CNF: Morning Stars
by Chris Clemens
I have things to worry about, but first I must unload the dishwasher, making sure that the plates don’t clink too much. I can’t wake everyone up to clatter downstairs into these quiet hazy sunbeams, to shatter my tenuous peace with their unavoidable messy living. Hopes and dreams begin and end with breakfast. And so the coffee mugs are gently placed into the cupboard, slowly enough that I can consider the printed rocket ship and angry morning bear, the summer sun shimmering through the window, the garden already under siege, heat waves rising against the noise wall like an unchecked tide on the horizon, yet still far away on the other side of that wall so calm down already or I’ll shatter another mug on the floor. Cutlery jingles, each utensil placed into a plastic-moulded sense of order, comforting and restorative until the last spoon is neither large nor small, but something in-between. In a dream I might open the back door and throw this irregular spoon outside into the sweltering garden, as if to say: see? Look what you made us do. This categorically difficult spoon is your problem now, because we have worse things to worry about. In my dream I might scream something like this, irrationally, disturbing the neighbours. In reality I would dig the weird spoon out of the wilting tomato plants and tenderly return it to the dishwasher, terrified of what the raccoons might be capable of, equipped with such a tool. In reality I would never scream at all. Screaming might wake everyone up.
Chris Clemens teaches and writes in Toronto, where he has defeated 8.5 raccoons (with help from his wonderful family). Nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net, his stories and poems appear in Best Microfiction 2026, The Literary Review of Canada, Baffling Magazine, Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere. Find more at linktr.ee/clemenstation.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Morning Stars”? Despite many 4 am bedtimes in my past, somehow I’m a morning person now, concurrent with becoming a parent. I often doom out about heated matters like wildfires while auto-piloting through routine daily tasks, and it’s quite the experiential combo (“Am I still in some kinda weird nightmare”, etc). Morning Stars started as a stream-of-consciousness piece about these strange, quiet moments. I tweaked it for several months, and then Matter Press cut the final line – an improvement! by Chris Pellizzari He’s hiding from lost house keys, from curls fallen from homemade haircuts swirling on orange carpet, from unplugged wires seeking their place in the galaxy. He’s hiding from the baseball he can’t wrap his fingers around, dropped and forgotten near the refrigerator in favor of a cherry popsicle. He’s hiding from baby sister’s bottle nipple pointing towards the fuse box that connects clean teeth to itchy fingers and from the steak knives his mother left out on the kitchen table, telling me to stay away. He’s hiding from promises I could not keep thanks to my diabetes, anxiety, insomnia, and cowardice. He’s hiding from the puppy that scratched his hand last week in mutual excitement and from the fireworks outside his window and the windless night carrying sulfur into today. What is that humming sound coming from the kitchen sink, my boy’s hiding place? Come out, show yourself my son. There is a July cricket in the garage who wants to meet you. His voice is the truce between the earlier explosions of the fireworks and the quiet. Come my son, listen to the cricket, who keeps perfect time, like your heart when the fear is gone. I hope, for both our sakes, the next decade is not too loud. I hope, for both our sakes, that time is kept perfectly. Chris Pellizzari is a writer from Willowbrook, Illinois. His work has appeared in The Citron Review, Lake Effect, and Hobart. He is a member of The Society of Midland Authors. 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 Hiding Son on the Fourth of the July”? The poem is influenced by a Fourth of July in which I witnessed my young nephew’s reactions after being frightened by some particularly loud fireworks outside his bedroom window. by Leath Tonino They burned her alive, pretty standard, and soon after a cloth-and-stick effigy was constructed, carried to the town square, and committed to the flames of a new fire. Burned her dead this time? The ashes were spat upon, pissed upon, scooped up and thrown down, and additional bodily fluids were gleefully discharged. Then someone had an idea: Mix the ashes with hay and clay, build a sculpture, cut its head off! The crowd did this repeatedly, five executions, six executions, seven executions, and stopped only when the point was convincingly argued that too much recycling had diluted the essence. This prompted a lengthy debate about the meaning of the word “essence.” Questions led to more questions, and more questions, and more questions, and the anger fizzled, the energy drained away. A sleepy boy mutilated a rabbit. An old stooped man tidied the town square up in preparation for the Sunday morning market. All of the above occurred many years before she was canonized, obviously. The surprise, I suppose, is that everything started over again in response to her canonization, i.e. nothing really changed, nothing except this: The boy with the rabbit was now the man lugging the bucket, the old stooped man almost sort of dancing, under the full moon, late on Saturday night, across the ancient cobblestones, the moony cobblestones, with his disgusting mop. Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections: The Animal One Thousand Miles Long and The West Will Swallow You. A freelance writer, his prose and poetry appear in Orion, The Sun, New England Review, Outside, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Saint”? I was reading Ian McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. There was some fascinating stuff about the Protestant Reformation and the destruction of religious images. I started there—and soon enough the sentences were running away with themselves! by Avril Shakira Villar In 2023, the Philippine government allocated approximately 0.34 percent of GDP to the arts and culture. It is the official numerical expression of a nation’s belief about what counts as productive, what deserves to be resourced, what kind of human activity merits the sustained attention of a state that has other priorities. What this number means, in practice, is that the Filipino artist learns very early and very permanently that compression is not an aesthetic choice. You finish the woodcut because you cannot afford the oil paint. You write the short story because the novel requires a room of one’s own and the room belongs to six other people and three of them work night shifts and need to sleep. What it does not reliably produce is the middle range, the sustained work, the five-year novel, the decade-long film project, the body of work that requires institutional support and a career structure and the basic guarantee that if you spend the next three years making the thing you need to make, you will still be able to eat at the end of it. This is what we have not built. Not the individual talent, which is everywhere, which has always been everywhere, which boards planes at NAIA Terminal 3 and lands in Toronto or London or Singapore and wins prizes there and is claimed then as a Filipino artist by the same country that could not find a way to keep them. The psychic cost of making art inside a structure that does not support it is not documented in cultural policy papers because cultural policy papers are written by people who have jobs and therefore do not feel it. It is documented in the dropout rate and in the number of writers who stopped writing after thirty because the writing was not feeding their children. In the number of musicians who play weddings and corporate events and are excellent at it and hate it with a precision that only people who know what they could have done instead are capable of hating anything. It is tragedy in the administrative sense, the tragedy of neglect so structural it becomes invisible, so normalized it becomes character, becomes the Filipino capacity for resilience, becomes something we are praised for internationally by people who do not understand that what they are praising is our ability to survive conditions that should not exist. The Filipino artist knows all of this from the inside, in the body, without needing it explained. The knowledge is in the hands that finish the woodcut at two in the morning before the shift begins. It is in the short story that is short not because short is the right length but because short is the length that fits in the life. It is in the film that runs twelve minutes and screens in Rotterdam and wins the prize and the director flies home economy class and goes back to shooting commercials on Monday. From the outside, you can see the shape of what was prevented. The novel that would have been written with five more years and a living wage. The career that would have unfolded if the career had been possible. It is the political question underneath the aesthetic one: not how do we celebrate the art that survives, but why must so much of it not survive at all. Avril Shakira Villar is a writer and youth leader from the Philippines. She is the author of I Live Because I Almost Died and an alumna of WriteGirl LA. She is one of the finalists in the English Poetry category of the 2025 Maningning Miclat Art Foundation competition. Her poems appear in Adi Magazine, Evanescent Magazine, Arcana Poetry Press, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Renard Press, and other literary magazines. 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 Economy of the Blade”? The title came last. For most of its life the essay was called “arts funding draft 3” and then “arts funding draft 3 ACTUAL” and then a date, because at some point I stopped believing in the word draft, and I started using timestamps because it is the only record I have. The first version was longer. It had a section on the patronage systems of the Spanish colonial period. It had the kind of transitions that exist to reassure the reader that the writer knows where they are going, which is the tell of a writer who does not yet know where they are going. I cut the colonial section, because an essay about the economics of compression cannot itself be uncompressed. The form has to know what it is arguing. Otherwise it is just a document with a title. What the essay is doing, which I understood only after it was finished, is treating the composite as evidence. The woodcut stands in for every constraint that produces compression as a survival strategy rather than an aesthetic one. The director stands in for every prize that flies home to a country that cannot sustain the career that won it. They are the logical endpoint of a structure, and I rendered the logical endpoint as though I had met it, because in a certain sense I had, because the structure is real even when the specific body inside it is assembled. by Roberta Allen This time she will know exactly how he looks. With fingertips, she traces the outline of his face in profile. But lightly snoring, lips apart, he is not anyone she knows awake when his expressions change so rapidly. There is no one way of seeing him except now when he looks