Month: December 2025
CNF: from Paradise
by Stephan Viau
every time a window opens, a bumble bee saunters in, as though it had been knocking. i sit and make it tea to ease its mind. we chat about this and that over what biscuits i might have lying around. it didn’t hope for anything special. it’s not out for some devastating truth, but when it dies looking for the window on the way out, i know everything comes to us whether we want it to or not.
Stephan Antoine Viau is a poet, translator, and reviewer. He earned his MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University. HEIRLOOMS, his first book of poems, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2026. Work of his has appeared in The Hong Kong Review of Books, The Colorado Review, ABSTRACT, The Word’s Faire, HASH, New Delta Review, among others. He lives in Maryland with his family
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “from Paradise”? by Catherine Bai Not everything needs to be seen by the love of your life. Just because they want to kiss you doesn’t mean they want to peer into your fallopian tube, and look for that one fragile, fading memory. You know the one. I never said you couldn’t show them all the words you’d never say out loud. Say them to your mother, who would’ve loved you anyway. Except you wouldn’t do the same for her. Yeah, I said it. ‘Cause I’m that way too. The leaking yawn of your mouth looks so stupid now, but it was celestial, when you couldn’t imagine that one day, everyone you know will die, and so will everyone you didn’t know, who died anyway. Picture the pomegranate tree, in the underworld. They’re not red but green. I bet you thought of the fruit ripe and heaving, with scars on the skin that someone made when the branch was still an embryo. The dark traffic swimming, in the pale bit of bone. Catherine Bai is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and a residency grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her fiction was longlisted for the 2025 Disquiet Prize, appears in Best Debut Short Stories 2022, and is forthcoming in AGNI. Her poetry is forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Your body knows things you never could”? I credit Jenny Zhang’s poetry with inspiring me to make my own attempts in the dark. If you read her poem “I keep thinking there is an august” (available online via BOMB), you’ll get an idea of how the words “stupid” and “celestial” ended up in the vocabulary of my piece. I don’t remember much about the genesis of this piece, except that it came out effortlessly (which doesn’t often happen!)—but I watched KPop Demon Hunters days before getting the acceptance email, and when I reread my submission, it gave me some insight into why I ugly-cried through much of the last half-hour of that film. by Isabelle Ness “Goddammit, can’t you keep your feet clean? Can’t you learn how to wash them with soap like a big girl?” Mother is raising her voice over the ch, ch, ch of the peeler against the carrot. “Look at those things, you got dirt all over them. You got toenails like a goblin. Aren’t you embarrassed?” I tell her I do keep them clean, but the truth is I don’t. They are so far away in the shower. They are so far away they are their own entity, I tell them to take care of themselves. “I’m embarrassed enough for the both of us. Having a daughter with goblin toes.” Shhhhhh, the faucet over the carrots. “Hand me that pot, will you?” Mother is talking mad but she’s not really mad. She is making jokes. I hand her the pot and she fills it with water, sets it to boil. Then she slides a knife from the drawer and chops like the wind. Like she is racing herself to the finish, like she is just a little bit excited she might catch up to her fingers and take them right off. Shht! “Your toes aren’t any better,” I say, and I point to her big toe, the one with the ingrown nail the doctor had to dig out. Left nothing but a nub behind. “Talk about goblin toes!” I cry, and I run from the kitchen, but I hear her laughing behind me. She is laughing that good-life laugh. I’m laughing, too, and my feet slap, slap, slap down the hallway. In the living room my brother is watching the news. Always he is watching the news, or listening to it, or reading it. I think if they found a way to put it in a cup he would drink it. “You see this shit?” he says. “Crazy. People are crazy.” He is shaking his head and I can hear in his voice how much it hurts him, the people. When he looks at me he sighs, and I feel him thinking I won’t ever understand. Maybe he is right. Bang, my foot comes down on the coffee table. “Do you think I have goblin toes?” He takes a look at my grubby nails. “Yes,” he says. “Yeah, you got goblin toes, for sure,” and he cracks a smile. For all his hurt, my brother’s smile is the kind that bunches around the eyes, that makes you think everything is okay—that it’s better than okay, that it’s marvelous. I huff like I’m mad and turn away quick before the smile goes. I find the sliding glass door and I slip out into the yard. It is twilight, I think. Gray. But the cicadas still zzzzzzz in the bushes. And my goblin toes step through the grass. Push into the earth, crack a few sticks. I watch them taking me somewhere—it’s true, see, they are their own entity, even if Mother doesn’t believe me. They take me around the house, over the fence, out into the field that borders the cemetery. They take me, and take me, and take me, until I am tired of all the taking, and we stop beside a hickory tree and a tombstone. They seem to be talking to me, my goblin toes, from down there in the grass and the dirt. Take a good look, they seem to be saying, Take a look, girl. Isabelle Ness is a fiction writer from Wisconsin. Her flash fiction was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and appears in Atticus Review. Her short story, “Celestial Bodies,” was a finalist in the Sixfold Fiction Contest. She currently lives in western Massachusetts, where she is at work on a novel. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Goblin Toes”? The idea for this piece started with an image in my mind of the annoyed mother, from which that first line sprang up, Goddammit, can’t you keep your feet clean? Then I let the story take me wherever it was going to go. (Similar, I suppose, to the protagonist’s relationship with her feet.) by Rowan Tate First of all, the ground here is different. Not bad, just different. More stubborn, like a child who won’t answer unless you call more than twice, or a scab. I’ve learned how to plant the seeds of a fruit, how to tell when the water is clean enough to drink, how to hold a chicken still to slit its throat clean, and how to salt a fish so it won’t go soft by morning. We mark time now by the state of our feet. Did you think it would come to this? I have learned which ribs from the carcass of dead animals break easiest for tools. Is that the lesson you wanted me to learn? I made fire. With flint. Thank you for fingernails. And sweat glands. And clay that hardens into something useful. I understand decay now: the things that die help us live. You and I don’t have to wonder what it’s like to be the first of anything. To be without precedent. You made me from absence and called it help; I make bread from stones and call it dinner. I don’t miss it, in case you’re wondering. I don’t need paradise. I need a decent rain now and then. I need one child to come home clean. I need fewer dreams where I taste the fruit again and wake up with a mouthful of dirt. The animals have become unkind. The children are loud. Abel watches ants take apart a fig and doesn’t interfere. Cain bites his nails and strangles snakes in the grass when he thinks I’m not close enough to see. He is trying to understand. Why did we have to leave? Why did He stay? When can we go back? Adam breaks the bread unevenly. He looks at me now the way you did the last time I saw you, like I’m part of the wilderness to be tamed. I write so you cannot pretend you do not hear me. I want you to know what it costs us to live in the world you abandoned. Do you remember when you taught me how to swim? When we put stories in the skies and gave the stars names? Please stop sending the snakes, as if we need the reminder. I know what you’re doing. I haven’t forgiven you yet. Read this aloud in your silence. I invented this alphabet from what you left us in order to say I remember everything, I will not let you be the only one to tell this story. I can still name things. You didn’t take that from me. Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative (poet, essayist, visual artist, songwriter). She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Eve writes a letter to God”? I’d been thinking about how women’s labor—cooking, cleaning, healing—gets left out of sacred narratives. I wanted Eve to speak from those spaces: blood, salt, sweat, hunger. Doing so, she discovers that language itself is a counter-creation. “Eve writes a letter to God” belongs to the unwritten testament which, by imagining the missing stories, questions who got to speak for God and who was written over. by Salvatore Difalco During one of our last meals together—a simple spaghetti al pomodoro prepared on short notice—my mother recalled how as a child I used to beg her for Chef Boyardee spaghetti. “That stuff from the can,” she said. “Seriously?” I said. “Madonna,” she said, “you wouldn’t shut up about it. Please ma, please! Oh, I’d get so angry.” Her voice trailed off and her blue eyes lost focus. “Ma, are you okay?” I asked. She nodded but kept staring. I’d forgotten all about Chef Boyardee. As I twirled a forkful of spaghetti, I tried to imagine what rattled through my young idiot mind at the time. Back in the day, my Sicilian mother could roll with the best of them in the kitchen. Her ricotta-and-spinach ravioli had achieved mythic status among the paisans. Cheeks powdered with flour, she’d spend an entire Sunday morning laying out the dough, prepping the filling, then sectioning the ravioli squares with a wood-handled wheel cutter from the old country. She stopped making the ravioli a few years before she passed away. But right until the end, even with arthritic hands and onset dementia, she could whip up a mouthwatering and heartwarming plate of spaghetti al pomodoro in a flash. That I begged my mother for Chef Boyardee both puzzled and wounded her. Those clever 1960s television ads played a part for sure. But essentially, I just wanted to belong. As a son of immigrants who could barely speak English, I yearned to be more like my schoolmates, which among other things meant eating the foods they ate. Paradoxically, many of them, who weren’t Italian, liked Chef Boyardee products—not only spaghetti, but also the mini-ravioli, beefaroni and rings. I have to hand it to my mother: no matter how much I pleaded, begged, and cajoled her, she never relented. She likened Chef Boyardee spaghetti to worms, and refused to buy it for me. Indeed she made me swear I’d never eat it. My twenty-year-old Giuseppe has come home late tonight. His blue eyes—straight from my mother, likely an errant Norman gene—are bloodshot and he smells of booze and weed. He’s had it tough since his mother passed away a year ago. Breast cancer. I ask if he’s hungry. “Sure,” he says, “I can eat.” I chop up a small onion, a garlic clove, and heat them in a pan with chili flakes and olive oil. Then I open a can of SAN Marzano tomatoes, empty it into the pan and turn up the heat. I crush the tomatoes with a wooden spoon, stir, season, and set a pot of salted water to boil. “Spaghetti or spaghettini?” I ask my son. “Spaghetti, pops,” he says. “Make it real al dente, please.” He sighs, rests his head in his hands. I stir the bubbling sauce. Time passes. I never did eat Chef Boyardee. Not once. Not even in my college and stoner days. The water comes to a boil. Sicilian Canadian poet and storyteller Salvatore Difalco is the author of five books, including Black Rabbit & Other Stories (Anvil Press). His short works have appeared in journals such as E-ratio, The Lake, Heavy Feather Review, and Cafe Irreal. He lives in Toronto, 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 “Chef Boyardee”? My mother expressed her love to me with hugs and kisses, yes, but more often than not with a hot and nourishing plate of food—usually spaghetti with a simple tomato sauce. I don’t know what magic she performed with a few basic ingredients, but I always felt restored after one of her meals, and loved. Food has always been the currency of love in my family. More than words or other gestures. I guess I’ve maintained the tradition. Of course, the nourishment was never meant only for the body, but also to heal and soothe the soul, particularly if troubled. I can honestly say food has been medicine, succor, and the deepest expression of love in my life. And yes, as a young son of Sicilian immigrants struggling to be more North American, I had a virtual and (looking back now) rather preposterous fetish for Chef Boyardee, which has never been resolved. Your body knows things you never could
Goblin Toes
Eve writes a letter to God
CNF: Chef Boyardee
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.
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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.
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