The Economy of the Blade

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.

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CNF: Horses

by Yejun Chun

The word for “horse” in Korean is “말” which also means “words” but none of us were allowed to speak out loud the thoughts that we created in the classroom.

Especially during our midnight sessions and Saturdays. The blinders thickened then. The teacher said that he’ll make us gallop across the finish line first, no matter what it takes. The rest will have their name erased from the race. No higher education for those who tread, they don’t deserve it. Our heads are always down; the equations and Greek letters scribbled by hands are our marks. They also marked how much respect we could earn and the time we could eat our dinners.

His voice snaps like a whip. I am called out. Caught daydreaming again. Last time, it was a slap to the right cheek. The ruler hits my palms and the numbers go flying. The others still have their heads down. Like shattered glass, the plastic bits twinkle in the air, momentarily like sugar or stars or dust particles in the sunlight.

Retracing my mind now. I was not animalistic enough for the real world. The tears swallow themselves. The notebook hidden inside my desk had new poems about flowers and grapes, ready to be eaten by the hills.

Yejun Chun is a poet, playwright, and prose writer from Seoul, South Korea. He is currently studying English Literature and Culture at Yonsei University as a graduate student. His works of poetry, CNF, and short fiction have been published in the Academy of American Poets, fractured lit, Hobart, and 50-Word Stories among many other places. His plays have been performed in Seoul. He has been awarded the top University Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 2024.

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CNF: I Keep Thinking About that Scene From Buffy the Vampire Slayer

by Allison Blevins

Buffy comes home on a bright day, windows streaming day and sunshine. I sit on the sofa shivering, calmly stroking the soft hairs on the top of my daughter’s foot, her body half-on and half-off my body—languid. Hold music, soft violin and piano. Tell them you’re a call back patient, said the nurse who called to give me the results.

My husband paces the living room, plugs in the lights on the Christmas tree. My hand strokes my daughter’s foot. My husband mouths, 9 days? They don’t have an earlier appointment? And I remind myself to notice. Remember. Remember this. If you can take your memories with you.

The whole Summers’ house is horror movie bright. Buffy finds her mother on the sofa—eyes open and arms jutting. Joyce is all elbows and finger joints crooked. Her skirt is hitched ever so slightly higher than anyone would want for their own mother—who is soon to be found on the sofa by EMTs.

Later, I argue with my husband. It feels so good to scream. Get out of the bathroom. He says I’m misunderstanding. I wait motionless while he walks back and forth from bathroom to bedroom, bedroom to bathroom, bathroom to bedroom. When he finally leaves, I take a handful of pills I’ve been saving for an eventuality like this.

Buffy vomits on the floor, and she stares and stares, and it is so silent and the silence makes the brightness brighter. Louder. Later, Willow and Tara share their first kiss on screen.

Earlier, in my car in a basement parking lot, I move my body violently. After reading the report, I’d managed three floors down in the parking garage elevator. In the car, my body shakes my torso and jerks my hands from my arms—unnatural and sharp—my lungs scream despite my mouth’s resistance. I call my husband and tell him the report says right breast and multiple masses. I gasp and choke. The whole thing so desperate and raucous and embarrassing.

I think about those old tinny photos I took at the lake some summers. The one with my dad in a high backed wicker chair. He wears a soldier costume right out of a civil war reenactment.

This episode of Buffy is titled “The Body.” Apparently Joss Whedon didn’t want this episode to have an existential lesson. The point was for all of us to watch a person become a mere body.

I loved those photos, summers when our family rented a few nights at the lake and dad drove a rented speed boat and we ate banana saltwater taffy and raced at every go-kart track along the highway from our small town to the lake one state over.

The EMTs leave Joyce on the floor after performing CPR, leave the body with Buffy.  Unrealistic.  When Giles comes, Buffy exclaims, We aren’t supposed to move the body!

On the sofa shivering, waiting on hold, waiting to the soft, surprising on-hold music, I remember the day my mom called me to her room as a child. My mom had to tell me my friend since preschool was dead—driving to the city to shop for Christmas. I’ve had a recurring nightmare ever since. I killed her. My psychiatrist might call this a trauma response.

I can’t tell you much about what happens in the dream. I just know it’s my fault. In the dream. In the car after I read the report, I was screaming again and again against my closed mouth.

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down?, Cataloguing Pain, Handbook for the Newly Disabled: A Lyric Memoir, Slowly/Suddenly, and six chapbooks. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com

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CNF: from Paradise

by Stephan Viau

every time a window opens, a bumble bee saunters in, as though it had been knocking. i sit and make it tea to ease its mind. we chat about this and that over what biscuits i might have lying around. it didn’t hope for anything special. it’s not out for some devastating truth, but when it dies looking for the window on the way out, i know everything comes to us whether we want it to or not.

Stephan Antoine Viau is a poet, translator, and reviewer. He earned his MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University. HEIRLOOMS, his first book of poems, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2026. Work of his has appeared in The Hong Kong Review of Books, The Colorado Review, ABSTRACT, The Word’s Faire, HASH, New Delta Review, among others. He lives in Maryland with his family

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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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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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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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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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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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#1: Hospital Halls

by Meg Boscov

Armed with color, I walked the hospital halls. I imaged my body brimming with flowing shock-resistant blue. A blue that felt like a sigh from the infinite cyan sky to the depths of the lapis ocean. The blue of a heavenly morning glory blossom who gracefully opens and closes each day accepting the all of it with bittersweet ease and peace.
 

And as if I were backlit, my body was lined with an orange-yellow glow. A symbol of my strength, my life force. It was the sun low in the sky on a bitter winter day lighting up the golden leaves on the beech trees who didn’t get the note to let go and fall. It was the color of Rubeckia whose opening is a marvel of reaching, stretching slowly as if to savor every moment of its fleeting awakened life. After shockingly cruel behavior from my surgeon, I added a much needed layer of protection, a white translucent glow circling me at all times.
 

Seemingly vulnerable but truly impregnable.
 

From an outsider’s standpoint, little me, barely 105 pounds, walked in her flimsy hospital gown attached on one side to an IV pole and on the other to a hospital technician. But that of course was not the full, truer image.

Meg Boscov’s background in performing arts put her on an artistic journey that continues to focus on storytelling—on discovering and communicating the creative and emotional story in each image.Her award-winning photography has appeared in numerous in-person, print, and web exhibitions, including the Photo Review, the Shanti Arts Still Point Gallery and Quarterly Journal, the Foley Gallery in NYC, the PhotoPlace in Middlebury, VT, and various galleries and art centers in the Philadelphia area. In her book HEALING VISIONS, fifty-two international writers respond to her images with exactly one-hundred words, and her book HAND-IN-HAND pairs her macro-photography with micro-essays, one for each week of the year. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and currently resides in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where she continually finds personal joy and creative energy in her surroundings.

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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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.

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