If you haven’t subscribed yet to our weekly newsletter (seriously—what are you waiting for?), you can dive into this week’s recommended reading here. Selections come mainly from literary magazines and websites and are curated based on Managing Editor Nicole Foor’s tastes.
“Burning Juniper” by Bruce McRae
There’s something in the language and word choices of Bruce McRae’s “Burning Juniper” that feels like an old-time spell—talk of witches, warding off evil, summoning something protective—yet it unfolds alongside a relationship rendered with striking intimacy. The poem seems to hover at a point of farewell, arriving at that surprising, almost offhand “when o’clock in the fare-thee-well,” even as it insists on a love that feels boundless: someone the speaker would “wed every day for a year. / Infinite love. Eternal honeymoon.” That juxtaposition—of enchantment and ending, of something slipping away and something that feels like it should last forever—gives the poem its quiet charge.
Read the poem in the Spring 2026 issue of Bloodroot.
“The Horror of Forward Motion” by John Grey
As we get older, when more and more time comes to stand between youth and the present, you can’t help but feel how brutal forward motion can be. John Grey captures that unease perfectly in “The Horror of Forward Motion.” Unlike wine, not everything improves with age; relationships fray, and our own bodies begin to betray us. Grey gives that erosion shape in lines like, “From afar, your friends / speak well of who you were. / What use is that? / What was laughter / thirty years ago is silence now.”
The poem insists on movement as something inescapable and indifferent—time as a force you can’t negotiate with, only endure. Even memory becomes a burden, something “large, a dead weight,” always ahead of you, something you stumble over rather than return to. It’s a stark, unsettling meditation on aging, where the past is no longer accessible comfort but a kind of obstruction, and forward motion offers no relief, only continuation.
Read the poem in The Coffee Shoppe Literary Magazine.