In a world that pulls you in every direction, feeling disconnected is real. Through original poetry, essays, and craft insights, each themed issue helps readers reconnect...with themselves, their stories, and the world around them.
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The Valentine's Issue
Published about 2 months ago • 3 min read
February 14, 2026
The Valentine's Issue: Asphalt Blooms, Say It Again, The First Valentine, A Postcard Revival, and More.
The newsletter has a new look, but it’s still chasing the same thing: moments most people walk past. Each issue now carries a theme — a way to look harder at the ordinary, the sacred, the broken, and the beautiful.
This week’s poem, Parking Lot Flower, fits right in. It's about the awkward weight of love, the ways we fumble it, and the quiet beauty that keeps trying anyway. Sometimes what we’re searching for isn’t front-and-center; it’s flowering under our feet.
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Featured Poem
Parking Lot Flower
Parking Lot Flower by Jason Z Guest
Standing in the aisle of little sweet nothings under bright lights, fingers carefully flipping through colors and cartoons like an elder checking for cracks in a paper carton of fresh eggs, as if breakage feels inevitable, as if what love remains gathers in the dark folds of a greeting card, the husband exits, empty-handed, weary of ways to express tenderness, when at his feet, through asphalt seams, starry petals of chickweed glimmer and purple bells of henbit ring— apologetic, humble, alive, vying for his attention, if only he noticed love blooming through cracks.
Anaphora is the deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines. It works beautifully in love because affection rarely arrives once; it returns, insists, repeats. Anaphora mirrors the way we speak: I remember, I wait, I choose. It gives language a heartbeat, letting feeling grow instead of rushing past. In love, we repeat ourselves because each return can deepen meaning, right?
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach… I love thee to the level of everyday’s Most quiet need… I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
February 14 isn’t just hearts and candy. On this day in 1382, Geoffrey Chaucer scribbled Parlement of Foules, linking Saint Valentine’s Day with love and desire for the first time in English literature. Birds paired up, humans dreamed of mates, and a quiet revolution of the heart began on the page. Romance got a date and poetry claimed it first! Love is messy, wild, and poetry on the page reminds us that love is rarely tidy. Chaucer made Valentine’s Day a story, and some of us keep chasing that spark.
A slice of Chaucer on love, as he wrote:
“For this was on seynt Valentynes day, whan every foul cometh there to chese his make.”
— Geoffrey Chaucer, from Parlement of Foules (1382)
Why? Because in a world of endless screens, real mail still stops us in our tracks. Like the founder of Postcrossing, this community believes there’s something special about holding a postcard in your hands: paper that’s traveled miles, carrying a story from a place you may have never heard of before. Each postcard turns your mailbox into a small moment of pause. Couldn't we all use a reminder that the world is still wide, curious and yet personal?
Postcrossing reports over 80 million exchanged postcards around the world.
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Wrap your screen in a little Western tenderness. This illustrated Valentine series blends bold Texas color with whimsical heart-shaped suns, cacti, and small-town scenes, where cowboys carry flowers and love lingers in the open air. Each piece pairs rugged landscape with quiet romance. Carry a touch of the tender frontier in your pocket.
Rediscover connection through poetry that hits bone.
In a world that pulls you in every direction, feeling disconnected is real. Through original poetry, essays, and craft insights, each themed issue helps readers reconnect...with themselves, their stories, and the world around them.
Songs Before Light, The Turn That Opens, Still I Rise, What Stays, Grows, The Quiet Opening. The Bloom issue / April 4, 2026 View on the web → Welcome to The Bloom Issue where today’s poem, Sonnet of the Songbird, lifts from a quiet place and finds its way into open air. There’s a kind of bloom I trust more than the ones dressed up for show. I like the ones that push through the cracked dirt, through neglect, through whatever tried to keep them down. No audience or applause, just a pressure...
At Your Feet, Voice Without Audience, Steady Work, A Life Poured Out, What Remains. The unsung issue / March 28, 2026 View on the web → Welcome to The Unsung Issue, where today’s poem, The Shoeshine Man, sits just off to the side, doing its work without asking to be seen. I still find myself looking for it whenever I can, that vanishing art of a man behind a stand, cloth in hand, bringing something worn back to life. It is harder to find now. Airports rush past it. Streets don’t hold it the...
Bearing Witness, No Frills, A Day That Holds, In Exile, Looking Up, and More. The witness issue / March 21, 2026 View on the web → Welcome to The Witness Issue, where today’s poem, Sighs of the Salvadoran Coffee Farmer, stands in the fields and refuses to look away. I first wrote this piece in 2018 as a triptych, three connected panels that move from land, to place, to people, each holding its own view while building a larger whole. It has stayed with me ever since. It is one I return to, as...