Coalitionist | October 2025

Coalitionist.

October 2025

Cats, sunpatches, and other such joys.

Fall is here. And so are we.

I’m not sure where you are, but I hope this email finds you. Well, etc.

This fall mixed bag: Something of a run-on sentence, a bundle of tremendous artistic contribution and good news, this collective excellence stuffed in a digital sack, was a joy to assemble!

I know I haven’t been very good at keeping up with submissions or podcasting in recent months because I’ve been writing and recording my own creative work. Yes, I’ve been busy with bold, ambitious artistic pursuits! Incredible feats of craft and topical resonance! And really important art! I’ve been on fire! That sounds incredibly pretentious and false. I have been making art and it’s been great, but to be truly honest: Sometimes the only thing a grown-ass man can get done after a long workday is make dinner and watch a few episodes of the Simpsons with the fam. Maybe go to bed at a decent hour. There aren’t enough hours in the day, and sometimes I just can’t get to the inbox. I’m starting to accept my production and response times are going to be slower than I’d like.

Nonetheless, my intention still is to continue gathering literature and creative miscellany at the coalition. It may take me a little while to answer your submission email, but when I do answer, I will be better able to serve your work!

…A quick note before I let you go: I’ll try to publish CNF/prose poems/other nonfic as solo pieces on Substack throughout the month and then send this version via email at the end of the month. Still trying to find the best way to format the publication. I recently heard some authors take objection to having their work published by a Subtack lit mag rather than a publication with its own website, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. If you have my email, feel free to let me know what you think. For now, I hope this digital bulletin brings you a nice helping of coalitionist wins, work that celebrates little joys, and of course, cat propaganda.

Extremely grateful to every Coalitionist for their artistic contributions and patience. Sincere thanks to my cat, Oscar, for reminding me the pace of my life can be much slower than the breakneck speed of American exceptionalism. And of course, thank you so much, dear reader, for taking the time to check out the mixed bag.

Much love,

j

Also, keep an eye out for coalitionworks11 coming out in the next week or so.

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The coalition announces first-ever Best of the Net nominees

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Penny Nolte | Michelle, ma Belle

There they were, those first few notes, recognizable from within the wash of a six-string chord. It felt like magic as I heard and then played them, one at a time.

This was December, 1965, I was 10 or 11, home alone, sick, from school. Nested on the couch with Kleenex and comic books, a purring cat or two. And my Sears guitar. Its steel strings so high off the fret board I had developed a vice-like grip with calluses that felt like nail heads and shouted, proudly, “I am a guitar player.”

The surprising thing about finding Michelle that day, among all the other notes, was that I wasn’t even looking for it. I was a strummer, not a picker. But each note just followed the last so naturally. With a static drone on top of a downward stepping accompaniment, “say the only thing I know,”* easily played together with thumb and forefinger.

Then there was the emotional chorus, “I love you I love you I love you!”* I loved Michelle, too, playing it for my family and all of my friends.

Until everyone was thoroughly sick of it.

*Beatles, “Michelle.” Rubber Soul, Capitol Records, 1965.

Penny Nolte | Introduction to Organization

Auntie Barbara’s footsteps echo under the tall domed ceiling. She greets me, as she always does, with a big hug smelling of Pall Malls and Red Rose Tea. I notice a few cat hairs clinging to the back of her navy-blue sweater as she leads me toward the imposing oak cabinet. Where she demonstrates how to pull out the long metal bars holding hundreds of musty index cards in place. So that we can turn them over and read notes, left there by previous librarians.

*First publication in Vroom Lit Magazine.

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R.P. Singletary announces debut novel!

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Amber Odlin | Poem for Spring Emerging

Spring: caught on my fingertips like spilling-over blossom,
The time of year we reimagine green.
The ice of the sunset thaws, transformed,
Captured heat clinging to the grass in beads.
The rough, warm ground hardens soles of feet,
The long grass knows the gooseflesh of my knees.
I am wordless with it all.
The sun wakes us from the stretch of night,
The world’s precipice gently tilting.
We hang our dreams on lace curtains to dry-
Pressed from my sheets of white linen,
Their film realises itself in the light.
Like a polaroid capture softly emerging,
The world unfolds itself to our waiting eyes.

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INTERMISSION (Brought to you by Oscar)

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Jianna Heuer | Why isn’t anyone talking about this? (newsletter release)

Coalitionist Jianna Heuer (CW7) recently debuted her newsletter on Substack entitled, Why isn’t anyone talking about this? Be sure to subscribe and read her personal essay. Perimenopause Psychosis or The Time I Thought I was a Gremlin Who Had To Move To The Woods! Congratulations Jianna!

I want to talk about shit nobody is talking about; menopause, bullying, body dysmorphia, shame, bullshit social policies, the list is endless. Using the power of personal essays and that handy comments and chat section, let’s discuss what’s been kept in the shadows.

-Jianna Heuer

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Donald Patten | Visual Art Showcase

The coalition is thrilled to present the art of Donald Patten in this coalitionist mixed bag! This series of drawings represent the artist’s experiences during the COVID years. Click below to view the complete showcase!

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New poetry from Absurdilachian David Earl Williams

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Anne Mason | The Catasterism

Seven sisters flee their oppressor, the mighty hunter, the predatory bear who pined to bind them in his corseted grip. They exist in the mythology of my bones, the score of my corporeal form. After hauling the globe on my shoulders, the Atlas-like burden of hustle and stress and strife and strain, an Olympian battalion of force and ferocity etch the stellar siblings into a celestial cluster of cells, there to remain in perpetuity.

An immune system run amok, revolting against its multidecadal home, charges a B-cell infantry of hungry, nerve-lusted soldiers to burrow and bore. To eat and erode. To disintegrate. Demyelinate.

Acting in an inflamed rage, the neuralogic interior is laid bare, a routed debasing, a cellular razing. As they advance from one battleground to the next, a devastation of hyperintensities are left in their stead, neuronal scarring that the doctors refer to as Black Holes.

One cannot witness the despoliation with the naked eye. I tell you, it is cruel to labor towards some semblance of perceived normalcy when moving through life under the hold of an invisible disease. Peer closer and you might observe the refugee survivors of fatigue and flushing and footdrop, but you will never lay eyes on the burning, blurring, pricking, tingling, slashing, sleeping, waking, chilling, vibrating frostburn pins and needles of constant chronic pain, of the medicalese hypersensitivity, of spasticity and ocular degeneration.

Encase me in a capsuled magnet. Glide me through the humming, clanging contraption, and the inner galaxy of a diseased central nervous system comes into view. A septenary string of lesions along the cervical spine, the internal evidence of early illness relapse, are joined by constellations of plaques, marring in the temporal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital and frontal lobes, medulla, brainstem, cervical spinal cord, middle cerebellar peduncle, posterior fossa, periventricular white matter, subcortical white matter, craniocervical junction – all peppered throughout, scattered across the brain and upper spine.

More scleroses than one can comprehend. More wreckage. More rubble. More ruin.

But the cosmos are within us. We are such things as dreams are made of. We are composed of stardust.
So I traverse the blasted neurological terrain, rebuilding neural networks, relaying pathways, reclaiming itinera, following the neuronic road to a newly formulated nexus; and I incorporate the scars, my seven sisters, my personal pleiades and their ever-expanding panoply of multiple sclerosis kin, all glittering outward, shimmering upward into a limitless universe, an Elysian Field vaster and more wondrous than we may ever humanly fathom.

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mk zariel | Boy Apparition, a new poetry collection

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Arts Calling Interviews

Arts Calling started again for the fall/winter season. Hope you enjoy our latest episodes!

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For a life well-lived, consider this:

What brought you joy as a child? Just do that thing now, I guess.

I’m gonna fire up the old Super Nintendo in the basement and play me some Mortal Kombat. Back in the day, I wrote down every fatality and could regale my brethren with off the cuff knowledge, much like Homer reciting the Odyssey from memory. Stay tuned for my highly-anticipated nostalgia fever dream column, The Fossil Times.

In the meantime, hope you have a remarkably spooky week! I’ll be out here in the prairie with the fam, handing out candy in my Mothman costume, procrastinating any kind of writing. Go pass the time beautifully. Ain’t nothing to it but to do it.

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