Screwball

by Edward Thomas-Herrera

She’s the scrappy showgirl from the Zanzibar Room. She’s the dizzy high school sweetheart from back home in Lake Esther. She’s the fast-talking working class gal, holding out for a knight in shining armor. She’s the pitiful wallflower in need of an emergency makeover. She’s the madcap heiress to a fortune in steel who won’t take But Madam, we can’t possibly accommodate a walrus at this restaurant! for an answer. She’s the plucky editrix-in-chief of Modern Miss magazine. Until the right kind of guy comes along, of course. He’s the streetwise tough. He’s the cynical reporter for the Daily Times-Mirror. He’s the jailbird on the lam with a bum rap, trying to clear his name. He’s the incorrigible playboy who needs to grow up. He’s the silver-tongued sea captain with a girl in every port south of the Equator. He’s the high society blueblood who’s had everything handed to him gift wrapped extra special. He’s the uncompromising idealist with an invention that’s gonna knock your socks off. Just you wait. All he needs is someone who’ll believe in him. They meet in a ritzy nightclub. They meet on the subway when she takes a seat on his hat. They meet on the moonlit deck of a trans-Atlantic ocean liner. They meet in an elevator car stuck between the 21st and 22nd floor. They meet in a hotel room, waking up in the same bed, registered under the names of Count and Countess de Carlisle. They take an instant dislike to each other. It’s love at first sight. She decides right then and there he’s the man she’s going to marry – only he doesn’t know it yet. Say, I’ve got an idea! You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. But this partnership is strictly business, get me? Nothing funny! A bet is made. A deal is struck. A plan is hatched. An identity is mistaken. Hijinks. Shenanigans. Complications. He’s sailing for Panama the day after tomorrow. She’s out to save the family farm. He’s not ready to tie the knot. Her parents want her to marry the flat tire who works for the post office. He’s already engaged to a beautiful blonde with a permanent sourpuss. There’s a hundred-fifty-pound Great Dane who goes nuts whenever he hears the trombone. There’s a delivery guy out here just trying to do his job, Mac. Now where do you want this Steinway? There’s a society matron who’s never heard of um… what was that delightful game called again? Pinochle? There’s a hard-nosed mob boss looking to collect on a past due loan. There’s a prize fighter who’s one chicken short of a pot pie. There’s a real stuffed shirt who mans the front desk. There’s a secretary with a fresh mouth. There’s a phony Bulgarian princess. There’s a set of identical twins. Maybe two sets. Somebody takes a pratfall on the rug in the lobby. Somebody swipes the Razumovsky diamonds. Somebody slings a cream pie. Somebody call the cops! What are all those reporters doing outside the window? Tell it to the judge, Sister! Now see here! Well, I never! Follow that taxi! Turns out that lousy mug knew the whole truth all this time. Turns out that boyfriend of hers was only interested in her stock portfolio. Turns out that toothless old bum’s really president of the First National Bank. Turns out the lady who writes the advice-to-the-lovelorn column is that mousey dame who works at the library, hiding behind a pair of cheaters. Turns out he’s got a rich uncle who left him everything in the will hidden in the antique clock on the mantelpiece. But it’s not until she gets jilted at the altar and the evening edition hits the newsstands and the show’s a big hit and he spots her waiting for him on the train platform, shivering in the rain, does he realize they’re meant for each other. Close-up. Big kiss. Cymbal crash. Music swells. The end. Roll credits.

Edward Thomas-Herrera is a Salvadoran-American poet, playwright, and performer living and working in Chicago. He has a very long resumé of stage credits with which he refuses to bore you, but he’ll be happy to tell you his poetry has appeared in Tofu Ink Arts Press, Beaver Magazine, and The Account.

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So what do you do?

by Max Kerwien

Google “big toe pain.” See where that takes you. Perhaps to a long chain of YouTube videos of bunion removal. I have seen how rail workers fare in Norfolk’s care, and there are more bunions than paid sick time. I was the Leave Management Officer. To deny their requests for time off were little deaths. Now I coordinate projects for health insurance. I quit making guns to manufacture bullets. I remember a meeting with the Product team last month about making the Claims Denial UI more accessible for the hearing impaired. My VP Kevin made this excellent point about captioning where we can and getting that tech from Brazilian contractors, limiting the financial responsibility of providing benefits for US FT employees. It made me think, what am I currently doing to increase Western productivity in a time of excellent suffering? But the paycheck. My manager and I talk about climbing a ladder. I keep a loose grip and hope I fall. Anyways, I’m rambling. So your profile said you’re from Colorado?

Max Kerwien is a disabled poet and comedian. In 2016, he won the Joan Grayston Poetry Prize. His work has been published in the decomp Journal, the DASH Literary Journal, and more. Most recently, his chapbook “Whirs, Snaps, Clicks, and Clacks” was published by Bottlecap Press.

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The Crow

by Dania Jamal

I am waiting at the bus stop. I am allowed be nervous, I say; there is hope to meet.

I try to distract myself with the people around me. There is a father waiting with his daughter. He is playful and she is nervous as I. It looks like something my father pretends to have done with me or it looks like something my father did when I was young and I can’t remember. The little girl will dream big. She will try not to dream too far. But at the end she won’t help it. She is a little bird in a nest. Her father wants to push her out, off the road. I catch myself before jumping to save her. How could he do something like that?

The bird is beautiful. My bird is intelligent, collects silver and anything that glimmers. I keep it for when I need it. It keeps me company instead of a conversation.

In the glass turned mirror by the poster on the other side, I am reflected a crow. I lower my head down in shame. I put no call. I don’t act the omen. Let the girl live. Let her dream. I turn to the other side. There is an older woman, hunched back with small eyes. She is no longer beautiful. She no longer needs to be. This is a relief.

Does she get lots of visitors? Is she loved? Had she done enough? She looks lost, all alone. Perhaps she saved herself. Perhaps she saved others. Maybe that is where all of her strength went. Maybe her lips withered out by kisses. Her cheeks hollowed from smiling. Her legs weakened by dancing. I have to save myself. When I am her age, I won’t be alone in a bus stop, I will save my kisses to still have my lips. I won’t move my hips. You can’t know what the future hides. Perhaps for the better.

I want to see her cry. I want to console her and unveil her secrets. I want to know if it is worth it to become like this. I want to know where she wasted it. I want to know better. But I will save it.

I turn my head away from her; she started smiling happily and joking with some kid.

Me, on the other hand. I will save it.

I look back at the blackened mirror. I am a crow again

Dania is a middle-eastern woman. She always enjoyed crafting stories and writing since she can remember. Her poem, I always prefer the future to the present has been recently published in Vita and the Woolf literary journal and was featured on the online magazine The Raven’s Muse for the third issue

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CNF: Just Cos

by Eddie Cassidy

We lived in a yellow house on top of a hill. It was old and steadily losing ground in a battle with the woods around it. It was pretty in the conventional sense when we moved in. Azaleas lined the stairs. It was pretty in an unconventional sense thereafter. The azaleas and everything else gave way to green overgrowth. My father tended to everything until he felt the place was his. My mother came to believe the house was cursed, the source of all our problems.

One day, old enough to feel shame, I mowed the lawn of my own accord. Before I had finished, my father came out and watched me from above, saying nothing. I felt his presence and let go of the gas. He shrugged as if to say, “what for?” I shrugged as if to say, “just cos.” He went back inside. Before I took a shower, I ran into my mother. She asked me why I mowed the lawn. I shrugged as if to say, “just cos.” She smiled as if to say, “thank you.”

My father died a couple years after that. We had no insurance and no savings. To impress potential buyers, I did my part and mowed the lawn. I ran out of gas shortly into it. I went upstairs to check the red container of gasoline we kept under a bush. The liquid within splashed when I shook it. My father must’ve filled it sometime before he passed. At the top of the stairs, I saw a patch of cut grass and what our home used to be.

A quarter way through the lawn, the mower died. The lawn and everything around looked conventionally uglier than it already had.

I managed to borrow a lawn mower from an acquaintance. He asked me if I needed extra gas, but I told him I had plenty. Halfway through the front lawn, I needed the red container.

I filled up the mower, primed it, pulled the cord, and continued. Five steps in, the mower died. I tried everything. I emptied the cut grass. I played with the primer. I unwound the blade. I took a cursory look at the motor.

I went upstairs with the red container and placed it where it belonged. I looked at it for a minute before unscrewing the top. When I smelled the contents, I did not smell gasoline. I smelled nothing. The container had been filled with water.

I felt his presence, looked to the sky, and shrugged as if to say, “what for?”

Eddie Cassidy is a high school English teacher who lives with his wife and newborn son in the Bronx. When he isn’t planning lessons, he stops overanalyzing art for just enough time to produce his own. This is his first published work.

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Slugs

by Roberta Allen

They are the largest slugs she has ever seen. Spotted and over eight inches long. Every evening she waits for them to emerge from their dark damp tunnels under her cottage in the country. Her enthusiasm is so contagious her neighbors have become interested. But her friend in the city says he’s seen enough bugs.

“But slugs are not insects!” she tells him. “They’re related to snails though they don’t have shells. Slugs are mollusks like octopuses.”

He is silent.

She doesn’t say slugs saved many soldiers in World War 1. They detected harmful levels of mustard gas before humans could. Nor does she mention annual slug races on an island in Canada.

What would’ve been the point?

Every evening at this hour neighbors gather in front of her cottage, bend down, and look closely at the soft slimy creatures but they aren’t allowed to prod them. Slowly crawling along the ground, the slugs leave trails of mucus. The neighbors cry out, “That is so disgusting!” Still, none of them can look away. They make gargoyle faces to emphasize their revulsion. She is the only one who does not make faces. In truth, she likes the slugs better than the neighbors who come to watch.

A Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction and a Yaddo Fellow, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books. Her latest story collection is The Princess of Herself. Her many stories have appeared in such magazines as Conjunctions, Guernica and Bomb. Also a conceptual artist, very active internationally through the 1970s-early 80s, her art papers and her works on paper have been acquired by The Smithsonian, her writing papers by the Fales Archive at NYU

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CNF: Helter Skelter, Or: Things I Write Down So They Stop Perplexing Me

by Daniel Seifert

What my high school English teacher was thinking when she told me to Stop Being Such a Bloody Boy. What a sixteen year old Bloody Boy should make of this request, delivered with such fervent heat. How sometimes the best thing to be is the ice cracking, like a broken promise in my G&T. Where twenty years have slunk off to. Where the boy will be ten years from now, when the ice caps have boiled away. How Salinger got the idea for Holden to keep asking where the ducks go when the pond collects a skin of ice. Why ducks seem capable of a happiness entirely richer than mine. Whatever happened to the interrobang, the upside-down one in particular (⸘). How come helter takes its rest in shelter, and what it means to see chaos in everything. A word within a word.

And who coined  the phrase a murder of crows and what they had, precisely, against crows. Why when I see a happy duck I want to scream into its face Stop being such a bird.

Daniel Seifert’s writing is published or forthcoming in The New York Times, Consequence, The Sun, and Gulf Coast. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. He lives in Singapore, and is working on a novel. Wish him luck on Twitter @DanSeifwrites.

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CNF: Barn Cat

by Jodi Cressman

Have I told you about the time my mother mentioned that, as a teenager, she trapped the barn cat and drowned it, flayed it, and boiled its bones to study anatomy? It was murder with purpose—to get off the farm and into nursing school, but the story of the murder had no purpose. Not confession, scare tactic, science lesson, just memory unearthed, like somebody’s favorite dinner plate amidst the empty juice bottles and old sofas upturned by a bulldozer. Her voice flat as that plate, her body flat as that bed she lay in, four years after a stroke.

Jodi Cressman teaches writing and literature at Dominican University, just outside of Chicago. She is working on a book-length hybrid memoir about disasters that have taken place in U.S. towns called Centralia.

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CNF: No Regrets

by Alison Watson

I sometimes wondered if my mother regretted adopting me.

Over the years, I put her through so much: drug addiction, psych wards, suicide attempts. Bipolar Disorder, OCD. Despite all the trauma, she never gave up on me, even when other family members reached their breaking point.

Sometimes her attempts to help me were misguided, such as having my childhood piano shipped to me in New York, as if that was going to save me, or paying for me to move to rural New Mexico, thinking that New York was the problem.

But ultimately it was thanks to her support that I finally got the psychiatric help I needed. She paid for medications and psychiatrist appointments when I lost my insurance. She visited me in almost every psych ward I was incarcerated in. She believed I could get well, even when I didn’t believe it, myself.

“Please take care of Ali when I’m gone,” she asked my sister a few years before she died.

Then she succumbed to Alzheimer’s, and ultimately ALS. The little dynamo who had always been my best cheerleader faded away, leaving a corpse-like shell who seemed to have no idea what was going on around her.

In her final days, I sat by her bedside. By now, the ALS had rendered her paralyzed. She had a Do Not Resuscitate order, and had made it clear that she didn’t want a feeding tube. So, we watched her slowly dehydrate to death over a gut-wrenching two weeks.

Alone with her, unsure if she was still somewhere in there and could understand me, I spoke to my mother as I held her hand.

“You can pass without worrying about me,” I whispered. “I’m clean and sober a long time; I’m stable on meds. I’ll be okay.”

And even though she was paralyzed, somehow, she squeezed my hand.

Alison Watson is a memoirist who writes about overcoming mental illness, addiction, and being an adoptee. She is currently shopping her full-length manuscript, “A Psychotic’s Journey Through Eastern Seaboard Psych Wards,” with publishers. Alison’s work has been published in The Sun Magazine, Please See Me, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Writer’s Journal, and MoonPark Review (which nominated her essay to Best of the Net 2025). In addition to writing, Alison feeds her soul by working in an animal shelter. To read more of her writing, please visit her website, alisonmorriswatson.com.

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CNF: People Just Assume You Do

by Diane Lefer

I don’t have a cell phone, a car, A/C, a microwave, a blender, a dishwasher, cable, Wi-Fi, Netflix, a bathroom scale, children, a husband, regrets.

Diane Lefer’s novels feature scientists who become terrorism suspects (Out of Place) and baboons with broken hearts (Confessions of a Carnivore). She is the author of three story collections, including California Transit which received the Mary McCarthy Prize. With Hector Aristizábal, she co-authored The Blessing Is Next to the Wound: A story of art, activism, and transformation, cited as recommended reading by Amnesty International. Diane has worked with asylum-seekers, men on parole, youth affected by the criminal in/justice system, and vulnerable kids in Bolivia and Colombia. She is delighted to have work appear here and was just as happy to be part of Healing Visions, the beautiful photography and prose anthology published by Matter Press. Diane lives in Los Angeles, relying on public transportation and her cat.

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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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CNF: After the Parade of Storms

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.

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Hold ‘Em

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.

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CNF: Juicing

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.

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The Rum Escapades of Mr. Charles

~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.

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Jurassic Jerks: The Life and Times of Dr. Alan Grant

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.

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Autism Evaluation

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.

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CNF: Private School

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.

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CNF: Piñata Memory

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.

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The Blue Pony

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.

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CNF: Not All Words Taste Like Prayer

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.

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Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.

Submissions

Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2025. Submit here.

Upcoming

01/13 • Edward Thomas-Herrera
01/20 • Zero Laforga
01/27 • Jack Bedell
02/03 • TBD
02/10 • Gaurav Bhalla
02/17 • Callie Dean
02/24 • TBD