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SoFloPoJo Nominations: Best of the Net, Pushcart, Best Microfiction, The Best Small Fictions
Special Features Section 2026
February 2026 -The SoFloPoJo Stealth Ekphrastic Challenge
Curated by SoFloPoJo Founder, Lenny DellaRocca
We asked that submitters send their best photograph
(one they have taken),
along with an unpublished poem that they have written
that is NOT necessarily ekphrastic but is inspired by their photo.
February 2026 -The SoFloPoJo Stealth Ekphrastic Challenge
Curated by SoFloPoJo Founder, Lenny DellaRocca
We asked that submitters send their best photograph
(one they have taken),
along with an unpublished poem that they have written
that is NOT necessarily ekphrastic but is inspired by their photo.
FLUX by T. Ahzio
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The waterways are swollen, carrying mud and snags, turning them a light brown in color. Their entire stories are unknown, stretches of life, a mystery, from gathering glacier melt and rain to winding through the wild. We piece their stories together by observing, looking, measuring, predicting their outcome. We are often wrong. Near their first chapter, they were clearer than any clear could be, easily understood. We could see beneath their facade, broken rocks, pebbles, polished, flattened, smoothed. We would not see the history of their floods, their times of drought, until they tell us these stories within our own current, during our own time, stories of the fine line between fragility and strength, how they blend, blur...give & take. Eventually, all that is beneath them is covered in reflection and debris. Some things might never be found again, a word, a feeling, someone. Still, our legs are strong enough to stand here where the mud begins to dry where footprints weave, wandering like words. |
T. Ahzio, from Portland Oregon, is a visual and audio learner who enjoys interpreting what he sees and hears into words. This includes inner feelings about the beauty and destructiveness of nature in connection to humanity, self, and spirit. He writes to express the intangible experiences that are difficult to put into words. T. Ahzio's work, whether music, art, photography, and writing has appeared in Muse-Pie Press, Press Pause Press, Juste Mileu Zine, Rooted Literary Magazine, and runs a blog Moon-Cat.org
Great Aunt Hannah by Kimberly Barsamian
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Great Aunt Hannah
came to me in a dream wearing an apron with red polkadots her hands cradling a blue mixing bowl filled with golden delicious apples Behind her, a tablecloth with a cherry pattern criss-crossing down the sides of the table a stiff ladderback chair, softened with a yellow checked cushion, is tucked into the round welcoming table In walks a man through the crimson red door in a rough green wool coat he walks over to the sink and pumps the water and washes–then reaches for the towel scattered with lavender daisies, dries his coarse hands A blue speckled enameled kettle whistles, and a coal black pot bubbles on the mint green stove, a Singer’s gold lettering glints in the sun and waits patiently in the corner to sew Aunt Hannah looks to me and smiles, puts down the bowl, brushes an errant hair aside, steps towards me she gently pats her quilt on my bed, traces the stitches around the pink flying geese and the yellow satin octagon with her crooked fingers she pulls it back and crawls under with me I feel her warmth, and her heart beating she wraps the quilt up around my shoulders and I see her so clearly as we dream together. |
Self Portrait as Ruth Asawa by Maya Bernstein
Maya Bernstein’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Beloit Poetry Journal, On the Seawall, the Ekphrastic Review, Lumina Journal, Pensive, Psaltery & Lyre, SWIMM Every Day, Vita Poetica, and elsewhere. She is a 2024 graduate of the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, and her first collection is There Is No Place Without You (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022). Maya teaches leadership and facilitation and serves on the board of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry. Learn more about her at mayabernstein.com
A bird of the lake by Immaculate Halla
A bird of the lake
I'd like to be the water, so I can swallow swimlings and never bring them back again. I'd like to
be the water, so I can feel your wooden keel brush over the surface of my awakening, hold you
anchored, and watch lovers find love in my depths. I'd like to carry the message safe in a bottle,
to be heard, mysteriously, from bivalve coves and into your ears, hang in your locs and around
your neck. I'd like to glow from the north side of the mountain so you can awe at silver sardines
dancing under the twilight. I'd like to tell you stories of once upon a lake sailed for the first time,
men searched and fought only to find me endless, a soul unreachable. Tales of midnight bonfires
before they built a home across my ribcage so they can wake up next to me everyday. I'd like to
be the water, so a love letter is when you trip over the graveled sands of my fingertips, write me
praise poetry to send to the other side of the lake. I'd like to be the water, so you’d let me kiss
your bare feet again, forever, as you trot my shores.
