Month: July 2021

CNF: Me Without You

by Jasmine Sawers

 

I used to wish you dead and think wistfully on this motherless version of me: someone who was allowed to flush the toilet at night; someone who doesn’t cower when the dishes clatter in the sink; someone who doesn’t shake when voices are raised; someone who never learned how hard your hands are when they’re done being soft; someone who hasn’t been told a thousand times that you’d trade them for the 1980 miscarriage—the angelic never-child who would never hurt or disobey you; someone who never lived with your threats to kill them echoing between their ears; someone who didn’t spend a lifetime straddling the line between damned if you do, damned if you don’t; someone who crushed under their heel all those eggshells I spent a lifetime minding; someone who never grew out of the phase of wishing they were beautiful—that is, wishing they were white; someone without Thai simmering beneath all the English in their brain; someone who never learned the right way to make rice; someone who never learned to pour fish sauce liberally on American food to make it better; someone who never bathed outside in a barrel during the monsoon; someone who never chased chickens around a house on stilts; someone who has never been the fifth passenger on a motorcycle taking a bunch of kids to school; someone who doesn’t know when they’re being insulted in Thai; someone who’s never ducked beneath scaffolding in Bangkok only to discover a bustling halal restaurant, tucked away like a wink; someone who has never heard the call to prayer sweep over the canal at dawn; someone ignorant of the way you were passed around your family to be their workhorse, their wet nurse, their punching bag; someone who mourned a saint suspended in the perfect amber of memory; some fool, some poor fucking fool.

 

Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fiction fellow whose work appears in such journals as Ploughshares, AAWW’s The Margins, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Sawers serves as Associate Fiction Editor for Fairy Tale Review and debuts a flash collection through Rose Metal Press in 2023. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis.

 

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Lauds

by Jen Huang

 

All I ask for
in a day
is zero blood.

I want our hides whole
and untrespassed.

and no inner gambits,
faulty, giving up the ghost,

red plumes to write her name
across your history

The tidy monstrosity
that is the body,

working to clean up
its own mistakes

I want
none of this,

closed doors
and sealed windows.

The sun at its set distance,
each bone assuring bone.

 

Jen Schalliol Huang lives near Boston and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her chapbook was printed through The Kenyon Review, and her work has appeared in Flock, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, RHINO, The Shore, Shenandoah, Sou’wester, and elsewhere. She is a reader for [PANK], was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, twice for Best New Poets, and once for 2020’s Best of the Net.

 

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CNF: Body of Water

by Kylie Hough

 

My head–I wished it would stop. I got out my Mac, plugged in my earphones and played a thunderstorm. An octuple scull passed by the living room window making ripples so faint as to be barely audible. Then the city ferry, its passengers staring mute from the top deck. I stood up because they’re less likely to stare if I move between rooms.

It was late afternoon when I chose a position at the end of the rug. Indian or Turkish, it made no difference. It was as soft as lanugo on my soles.

I wondered about the feeling of the ellipsis, and the unfolding of thoughts as they struggled under the weight of sentences. I stood there–under the ceiling, glass separating me and the river, and I listened.

*

In the back-yard I can stand ahead of the light streaming from the door and look out to the jetty toward the mountains. The garden is planted with magnolias and birds of paradise which compete with nutgrass for snippets of sky. None of the pots on my windowsill are empty–orchids flourish, despite cramped conditions, with or without rain.

My dog takes naps on a cushion. His hearing is going and he walks too far in the wrong direction when I call his name. Every day I ask him to accompany me to work, but instead of standing, he sighs, lifts then lowers his head.

The smell I make is not lamb lung.

When I was new to motherhood I used to picture sneaking out of my bedroom. I fancied myself lifting my skirt, climbing over the balcony railing and jumping into the shrubbery before tiptoeing to a waiting Jeep driven by imaginary friends. At the botanical gardens said friends and I would wander down plant strewn paths thick with green so lavish we could barely make out each other’s shadows. We would lose each other and wander disoriented around a dry fountain, pondering nothing but our collective breath for hours.

Thunder storms point the way to that dream.

*

I look at my wrinkles in the scorched bathroom light. The strain will appear as a broken line in a once pure patch of skin on my forehead. It will take a week to emerge an inch above my eyebrows.

I pull a towel from the cupboard and run a bath.

Most of the time I’m not aware I hear it. Anxiety is a thing you feel. Even alone, it becomes-with. Sometimes you hear it after lunch in the space you forget to eject your medicine from crumpled foil. But I know where to go if you want to hear nought.

What you do is lower yourself into a body of water. A tub is sufficient but any watery form will do. River, ocean, stream – it doesn’t matter. Lie back and wait for the surface ripples to make themselves invisible. Take a deep breath, submerge yourself, and listen for the end of games you forbid yourself to play.

 

Kylie Hough studies Arts at UNE. A VC Scholar, in 2015 Kylie received the Lucy Elizabeth Craigie Award, the Richard B Smith Memorial Prize, and the Australian Federation of Graduate Women Inc. (AFGW) NSW (Armidale) UNE ARTS AWARD. She was a finalist in the Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction 2018 and is published with Feminartsy, the write launch, Verity LA, Other Terrain, and Posit. She has poetry forthcoming with Antithesis and is a grateful recipient of a 2021 Australian Society of Authors (ASA) Award Mentorship in Fiction.

 

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Women’s Intuition

by Evann Normandin

 

[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]

 

I fiddled with my ring and watched the back of Luke’s head while he spoke to the flight attendant at the front in halting Chinese. She smiled. Documents changed hands. He slid into the seat next to me and his thigh clung to my bare leg longer than it should have before he pulled away. “What did you tell her?” I asked.

“I said that my wife is afraid of flying. She moved us up in the plane.” He flashed two new tickets. I felt the Xanax start to kick in. My wife.

I’d bought the rings deep underground in a market of flashing neon lights and stiff, gem-encrusted shoes and handbags just steps from Metro 1 in the city center. I picked a bold almost-too-big-to-be-real cubic zirconia and a simple silver band for Luke while the saleswoman oohed, ahhed, and refused to negotiate prices. On the way to the airport, I pulled out two blue-velvet ring boxes. “Thank you for pretending,” I said, flexing my long fingers so the colorless stone might catch the light.

Luke held me by my fingertips to get a better look. “It’s nice,” he said. “I don’t think I would have picked it.” He plucked the thick silver band from its case and let it slip down his fourth finger.

“A little big,” I said.

Luke broke into a smile that lit him from the inside. “Almost perfect.”

I told him I’d booked the villa without air conditioning on purpose. Luke could smell the lie in the sweat that eeked through my thin green t-shirt—the same shirt I was wearing the day I’d learned my time was up. The air in Shanghai had been thick and heavy and I was unpracticed in navigating the city alone. The doctor was brief. The scans reminded me of a carelessly planted garden.

“Thailand,” I’d said, the moment I opened the door to our seventh-floor walkup. “I want to go back to Thailand.”

“Thailand.” Luke said. “Why?”

That night as the jungle pressed against the open windows and Luke pressed into me I wondered whether the passing of time might be ceremonial the way the ancients thought. Not the modern world’s graceless obedience to sequence and increment, but the stunning imperfection of human memory and the movements of heavenly bodies. Perhaps this was the same moon that shone through the plastic shades in our cramped dorm when I first ran my hands down Luke’s smooth chest and fumbled with his clip-latch belt buckle. And perhaps this was the same breeze that pulled my thin hair from its tight bun the first time he’d kissed me before the sun went down. Perhaps yesterday we’d had that wedding I’d always been too nervous to wish for in my father’s musty barn, with warm cider, crisp wine, and an iPod on shuffle. Maybe tomorrow I had already told Luke I was dying.

 

Evann Normandin lives in Massachusetts and works in educational publishing. Her writing has appeared in Broadway World, Rewire News, and Slush Magazine. She completed her BA at Middlebury College in English with a focus on literature of trauma and traumatic memory, and her MSc at the University of Edinburgh in English with a focus on trauma and post-apocalyptic fiction.

 

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CNF: Yarn

by Debra Fox

 

          my ailing father’s
          scarf
          wrapped around my neck

I lied when I wrote this. My father never owned a scarf. That the scarf exposes itself on its own line torments the part of me that believes in telling the truth.

