Thank you to the groovy dudes at Mad Swirl for publishing my tribute to Little Bit.

https://madswirl.com/short-stories/2026/04/little-bit/

Little Bit

by Linda Imbler on April 4, 2026 

photo "Where's Your Sign" by Tyler Malone

Little Bit loved her Daddy, Virginia Slims, her long-distance boyfriend, Chal, her tub full of lip gloss, always liberally applied, and eye makeup to make her eyes look as big as chestnuts. Add glasses, and the chestnuts became crab apples. Like Elly May Clampett, she never met an animal she couldn’t charm, or that couldn’t charm her. Brown hair slightly past her shoulders and silky. She stood no more than 5 feet tall, and soaking wet, weighed approximately the same number of pounds a dozen chickens on a scale would weigh.

I never had a more neatnik college roommate, except for the cigarettes, nor a fiercer friend. Kind to all, soft-spoken Little Bit lived her life as the good book suggested, except for the body temple part (see Virginia Slims).

She drove a fancy red sports car that played nothing but shit-kicker music and when set at full volume, Tammy Wynette. This was the car she drove home every weekend to spend time with Chal (see Chal). At least until they broke up during winter break after that third semester. She returned to the university with a trunk of Christmas presents from Daddy (see Daddy) and vowing within her heart eternal spinsterhood.

When I found out two years ago that Little Bit had died some years earlier, I was sad, then realized she had spent her adult life after graduation with all those critters while working for the Parks Service (see Parks Service.)  Most importantly, she had kept her vow of spinsterhood and was happy about it.

I figure that now she and Daddy are in Heaven, Chal’s in Hell, and the angels know all of Tammy’s songs.

Virginia Slims: very thin smokes.

Chal: jerk.

Daddy: giver of gifts, cash, and other perks.

Parks Service: access to more critters.

editors note: 

We all want to live like we don’t want to get into Heaven. But where do we want to go and when do we want to go there? ~ Tyler Malone

 

Thank you to Editor Mark Antony Rossi of Ariel Chart for publishing my poems in the April issue.

Defying The Odds

 

In One’s Favor:

 A winsome cardsharp,

 ready to ante up,

 feeling that tingle that precedes 

the accumulation of silver coins.

 

Out Of One’s Favor:

 The ministry of chance,

 making pithy observations,

 trying to manage the scandalous,

 eager to tighten the grip

 on a catalog of activated and far-flung probabilities.

 

In or out, 

both,

 such seemingly fathomless pipe dreams.

Learning Curve (Fibonacci)

I

once

believed

that to hear

one’s lament is the

most beautiful thing in the world,

but I am now aware that our most breathless moments

come from positive experiences that lend themselves to the best consequences.

No Critique Too Small

 

My spiteful, antagonistic co-worker,

mistress of the pipeline that scowls and gripes.

 

A savage bobcat with far-reaching mandibles,

a windstorm, a prickly cactus,

a winged basilisk that sees me as carrion,

a pitchforked wolf

digging into a deep canyon, 

shoveling up doggerel with glee.

 

I sit inside a mini hoop of self-protection.

I am penned in.

I handle my boo-boos

with the intent to not draw attention to myself.

 

Yep,

everyday,

there’s no critique too small.

 Thank you to Deborah Edgeley of Ink Pantry for publishing my poems.

Awakened From Beginning to End

As an infant with booties and cowl,
I strove to overcome the barriers
making me unable to stand on my own.

I searched for an antidote
to a crippling childhood,
a pitiful position for one
harboring such intense fantasies.

A young adult’s silent silhouette,
the impact of being lost
within a catacomb of sheets in any given hotel.

The reluctant glee of parenthood,
trying to carefully carry so much more than I should.

Today is the farthest in time I’ve ever come.
I feel that any minute, fatigue will set in,
and produce that moment when agelessness fails me.

It’s in the Bones

We are predisposed while in the womb
to act a certain way.
From our first toddling steps,
through the measured time of our lives,
ancestral memories, long prepared,
by the earliest civilizations,
sensibilities first given forward,
then curving back again and again,
are willing to inform us
of some brand of zealotry.

We collectively embrace a trend
toward devotion to the arts.
We’re still shining cardinal features,
ready to be summoned.
Accepting widespread patterns
for the shaping of our cultures,
in the hopes that all this will become
a prelude to a single tradition.

The Echo in my Old Necklace

A necklace chain adorned with links of gold streaks,
interspersed with beads representing the wax and wane of memory,
interwoven threads of recorded thought
belonging to earlier days.

A necklace pumped full of memories,
this particular jewelry’s unceasing watch,
whispering echoes into halls of the mind
directly dictated to my heart.
Those visions I do not wish to share.
And the ones I hoped would keep me aware.

What falls back is the truth,
that we’re no longer friends,
a wealth of past hurts.
I remember the real version of last time on the road home.
Rejection was my only antidote to delusion.

Startling thoughts about what might as well have been just yesterday,
starting to silence over time.
Someday perhaps no thoughts of those days will remain.
I wonder when I’ll know
that they will not return.