Eve writes a letter to God

by Rowan Tate

 

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

 

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

 

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CNF: Chef Boyardee

by Salvatore Difalco

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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Breach

by Lucy Zhang

 

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

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

 

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

 

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CNF: The Scent of Cinnamon

by Alison Colwell

 

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

I tighten my clean apron. Breathe.

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

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

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

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

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

She almost starved to death.

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

She’s okay now.

It took a long time.

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

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

“Time to wake up.”

She opens her eyes.

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

 

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

 

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CNF: Tuesday, the Regulars

by Liz Abrams-Morley

 

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

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

 

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

 

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CNF: Opera

by Sara Cassidy

 

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

 

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

 

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CNF: Lilith’s Song

by Sunmisola Odusola

 

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

 

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

 

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CNF: I am here to lay my body down

by Carolyn Zaikowski

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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Finding My Story

by Joseph O’Day

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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CNF: I’m the Teacher They Make Memes About

by Jennifer Edwards

 

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

 

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

 

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CNF: Night Shift

by Amy Speace

 

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

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

 

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

 

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Game Over

by Karen Regen Tuero

 

As long as her hat was on, she looked quite good. The hat hid her thinning hair; showing only her thick, dark, shoulder-length curls; letting her imagine she looked young. But sometime between yesterday and today, the hat disappeared, and the jig was up.

The hat itself was old yet durable, the packable, washable kind meant for adventures. In earlier days before it ever dutifully protected her vanity, it protected her skin. It had travelled with her the world over, lately to this gaucho town outside of Buenos Aires, where today, as the sun waned, it had to be somewhere.

Retracing her steps in and out of the shops, restaurants and cafes around the town square, she encountered sympathetic shopkeepers who shook their heads to her inquires before letting her check for herself whether her hat had been left on a table or dropped on the floor or even forgotten by a washroom mirror. But there was no tan hat.

The village dog resting outside of one cafe apparently understood her distress. He led her to the square; waiting patiently, his dappled front paws outstretched on the lawn while she checked each bench, each path, then combed the grounds. He seemed to accept she might expect to find the cotton hat torn to pieces, the handiwork of one of his mangy brothers that ruled the town. But there were no tan cotton pieces anywhere.

Later, she found the hat on her bed. She had never put it on.

Panic set in. She was at the beginning of a new adventure she had no desire to be on—the great decline. Next time the hat would not so easily reappear. Little by little, all would be lost.

 

Karen Regen Tuero is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose work has appeared in The North American Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. For links to her many published stories, go to: https://linktr.ee/kregentuero

 

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The Descent into Decline

by Abbie Doll

 

‘Twas the season of calendars crammed: too many appointments to name, let alone manage. The seeing-yet-another-physician season, the scans-and-surgeries season. The revolving-door season of hospital stays, both scheduled and unforeseen. The insufferable season of suffering, the season of wondering when—or if—you’ll make it back home. The season of asking on repeat: is this it? Is it? The season of one too many close calls, the season of pleading: please, give it to me straight. That d(r)eadful season of determining how and why and when… ‘Twas the season of staring at each clock in disbelief, willing them all to wind back. The season of constant wondering, of hope & despair warring in equal measure. The season of forsaking every last belief while wallowing in the feeling of flat-out defeat. The burdensome season of failing to cope with your new reality: the irreversible necessity of need in every minor thing. Assistance, a must. ‘Twas the season of gradual-yet-rapid deterioration. A season of too many feelings: the regrets, the longings, the never-ending negotiations, the wanting more time, the blues, the blues, those fucking relentless blues. That inescapable shame with your biology to blame. Letting everyone down, down, down…and feeling let down—by your own body no less. Welcome to the season of no autonomy, the postseason period where life itself ceases (to matter), the season where the writing on the wall is unalterable—the stains and scars permanent. The season of incessant apologies, the season where language itself atrophies into sheer inadequacy. You’ve reached the all-too-predictable season of Death approaching—Death lurking, Death bedside-lingering. The sickening season of postmortem planning, concluded by the cessation of planning entirely. Then comes the heavyhearted hassle of saying goodbye, while fickle Father Time clicks his tongue and checks his watch. Enter the unbearable season of not knowing what to say, while somehow also having too much to say. Then comes the season of solitude: of not saying anything at all—where silence descends like snow. Enter the contradictory season of trying to fit everything in, as if you hadn’t already rushed to live your whole damn life. The season of trying to secure One. Last. Taste. The oh-so-infuriating season of demanding a do-over. That back-and-forth seesaw season of wondering if you ever did anything right. That finicky assessment season. The final-countdown season, without knowing exactly when. The hoping-death-is-just-a-new-beginning season. That sucky barnyard season of being put out to pasture—having to let go of everything and everyone you ever knew…or die trying (but really, dying either way). ‘Twas the season of last reflections, the season of sorrow, the season of bargaining, and reluctantly, oh, so reluctantly, the season of acceptance. ‘Twas the final season, after all. The season of separation, the season of farewell. The season of departure, the season of burial. The season of grief, the season of reckoning.