The poem is not a complete fabrication—my father did ail. He crashed his dry-cleaning van into an oak on the same route he’d taken to work for sixty years. I never knew why. He was in shock by the time the ambulance arrived, and later he couldn’t remember what led to the collision. His eighty-year-old body suffered broken ribs, a shattered forearm and internal injuries so severe, he required six separate surgeries.

Fueled by the fear of losing him, and the monotony of visiting while he lay comatose, I jotted images into a notebook. The scarf materialized as the respirator pumped oxygen into his lungs. Knit of gray and black flecked wool, it mimicked the stubble on his unshaven cheeks. Though I yearned for something soft, the scarf was scratchy like him. I imagined it acquiring his scent—a mixture of Noxzema Shaving Cream and Lifeboy soap.

Another lie—the word wrapped. Nothing about it describes my relationship with my father. Of the gifts he gave me: the wooden box with a ballerina painted on top, later the red satin “Seventy-Sixers” jacket, and finally the gold bracelet to commemorate my law school graduation, all were unceremoniously delivered—no bows, no wrapping paper.

Nor did my father ever wrap me in his arms. Not when I returned from the year I studied abroad in France; not after I gave birth to my two children; and not after my husband’s cancer diagnosis. That didn’t stop me from employing it. The one verb in the poem.

A final lie—that coiling my father’s scarf around my neck would bring comfort. We shrunk from touching one another, or by extension one another’s possessions. That I spotlight the neck, a body part that houses the carotid artery and jugular vein with nothing but skin to protect it, feels unsettling.

After the accident my father lived another ten years. The part of me that longs for connection forces false images. I dream about wearing the scarf on a cold walk home from the train station. Or while sautéing carrots and celery in butter in my drafty kitchen as I prepare the potato leek soup he favored. Or when sitting by the fire with my husband on the first anniversary of his death.

 

Debra Fox is an adoption attorney and founder of Story Tributes, an enterprise that preserves the stories of people’s lives. She is a reader for Philadelphia Stories, as well as the mother of two sons: one profoundly autistic and the other a journalist. In her spare time, she loves to dance. She, her husband, and their son Matthew live on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Much of her published work can be found at www.debramfox.com.

 

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Travel Selfie at Peradeniya Junction

by Kristen Swan Morrison

 

[Editor’s Note: Click on the triptych below to view it at full size.]

 

 

Kristen Swan Morrison’s stories have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Grain, and Wigleaf. She’s completing an MFA through The University of British Columbia. Originally from the Washington, D.C. area, she currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she’s working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

 

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Bedside

by Michael Buckius

 

Bedside, I bring you chicken nuggets
The unemployment rate has fallen again
and it’s starting to make us look bad
We sigh, the dream is over
You light a cigarette
and pass me the pack
Tomorrow we will initiate
divorce proceedings
We will divide the Venetian blinds
vertically
find smaller windows
and become nostalgic
about horizontal patterns
of light through the smoke
the grease on our fingertips
the crumbs on an empty plate
beside the bed

 

Michael Buckius is a writer and filmmaker from Lancaster, PA. He earned his undergraduate degree in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, and his MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University. His work has appeared in Ghost City Review, Masque and Spectacle, Shrew, Write On, Downtown, and elsewhere. His first chapbook, Future Sarcasm, is available now from Tolsun Books.

 

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Soul Sale

by William Doreski

 

When I ask Satan to sell me back my soul he laughs. “What can I give you that you don’t already have?” I ask. He replies, “Nothing. You can have your soul back. What do I want with that filthy rag?” We’re sitting in a coffee shop in Midtown. Buses hustle past, snoring and shaking the plate glass windows. “You have to accept payment,” I say. “Contract law requires both parties to benefit from a transaction.” The waitress refills our cups. She thinks Satan is cute, with his pert little mustache and his crimson cassock. She glares at me, a grumpy wrinkled old man, and sneers. She’d spill coffee into my lap if she weren’t afraid of losing her job. “No benefit involved. You have to realize that your soul is worthless,” Satan explains. “If I accepted payment for returning it, I’d be adding to my burden of sin.” “But if my soul is worthless, what does that say about me?” “You sold your soul. You sold it so long ago that it became obsolete. I made a poor investment, but that often happens. Just pocket your soul and drink your coffee while it’s hot.” He hands me a slip of folded spiritual matter. I tuck it into my shirt pocket. It’s so tiny I’m afraid of losing it. “You might as well face it. Hell isn’t for you. You wouldn’t last five minutes before vaporizing.” “What about Heaven?” I ask. “Oh yeah,” Satan says, “I guess some people still believe in that pie-in-the sky stuff. Don’t think about it. Just take your soul home and stash it somewhere out of sight.”

 

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. His most recent book of poetry is Mist in Their Eyes (2021). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.

 

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this is where it ends after a tooth extraction

by Jeff William Acosta

 

[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]

 

I lay my body in a field of bougainvillea
petals as I would if I am to be draped
in lilacs—no inch for mechanical body
nor all the moving parts cocooning
my shadow, or the ocean waves rising
and falling inside the concaved gums
as I bite down this gauze full of rusting
iron and copper scent. I have never been
so lost in an image where my tooth clings
firmly on to the jawbone. The tongue
remembers the touch as if it was meant
to rekindle the skinship. Now swallowing
has never been this so tormenting: whenever
I open my mouth, it means something
is missing: you whose name I never get
to hear often by the ear but lives beneath
the memory of the lips

 

Jeff William Acosta is a Filipino poet from Ilocos Sur, Philippines. His works appeared or are forthcoming in 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, The Dark Horse, CAROUSEL, Olit and among others. Find him at jeffwilliamacosta.weebly.com

 

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Abattoir

by Ellen June Wright

 

Such a pretty word for
a slaughterhouse
rank with blood
and the stench
of unsellable parts—
burned.
It’s from the French—
‘to fell’
like a tree cut down
or a life in shambles
like a shanty after the storm
every board scattered.

 

Ellen June Wright is a poet based in Hackensack, New Jersey. She was born in England of West Indian parents and immigrated to the United States as a child. She attended school in New Jersey and taught high-school language arts for three decades. She has worked as a consulting teacher on the guides for three PBS poetry series called Poetry Haven, Fooling with Words and the Language of Life. Her poetry has most recently been published in River Mouth Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, New York Quarterly, The Elevation Review, The Caribbean Writer and, is forthcoming in, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week for their website. She was a finalist in the Gulf Stream 2020 summer poetry contest and is a founding member of Poets of Color virtual poetry workshop in New Jersey. She studies writing at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Ellen can be found on Twitter@EllenJuneWrites.

 

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Wading

by Cole Williams

 

[Editor’s Note: Click on the triptych below to view it at full size.]

 

 

Cole W. Williams is the author of Hear the River Dammed: Poems from the Edge of the Mississippi (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2017) as well as several books for children. Her poems have appeared in Intima: Journal of Narrative Medicine, Martin Lake Journal, Indolent Books online, Waxing & Waning, Harpy Hybrid Review, WINK, Creatopia, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. She recently attended Rockvale Writer’s Colony and is currently a student in the MFA program at Augsburg University in Minneapolis.

 

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The Adventure of Stepping Outdoors

by Jim Ross

 

[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]

 

When COVID restrictions began to ease, the family agreed that we needed to rent a beach house at pre-Memorial Day, off-season rates within a three hour’s drive. After reservations were made, we heard that 90 percent of epidemiologists—people who professionally have been looking at when the easing of restrictions would be safe—said they planned to rent a summer beach house. So, the eleven of us—two grandparents, four parents, and five children between the ages of one and five—were in good company.

The best part of our week together wasn’t as much being by the beach as it was always having an excuse to step outdoors with each other, unmasked, fully vaccinated, without fear.

One night, after dinner, Ben, not quite 6, with three missing teeth already, kicked off a one-on-one conversation with one of his patented, probing questions.

“Papa, do you ever wish you could re-experience your childhood?”

“Yes,” I answered, “Every day. All the time.”

“What was it like? Tell me about it.”

“There was a creek. We lived every day around or in it.”

“Your family let you do that?” Ben asked.

“There wasn’t much way to say no. The creek was all we had. It was our life. We knew that across the creek we’d find adventure. In it too.”

“You didn’t have video games?”

“They hadn’t been invented yet.”

