Now Playing: Emma Swift – The Soft Apocalypse (2020).

Word Raccoon here. Drema does not trust herself to speak right now. Big news, loves: Drema’s had three poems accepted by The Write Launch for their October 2025 issue! Yes, three. That’s a full-on raccoon hat trick, and I am already shimmying across the coffee table.

The poems?

• The Soft Apocalypse (tender, devastating, and very dear to Drema’s heart)
  
• Alluding Perusing (mischievous and book-drunk)
  
• Outré (a love letter to glorious weirdness; my outfit will make sense when you read it)
  

---

These poems carry (we hope) grief and grit, wit and strangeness. And The Write Launch, a journal Drema has long admired, said yes to all three, and Drema is grateful. Word Raccoon calls that a triple crown moment, complete with sparkly tiara.

Drema shared with me that she wrote “Alluding Perusing” on the porch of her favorite coffeehouse one morning this summer. She wrote “Outré” on a Saturday morning on her sunporch, just before breakfast. It arrived wearing boots.

Celebration Mode

So mark your October calendars: Drema will be quietly grateful, Emma Swift’s song will be echoing in the background, and Word Raccoon will be shouting from the roof with a Coke Zero in one paw and a tambourine in the other while handing Drema Kleenex whenever anyone mentions “The Soft Apocalypse.”

Thank you to The Write Launch for giving these poems a home, and to you, Dear Reader, for listening to Word Raccoon howl the news. I truly hope you like the poems.

Link to follow in October.