Stone Soup Magazine

Poetry·Daniel Shorten — A clock contemplates its endless mechanical existence, questioning why humans created it to mark time in perpetual, lonely repetition.

Artwork·Lucy Kershen

Story·Ava Shorten — A river blocked from the sea becomes a puddle who befriends an aging frog that shares stories of the ocean and ultimately carries the puddle to its destination.

Artwork·Jiacheng Yu

Artwork·Ivory Vanover

Poetry·Steven Cavros — An abstract meditation on the invisible and forgotten, those who lived and died without being seen or remembered by the living.

Poetry·Alice Robinson-McVety — A found silver button with a swirl pattern becomes a portal to imagined water, its unknown owner haunting the speaker's meditation on the small, lost object.

Artwork·Ethan Zhang

Poetry·Zaid Nazif — A child catalogs each family member's hair color through vivid comparisons, lingering longest on their mother's dreamlike blonde strands.

Personal Narrative·Marti Wong — A girl navigates language barriers with grandparents on two continents, discovering how gifts, food, and gestures become their shared vocabulary of love.