Month: June 2019

Sunday Focus: What To Call It

Photo by Meg Boscov

[Editor’s Note: This ongoing Sunday feature pairs photographs from Meg Boscov with a thought (or two) from the managing editor about focusing on tiny things to find something significant. Click on the picture itself to view at full size.]

 

 

“An insightful title is almost like a philosophical question. You can chew on it for weeks, or even years after reading.” So says New York Book Editors. What would you title this image? There is the “story” the photographer has shot and the one that the viewer sees. Does a title bridge the gap? Is that light in the distance the coming Apocalypse or a savior? From where did they set-off? Who held whose hand first?

 

“One of the greatest titles in the world is parent,” writes Jim DeMint, “and one of the biggest blessings in the world is to have parents to call mom and dad.” Sunday’s Focus asks you to consider what to call it. See how it changes everything.

The photographer calls this one “Together.”

☄

Meg Boscov is a photographer who lives and works outside of Philadelphia where she continues to pursue her careers in animal-assisted education and dog training. She can be reached on instagram at megboscov.

CNF: 17 years later, my hand still closes in a fist

by Hege Lepri

 

[Editor’s Note: Click on the image below to view it at full size.]

 

Hege A. Jakobsen Lepri is a Norwegian-Canadian translator and writer based in Toronto. She returned to writing in 2011, after a very, very long break. Her writing has since been all over the place writing very long short stories and very short poems. She was recently shortlisted Briarpatch’s ‘Writing in the Margins’ contest. She’s been published or is forthcoming in J Journal, Saint Katherine Review, Monarch Review, Citron Review, Sycamore Review, subTerrain Magazine, Agnes and True, Forge Literary Magazine, Fjords Review, Grain Magazine, Typehouse Literary Review, The Nasiona, WOW! -Women on writing, Burning House Press, Haiku Journal, Gone Lawn, Crack the Spine, Carve Magazine, The New Quarterly and elsewhere. You find her on twitter @hegelincanada and on her website: www.hegeajlepri.ca

 

Earthbound

by Stephen Reaugh

 

Work on the farm is an assembly line
of alienation: those imperfect,
grotesque gargoyles of tools; head-down labor;
the exquisite wild, un-celebrated;
a montage of the not-quite-square;
that vampiric index of every
earthly being lowered into our mouths.

 

Stephen M. Reaugh grew up in western Pennsylvania. In 2016, he obtained an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. His creative and critical work has appeared in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice, The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, Hawaiʻi Review, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, and others. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

Sunday Focus: I Spent a Little Time on the Mountain

Photo by Meg Boscov

[Editor’s Note: This ongoing Sunday feature pairs photographs from Meg Boscov with a thought (or two) from the managing editor about focusing on tiny things to find something significant. Click on the picture itself to view at full size.]

 

 

Mountains, the dream readers tell us, represent obstacles to be overcome, a challenge that’s been conquered. But I think that’s an easy fit, an analysis that focuses on the conquering rather than becoming, on battling nature rather than becoming one with it.
 

“For nature, as we know, is at once without and within us,” Joseph Campbell writes. “Art is the mirror at the interface. So too is ritual; so also myth. These, too, bring out the grand lines of nature, and in doing so, re-establish us in our own deep truth, which is one with that of all being.” One love. One heart. Let’s get together and feel alright. Rather than seeing “nature” as something to be overcome or conquered, see it as something to become part of. That is what this Sunday Focus wants of you.

☄

Meg Boscov is a photographer who lives and works outside of Philadelphia where she continues to pursue her careers in animal-assisted education and dog training. She can be reached on instagram at megboscov.

Wave

by Tommy Dean

 

You’ve started talking through the picket fence of your teeth. Drawing me closer with every lisping word. Your breath smells of wilting dandelions, a sugary spike that pokes at the nerve endings in my toes. Your pleas like broken cartilage wrapped in cellophane, as you decide if this is the last time you’ll leave me.

Say it, I beg, but your nose only whistles the tune we haven’t yet placed on the map of your soiled emotions.

I beat at your chest, but the birdcage only rattles, keyless, fragile as plastic fork tines, yet unyielding. Anything unbreakable I find endlessly irritating. Maybe love is one knob turn of agitation away from complete surrender, but that would be too easy for people like us.

I’ll say it then, my mouth opening, teeth bridging the gap between object emptiness and the sated timbre of intimacy decoded into language, but, and here the fuel needle of my need for you dips, trails, hitches, like a hiccup never expressed, because your tears won’t stop the goddamn door from slamming shut or the echo that reverberates into space, a place where all I can see is the backlit shadow of your back, bent like those unbreakable combs given away on picture day, boys like you worrying them until they snapped.

