Spawning Pool is a literary arts chapbook published at Shippensburg University by a small and dedicated team of undergraduate students. It is composed of pieces submitted by undergraduate students at the university.
Spawning Pool accepts rolling submissions throughout the year, and we publish our chapbook every spring semester. Spawning Pool is a publication of The Reflector, which also accepts submissions year-round, and is compiled each fall semester.
Contact us: spawningpool@ship.edu
Submissions and inquires: reflect@ship.edu
Spawning Pool Poetry Chapbook, Spring 2026
Text set in Garamond
Layout by Reed Vollrath and Alex Heckman
Cover Design by Alex Heckman
Poetry Editors
Reed Vollrath
Alex Heckman
Poetry Committee Members
Alcinda Burchill
Elizabeth Engle
Paige Becker
Letter from the Editors
Dear Reader,
It is with great joy that we write to you. In this chapbook, we bring you a collection of poems from the minds of students who are ever curious, and endless in their c reativity. We are honored to have had the opportunity to work alongside these amazing writers and bring their voices to the page.
The theme for this year's spawning pool chapbook was “sonder.” A word that, unsurprisingly, is not known by many. The term was coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, in which he defines it as “the awareness that everyone has a story.” Our mission with this spawning pool chapbook is to encourage students to experience a world outside of their own; to inhabit a life they may have once walked past without a second thought, and to realize how many stories there are in the world that go unheard. We could not be more thankful for these writers, for offering their voices to tell these untold stories.
So, without further ado, we will let the poetry speak for itself. Thank you all so much for reading.
Reed Vollrath and Alex Heckman
Benjamin Zacharias
Star Baby
by Hayley Diehl
It makes a splash in the ocean
A small one, as if a penny fell from the sky
And landed on the glistening edges of the water
It felt completely whole
If only for a minute before the water
Rushed its lungs as they spattered against the force
But they could not keep up
The lungs filled with the water so salty
The pale skin revealed the veins
Making it look like a worm ready for a
Fish to swim up and grab
At its skin with its gaping jaws
Its brain bulged at its head trying
To escape from the thin skull trapped
In layers of skin, eyes flung open as if
Making them wider made them see
Frantically, it thrashed in the water
Not helping the worm rumors, but
It began to glide through the water
Soft and silky like the fur on an animal
It could not keep the water from coming in
So it had to get out, it spun and
kicked and pushed until the shore was not just something of dreams
It cried out a noise no animal could
Make and not loud enough for the mermaids
To aid it in its quest for the shore
But it slowly slung its way towards sand
The sand was soon in its grasp
And where water was once there
Small glass had filled its place
It tried to breathe, but failed
The eyes still wide, looking at the moon for guidance
As it turned its back on the star baby
It stopped moving, stopped attempting to breathe
The water licking at its toes
It was whole again, but in a way
That was absent to itself
Absent to the world and the moon and the water
IT was no longer there
starry-eyed by
Daniel Wintersgil
nightly i prayed to god that he give me a child, one blessed with pure eyes, eyes that see the world in neon, technicolor,
eyes that gaze into the sunrise, that marvel at each passing cloud, with xray vision for the beautiful, focused eyes.
child, you received this gift incomplete. your eyes were made to stare into the starlight, yet the surrounding night draws your attention.
each night i cry as the stars flicker and fade, as the night continually darkens its sickening shade. scarlet red comets, furious,
slash through the ink of night. they pulverize stars on-contact. why do you gaze at them? avert your innocent eyes, please, it was never meant to be this way.
Laundry
by Deb Knittel
dancing together between sheets of white fabric
just us spinning in the room filled with needed embraces keeping you close to me as you feel the energy running off me falling into you and your needs mixing us together like paint motion after motion meshing into one folding together like a piece of white fabric
The View From Mars
by Regan Henry
If there’s one thing I know, it is dust.
Crusted in my eyelashes, stuck beneath the seams of my clothes, coated on the sticky surface inside my lungs.
Despite what you may think, exile is not a whirlwind spring break.
I’ve walked the length of this desert twice, spring at my feet and winter over my head, and found no eccentric lovers or lost ancient relics.
Only dust.
Often, I stare through the scarlet haze at the living, breathing surface of what once was my home, swallowing sand like it’s water, fantasizing of drowning, face first, in a frosty mountain spring.
My orbiting allies,
those who pulled Ares into war all those light years ago, attempt a desperate human comfort alien to them.
Only 50 million years, the closest one says, its voice soothing in a way it shouldn’t be. 50 million years and I’ll drift close enough to touch, crash and collide, the end of the line.
At night, when my flesh freezes over and the dark canyon drones my name, I repeat it like a prayer.
Only 50 million years.
Only 50 million years.
