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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Autumn Hummingbird

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.

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Taxonomy

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.

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My Left Thumb

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.

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CNF

by Terena Elizabeth Bell

Zoomers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 2024

In the room young women come and go, TikToking Michelangelo.

Terena Elizabeth Bell is a fiction writer. Her debut short story collection,Tell Me What You See (Whiskey Tit, 2022), was named one of the “best books of the century” by New York Society Library. Her writing has appeared in more than 100 publications. A Kentucky native, she lives in New York. Get one story delivered to your inbox every month by subscribing here: patreon.com/terenaelizabethbell.

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Interview Erasure

by Wayne Lee

Writer, editor and teacher Wayne Lee (wayneleepoet.com) lives in Santa Fe, NM. Lee’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Press, Slipstream, The New Guard, Writer’s Digest and other journals and anthologies. He was awarded the 2012 Fischer Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and four Best of the Net Awards. His collection The Underside of Light was a finalist for the 2014 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award; his collection Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets was published by Cornerstone Press in April 2025; and his collection The Beautiful Foolishness is forthcoming from Casa Urraca Press in 2026. Lee is the host of the online Tuesday Poetry Practice community.

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First Woman

by Sarah Daly

The existential angst of not being able to find a job was squashing her brain. Like flattening it to a pancake. Her brain would become so flat that there would be no room for the 12,000-word research paper about beetle worms’ spots. There would be no room for the two-hour lecture about the habits of glowworms in volcanoes. There would be no room for the three-year experiment comparing the variegations of gnats’ wings. Her brain would become so flat that there would be big gaps in her head. Her head would sound hollow when she slumped over her desk and impatient students knocked on it. Helium from the gnats’ nests would creep into her ears and fill those hollow spaces. Her head would get so light that her feet would lift off the ground. She would begin to float over her crazy city and look down on everyone. She would float over lakes and rivers and streams and cities and mountains and oceans, lots and lots of oceans. She would get so sick of water that she would dream she was a cactus. She would float higher and higher until the clouds were cushioning her and wrapping themselves around her like ermine robes. She would wave at passengers on airplanes who fainted when they saw her. She would knock birds off their courses, who plummeted to untimely deaths. She would float until the air was purplish and speckled with stars. She would float until she passed the satellites and saw nothing but swathes of light on a blueish background. She would float until her feet touched a white, dusty surface and she landed. Then the helium would leak from her head and her brain would expand back and she would live a very happy existence on the moon.

Sarah Daly is an American writer whose fiction, poetry, and drama have appeared in fifty-five literary journals including New Feathers, Moss Puppy Magazine, Shot Glass Journal, and The Avalon Literary Review, and Autumn Sky Daily. You can find her work at https://sarahdalywrites.wordpress.com/

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About Time

by Robert McBrearty

He was meditating in his favorite rocking chair in the cabin when his wife said, rather urgently, You might want to hurry with that, the enemy is about to attack.

His eyes fluttered open for a moment and he caught a glimpse of the full moon through the window. Of course, he thought, they always attack during the full moon. It was so like her to make a big deal of things. He heard the wind rattling the clapboard cabin. Plenty of time, he said, you can’t rush a meditation. He shut his eyes and focused on his breath, in, out, a wavelike movement of the belly.

She gave that certain long-suffering sigh of hers. He heard her storming about, shuttering the windows, barring the door, loading the weapons.

Really, she said, couldn’t you help a little for once?

This isn’t a good time, he said, without opening his eyes. Let me know when they arrive.

Jerk, she muttered.

There was a fierce pounding at the door. The door shuddered and creaked at the hinges. The wind rushed in. He stood up, blinking his eyes in bewilderment. My God, he said, what’s going on here?

His wife gave him that certain withering look of hers and asked, Is it a good time now?

But she was already opening fire.

Robert Garner McBrearty’s stories have been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize and widely published in literary journals including Missouri Review, New England Review, North American Review, StoryQuarterly, and previously in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. He’s the author of six books of fiction including A Night at the Y, When I can’t Sleep (Matter Press), and The Problem You Have (University of New Mexico Press, 2025). His writing awards include a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award and fellowships from MacDowell and the Fine Arts Work Center.