You push my head to your chest, but keep walking until we’re outside, night-vision lit, my blood vessels traitorously flowing toward you, an Earthly gravity I regret. I start to yell, but you say, you only want the quiet parts of me. I stomp I clap, I shout, dancing in the off-rhythm way that follows the earthquakes of your departures.

***

Every month, I take down a new door, leaving them on the curb for the trashman, small offerings to the spirits of unnamed barriers. Cabinet doors pop from their hinges, exposing industrial cleaners and solvents, cups from shuttered restaurants, plates with scratches from your overzealous stabbing of beef and potatoes. The Disney cups bought at garage sales for nickels, while we joked about needing them for the children, the ones this second marriage was supposed to provide, the cartoon faces twisting toward garish impressions of joy you obviously never felt.

When you stand on the porch, your hand pushing through the empty doorway, I think of snorkeling in Jamaica, how you almost drowned, your lungs mistaking water for air, your arms retracting away from the fish below, sure you were about to be bitten.

I want to give you a tour of my obsession, but you’ve always hated mania, and I won’t apologize. You’ve come back, I say, but you’re still working out how I can dare to live in a state of unprotected bodily harm. I’ve gotten rid of the alarm too, the baseball bat hidden under your side of the bed.

You’ve come back? This time the question closes to the frequency of a liquid metal being struck by the bow of a violin.

And you wave and you wave, and you…

 

Tommy Dean lives in Indiana with his wife and two children. He is the author of a flash fiction chapbook entitled Special Like the People on TV from Redbird Chapbooks. He is the Flash Fiction Section Editor at Craft Literary. He has been previously published in the BULL Magazine, The MacGuffin, The Lascaux Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review. His story “You’ve Stopped” was chosen by Dan Chaon to be included in Best Microfiction 2019. It will also be included in Best Small Fiction 2019. Find him @TommyDeanWriter on Twitter.

 

Periods Without Pain

by Avra Margariti

 

[Editor’s Note: Click on the image below to view it at full size.]  

 

Avra Margariti is a Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, The Forge Literary, Argot Magazine, The Arcanist, and other venues.

 

Sunday Focus: This Little Light of Mine

Photo by Meg Boscov

[Editor’s Note: This ongoing Sunday feature pairs photographs from Meg Boscov with a thought (or two) from the managing editor about focusing on tiny things to find something significant. Click on the picture itself to view at full size.]

 

 

“Turn on your love light let it shine on me. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” Do you have someone who lit up your life, who is no longer here? Shining a light on those memories brings such pain, yes? But forgetting isn’t an option, and even if it were, how could you ever keep that person in darkness.

 

“Walk into splintered sunlight,” the Grateful Dead tell us. “Inch your way through dead dreams / to another land.” Eventually, although the pain never subsides, something light breaks through, yes? This Sunday, the garden asks you to see if there’s light yet. Hope there is.

☄

Meg Boscov is a photographer who lives and works outside of Philadelphia where she continues to pursue her careers in animal-assisted education and dog training.

The Cake Makers

by Beverly Jackson

 

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” ― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

In the heat of a large country kitchen,
(think back to Southern plantations
with sideboards and planked floors
live oaks silhouetted at the windows
sunrays dappling a farmhouse table
in the middle of a steamy room.)

A dozen aproned aunties-skin black
as cast-iron pots, – kerchiefs ‘round their hair
sit on wooden chairs- animated, laughing,
spilling soft gossip with rolling eyes.

Palmetto hand fans push against the
Rising waves of heavenly scents.
Newly-baked cakes. Lemon and coconut,
vanilla and chocolate doesy-doe on the air.
Pastel frosting gleams in bowls:
soft peach, butter-yellow, and pink.

I am being summoned by the senses,
But history’s call is not a dream.
It begs to be remembered not as the glow of
Pastel icing on strong African hands,
But in bloody red and the sepia tearstains of
antebellum walls. The Cake Makers beckon me.
Come make the cakes, they call. We’ll teach you how.
The time has finally come for you to learn.
Come, they titter, come.

 

Beverly A. Jackson’s short fiction has been nominated for BASS (Best American Short Stories) and Pushcart Prizes; Her work appears in over eighty print and online literary venues. Her poetry chapbook “Every Burning Thing” and her 2-volume memoir, “Loose Fish”, are available on Amazon, and her first novel “The Eye of Hachiman” will be published in 2019. www.beverlyajackson.com

 

CNF: Know Your Cans

by Erica Soon Olsen

 

1.
Cowboys in the Old West played a game called Know Your Cans. One would call out a brand name, like Hunt’s baked beans, Borden’s condensed milk, or Maxwell House coffee. Another would step up and recite the label on that can from memory, word for word, including the punctuation marks. Miss one thing, even a comma, and the cowboy would forfeit a dime.

In the bunkhouse, there was nothing for the men to read except the labels on cans.

