared experience within a natural landscape.
Nekyia and four poems
Five poems of the soul’s striving toward the divine.
Five Poems by John Leonard
These are five poems showcasing some of Leonard's different poetic forms.
A New Hampshire River
A river's current gives a sense of rebirth, negating possible feelings of loss.
The Dogwood + 7 poems by Elise Powers
8 poems, each exploring the intersections of memory, tenderness, and the sacred ordinary.
Short Story: The Reader Digests
A short fiction piece about the self-mythology of a mediocre man.
What Durkheim Dreams About
“What Durkheim Dreams About” is a poem I wrote while taking a sociology class and having to read excerpts from Durkheim’s Suicide. I disliked his approach to life and wrote this poem inspired by that, as sort of a subversion and way to try to empathize with what he was saying.
Five Poems by Sreelekha Chatterjee
My mind experiences an emotional barrenness, resembling an empty terrace. An empty seat is forever there, indicating an absence, perhaps a spiritual emptiness.