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Dépaysement

by Mathieu Parsy

My coat isn’t warm enough for Toronto’s winter. The consulate man said, “Layers are key,” but he had a beard and the kind of face that doesn’t feel cold. My breath fogs like speech bubbles in a language I don’t read. Every time the subway doors open, the air bites a little harder. This city wants me to flinch.

I live in an open basement with a futon and a microwave that smells like melted plastic. The ceiling is low. I bump my head on edges I keep forgiving. My landlady is an old Greek woman who calls me “France” and warns me not to use the washing machine at night because it frightens the cat. There is no cat. There is no explanation either. I nod and try not to dream of water.

The city is wide and gray and not ugly, just undecided. Glass, concrete, a skyline in mid-thought. I walk west on Queen Street with my hands in my pockets and pretend I’m in transit. Everyone here walks like they’re late for something beautiful. They carry coffee like weapons. I buy one too. It burns my tongue, and I’ve been branded.

I came here for reasons that sounded better in French: Épanouissement. Indépendance. Opportunité. I recited them to my mother to reassure her. Now I say: “I’m just settling in,” and “It’s an adjustment,” while watching the water heater in my room click at odd intervals, like it’s learning Morse code. Sometimes I answer it. “Yes,” I say. “I know. Not yet.”

At the French bakery on College, the woman behind the counter asks where I’m from. I want to say something wry and memorable. Instead I shrug and say, “Marseille,” like I’m offering a confession. She says she’s from Nice, and her mouth twists when she says it, like it used to be something she was proud of.

On Sundays, I call my sister and tell her things I think will travel well across the Atlantic: a guy on the streetcar was beatboxing into a sock, a squirrel stole a whole sandwich, there’s a bar that serves nothing but cereal. I don’t tell her about the silence. How it follows me through daylight like a patient dog. How sometimes I whistle and wait for it to come.

Today I applied for a job folding clothes in a store where all the music sounds like someone exhaling. The manager had hair that looked expensive. She asked if I had Canadian experience. I answered, “I’m working on it.” But I was dying to tell her: I fold my own laundry. I fold into this city like origami—smaller each day. Isn’t that experience?

I’ve started naming pigeons out the window. One of them has a limp. I call him Alain. He comes most mornings and stands at the same crooked angle. I leave him crumbs shaped like letters. Sometimes he eats the ones that spell “okay.”

In the evenings, the upstairs tenant practices the same piano song—slow, with one note slightly off. I pause. It sounds like someone learning to stay.

Mathieu Parsy is a Canadian writer who grew up on the French Riviera. He now lives in Toronto and works in the travel industry. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Flash Frog, MoonPark Review, BULL, New World Writing Quarterly, and Bending Genres. Follow him on Instagram at @mathieu_parsy.

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CNF: Horses

by Yejun Chun

The word for “horse” in Korean is “말” which also means “words” but none of us were allowed to speak out loud the thoughts that we created in the classroom.

Especially during our midnight sessions and Saturdays. The blinders thickened then. The teacher said that he’ll make us gallop across the finish line first, no matter what it takes. The rest will have their name erased from the race. No higher education for those who tread, they don’t deserve it. Our heads are always down; the equations and Greek letters scribbled by hands are our marks. They also marked how much respect we could earn and the time we could eat our dinners.

His voice snaps like a whip. I am called out. Caught daydreaming again. Last time, it was a slap to the right cheek. The ruler hits my palms and the numbers go flying. The others still have their heads down. Like shattered glass, the plastic bits twinkle in the air, momentarily like sugar or stars or dust particles in the sunlight.

Retracing my mind now. I was not animalistic enough for the real world. The tears swallow themselves. The notebook hidden inside my desk had new poems about flowers and grapes, ready to be eaten by the hills.

Yejun Chun is a poet, playwright, and prose writer from Seoul, South Korea. He is currently studying English Literature and Culture at Yonsei University as a graduate student. His works of poetry, CNF, and short fiction have been published in the Academy of American Poets, fractured lit, Hobart, and 50-Word Stories among many other places. His plays have been performed in Seoul. He has been awarded the top University Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 2024.

