Sunday Focus: the excitations

Photo by Meg Boscov

[Editor’s Note: This ongoing Sunday feature pairs photographs from Meg Boscov with a thought (or two) from the managing editor about focusing on tiny things to find something significant. Paired with this photograph is a prose poem from the series AFTER, a series of photographs & prose poems that imagines the world without us, after the melting. Click on the picture itself to view at full size.]

 

 

For the humans, a fingernail scraped across a chalkboard, the ear’s shape creating amplification, pain. For the owl, a weasel’s chin against a turtle’s scute. But this efflorescence of folding, flowering, sprouting only picks up good vibrations, oom bop bop. All ears, eyes closed, creation feels closer now. Light, scent, touch, wind, gravity, the vibrations of feeders, of the world’s soft breath—all these the cluster of blossom picks up, juggles pistil to stamen, petal to sepal, stigma to anther, filament to filament. The ripple of this surprising environment pulses through the air, like the exuberance of oxygen, the profusion of pollen, the bumble of birds, bats, bees, butterflies, beetles, bebop, a teeming harmony, a pet sound.

☄

Meg Boscov is a photographer who lives and works outside of Philadelphia where she continues to pursue her careers in animal-assisted education and dog training. She can be reached at her website or on instagram at megboscov.

Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.

Submissions

Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.

Upcoming

12/15 • Isabelle Ness
12/22 • Catherine Bai
12/29 • Stephan Viau
01/05 • Allison Blevins
01/12 • Justin Ocelot
01/19 • Yejun Chun
01/26 • Mathieu Parsy
02/02 • Robert McBrearty
02/09 • Sarah Daly
02/16 • Wayne Lee
02/23 • Terena Elizabeth Bell
03/02 • Michael Mirolla
03/09 • Nicholas Claro
03/16 • TBD
03/23 • TBD
03/30 • TBD