​Late Laura
 
Perpetually late, Laura wandered into the restaurant, her dyed black hair wispy thin, clothes slightly hanging. She was always apologetic. Always an excuse I didn’t quite believe. Back when times was money, I worked on straight commission. When pressed, she confessed her singleton childhood, broken parents, mother bent on crazy, father so enamored of his whacked out wife he’d do anything wifey asked. When she was fifteen, Laura awoke to her father, pulling her waist-length hair taut above her head, her mother poised over her with sewing shears, cutting close to the scalp. I didn’t scream, Laura said. No one was there to hear me. When she turned seventeen, her parents took her to a cafe in NYC, sat her at a table, and left. A wild-haired man, acne-scarred and snaggletoothed, came up and introduced himself as “Master,” led her away. Laura’s parents had sold her for $5,000; “Master” produced a bill of sale. He was a savage, Laura said. It took her months to escape. You understand now why I’m late, she said. But I grew tired of her tardiness, and began giving her a meeting time a good 40 minutes before the actual appointment. It worked. She showed up on time again and again. One day she asked me why I no longer seemed perturbed when she arrived for lunch. I confessed my subterfuge. She burst into tears. Like she’d been duped. Again. I can’t be alone at a restaurant table, she said. Too traumatic. Her shorn hair. Her “kidnapping.” Her entire, frightened life.

**

This poem was first published at MacQueen's Quinterly.

**

Hey, 19: Daddy’s Pal, Paul and I Cut to the Chase…
 
Paul pushes into me with all the desperation of his forty-five years. Hey 19, he moans, like the song, and I smile, murmur encouragement as he ruts and grunts, his beer belly slapping against my ass. I’ve cured him forever, he says, of loving Ann, that I’m a better fuck than his ex-wife ever was, that she never could give a proper blowjob, and did I think I could I love an older man, and did I think my daddy would mind? Have to confess, the dude’s got moves. He’s doing things to me down there that thrill my nubile heart. That’s when I remember Paul’s a gynecologist. I figure I could do worse, given my run of bad luck with boys my age, and that doomed foray into lesbo-land with my crazy girlfriend, Anjelica. I’m all in, I tell Paul, and Mona Lisa all over the place, wearing only a smile as I languish on the bed at the Palm Springs hotel, and fall in love… with room service. I run up quite a bill, Dom Perignon, Beluga caviar on Ritz crackers, a giant-sized box of Jujubes. And when Paul gets back from the jewelry shop in the arcade with the small blue box that sparkles, the last thing I want is for the evening to end, for him to come to his senses. 

**

This poem was first published in Gargoyle Magazine.
 
**

Post-Wedding Photos, High Sierras, 2015
 
It’s a forest, he explains. I marvel at the vertical expanse of green. Trees. And the blue? Sky, he says slowly, like he’s speaking to an amnesiac. How could you forget? he asks. But I have. Our idyllic honeymoon, tucked in a cabin on June Lake, making love under a verdant canopy. A blank. The tangerine sun, igniting the Sierras? All too long ago. We’d been lured by high-rises and fine dining, duped by museums and concert halls and Veuve Clicquot, addicted to partying past dawn. City life eats nature. Replaces it with strive and hustle, that lulling excess, everything pavement, the pigment of money. I remember green, I tell him.

**

​Trinity
 
I.
He says there’s no such thing as sin. That it doesn’t exist in the real world. It’s a construct, he explains. Sin exists only in your brain. He taps the side of her skull.
 
The woman's Catholic childhood baptizes otherwise. Indoctrination hard to shake. “Give me a child until she is seven and she’s mine forever,” the Jesuits bragged. Jesus took her wheel until puberty. She liked to say she didn’t stand a chance.
 
What about evil? she persists. What about absolution? How could she survive without that warm bath of forgiveness? The man laughs. Don’t believe in either of ‘em,” he says. She wasn’t letting him off the hook so easily. Bite me, she says.
 
That night as penance, he takes her to dinner at a fine restaurant where he orders for both of them. In French. But I detest frog legs! she cries when dinner arrives. Mange-les quand même,* he barks.
 
II. 
Why do I love him? She pouts into the bathroom mirror after he drops her at her door. She washes her face. Puts on a silk nighty for no one. Kneels at the side of her bed, blasphemes. Mother. Daughter. Holy Ghost, Amen.
 