Immaculate Halla (she/they) is a writer and poet from Tanzania. She was shortlisted for the Toyin Falola Prize 2024, longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2025, and became a 2025 JIAS Creative Writing Workshop Fellow. Her works have appeared in Lolwe, The Shallow Tales Review, African Writer, The Empyrean, and elsewhere. She particularly loves queer narratives, psychological thrillers, and damaged characters, all woven into beautiful storytelling. She is on Instagram sometimes, @immie_writes
Maybe Past Them by J.M.C. Kane
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Maybe Past Them
My uncle thinks I don't know about the rocket. He says the cone is just a net, thinks I'm just holding the frame because he asked me to. But I know I have the midsection in hand-- I've seen the fuel canisters under the dock. I found the sketches, under the Nga Pi Pot-- trajectory arcs, calculations in his careful hand. He's aiming for the mountains, maybe past them. We haven't discussed it. We don't discuss anything. I hold the fuselage steady and he balances inside it, practicing for a launch he won't announce. When he goes, I'll be the last thing between him and the sky. I haven't decided if I'll let go. |
J.M.C. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance. Disabled, he writes from this learned experience as an ASD-1. His prose work has been published in more than two dozen literary journals & magazines. He is presently longlisted for The Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, currently shortlisted for 32nd Annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest (2025), and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kane admires compression and willingness to trust his reader.He lives in New Orleans with his dogs and family. |
Necessary March by Karen Lozinski
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Necessary March
Full body respiration oyster shell grey firmament distant hazy pearl sun pinned to the back of someone else’s star system warmth a galaxy away first to carve ambulation into almost three feet of snow—the crunch is delectable, its steady music a crashing tribute; the march slow and necessary. Backpack stuffed with provisions Brula’s eaves will welcome me once I shovel enough accumulation so she can open her storm door. I am sure she is fine, mother to us all, but the phone goes unanswered and I have waited for the storm to pass. I am the only movement outside the wind that picks up loose snow in carless eddies, that whips branches, and the sun that twirls a silver halo around its fingers. Gelid air finds the sweat between skin and clothes and settles in with it creates its own highway, its own damp circulation, a frigid tonic taken backwards, but I will not stop. (continued in column 2) Vertical Divider
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I sing to the sun that does not care, cannot hear me, George Harrison songs--my sweet lord, my sweet lord. The tempo matches my heavy footfalls. Dusk licks away scant light by the time I pound on Brula’s door, pushing snow into mounds with my hands and still she does not answer. My sweet lord. The songs she sang us decades ago ring over George Harrison, braiding themselves taut into one inharmonious melody that drives my digging to a fury, Brula’s face taking the place of the sun, beaming down on me the way I saw it as a child: warm, resplendent, open. And then she is right there, holding on to the doorframe, beckoning me inside. She’d fallen asleep by the fire—would I mind helping her build a new one? Faded in reality from her starlike visage, she still radiates more luminescence than whole hemispheres brimming with constellations, than every sun on this side of the universe. I make myself busy loading the hearth and let her open up my backpack, rubbing her hands to ward off the cold. |
Karen Lozinski hails from New York City and lives in New Orleans. She's a multidisciplinary artist who earned her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. At work on a novel and a poetry collection, her writing appears in Mantis, The Citron Review (2024 Pushcart nominee), Chapter House Journal, Red Ogre Review, The Broadkill Review, The Bookends Review, The Naugatuck River Review, The South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Gyroscope Review, and many more.
IG: @karenlozinskiphotography
IG: @karenlozinskiphotography
Moon Club by Lance Mazmanian
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Moon Club
The mysterious spot occurred, one filled with bodies and a few flippy brains that spoke of faraway places where drinks were made of kaleidoscope coconut types, along with establishment fine clothes & accoutrements provided that shook scales of pretty much any palette, anywhere. Some say the place happened in a cool cloud over the coast, or maybe a secret downtown spot where doors are sparkle-sealed with illusions of flowers or maybe even strange pink metal, because once inside all time instruments dance from clocks and disappear, even wearing Moonstar shoes from Antonio Vietri, on occasion. Wow. |
Word/visual author Lance Mazmanian: Random House with Harlan Ellison, got coffee as payment. Since 2025 Mazmanian did 56 publications including Mediterranean Poetry (Göteborg & Mediterranean Sea), Fiction On the Web UK, Isele Magazine (Africa/Utah), more. 2026 Pushcart nom. Leonard Cohen (RIP) wanted a chapbook with Mazmanian. Til “Scrapbook File” imploded.