The season of no longer being around.

The season of no longer being.

The season of no longer.

 

Abbie Doll is a writer residing in Columbus, OH, with an MFA from Lindenwood University and is a Fiction Editor at Identity Theory. Her work has been featured in Door Is a Jar Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, and Pinch Journal Online, among others; it has also been longlisted for The Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. Connect on socials @AbbieDollWrites.

 

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If Only The Great Thinker Knew it Wasn’t that Bad

by Michael Mark

 

He’d read in college the author of The Stranger swerved around a squirrel that darted in front of the car and crashed into a Plane tree and died. Ever since, he fixated on not avoiding any small animal should it be in front of him on the road. He’d have to hit it. Images of running over varied creatures repeated in his mind whether he was driving or not. He’d be walking and see a bird, and then himself behind the wheel running over that bird. He was haunted, and shared in detail what he saw in his head, even at parties. It never happened until a pigeon, probably lame, because it didn’t fly away as they all had before. The next time he hit a squirrel, like the one Camus successfully avoided. It hardly made a thud, more like a sigh.

 

Michael Mark is the author of Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet which won the 2022 Rattle Chapbook prize. His poems appear in Copper Nickel, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Southern Review, The Sun, 32 Poems. His two books of stories are Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). His piece, “House Story,” originally published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2024. He was included in Best New Poets 2024 and awarded a Pushcart Prize, 2026. michaeljmark.com

 

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CNF: Please verify that you are human

by Callie Dean

 

Sperm whales have an alphabet. Crows can count to six. Sea otters turn stones into tools. Starlings keep coin collections; orangutans mug into mirrors. Hyenas laugh, bats kiss, giraffes mourn their dead. Lab rats pull on levers as if playing slots in a casino. The giant Pacific octopus can unscrew pickle jars and medicine bottles. Chimpanzees jockey for power with surprising political prowess. Eagles practice monogamy, and not even fruit flies can escape the pull of peer pressure. Elephants paint. Chatbots write novels. And I, with my wild, precious life, click all the images containing motorcycles.

 

Callie B. Dean is a writer, musician, and program evaluator living in Shreveport, LA. Her essays and poetry have appeared at Coffee + Crumbs, JMWW, Unbroken, and HOOT. Her first picture book, Marvelous Mistakes: Accidents that Made History (Beaming Books), will be published in 2026. Find her online at calliebdean.com.

 

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Knots and Braids

by Gaurav Bhalla

 

She says: Why can’t you put the spice bottles back in the rack when you are done with them?

He says: I was looking for paprika.

She says: You’d find it if you put it back in the same place every time.

He says: Should I make my omelet with olives … or capers … or both?

She says: Reminds me, did you pay the property tax bill?

He says: Hot pan, warm oil, perfect for a fluffy brown omelet.

She says: There’s a very hefty fine if we don’t pay the property tax on time.

He says: You were saying?

She says: Forget it. Asking you to do anything is a waste of time, should just do everything myself.

He says: Yes, the property tax, would have paid it, couldn’t find the bill.

She says: It’s on the kitchen desk. Did you bother looking?

He says: Have you seen the kitchen desk?

She says: What about it?

He says: Looks like the local landfill.