What do I see in her? The man asks himself on the long drive home. He toys with the idea of unzipping his fly, jacking off in the car, as usual. But tonight, somehow it seems wrong. All that chatter about sin, he thinks. 
 
They each determine to end things. But the nights grow lonely. 
 
III.
They go to the party together. Let’s agree to come home with the one who brung you, he says. DTLA, a loft in the Old Banking district. 8th floor. New Year’s Eve. At midnight, instead of attending mass, she finds herself kissing a woman she hardly knows. Someone zaftig and blonde, named Evelyn, who writes her number on the inside of the woman's wrist. A sweet reveal. Come home with me, Evelyn begs. But she’s promised. And he insists. 
 
When they get back to her place it’s 2 am and she’s horny, still tastes Evelyn on her tongue. When the woman turns to him, straddles his hips, the man pushes her away. It’s late, he says. I’m tired. He has a habit of luring her in, then abandoning her. It isn’t the first time. Maybe a threesome? she teases.
 
She calls Evelyn before the number fades on her wrist. 

**

*Eat them anyway! 

**

This was first published in Throats to the Sky.

**

​Dry Hustle
 
“Hey, Missy! This ain’t no charity. You got till tomorrow to pay up or get out!” The landlord’s eviction threats echoed through the courtyard as I walked the no-man’s-land past his bungalow to mine. He stood, bare-chested, outside his door, illumined by the porch lamp, battered Stetson askew on his ratty curls, dusky skin gleaming with threat. I had walked this path before.
 
Ashley, the other relief bartender at the Disco Duck, had told me not to worry, that she was an expert at the manifestation of cold, hard cash. “It’s called the dry hustle, honey,” she’d said in her saccharin drawl. “Dry because you never have to, you know, fuck ’em?”
 
The landlord blocked my path. Between losing my shirt in Vegas and those emergency car repairs, the rent was two month’s behind. I swallowed my nascent feminism and squared my shoulders, breasts straining the buttons of my bartender’s uniform. I pressed against the landlord, squeezed by. He liked to cop a feel, lick me with his eyes. “Tomorrow,” I promised. He grabbed my arm. His knuckles grazed my breasts.
 
Ashley, at the Disco Duck, sent me to the bar at the Bel-Air Hotel, said it’s where the rich men drink. My dress was too short, too low-cut. Ashley had picked it out. “Trust me,” she’d said. “He’ll be watching your tits, not you. Do what I say. Look sad. Play with your hair. Nurse your wine. When a man comes by, offers you a drink, play it coy. Draw him out. Let him do the talking.”
 
That night when I got home from work, someone had been in my apartment. The door was wide open, and my stuff was gone. Not everything. Just enough so I’d lose my peace of mind. When I walked by his bungalow, the landlord was not in his usual spot. 
 
Ashley had been quite specific. “After dinner,” she’d said, “excuse yourself. Go to the ladies’. When you come back, look distracted, like you just got real bad news.” To demonstrate she pulled her straw-blond hair back from her face, gave me a stricken look.
 
The old man sitting next to me at the Bel-Air Hotel bar was smitten, directed his monologue at my breasts, about how he produced movies and documentaries, how he was separated from his wife. He was on his third martini when I spilled my sad story about the landlord and the break-in and the unpaid rent. He said I looked a lot like his second wife.
 
Ashley’s instructions were explicit. “So then you look that rich man in the eye like a broke-winged bird,” she’d said. “Like you’re something he could fix in a heartbeat.”
 
The landlord would be waiting when I got home. The old man smelled like money.
 
Ashley had schooled me how to move in for the kill. “So he’s on his fifth martini,” she’d said, “while you’re still nursing your first chardonnay. He thanks you for being such a good listener. You tell him how sincerely grateful you’d be if you had a little less on your mind.”
 
“How much?” the old man cut to the chase. He held my wrist in one large hand, reached for his wallet with the other. I stroked that wineglass stem between my thumb and middle finger like it was his cock, looked at him through my long, sad lashes, and when he pulled out a wad of cash I thought fast, and eyeballed the exits before I gave him a number in the low four figures, something he could do without blinking.
 
**

​This was first published in Drunk Monkeys.