Donnie Creek, BC. 2023 by kerry rawlinson
Donnie Creek, BC. 2023
summer hid our hope
in scars below a tyrant
wildfire’s charred
& crackling cloak.
summer hid our hope
in scars below a tyrant
wildfire’s charred
& crackling cloak.
kerry rawlinson’s a mental nomad & bloody-minded optimist who emerged from a Zambian pupation & flew to Canada. Recipient of New Millennium Writings, Princemere and Canterbury Poetry Prizes and placed in others, e.g. CV2; Wells Open; recent acceptances include: Broken Spine; Dreamer’s; PrimeNumber. kerry’s also an award-winning flash fiction writer (Glittery Literary and Edinburgh International) and artist (Winner Makarelle; Rattle); still wandering barefoot—still drinking too much (tea). kerryrawlinson.com @kerryrawli
the joker by Andy Sachs
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“the joker” “When you were partying, I studied the blade. When you were having premarital sex, I mastered the blockchain. While you wasted your days at the gym in pursuit of vanity, I cultivated inner strength. And now that the world is on fire and the barbarians are at the gate you have the audacity to come to me for help.” - graysjsnake the joker lies in the deck, the most worthless card “card” was what they called everybody else, but him him alone, in middle school, when Jack Sheinerbaum Jack Sheinerbaum had a beard, and everyone else did did he have a beard? No, so he wasn’t a card, at least-- least among men, least among boys, least among mortal flesh flesh cast out away from the bone, the bone and marrow of school school was the enemy to him, and then the state was the enemy to him, him and him alone, and God was the enemy to him, and woman woman became his ultimate foe, for he, although of woman born born a man, became the enemy, for he craved again the warmth warmth of a woman’s embrace once more, but deprived deprived, became depraved, and bitter and cold cold comfort were the papers and comedians to him and so so soon after birth, he lived a living death, death was to him the death of his soul, not the body body was what he wanted, but he would never get it it struck him as unfair, for he refused to change change frightened him, so he shied from it away away to the warmth of his keyboard’s squares squares on the internets comforted him, for they were like him him alone away from the world, with millions of other hims alone alone, and outcast, with naught but a scattered few few men were there to be his model, but some, some reflected him, and he craved their embrace embrace appetized him, but he could never take it it irked him, but he slouched through life with his back bent bent back, and his beard wrapped around his neck neck crooked from staring down down into the blackness of infinity, which was the internet the internet mocked him, and finally he gained attention attention was what he wanted, but not this kind, kind words were what he wanted, but he was not good for that that was the fact: and yet, if only—! only, in the end, he was good for making people laugh at him: the joker. |
Andy Sachs is a budding photographer from New York City. So far Andy's works have been featured in articles in publications by friend and journalist, J. Barnes.
Mary Tyler Moore Has Her Fortune Told By Madame Marie in Asbury Park by Alex Stolis
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Mary Tyler Moore Has Her Fortune Told By Madame Marie in Asbury Park
Marie tells her she will have a dream tonight; it will be past, present, future, filled with maybes, maybe nots, & one not-so-happily-ever-after. There will be fireworks, a carnival night, neon lights that flash, pop, fizzle. The moon a rising halo; it’s a Hollywood musical with a Bernstein score. She’s Natalie Wood, has Rita Moreno’s fire & sass, a West Side Storybook. Muscle-shirted Latin boys sway on the stoop, snap their fingers, music swells. The handsomest boy, arm outstretched, her skirt, a baby blue billowing cloud. The chorus girls chase, act kittenish but they’re wild. The boys pretend to be feral, untamed & when they’re caught, fold like switchblades. The boardwalk’s a full-cast ensemble number, a roar of sawdust, summer sweat mixed with weed mixed with salty air; sex waiting off stage. The song slows to lament. The boy watches her hand slip from his; the world fades to dark, a white angel glow followspot narrows on her. She will wake, ready for unknowing. It will feel like a dream about dying but it means she can fly. |
Alex Stolis has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections Pop. 1280 and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press. He lives in upstate New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra.
Highlights from our Special Features Section:
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Adam Day Poetry - 36 Hours in the Strategic Crescent
Album of Fences - Excerpts from Omar Pimienta's Poetry Translation: Jose Antonio Villarán & Review: Arturo Desimone Ekphrastic Poetry - Palm Beach Poetry Festival's Art Couture Contest winners 2020 Favorite Poems? - What's on Your List? Follow the Dancer - Poetry McClintock, Santer, & Stevenson In Memoriam: John Arndt In Memoriam: Patricia Whiting Peter Hargitai - Humanism & Identity in Hungarian Poetry |
Joel Harris Poetry Paradise & Haibun for Port of Spain
Kiss & Tell - First Kisses with Poetry & Prose Lennon or McCartney - Opinions & Poems Neighborhood of Make-Believe - after Thomas Lux - Prompt 4 Poems PAVEL RYSTAR - translations by Ukrainian-American Poets SNAPS - photos of poets in the wild SoFloPoJo Nominations Surfside - Poets respond VISIT TO THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY by George Wallace |