Month: December 2025
Eve writes a letter to God
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. 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.
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