エピソード

  • I Promise by Riley Hope McPheters

    I Promise by Riley Hope McPheters
    2026/01/13
    I Promise Riley Hope McPheters When you are sad-It feels that is who you are.You are not the sad of a hard day,Nor the sad of a loved one gone too soon,You are a sad that is in your blood,Cold and slow.A depression deeper than the depths of rock bottom.Rock bottom becomes your safety net-And when it is not deep enough to relate to the pain within your own walls,You scrape with your nails to get even deeper into the depths of your own sorrow.Days are warped- time is too fast yet manages to be miserably slow.The perfunctory lives of those around you drive you into an underworld of isolation that youfeel as if you don’t want to come up from.And not all do.We lose many from sadness. Inner war that comes with no peace treaty. Anger andtraumas many grow so numb to.An inner frustration with no exit point.Sadness is us. And we are sadness.
    However, some of us get cold to the darkness- or curious of the light up above. Some of usstart climbing,Knowing that no fall could be as damaging as the darkness below we once knew so so well.
    The lives of routine we once feared became the lives of ambition,Prosperity,Resilience,
    And strength we learned to admire the most.
    To feel the warmth of the light and know it was never too far. To feel the sadness seep outof the very veins that once held it.
    To be full of so much brightness- no darkness could outweigh what is within.
    To be ok with the darkness and look forward to the light.
    To be so whole. To be so happy.
    It is possible.
    Find your light. And accept your darkness.
    Growth happens there.I promise.

    More from Riley Hope McPheters ↓

    1. @rileyhmcpheters on Instagram
    2. She is a member of @PoetzPortalFW, that exists to awaken consciousness and cultivate liberated creative practice through the transformative power of poetry, sound, and communal dialogue.

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Join the mailing list to be the first to know when OPO submissions open ⬇️

    🖋️ Read My Newsletter: Free Flow 🖋️
    続きを読む 一部表示
    3 分
  • Happiness by Navya Chaudhary

    Happiness by Navya Chaudhary
    2026/01/12
    Happiness Navya Chaudhary If you are out there chasing happiness,Then I want you to remember this.If you're chasing it,It's definitely not yours.
    Happiness is not somewhere out there,It's hidden in those small moments around you.The one you don't notice very often.And sometimes,
    You don't even have to find it.You can create it.Why wait for someone else to bring you happiness?When you can be that person for yourself.
    Do the things you've wanted to do for so long.Try that new drink before it's off the menu.Watch that movie before it leaves the theatre.Buy yourself the flowers you always wanted.
    Go.Now.
    Why are you still here?

    More from Navya Chaudhary ↓

    1. @chaoticconfessor on Instagram
    2. Her book, Unfinished Letters, is out now.

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Join the mailing list to be the first to know when OPO submissions open ⬇️

    🖋️ Read My Newsletter: Free Flow 🖋️
    続きを読む 一部表示
    2 分
  • Sunday Recap & Suck It In by Maggie Devers

    Sunday Recap & Suck It In by Maggie Devers
    2026/01/11
    Here’s your recap of this week’s poems plus one new poem to carry us into the week ahead.On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renée Nicole Good. She was murdered by ICE on January 7, 2026. In 2020, she won the undergraduate Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020 for this poem.Jan 5 - Becoming Again by Reya @moodmakerperson on Instagram. Her book, Teenage Tide, is available now.Jan 6 - To Fall Is to Begin by Irina Vérène @queen_of_gore on Instagram. They are featured in Haunted Words Press’ anthology, Our Dearest Devotions, which contains their flash fiction piece about friendship, fae magic, and gender transition.Jan 7 - Transmorphing by Özge Lena @lenaozge on Instagram. You can find her on Substack @lenaozge where she presents her new approach to poetry, Catapoetry. It is a poetic framework about the interwoven and inseparable catastrophes of our age. You can listen to me read luminous girl lullaby by Özge Lena on Instagram @rembrandts.cure.Jan 8 - Genesis of Her by Kiran Ashraf @kiran_ashraf on Instagram and @kiranashraf7 on Substack.Jan 9 - Part Oracle, Part Warrior by Aslam @smmaslam on Instagram and @aslammohammed on Substack. His book, Paper Boat in Rumi’s Garden, is available now.Jan 10 - The Tender Descending by Ellie A
    続きを読む 一部表示
    9 分
  • The Tender Descending by Ellie A

    The Tender Descending by Ellie A
    2026/01/10
    The Tender DescendingEllie AThe earth exhales and everything slows.The trees remember what it means to be bare.We gather what warmth remains in our handsand stitch our dreams beneath quiet skies.Each flake that lands upon the skinis a messenger of mercy,a reminder that even in endings,something tender still descends.