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And Flecked with Copper

by Justin Ocelot

One day, I daydreamed a stone, veined with calcite and flecked with copper. It felt heavy in my hand, just like a real stone. I had no doubt that, if I dropped it, it would fall to the ground. But I put it in my pocket instead. I wanted to show it to my wife, but when I got home it was gone.

One day, I daydreamed a wife. She was exactly like my real wife, except that she was a Formula One race car driver with a crowded mantle of trophies. I felt a little intimidated in her presence. Tragically, she perished a month later in a fiery crash.

One day, I daydreamed a funeral. The people who came were mostly race car drivers. It was disconcerting to see such hardened men weeping like babes. When the ceremony was over, I gathered their tears off the grass. They were just like real tears, but hard like diamonds.

One day, I daydreamed that I found some diamonds and became a millionaire. I gave most of it away to friends and family and random people on the street. I kept only one dime, which I used to place a call from the payphone that used to stand on the corner in front of the old drugstore. “Hello, mom?” I said.

One day, I daydreamed a mother. I was walking by the harbor, where the boats come in and out, and she waved to me from the deck of a catamaran. She had a tan and her hair was dark again and the wind blew it wildly, like the tail of a horse that would never tire of running.

One day, I daydreamed a horse. I looked in his eyes and I felt that we understood each other perfectly. We were brothers, divided into different species by some cruel trick of nature. “Ride on me,” he seemed to say, “and we will reach the very ends of the earth.”

One day, I daydreamed I was galloping to the very ends of the earth. A storm was chasing us, spitting lightning and belching thunder. We reached the edge and kept going and tumbled hoof-over-head into sky, endless and blue. When we stopped spinning, I saw the earth below me like a stone, veined with calcite and flecked with copper.

I took it home and showed it to my wife. “It’s beautiful,” she breathed.

Justin Ocelot collects unsolvable puzzles and invisible maps. He writes stories without training wheels (they aren’t safe and you might fall off). He lives with his wife and two boys in a tropical forest somewhere along the coast of California. More info at justinocelot.com.

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CNF: I Keep Thinking About that Scene From Buffy the Vampire Slayer

by Allison Blevins

Buffy comes home on a bright day, windows streaming day and sunshine. I sit on the sofa shivering, calmly stroking the soft hairs on the top of my daughter’s foot, her body half-on and half-off my body—languid. Hold music, soft violin and piano. Tell them you’re a call back patient, said the nurse who called to give me the results.

My husband paces the living room, plugs in the lights on the Christmas tree. My hand strokes my daughter’s foot. My husband mouths, 9 days? They don’t have an earlier appointment? And I remind myself to notice. Remember. Remember this. If you can take your memories with you.

The whole Summers’ house is horror movie bright. Buffy finds her mother on the sofa—eyes open and arms jutting. Joyce is all elbows and finger joints crooked. Her skirt is hitched ever so slightly higher than anyone would want for their own mother—who is soon to be found on the sofa by EMTs.

Later, I argue with my husband. It feels so good to scream. Get out of the bathroom. He says I’m misunderstanding. I wait motionless while he walks back and forth from bathroom to bedroom, bedroom to bathroom, bathroom to bedroom. When he finally leaves, I take a handful of pills I’ve been saving for an eventuality like this.

Buffy vomits on the floor, and she stares and stares, and it is so silent and the silence makes the brightness brighter. Louder. Later, Willow and Tara share their first kiss on screen.

Earlier, in my car in a basement parking lot, I move my body violently. After reading the report, I’d managed three floors down in the parking garage elevator. In the car, my body shakes my torso and jerks my hands from my arms—unnatural and sharp—my lungs scream despite my mouth’s resistance. I call my husband and tell him the report says right breast and multiple masses. I gasp and choke. The whole thing so desperate and raucous and embarrassing.

I think about those old tinny photos I took at the lake some summers. The one with my dad in a high backed wicker chair. He wears a soldier costume right out of a civil war reenactment.

This episode of Buffy is titled “The Body.” Apparently Joss Whedon didn’t want this episode to have an existential lesson. The point was for all of us to watch a person become a mere body.

