by David Henson

Cans of green beans, corn, carrots, and more litter the kitchen floor. My father sits at the table looking out at the bird feeder. When I ask him how it happened, he says something about needing more sunflower seeds. The ceiling creaks, and white flakes fall. Inside, not out. Bits of ceiling plaster, not snow.

I tell Dad that he must know what this means. My sister is lucky she lives out of town. She’s been warning me this day was barreling toward us, but I’d been putting it off. 

My father points toward the window. “Cardinal.” It was my mom’s favorite bird. Older folks, I’d noticed, seem to anoint favorites for lots of things — birds, flowers, trees. Guess they harken back to pleasant memories. Might be different for me if I forever associate cardinals with today.

I study my dad’s hand. The hand that taught me to throw a curve, bait a hook. He seems shakier than usual. Is it because of what’s happened or what’s about to? 
I go out the kitchen door to the garage to check the damage again. The overhead door is open, but the maroon Impala, its bumper crumpled, has its nose to the wall. 

When I step back inside, the cardinal flies away. Frightened or has it eaten its fill? I hold out my hand. My turn to tremble. The keys jingle as Dad gives them to me.

* * *

DAVID HENSON and his wife reside in Illinois, USA. His work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart prizes and has appeared in various publications, including Trash Cat Lit and Best Microfictions 2025. His X handle is @annalou8. His website is http://writings217.wordpress.com

by Leigh Loveday

Her hometown, Ffion had decided, looking back towards land from the old stone pier, was full of dragons. A wyrm here, a wyvern there, tucked into parks and factories and the warren of tight streets that tumbled inelegantly from mountainside to sea. Rampant or dormant, they lifted her heart.
 
The closest she’d found so far had nested in the ramshackle beachfront fairground, more allure than alarm these days in its ragged rollercoaster crest.
 
Downwind, fiercer fellows hunkered in the steelworks where town became wasteland, all ridges and combustion and nocturnal furnace roar.
 
Behind them all, the mountain itself: a stunted hill really, so deeply enfolded in sleep that its week-long inhalations went by entirely without notice.
 
Studying it, striving to regain lost detail, Ffion found the daylight beginning to fail around her. She sighed, and stirred her limbs to lead her home.

As she walked the pier’s crumbling span, she reached out to touch the great jack-shaped stones that braced it on both sides, known to everyone in her orbit as the Dragons’ Teeth.
 
Ffion smiled sadly. A town full of tales to hide in. She walked away and left them there, on the shoreline, to pick up again another time.
 
Far out in the bay, catching the low winter light, the last remaining leviathan raised its head to watch her go.

* * *

LEIGH LOVEDAY grew up on the Welsh coast and now lives in the English Midlands, besieged by cats and foxes. He writes short fiction aggressively slowly, landing in the likes of Uncharted and Shoreline of Infinity. Find him at @leighloveday.bsky.social.

by Mikki Aronoff

Father doesn’t talk much, except when he’s gripping a tool. He leads me down to his basement workshop, his after-hours refuge, plucks the spirit level from its place on the pegboard, and hands it to me. I wobble to its jittery fluorescence. It’s challenging to zero the bubble. “It’s not what you think,” Father says. I look at him, nervous, perch myself on a stool, settle in for a story. 
 
He tells me the vial that’s now in the spirit level replaced the original. “Didn’t know where else to put it,” he said, adding that it came to him via one of his patients, an astronaut recently returned from a mission to a faraway planet. There he was seduced by an extraterrestrial charmer familiar with Father’s obsession with interstellar communication. She desperately wanted contact. She’d implanted a coded message to him in the vial and placed it, unsterilized, into the astronaut’s neck when he fell asleep. By the time he returned home, it festered, as was part of her plan. Father conducted the sensitive and costly surgery necessary to excise it from the space traveler’s septic skin. “The level's a bit useless now, really,” he adds. “More keepsake than tool. Not sure why I bothered to keep it after I decoded it and answered her back. But it’s yours when I go, if you want it. Might fetch something on eBay if you find yourself strapped.” 
 
