I hold between my fingers
its lack of suitability for this task
to take apart the earth beneath me
for the memories grow together
like moldy pages, impossible
to separate: the celery fields,
striped black and green, July 4
corn and purple chicory, salted
sand of San Diego, lit ribbons
of LA traffic, twin downtowns
still climbing over Phoenix’s
saguaro-studded sun-splayed
hills, the dark lake waters that
lap and lick the weedy shore.
When I most need to accept
I cannot be only here and not
there and there at the same time:
thus the needle to pry the places
apart, but the way needles are
is that they travel in and out,
knotting as they move about.
Behold the Needle
Luanne Castle’s Best of the Net-nominated art appears in Raw Lit and in Best of Mad Swirl’s 2023 anthology. Her Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net-nominated writing has appeared in Copper Nickel, Your Impossible Voice, Bull, South 85, Thimble, Bending Genres, Ekphrastic Review, River Teeth, Dribble Drabble Review, Does it Have Pockets, Roi Fainéant, Flash Boulevard, and many other journals. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her hybrid memoir-in-flash will be published by ELJ Editions in 2026. Luanne lives with four cats in Arizona along a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare.
Congratulations Luanne Wonderful..love the poem
Good one
This is so winsome and apt.
Lovely, Luanne. I love the weaving and threading of images, places and memories not to mention the sweet rhyming couplet at the end.
A beautiful poem, Luanne!
The images are so enjoyable here, Luanne. Nice that the poem’s title and the journal’s title are connected. Wonderful!
So very nice!