**

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, Slipstream, and elsewhere. Her eleven poetry collections include Erotic: New & Selected, and Brazen (NYQ Books); Duets (Small Harbor Press), an ekphrastic chapbook with Cynthia Atkins, and Triggered, a “pillow book” (MacQueen’s). Coming soon:  CockSure, a full-length erotic book, from Moon Tide Press, SinkHole, from MacQueen’s Press, and a book of portraits of over 100 Southern California Poets at Moon Tide Press A multiple Best of the Net and  Pushcart nominee, Alexis recently won BestMicroFiction 2025. Find her at www.alexisrhonefancher.com

​
Just Lucky, I Guess

At irregular intervals, I’m just an average Joe. The things that are good for me, are the things that are bad for me. And vice versa. In most cases, all it takes is a case of mental gymnastics, not superintelligence.  In fact, Artificial Intelligence says that people skills have become increasingly important in the robot workplace.  Of course, it’s difficult to maintain a polished, fashionable exterior when you’re running around like a chicken with its legs cut off, but like the ancient Greeks used to say, the bigger the boat, the higher the wake. Thankfully, every silver cloud has a bituminous lining, although it takes one to know one. As a matter of fact, for a fully authentic experience, you can’t beat pretending to dance with your blind date at a masked ball. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll dodge the silver bullets while taking someone else’s selfies. After all, like the best-intentioned cannibals, we are what we eat, so don’t hesitate to chow down whenever things are looking up. I don’t know why I’m so lucky, but I am.

**
 
Bound to Happen
 
The new incubators are far and away better than the old ones. Of course, you’d barely recognize the baby vampire bats wrapped in all that swaddling, but I’m just trying to capture the low hanging fruit—you know, before it gets too late in the season. Whenever possible, I try to feed them rarified goat milk, but I don’t have a lot of spare cash lying around to invest in neonatal niceties. In fact, one of the most important lessons I learned from my previous career in teaching, is to teach only lessons that don’t have any lesson. That way, you can avoid any unsightly moral pitfalls or potential ethical failings. Like Mrs. Satan used tell me, Lucky things can happen to anyone, so why waste your time trying to be Mr. Nice Guy? I hate to go out on a limb here, but don’t you ever wonder why we don’t see more animals kissing? It’s about as rare a sight as snakes on crutches, but I guess in a pinch, you could always call an ambulance. It’s never too soon to start decluttering before the bodies arrive. Until then, just for stage luck, let’s break some legs and bid a fond arrivederci to our posterity, those traitors. Sooner or later, something’s bound to happen.
 
**
 
Favourite Model
 
I put on my scream-enhancing headphones and start making the same mistakes I always make. My wardrobe may be missing a few of the must-haves, but on the whole, I’m more beautiful than not. Rewind or playback? All my deviations are within the mean. Happy-go-lucky is my preferred theme music, but, then, who doesn’t love dayglo gargoyles? It may be necessary to be relentlessly on-guard, even in the best of happenstances, but no matter how hard they try, they can’t stop you from buttoning up your button-down shirt. That would be tantamount to treason. Everybody’s got to come from somewhere, so I hope you don’t mind; I’d like to use you as a professional reference. Tell me, what’s your favorite model guillotine? 
 
 **

When I Least Expect It 
 
One thing keeps happening after another. I love the symmetry. In fact, like a snake eating its own tail, every room simmers at room temperature, no matter how hot you are. No need to go that extra mile. After my latest kidnapping, I came down with the Norwegian variant of the Stockholm syndrome, so now I obey only half the orders I’m given. On the upside, I’ve become fluent in glossolalia, although like some clergymen, I soon hope to become tongue-tied. Can’t wait until the grudge match. I’m told that no prior hypnotic training is necessary, unless of course, you’re prepared to meet yourself more than half-way. This fact clearly speaks for itself. On the other hand, it only minimizes my point, so you’re going to need a larger telescope, if you hope to discover anything meaningful in spacetime. Like general anesthesia, one minute you’re present and accounted for, and the next, you’ve completely disappeared. As Einstein said, after inventing the atomic bomb, I’m not looking for a fight, but someday, when I least expect it, I’m going to get even with myself.  
 