I loved those photos, summers when our family rented a few nights at the lake and dad drove a rented speed boat and we ate banana saltwater taffy and raced at every go-kart track along the highway from our small town to the lake one state over.

The EMTs leave Joyce on the floor after performing CPR, leave the body with Buffy.  Unrealistic.  When Giles comes, Buffy exclaims, We aren’t supposed to move the body!

On the sofa shivering, waiting on hold, waiting to the soft, surprising on-hold music, I remember the day my mom called me to her room as a child. My mom had to tell me my friend since preschool was dead—driving to the city to shop for Christmas. I’ve had a recurring nightmare ever since. I killed her. My psychiatrist might call this a trauma response.

I can’t tell you much about what happens in the dream. I just know it’s my fault. In the dream. In the car after I read the report, I was screaming again and again against my closed mouth.

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down?, Cataloguing Pain, Handbook for the Newly Disabled: A Lyric Memoir, Slowly/Suddenly, and six chapbooks. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com

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CNF: from Paradise

by Stephan Viau

every time a window opens, a bumble bee saunters in, as though it had been knocking. i sit and make it tea to ease its mind. we chat about this and that over what biscuits i might have lying around. it didn’t hope for anything special. it’s not out for some devastating truth, but when it dies looking for the window on the way out, i know everything comes to us whether we want it to or not.

Stephan Antoine Viau is a poet, translator, and reviewer. He earned his MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University. HEIRLOOMS, his first book of poems, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2026. Work of his has appeared in The Hong Kong Review of Books, The Colorado Review, ABSTRACT, The Word’s Faire, HASH, New Delta Review, among others. He lives in Maryland with his family

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Your body knows things you never could

by Catherine Bai

Not everything needs to be seen by the love of your life. Just because they want to kiss you doesn’t mean they want to peer into your fallopian tube, and look for that one fragile, fading memory. You know the one. I never said you couldn’t show them all the words you’d never say out loud. Say them to your mother, who would’ve loved you anyway. Except you wouldn’t do the same for her. Yeah, I said it. ‘Cause I’m that way too. The leaking yawn of your mouth looks so stupid now, but it was celestial, when you couldn’t imagine that one day, everyone you know will die, and so will everyone you didn’t know, who died anyway. Picture the pomegranate tree, in the underworld. They’re not red but green. I bet you thought of the fruit ripe and heaving, with scars on the skin that someone made when the branch was still an embryo. The dark traffic swimming, in the pale bit of bone.

Catherine Bai is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and a residency grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her fiction was longlisted for the 2025 Disquiet Prize, appears in Best Debut Short Stories 2022, and is forthcoming in AGNI. Her poetry is forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine.

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Goblin Toes

by Isabelle Ness

“Goddammit, can’t you keep your feet clean? Can’t you learn how to wash them with soap like a big girl?” Mother is raising her voice over the ch, ch, ch of the peeler against the carrot. “Look at those things, you got dirt all over them. You got toenails like a goblin. Aren’t you embarrassed?”

I tell her I do keep them clean, but the truth is I don’t. They are so far away in the shower. They are so far away they are their own entity, I tell them to take care of themselves.

“I’m embarrassed enough for the both of us. Having a daughter with goblin toes.” Shhhhhh, the faucet over the carrots. “Hand me that pot, will you?”

Mother is talking mad but she’s not really mad. She is making jokes. I hand her the pot and she fills it with water, sets it to boil. Then she slides a knife from the drawer and chops like the wind. Like she is racing herself to the finish, like she is just a little bit excited she might catch up to her fingers and take them right off. Shht!

“Your toes aren’t any better,” I say, and I point to her big toe, the one with the ingrown nail the doctor had to dig out. Left nothing but a nub behind. “Talk about goblin toes!” I cry, and I run from the kitchen, but I hear her laughing behind me. She is laughing that good-life laugh. I’m laughing, too, and my feet slap, slap, slap down the hallway.

In the living room my brother is watching the news. Always he is watching the news, or listening to it, or reading it. I think if they found a way to put it in a cup he would drink it.

