Autumn 2025
Contents
Also available as an audio issue and by podcast
Editorial
An Invitation to Brilliant Multiplicities | Caroline Langston
A Farewell to Poetry Editor Maggie Swofford
Poetry
These Can't be Real Angels | Willam Doreski
Going Somewhere | Sheri Reda
Purington Paver | Rob McClure
I Am Going Higher | Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
Emigrant | Lisa López Smith
The Seed Collectors, Sarah's Dream, & Rebirth Motif | Brittany Deininger
Amulet | Julia Lisella
St. Michael, rooster | Megan Willome
Prometheus | Lauren Suchenski
Backyard Sabbath | Rhett Watts
A Galaxy by the Pond & The Garden | Constance Clark
Awakening | Mike Wilson
Picturesque | B.A. Van Sise
The Fly-Whisk Man | Jacqueline Wallen
The Woman Who Lives Without Bread | Anne Myles
An All-American Girl — for Gwendolyn Brooks | Beth Brown Preston
Fiction
Negative Space | Steven Ovadia
Nonfiction
Seeing Small | Cheryl Sadowski
Leaving the Labyrinth | Lory Widmer Hess
Visual Arts
Red Sea Symphony | Gerburg Garmann
Echoes of Infinity | Natalya Raduenz
Pigments in Abstraction | Ellen June Wright
Multimedia
Lay Me Down Gently | Onyeka Ndukwe
Review
“Hear me, hear me, ye who are alive!”
A Review of Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung
Susan Rowland
Contemplative Practices
Strong Back, Soft Front, and Open Hands | Eric Massanari
Havening with Affirmations | Wai-Chin Matsuoka
Cover Art: Natalya Raduenz. I Am Near, 2019. From Echoes of Infinity. Graphite, acrylic on paper. 16.5 × 23.4 inches.
An Invitation to Brilliant Multiplicities
A Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston
One of the great pleasures about being a middle-aged adult (and I turned 57 the day before the day on which I am writing this) is the ability to make unexpected connections, to hold in tension many things at once, and to explore their possibilities.
A Farewell to Poetry Editor Maggie Swofford
This issue of Vita Poetica is the last for Poetry Editor Maggie Swofford, who has set our standards and tone for poetry since 2020 – since the journal began, in fact.
These Can't Be Real Angels
By Willam Doreski
Downtown the friendly river
that used to empower mills
writhes in its tough black segments
with a fringe of ice trembling.
Going Somewhere
By Sheri Reda
How do we defend this way we have of birthing
monsters to watch us die? Ants
are not so lonely as us but we disparage them
Purington Paver
By Rob McClure
By an abandoned brick factory,
grass churning with cicadas,
a sun descends blood-orange
I Am Going Higher
By Jonathan Chibuike Ukah
I wanted you to be the first to know
that I have made up my mind to ascend
The Seed Collectors
By Brittany Deininger
Having shrugged off madness,
two scientists
tucked seeds
into a bottle-warmer
Sarah’s Dream
By Brittany Deininger
The length of the dream was the length of my last days.
It’s blue-light early when I hear the cadence of wood splitting.
Rebirth Motif
by Brittany Deininger
The mind is easily convinced, this is how you go—
devoured, wrapped in weeds, curled in on the self,
St. Michael, rooster
By Megan Willome
An angel can get so much more done
in domesticated form, perched
Prometheus
By Lauren Suchenski
When I pass the financial planning firm;
the capital management branch on main street
Backyard Sabbath
By Rhett Watts
Before leaf blowers buzz metallic as cicadas,
the last leaves on the white ash lift
A Galaxy by the Pond
By Constance Clark
So much is invisible, under skin,
under water something in
the anima untouched by reason.
The Garden
by Constance Clark
As we grow into skin that has waited so long for us to enter it,
to the garden, loosened in rain, is stretching its dirt in all directions,
Picturesque
By B.A. Van Sise
A real estate developer who only wants the land
stands with me in this Italian town,
The Fly-Whisk Man
By Jacquelyn Wallen
A wealthy man, Ethiopian, the neighbors say.
He brackets his Amharic rants
The Woman Who Lives without Bread
by Anne Myles
The woman who lives without bread
sits alone in an echoing room inside.