Month: August 2026

CNF: Living Beneath

by Richard Hurst

 

I grew up in Levittown, Pennsylvania, under rows of Norway maples that made a ceiling out of summer. I thought that was how neighborhoods worked. Shade laid in gentle curves, sidewalks lifting where roots insisted, leaves thick enough to quiet whatever tried to grow beneath them.

I did not know I was living inside something planted all at once. Sometimes I slipped past the rows into small woods the builders had missed. The air cooled. The light split. Tulip poplars rose straight into the sky.

Red oaks held the ground in a way I could feel without understanding. Beech stood pale and smooth, like a room that asked for silence. Sweet birch carried the faint scent of wintergreen.

These places felt older than anything I knew how to name. Back in my neighborhood, the maples spread wide and shallow, covering everything. I lived beneath them without knowing what they had replaced.

Even then, something remained. A single poplar behind a fence. A beech at the edge of a schoolyard. A red oak holding its ground. I noticed them without knowing why.

Now I understand what remained.

 

Richard Hurst is a writer who recently retired from a patrol position with the Minneapolis Park Police and now works seasonally as a ranger in New Mexico’s Gila country. His work explores public space, memory, landscape, and the fragile structures that hold people together. His writing has appeared in the Minnesota Reformer, MinnPost and Núvol, with forthcoming work in Smoky Blue Literary & Arts Magazine, Star 82 Review and Thin Places Journal.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Plain Jane’s Calamity

by Barbara Diehl

 

Jane sees herself as anything but plain. Jane is no child in a primary reader who looks and sees and runs with a brother named Dick and a dog named Spot. Jane is no Jane Eyre, no pitiable governess, no almost-missionary’s wife. Jane is no Tarzan’s Jane, a Baltimorean bumbling her way through an African jungle. No, not our Jane. Our Jane sees herself a Calamity Jane, tobacco spitter, a beer guzzler, sharpshooter, fearless rider Jane, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.

But look. See Jane in her gingham dress and bobby socks watch Dick play fetch with Spot. See Jane push funny little baby Puff in the carriage while Dick struts in Father’s fedora. But see Jane cower before the savage, unrepressed Bertha in the attic. But see Jane run from Thornfield Hall across windswept moors clutching her carpetbag of belongings. But see Jane need Tarzan to rescue her from lions and apes and kidnappers, time and time again.

See Jane ride the subway with her dog spray canister tucked into her cross-body bag. See Jane take coffee orders, take minutes of the meeting on a legal pad, take whatever anyone dishes out, take it with a grain of salt, take it on the chin, take it like a good sport. See Jane dream of a horse named Rochester, a lover named Hickok, of being addressed, with respect, as tribal chieftess, and sometimes Lady Greystoke.

See Jane dream of bursting through saloon doors with a Winchester rifle. Dream of a Stetson with an eagle feather. Of spurs. Of being spurred, an unbroken horse in a wild west show. Dream of herself in Father’s fedora, leaving little baby Puff with Dick so she can rip herself right out of that reader. Be Bertha shredding the bridal veil, burning the manor down. Plain Jane is only a bookmark. Plain Jane is not the story. See Jane know she will be any Jane but plain.

 

Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poems appear in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, Raleigh Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Tiny Molecules, Sky Island Journal, Gargoyle, and Cleaver. She is the winner of the 2025 L+S Press Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series Contest.

 

See what happens when you click below.

CNF: My Mother Hates the Movie FARGO

by Courtney LeBlanc

 

Thinks it portrays the state she loves more than her daughter as small. Backwards. A frozen tundra. Plus, she argues they got the accent wrong but every time I talked to my father, Oooh Courtney, how ya doin’? rolled out of his mouth and I can confirm: Frances McDormand nailed the accent. And that scene where Steve Buscemi buries the money in the snow-filled ditch and he looks one way and it’s just a blanket of white stretched as far as he can see and then he looks in the other direction and it’s the same—yeah, that was my childhood. And my childhood was great, my playground: our entire farm, wide open for miles, but I always felt caged in so I left as soon as I could. Now I hate winter, can’t stand the cold, have only returned for one Christmas in twenty-six years. I recently rewatched the movie, it still holds up. My relationship with my mother is complicated, frozen for years, my father’s death thawed it a bit. I don’t talk to her much but I call her the credits rolled. I wanted my father’s voice in my ears, those long Os, the way he laughed at the woodchipper scene. I try not to cry when she picks up.

 

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of the four full-length collections, most recently Her Dark Everything and Her Whole Bright Life (winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize). She is the Arlington County Poet Laureate Emerita and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She’s also the founder of the Poetry Coven, a monthly generative workshop. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Find her online at www.courtneyleblanc.com.

 

See what happens when you click below.

We’ll Have Plans

by Suzanne C Martinez

 

Let’s make a vow that fifteen years from now, we will not be those people who only talk about aches and pains, doctors’ visits, or upcoming operations, or about people we knew who have passed on, bless their hearts. Let’s not criticize other people’s questionable clothing choices, their saggy neck wrinkles, or the crepey skin on their arms. We won’t suck our teeth mentioning the ones who’ve had ‘work done’ or dental implants. We won’t discuss anyone’s children’s divorces and job losses, or our grandchildren’s many accomplishments.