“You see this shit?” he says. “Crazy. People are crazy.” He is shaking his head and I can hear in his voice how much it hurts him, the people. When he looks at me he sighs, and I feel him thinking I won’t ever understand. Maybe he is right.

Bang, my foot comes down on the coffee table. “Do you think I have goblin toes?”

He takes a look at my grubby nails. “Yes,” he says. “Yeah, you got goblin toes, for sure,” and he cracks a smile. For all his hurt, my brother’s smile is the kind that bunches around the eyes, that makes you think everything is okay—that it’s better than okay, that it’s marvelous. I huff like I’m mad and turn away quick before the smile goes. I find the sliding glass door and I slip out into the yard.

It is twilight, I think. Gray. But the cicadas still zzzzzzz in the bushes. And my goblin toes step through the grass. Push into the earth, crack a few sticks. I watch them taking me somewhere—it’s true, see, they are their own entity, even if Mother doesn’t believe me. They take me around the house, over the fence, out into the field that borders the cemetery. They take me, and take me, and take me, until I am tired of all the taking, and we stop beside a hickory tree and a tombstone. They seem to be talking to me, my goblin toes, from down there in the grass and the dirt. Take a good look, they seem to be saying, Take a look, girl.

Isabelle Ness is a fiction writer from Wisconsin. Her flash fiction was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and appears in Atticus Review. Her short story, “Celestial Bodies,” was a finalist in the Sixfold Fiction Contest. She currently lives in western Massachusetts, where she is at work on a novel.

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Eve writes a letter to God

by Rowan Tate

First of all, the ground here is different. Not bad, just different. More stubborn, like a child who won’t answer unless you call more than twice, or a scab. I’ve learned how to plant the seeds of a fruit, how to tell when the water is clean enough to drink, how to hold a chicken still to slit its throat clean, and how to salt a fish so it won’t go soft by morning. We mark time now by the state of our feet. Did you think it would come to this? I have learned which ribs from the carcass of dead animals break easiest for tools. Is that the lesson you wanted me to learn? I made fire. With flint. Thank you for fingernails. And sweat glands. And clay that hardens into something useful. I understand decay now: the things that die help us live. You and I don’t have to wonder what it’s like to be the first of anything. To be without precedent. You made me from absence and called it help; I make bread from stones and call it dinner. I don’t miss it, in case you’re wondering. I don’t need paradise. I need a decent rain now and then. I need one child to come home clean. I need fewer dreams where I taste the fruit again and wake up with a mouthful of dirt. The animals have become unkind. The children are loud. Abel watches ants take apart a fig and doesn’t interfere. Cain bites his nails and strangles snakes in the grass when he thinks I’m not close enough to see. He is trying to understand. Why did we have to leave? Why did He stay? When can we go back? Adam breaks the bread unevenly. He looks at me now the way you did the last time I saw you, like I’m part of the wilderness to be tamed. I write so you cannot pretend you do not hear me. I want you to know what it costs us to live in the world you abandoned. Do you remember when you taught me how to swim? When we put stories in the skies and gave the stars names? Please stop sending the snakes, as if we need the reminder. I know what you’re doing. I haven’t forgiven you yet. Read this aloud in your silence. I invented this alphabet from what you left us in order to say I remember everything, I will not let you be the only one to tell this story. I can still name things. You didn’t take that from me.

Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative (poet, essayist, visual artist, songwriter). She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.

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CNF: Chef Boyardee

by Salvatore Difalco

During one of our last meals together—a simple spaghetti al pomodoro prepared on short notice—my mother recalled how as a child I used to beg her for Chef Boyardee spaghetti. “That stuff from the can,” she said. “Seriously?” I said. “Madonna,” she said, “you wouldn’t shut up about it. Please ma, please! Oh, I’d get so angry.” Her voice trailed off and her blue eyes lost focus. “Ma, are you okay?” I asked. She nodded but kept staring.