nothing like himself. A Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction and a Yaddo Fellow, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books, including four story collections, THE TRAVELING WOMAN, CERTAIN PEOPLE, THE DAUGHTER, THE PRINCESS OF HERSELF; a novel, THE DREAMING GIRL, and the writing guide FAST FICTION. Over three-hundred stories have appeared in magazines such as Conjunctions, Guernica, The Bennington Review, Epoch and The Brooklyn Rail. Also a conceptual artist, most of her works on paper are held by The Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Her writing papers are held by the Fales Archive of NYU. robertaallen.com See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “His Face”? I found this piece recently, buried in binders with drafts of very old stories. I wrote this one in the 1980s about a boyfriend I had then. It was true to the experience of watching him sleep. That experience is still vivid in my mind even after all these years. by Kenneth Probo I’m a hummingbird when the last lobelia has withered, the red faded, each stalk a dead brown, the feeder taken indoors. Kenneth Pobo (he/him) has a new book out called Raylene And Skip (Wolfson Press). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Amsterdam Review, and elsewhere. He’s retired and enjoys the garden. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Autumn Hummingbird”? “Autumn Hummingbird” came from the many times my husband and I sit on the porch and enjoy the birds. Hummingbirds are a particular favorite. It is a little sad as the fall presses on as they fly away and the flowers they went to die. Originally the poem was a tanka, but it felt stilted in the 5-7-5-7-7 format, so I recast it as a short prose poem. That feels much more natural. by Nicholas Claro I’d gone to look out the window to look at anything that wasn’t Miranda, who I didn’t feel like looking at. Not after she said what she said. She said, “This doesn’t have to be ugly.” And after a minute said that what she’d said was something she had been meaning to say for a while. Then I saw it out there, lying motionless in the backyard. I thought it was a dog. But dogs don’t sleep like that, I thought. Especially not when it’s raining. My next thought was, Poor dog. I must have said this out loud. Miranda joined me at the window. A hand went to her mouth. “What do we do?” she said through her fingers. “What kind of question is that,” I said. She followed me to the door. I stepped into boots and put on a jacket. I found the shovel on the floor in the garage, below a hammer with a splintered handle that hung from a pegboard next to a saw with rounded teeth and a pair of rusted pliers. It wasn’t a dog. It was a large raccoon. Raccoons grew large in this neighborhood. There was a soybean plant nearby. The air always smelled like burnt popcorn. It drove them to frenzy. The raccoons were in the habit of breaking into the silos and eating their fill. The blade slipped easily into the wet soil. It wasn’t long before I had the thing buried. Back inside, I filled a kettle with water and set it on the stove. While it heated, Miranda walked in. It was really coming down now. Rain thumped against the windows. “Was it wearing a collar?” she said, her voice breaking a little. Now it breaks? I shook my head. “There wasn’t any collar.” “That means it was a stray,” she said. “Doesn’t it?” “Would that make you feel better?” She thought for a moment, her eyes watering over. She sniffed. “No, actually,” she said. “I don’t think that it would.” “It was some kind of mutt,” I said. “It looked like a really sweet dog—” “Stop it.” “—maybe with a little Border Collie or Australian Shepherd mixed in. You know, something I didn’t notice at first. But became more obvious the closer I looked.” Nicholas Claro holds an MFA in Fiction from Wichita State University. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, Necessary Fiction, XRAY, Write or Die Magazine, and others. He is the author of the story collections This Is Where You Are (Roadside Press, ’25) and Sedgwick County (Roadside Press, ’26). He lives in Wichita, Kansas. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Taxonomy”? For days on end I went back and forth on whether to take out or leave Miranda’s final line of dialogue: Stop it. It’s funny. It’s two words and I spent more time tinkering with these than I think it took me to write the original draft of the story. It’s one reason I love writing fiction this brief – every word matters. And laboring over them, as frustrating this can sometimes be, in the end, is really rewarding. by Michael Mirolla It starts as a gentle weakness in my left thumb. Like a slight pinching that won’t allow me to use the full strength possible when matched to my right thumb. That prevents the thumb muscle from achieving its full potential. Nothing serious, mind you. Nothing visible when placing the two thumbs side by side. Nothing that I need to bring up to my family doctor on our rare Zoom meetings. (Not wanting to waste her time with trivialities when I know I an fortunate to even have a family doctor despite her office being several hundred kilometres away and thus awkward for face-to-face.) It does worry me, however, that nothing I do by way of exercise improves the strength of that thumb. And is it getting worse? Hard to tell. For some reason, my mind goes to the thought of the opposable thumb theory of human intelligence and ingenuity. And how now, when twisting off the top of a vacuum-sealed jam or olive jar, I can no longer make full use of one of my opposables – and need to switch to my right hand. Is this going to lead to a loss of a percentage of that intelligence or ingenuity? Well, I