• Submit to Five South

  • Submissions are open for flash, poetry, long fiction, and non-fiction. Read our submission guidelines.

  • Recently Published

    • Our Theseus by Nathan Jefferson
      Last week he was a dishwasher who his coworkers called Ricky. Today he’s a day laborer named Eddie, clearing a pair of fallen trees off a new build’s lawn and fixing up a large garden. Rotting plank ripped out, new plank inserted.
    • Robbing the Pillars by Marie Goyette
      Ruth stood on the narrow iron bridge, gripping her father’s obsidian necklace, and wondered how many years it would take before the river wore them both down to nothing.
    • Roll for Love by Cidney Mayes
      She holds the dice up to me. “For good luck?”
    • The Call by Eben E. B. Bein
      I hungered into that quiet until— there—unbelievable!— a wolf spider scuttled onto a leaf.
    • Saturation by Claire Oleson
      I no longer harangue every desk nurse at every hospital for a taxonomic breakdown of her bills. I don’t ask for the numbers of the Benadryl, the water cups, the abdominal touches done with gloved hands. I am the most American I’ve ever been—she costs what she costs and I eat it.

In this short life that lasts more than an hour by Maria Castro Domínguez

May 17, 2022
Reading Time: 1 Minutes
I’ll stop listening to the news,
instead listen to the birds, their wings
and the wind
and how it edges doors open.
I’ll wake up at dawn hearing
how the black-inked sky inhales its blues;
watching the clouds chase the sun
before tripping over its ragged orange threads.
I’ll follow the off-beat rain
creating a new rhythm against the window’s back.
I’ll taste each cup of breath
aware of the brevity of a life’s hour.
I will touch a tree trunk
for its layers of life, trace
the light on petals falling
from my neighbor’s oak.
I will silence my phone
and look at the dandelion’s
open-faced hope
as it burns
and burns
and burns.

Share

Poetry  / The Weekly

Castro Domínguez, María
Maria Castro Dominguez is the author of 'A Face in The Crowd' her Erbacce–press winning collection and ‘Ten Truths from Wonderland’ (Hedgehog Poetry Press) a collaboration with Matt Duggan. Winner of the third prize in Brittle Star´s Poetry Competition 2018. Finalist in the 2019 Stephen A DiBiase Poetry contest NY and was highly commended in the Borderlines Poetry Competition 2020. Her poems have appeared in Apogee, The Long-Islander Huntington Journal NY, Popshot, PANK, Empty Mirror , The Chattahoochee Review and The Cortland Review.

Read More by Castro Domínguez, María:


You might also like

The Call by Eben E. B. Bein
February 25, 2025
girl, glissading by Irteqa Khan
October 6, 2022
The Bird Beneath My Feet by Kenton K. Yee
June 8, 2022