Month: January 2012
They Lived Again
by Christina Thatcher
In his young life he gut fish for family. Sliced their silvery gills, spread their freckled skin, and cracked their fragile spines. He did it by the sea. Threw the entrails to the gulls and sucked the sea salt air with gulping sounds until his lungs pressed against the rest of him. Then he’d amble, flat-footed, back to his home in the village, stinking like the shore. The windows, warm lit, swelled with the thick scent of dough and flour. He was welcomed with shoulder pats and hair rustling, before his fish were crumbed and thrown into the pan: Pescado Frito with love. (more…)
Abstention
by Louisa Wolf
After the marathon crowds disperse, she crosses a Brooklyn waterway—a river or a lagoon—and buys a new mug from a crabby artisan. She encases it in bubble wrap and pads it in a thick blue sweater for the jostling flight from Kennedy to O’Hare. She washes it by hand and dries it with a soft linen cloth before stowing it at the back of the top shelf, out of reach, where no child can threaten it with slippery hot cocoa hands. Where no coffee drinker might find and lose it in the den or on the deck, absorbed in the Sunday paper. (more…)
DAEDAL DOODLE, X
by Victor Stabin
[Editor’s Note: We will be publishing all 26 letters of Victor Stabin’s Daedal Doodle series, one each Wednesday for 26 weeks. Be sure to click on the picture for the FULL VIEW! Victor Stabin’s alphabet book is available here.]
For almost three years, wherever he went, Victor Stabin brought a dictionary along. Combing through over 8,000 pages of a variety of dictionaries, he came up with the alliterations that inhabit this work. Inspired by reading “ABC” books to his three-year-old daughter Skyler, his love of words, and his incessant inability to to stop doodling, he unflinchingly created the improbable alliterative combinations and illustrations that inhabit this work. In his heart he knew he was creating a work that, while using unusually obtuse words, would have broad appeal and challenge the “ABC” status quo. The goal—to create platforms that bridge literate curiosity across multiple generations using mostly common (and sometimes extraordinarily uncommon) imagery in new and inventive ways. Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, presented for your literate and retinal delight… (more…)
Summer Vacation
by Peter Grandbois
We rise to the spongy heat of summer, throw off our sheets and run downstairs to fill our bowls to the brim, cool milk spilling over. (more…)
The Bethany Poems
by Maureen Alsop
Saintes Femmes Au Tombeau
Were I a resting place. A place prepared for you among the many rooms: horizontal male
countries in which slender fields speak perennially and exact—but you speak of another
house. (more…)
DAEDAL DOODLE, W
by Victor Stabin
[Editor’s Note: We will be publishing all 26 letters of Victor Stabin’s Daedal Doodle series, one each Wednesday for 26 weeks. Be sure to click on the picture for the FULL VIEW! Victor Stabin’s alphabet book is available here.]
For almost three years, wherever he went, Victor Stabin brought a dictionary along. Combing through over 8,000 pages of a variety of dictionaries, he came up with the alliterations that inhabit this work. Inspired by reading “ABC” books to his three-year-old daughter Skyler, his love of words, and his incessant inability to to stop doodling, he unflinchingly created the improbable alliterative combinations and illustrations that inhabit this work. In his heart he knew he was creating a work that, while using unusually obtuse words, would have broad appeal and challenge the “ABC” status quo. The goal—to create platforms that bridge literate curiosity across multiple generations using mostly common (and sometimes extraordinarily uncommon) imagery in new and inventive ways. Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, presented for your literate and retinal delight… (more…)
The Day the Universe Learned How to Lean
by Len Kuntz
There is no wind, yet I walk at a slant. Mother says I need to straighten up, change my attitude, but she can’t know that I’m being buried alive, pulled toward the greedy ground. (more…)
My Husband’s Medals
by Nance Van Winckel
Where are they?
He shrugs. What were
they? He rolls his eyes.
When did you last
see them? In a headache
last week, in a bad
dream last month.
\
Nance Van Winckel’s fifth collection of poems is No Starling (2007, U. of Washington Press). She’s received two NEA Poetry Fellowships as well as awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. New poems appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review. She is also the author of three collections of short fiction and a recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. New fiction can be found in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, and Kenyon Review. She lives near Spokane, Washington and teaches in the MFA Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
What do you think is the challenge of “compression”? For me, to COMPRESS means, first of all, to DIGEST. Let the too-much sit and settle or swirl and blur. Eventually, if I’m patient and lucky, the essential bits float to the top and I’m there in the nick of time to skim them off. [Editor’s Note: We will be publishing all 26 letters of Victor Stabin’s Daedal Doodle series, one each Wednesday for 26 weeks. Be sure to click on the picture for the FULL VIEW! Victor Stabin’s alphabet book is available here.] For almost three years, wherever he went, Victor Stabin brought a dictionary along. Combing through over 8,000 pages of a variety of dictionaries, he came up with the alliterations that inhabit this work. Inspired by reading “ABC” books to his three-year-old daughter Skyler, his love of words, and his incessant inability to to stop doodling, he unflinchingly created the improbable alliterative combinations and illustrations that inhabit this work. In his heart he knew he was creating a work that, while using unusually obtuse words, would have broad appeal and challenge the “ABC” status quo. The goal—to create platforms that bridge literate curiosity across multiple generations using mostly common (and sometimes extraordinarily uncommon) imagery in new and inventive ways. Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, presented for your literate and retinal delight… (more…) sometimes there is an itch for poetry: but mostly today, i write Lin Wang’s work has been nationally and internationally recognized by organizations like YoungArts, Scholastic, and the New Zealand Poetry Society. She recently took 1st in Gannon University’s poetry contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in literary magazines such as inscape, Cadence, and Ice divider: New Zealand’s Poetry Anthology of 2011. She edits the online literary magazine, The Sandstar Review. A graduate of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, Lin attends the University of Alabama. She dreams best in June and writes best in October. What are you seeking through poetry? I seek connection and a sense of beauty through poetry; I seek to capture the small feelings that grip you when you sit quietly, thinking and remembering—writing down words that evoke something timeless and tranquil. I seek a way to describe the way the world works, the way humans are: terrible and beautiful, sadness consumed by lofty aspirations. To me, poetry is an art of connection, an art that doesn’t pretend to have answers. It searches. It asks. It finds answers. Poetry is always seeking something, and I seek to give that impulse voice. [Editor’s Note: We will be publishing all 26 letters of Victor Stabin’s Daedal Doodle series, one each Wednesday for 26 weeks. Be sure to click on the picture for the FULL VIEW! Victor Stabin’s alphabet book is available here.] For almost three years, wherever he went, Victor Stabin brought a dictionary along. Combing through over 8,000 pages of a variety of dictionaries, he came up with the alliterations that inhabit this work. Inspired by reading “ABC” books to his three-year-old daughter Skyler, his love of words, and his incessant inability to to stop doodling, he unflinchingly created the improbable alliterative combinations and illustrations that inhabit this work. In his heart he knew he was creating a work that, while using unusually obtuse words, would have broad appeal and challenge the “ABC” status quo. The goal—to create platforms that bridge literate curiosity across multiple generations using mostly common (and sometimes extraordinarily uncommon) imagery in new and inventive ways. Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, presented for your literate and retinal delight… (more…)DAEDAL DOODLE, V
by Victor Stabin
seeking
by Lin Wang
slight breeze between silver bells
hopeful tangles left undone
soft arcs on creased pages
green skies, horizons bare
of calligraphy, horsehair clouds
pooling in unknown characters
of ghost breath and intuition
the peeled skin of family
a leaf forgetting its roots
DAEDAL DOODLE, U
by Victor Stabin
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD