Month: February 2024

The Cows

by D Angelo

 

A handful of cows, fed up with their predestined fate, decided to abandon the pastures and move into an unoccupied house. They ate Doritos and watched football. Drank Budweiser as rain pecked at the windows. Sometimes lightning would charge like a bull across the sky. The cows would laugh at the irony before curling up against each other for warmth. The cows did all the chores, including mowing the lawn, and enjoyed the experience. When the original owner of the house appeared, she fell to her knees and wept, having never experienced this kind of life before.

 

Shortlisted for the 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize, D Angelo (also credited as D A Angelo) is a UK-based writer with work in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Sage Cigarettes, Flights of the Dragonfly and Petrichor Mag.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Practicing

by Matthew Anderson

 

Below the house, the pest control man inspected the crawl space for termites. Crawling along the cinder block perimeter of the wall, he looked for signs of termite tubes. The little mud highways they build as they chew through the insides of houses. He crawled on his belly, following the beam of his headlamp. He turned his head one way, then the other, waving his circle of light across the bricks. He has found many things in crawl spaces. A rusted knife. Dog collars. Scared and coiled snakes. But most often what he found was death. Stiff rats and stinking opossums teeming with maggots. He often wondered about how painful their deaths were, often imagined his own bones giving way, shattering inside of him from the impact of a car, like so many small frail creatures. He orbited death like a lonesome moth transfixed by a lightbulb. He spoke nothing of it to anyone. He spoke little about anything. But he felt a peculiar peace when deep inside of cool, quiet crawl spaces. Sometimes, after finishing a termite inspection, instead of going home to her unwavering disappointment in him, he would turn over to lie on his back and perform his only ritual. He would let his gloved hands flex in the dirt and feel the cold of the ground slowly leaching his heat. He would turn off his headlamp and stare up into the blackness that had just been the floorboards above. He would let his eyes adjust to the deepest dark, a soothing blindness. He would set his hands atop one another on his stomach and close his eyes. He would lie in the dirt as still as stone, and imagine never seeing such a world again.

 

Matthew Anderson is a Southerner living in Portland, OR with his fiance and two Sphynx cats. He experiments with prose poetry and non-fiction and is currently working on a memoir. His work can be found at medium.com/@matthewdavisanderson and he can be found on Instagram @yerboymatthew.

 

See what happens when you click below.

CNF: A Daughter Contemplates

by Michelle Bitting

 

How strokes and seizures have put him in the hospital again. We come to say hello. He’s eating chicken in a chair— parmigiana, salad, ranch dressing and a roll. Better than yesterday! Says the nurse. His mind was on a boat, somewhere in San Diego, yanking at tubes, the strapped-on oxygen. Arm restraints. He who never held back, stomping I am the King! around the house, his throne front and center. After all the chaos, here is his final crown— an EEG meter reading the heady Zeus bolts— his aim, his honor under fire. I could object how old age and infirmity so mercifully erase the past in a white room where his face— so genuinely sweet, so delighted to see me— as if my little boy, as if. What is this all about? My mother at her window repeating doctor reports, struggling to get it straight, comb it along her own ravaged folds. Half a century he marched us, the spoils doled, the strict conditions— captives and a promise of allegiance— my brothers not able to make it, buried out there in ghost country. The quality of mercy grows strained. His wife, his perennial sun sits confused, not knowing if rising or setting, a waning orb. Hands that grasp at keys can’t hold where they go— locked in a crib if it comes to it. They don’t believe I won’t bolt, silly, so long ago I left but look how machines beep on. He finishes his sorbet, the hospital tray I’ve placed outside, needing to head home. He moves to stand, thinking he’s going with me, forgetting the nightie, the tube sucking gold between his legs. Alarms will go off, the nurses come running if he tries. He looks to me, hoping for reprieve, and for a moment I love him mistaking me. Whoever it is he believes I am.

 

Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, the 2021 Fish Poetry Contest judged by Billy Collins, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She won Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruminate Magazine, 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. She is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural DeNovo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Tammy Wynette Kind of Pain

by Laton Carter

 

A bird in my backyard sounds like it’s choking. It isn’t my yard, the apartments all share it, but still—it feels like it’s there for me. Just one maple. Grass, some geraniums for a border. You’d think I’d see it, but I never have. The bird only sings. I don’t mean strangulation. I mean that single falling grace note proceeding the central pitch. It drops like a warble.

If you stare at a sofa long enough, it becomes a country. The seams, the cushions, the backrest, they’re territories. All the people who’ve sat there are tourists. Some more than others, and the ones who return become residents. Look at that face. His deep set eyes, the buried self. I don’t know what to call it and have it be right: self-loathing, self-doubt. It leans out to be fixed.

I never let my license expire. Cosmetology sounds a lot like space, but it’s lids and brows, cheeks and a jaw. You get to draw on them, watch the surface transform into something it isn’t. Make-up is a damn better protection than a gun. Drink your coffee and think about it. It doesn’t make sense until it does.

The tablets in my mouth at first were bitter. Then you don’t notice a thing. The grandmother I’m holding is a pillow. Her breast against my cheek is all I want just for a little while.

 

Laton Carter’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in A-Minor Magazine, Atticus Review, The Boiler, Indiana Review, The MacGuffin, Necessary Fiction, and Split Lip Magazine. Carter works in a middle school in Western Oregon.

 

See what happens when you click below.

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