I’d forgotten all about Chef Boyardee. As I twirled a forkful of spaghetti, I tried to imagine what rattled through my young idiot mind at the time. Back in the day, my Sicilian mother could roll with the best of them in the kitchen. Her ricotta-and-spinach ravioli had achieved mythic status among the paisans. Cheeks powdered with flour, she’d spend an entire Sunday morning laying out the dough, prepping the filling, then sectioning the ravioli squares with a wood-handled wheel cutter from the old country. She stopped making the ravioli a few years before she passed away. But right until the end, even with arthritic hands and onset dementia, she could whip up a mouthwatering and heartwarming plate of spaghetti al pomodoro in a flash.

That I begged my mother for Chef Boyardee both puzzled and wounded her. Those clever 1960s television ads played a part for sure. But essentially, I just wanted to belong. As a son of immigrants who could barely speak English, I yearned to be more like my schoolmates, which among other things meant eating the foods they ate. Paradoxically, many of them, who weren’t Italian, liked Chef Boyardee products—not only spaghetti, but also the mini-ravioli, beefaroni and rings. I have to hand it to my mother: no matter how much I pleaded, begged, and cajoled her, she never relented. She likened Chef Boyardee spaghetti to worms, and refused to buy it for me. Indeed she made me swear I’d never eat it.

My twenty-year-old Giuseppe has come home late tonight. His blue eyes—straight from my mother, likely an errant Norman gene—are bloodshot and he smells of booze and weed. He’s had it tough since his mother passed away a year ago. Breast cancer. I ask if he’s hungry. “Sure,” he says, “I can eat.” I chop up a small onion, a garlic clove, and heat them in a pan with chili flakes and olive oil. Then I open a can of SAN Marzano tomatoes, empty it into the pan and turn up the heat. I crush the tomatoes with a wooden spoon, stir, season, and set a pot of salted water to boil. “Spaghetti or spaghettini?” I ask my son. “Spaghetti, pops,” he says. “Make it real al dente, please.” He sighs, rests his head in his hands. I stir the bubbling sauce. Time passes. I never did eat Chef Boyardee. Not once. Not even in my college and stoner days. The water comes to a boil.

Sicilian Canadian poet and storyteller Salvatore Difalco is the author of five books, including Black Rabbit & Other Stories (Anvil Press). His short works have appeared in journals such as E-ratio, The Lake, Heavy Feather Review, and Cafe Irreal. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

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Breach

by Lucy Zhang

My mother-in-law claimed that my work caused my breech baby, and the only way to flip him was to drink white peony tea and quit, never mind that I couldn’t quit my job else we’d be down half an income—although trust me, I’d love to have quit. My baby ended up punching his way out, a mutant breech unwilling to contemplate the notion of being cut out from the top. Not even too high a cut. Bikini cut style so scars remain hidden even when stretch marks reign free. But he lived and I lived and I thought that was the end of it.

Except my son kept getting lost. Or, I kept losing him in this placenta-exterior era. I found him sitting in cupboards, crawling by the window sill, sleeping on the car hood. An aimless wanderer who I feared would one day slip through a crack in the asphalt and find himself in another dimension. Because you let money win over your heart, my mother-in-law chastised. A baby can’t find its way back to a heart void of maternal devotion. I disagreed: getting lost simply meant knowing where to search, when to give up. Even vanishing through a space time continuum couldn’t deter my son’s intuition to find home: the smell of vinegar and garlic, the feel of a tousled carpet in patches of bald and clumped tufts from the dog’s nails, the taste of microscopic drops of breast milk squeezed from sore, tender nipples bubbling with blebs. A baby who had ripped his way through me would never struggle to find the tear and stretch it until there’s enough space to fit a mother’s “heart of devotion” and then some.

Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech or on Instagram @Dango_Ramen.

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CNF: The Scent of Cinnamon

by Alison Colwell

Scrub the counters, put away the dishes, open the window to let the May breeze into my kitchen. Outside the sky is robin’s egg blue. I flip the pages of my red binder: Cinnamon Buns, Brownies, Caramel Squares, Dream Squares, and more.

I tighten my clean apron. Breathe.

I begin small. But it’s so hard to choose, I end up making more than I’d planned.

Measuring sugar and butter into the mixer, cracking eggs, adding vanilla, a pinch of baking powder, sifting flour, my hands remember their tasks. Scooping cookie dough onto baking sheets to slide into the oven.

