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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CNF: Opera

by Sara Cassidy

The day of the neighbour’s death was given to shovelling his wide driveway following a deep snow – the first snow of the year, on Valentine’s Day, in a city that goes some winters with no snow at all. We spent hours in the whiteness, lifting water and hurling it to the side. Other neighbours came and went, even children, understanding the task and pitching in. One neighbour, from Colorado – who mentioned as we shoveled that she was a glass-half-full person — had expertise, a closeness of blade to pavement, a clean scrape. Shovelling is like digging, but above ground, and the matter ephemeral, its displacement itself ephemeral, especially in this part of the world where warmth and rain will make it all a memory within days – so much work for nothing. I am learning finally that every day is an opera – some long, some short, some poor, some great – with ephemerality being the singing. Of course, you are no longer the lead, the way you were when you’d regularly sit for an hour on a roadside or read for a few hours in a field, not heading anywhere, and not coming from anywhere either, would pull up a blade of grass and coax a bullet of sweetness from its end, using your teeth to pinch and squeeze, and deliver. The teenager leapt out of bed to help shovel – he’s so tall now he could brush the snow off the top of the car without even reaching. This tallness is built of birthdays, on each of which the neighbour has given him a double-litre of ice cream, all for himself, even when he was three. Can you imagine a small child owning that much ice cream, lifting the lid to that frosty landscape of selfish delight? An overwhelming gift. Our neighbour always had a laugh and a joke, a light-hearted, albeit non-committal, response to anything that was said. But neighbours being what they are, defined by boundaries, now that he is permanently on the other side of the fence, I wish, of course, that I’d gotten to know him better, had been a little bolder, worked harder – so what if he read the National Post? As we’d shovelled the driveway, his wife was miles away, sitting by his side, listening to his breathing, while the neighbours and I learned more about each other than we ever had, the mysteries of our houses given shape. That night, once we were all in our beds, our neighbour’s widow arrived home, and walked up the dark stripe of driveway, up the bare stairs, into the silent house, and fell asleep, exhausted – so she reported to me – then woke ten minutes later and watched tennis all night, not seeing any of it.

Sara Cassidy’s writing has been published in Barren Magazine, and in Canada’s Geist Magazine, Malahat Review, Fiddlehead, Grain, CV2, and other literary magazines, and she has won both a National Magazine Award for non-fiction and the Atlantic Writing Competition for poetry.

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CNF: Lilith’s Song

by Sunmisola Odusola

It may appear that a woman is always on the verge of becoming—a god, the moon, a still brook, a fruit, crockery, a mass of blackened blood, a daughter, so what she feels the need to do is to contain herself. In the room, a loaf of flesh brooding over ink-filled dead leaves, ink on her body, ink on her teeth, her blood warming up against her. The woman herself is a container. In the role of a daughter, not much is done, a lot is replicated instead. She wears her mother’s skin, and sheds it later on to become her own mother. But a container must forget, or be confined to a single use. Likewise, a girl must become and become, until her skin turns translucent, until she wakes up without a body, and until she feeds herself her own body. This consumption happens on the inside—the shedding of the lining—a metaphor for a body that cannot live with itself. A body that must run and run until it becomes the path it is chasing. First a daughter, then a lover, of the world, of art, of paper, of beauty. The first time I came in contact with beauty, it was the skin of a snake, and I had almost picked it up before I heard the hissing.

Sunmisola Odusola writes on existence, love, and death, and daydreams about making surrealist art someday. They were shortlisted for DKA Poetry Prize (2024), and have had their works published in Backwards Trajectory, Brittle Paper, Fiery Scribe Review, Witcraft, April Centaur, and Eunoia Review.

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CNF: I am here to lay my body down

by Carolyn Zaikowski

my rugs and tiles, I love them. yes, this is the correct word, love. my sinks, chairs, forks, these fronds on my ferns, and all my deep purple hearts. my primrose as well. and the atlases, those ancient ones I carried with me, with all their keys in code. and the mishappen stones, hoarded strings, dull tacks. for forty or a hundred days, or ‘til all that remains:
I am here to lay my body down;

yes, this vow is correct. for I left everything for here. left his home and his, too. was caught in phonebooths downtown and in fields stuffed with what were called, by trusted sources, wild things. I was brashly scissor-cut from the elegies and odes of my mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers all the way back. which wasn’t far, to be fair. and from rooms crushed by walls toppled by the unpacked crates of others. barred from the only room I had a key to, driven from the bed I’d, as in a dare, named mine. and so I lay my body down:

my paper stacks and dishes, my sprays. my notebooks and jumpers. lights and switches. all the shoes on my feet imprinting floors just because they can. crusty chairs, the links on my chains,
I love them, yes—this is the correct word, love, my love.

forty or a hundred days for my body forty or a hundred days for my bruise—

all the way back, foreseeing my autumn fern and its fronds, I someway waited. predicted my fern’s primordial lace, the glories of its slits and arrowy points. patient. maybe not serene, but patient. the man who never arrives will tell you: I’ve always been so patient. studying with a hustle and hope only to be attained with the glasses I was born with, and my abacus, my astrolabe, my camera obscura. all these trances I loved within, stubborn, years before I could aspire to meet lace, let alone the lace of a fern.
there’s no tracing or touching me now, here at this arrival. I am here to lay my body down.
forty or a hundred days.
forty or a hundred days for my body forty or a hundred days for my home.

Carolyn Zaikowski is the Poet Laureate of Easthampton, MA and the author of the novel In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely, in such publications as The Washington Post, Alaska Quarterly Review, Everyday Feminism, DIAGRAM, West Branch, and Denver Quarterly. Carolyn holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and currently works as a creative writing instructor and volunteer death doula. She can be found at www.carolynzaikowski.com and carolynzzz.substack.com.

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Finding My Story

by Joseph O’Day

I once got scolded in first grade because I needed to sharpen my pencil. Sister Rose had told us to take out a piece of paper and prepare for a quiz, but my pencil’s lead had broken. Before I could make my way to the sharpener, she hovered over me, and in raised voice declared, “No wonder you need to sharpen your pencil, Mr. O’Day. You’ve been writing all over your desk!” I started crying and Sister Rose sent for my sister Maureen in fifth grade to come see how bad I’d been.

That scene lived in my head for forty years, until I wrote it out. I had an image of short, stocky Sister Rose and of my desk in the back row behind the other kids, and of the patch I wore over my right eye to exercise my weak left eye. I believed I never wrote on that desk, but couldn’t be sure; I was only six at the time and lost touch with most of the living witnesses.

I also believed the story’s essence centered on Sister Rose’s oppression, how she pulled my chair and me to the back wall of closets (which stored our coats and lunch bags), and on my mother’s tepid reaction when I got home – “Those nuns make such a big deal out of everything.” But the more I rewrote and reviewed my memories, the shakier seemed my “facts.” I wondered for instance where the pencil sharpener was located. Was it next to Sister Rose’s desk in the front of the room like I thought? Was I seated in my chair when Sister moved it furiously to the back wall? How had she gotten from the front of the room to the back so quickly? Did she really strut through aisles of frightened students like I’d written, knocking them aside like Moses parting the waters?

Some elements stayed true, like Sister Rose showing Maureen the markings on my desktop, and her directive to tell our mother I’d “damaged school property.” There was another, overlooked, moment I recalled, that occurred away from Sister Rose’s grasp, when Maureen’s facial expression told me how ridiculous this was, when she looked into my eyes and whispered, “Jody, don’t worry. Don’t worry about it.” How soothing her words had felt, how great to have had her on my side. No wonder I didn’t worry about my mother finding out. I realized my story wasn’t about Sister Rose’s stridency, or my mother’s scoffing about nuns. It was about my ten-year-old sister’s kindness in that moment. It was about how Maureen had knocked away my feelings of humiliation and isolation and replaced them with love.

Joseph O’Day’s writing focuses on family relationships and life transitions. His work has appeared in The Bluebird Word, Oyster River Pages, Spry Literary Journal, The Critical Flame, bioStories, and other publications. He served as Director of Pharmacy at Brigham and Woman’s Faulkner Hospital for many years until his retirement and received his MA in English from Salem State University.

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CNF: I’m the Teacher They Make Memes About

by Jennifer Edwards

Home on winter break, unshowered, slightly buzzed, overtired, binge-watching 90-day Fiancé, hedging bets about which relationships will last. My husband says, Babe, you’re blending in! He sends a photo to our friends group chat documenting my obsession with Buffalo Plaid. My disembodied head floats in a congealed mass of my fleece-lined long sweater, knit blanket, and throw pillows of the same black and white print. I’m dissolving into comfort. He grins & waves his whole arm from across the sectional, smiling hello like Forrest Gump on a shrimp boat. I laugh & he pretends to be startled; Oh, I didn’t see you there! We’re confused when a girl on TV talks of Tylenol or first child an all. How long were we not paying attention? Wait, is there a child involved? We rewind. Oh, she meant tell all! It’s funny being wrong in different ways. Nobody speaks clearly anymore, I complain. Mmmhmm, he agrees. Or actually listens, I continue. Ya, exactly, he mumbles, down to his phone.

Jennifer R. Edwards’ collection, Unsymmetrical Body (Finishing Line Press) was an Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention, First Horizon Finalist, and Boston Author’s Club Julia Ward Howe Award Finalist. Her poems have received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, the New England Poetry Club Amy Lowell Prize, 6th place for the Poetry Super Highway contest, the Thomas Lux Poetry Fellowship from Palm Beach Poetry Festival and other support. Her poems appear in several anthologies and journals including Iron Horse Literary Review, The Shore, Beaver Magazine, RHINO, ELJ, MER, One Art, and Terrain. She’s a neurodiversity-affirming speech-language pathologist in public schools, and MFA in Writing candidate at Bennington Writing Seminars. She’s a curator for Button Poetry and serves on the board of the New Hampshire Poetry Society as events coordinator. https://linktr.ee/JenEdwards @JenEdwards8

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CNF: Night Shift

by Amy Speace

My mother would throw open the curtains of our darkened yellow room singing, O what a beautiful morning!, the stabbing sun at high noon, a cheery scold as the house had been

moving for hours, alive as a corporation. I never saw the sunrise until I had a baby and then I saw every hour. At night she’d dress in her bridal peach nightgown, long gauze train, satin straps holding her to her vow, over sweatpants smeared with flour handprints. Curled under covers, my sister and I would squeal when she’d enter our room. She called herself the night nymph and would dance us off to sleep, while our father worked past dinner, past stories, past dreaming.

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana/Folk singer and songwriter, discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won “International Song of the Year” from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother and Salon.com. Her debut collection of poetry, The Cardinals, will be published by Red Hen Press in Spring 2027. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield.

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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

12/15 • Isabelle Ness
12/22 • Catherine Bai
12/29 • Stephan Viau
01/05 • Allison Blevins
01/12 • Justin Ocelot
01/19 • Yejun Chun
01/26 • Mathieu Parsy
02/02 • Robert McBrearty
02/09 • Sarah Daly
02/16 • Wayne Lee
02/23 • Terena Elizabeth Bell
03/02 • Michael Mirolla
03/09 • Nicholas Claro
03/16 • TBD
03/23 • TBD
03/30 • TBD