A poem from an attic written in Time’s pocket by
Jenna Teccio
I find myself lost in Time’s Pocket
Stood in a Room of Emptiness or is it possibility?
Nothing but rows of doors
Infinite realities
For a Moment
The world’s music
Stops.
…….. & I see her
All the different versions of me, in one room
The peace turns to WAR as I am drawn to make a decision
Everyglimpsecallingmyname
I’m tempted
But as I reach to graze the surface
The clocktower souNds
& I am cemented to the writing on the wall
“R E M A I N”
But even in this moment of stillness, I am left wondering
How long it will be until I can move.
Before Me
by Emmett O’Bell
I wonder what it was like before
To play with you in the cramped backyards of Baltimore
To run & jump & skip with you
Before your body became something you hated
Before you thought it needed urgent fixing
Gagging, spit drooling from your mouth, taste buds burnt
By cigarettes & stomach acid
Before you had to start putting salt on anything just to taste it
To come over for dinner and see her before the cancer took over
She was lively then, & probably just like you will turn out to be
Before your body became a temple, the kind men think they have control over
I want to hear your youthful screech of laughter
The kind you gave before you were 13 & distraught at the color red
Before you learned that love must be fists & open hands & force & arguments
I want to hold your slowly breathing infant body
Before you even learned what a mother was
Or what it even meant to be a mother
Before you had to choose between the things that took you
Or the things you gave & chose to stay with what you created anyway
the gardener
by Alex Heckman
he wonders if the flowers ever feel pain. do they cry when they are pruned? do they whimper when they are plucked? do they scream when they are cut from their roots? he’d asked his mother once if the flowers felt, if they knew the pain of losing something. she’d patted his cheek with a dirt -covered glove and smiled gently, telling him, “ask me again tomorrow.” and he did so, asking her every day until her last “ask me again tomorrow” from the hospital bed. now he bends over the flowers of his garden, fingers stinging from the pricks of thorns and his back aching from pulling weeds, and he thinks of her words and what her answer would have been if only she’d had more time.
Charted by Johanna Baker
A common misconception
I held when young, was that a compass points where you need to go.
I always wondered how it knew where I wanted to go, if I myself was using it, lost.
Of course I learned, fairly quickly, a compass doesn’t tell you where to move.
It situates you exactly where you are, based on what it knows to be true. It’s up to you to move from there.
For a compass, truth is north. It comes to you, already knowing. For us, our guiding truth is quietly left to self-discovery. And that must be done,
before moving anywhere.
Cliches are a privilege
by Hayley Diehl
How amazing is it
That humans have come up with a word
That means the dislike of stories
Because you have heard them before
Humans were crafted
Not by a god but the earth
To have a voice to communicate
And a voice to shout
But if your shout sounds
Like the other person’s shout
The one who shouted two hundred
Years ago
Throw it out
But I would argue Cliches are a privilege
Cliches become cliché because
People liked the story they heard,
Liked the metaphor that was written,
Liked what they were told
So much
That they continued to tell it
Over And Over And Over And Over And Over And Over
Until we decide we hate it
But clichés come from love
Clichés come from a connected
Human soul
The human soul lives
Even when the body dies
And the soul continues
To make stories reheard
No one stop to think
Maybe a story is told over and over because
It is important
It wants to be heard.
I break open a pomegranate to Show my love A wishbone never breaks Even A rose by any other
Name would smell as sweet
I peel an orange to prove My love
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Speak when it’s needed
And shout what is true
And we all lived happily ever after
to the poets who once lived in horton hall by Emily Brewer poetic stanzas still line these walls –
I imagine you’d be pleased to know our poetry department lives in your halls –where sarah fell in love, and jesse found bliss in the pages of moby dick –we add to this history, this haunting –it is stuffy with emotion in the now attics of horton hall –you still inhabit your old bedrooms, with unvoiced emotions making the air hard to breathe –so we write –
we write and we bring you back to life with each poetic line, each word, each thought –
we are now the poets of horton hall –
Potion of Love
by Deb Knittel
combining agony and happiness
creating a potion of love and laughter felt upon the skin of lovers seen within the stars succumbed with wonder lightweight fleeting feelings a lasting touch upon our skin senses filled with sonder.
2/16/26
January 30th, 9:57 A.M.
by Regan Henry
My face is pale.
It’s a kind of lifelessness that is both striking and underwhelming, a face that doesn’t want to disappoint itself by looking in a mirror.
The bone of my jaw cuts into the palm of my hand, dull and aching like the gray of the sidewalk and the sky and the day and the idea of it and the lifeless skin of my hands.
The phone rings and my eyes roll back, another interruption in the roughage of wallowing and my pale hands reach for it, lifeless and disappointing as they are.
I need to cancel it, you say.
The dementia training course. My husband and I were going to take it for someone, but we aren’t anymore.
No problem, someone, probably me, answers,
customer service dripping sweetly from the pale, lifeless tongue in my mouth.
I delete your names like they never even existed, like they might as well have been a breath of stale air.
They died, you tell me, abruptly, like you wanted me to ask, needed it from me, in fact, needed me to know your loved and cherished soul lay lifeless and pale on the floor.
Oh.
It escapes my lips without any thought like most words do, a lifeless and pale and disappointing response, the absence of any reply at all.
January 30th, 9:57 A.M.
The phone rings and I roll my eyes, my voice pale and lifeless and disappointing, answering another meaningless call on a day devoid of anything worth saying .
January 30th, 9:57 A.M.
You dial the numbers with fingers trembling like a swarm of hornets, parched with thirst for the smallest twinkling resemblance of
human connection, and are met with my pale and lifeless and disappointing voice.
The Highway Man (Prelude)
by Alex Heckman
he asks for your heart but takes your soul, as if one can survive without the other. he wishes for a kiss but steals your voice, though it doesn’t sound right coming from another.
he questions your dreams just to bottle them up, placing them like trophies on his favorite shelf. he extracts your passions like poison from a wound, and laughs while you struggle to find your true self.
he’s what hides under your bed, creeping within the shadows of your room. he’s the doubt that claws at your insides, bringing a lasting feeling of impending doom.
nothing you do can shield you from him, his sharp talons reach even the farthest corners. he digs through every part of you, taking what he wants and leaving no mourners.
he’s the monster parents warn their children of, the nightmare that plagues young minds relentlessly.
he revels in depression and bathes in your tears, and yet his wickedness will reign endlessly.
The Highway Man and the Child Inside
by Alex Heckman
he prides himself on his bookshelves, stacked with mason jars full of broken things, their lids powdered with dust and their labels illegible.
when he becomes bored of his assortment of specimens, he grabs his hat and stalks out his door, cane in one hand and a burlap sack in the other, the skin filled with patches and stitched-up claw marks. he disguises himself like you or me, painting on a smile over his pointy teeth and forcing the darkness in his depthless eyes to turn blue or brown or green whatever color makes it easier.
he prowls the neighborhoods, peeps through windows and slithers through cracks until he finds the ripest one. the one he considers more precious than all the others.
then he waits . . . and waits . . . and waits . . .
he slips into your room, bones flattening and skin stretching
until he stands above your bed, slitted eyes focused on what lay inside your chest. it glowed lime in the night, bright light bursting through flesh and bone until it washed away the dark. your heart.
that’s what he wants.
it lay inside its delicate cage, a beautiful cocktail of hopes and dreams wrapped tightly in diamonds made of stars and love and the blessings of ancestors past. fragile bone curls around it, layered with bruising skin and veins and muscles that could never stop him.
you never get the chance to wake. claws rip through flesh and muscles, tear apart veins and tendons, and pierce through that ethereal shield until they wrap tight around your heart. he feels it thump beneath his skeletal fingers with dreams that try to escape. the lime glow dims as he pulls, snapping arteries and crushing cells until it’s removed from your empty cavity.
and he studies it ripe red with the queen’s tears staining his ghastly skin, claws coated with the remains of your once beautiful armor. his eye s dissect every inch of the muscle, looking between the atoms to see the truth inside.
when he is satisfied with his pick, he pulls the mason jar from his sack and twists the cap off, plopping the heart carelessly inside before sealing it off from the world. its glow continues to dim, disappearing behind burlap and cotton until it appears as though it was never there.
he looks back at your sleeping form, your emptiness hidden by new skin an illusion of wholeness. in the morning, you will wake up like any other child, but you will feel incomplete void of what makes you you. your inner child will be gone, replaced by a silence that will drive you mad.
but by the time you realize what has happened, the man will be back in his house, his new specimen placed among the others, and he will be watching it until its glow finally fades and he returns to the neighborhood to find his next victim.
How do birds not have names at a time like this?
by Jenna Teccio
Flying through their havens
Perched upon the broken oak fence
Speckled in feathers of shades
Red / Brown / Blue
Small winged creatures
Denoted to classification
When I feed the Finch seed, I unconsciously deem him an Ernie
Or the Canary who sings the song of Spring
Maybe her name is Estelle
When I build the birdhouse in my yard, I think of the bluebird
It can be home to Tallulah
I know they are not people, but I don’t know how much longer
I can live in a world in which every Robin is called the same
As if they don’t have different brains
Different hearts
Different souls.
The Robot Character
by Benjamin Zacharias
Some TV shows have that character who's bad at reading people’s expressions or who gets a laugh when he states something obvious.