She says: 90% of the junk on that desk is yours—car keys, wallet, watch, Wall Street Journal. Why don’t you dump your junk on your own desk?

He says: My desk’s in the basement.

She says: All hail the Lord of the Manor. Fie, fie, fie.

He says: Ah, the play begins.

She says: Want to know the ending?

He says: NO.

She says: Want to know the ending?

He says: Let’s not go there.

She says: Let’s, I’m sick and tired of running this show single-handed and being dumped upon.

He says: Adam Smith, division of labor.

She says: Labor gets paid, I don’t.

He says: What are you suggesting?

She says: When you started your company, you asked me for an eight-year divorce.

He says: A temporary one.

She says: It’s coming up on thirteen years.

He says: Thirteen years! My how time flies.

She says: Time’s up. Choose.

He says: Choose what?

She says: Cut it out, you know damn well what I’m talking about.

He says: Would you like some of my gourmet …?

She says: Your omelet’s burning.

 

Gaurav Bhalla is an entrepreneur, educator, and former global C-suite executive. Published in both business and literature, his writing focuses on cross-cultural themes that aim to deepen people’s understanding of themselves and others. His short stories have been published in India, UK, and USA. Recently, his short stories have appeared in Jimson Weed, Defenestrationism.net, and The Writing Disorder.

 

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CNF: Revision

by Jack Bedell

 

My son came into our room last  night wanting to know what fight I’d change if I could rewrite the result. It was tough not to rattle off a list of wrongs I dreamed of making right when I was a kid, or of heroes I’d love to put back on their feet. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that any change I gave him might change too much. If I gave Foreman the win in Zaire, would we have lost Ali’s voice from then on? Or what about keeping Douglas down for that long count against Tyson? Would that’ve ruined Tyson’s chance to redeem his life later? So I told him I’d let Frazier land the big left he missed in round one of his first fight with Foreman. If that punch caught chin instead of whiskers, maybe Foreman could’ve found God earlier. Or maybe he would’ve been ready for Ali when he finally got him. Who knows, but maybe Frazier would’ve gone on to be the champion he deserved to be if that hook found its target. I do know I would’ve gone to bed a lot happier that night if it did, and that might be enough of a reason, right there.

 

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, and other journals. His work has also been selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Ghost Forest(Mercer University Press, 2024). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

 

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CNF: hamlet act 3 scene 1

by Zero Laforga

 

when i die, i don’t want to be anyone else’s problem, not like the just dead horse in a forklift i saw today, on my run out in colma, halfway to the serbian cemetery, where no one there has made it past fifty and it feels suspicious that no one has ever reflected on the apparently short lives of serbians in san francisco, but anyways, the horse’s legs stuck straight out, the body so newly stiff it made me wonder if they just ran out of gas carrying the damn thing over or thought it belonged better in the pet cemetery but they didn’t have the space, and maybe they’re waiting on that one guy they know to pull a deal on its cremation since i think it’s technically illegal to do that to a horse but god i don’t know how you’d get rid of a thing so big, i’ve never had to personally get rid of a human body, but i feel like it’s easier than some horse, but can you imagine my body, like that, i can hardly look at my face in the mirror as it is, i don’t need anyone to look at my lifeless face, so i guess they have to burn my body to a crisp and leave it at that and really, no offense to you claudia, but when i die, i don’t need my ashes to be turned into a tree or become a coral reef or a preserved skin suit or a star you can’t even see from the roof of the house because really don’t we all end up in the same place as the worms or the gophers or like shakespeare says i think, that the fish who feeds the pheasant who feeds the king ends up feeding the — doesn’t matter, i just can’t become my father, a mess on the beach spilling out of a yellow sand pail that surely wasn’t full of human remains, but i think everyone else on the beach knew because my wife kept yelling at me to have more decorum, but god, can’t you just let a man not deal with the death of his father, but, oh lorna, i’m sorry that your cat’s gotta get e-u-t-h-a-n— you know what i’m saying, but i guess death just won’t stop staring us in the face, that greedy rat bastard.

 

Bio

 

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

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

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

Submissions

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

Upcoming

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