I hand the spirit level back to Father, chuckle at the back roads the vial's taken to get to him. He nods, tells me he considered the alien’s strategy circuitous.  Outside later that evening, he points towards Orion, pronounces, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” He tilts his ear to the stars. A long breath, a bit like a whistle, escapes from his chest. “The heart is a lonely hunter,” he sighs. I wrap a tentacle around him, give him a squeeze. 

* * * 

MIKKI ARONOFF lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025 and Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025. She is a co-author of the book, Neverafters. 
More at https://www.facebook.com/mikki.aronoff/.

by Barbara Brooks

The green tint on the hills slowly grows darker.
Columbine blooms in the back yard.
The last call of winter’s white throated sparrow
leaves only the locals at the bird feeders.
 
Asters put forth their leaves with the promise
of blooms in the Fall. Blond daffodils rock
in the spring breeze. The smell of grass
after its first cutting. Waking up to the chatter
of wrens.
 
Mornings enter the screened window.
Dog lazes in the Spring sunlight.
Weekend coffee on the deck hearing only birds.

* * *

BARBARA BROOKS is a retired physical therapist and author of 3 chapbooks, The Catbird Sang, A Shell to Return to the Sea, Watercolors.  She is a member of PoetFools writing group. She lives in Hillsborough, NC with her dog.

by Ruth Holzer

​How slight they look— 
my husband and my mother
on a bench beneath the flowering cherry,
from where I stand
on the far side of the pond,
having walked away from them,
just for a minute.

* * *

RUTH HOLZER is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently, On the Way to Man in Moon Passage and Float. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is a multiple Pushcart, Touchstone, and Best of the Net nominee.  

by Lindsay McLeod

Say what you like
but I made sure
she had the space

to be right or wrong
to be brave and proud
determined and complete

able to wear in equal
measure her ferocity
and bare vulnerability

and to let the world
like it or lump it
right alongside me.

* * *

LINDSAY MCLEOD lives by the Port in South Australia where he is driven by his cattle dog, Mary. He has won a few awards for his writing, which appears most recently in Ephemeral Elegies, Rat’s Ass Review, Snakeskin, and Meniscus.

by Joshua Walker

I wake before dawn,
the quiet pressing against my chest.
I make coffee the way I always do,
sugar measured by habit.
Light moves across the kitchen
without stopping.
My son murmurs.
My daughter shifts beside him,
hands closing around the blanket.
I fold the laundry I meant
to fold yesterday,
shirts,  socks
returning to their places.
A note on the counter
from last week’s goodbye
waits where I left it.
I read it aloud.
Evening gathers slowly
in the living room.
I sit with it.
Some days healing is quiet.
Breath leaves.
Breath returns.

* * *

JOSHUA WALKER is a poet based in Oklahoma City. His work has appeared in Potomac Review, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, Solarpunk Magazine, and elsewhere. He writes about language, memory, and the quiet architecture of ordinary life.

by John Grey

A single carved heart made this tree part of my story.
My hand shook as I dug blade into bark.
 
Though I pressed lightly, it felt as if the heart ran deep,
was there already, and I was merely tracing it.
Then the initials, cautious at first, emerged slowly, sweetly,
like sap warming its way to the light.
 
Through many seasons, many wandering years,
this etching, this loving declaration, remains.
 
Ah WS, where are you now? What does it matter?
Never engaged but we’re engraved.
And this tree keeps the small truth of us.

* * *

JOHN GREY is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, Trampoline and Flights. Latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters, and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Levitate, White Wall Review and Willow Review.

by M. Frost

I’ve tried for a year to contain myself, to trim
the fat, to fit into the box (or the clothes from before).
To scrape words off my plate to meet the word count. I’m trying

to be smaller, but every day’s an incremental failure.
The tempting adjectives entrench, then an adverb 
sneaks in deliciously. I succumb, buy the larger of the men’s pants, 
the roomier women’s blouse. My bra bulges like the anpan I tried in Japan.
I cover it with shirts that don’t care. Order another syllable.