You know the guy: he’s friends with books and he talks ten years older than he should, but he’s always got that lynchpin clue or insight that changes the whole episode. Then halfway through season two, it turns out he was a robot. And eight-year-old you says, “He can’t be a robot, I saw him sleep, eat, he laughs! He’s just as human as me!”
And the marketable, spiky-haired main character says, “we love you even though you’re a robot.”
But then the writers get him connected to wifi, and he stops making jokes, his dialogue gets stiff.
Then one night you’re staring out the car window into the dark and praying that you don’t stop making jokes, and worrying that you’re starting to sound like Mr. Data on Star Trek.
Because that guy?
He was you.
Up until season two.
Warm Stones
by Johanna Baker
For the briefest of moments, a small rock is lifted from its crowded home along the stream bed.
Drying briefly under streaming sun rays, it warms the cold, wet hands clasping it.
Depending on the thrower’s skill, it skips water eagerly, traveling farther in seconds
than it would have in years.
Just to settle again. A slimy film left to accumulate. Its journey buried, its progress reset, until it’s clutched again by excited fingers, and sent farther than ever before.
ups
box by Deb Knittel
Storage.
It’s something i need to place all the things i don’t want to see
It's something that contains all of the free flowing aura of things Space it vacates.
Shoes in the Snow
by Hayley Diehl
The points on the edges
Direct to the nearest exit
Or opportunity or dumpster
Where did you go, little triangle?
Is it a triangle?
Or a square, hexagon, dodecahedron
How many shapes can you name?
How many shapes could I name?
That's not the point
The crunch of cornstarch
Between your fingertips
Echoes in the snow
And the hexagonal lines
Show where you have been
There are so many, remember we are numbers
Or tick marks across the screen
There is so many, I wonder
Who are you and what shape are you?
Do you know?
Do I know?
Darwinism
by Jenna Teccio
The television glows in the room of brick
An imminent wind approaches six more weeks
The rot setting in like a sponge
The blue minty pool of a trashcan overflowing
The frog of my own devising
A gravitational pull & I am drowning.
No. I refuse.
I force the air through my hollowed husk & remember the forecast
If fish can grow legs, I can grow gills
Ignoring the Siren’s Song pulling me under
Evolving to be free.
unwoven silence by
Reed Vollrath
sift through dirt, dust, black ash, uncover torn cloth, splintered wood, broken toys, a tin water bucket pierced by a bullet. a small pinkie bone, entwine your finger with it. bring the bone to your ear and listen. their laughter, their song, their anguish, a cut thread to weave into your heart. listen now to the silence,
stillness, pretense of peace, broken as the smoke-smothered morning sun heralds the bombings’ return.
Today I Found A Body
by Regan Henry
Today I found a body.
It was tucked off-trail like an inside joke, overtaken with moss and small, white flowers like a garden or a grave.
Birds chatted too joyfully across the great divide of brush and dirt and spiraling, snagging trees.
She was dark with bruises and blood, blackened clumps in her hair, rusting under her nails, clinging to her half-torn clothes, and so obviously not of this time.
Her eyes were still open. They were the color of sunlight, so warm and so alive, still, even now, lying cold and motionless in thorns and stems, dead to the world and alive with a memory. I could hear her then, voice muffled and calling, a siren pulling a sailor to their underwater coffin.
I remember it all now, much too vividly, stolen and enraptured in my head.
Shining glasses of champagne like a handful of glittering stars. Clicking grey cobblestones underneath too-tight high heels.
Golden light filtered through leaves the size of my hand. Pockets stuffed full of dying and drooping daisies. Long, rainy drives pressed against a strong velvet arm.
Ripped stockings and cold leather seats.
Gentle and absentminded pats to my hair, like a dog.
Heartbeating devotion and headsplitting devastation .
When I walk away, her eyes a little more living and mine a little more dead, I do not call 911.
Let her lie there and rot, that body I found today.
She took something from me and I will never get it back.
Acknowledgements
First, we would like to thank all of the incredible writers here at Shippensburg University. Thank you for gifting us with your voices to create this collection of poetry. None of this would have been possible without you. Never stop writing and never let your voices go unheard.
Next, we want to thank our Executive Board. Thank you for all the support you have given us throughout this entire process. Your commitment and dedication to this organization is truly awe-inspiring, and it is through your continued efforts that we can provide a place for students to share their voices.
Thank you to our committee members. It is with the help of your own perspective and input that allowed this book to become what you see before you now.
Thank you to Kim Hess. For guiding us through the publishing process and answering any questions we had. It is because of you that we were able to make this chapbook a reality.
Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Santalucia , the advisor of The Reflector and professor of poetry. Thank you for creating a classroom environment where students could share their creative voices without worry, and for encou raging them to share their story with the world.
