Month: December 2024
The Crow
by Dania Jamal
I am waiting at the bus stop. I am allowed be nervous, I say; there is hope to meet.
I try to distract myself with the people around me. There is a father waiting with his daughter. He is playful and she is nervous as I. It looks like something my father pretends to have done with me or it looks like something my father did when I was young and I can’t remember. The little girl will dream big. She will try not to dream too far. But at the end she won’t help it. She is a little bird in a nest. Her father wants to push her out, off the road. I catch myself before jumping to save her. How could he do something like that?
The bird is beautiful. My bird is intelligent, collects silver and anything that glimmers. I keep it for when I need it. It keeps me company instead of a conversation.
In the glass turned mirror by the poster on the other side, I am reflected a crow. I lower my head down in shame. I put no call. I don’t act the omen. Let the girl live. Let her dream. I turn to the other side. There is an older woman, hunched back with small eyes. She is no longer beautiful. She no longer needs to be. This is a relief.
Does she get lots of visitors? Is she loved? Had she done enough? She looks lost, all alone. Perhaps she saved herself. Perhaps she saved others. Maybe that is where all of her strength went. Maybe her lips withered out by kisses. Her cheeks hollowed from smiling. Her legs weakened by dancing. I have to save myself. When I am her age, I won’t be alone in a bus stop, I will save my kisses to still have my lips. I won’t move my hips. You can’t know what the future hides. Perhaps for the better.
I want to see her cry. I want to console her and unveil her secrets. I want to know if it is worth it to become like this. I want to know where she wasted it. I want to know better. But I will save it.
I turn my head away from her; she started smiling happily and joking with some kid.
Me, on the other hand. I will save it.
I look back at the blackened mirror. I am a crow again
Dania is a middle-eastern woman. She always enjoyed crafting stories and writing since she can remember. Her poem, I always prefer the future to the present has been recently published in Vita and the Woolf literary journal and was featured on the online magazine The Raven’s Muse for the third issue
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “xxx”? Faced by every reason to be pessimistic toward the world, I wrote the crow as an endeavor to be optimistic and reproach myself for not considering the best out of the world and allowing my imagination to always take the darkest of turns. I consider this poem as the first step of my path toward optimism as a crow myself. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Just Cos”? I wrote “Just Cos” lying in bed while my son slept in his crib across the room. My wife and I always point out which of his features belong to either of us. My eyes, her lips, a combination of our hair. We hope he grows into his ears as I eventually did. In the dark, with no features to look at, I wondered what of my personality he’d inherit. Every now and then my wife points out unconscious habits that, until then, I didn’t know my parents had planted in me. The habits are quirks at best and flaws at worst. When she points out the latter, she usually does it in the form of a question. “Why do you do that?” It feels like an accusation. Growing up, I tried not to be like those people as much as possible. Grown up, I am those people in ways I didn’t think possible. Then, before I say anything in response, the guilt floods in. At the end of the day, my parents weren’t those people. They were simply people. And they were mostly good people, albeit flawed and quirky. I project my youthful disdain towards my parents into my wife’s question. I feel attacked. The bullet goes through me and hits them, too. It’s neurotic and insecure and, rather than unpack the baggage unearthed by the question, I diffuse everything with a shrug. “Just cos,” I say. With the story, I tried to communicate how much went unsaid in my family, how lack of communication between too proud people led to unnecessary strife. And, I suppose, by writing it I hoped to pave the ground for a more communicative home for my son to grow up in. 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.
by Roberta Allen They are the largest slugs she has ever seen. Spotted and over eight inches long. Every evening she waits for them to emerge from their dark damp tunnels under her cottage in the country. Her enthusiasm is so contagious her neighbors have become interested. But her friend in the city says he’s seen enough bugs. “But slugs are not insects!” she tells him. “They’re related to snails though they don’t have shells. Slugs are mollusks like octopuses.” He is silent. She doesn’t say slugs saved many soldiers in World War 1. They detected harmful levels of mustard gas before humans could. Nor does she mention annual slug races on an island in Canada. What would’ve been the point? Every evening at this hour neighbors gather in front of her cottage, bend down, and look closely at the soft slimy creatures but they aren’t allowed to prod them. Slowly crawling along the ground, the slugs leave trails of mucus. The neighbors cry out, “That is so disgusting!” Still, none of them can look away. They make gargoyle faces to emphasize their revulsion. She is the only one who does not make faces. In truth, she likes the slugs better than the neighbors who come to watch. A Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction and a Yaddo Fellow, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books. Her latest story collection is The Princess of Herself. Her many stories have appeared in such magazines as Conjunctions, Guernica and Bomb. Also a conceptual artist, very active internationally through the 1970s-early 80s, her art papers and her works on paper have been acquired by The Smithsonian, her writing papers by the Fales Archive at NYU See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Slugs”? I saw these slugs in Virginia but I love research and was inspired by the little known facts I learned about them though these facts play a very small part in the piece. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Helter Skelter, Or: Things I Write Down So They Stop Perplexing Me”? The best part of writing is collecting my little thoughts, oddities and fears like pebbles, stacking them up and seeing what kind of shape they make. In this case, the quote from a teacher (a lovely woman, which made her fierce non sequitur all the more baffling) has rattled around in my brain for years. But now it reached out and linked hands with my favorite, most haunting image from Catcher in the Rye. Why? Who knows, but if I’ve learned anything it’s that strangeness is where things start to cook on the page. The emergence of an ice motif then offered a way to introduce my gnawing fear of the climate crisis, the comfort of my daily sundowner, and a love of typography. I love that if I had written this piece another day, or another hour, the pebbles that swum to mind would have been entirely different. Hey presto and helter skelter, I had a strange, crooked tower of pebbles. One that perplexed me in the best possible way. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Barn Cat”? The story inside of “Barn Cat” was told with a flat, quiet voice in a tiny room off the kitchen, where my mother spent ten years after a catastrophic stroke, and then it hibernated in my memory for a half-decade, surfacing nearly whole in the ten minutes before a workshop at Kenyon College.CNF: Just Cos
#1: Hospital Halls
Slugs
CNF: Helter Skelter, Or: Things I Write Down So They Stop Perplexing Me
CNF: Barn Cat
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, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
01/13 • Edward Thomas-Herrera
01/20 • Zero Laforga
01/27 • Jack Bedell
02/03 • TBD
02/10 • Gaurav Bhalla
02/17 • Callie Dean
02/24 • TBD