Month: March 2026
His Face
by Roberta Allen
This time she will know exactly how he looks. With fingertips, she traces the outline of his face in profile. But lightly snoring, lips apart, he is not anyone she knows awake when his expressions change so rapidly. There is no one way of seeing him except now when he looks nothing like himself.
A Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction and a Yaddo Fellow, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books, including four story collections, THE TRAVELING WOMAN, CERTAIN PEOPLE, THE DAUGHTER, THE PRINCESS OF HERSELF; a novel, THE DREAMING GIRL, and the writing guide FAST FICTION. Over three-hundred stories have appeared in magazines such as Conjunctions, Guernica, The Bennington Review, Epoch and The Brooklyn Rail. Also a conceptual artist, most of her works on paper are held by The Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Her writing papers are held by the Fales Archive of NYU. robertaallen.com
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “His Face”? I found this piece recently, buried in binders with drafts of very old stories. I wrote this one in the 1980s about a boyfriend I had then. It was true to the experience of watching him sleep. That experience is still vivid in my mind even after all these years. by Kenneth Probo I’m a hummingbird when the last lobelia has withered, the red faded, each stalk a dead brown, the feeder taken indoors. Kenneth Pobo (he/him) has a new book out called Raylene And Skip (Wolfson Press). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Amsterdam Review, and elsewhere. He’s retired and enjoys the garden. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Autumn Hummingbird”? “Autumn Hummingbird” came from the many times my husband and I sit on the porch and enjoy the birds. Hummingbirds are a particular favorite. It is a little sad as the fall presses on as they fly away and the flowers they went to die. Originally the poem was a tanka, but it felt stilted in the 5-7-5-7-7 format, so I recast it as a short prose poem. That feels much more natural. by Nicholas Claro I’d gone to look out the window to look at anything that wasn’t Miranda, who I didn’t feel like looking at. Not after she said what she said. She said, “This doesn’t have to be ugly.” And after a minute said that what she’d said was something she had been meaning to say for a while. Then I saw it out there, lying motionless in the backyard. I thought it was a dog. But dogs don’t sleep like that, I thought. Especially not when it’s raining. My next thought was, Poor dog. I must have said this out loud. Miranda joined me at the window. A hand went to her mouth. “What do we do?” she said through her fingers. “What kind of question is that,” I said. She followed me to the door. I stepped into boots and put on a jacket. I found the shovel on the floor in the garage, below a hammer with a splintered handle that hung from a pegboard next to a saw with rounded teeth and a pair of rusted pliers. It wasn’t a dog. It was a large raccoon. Raccoons grew large in this neighborhood. There was a soybean plant nearby. The air always smelled like burnt popcorn. It drove them to frenzy. The raccoons were in the habit of breaking into the silos and eating their fill. The blade slipped easily into the wet soil. It wasn’t long before I had the thing buried. Back inside, I filled a kettle with water and set it on the stove. While it heated, Miranda walked in. It was really coming down now. Rain thumped against the windows. “Was it wearing a collar?” she said, her voice breaking a little. Now it breaks? I shook my head. “There wasn’t any collar.” “That means it was a stray,” she said. “Doesn’t it?” “Would that make you feel better?” She thought for a moment, her eyes watering over. She sniffed. “No, actually,” she said. “I don’t think that it would.” “It was some kind of mutt,” I said. “It looked like a really sweet dog—” “Stop it.” “—maybe with a little Border Collie or Australian Shepherd mixed in. You know, something I didn’t notice at first. But became more obvious the closer I looked.” Nicholas Claro holds an MFA in Fiction from Wichita State University. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, Necessary Fiction, XRAY, Write or Die Magazine, and others. He is the author of the story collections This Is Where You Are (Roadside Press, ’25) and Sedgwick County (Roadside Press, ’26). He lives in Wichita, Kansas. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Taxonomy”? For days on end I went back and forth on whether to take out or leave Miranda’s final line of dialogue: Stop it. It’s funny. It’s two words and I spent more time tinkering with these than I think it took me to write the original draft of the story. It’s one reason I love writing fiction this brief – every word matters. And laboring over them, as frustrating this can sometimes be, in the end, is really rewarding. by Michael Mirolla It starts as a gentle weakness in my left thumb. Like a slight pinching that won’t allow me to use the full strength possible when matched to my right thumb. That prevents the thumb muscle from achieving its full potential. Nothing serious, mind you. Nothing visible when placing the two thumbs side by side. Nothing that I need to bring up to my family doctor on our rare Zoom meetings. (Not wanting to waste her time with trivialities when I know I an fortunate to even have a family doctor despite her office being several hundred kilometres away and thus awkward for face-to-face.) It does worry me, however, that nothing I do by way of exercise improves the strength of that thumb. And is it getting worse? Hard to tell. For some reason, my mind goes to the thought of the opposable thumb theory of human intelligence and ingenuity. And how now, when twisting off the top of a vacuum-sealed jam or olive jar, I can no longer make full use of one of my opposables – and need to switch to my right hand. Is this going to lead to a loss of a percentage of that intelligence or ingenuity? Well, I guess that would have had to depend on measuring the difference between pre- and post-left-thumb-weakness intelligence and ingenuity levels. I had never thought of doing that before my left thumb showed this weakness. Would have shown incredible foresight if I had done so. In any case and not crying over spilled milk (not that I would ever cry over milk as I don’t drink it), I am able to simulate that pinching and loss of strength by holding the base of my diminished thumb between right thumb and index and squeezing. Being somewhat still intelligent, I check to see what can cause thumb pain: trigger thumb, thumb arthritis, DeQuervain’s tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, skier’s thumb. None of these pains describe the weakness and pinching in my left thumb. Next, I check the muscles included in the thumb: abductor pollicis brevis, flexor pollicis brevis, opponens pollicis, adductor pollicis. This is all Greek to me. Perhaps my intelligence is already starting on that downward slippery slope. Tom Thumb, while interesting as the first fairy tale printed in English, doesn’t help all that much – especially the part where a cow swallows him and is then expunged via a cow pat! But I digress. Is that another symptom of diminishing intelligence? I fear it might be. Well, look on the bright side. Unlike many others, I can trace this lessening to a specific cause. Hopefully, I can hold onto that as I fade away. Michael Mirolla has had the fortune of publishing more than two dozen novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections. These include award winners such as a novella, The Last News Vendor, winner of the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award, and three Bressani Prize winners: the novel Berlin; the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue; and the short story collection Lessons in Relationship Dyads. Michael is also a veteran writer-in-residence, including: a three-month residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver (fall 2019); Olot, Catalonia (September 2023); Barcelona (Can Serrat residency, July 2024); Regina Public Library Writer-in-Residence (Sept. 2024-June 2025); Virtual writer-in-residence (Saskatchewan Writers Guild, September-October 2025). A symposium on Michael’s writing was held on May 25, 2023. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael makes his home on a 30-acre farm (along with five dogs, a cat and sundry humans) outside the town of Gananoque in the Thousand Islands area of Ontario. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “My Left Thumb”? I don’t know if any of it is surprising and/or fascinating in all truth. I was reaching for a bottle of my favorite wine one evening and felt a twinge in my left thumb. One of those things that happens when you over-extend, I thought. But no. The twinge persisted. I checked my right thumb and it was all good. No twinge. I waited several days to see if it was gone. It wasn’t. But it also hadn’t become worse. Low level twinge, in other words. That’s when the idea came to me to take advantage of this (something I’ve done quite often with other ailments and dreams as inspirations for my writing). In the hope something good comes out of something a little scary.Autumn Hummingbird
Taxonomy
My Left Thumb
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 September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
06/01 • TBD
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06/22 • TBD
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07/06 • TBD
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07/27 • TBD
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09/07 • TBD
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09/21 • TBD