 **

Raising Hackles
 
Like a life-sized model, I’ve been following in my own footsteps. You know how it is when you start nibbling at yourself, and before you know it, you’ve reached the bottom of the bag. What ever happened to gimmicks, anyway? I like toy equations because they’re not as hard as the grown-up kind, although to be fair, they’re therapeutic, particularly when, like a bad boy haircut, they give you a frightful scare. But what else would you expect to be #2 on a cannibal’s shopping list? Of course, you have to catch eels at just the right time; before they electrocute you. Some people prefer to use rubber gloves and boot-foot waders, but not me. I just dive right in and fight off both the alternating and direct currents, simultaneously. By the way, God sure has been making some funny radio transmissions lately, hasn’t He?  Have you noticed how even at low voltages these make the hair on the back of your head stand up? After a few seconds, you don’t care who gets hit by lightning. As might be expected, the grass in Hell always needs cutting. Even if there is none. 
 
**

Recognition
 
Asleep in wolves clothing, I’m switching up my vibe. Never feed the hand that bites you. Although it’s beigely sedate in all this noisy humidity, why not rise and shine before you run out of steam? Naturally, you’ll need to confirm which came first, the chicken or the yolk, but I find that it’s always just the right time to recalibrate your forcefield, even if the weather is a little hot and chilly. The fun pack is always a big money saver.

The day before yesterday, as I was taking the low road back to town, I mistook the music for my self. Like an invisible accident, my thoughts began to pile up, and before I knew it, I’d called a discount ambulance, but like Zeno’s paradox, it kept cutting the remaining distance in half, and never arrived. Of course, you can both save and waste time by hunting the duck-rabbit illusion, especially in your own backyard. Is that a stunt or a shtick? I don’t know, but I must say,  you look strangely familiar to me.

 **

Making Excuses 

Kissing was invented in 2400 BC, in the Sumerian city of Nippur. Evidently, everyone there had their own pair of lips and they weren’t afraid to use them. Personally, I admire that kind of inventiveness, but like they used to say in ancient Nippur, Don’t blame me for the meteorite. I’m making excuses as fast as I can.
 
**
 
Silly Me
 
Hurry up. You’ll be late to school. And don’t forget your candy cigarettes. You must never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, even if it’s due only to good luck. Elsewhere in the region, I’ve finally finished-up impersonating myself. Thank goodness I signed that non-disclosure agreement. It was a long and painful process, accomplished entirely by my trial by error, but then, not everyone testifying under oath can be saved from self-incrimination. Like they say in the legal profession, may the best liar win. Naturally, it's difficult to determine with any certainty whether it’s due to an inferiority complex or an inferiority multiplex, but just because I was voted least likely to succeed, doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve invented a language that only I speak. As you can plainly see, whenever I talk to myself, I don’t understand a thing I say, so let’s put that old wives’ tale to bed, shall we? Say, now that I’m making a list and checking it twice, would you mind lending me your hunting knife? Silly me! I seem to have grabbed someone else's umbrella, by mistake.

 **

Daylight-Saving Time
 
Today’s the first day of daylight-saving time. I hope you didn’t forget to turn your parallelogram ahead by 180 degrees. I’ve just parallel parked my rhomboid helicopter and started doing something beautiful. Sure, it includes animal parts, but only about 30%, and they’ve been fully desensitized. Of course, discovering your dream job takes some inner reflection, so I started off gradually by locating my dream x-rays. I also turned up the volume of my inner voice so I could better hear myself droning on. Before I knew it, my data was fully transparent and my passwords were posted all over the internet. Sometimes you can really surprise yourself.  

Did you know that 80% of mistakes are made by 20% of the population?  Nobody’s perfect, but you’d think that more people would be in a hurry to get it over with before it’s too late. What ever happened to the work ethic?  

By the way, they say that next to carpenter ants, hammerhead sharks are nature’s best carpenters. If you think about it, that’s one of the top reasons to bring along a claw hammer and some sinker nails whenever you go deep sea fishing, although this may be a little hard to wrap your head around. Fortunately, for any memory worth forgetting there are thousands of new mistakes yet to be made.
 
**

Dead Horse
 
Not sure whether I took the placebo or the nocebo, but I feel vertiginous and a wee bit verdant around the withers. At least there were no hidden fees. Of course, at the molecular level it’s mostly animalcules all the way down, but I still can’t tell the difference between fuzz and fleece, especially when I’m sleepwalking. A tiger’s skin is striped, just like its fur, so in the morning, I’m going to buy a mohair suit and a magical necktie. Better to be safe, than worry. Customarily, I don’t like to lie about my height because I’m a good Samaritan, even when wearing a mock-turtleneck. Believe me, it’s not for the faint of heart. The last time I took an IQ test, they had to tie my feet and legs so I wouldn’t attempt to escape. That really put me through my paces. I complained again and again, until it nearly killed me. So as not to be a dead horse, I continued to whinny.
 
**

The son of two Torontonian ex-patriots, Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is the author of seven collections of poetry and flash fiction: I Wouldn’t Say That, Exactly,  WordInEdgeWise,  Lucky Animals, No. Wait. I Can Explain,  Pink X-Ray, de/tonations, and Momentary Turbulence. His book of prose poems, Or Words to that Effect, is forthcoming. Eight times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and three times nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology, Brad’s poetry and fiction have appeared in: The American Journal of Poetry, The Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Review, New York Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Folio, Best Microfiction (2019), Action Spectacle, Right Hand Pointing, and other journals and anthologies. His website is www.bradrosepoetry.com 

San Francisco Sigh

Ding. "Next stop, Chinatown. Little Italy, Union Square." The Mason-Powell line. "Everybody gets off on the trolley." The rattle and rumble. "Hold on, now! Left turn!" Mai Wen Beauty Parlour. Hilton Hotel. Macy’s, Barneys, Walgreens and Nordstrom. Super Bargain Basement. Uniqlo. Down coats, silk slippers, parasols, and fans. Sweaters and deodorants in racks and rows. Easels on Washington Square. Artisanal jewellery, millinery, patisserie.  "We all have hard times sometimes." Hand-written menus pasted onto walls. Turnip, chrysanthemum, a deconstructed cauliflower. "Need prosthesis." Won ton, tacos, chowder and gelato. Crabs stacked on stalls on Fisherman’s Wharf. Cars sliding by in the dark. Del Monte, Ghiradelli shucked for shopping. Sea lions loll on the pier. A Monterey memory: warm bodies, distilled fish, and the gag in my throat. "There’s more than one way to smell," Nina tells me. Breathing in trees on a Muir Woods morning.  "No seafood left here," says the guide. Airport to downtown at 3am, shuffling streets peppered with people. Kelp forests. Muttering aloud in the middle of the road. Udon, nopales: slippery and bitter. Man with leg stumps on show. The cable-car queue looks elsewhere. Hoppy Hops, Sauvignon, Anchor Steam Beer. A fifteen-dollar glass of wine. A two million-dollar houseboat. The police cars roll up and down. "What controls the speed? I do!" The driver grasps the lever. The sole woman conductor as strong as any man. Gripping and grinning, the judder through the body. Golden Gate glimpsed in the hollows of streets. An owl hoots. Hoot and howl. City Lights Bookstore – "take a book, sit and read." A homeless ex-marine dreams of Oxbridge. "Zoopolis." Metropolis. Hobopolis. Scratch that: insulting and nostalgic at the same time. Or reclaim it: riding the rails with Riding the Rails, Josée Yvon’s lesbian hobos in mind. The chill sea mist and the regular commuters. I’m the only one who pays.  Beautiful Wheat Field Bakery. "I won’t lie, it’s for beer." San Francisco, I love-hate you. I walk past, I don’t see. I’m ashamed of myself, yet I’m falling for you: shadows of Victorian bays tracking my skin, cedar leaves puncturing pavements and veins. Maupin, Solnit, Giscombe and Halebsky. Hejinian signs her name. Seven-dollar fare in my pocket. "No coins."   

**

A version of this poem was included in Coordinates Society.

**

Unstuck

Sigh of chrysanthemum city. Whispered plea scratched on a menu. I slide in obscurity to loll on the pier, sea lion stink in my nose. I find solace in the rhythm of discomfort. Leaving the crab stalls on Fisherman’s Wharf, I walk agitated streets looking inwards, talk fiction with homeless ex-marines. Unsee signs of loneliness, restlessness, rootlessness to jump on the trolley, the Powell-Mason line. Cling on as we clatter up and down hills, Golden Gate glimpsed between skyscrapers. The conductor grins as she grips the lever, sole woman working the rails. Ding! "Next stop, Little Italy." Gelato and Bolognese. A vino da tavola costs 15 bucks - dang! Dysphagia (b)looms, but I swallow and focus, join a Muir Woods excursion while the trees still stand. Thoughts run ahead of my words, (s)tumble into frantic Morse code. Scramble and scrumple, sling out to Sun Valley, watch the trash pile high. A mezzo-soprano, I can no longer sing, voice scorched to exhausted embers. I think of kelp forests, a beach bonfire, a waiter bringing me grilled fish. Mon chou-fleur, j’ai honte de moi. A haunting shame like ancient hinges. It reminds me that I am alive.*

**

*This poem was written following an experiment with AI: aware of the impact of AI on translation and creative writing, I used Google Translate to translate "San Francisco Sigh" into French, my second language. I translated the result back into English and fed this version into Copilot, requesting a free verse poem. I used the generated poem as a challenge, trying to include as many as I could have its occasionally jarring phrases and images. My final poem embraces the playful and creative aspects of translation, shadowing or haunting the "original." A collage poem, the title makes a play on "coller" (to stick).

**

Botanical Gardens, Montreal

"Descente dans le magique."1 Yesterday,2 I walked to the metro, tracking front gardens tumbling with pumpkins. I put up my hood as wind sharpened near the station, mumbled through my scarf when asked the time. Swiping through a turnstile, I waited for the train’s three-note refrain, remembering an afternoon spent underground. In photographs, I’m laughing in the dress bought at Fripe-prix, aquamarine against Beaudry’s mushroom tiles. Your head’s fuzzy in one picture, caught mid-turn as you moved to kiss my cheek. Yesterday, I put my hand to my face, found a seat in the carriage, took my book from my bag to sketch once more the route driven by Elle, cutting across Sherbrooke with blue hair piled high. Fifty minutes on, I met my date at Pie IX, nightfall in his violet eyes. Strolling by dragons, persimmon, and cranes, we paused to eat cakes – probably bean curd, I didn’t catch their name. Words were f(l)ailing, I was losing my nerve, shrinking and paling in the reflection from the pond where He Luo Yu poised to take flight as a bird. Lights played in the Japanese and First Nations Gardens against maple, poplar and birch. Yesterday, I understood I was falling in love with him, pressed my lips to his, found my tongue. "Les mots changent de cours’."3 Mon amour, let’s unmap this city, blow it wide open with desire. Dream, drift, scritch-scratch and scribble-scrabble. "Halluciner une écriture."4

**

1. Nicole Brossard, French Kiss (Montréal: Quinze, 1980 [Éditions du Jour, 1974]), 30.
2.  See Nicole Brossard, Hier (Montréal: Éditions Québec/Amérique, 2001), and Andrée Maillet, Les Remparts de Québec (Montréal: les Éditions du Jour, 1965).
3.  Brossard, French Kiss, 56.
4.  Brossard, French Kiss, 61.

**

Waiting for the Glan(cynon Inn) to Reopen

Some nights, I wake up warm, ease myself back to dreams with thoughts of cool. Of weekends working at my local pub on the bank of the river Cynon. Of dipping into the ice machine, dripping melting cubes into sweating shots of Mirage or Taboo. In our twenties, my colleagues and I dressed up at New Year’s, took compliments from customers, laughed as the youngest dropped a third tray of glasses, her foot hooked on the lip of a warped cellar step. Applause and a cheer and the bump and bumble of hip and shoulder and costumes and sipping and talking. A welcome chill through the night’s velvet windows. At the end of the night, staff sat to chat, our elderly manager miming hand-picking under pool tables or hacking up tales of villagers whose family trees spread from Maescynon to Penywaun. My parents weren’t local: a teacher’s daughter, most miners thought me a snob. I stared at them shyly beneath a strip of permed fringe. The Tower is my colliery, I told a Stoke friend. He understood, even if the mine’s now a zip-line. My sisters and I will whizz down it one day, one day soon, very soon.  

**

Ceri Morgan is Professor of Place-writing and Geohumanities at Keele University, UK. She writes prose-poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical-creative texts. Ceri uses writing and other creative practices to make new place-art with individuals and communities outside universities. She has published prose-poems and creative nonfiction in New Welsh Reader, annie journal, NAWE Writing in Education, Forge Zine, Nightingale and Sparrow, and Geohumanities.   ​