Borderlines
by Chiwenite Onyekwelu
When I dream about poetry I dream about it in borderlines. For example. Instead of moonlight, I say Luz de la luna & watch the Spanish sing. In another dream, I’m running because the country I call home has been set on fire. At the Immigration someone says, No pigs & I imagine a dancefloor in Lagos. Like everyone I’m half drunk & I’m swirling around with my jeweled feet. I say, could you imagine Emi elede & they laugh because here, I fit in. Because here the music the music. In yet another dream, there’s no word for pig, so he says Svaagat meaning welcome meaning feel safe. Somewhere in his throat, a light. Language is such a personal thing. Like orgasm. Or like that other dream, where– astonished–an American screams Holy cow so I try to poetize it in Bangladesh: tsarki sani. Language is a personal thing. Otherwise tell me why, despite where I look, a holy cow is more funny than fuss. I imagine its chubby neck, the prayer beads around its wrist, imagine it moos during devotion & kneels to its own vegan god. There are nights all I ask for is a dream breathtaking as this. Let the poems enter me, peel me open like coneflowers in summer light. & if not the poem then the beaded cow within the poem.
Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s debut poetry chapbook, EXILED, is forthcoming in Red Bird Chapbooks. His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Adroit Journal, Terrain.org, Frontier, Palette, Chestnut Review, ONLY POEMS, Ubwali Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2024 Idumaese Alao Prize for Literature. In 2023, he won the Hudson Review’s Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for both the Writivism Poetry Prize as well as the Alpine Fellowship Prize for Poetry. Chiwenite has a Bachelor of Pharmacy (B. Pharm) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria. He’s on Twitter as @Chiwenite_O
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Borderlines”? For a long time, I had an uptight notion of poetry. I saw it as a genre of literature only. However, I now understand that before its aesthetic utilities, poetry is first a means by which poets communicate their thoughts. “Borderlines” was my attempt at showing this. In writing Borderlines, I did not want a poem that aims, advocates, or desires; I just wanted a poem that exists. The expressions in the piece (like holy cow, a man calling another man Pig, the dancefloor in Lagos; etc) are things we hear and experience in our different societies. All I did was bring them together and say: Look, there is poetry even in our most ordinary affairs. Also, former Young People’s Laureate for London, Theresa Lola, once described her writing style as spontaneous. Often, we impose a predetermined path on a poem, rather than letting the poem lead the way. Lola’s technique was helpful to me in avoiding this. I didn’t think about the lines. I just wrote them roughly as they to my mind. For me, therefore, the most fascinating thing about Borderlines is its spontaneity. In addition to this, I love the humor– even more humorous is the fact that the humor was unplanned. I love that the poem surprises me with each twist, each ordinary twist. by Rae Gouirand I stepped on the bird fully conscious I was stepping on the bird. Whether it had fallen with a falling tree and been stunned, drowned with an injured wing, broken through some act of rain, I can’t know. I was in motion reading against the pattern of the sidewalk when it registered not leaf rib, but faintest avian bone. More line than feather. A long enough time readable not before me but in some translating place. I only realized what I was reading after my weight had already transferred to the other foot in the middle of that rush of students in the rain after class on the first day of the winter quarter, in the near-still early day dark. I wish I didn’t have the impulse to tell the full truth, which is that I felt it, not higher up in the clenched reactive part of my body where I illustrate so much at a safe distance, but in the soft spot at the center of the T of my foot, through the sole of my sodden and swollen boot, right at the point of its sole gum where I have come over the years to feel things much more finely than the top of the boot might suggest: beneath the greybrown leather, inside the shoe rubbed clean of its once-shearling, that flat spot at the center of the T didn’t just read the ribcage of that drowned and disappearing one; it knew, in that one transfer of weight through its nearly gossamer sock, that it would be the one thing I would remember about the year. Rae Gouirand is the author of eight titles of poetry and nonfiction, including Glass is Glass Water is Water (Spork Press, 2018) and the book-length poem The Velvet Book (Cornerstone Press, 2024). She leads several longrunning independent workshops in northern California and online, including the cross-genre workshop Scribe Lab, and lectures in the Department of English at UC-Davis. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “After the Parade of Storms”? Most of my work comes out as verse poetry, but much of the work I’ve produced that connects to the climate crisis has come out absent linebreaks. I think it’s possible that disorientations of some scale of magnitude can change a poet’s sense of how linebreaks double or double back on what’s suggested in a poem, and can change a poet’s relationship to implication. This piece was written in real time early one morning in January 2023 following the second or third in a monthlong series of severe storms that took down many magnificent trees that had been weakened by longstanding drought in my region of California. by John Arthur We rigged the deck while Jay was taking a piss, so he would be dealt the eight and nine of hearts, but I’d have the king and the ace. The three others we needed would also show their faces, one on the flop, one on the turn, one on the river, and we knew he’d think he finally had a winner. He was always on an epic run of bad beats. We all watched to see his excitement. His tell was licking his lips before he bet. He licked them like he was about to eat the first real meal he’d had in days, which for him was often the case. His parent’s pantry was bare and the only thing his mom and dad cooked bubbled up on a spoon. Their favorite meal would soon be his too. But that day we were just playing hold ‘em in my basement, six old blood brothers getting older, forgetting all the pacts we made, five of us getting ready to leave him by leaving home. Before we dealt we counted his chips. The goal wasn’t to rob him, just to play a joke. When he showed the straight flush his face was flushed with hope. For a moment, to preserve the only joy I’d seen in his eyes in years, I thought about saying, “nice hand,” and tossing my cards into the muck, but I didn’t. I slow rolled them with a grin, letting him know that he never had a fucking chance. John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. He has worked as a valet at a casino, a Ferris Wheel operator, a cook, a cashier/deli worker, a pizza delivery driver, a kati roll delivery driver, a fast food delivery driver, a UPS overnight box loader, a caddy for a weekend, a landscaper for a week or two until the guy didn’t pay us and me and a friend had to show up at his house and demand payment, a librarian and library director, a municipal manager, a waiter, a journalist, an editor, and the world’s worst jewelry salesperson. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, failbetter, trampset, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His band is The Deafening Colors. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Hold ‘Em”? “Hold ‘em” started off as a response to Rattle’s prompt poem challenge. In its original form it included a haiku at the end and was titled Hold ‘em Haibun. While it wasn’t selected that month for Rattle’s prompt poem of the month, I received some positive and encouraging feedback from their prompt poems editor. I then began to revise the piece and ultimately felt I wasn’t getting the haiku at the end right, so I cut the haiku and the piece became flash fiction instead. I think the piece works better this way. The original prompt was to pick a card out of a deck of cards and write a poem about it. I was a teenager during the poker boom following Chris Moneymaker’s win at the World Series of Poker in 2003. I also grew up near Atlantic City, New Jersey. Gambling was all around us, and we used to gather after school and on weekends to play hold ‘em for hours. Unfortunately, this also coincided with the opioid epidemic, which was devastating throughout the country, and the town I grew up in was hit hard. A few classmates died from overdoses while we were in high school. Others struggled with, or are struggling with, addiction long after. Many of the friends I grew up with spent some of their formative years as young adults in and out of prisons, rehabs, or both. This piece straddles the line between creative non-fiction and flash fiction, but it is fictionalized enough that I felt it should fall under the fiction category. Either way, as with all writing, I hope it offers something true. by Baylee Less My Dad started making his own juice at home twice weekly in the fall of 2022 when he received the news that prostate cancer was living inside him. As the self-diagnosed vegan in the family, my Dad called upon me to embark on this expedition with him, but juicing is a verb that my Dad and I never expected to share. My Dad read Chris Beat Cancer, a memoir about a 26 year-old with Stage 3 colon cancer who beat the odds by adhering to a plant-based diet. And while my Dad underwent all the traditional treatments as well, he felt that changing his diet was one additional step he could take to combat his curdling cells. One day, while holding the book between his palms, my Dad told me Chris is from Memphis, too. When I would come visit, the book would move throughout the house. It jumped from place to place, around the home, mimicking my Dad’s fluttering household movements. Time was an asset between us now, so I attempted to make the most of it. I would suggest reading, walking the dog, micromanaging a crossword puzzle, but my Dad steadied himself through his routine. He wobbled without unloading the dishwasher – so, I grabbed the utensil rack, and we shared this too. A few months after his diagnosis, we started juicing together. The process began with him grabbing his reusable shopping bags and frenetically-written list. Whole Foods was our destination, another place we never expected to go together but we went anyway. My Dad was avoiding additives and MSG, sugars and high-fructose corn syrup. All of these things would feed the cancer, and no one wanted that. These dietary restrictions would eventually relax as my Dad’s body mass dropped during radiation treatment. Then, we would feed him anything because we never expected my Dad to not have an appetite. At Whole Foods, my Dad pushed the cart while I grabbed the parsley, microgreens, cucumbers, and ginger – the two 16-pound bags of carrots, turmeric, bell peppers, and beets. Occasionally, when I would turn around from the hissing produce cooler, my Dad would be picking through the apples, turning them over, looking for brown spots. Together, we reviewed the cornucopia-looking metal cart, and he crossed each item off the list. We checked out, and my Dad would take the receipt, a foot and a half long, and shake his head. My Dad never expected to buy organic produce in bulk for the sheer purpose of grinding it to pulp. But before we could press the fruits and vegetables down, watching their fibers split like string cheese, the most tedious task of juicing began. We peeled and chopped, soaked and scrubbed, sorted and weighed. I started with the greens, rinsing the romaine and taking a scrub brush to the dirt trapped in between leaves. My Dad soaked the dirt-stained produce in the plugged-up sink, and his elbows dyed themselves pink from peeling the beets. After two hours of list-making, shopping, peeling, and chopping, the juicing took no time at all. The whir of the rotating blades hummed us into quiet communion as my Dad cleaned the kitchen and I stuffed chunks of our plunder into the neck of the juicer. We bottled the liquids in glass, and they found their home on the top shelf of my parents’ fridge. My Dad would thank me – as he always did – for helping him with this task. “I know it’s not the way you would choose to spend your Saturday.” He would kiss my cheek and hand me a juice to take home. Baylee Less is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Memphis and is a reader for the literary journal, The Pinch. She is working on her first novel, and while not writing, she works full-time at a nursing home in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Juicing”? I wrote “Juicing” about a year after my Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He has a rare and aggressive form of cancer, which has handed us a timeline of life shorter than either of us ever prepared for. When this happens, one tends to feel that they must stuff as much quality time in as possible, and that each time together must be meaningful, memorable. This was a struggle for my Dad and I, and we often found ourselves sitting in silence or doing household chores together. Juicing became this new activity that we shared, that was still considered a chore, but the newness of it, the difference of it from our everyday, made it become meaningful between us – and memorable. I don’t think my Dad ever realized how special this time became for me, so I wanted to create a piece that showed it. In short, “Juicing” is my love letter to the surprising tasks that bring us closer. ~for Chall Gray and the Proprietors of Little Jumbo by Eric Steineger Last night, I remember a bottle of pleasant strangers. Sitting around a wooden table on a ship. Overhead, a bulb swung with the waves, cards slipped onto the floor. It was stormy. A green parrot with an eyepatch repeated the word Damn through its cage. There was Teddy Roosevelt in spectacles, bourbon in hand, regaling the group with his hunt. Alice Waters nodding, talked sustainability. And Lucille Clifton wrote in her notebook, her left hand holding the table like a soothsayer. Solange spoke jazz and the allure of Houston in June. These were the faces and a couple from Barbados with dazzling teeth when someone asked, “Mr. Charles, what do you do?” I mentioned getting back to Little Jumbo where the creature in the corner makes me feel at home. At this point, the pot was huge, and nobody spoke to me after that, but I felt like Solange and I were on the same wavelength. With Waters gone, with Clifton and Solange singing, Teddy snoring face down, one hand in the ice, the other on his binoculars, I played his hand. The couple undazzling, rose to shake the parrot’s cage. “Mr. Charles, what’s next?” someone asked, breaking the unspoken rule. “Well,” I said, looking around the table. “We’re in the last act, let’s divvy up the pot.” “Sold,” said Waters returning with a baguette and wine. Not sure how long we ate, but it was late and when Clifton stood to read her poem, the sea. Eric Steineger lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee. For ten years, he was the Senior Poetry Editor of The Citron Review, and his creative work has been featured in such places as Waxwing, The Night Heron Barks, Asheville Poetry Review, and Rattle: The Poets Respond. His manuscript, Curtain Call, was recently a finalist for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. When he is not teaching, he can be found at home with his daughter and his Great Pyrenees, Evie. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Rum Escapades of Mr. Charles”? by Mike Itaya (After Jurassic Park) Day 1: Bad Day at Badlands Snakewater, Montana. I have poisoned the Velociraptor dig. I’ve been exposed as a paleontological fraud. Ellie left with Hammond in his helicopter – with Hammond’s hand in her lap. The graduate interns (even Hannalore, the well-hootered townie) hot-wired the department van and boogied. These are the things they took: hard booze, my pet weasel, Evinrude, two bushels of Yukon Gold Potatoes, and my self-respect. Day 2: Leftovers A catalog of what remained: Ellie’s horrific homemade sorghum sundries. One case of non-alcoholic beer. A scattergun for the coyotes. A fuckton of regret. Day 6: Cookie Monster I ate all of Ellie’s cookies and barricaded myself inside the shithouse, where someone had written “Alan Grant is a Jurassic Jerk” on the wall. Weeks before, there was a dartboard of my face in the staff lounge. I’d pay a lot of money to never see that face again. Day 8: Because Reasons Dr. Sattler left because there was – quote – “no future here with me.” Day 9: Dick’s Donuts I walk to Rattlesnake Lake. To my unluck, no venomous snake bites me. In town, everything is closed except for Dick’s Donuts. I have a hankering for donut holes. The drive-thru is open, but they refuse to serve me because I am not in a car. Day 12: Velociraptor “A man destined to change the face of paleontology.” That’s what they once said about me. I remember the day I “found” the female Velociraptor – the radius and ulna and femur. Without a discovery, Hammond would have withdrawn his money. Ellie and I would’ve retreated to our separate research facilities. The dig would be finished. So would our life together. Day 14: Scrambler In Ellie’s absence, I find a fiefdom of rats nestled in a derelict pair of her undies. “Time to get scrambled,” I say, and blast them with my scattergun. Day 16: Still Here I woke next to a spent campfire. I was alive. It was a shame I lived with to that day. Day 17: Dear Alan Half-crazed with horniness, I fell into the site of our dig. I’ve consumed enough non-alcoholic beer to kill a lesser man. I was alone save for the ruin of a thousand scrambled rats. In an act of dwindling bravery, I entered the trailer Ellie and I shared. I felt like a ghost, haunting the rot of my former life. On the bed, there was a note, in which Ellie accounted for her brightening future, the arc of her days without me. Alan, our unborn son will never know that you didn’t want him – or that I no longer can be with you – because I will never tell him your name. Back on the day I staged the Velociraptor skeleton, I remember the way Ellie looked, the way that Ellie looked at me. Her face softened, and the mapped worries – about funding, our relationship, our standing in the world – smoothed behind the hazy light of morning which I then mistook for luck. Mike Itaya lives in southern Alabama, where he works in a library. His work appears in New Orleans Review, BULL, and The Offing. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Jurassic Jerks: The Life and Times of Dr. Alan Grant”? I first heard the “scrambled” rat phrase from a friend during a trip to New Orleans. We were drinking at an outdoor bar when a frisky rodent familiarized itself with another patron’s pair of open-toed shoes. Long story short, Michael’s phrase entered my lexicon and has never left. by Tim Raymond In which the psychologist asks me what 2 and 7 have in common. I don’t know, I say to him, because the question is too big. He said the IQ component of this thing would start easy and get complicated later. But doctor, it’s always too complicated. Depending on how you draw them, the 2 and 7 can both act as hooks, or perhaps baskets if you flipped them over. They are made of two lines each. If you write them, you can do so completely without your pencil ever leaving the paper. Ah yes, and they are divisible only by themselves and the number 1, which is what a prime number is, unless I’m mistaken. I can’t remember. I took Calculus in high school and got an A in it and then like 30% on the math portion of the GRE. Once upon a time I was published in Prime Number Magazine, a story called “Wounds,” in which all the different characters list their ailments. I didn’t at the time know I was autistic. Anyway, autism isn’t an ailment, as you know. It’s a beautiful ripe peach on a limb near my aunt’s house where I almost drowned in the pool one summer. Doctor, it’s 2 because I’m closer to that many genders than 1. And 7 because that’s how many fingernails I paint because 70% of the time I feel closer to female than male, even though male is how I’ve lived my life. And still mostly live it, I guess. I realize the question is not asking me to consider their relevance to my own life. I’m just not sure how else to approach my tasks. 2 is how many graduate degrees I have. 7 is how many breakdowns. 2 is how many cats. Also, brothers. 7, the amount of nieces and nephews. They both have a single vowel in them. Both start with consonants from the latter half of the alphabet. Both are less than 10, which means poem-wise they’d be spelled out as opposed to the numeral. Unless I’m mistaken about that, which is both possible and likely. They’re numbers, he tells me. Tim Raymond works as a barista in South Korea. His writing has appeared recently or will appear in Conjunctions, Chicago Quarterly Review, Boulevard, and CRAFT, among other publications. Find his comics and stories on Instagram at @iamsitting. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Autism Evaluation”? “Autism Evaluation” is from a collection of poems I’m writing called Kelly Walsh in Paradise, which is a phrase from a novel I’m writing called Alice Fisher, which is autistic and gender-fluid like I am. I’d been wanting to write about the evaluation process for ASD because I think it’s so ripe for play with language and inversions. I’m convinced actually that the content of the questions and statements in the evaluation’s various components matters less than the nature of the respondent’s answers—whether they ask for qualifications, or go silent, or info-dump, or contradict themselves intentionally for the sake of thoroughness, for I think maybe the quintessential autistic experience is imagining what else could or might be. Anyway, I didn’t know how to write the 2 and 7 poem until I was browsing JCCA and realized I could go the prose poem route, and just forget the line breaks altogether and compress everything. Thank you, JCCA. by Meg Eden In eighth grade, Kevin Hannigan pointed at each person in the class and said, “May you be anathema!” We weren’t allowed damn and shit and hell, but none of the teachers complained about his application of systematic theology in conversation. At lunch, he’d ask to sit with the teachers, but even they found better things to do, their excuses thin and wafer-like. The rest of us learned how to look out the window when he asked us questions, an art I never fully mastered. The teachers would always pair me up with him, thinking I was kinder than the rest. But I wasn’t. I was only quieter. I don’t want to say it was because he was Catholic in a Protestant school—it wasn’t. As much as Anna argued for Calvinism at recess, the rest of us were just trying to pass. We wanted to survive. A year later, half of us went to public schools, where our best friends damned us on the bus and on the way to class, and we were supposed to be the light that shined without earthly reason, without reward. Meg Eden teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World” and children’s novels including a 2024 ALA Schneider Family Book Award Honor “Good Different,” and the forthcoming “The Girl in the Wall” (Scholastic, 2025). Find her online at megedenbooks.com. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Private School”? I start writing in what I know, mining my memories and experiences. I think as someone who believes in heaven and hell, the transition from private school to public school came as a particular shock in how casually we use phrases like damn in American culture. But as I mined my memories, I remembered a kid who sort of got around this by using anathema instead. So these worlds that I thought were so different were maybe not as different as I thought. There’s an ironic humor to this, but also it struck me with a challenge. Thinking about the way scripture challenges believers to be “lights” in the world, not conforming but transforming the world around us by choosing what is good, writing this poem made me wonder: am I really living a good different kind of life? Am I choosing radical love and joy, or am I choosing to imitate and be safe? by Carlin Katz The VHS tape stutters back to life: cicada drone and the summer-crisped backyard of my childhood. Adults wander into the frame with sweating beer bottles and bowls of pretzels. A solitary donkey dances in her paper dress at some cousin’s birthday party. All of us kids line up and take a turn with the bat. I’m the eldest child, so I have to wait. Each kid steps up and an aunt or uncle spins them, takes them by the shoulders, and aims them at their goal. Thunk of wooden bat against cardboard. The piñata careens like an untamed thing on her thin tether. I step up to take my turn and look around to see who will spin me, but the adults have lost interest. I am watching my 10-year-old self: skinny knees, too-serious. I try to reach her, this flickering shadow: steady now, I’m here with you. But I am eager for my chance to swing. And with no one to pull the blindfold down over my eyes, I do it myself. I jerk, head-down, whirling myself silently in a crazy circle, and without warning I head off in the wrong direction. Blind, I knock the daylights out of little Andy from next door. I lift the bandana and blink at my forfeit prize as the adults hurry to tend to the dazed child. My family pauses and rewinds the tape, laughing. They want to watch it again. But in my mind, the frame is frozen on that little girl—unbalanced and alone with a weapon in her hand. Carlin Katz (she/her) is an animist, student herbalist and writer living with her family and an anxious dog on traditional Chinook land in Washington State. She loves wordplay and cracking up. You can find her in the woods. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Piñata Memory”? As the mom of a 10-year-old, and as a person undergoing her own late initiation into true adulthood, I very often think about rites of passage and the lack of meaningful rituals for entering adolescence in mainstream White American culture. Even in a loving and well-intentioned family like mine, most young people of the dominant culture are left clumsily wielding their own power with very little guidance or elder-ing. We long to be woven into the great nexus of meaning and purpose and that we are born to as children of the living world. This yearning was made conscious for me the moment I saw myself in this home movie, spinning myself around and around. On a lighter note, I considered titling this piece “Andy Gets His” because I find it funny that this was the actual title someone wrote on the VHS tape—as if the child in question deserved to get clonked on the head with a hollow bat. Which, of course, he did not. by Valerie Valdez Gifted. Zara sees more than she can speak. Feels what others can’t. She is slow when speed is needed. Or quick when it’s not. No sync. She gazed at the vast sky. “Maybe its a place for me? Where my slow and quick make sense.” She climbed up a tree. Higher. Higher. And still higher. The clouds pulled her inside. They praised her gifts. “What are they? I don’t know.” The clouds replied, “You will.” The teacher said, “All kids will paint a picture. A noble masterpiece.” She raised her hands high in the air. Up and still up. Zara’s eyes followed the teacher’s fingers up. Past the ceiling to the clouds. Zara imagined painting a gorgeous pony with her as its rider. Other kids drew stick figures living in square boxes. Yawn. Her painting would hang at the highest spot on the classroom’s wall. The other artwork would make the teachers and parents smile. “How nice.” They would say in their polite teacher and parent voices. But then their eyebrows would arch at Zara’s painting, and they would sing her praise like a choir. “What a beautiful portrait of a pony with such a lovely girl rider.” “So amazing.” “A noble masterpiece.” Mother surely would hug her extra tight. And still tighter. Then hang it on the family’s dining room wall beside father’s war medals. Zara decided to paint her pony blue, like the sky, with a white mane, for the clouds. She wanted his eyes yellow, but she dipped the brush in black paint instead. Dark spots stared at her. Fail! Make it right. Clean the brush. She painted another blue pony. Clean the brush. She painted her figure in orange sitting on top of the pony it. Sitting proud. But the brush slipped. It mingled with wet green paint. The colors turned into mud. Fail again! Fix it. Zara mixed more green to the dark spot. She added more orange to her figure, then more green. The lines grew fatter. The paper sagged. Make it right. Other children cleaned up. Zara asked for more paper. The teacher said, “Sorry, I haven’t got time.” Defeat whispered to her, “You failed, again.” Everyone looked at her. Fear tightened her throat. No words. Paint dripped from the sagging paper. A mud puddle on the floor. But Zara refused to believe defeat’s words. She grabbed the wet brushes and painted on the wall. A large blue pony with a white mane and yellow eyes appeared. The teacher yelled, “Stop.” Zara still refused. Other kids laughed. She smeared orange paint over her clothes. She whistled. The pony turned its head to look at her. He jumped off the wall. The teacher and other kids gasped. Zara climbed onto its back. They trotted out of the school. Zara clung to its white mane. The pony trotted quicker. Then slower. Yet it was her quick and slow. Now it made sense. Sync. The pony jumped into the air. A huge wind lifted them. Higher. Into the vast sky. The clouds pulled them up inside. They cheered. Proud of her. THUNDER! Her confidence exploded. “I painted a noble masterpiece.” The clouds replied, “First of many.” The blue pony stayed in the clouds. It would come to her. If she needed it, again. Mother washed the orange paint off her clothes. Zara put the piece of paper on the wall next to father’s war medals. Her parents said, “It’s blank.” But Zara shook her head no. “It’s a painting of me riding a blue pony.” Because of autism, I didn’t speak until the age of five, but didn’t get diagnosed until age 42. So, I found my first friends in words. After forty years of working in business, I retired in 2023 to write full time. I consider myself a “Goat Singer”, the ancient Greek term for a storyteller. My life is multi-layered to the hilt with careers in television production, a freelance reporter, and a college professor of theater and film studies, and an office manager for architecture and engineering firms. Recently published online works include “The Venus Inn,” which received an Honorable Mention from the Northwind Writing Award sponsored by Raw Earth Ink Books, and CultureCult Press published “The Alba River” in its anthology, as well as “Sara and Sunlight Midnight” (poems), “The Watched Man and Idiots” (fiction), published in Write or Die Fiction Magazine, and another poem, “Older,” in Pure Slush Magazine. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Blue Pony”? The idea of the Blue Pony started in my childhood. While watching a parade, a group of ponies rode by. Of course, I asked daddy for one, and he promised me a pony. And of course, I never got it. My lifelong love of horses stayed with me, and naturally, I even dreamed of a pony and a blue one that I rode into the clouds. When I started my writing career, that dream returned, but now I was wide awake. Combining my struggles in school, and throughout my life, with autism, I wrote the story in one afternoon. by Lynne Jensen Lampe Split dry pods, remove seeds. Knife their hard covering & soak overnight. Set a watch o Lord. Moonflower vines scaffold the porch beam & railing. A backyard baptism, hot tub instead of the River Jordan. Hands push me under. Words flood in—Jesus, scotch & Mama. I keep my eyes closed, afraid to see God & remember shame. I am someone whose mother twice tried to drown her. Buds unfurl at dusk. White blossoms glow—toxic, not deadly. Set a watch o Lord. I’m twelve, maybe younger. Mama & I stop washing dishes, twirl round & round, sing nonsense & giggle. Dad can’t see my happy. A month later, I pass through locked steel doors to bright tile & fluorescent lights & Mama chain-smoking menthols on a psych ward. Set a watch o Lord. Her roommate dies & Mama sleeps next to the corpse. No one finds the body till morning. Scents of honey & vanilla tickle the air, fragrant as my inner wrist after caress. Blooms sweeten the night, spiral shut at dawn. In college I call Mama & we laugh so long I forget sorrow. Then she asks if I have sex, if I feel she pushes me. Men rush to answer. Hips unfurl—I scaffold other bodies while scared of my own, trade my happy for good. Set a watch o Lord. I use drugs to slip borders, realize only later my mind can push me under. I am someone whose mother twice tried to drown her. Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award winner and finalist for the 8th Annual McMath Book Award, concerns motherhood and mental illness. Her poems appear in Stone Circle Review, Rise Up Review, THRUSH, Yemassee, and elsewhere. She edits academic writing, reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and lives with her husband and two dogs in Columbia, MO. https://lynnejensenlampe.com or https://linktr.ee/lynnejensenlampe for socials. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Not All Words Taste Like Prayer”? This poem started in July 2018 with a ramble about women and water. A few months later in a long-form class, I scavenged the free write, choosing lines about my baptism and my mother’s action for a multi-section poem, including Bible-verse fragments and something about water and Mama in each part. The next several years the poem cycled through feedback, revision, submission, and rejection. I dropped a section. Added the moonflower vine image, though in relation to my husband and not my mother. Tried a different title: “God Started the Conversation, Mama Ended It.” My sense is I couldn’t face the truths the poem needed to tell. Finally, in April 2024, it all clicked. by John Davies While I’m stirring too much honey into the porridge, The Softness lulls: Don’t worry, give up, the time for senseless adventure is over. The post drops through the letterbox: mortgage interest on the rise; the bill for my father’s headstone; flyers for cut-price lawn equipment; Make your Will now and receive a free fountain pen; 3-for-2 offer on grout; Municipal Golf Course Seeks New Members: Your game won’t improve with rusty clubs. A bumper day for The Softness. Deposit down on an Adriatic cruise – pay the balance in easy installments. The Softness coos at two hours’ free time in Venice or Trieste, souvenir opportunities, Segway rides for the thrill-seekers. Go on, The Softness urges, You only live once. Oats swell and the porridge bubbles, spitting milk. Only believing in what they can taste, the cat and dog lick each other’s empty bowls, then sit and stare expectantly: What next? Are there enough unpainted fences and unmowed lawns to last your remaining years? A 45 minute Youtube tutorial on toilet cisterns beckons. That’s the stuff, The Softness moans. No longer feel a DIY failure – Like our channel and Subscribe. But beneath the back garden decking, patio furniture, fire pit and netted trampoline, the deep roots stir. An underground rumbling causes The Softness to whimper, to drop the latest Aldi brochure. Crows swivel necks to peer into the kitchen window where the porridge is beginning to burn. In their quickshot eye, you are archived with all prior residents. The crows speculate as to who will come next, change the colour of the fence to their taste, pebble-dash the walls, plant plum trees but never really make a dent. Groggy children surface one-by-one, grumble at the ruined porridge, are bundled into uniform and pointed in the direction of school, careers, certain death. The Softness swells to room-size, restored by the numb joy of routine. Go out and make a living – Celebrity Surgical Disasters and a glass of discounted wine your reward. You’ve earned this. Outside the living room windows, panes flickering ghost-characters of streamed box-sets, the roots of the ancient oak flex. The river has always made this sound. The standing stone in the far field absorbs the dying rays, eyes the encroaching moon, waits for the house to crumble, return to earth. As distraction, The Softness drills you for tomorrow’s job interview: What are your strengths and weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five, ten years, in millennia? Name your favourite team-building exercise. What is music for? You’ve got this. Floss, double Windsor your tie, act confident. Practice in the mirror. Between the leaking taps and toothpaste spatter, your lips twitch, try to remember. The Softness whispers into your ear: A fake smile’s as good for you as the real thing. The toilet still refuses to flush, but The Softness knows an excellent plumber. Born in Birkenhead, UK, John has lived in Navan, Ireland since 2013. A former winner of the Penguin Ireland Short Story Award, and the Letheon Poetry Prize, his work appears in journals including Vastarien, Banshee, Southword, Manchester Review, Maine Review, Apex, Pseudopod and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. He co-runs The Bull’s Arse Creative Writing Group based in Navan (Twitter @Bulls_Arse). See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “xxx”? by Amanda Chiado My husband says the crabs he catches are filled with the souls of his dead. He leaves like a ghost before dawn, and his clothes are already stained with blood. I draw him near like a homecoming, or a memory I plan to keep. I like that I still feel like I am dreaming. Recently, he has taken to rubbing my legs and feet before he says goodbye and I can see how I am too, a soft animal made of desire. He comes back smelling of the far away, yet not Peter Pan, and his ship mates are chummy and tired and manly. They catch their own transgressed souls. He can’t kill the crabs right away since they are harboring messages on their hard shells, in their fur kissed mouths, in their pinchers. He treats them fairly, but their sadness is gut punch when you open the cooler. They lay on each other and look up at the sun. They pretend, like me, that they are not dangerous. My son wants to keep them but kept is not a wishing rock. It may be the winter that makes us so desperate. The thinning of the veil between here and there. Eventually my husband eats the messages, covered in butter to smooth the salvation, and his eyes swell up with the tears of the ocean, and we brace ourselves and buoy the dog. The house fills with wet memory. We ride out the rocking waves until Easter, and then my husband rises from the water, dripping, soft and wrinkled as a newborn. Amanda Chiado is the author of Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has most recently appeared in Rhino, The Pinch Journal, and The Offing. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart & Best of the Net. She is the Director of Arts Education at the San Benito County Arts Council, is a California Poet in the Schools, and edits for Jersey Devil Press. www.amandachiado.com/em> See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Pretending Not to be Dangerous”? The surprising aspect of this piece is that I don’t eat crab. The draft began with my husband Fabio returning from a fishing trip and my son, Gianluca babying the live crabs in the cooler. “Can we keep them?” he asked. The crabs seemed to call to me with their beady black eyes and dense claws. Astrolgically, I am the sign of cancer represented by the crab, so I often ponder my connection to the animal. In the draft, I began to create a personally necessary spiritual narrative around the catching, cooking, and eating of the crabs. In the final version of the piece, this experience offers my husband a method in which to transfigure his untended grief. Ultimately, there is a role reversal where my husband is softened, and I am dangerous which is emblematic of the crab’s physical form. by Claudio Perinot I push the switch and the bulb bursts. A short circuit. My father says what happened?, what did I do? I tell him I wanted to switch on the light in the corridor and it burst. My father, in the dark, starts explaining why these things happen. He says there are candles in the kitchen. My mother sits in the dark. She doesn’t move, doesn’t say a thing. She waits for something to happen, for someone to explain. My father rambles on, about the candles to get in the kitchen. He tells me to wait for him to get the candles and gets up feeling his way towards where he thinks the kitchen is. My mother sits silently. I can just make out the greyish outline of her wig as I pull out my mobile and touch a key. The little screen lights up and I see my father moving around the long side of the table, ordering me to wait for the candles that he’ll just fetch from the kitchen. Apparently neither of them has seen the light. I find the mains switch and put it back up. The little flat lights up again. My mother smiles quietly. She’s still seated in the same way and looking in the same direction. My father is surprised, then collects and preaches that I should have waited for him, he was so close to getting the candles, after all. My father wants me to take care of my mother after he’s gone. He wants me to promise. He wants me to declare. He wants me to swear. He wants me to put it down in black ink, in front of a notary. He wants it to be legally binding. He wants to be sure that my mother won’t be left alone, after he’s gone, wants to know that she’ll always have someone by her side. He wants to make sure. He wants me to promise. After all, I am the nearest son and it’s no use moving down to my brother’s, all that distance, and even though maybe he would have more space, my mother would not be able to cope with the new location and new habits and all. No, much better here. That’s why he wants me to promise. To declare. To swear. My mother listens. Silently. At times she tries to get a word in sideways, but my father doesn’t seem to hear. At times, when I see she really wants to say something, I stop my father by pulling his arm and making him see my mother wants to say something. She usually begins confidently, then soon afterwards stumbles on a word or two she can’t remember, and stops to recollect things, trying hard to pinpoint the word, the meaning, the idea. That’s when she usually asks my father for help. My father, let in again, starts off on another run of ideas and principles and thoughts, forgetting her along the way. She retreats and sighs. She sits again, listening. He talks. He says he wants to make sure that my mother won’t suffer when he’s gone. I must promise. She’s letting go. My mother. My mother’s letting go. Quietly. My father. My father’s hanging on. Desperately. Claudio Perinot is a bilingual disabled teacher. He holds a degree in English and Spanish Language and Literature (Univ. of Venice). His poems have appeared in Eleven Bulls, Theviewfromhere, and Cricket Online Review. He was longlisted in the 2021 Briefly Write Poetry Prize. His research on the Eliot – Verdenal friendship has been published in Annali di Cà Foscari, ANQ and South Atlantic Review, and is often cited in studies on T.S. Eliot. He lives in Italy with his wife and two sons. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “My Mother Says”? That day had dogged me ever since. After a lifetime together, my father had told me flatly that he did not trust me and that he needed some kind of guarantee to convince him that I would take care of my mother. The accusation was a heavy burden. That thick, compressed clot of memory had increased the emotional pressure on me as I witnessed my parents’ slow descent into disease. To relieve the tension, I turned to writing. As I recollected the scene, I discovered it was etched deep and clear. The sudden return of the lights in the flat had been like the flash of a powerful camera. Everything, even the smallest of details, had been fixed indelibly. I began to describe the experience. The flow started, sustained by my pent-up resentment. I wrote confidently and quickly, trying to keep up with the unleashed thoughts as they sped out, trying to miss nothing. In the end, the result was completely different from anything I had written before. It sprawled over the page, like prose. Yet, it had such a distinct emotional charge that I was certain it was the draft of a potential poem. I read it again and again, revising and improving. Excluding the removal of some unnecessary distractions, and a few minor corrections, it did not require extensive reworking. At every reading, however, it felt as if there was a hidden layer of meaning somewhere. To find it, I reread the poem repeatedly, to the point of reliving the scene. As I listened to my father’s desperate voice again, the missing piece of the puzzle was right in front of me, staring at me. It was the real subject of the discussion. It was my mother, who sat quietly through the argument although it revolved around her. And when, at last, she wanted to say something, the words came out mixed up and incomprehensible. She was unable to convey the obscure reasoning of her deranged mind. I wondered what she thought, what her point of view was. Did she agree with my father? Was she more lenient? More optimistic? Her opinion counted more than anything else but it was unknown. I could see it clearly now. The core of the matter was not what my father had said. It was what my mother had said, and that was lost forever. I finished the revision. I was painfully aware that it had been one of the darkest moments of my life. I wrote the title and sealed the final version of that day. by Nancy Lord For years, I tried to find her. Not determinedly but sporadically, inquisitively, wonderingly. Guiltily. She’d been my best friend in fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade. She was the only girl I knew who loved nature the way I did. In the woods and creek behind her house we collected caterpillars and salamanders. We cut open galls that ballooned on the stems of plants to see what parasites lived inside. We made an art of tearing away the tissue of leaves to reveal the skeletal networks of veins. One winter day, sledding at dusk, the snow-covered road was suddenly brightened by the lights of an on-coming car, and we turned into a hard-packed snowbank. When I landed on top of her, her arm swelled with a painful lump. Her father got mad, and it was two days before her mother snuck her to a doctor for an x-ray and cast. Her father was both fun and difficult. He took the two of us fishing and was as interested as we were in what we found—once fly larvae with impressive pinchers, fluttery gills, and acrobatic moves. I learned these were called hellgrammites. I had also learned that my friend’s mother slept on a cot in their laundry room. If that seemed odd and a little sad, I didn’t think too much about it. For eighth grade I transferred to a different school and our lives diverged. Later that same year, listening to the radio in my room, I heard a news announcer say her father’s name and “self-inflicted gunshot wound.” I told my parents and went back to my homework. Suicide seemed like something adults should deal with. I don’t know if my parents did anything. I didn’t ask; they didn’t say. Our mothers had been Girl Scout leaders together. My friend, her mother, and her two sisters moved across town. I may have helped. I at least recall a truck piled with furniture, driving away. Not a moving van—a pickup truck and some young men, perhaps friends of the older daughter. I recall beaming faces, as though there was some joy in the occasion. The other side of town seemed immeasurably far away. A couple of years went by and I heard that my friend had dropped out of school and had a child. Years—many years—passed. I lived very far away. I thought about my friend every December