* * *

Find M. FROST in The Hopkins Review, Little Patuxent Review, Strange Horizons, and others, with chapbooks Cow Poetry (Finishing Line Press) and The Women of Myth (Island of Wak-Wak). 

by Andrea Tillmanns

After the rain, the air tastes like summer, blowing in through the open window and enveloping you in night. The quiet grunting of hedgehogs in the garden, above which bats flit silently through the dark. A single blackbird sings timid notes from the fir tree before settling down to sleep.

These quiet moments write notes inside you, which you may transfer to sheet music and later to strings, and even later release to other people who listen to you in small groups and perhaps remember: the taste of the air after the rain and the summer night that envelops them.

* * *

ANDREA TILLMANNS lives in Germany and works full-time as a university lecturer. She has been writing poetry, short stories and novels in various genres for many years. More information can be found on her website www.andreatillmanns.de.

by Ruth Holzer

What would I not give
to lie in that first remembered room,
​to fall asleep as the lights
of cars on Main Street
slid across the ceiling
like friendly ghosts,
and my sister breathed softly
in the bed next to mine.

* * *

RUTH HOLZER is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently, On the Way to Man in Moon Passage and Float. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is a multiple Pushcart, Touchstone, and Best of the Net nominee.  

by Terry Trowbridge

I did not know my kid likes kingfishers
until, 24 years old, they saw one
flying over the orchards,
tilting itself during a long glide,
shoulders facing the sun
within earshot of Lake Ontario.

My kid was all smiles and surprise,
noting they did not know we had kingfishers,
remarking on the bird panoply that soars above us.

Now they live away, at college, home weekly.
One of my privileges of parenthood
is learning what they see here, renewed,
educated to reinterpret our place.

* * *

Canadian farmer TERRY TROWBRIDGE's poems have appeared in CV2, The New Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, Nashwaak Review, The Great Lakes Review, Pamenar Press, The Ex-Puritan, Studies in Social Justice, and ~200 more places. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for funding during the polycrisis.

dropping into
the beggar’s hat–
spring rain


​park bench– 
an old man’s small talk
with pigeons

                    Martina Matijević ​

Venus suspended, a low-slung crescent moon ready to catch her

​                                                                                            Clodagh O Connor

​

spring rhythms
the woodpecker performs
a drum solo 
​
​
seventeen years
in the making . . .
cicada serenade 

                  Valentina Ranaldi-Adams

​

​one petal
all the difference
to a daisy

                    Julie Schwerin

 * * *
​

With the start of a new year comes a new issue of The Hoolet’s Nook, and we’re glad you’re here.

THN has always gravitated toward understated, thoughtful work that values resonance over noise, and the pieces in this issue continue to carry that quiet strength.

We invite you to pause and let the words settle, perhaps with a warm cup in hand, and to all the contributors who have helped shape THN, we are deeply grateful—your trust and support mean the world to us.

Namaste,
G.R. LeBlanc
Managing Editor

Thinking of submitting? Our next reading round opens February 1st. Guidelines are available here. ​

by Sarah Rodgers

Sealskin does burn, it turns out.
               
She was sleeping in our bed when I slipped away to do the deed. She didn’t know I had found the secret skin she had shed, and she never will.

I told myself I was setting her free. She wouldn’t be torn between land and sea anymore. She would be with me, fully, and neither of us would be alone. Love can look like this, right?

I didn’t know she would feel it, though. I didn’t know it hurts when you burn a selkie’s skin. Of that bit, I am innocent.

Loneliness burns, too.

* * *

SARAH RODGERS is a storyteller who lives in upstate New York with her husband and three daughters. In addition to (or perhaps due to) her passion for storytelling, she also loves movies, reading, and dancing.