by Sarah Guppy

Although I don’t think the nightingale
Had sung especially for you
That time under the plum tree
Or indeed any other bird had warbled forth,
Upon the boughs, only to entrance you further
You took a moment, you flew with the birds
Why, at that moment, if I had observed
You lying on the heath
I’m sure I would have seen only the one:
One creature, one soul
Such was the intensity
Of the communication with nature.

I went in to the room
Where you met your love,
You never were the same man
After that meeting.
The very floor boards reeked of romance
Even the newspaper reading lady with the upper crust vowel sounds
Could not erase your power, your vision
One hundred and seventy years after your leaving.

But, in a sense, you never completely left and
I’m sure when every nightingale sings
And someone hears the song
Your essence hovers somewhere amongst the leaves

And in the air.
For who can ever say you died when your consciousness
Lives on forever?

How poignant your words seem now,
Your every utterance a precious perfumed flower
Oh, what would you think now
Of this green and pleasant land
Being so brutally trashed
Or the modern day troll-mobs
Munching their way through the pastoral?

I read your thoughts and
If “beauty is truth and truth beauty”
Does that now mean
That we live surrounded by lies and ugliness, the outer environment
Reflecting the crisis within;
The rejection and scorn of anything natural
Anything of the senses, of the unseen world
Of the inherent truth, beauty within us all.

The division of nature and technology
Reflecting the division of our own consciousness,
So that, disjointed as it were and disconnected
We gaze at you like numb automans
Being removed from you
Through time and space.

Tell me, which is the strangest
We voyeurs, observing the relics of your life
Self contained and stuffed

In one of those Victorian display cases,
Or our fear of the sensual feeling life
Our emotions disturbed by your selfless romance,
Our thoughts as stifled as the air within the case.

Now unable to tune in to your music,
A kind of mass blindness prevails across the land
This subtle numbing of the senses
So that eventually we become
As frozen and rigid as the figures on the urn
Our lives and consciousness frozen and disconnected
As the people on the Grecian Urn.

For in the disconnection of our selves
In the splitting off of our feeling, instinctual self
There is an immense loss
The earth’s poisonous yield
Being merely a barometer of the poison within of
This terrible poverty of the spirit,
So that your luminous august feasts
Ring resoundingly on now
Haunting us in our identity crisis
Reminding us of our real need
To reclaim Darien.

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Never one to waste a moment:

Grand Prize Winner:
Madeleine’s Wife
Runner-up:
The Vanishing of Viera

Fan Favorites:
The Vanishing of Viera (1,704 votes)
A Life in Seasons (1,236 votes)

See how the Judges voted, below,
including the results of Fan Voting.

Tell me, have you ever:

gone skinny-dipping in the rain on a Christmas Day?;
or sung to standing ovation on the longest day of the year?;
smoked a cigarette with your boss’ boss?
read a monster’s diary?;
or lost your favorite hat whilst stealing a Saudi prince’s sapphire from underwater turtles, only to escape by lemur-cover?;
got caught up with by the emptiness— that, nothing-not-yet, emptiness?;
yet somehow— amidst all the abstraction— it’s all about the back-and-forth of a tennis match?

Why, all this winter you have, on Defenestrationism.net during the 2025 FLASH SUITE Contest.

Be sure to sign-up for our quarterly
Lovers of Literature Newsletter
(there should be a pop-up window, somewhere lower left)

And keep surfing through, Lovers of Literature,
we do this three times a year.

HOW THE JUDGES VOTED

(One Grand Prize vote is worth two Runner-Up votes)

Lady Moet Beast
Grand Prize: Madeleine’s Wife
Runner-up: The Vanishing of Viera

Glenn A. Bruce
Grand Prize: Evening of Earth
Runner-up: Madeleine’s Wife

Aditya Gautam
Grand Prize: Madeleine’s Wife
Runner-up: Once a Good Girl

Allison Floyde
Grand Prize: From the Life of St. Francis
Runner-Up: Once a Good Girl

FAN VOTING
Grand Prize: The Vanishing of Viera (1,704 votes)
Runner-up: A Life in Seasons (1,236 votes)

back to the 2025 FLASH SUITE Contest
meet the finalists
meet the Judges


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The Judges have voted, the Fans have voted—
in only one day, on MLK Day (US), January 20th,
the winners will be announced.

In the meantime, scroll down for the poem
“Unethical Monogamy” by Chantelle Tibbs
and be sure to come through on Wednesday for
“Dedication to Keats” by Sarah Guppy

Keep surfing through, Lovers of Literature,
we do this three times a year.

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by Chantelle Tibbs

I walk the tightest of ropes
My feet slip gripping a winding cord
Which makes its way up and around my neck
Toes twist in unnatural ways
To stay the course slammed into me 
Since the mere thought I could ever one day flower

Tighter it squeezes
Every excuse to continue the squeeze 
“No daughter of mine…”
“But I love you…”
“If you loved me you wouldn’t…”
Be me. 

I taste vomit in my throat
The sound of my own bones cracking 
My neck. My body. 
What did she do?
What could I have done
Better.
Nothing.

I crawl the tightest prison wire
It constricts, contorts
I am tiny. I am broken. Dug into.
Penetrated, the irony.
Closing in on my heart
as it watches my demise.

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Vote for your favorites now

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Each song on the album is a bee.

Each one of these song-bees pollinates one of six gardens: “the orchard”, “the greenhouse”, “rock garden”, “desert garden”, “roses and thorns” and “herbs and elixirs”.