on her birthday, wondering what might have become her life. When the internet arrived, I looked for her there. I found her father’s obituary, nothing about her or her mother or sisters. Every few years, I typed in her name. Finally, there she was, birth name along with another. She’d been dead already for a year, dead at 67 “after a period of declining health.” She had lived all her life in the same town where we’d grown up. She had two sons. In six short paragraphs I read that she “loved nature and spent much of her time enjoying and photographing the flora and fauna around her home. She experimented with the cross-pollination of some of her plants and flowers. She also bred and raised quail, chickens, ducks, and geese. . . But her happiest pastime was fishing in a canoe on Lake Massabesic.” I read this again now, years later still. I picture my friend floating on that lake on the edge of our town, casting a line, reeling in a brown-sided bass with large scales and sharp fins. Who is she with? Who does she tell about what makes her happy? Nancy Lord, a former Alaska State Writer Laureate, is the author of three short story collections, five books of literary nonfiction, and the novel pH. Her narrative work, which focuses mainly on environmental and marine issues, has appeared widely in journals and anthologies and has been honored with fellowships and awards. She currently teaches science writing for Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Homer, Alaska. www.writernancylord.com See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Hellgrammite”? I’d been thinking about my childhood friend for years and had made a couple of unsuccessful efforts to write about our relationship. I decided one day, after rereading her obituary, to compress my memories and grief into something very short, relying on just a few images. The day of fishing and examining hellgrammites with her father had always stayed with me. The piece I wrote was 700 words. I further compressed it to meet the word limit when I submitted it to your journal. by Paul Beckman Everyone’s getting ready for the party, mom and dad say there should be a reason for a party but neither remember the reason we start parties so we just go about our business and tonight our business is decorating, food, and, then I see it as the last sliver of sun goes behind the ghost hills to the north a tiny sliver of orange breaks through from the east and everyone stops and watches it and can taste the juicy orb, and then little by little it begins to segment like shooting stars, and the residents of Isaac Newtonville smile and jump up and down, not ready to talk or do anything but wait and mind taste the tangerine, when suddenly it segments and begins to fall with only the tangerine silk holding together, then the movie comes on an Issac Newton, founder of our town, laughs, and claps his hands, segments keep splitting into smaller ones until everyone has their taste of tangerine and they sit in crescents around the town bonfire and eat and slurp and smile so happy that tangerine season is upon us and they don’t look forward to the baby season and become morose fearful for the change of seasons. Bio See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Thank You, Isaac”? aaa when I comb the Walmart clearance racks for a $2 t-shirt, when I eat three bowls of Reese’s Puffs because my parents only bought it for me as a wrapped gift on Christmas morning, when I apply for a writing workshop and instinctively click “yes” for the scholarship button and am reminded of the hours I spent as a teen hunched over the dining room table with piles of scholarship forms and pens, and before that the hand-me down sweaters and dusty sneakers, the special family nights when we shared the $5 burger deal at McDonald’s, and before that sneaking down the stairs in my faded Lion King nightgown watching my parents’ shadows argue about bills, and before that my dad telling us to trust God would provide, and before that my dad telling us he quit a job, and before that my dad telling us he quit a job, and before that my dad telling us he quit his one good job, and before that squealing while he tosses me into the air— by Bethany Jarmul Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of two chapbooks and one poetry collection. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, Salamander, and One Art. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “I Become My Younger Self”? I was applying to a writing workshop and instinctively checked the “scholarship” button, which triggered a series of memories and emotions for me— of a complicated childhood, that was not all good or all bad. I figured that this experience would make an effective micro piece, but more than that, I knew I needed to write about it, to try to process it. Writing is often how I make sense of my life and the world. This piece was written all at once, and required very little editing after the first draft. Those are my favorite kind of pieces to write, when they come out all in one rush. What a thrill! If only all my writing arrived so easily! by Sybil Baker I’m in a body of water far from home. My brother, who lives here in Turkey, has found a spot of beach with white sand and trees for shade and a shallow entrance to the ocean that only the locals know about. The rocks underneath my feet are worn smooth, the water is clear and calm. Turkish families set up picnics, with couples and young people lounging on towels. I play with my seven-year-old nephew, the child of two empires, in the calm water of the Aegean Sea. Somewhere, it is 1630 and my ancestor seven-year-old Jeffrey Baker is on the Mary and John headed to the British colonies, never to see his homeland again. Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk writes of Istanbul, “Here amid the old stones and wooden houses, history made peace with its ruins; ruins nourished life and gave new life to history.” Pamuk calls this melancholy about Turkey’s lost greatness, “hüzün.” Surrounded by the crumbling ruins of its former empires, the Turks are surrounded by visual reminders of a past that will not return, even if their leaders want it to. It is, Pamuk says, a uniquely Turkish feeling. Americans seem to be stuck in a restorative nostalgia Svetlana Boym writes of in The Future of Nostalgia that “manifests itself in the total reconstructions of monuments of the past,” while Pamuk’s hüzün as a reflective nostalgia that comfortably “lingers on the ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.” With this reflective nostalgia, Americans could live in peace among the ruins instead of trying to re-construct them, allowing us to envision a future we cannot yet dream of. My dad’s dream for us was not necessarily the American Dream of the next generation doing better financially than the last. That none of his three children followed the traditional corporate path that he himself had become disillusioned with pleased him. It pleased him that all three of us and our spouses earned advanced degrees. It pleased him that I lived in Korea and my youngest brother had moved to Turkey, even if he wished we were closer. It probably would have pleased him that our own marriages—to a Jew, Muslim, and White man from South Africa—and their progeny have diluted the Bakers’ White supremacist legacy. It was my dad’s dream to pass on the desire to pursue knowledge and to always be curious of what life is about. As my dad said, “If there were no longer questions then there would be no hope, no dreams, no unknowns, no visions, no tomorrow, no future.” We are living in my ancestors’ future; one they could never have imagined. Soon I will be on a plane back to the States, leaving Turkey’s hüzün behind. Like Odysseus, I will return to my ancestral home. But unlike him, when I return I will not slay the suitors or hang the women servants for their acts of resistance. When I return, I will gather the threads of Penelope’s funeral shroud she weaves and unpicks every night. With my loom, I will weave the threads of stories into a shroud that will be large enough to bury and honor the dead so that we can begin life anew. And like Odysseus, like my ancestors, I will dream of the sea, of leaving my homeland once again. Sybil is the author of five works of fiction, which have won Eric Hoffer, Foreword, and IPPY awards. Her nonfiction work, Immigration Essays, was the 2018-2019 Read2Achieve selection for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and required reading for all first-year students. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Guernica, Electric Literature, Glimmer Train, and Critical Flame. She was awarded two MakeWork Artist Grants and a 2017 Individual Artist’s Fellowship in nonfiction from the Tennessee Arts Commission. She is a professor of English at the University of Tennessee and Chattanooga, Director of the Meacham Writer’s Workshop, and on faculty for the Yale Summer Writer’s Workshop. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Hüzün”? “Hüzün” is one of the final essays in a draft manuscript called Reconstructions of a Lost Cause, and was inspired by my most recent visit to Turkey (where my brother and his family live). I’m interested in the intersection of America’s nostalgia for a problematic past and Turkey’s hüzün, which Orhan Pamuk translates as a melancholy for a previous greatness. Another short piece inspired from that trip was published in Healing Visions last year. by Beth Sherman On day one, I heard a noise. Louder than my mice, Esmerelda and Dorothy. A murmuring really, like a brook splashing over rocks on a cloudy day. Words floating on water. I hadn’t heard words in 55 years. Trail breadcrumbs witch candy. It comes back to you, the listening, if you concentrate hard enough. They were dismantling my house, piece by piece. Taking things. My home is all I have. Without it, my body shrivels and fades. I put the boy in a cage. Don’t judge. I have my reasons. On day two, Gretel and I played catch the gumdrops. Boysenberry, blueberry, cherry, gooseberry. We threw them in the air and they dissolved on our tongues. A lovely child – flaxen braids, curious lips, trusting eyes. She reminded me of me before. On day six, we baked a plum cake. Talked about our favorite things. Hers was dancing between raindrops, mine was baking coconut cream pie and stuffing the entire thing in my mouth. On day twelve, we baked Red Velvet cake. While measuring sugar and flour we shared our biggest fears. Hers was going hungry, mine was stepping foot outside the house. On day nine, we baked Black Forest cake. After whipping cream for the icing, we discussed our hopes for the future. She said she wanted to grow up, meet a man, get married, and have four children. I said I wanted to be left alone. On day sixteen, we baked upside down cake and traded secrets. She said she never liked her stepmother. I said I never got undressed till after dark. On day twenty-three, I told her how I used to be pretty as a princess, cherished by all who knew me until one day walking alone in the woods a woodcutter happened by and grabbed me by the chin. We baked a gingerbread man and ate him, starting with his raisin eyes, ending with his crumbly toes. On day twenty-nine, I decided to let them go. Gretel missed the boy. She’d been feeding him secretly. She loved him. There was that. I wanted them to taste my Mandel bread before they left. I opened the oven door, peered inside to check whether the bread had risen. Felt someone shove me in. Dying didn’t hurt. Had happened to me once before in the woods. That familiar pain. Shame. Flesh turning to bone. Blood in the ashes. Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her stories have been published in Portland Review, Blue Mountain Review, Tangled Locks Journal, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Flash Boulevard, Sou’wester and elsewhere. Her work will be featured in The Best Microfictions 2024. She’s also a Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and multiple Best of the Net nominee. She can be reached at @bsherm36 or https://www.bethsherman.site/ See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Gretel and Me”? When I recently reread the story of “Hansel and Gretel” in An Illustrated Treasury of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, I noticed a few unusual things that didn’t jibe with my memories of the fairy tale. One was that the children were deliberately eating the witch’s house. “Hansel so liked the taste of the roof, he broke off a big chunk, and Gretel took out a whole windowpane and sat down on the ground to enjoy it.” I’d always envisioned the kids as innocent victims, preyed upon by a malevolent crone. But now I was beginning to see her differently – someone whose home was of the utmost importance, whose house was under attack, and who never ever left it. I asked myself why that might be. The other thing that caught my eye was that after the Witch locked Hansel in a cage, Gretel kept her company for four weeks. That’s an awfully long time. I wondered what kinds of things the two of them did together during that month. What did they say to one another? Could a bond have formed that neither expected? The ease and nonchalance with which they killed her haunted me. “How horribly the witch screeched as she burned to death.” Neither of the children felt remorseful about the murder. Indeed, right they pushed her into the oven, they looted the witch’s house, stealing boxes of pearls and precious stones (another detail I hadn’t remembered). Then they went home to live happily ever after without giving the witch another thought. For me, the Grimm’s origin story raised more questions than it answered. Chief among them was how the witch became the woman the children encountered when they began dismantling her house and whether or not, after all those years, she was capable of connecting to another human being, whether she felt worthy of love. I was attracted to the idea of telling a compressed version of the story because it seems to echo the witch herself, whose world has shrunk to the corners of her candy dwelling. by Robin Turner
It’s spring & I’m thinking of the things that come back—macrame & low-rise blue jeans, the scissortails & the ruby throats, wild primrose & thistle & thyme. I have seen them. Old gospel songs & Polaroids, the first & the last days of school, &—so they tell us—Jesus. I am waiting for the coming of some late summer rain, the return of the red resurrection flower, its strong-tender stem, its intricate blossom a year’s dark, deepening. I am waiting for my mother. Robin Turner is the author of the chapbook bindweed & crow poison (Porkbelly Press). Her poems, prose poems, and flash fiction appear in DMQ Review, Rattle, Rust + Moth, The Texas Observer, Bracken Magazine, and in many other journals, anthologies, and community poetry projects. Her work has been honored with nominations for Best Spiritual Literature, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Currently a poetry reader for Sugared Water, she lives with her husband near White Rock Lake in Dallas, Texas. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Come Back”? I came upon a photograph my husband took of a brilliant red spider lily, common in Texas. They tend to appear after a heavy rain in late summer/early fall. The flower is also known by other names–among them “corpse flower” and “resurrection flower”. The poem gathered in me pretty quickly as I contemplated my mother’s late summer death last year, what returns and what does not, cannot–though something in us continues to call Come back.CNF: After the Parade of Storms
Hold ‘Em
CNF: Juicing
The Rum Escapades of Mr. Charles
Jurassic Jerks: The Life and Times of Dr. Alan Grant
Autism Evaluation
CNF: Private School
CNF: Piñata Memory
The Blue Pony
CNF: Not All Words Taste Like Prayer
The Softness
Pretending Not to be Dangerous
CNF: My Mother Says
CNF: Hellgrammite
Thank You, Isaac
CNF: I Become My Younger Self
CNF: Hüzün
Gretel and Me
CNF: Come Back
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD