Month: November 2025
Breach
by Lucy Zhang
My mother-in-law claimed that my work caused my breech baby, and the only way to flip him was to drink white peony tea and quit, never mind that I couldn’t quit my job else we’d be down half an income—although trust me, I’d love to have quit. My baby ended up punching his way out, a mutant breech unwilling to contemplate the notion of being cut out from the top. Not even too high a cut. Bikini cut style so scars remain hidden even when stretch marks reign free. But he lived and I lived and I thought that was the end of it.
Except my son kept getting lost. Or, I kept losing him in this placenta-exterior era. I found him sitting in cupboards, crawling by the window sill, sleeping on the car hood. An aimless wanderer who I feared would one day slip through a crack in the asphalt and find himself in another dimension. Because you let money win over your heart, my mother-in-law chastised. A baby can’t find its way back to a heart void of maternal devotion. I disagreed: getting lost simply meant knowing where to search, when to give up. Even vanishing through a space time continuum couldn’t deter my son’s intuition to find home: the smell of vinegar and garlic, the feel of a tousled carpet in patches of bald and clumped tufts from the dog’s nails, the taste of microscopic drops of breast milk squeezed from sore, tender nipples bubbling with blebs. A baby who had ripped his way through me would never struggle to find the tear and stretch it until there’s enough space to fit a mother’s “heart of devotion” and then some.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech or on Instagram @Dango_Ramen.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Breach”? “Breach” has simple origins. At the time I wrote this, my baby was breech, and I was madly doing downward-facing dogs and All The Stretches to get him to flip. Did the stretches work? Or did he magically decide to flip on his own? I’ll never know. Simultaneously, I was contending with parents and their traditional (occasionally pseudoscience-based) beliefs on pregnancy and childbirth, and thus this piece was born in a bout of frustration. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Scent of Cinnamon”? My daughter was hospitalized for anorexia on her 15th birthday. I hadn’t even known she was sick. The long process of recovery was incredibly hard, and both of us emerged changed by the experience. I had been a baker. I still work in food security, keeping my small island community fed. And at the same time, my daughter almost starved to death. There was a horrible irony to her illness. And afterwards I needed to learn how to love food again, which is what this essay is about. I have returned to her illness and my role as parent, over and over in my writing. It was a traumatic and transformative time that upended my world, and writing is how I make sense of hard things that happen. “The Scent of Cinnamon” was a challenge because I wanted to figure out how to capture some of that experience in a compressed form. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Tuesday, the Regulars”? For the past few years, I’ve been creating work that blurs the lines between poetry and prose and I’ve ended up with a number of pieces that fall into the category I’d call prose poems. But what surprised me in drafting this poem was that I had no earthly idea what it wanted to be or become. I wrote a very initial version in a master class on zoom. It was a scene I wanted to paint of the clinic where I spend weekly early mornings, of the regular anti-choice protesters and their crazy assertions. This started as a longer and more discursive piece into which my workshop colleagues noticed I’d dropped the barest hint of my mother and her experience. A few months after I wrote it, I began to shape it, compress it, and build in a sense of music that I think separates prose poetry from prose, but I still didn’t see the breadcrumb I’d dropped myself, a slight reference to my mother, her illegal abortion decades ago. Only when I lifted my mom out did I find my ending. Look for those breadcrumbs you leave yourself, I always tell my students; this time I actually followed my own advice. 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. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Opera”? All I can think of is that it is all true. I wish that it didn’t take a record snowfall or a death to turn our little street into a neighbourhood; I often leave my front door open to build openness and welcome, and am happy to say it works with the kids and young teens.CNF: The Scent of Cinnamon
Connect with her at: alisoncolwell.com.CNF: Tuesday, the Regulars
CNF: Opera
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
12/15 • Isabelle Ness
12/22 • Catherine Bai
12/29 • Stephan Viau
01/05 • Allison Blevins
01/12 • Justin Ocelot
01/19 • Yejun Chun
01/26 • Mathieu Parsy
02/02 • Robert McBrearty
02/09 • Sarah Daly
02/16 • Wayne Lee
02/23 • Terena Elizabeth Bell
03/02 • Michael Mirolla
03/09 • Nicholas Claro
03/16 • TBD
03/23 • TBD
03/30 • TBD