Proposal for a collective noun: a hardship of cans.

2.
It’s good to keep some canned goods on hand in case of a natural disaster—an earthquake, a hurricane, or a flood. People who keep canned goods at home are prepared and self-sufficient. They donate canned goods to food banks, to shelters, to people who are not as prepared and self-sufficient as they are.

Proposal for a collective noun: an admonishment of cans.

3.
Once, out in the desert, we found a miner’s camp with the remains of a narrow metal bedframe, the springs all sprung; a stove, stove in; and, in a gully below the camp, the miner’s can dump. The labels on the cans were long gone, but I could imagine the illustrations: a red-checked border, a touch of the feminine, the grace of a hand pouring milk. This miner was prepared and self-sufficient. He was also lonely as hell.

Proposal for a collective noun: an isolation of cans.

4.
At fifty years of age, an artifact becomes historic. At fifty, a rusty can may be collected by archaeologists, analyzed, catalogued, nested in Ethafoam, and housed in an acid-free box in a climate-controlled museum curation facility.

Proposal for a collective noun: a preservation of cans.

5.
There is a can in the kitchen sink. There is a can on the kitchen counter. There are cans in the driveway where you opened the door of your truck.

There is only one of you, and so many of them.

A can is a masculine thing: strong and functional when full; when empty, easily crushed.

Proposal for a collective noun: a thirst of cans, a quench, a disappointment.

 

Erica Soon Olsen was born in Hollywood. She is the author of Recapture & Other Stories (Torrey House Press), a collection of short fiction about the once and future West. She teaches online in the UC Berkeley Extension Professional Sequence in Editing and lives in a log cabin near the Ashley National Forest in northern Utah.

 

Focus on Sunday: The Capture

Photo by Meg Boscov

[Editor’s Note: This ongoing Sunday feature pairs photographs from Meg Boscov with a thought (or two) from the managing editor about focusing on tiny things to find something significant. Click on the picture itself to view at full size.]

 

 

“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.” – Man Ray What does one do for the photo? Take it? Snap it? Shoot it? Make it? Capture it? Capture comes from the Latin captūra: taking, seizing, What has one taken here? What has one seized? An opportunity, perhaps? “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”– Dorothea Lange Stilled it? Distilled it? “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”– Robert Capa

 

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” And what is this Sunday’s message? Seize the moment. Hold it still, close. Make it yours, your swan song, your moment both in and out of time, your ‘why.”

☄

Meg Boscov is a photographer who lives and works outside of Philadelphia where she continues to pursue her careers in animal-assisted education and dog training.

The Withholding

by Rachel Rodman

 

At her chest, in a drawstring pouch, she kept a personal hoard of rats’ asses. They were worn and polished, like leather coins, with empty circles at their centers.

There she held them perpetually, warmed by her heart, so that, whenever the right occasion arose, she could conspicuously Not give them out.

“No,” she would say, lips twisting and eyes slitted, in a withering contempt: “This particular set of circumstances does not warrant anything that I have, stored here.”

 

 

Rachel Rodman (www.rachelrodman.com) writes fairy tales, food poetry, and popular science. Her work has appeared at Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Expanded Horizons, and elsewhere.

 

Inflating the Chatter

by Ankita Banerjee

 

 

Ankita Banerjee is a writer and poet based in Pune, India. Her works have appeared or will appear in The Bangalore Review, Coldnoon – International journal of travel writing & travelling cultures, Eunoia Review, Women’s Web, X-R-A-Y, Kitaab, Nine Muses Poetry and others. Her first short fiction series is published by Juggernaut Books in 2019. She can be reached at ankita.banerji88@gmail.com.

 

Focus on Sunday: The Red Door

Photo by Meg Boscov

[Editor’s Note: This ongoing Sunday feature pairs photographs from Meg Boscov with a thought (or two) from the managing editor about focusing on tiny things to find something significant. Click on the picture itself to view at full size.]

 

 

It isn’t just the red door—is it?—that creates the mystery. It’s that glimpse between trunks; it’s the moss, the stone frame, the dappled light. It is the photographer’s vision that creates the possibilities we sense here. Yes, we might wonder what we might encounter should we open it. But we also wonder what we might find here, in that moment before, in the approach, the contemplation, the steps that lead us to the threshold.

 

“Listen,” Mr. Mojo Risin’ says to us. “real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.” And what is this Sunday’s message? Go ahead. You can open it, walk through, or wait between the trees, among the shadows that play all around you, begging you to stay.

☄

Meg Boscov is a photographer who lives and works outside of Philadelphia where she continues to pursue her careers in animal-assisted education and dog training.

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

04/01 • Lu Chekowsky
04/08 • Robin Turner
04/15 • Beth Sherman
04/22 • TBD
04/29 • TBD