Lost

Inside a travel bag, I found my missing

red wool sock, in a winter jacket, one earring.

My wallet turned up months after a grocery

trip, on a coat peg, nestled in the scoop of a cap.

A constant struggle to track, my phone may lie

beneath a book or pillow, its charge exhausted.

I believed in God, when my keys showed up in the freezer—

though it did seem an odd way to answer a prayer.

And when, preparing to wash an apron, I checked

its pocket and felt two puzzle pieces, AWOL

a year, it seemed a miracle. Search not for “lost”

items in France; the word “perdu” implies

they’re gone for good. Ask for “forgotten” things

at the Office of Found Objects, Objets Trouvés.

But my son is lost, and I haven’t forgotten, decades

since he wasn’t born, since I allowed

his tiny body’s destruction. No sweet-talking that one;

I saw the vacuum jar. Memories

of what will never be, I find and find

again, like acorns stashed in the ground by blue jays,

sprouting to oak seedlings in an unmowed field.

Alice Haines’s poems can be found in: Does It Have Pockets?, Dunes Review, The Healing Muse, Northern New England Review, Off the Coast, Pangyrus LitMag, Pine Row, Portland Press Herald’s Deep Water column, Relief: Journal of Art and Faith and Touchstone Literary Magazine. Several of her poems have been finalists in Maine Postmark Poem Contests. A retired physician living in Maine, she volunteers at a free health clinic. Together with her husband, she enjoys nurturing native plants, tracking wildlife and birding.

In Praise of Plastic Flowers

Because I come from a long line of bisexual nonbinary pacifists

married to cis gender hetero army officers, and because

the opening of this poem is a lie, but a sweet one:

a silk flower of a sentiment. I just want to say it somewhere:

I am not alone. I inherited what is good from people who tried

to do right but also did wrong, who enabled pain

while cultivating love where it wasn’t expected to grow.

My grandparents appreciated bowls of painted stone grapes

and apples because it showed them what plenty might look like

on their tables. Every day is an argument in favor of surprise.

I show my daughter how to twist a plastic plumeria blossom

the color of margarine into her dark hair

because real plumeria blooms far away from where we are

while the Dollar Tree near our house is bountiful with 10¢ knockoffs,

and I remember how little beauty has to do with exactness.

It is more concerned with what we hope about the contradictory world:

that it remains both soft and callused, rare and everywhere,

that it is what it has been and what it could be too.

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and was released by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. For now, they live in the Pacific Northwest. www.abbyemurray.com

Dark Rooms

Editor's Choice: 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize

At eighteen I got up early and hitchhiked out of town. Hitchhiked all morning.

And when a man put his hand on my leg I took his picture. He didn’t look at me

again until I got out of his car.

I was braver then. The camera conferred an almost supernatural passport —

a kind of super power. Conjured a new origin story. For once I owned the sidewalk,

crossed barriers with ease that said “No Trespassing.” Photographed the guard in

the booth on his break with his coffee and a cigarette who didn’t tell me to leave.

Photographed the town drunk.

I had a darkroom once. Knew how to roll film around the canister in pitch black,

somehow managing not to fall backward into that bat cave. I knew how to develop

the image, agitating it, bringing it up through the glassy liquid in the tray. Its little

chemical placenta.

The first hint of an image, like a dream filling in: arms, legs, nose, the raccoon

killed by the side of the road. A young woman holding her toddler on a peeling

porch an early Maine morning, as old as the women Dorothea Lange photographed

in the migrant camps, becoming dust in the shacks they were shackled to.

Bodies coagulate on the sheet of paper like apparitions. Someone has come to tell

you what the dead want you to know. In the darkroom you make invisible things

visible. A magic trick, a kind of second rate resurrection. The camera around your

neck feels like the finger of God.

Joanna Young was the writer-in-residence at Millay House Rockland for the month of October 2025. Raised in Massachusetts, with generational roots in Vinalhaven, Maine, she now lives in Searsport. Walking with her dog Moxie on Moose Point nearly every day, she “feels initiated into a world of extraordinary beauty, mystery and healing. There is something about the horizon line that teaches me — creates a sense of reverence. In this space, this felt infinity, I feel myself open, begin to find words.”