It’s been eighteen months since I filled my bakery stand.

Eighteen months since I rolled raisins and brown sugar into brioche dough for a batch of cinnamon buns.

Eighteen months since my daughter was hospitalized for anorexia. Since food changed from being how I express my love, and creativity into something darker.

She almost starved to death.

While my skin smelt of cinnamon and vanilla, while racks of baking crowded the kitchen counters, I almost lost her.

She’s okay now.

It took a long time.

Now I’m in my kitchen again, reaching back to the time before, when food was love, when customers fought for the last raisin scone, when feeding people was a pleasure.

Early the next morning I pull cinnamon buns from the oven and slide one onto a plate.

“Time to wake up.”

She opens her eyes.

I set the warm pastry onto her bedside table and she smiles up at me.

Alison Colwell is a writer, mother, domestic violence survivor and community organizer. Her work has been published in several literary journals including: The Humber Literary Review, The Ocotillo Review, Roi Faineant Literary Press, Hippocampus Magazine, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes and is forthcoming in Grist. She lives on Galiano Island, Canada.
Connect with her at: alisoncolwell.com.

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CNF: Tuesday, the Regulars

by Liz Abrams-Morley

The second rat to scuttle across his foot and back into the dumpster, my friend Damien still doesn’t look down, just goes on directing cars into spaces along the clinic’s low wall.  Not yet dawn.  Damien in his long purple skirt, his you- couldn’t- possibly- feel- a- rat -through these shit kicker boots of his, smart guy, the usual protesters across the one lane street, Tuesday regulars, all broken and ancient looking men probably ten years my junior, are setting up their posters on the side where they’re supposed to stay but don’t:  Don’t Kill Your Baby,  It’s a Life, not a Choice— today, a colorful addition:  Women’s Rights Begin in the Womb—how do they not see the irony, my friend, Sheri’s saying as she moves my brightly striped Clinic Escort vest over my puffy parka, pulls my orange wool hat down over my ears.   It’s cold.  The sun won’t rise for more than an hour this time of year, but the cars begin to show.  The women—smiling or defiant—I don’t pretend to know what any she feels—will arrive, wrapped in woolen jackets or swaddled in blankets over pj’s, Uggs on their feet and slippers in hand.

Young, very young, not all that young, I’m walking beside each one of them, putting my body between her and the curb, between her and the arm reaching toward us offering her a brochure, a so called ultrasound photo I know to be a newborn of at least 3 weeks.   Just ignore him, I croon.  Just ignore this guy and soon, each patient delivered to behind the heavy, self-locked doors, I’m back on the stoop of the clinic and one of the four usuals—Jerry usually—crosses the street to remind me that I’ll soon be burning in hell.  It’s 18 degrees.  Icy rage roils my gut the way snow floes calved and thundered off  waning glaciers I watched from a safe distance once in Alaska.   What I can’t say—never engage with them, the training manual directs—what I won’t say is how good hell fire sounds about now, my coffee no longer even lukewarm in the go cup. My mother’s abortion was so long ago, it was in the bad old days before the good old days we’re looking back on now, far from home, maybe in Puerto Rico, and how she got there, I never learned.  Did she shiver despite the humid sweetness of the island air?  Feel relief?  Terror? Butter-gold and pink sunrise striating the sky to the east now.  My mother’s silences before she ever boarded that prop mirrored nonstop her silences after.

Liz Abrams-Morley’s collection, Because Time, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2024. Other collections include Beholder, 2018, Inventory, 2014 and Necessary Turns, published by Word Poetry in 2010 and which won an Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Small Press Publishing that year. In 2020 she was named the Passager Poet of the year in Passager Journal’s annual contest. Liz’s poems and short stories have been published in a variety of nationally distributed anthologies, journals and ezines, and have been read on NPR. A retired faculty member in the Rosemont College MFA program, Liz is co-founder of Around the Block Writers’ Collaborative. Poet, professor, gramma and activist, Liz wades knee-deep in the flow of everyday life from which she draws inspiration and, occasionally, exasperation.

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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 September 15, 2025. Submit here.

Upcoming

03/23 • Kenneth Pobo
03/30 • Roberta Allen
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