There is no other unifying concept to Tori Amos’ album The Beekeeper. The songs are otherwise unrelated, there are no recurring characters or topical catch-alls, and no narratives at all.

Yet, as Amos weaves her eloquent themes, sparkling images and substantial profundities across this collection of songs, a new and remarkable literary experience blooms from out the furrows.

read more…

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by Paul-Newell Reaves

A Musical Rebirth of the American Dream
Lyricists’ Watch
2024

Most pretentious concept album of all time is a highly contested prize. 

read more…

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By Timothy Ryan

The blizzard of lies, disinformation, hatred and loathing unleashed by the Republican Party and its allies around immigration has been successful in skewing and obscuring the issue, all but destroying reasoned debate.  It may seem odd then, even bizarre, to suggest one of the more incisive critiques of our current immigration dilemma actually comes from a gypsy-punk band named Gogol Bordello.  In the song and video of “Immigraniada” from the “Before Times” of Obama in 2010, Ukrainian/Romany Eugene Hutz and his eclectic international band recorded some intense anthems that seemed to speak to our moment then – but even more so now.

read more…

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Monday, January 6th
Fan Voting beings
(vote here)

Wednesday, January 8th
How a Gypsy-Punk Music Video from 2010 Speaks to Our Current Immigration Moment
by Timothy Ryan

Sunday, January 12th
Concept Albums Explained: “A Musical Rebirth of the American Dream“
by Paul-Newell Reaves

Wednesday, January 15th
Concept Albums Explained: Tori Amos, “The Beekeeper”
by Paul-Newell Reaves

Friday, January 17th
Last Day of Fan Voting

Saturday, January 18th
Unethical Monogamy
by Chantelle Tibbs

Monday, January 20 (MLK Day)
Winners of the 2025 FLASH SUITE Contest Announced

Wednesday, January 22
Dedication to Keats
by Sarah Guppy

Throughout April, 2025
Lengthy Poem Contest
winners announces May Day, which is May 5th

— So keep surfing through, Lovers of Literature, we do these contests three times a year—

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Fan Voting is now open for the 2025 FLASH SUITE Contest.

Tell me, have you ever:
gone skinny-dipping in the rain on a Christmas Day?;
or sung to standing ovation on the longest day of the year?;
smoked a cigarette with your boss’ boss?
read a monster’s diary?;
or lost your favorite hat whilst steeling a Saudi prince’s sapphire from underwater turtles, only to escape by cover of lemurs?;
got caught up with by the emptiness— that, nothing-not-yet, emptiness?;
yet somehow— amidst all the abstraction— it’s all about the back-and-forth of a tennis match?

Why, all this winter you have, on Defenestrationism.net during the 2025 FLASH SUITE Contest.

Hope you have enjoyed as much as we did.

Vote Now.

Meet the Finalists

Monti Sturzaker can be found wherever there are words, or playing with her two rescue dogs, Echo and Whisper. She’s previously published in Andromeda. 

Tracie Adams is a writer and teacher in rural Virginia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Does It Have Pockets, Cleaver Magazine, Trash Cat Lit, Anodyne, Bright Flash Literary Review, and others. Read her work at www.tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on Twitter @1funnyfarmAdams.

Jacob Anderson is an author from the Pacific Northwest and is majoring in Film at Arizona State. His works mostly fall into the genres of horror and fantasy, and has several works under consideration for publication.

Ann Kammerer lives in the Chicago area, having relocated from her home state of Michigan. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are coming in Fictive Dream, One Art, Open Arts Forum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Workers Write!, Chiron Review, Major 7^th Magazine, Thoughtful Dog, and Ekphrastic Review, among others,andin anthologies byCrow Woods Publishing and Querencia Press. Her chapbook collections of narrative poetry include “Yesterday’s Playlist” (Bottlecap Press, 2023), “Beaut” (Kelsay Books, 2024), “Friends Once There” (Impspired, 2024), and “Someone Else” (Bottlecap Press, 2024). You can find her here: annkammerer.com

John Manderino is the author of five novels, two short stories collections and two memoirs. A novel titled Bopper’s Progress, was the winner of the 2017 Wundor International Fiction Award and a runner-up for the 2019 Maine Book of the Year, in fiction. Reason for Leaving (short stories) was Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year – Bronze Award Winner 2001 for Humor.

John has also written plays that have been performed at theater festivals and other venues and has had short stories published in periodicals. He is currently working on a novel titled And Jill Came Tumbling After and a short story collection titled The Man Who Made Jesus Laugh and Other Stories, which this piece is taken from. 

Douglas Cole has published eight poetry collections, including The Cabin at the End of the World, winner the Best Poetry Award in the American Book Fest, and the novel The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry, Fiction International, Valpariaso, The Gallway Review and Two Hawks Quarterly.

He contributes a regular column, “Trading Fours,” to the magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician.  He also edits the American Writers section of Read Carpet, a journal of international writing produced in Columbia.

In addition to the American Fiction Award, his screenplay of The White Field won Best Unproduced Screenplay award in the Elegant Film Festival. He has been awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House, First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway, and the Editors’ Choice Award in fiction by RiverSedge. He has been nominated Seven times for a Pushcart and Nine times for Best of the Net. His website is https://douglastcole.com.

Holly Scott is a young writer from rural Australia. She was shortlisted for a competition held by Calanthe Press and has had several short stories published in speculative fiction literary magazines When she’s not writing, Holly can be found going on walks, enjoying a cup of coffee and wrangling a number of chickens. You can contact her on X, @fanfarress

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