    More from Ellie A ↓

    1. @lines_between_living on Instagram and @linesbtwnliving on Substack
    2. Read more from her on her blog, Lines Between Living

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Join the mailing list to be the first to know when OPO submissions open ⬇️

    🖋️ Read My Newsletter: Free Flow 🖋️
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1 分
  • Part Oracle, Part Warrior by Aslam

    Part Oracle, Part Warrior by Aslam
    2026/01/09
    part oracle, part warrior Aslam a crescent moon, hangs like a scaron her shoulder’s silence.her lips sealedby vow or violence.
    her eyes do not ask.they know.they have watched empires bleedon blades of their own lies.
    she stands in gray,spine unbent,each scar a sentenceshe never had to explain.
    call it rebellion.call it myth.a womanwho no longer waits.
    she is the ink and the echo,the storm braided into calm.
    you may look,but you will not read her.not everyone seeswhat silence reveals.
    so i offer you a line,a voice shaped by defiance,a presence drawn in truth.
    let me speak for her,since her lips are sealed:she would not kneel.
    she is herefor you to bow.

    More from Aslam ↓

    1. @smmaslam on Instagram
    2. @aslammohammed on Substack
    3. His book, Paper Boat in Rumi’s Garden, is available now

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Join the mailing list to be the first to know when OPO submissions open ⬇️

    🖋️ Read My Newsletter: Free Flow 🖋️
    続きを読む 一部表示
    2 分
  • On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renée Nicole Good

    On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renée Nicole Good
    2026/01/08
    On Learning to Dissect Fetal PigsRenée Nicole Good

    This poem was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020.

    i want back my rocking chairs,

    solipsist sunsets,
    & coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.
    i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
    (mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
    the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):
    remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,
    & salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.
    under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat
    ribosome
    endoplasmic—
    lactic acid
    stamen

    at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

    i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—
    maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

    it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.
    can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom


    now i can’t believe—
    that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—
    all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:
    life is merely
    to ovum and sperm
    and where those two meet
    and how often and how well
    and what dies there.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    3 分
  • Genesis of Her by Kiran Ashraf

    Genesis of Her by Kiran Ashraf
    2026/01/08
    Genesis of HerKiran AshrafHer body is like a powerful tidelooming in an ever-flowing motionchewing on her emotions like riceshe aches to read in sheltering armswearing her chaos for a better lifeher skin is a wild thing at its bestmemories in her songs of griefnow trembled and hummed in her boneslike a silent gust of unfinished wreckageor an absent orchestra of musical hellher two eyes wander through the meadowslessons forced on her forgiving shouldersall her exhausting days and unsent textsare winding up in threads of crocheted woolshe exists in this unyielding temporalgrowing stronger among unseen enemies

    More from Kiran Ashraf ↓

    1. @kiran_ashraf on Instagram and @kiranashraf7 on Substack

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Join the mailing list to be the first to know when OPO submissions open ⬇️

    🖋️ Read My Newsletter: Free Flow 🖋️
    続きを読む 一部表示
    2 分
  • Transmorphing by Özge Lena

    Transmorphing by Özge Lena
    2026/01/07
    TransmorphingÖzge Lena

    This Poem was commended for Winged Muse Poetry Competition of Winged Moon Literary Magazine

    After Harpy by Valerie Hammond
    In seven nights she will burstinto nothing. Now all alone in a creamcoloured void, a woundlike creature, a word hunger like no other.Soon you will meet herin the neon gloaming, after the ruby acheof not writing for a long winter,frost flowers in your heart. Her low wingswill be closed, sharp clawspointing down and down, some frozensadness on her pale face.Sunset’s vermilion beams will bleedinto your lungs as you holdher by hair, unfurl the ribbon to tie itaround your neck, to see your freedomknotted in its silk, and breathelife into her mouth. You will watch herunfold her wings wide, talonswill scratch the soft air when she cloaksyou tight until you morph intoa harpy to write a septet poem in red ink.

    More from Özge Lena ↓

    1. @lenaozge on Instagram
    2. You can find her on Substack @lenaozge where she presents her new approach to poetry, Catapoetry. It is a poetic framework about the interwoven and inseparable catastrophes of our age.
    3. You can listen to me read luminous girl lullaby by Özge Lena on Instagram @rembrandts.cure

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Join the mailing list to be the first to know when OPO submissions open ⬇️

    🖋️ Read My Newsletter: Free Flow 🖋️
    続きを読む 一部表示
    2 分