guess that would have had to depend on measuring the difference between pre- and post-left-thumb-weakness intelligence and ingenuity levels. I had never thought of doing that before my left thumb showed this weakness. Would have shown incredible foresight if I had done so. In any case and not crying over spilled milk (not that I would ever cry over milk as I don’t drink it), I am able to simulate that pinching and loss of strength by holding the base of my diminished thumb between right thumb and index and squeezing. Being somewhat still intelligent, I check to see what can cause thumb pain: trigger thumb, thumb arthritis, DeQuervain’s tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, skier’s thumb. None of these pains describe the weakness and pinching in my left thumb. Next, I check the muscles included in the thumb: abductor pollicis brevis, flexor pollicis brevis, opponens pollicis, adductor pollicis. This is all Greek to me. Perhaps my intelligence is already starting on that downward slippery slope. Tom Thumb, while interesting as the first fairy tale printed in English, doesn’t help all that much – especially the part where a cow swallows him and is then expunged via a cow pat! But I digress. Is that another symptom of diminishing intelligence? I fear it might be. Well, look on the bright side. Unlike many others, I can trace this lessening to a specific cause. Hopefully, I can hold onto that as I fade away. Michael Mirolla has had the fortune of publishing more than two dozen novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections. These include award winners such as a novella, The Last News Vendor, winner of the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award, and three Bressani Prize winners: the novel Berlin; the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue; and the short story collection Lessons in Relationship Dyads. Michael is also a veteran writer-in-residence, including: a three-month residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver (fall 2019); Olot, Catalonia (September 2023); Barcelona (Can Serrat residency, July 2024); Regina Public Library Writer-in-Residence (Sept. 2024-June 2025); Virtual writer-in-residence (Saskatchewan Writers Guild, September-October 2025). A symposium on Michael’s writing was held on May 25, 2023. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael makes his home on a 30-acre farm (along with five dogs, a cat and sundry humans) outside the town of Gananoque in the Thousand Islands area of Ontario. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “My Left Thumb”? I don’t know if any of it is surprising and/or fascinating in all truth. I was reaching for a bottle of my favorite wine one evening and felt a twinge in my left thumb. One of those things that happens when you over-extend, I thought. But no. The twinge persisted. I checked my right thumb and it was all good. No twinge. I waited several days to see if it was gone. It wasn’t. But it also hadn’t become worse. Low level twinge, in other words. That’s when the idea came to me to take advantage of this (something I’ve done quite often with other ailments and dreams as inspirations for my writing). In the hope something good comes out of something a little scary. by Terena Elizabeth Bell
In the room young women come and go, TikToking Michelangelo. Terena Elizabeth Bell is a fiction writer. Her debut short story collection,Tell Me What You See (Whiskey Tit, 2022), was named one of the “best books of the century” by New York Society Library. Her writing has appeared in more than 100 publications. A Kentucky native, she lives in New York. Get one story delivered to your inbox every month by subscribing here: patreon.com/terenaelizabethbell. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Zoomers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 2024”? I go to the Metropolitan Museum often and every time I do, I can’t help but notice how many people never actually look at the art. No matter what part of the museum you’re in, you see them: these women in their 20’s who walk around with their phones held up the entire time, recording, eyes locked on their screens. One day I was on a bench in one of the European galleries and this sentence just came to me. by Wayne Lee Writer, editor and teacher Wayne Lee (wayneleepoet.com) lives in Santa Fe, NM. Lee’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Press, Slipstream, The New Guard, Writer’s Digest and other journals and anthologies. He was awarded the 2012 Fischer Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and four Best of the Net Awards. His collection The Underside of Light was a finalist for the 2014 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award; his collection Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets was published by Cornerstone Press in April 2025; and his collection The Beautiful Foolishness is forthcoming from Casa Urraca Press in 2026. Lee is the host of the online Tuesday Poetry Practice community. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Interview Erasure”? There isn’t a lot of “fascinating stuff” to tell about “Interview Erasure.” I was simply writing an erasure poem from the Candace Bergen interview in Time, and I kept erasing and erasing until I had whittled it down to what felt like a tight little prose poem that made a much larger comment on aging and summoning the courage to face our own mortality. 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/ See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “First Woman”? I wrote the first draft of “First Woman” in 2019 while waiting for some chemical analyses to finish in the lab. Airplanes were flying over the building, which sparked a sudden inspiration to give my rather mundane experience a sci-fi twist: a scientific woman circumventing man-made structures and being the first woman to walk on the moon. Often in science, we forget the remarkable things we are doing and are bogged down by day-to-day details. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “About Time”? I’m always intrigued by how stories originate. For as long as I remember, I’ve had images and dreams of being under siege, people trying to break through my doors and windows. I suppose this speaks to some sense of vulnerability, of being under threat, whether that threat is real or only in the imagination. I also like to meditate, perhaps to free myself of such images. The story idea came to me when I put those two things together, being under siege while trying to meditate, as an avoidance strategy, I suppose. It probably isn’t a good time to be meditating as the man’s wife points out. The interactions of the couple, their contrasting viewpoints, helped pull the story along. One thing that happened during the drafting was that I changed the story from first person to third. I’m not sure why, but I like the story better this way. Perhaps it helps to see the story a little more from the outside looking in. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Dépaysement”? As a French immigrant who moved from France to Canada, this piece is a patchwork of my own and others’ experiences of migration. With “Dépaysement,” I set out to write a lyrical realist flash fiction about the subtle estrangement of beginning again in a new country. Influenced by writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, I’m drawn to stories of translation between places, languages, and selves. The title, a French word without a precise English translation, evokes that in-between state of displacement and discovery. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Horses”? Many of my works tend to be autobiographical. This is one of them. I first wrote this piece four years ago, after I graduated from high school in Korea. The education environment had been competitive and restrictive, with a small handful of teachers from school and the hagwons being unnecessarily violent, success being their justification. When I was in America, my second grade teacher, Mrs. Lang told me not to be like a racehorse with blinders, to always look around to others in need. I am most grateful and will always be in debt to the many teachers who have taught me with care, how to care. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “And Flecked with Copper”? I wrote ‘And Flecked with Copper’ as a reminder to myself to keep going. No one cares about the dusty rocks I find, but when I follow where they lead I often trip over treasures. 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 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 Keep Thinking About that Scene From Buffy the Vampire Slayer”? I was diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago. I have pages and pages of notes I’ve taken over the last year, but I haven’t been able to do anything with them. I’ve been listening to a podcast called “The Rewatcher: Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and realized I wanted to use the show as a type of ekphrasis. Pop culture has often been a way into difficult subjects for me. My love of Buffy and the nostalgia I feel toward the show made it the perfect vehicle to deal with this still raw topic. 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 See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “from Paradise”? 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Your body knows things you never could”? I credit Jenny Zhang’s poetry with inspiring me to make my own attempts in the dark. If you read her poem “I keep thinking there is an august” (available online via BOMB), you’ll get an idea of how the words “stupid” and “celestial” ended up in the vocabulary of my piece. I don’t remember much about the genesis of this piece, except that it came out effortlessly (which doesn’t often happen!)—but I watched KPop Demon Hunters days before getting the acceptance email, and when I reread my submission, it gave me some insight into why I ugly-cried through much of the last half-hour of that film. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Goblin Toes”? The idea for this piece started with an image in my mind of the annoyed mother, from which that first line sprang up, Goddammit, can’t you keep your feet clean? Then I let the story take me wherever it was going to go. (Similar, I suppose, to the protagonist’s relationship with her feet.) 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Eve writes a letter to God”? I’d been thinking about how women’s labor—cooking, cleaning, healing—gets left out of sacred narratives. I wanted Eve to speak from those spaces: blood, salt, sweat, hunger. Doing so, she discovers that language itself is a counter-creation. “Eve writes a letter to God” belongs to the unwritten testament which, by imagining the missing stories, questions who got to speak for God and who was written over.My Hiding Son on the Fourth of the July
Saint
The Economy of the Blade
His Face
Autumn Hummingbird
Taxonomy
My Left Thumb
CNF
Zoomers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 2024
Interview Erasure
First Woman
About Time
Dépaysement
CNF: Horses
And Flecked with Copper
CNF: I Keep Thinking About that Scene From Buffy the Vampire Slayer
CNF: from Paradise
Your body knows things you never could
Goblin Toes
Eve writes a letter to God
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
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