Instead, let’s get together and talk about the books we’re reading, the trips we’re planning, and the Broadway shows we have tickets for. Let’s go to the gym and swim, do yoga, and lift weights. Let’s finish writing our novels, start another one, and create new paintings in a series. Let’s go out for dinner at nice restaurants weekly, see the latest art shows, and attend book launches. Let’s live each day as if it were endless, and we have plenty of time.

But if we should die, let’s be ghosts. Let’s haunt the playground after the kids have gone and swing as high as the stars. Let’s make transparent rabbit ears behind everyone’s head on school picture day. And dance in the moonlight on roofs and parapets like fireflies. Best of all, we’ll go down into basements and up into attics, where they always say never to go.

 

Suzanne C Martinez’s fiction has appeared in North American Review, Wigleaf, Vestal Review, The Citron Review, and The Broadkill Review, among others, and was nominated for Pushcart Prizes (2019, 2020, 2026), The Best of the Net (2020, 2024), and Best Short Fictions (2022). She lives in Brooklyn.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Dorothy

by Ryan McGeeney

 

When I was ten years old, I asked my grandmother what my name was.

She leaned forward, put her hands on the knees of her polyester slacks, and peered into my eyes, her bottle-bottom-thick lenses between us.

“Omarosa Pizza Pan,” she said.

Our mouths were flat lines, a silence hardening between us.

“Millenia Trashcan Biscuit Basket,” she said.

My lip quivered. An eyebrow raised.

“Arsenio Fargleswap,” she said. I gave my head a single, curt shake.

I cleared my throat.

“Deprock Kegglebate,” I said.

Her septuagenarian face. A withered, immovable rock.

“No, no,” she said. “Don’t believe that’s right.”

“Maxamillian Farkletwerp,” I said, just a hint of a question mark.

“Mmmmmm, no,” she said. She straightened her back, stretching her hips forward a bit.

Gazing at the horizon above my head, she took in the full lay of the Kansas land before bringing her foggy gaze back down to me. Like the Hubble telescope hammered into the Rock of Gibraltar, that face.

“Ah,” she said, lowering her face back into mine. “Now I remember.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Lazarus,” she said. “Lazarus Gorthmorkin the Fourth.”

Pause.

“Forkin.”

And I lost it. The woman had done it again — chipped away at my bearing until I stood no chance of keeping a straight face.

This was a ritual between us, and we found ways to execute it all throughout our summer days, when I spent large swaths of time at her house, as my parents did whatever it is they did in the intervening years between their wedding and their divorce. Helping my grandmother bake cookies, I would pass her a scoop of kooglebarter fappleschnitz, after being directed to pull out the Skaarsgarten mufflestomp from the drawer of baking pans. It’s a wonder we never poisoned anyone.

The game, such as it was, had grown out of my first conscious memory. I was five years old, and had simply “come to” in my body while standing a few feet away from her, looking into those foggy, rheumatic gazers of hers. And when I’d asked her my name on that day, I’d honestly had no idea.

And so she told me. Even as a small child, I was skeptical about many things, but the name had the ring of truth. Going forward, no one disagreed with it. Had she been a woman of greater guile, she really could’ve gone with anything. Missed opportunity for both of us, I suppose.

And that was Dorothy. The first woman I remember. A child of the Great Depression, rye from morning into night, but forthright enough not to leave you completely unmoored in your more vulnerable hours.

Skepticism notwithstanding, I wasn’t especially insightful as a child, and ardently self-absorbed as an adolescent, so I never really discovered that much about her in life. “Discovered.” As if I’d have had to interrogate her. All I really would’ve had to do, more than likely, was ask. But I never did.

For shame.

Whatever became of Dorothy? Why, she died, of course. Some 20 years after letting me in on the forgotten secret of my own name, she’d faded rapidly in her final years, succumbing to Alzheimer’s or dementia or some other disease of forgetting and dysfunction.

I traveled home for her funeral, but regretted not having been available to her when she, perhaps, might have needed someone she could trust to simply remind her of her own name.

“Gorgonzola Moonraft,” perhaps.

 

Ryan McGeeney is a writer and carpenter living in central Arkansas. His work has also appeared in The Bleeding Margin. His forthcoming novella, “The Merciful Thing,” will be available from Ruadán Books in 2027. His woodworking can be seen at https://www.instagram.com/the.occasional.woodworker/.

 

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 September 15, 2025. Submit here.

Upcoming

10/12 • Kathy Fish
10/19 • Katherine Garrison
10/26 • Beverly Jackson
11/02 • Robert Scotellaro
11/09 • T.L. Sherwood
11/16 • Susan Buchler
11/23 • TBD
11/30 • TBD
12/07 • TBD
12/14 • TBD
12/21 • TBD
12/28 • TBD