Welcome to this week’s newsletter from Assemblage. These newsletters go out every Friday to highlight some of the top works from the past week. We hope these links (all friend links, so anyone can view them) find you planning a weekend of rest, relaxation, and recharging. You can also view all of our previous letters via the Letters tab on our homepage.

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” — Buddha

How will you make your world look this week?

Featured Writer

Each week we feature one of our writers and up to six of their essays or poems on the homepage underneath the Featured Essays and Featured Poems section. This week our Featured Writer is Tania Caan. Tania is a mum and a writer who loves short stories and poems. Tania published 5 poems in Assemblage in 2020. …

I’m an extremely honest person. I know it’s weird to upgrade one’s self from honest to something above that, but there are “honest” people out there who aren’t so honest. I have an issue. I can’t lie. Except to myself. This is a list of things I lie to myself about:

1. That I like being alone. I mean, part of this is true. I really do like being alone. But to fathom the rest of my life, as my kids leave the nest and develop their own lives, sitting in lotus pose, breathing in clean air, and doing whatever I want, whenever I want, sounds mindful, but decidedly lonely. I like being alone when I’m alone, but I need to call myself out on this also. I would like to be with someone who I love every day. I would like to be alone in moments, but not alone in life. …

Welcome to the weekly newsletter from Loose Words. These letters go out every Thursday and highlight many of our published poems from the past week. We hope that these poems find you allowing the words to flow. Out of your head. Through your mouth. Onto the page. Let them go.

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.” — Walt Whitman

Each week, we post a few lines from each featured poem (all friend links so anyone can read them) to give you a small sample of the full version, but we encourage you to click through and complete the ones that give you the feels. …

The days are short
but my disturbance
is long

I am unsettled,
broken up, or
altered in some way

The very first
definition of the
way I feel today

I am the result
of emotional and/or
mental trauma

And that’s only
from waking up
inside of this abyss

The second
definition of the
way I feel today

But I don’t think
my disturbance
is an actual illness

Because how could
we not be disturbed
with this world?

The gentle back-hum
of technology prying
our decisions from
our own hands
and making us think
we chose to buy
that weighted blanket,
because of our anxiety,
when it was really
the anxiety that kicked in
if we didn’t get this
woolen creature
because it certainly
is the solution
to all of the world’s…

Life feels like a slow death
by a million tiny paper cuts
but the best thing about
these tiny paper cuts
is that no one can see them
and we can pretend
that we are actually ok
even though we have slits
where air is coming in
but no blood is going out

We are tender to the touch
but able to walk upright
and talk outright
and warble our bodies
though our days
as if our tiny paper cuts
weren’t giving us a
small reminder about
how much things can sting

The good thing though
is that paper cuts heal fast
and even though they
keep happening to us,
our skin mends itself
and we look new again
with no need for bandages
to dress our…

We pull our tiny computers to refresh them even though we have all of our notifications turned on.

We blindly support a political ideology until it’s socially disadvantageous to do so and then we think no one will remember what we just supported.

We gaslight the viewers of our lives on a daily basis and think that they can’t see through our charade.

We convince ourselves that the means to an end is justified, only because we are so desperate for the end, and we forgot that there are other means.

We still think the squeakiest wheel gets the grease, but what we are about to find out is that the same wheel, the one with all the grease, is the easiest one to identify in a colossal downfall. …