“Did you have the Internet?”

“Didn’t exist.

“But you had TV.”

“Ben, when I was your age, on school days, there were only three hours of TV a day.”

“That’s what your family let you watch, three hours’ worth a day?”

“No, that’s all that was on. It started around dinner time, went for three hours, and that was it. During the daytime, if you turned on the TV, there was nothing on.”

“Nothing?” Ben asked.

“Nothing.”

“Why were there only three hours?”

“TV was still an experiment then. They didn’t know whether it would work.”

“You mean it was an experiment like my idea to install magnets beneath your scalp and put magnets in a wig so we can cover your bald spot and make you young again?”

“Exactly. Even if you have a good idea, you have to convince people it’s worth the trouble. Everyone already had radio and there were lots of movie theaters. So, why did they need TV?”

“Why did you need TV?” Ben asked.

“We didn’t need it. Someone had to convince us we did. And that wasn’t easy. After all, we had the creek.”

“Papa, if you had no TV or computer games and no Internet, what did you do? Once, we stayed in a hotel and there was nothing to do. It was boring.”

“We went outside, every day, twelve months of the year, and played with other kids, usually around the creek. We made our own adventures, just us kids, no grownups.”

“Did your parents think playing outside with no grownups was dangerous?”

“Not as far as I know. When they were kids, they played outdoors. That’s what kids always did, unless they were at school or had to work.”

“And nothing bad ever happened to you?”

I think about it for a moment. “Once, I cut my foot on a piece of rusty metal in the creek. It bled like crazy. Someone carried me home.”

“Someone from your family came and got you?”

“Maybe, but more likely, one of the other kids’ Moms carried me home, whoever was closest.”

“One time I cut my finger,” Ben said, holding out his right index finger, “when I used adult scissors. My blood dripped onto the floor.”

“Did someone have to carry you?”

“No,” Ben laughed. “Did you ever make a raft?”

“I’m not sure. Come to think of it, we made lots of rafts.”

“How far did you go on them?”

“They always sank. Anyway, the creek wasn’t deep enough.”

“You needed an inflatable.”

“But there was a goat who guarded a place where we sometimes had to cross.”

“He wouldn’t let you?”

“We had to feed him something and then he did.”

“What was your biggest adventure?” Ben asked.

“One summer, we had almost no rain, and the creek dried up, except for a dribble that came from one spring.”

“What’s a spring?”

“It’s when water springs up from an underground river or lake, like a water fountain created by nature.”

“Can you drink from it?”

“When we were out, that’s where we went. We believed that water was special.”

“Magic?” Ben asked.

“It would be magic to drink from it again now.”

“Would drinking from the spring make you young again?”

“Maybe I could re-experience childhood.”

“What happened when the creek dried up?” Ben asked.

“Oh, we had this idea that, as long as we stayed in the dried-up creek, we could follow it wherever it went, even if usually we couldn’t go those places, and we wouldn’t get in trouble.”

“Did you go far?”

“Further than we ever imagined, in both directions, to places we’d never seen before.”

“Like, going to a number bigger than infinity?”

“We felt like we had, but we’d only gone further than we knew, not really so far.”

“What happened, Papa?”

“We saw a snake, a poisonous one, a copperhead.”

“You sure it wasn’t a milk snake? Because I’ve seen those.”

“We believed it was a copperhead.”

“What did you do?”

“Everyone threw rocks to kill it.”

“Papa, don’t you know, that when you throw rocks at a snake it becomes even more powerful?”

“I do now. Instead of throwing rocks, what do you recommend?”

Ben said, “Turn around and run.”

I asked, “Do you think you should run away from adventure?”

Ben said, “If it’s poisonous or too dangerous. Aren’t iPads safer?”

“Are they? You tell me.”

“Sometimes, I get stuck in an infinite loop.”

“We all do,” I said. “When that happens, it’s time to step outdoors and find an adventure.”

 

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in the past six years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and photography in over 150 journals on four continents. Publications include Columbia Journal, Hippocampus, Ilanot Review, Kestrel, Litro, Manchester Review, The Atlantic, and Typehouse. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five preschoolers—split their time between city and mountains.

 

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Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.

Submissions

Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.

Upcoming

09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD