CNF: We Would Like to Buy Your Property!
by Barbara Westwood Diehl
This postcard wants to pay cash for my house. I imagine the
money in Monopoly colors. The stacks of bills beside a
game board. The dapper man with a mustache and top hat. A
beauty pageant bouquet and sash. The little green houses grown
to red hotels. The parade of thimbles and Scottie dogs. The
stock dividends. The poor tax. The jail card. Bankruptcy. A life
unboxed.
This postcard wants to know if I am thinking of selling. As if it
knows I haven’t been content. As if, when I opened the
mailbox, I had been dreaming of railroads and red hotels. Of a
man with a white mustache, a green bag of money in his fist.
Of a silver ship on a deep and distant sea.
This postcard would like to buy my house. As if I had suddenly
emptied my house of its contents and sat down on the front
steps with my purse and luggage. The essentials. The
sentimental. As if I had shaken my house like dice in a cup and
emptied it onto the lawn. To see how many spaces to move
along the flagstone walkway to the street. As if I knew where
that would lead. As if I could walk away the winner.
Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding and senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, including Quiddity, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, Per Contra, Thrush Poetry Journal, Atticus Review, The MacGuffin, The Shore, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Also a poem in the TELEPHONE project.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “We Would Like to Buy Your Property!”? I’ve been writing poems and flash based on postcards lately—mostly taking some ordinary aspect of a postcard and wandering away with it into some not-so-ordinary, sometimes fantastical, place. I’ve been getting a lot of those “we want to buy your property” postcards in the mail lately. The tone of them always strikes me as strange, presumptuous. As if people would say “sure, what the heck” and upend their lives upon receipt of a postcard. This feels as odd to me as living life by a roll of the dice, as unreal as Monopoly money. I wonder who takes these cash offers, and why, or if they keep the postcards like secrets.
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
09/15 • Abbie Doll
09/22 • Karen Regen Tuero
09/29 • Amy Speace
10/06 • Jennifer Edwards
10/13 • Joseph O’Day
10/20 • Carolyn Zaikowski
10/27 • Sunmisola Odusola
11/03 • Sara Cassidy
11/10 • Liz Abrams-Morley
11/17 • Alison Colwell
11/24 • Lucy Zhang
12/01 • TBD
12/08 • TBD
12/15 • TBD
12/22 • TBD
12/29 • TBD
11/17 • TBD
11/24 • TBD
12/01 • TBD
12/08 • TBD
12/15 • TBD
12/22 • TBD
12/29 • TBD