Month: January 2026

Dépaysement

by Mathieu Parsy

 

My coat isn’t warm enough for Toronto’s winter. The consulate man said, “Layers are key,” but he had a beard and the kind of face that doesn’t feel cold. My breath fogs like speech bubbles in a language I don’t read. Every time the subway doors open, the air bites a little harder. This city wants me to flinch.

I live in an open basement with a futon and a microwave that smells like melted plastic. The ceiling is low. I bump my head on edges I keep forgiving. My landlady is an old Greek woman who calls me “France” and warns me not to use the washing machine at night because it frightens the cat. There is no cat. There is no explanation either. I nod and try not to dream of water.

The city is wide and gray and not ugly, just undecided. Glass, concrete, a skyline in mid-thought. I walk west on Queen Street with my hands in my pockets and pretend I’m in transit. Everyone here walks like they’re late for something beautiful. They carry coffee like weapons. I buy one too. It burns my tongue, and I’ve been branded.

I came here for reasons that sounded better in French: Épanouissement. Indépendance. Opportunité. I recited them to my mother to reassure her. Now I say: “I’m just settling in,” and “It’s an adjustment,” while watching the water heater in my room click at odd intervals, like it’s learning Morse code. Sometimes I answer it. “Yes,” I say. “I know. Not yet.”

At the French bakery on College, the woman behind the counter asks where I’m from. I want to say something wry and memorable. Instead I shrug and say, “Marseille,” like I’m offering a confession. She says she’s from Nice, and her mouth twists when she says it, like it used to be something she was proud of.

On Sundays, I call my sister and tell her things I think will travel well across the Atlantic: a guy on the streetcar was beatboxing into a sock, a squirrel stole a whole sandwich, there’s a bar that serves nothing but cereal. I don’t tell her about the silence. How it follows me through daylight like a patient dog. How sometimes I whistle and wait for it to come.

Today I applied for a job folding clothes in a store where all the music sounds like someone exhaling. The manager had hair that looked expensive. She asked if I had Canadian experience. I answered, “I’m working on it.” But I was dying to tell her: I fold my own laundry. I fold into this city like origami—smaller each day. Isn’t that experience?

I’ve started naming pigeons out the window. One of them has a limp. I call him Alain. He comes most mornings and stands at the same crooked angle. I leave him crumbs shaped like letters. Sometimes he eats the ones that spell “okay.”

In the evenings, the upstairs tenant practices the same piano song—slow, with one note slightly off. I pause. It sounds like someone learning to stay.

 

 

Mathieu Parsy is a Canadian writer who grew up on the French Riviera. He now lives in Toronto and works in the travel industry. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Flash Frog, MoonPark Review, BULL, New World Writing Quarterly, and Bending Genres. Follow him on Instagram at @mathieu_parsy.

 

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CNF: Horses

by Yejun Chun

 

The word for “horse” in Korean is “말” which also means “words” but none of us were allowed to speak out loud the thoughts that we created in the classroom.

Especially during our midnight sessions and Saturdays. The blinders thickened then. The teacher said that he’ll make us gallop across the finish line first, no matter what it takes. The rest will have their name erased from the race. No higher education for those who tread, they don’t deserve it. Our heads are always down; the equations and Greek letters scribbled by hands are our marks. They also marked how much respect we could earn and the time we could eat our dinners.

His voice snaps like a whip. I am called out. Caught daydreaming again. Last time, it was a slap to the right cheek. The ruler hits my palms and the numbers go flying. The others still have their heads down. Like shattered glass, the plastic bits twinkle in the air, momentarily like sugar or stars or dust particles in the sunlight.

Retracing my mind now. I was not animalistic enough for the real world. The tears swallow themselves. The notebook hidden inside my desk had new poems about flowers and grapes, ready to be eaten by the hills.

 

Yejun Chun is a poet, playwright, and prose writer from Seoul, South Korea. He is currently studying English Literature and Culture at Yonsei University as a graduate student. His works of poetry, CNF, and short fiction have been published in the Academy of American Poets, fractured lit, Hobart, and 50-Word Stories among many other places. His plays have been performed in Seoul. He has been awarded the top University Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 2024.

 

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And Flecked with Copper

by Justin Ocelot

 

One day, I daydreamed a stone, veined with calcite and flecked with copper. It felt heavy in my hand, just like a real stone. I had no doubt that, if I dropped it, it would fall to the ground. But I put it in my pocket instead. I wanted to show it to my wife, but when I got home it was gone.

One day, I daydreamed a wife. She was exactly like my real wife, except that she was a Formula One race car driver with a crowded mantle of trophies. I felt a little intimidated in her presence. Tragically, she perished a month later in a fiery crash.

One day, I daydreamed a funeral. The people who came were mostly race car drivers. It was disconcerting to see such hardened men weeping like babes. When the ceremony was over, I gathered their tears off the grass. They were just like real tears, but hard like diamonds.

One day, I daydreamed that I found some diamonds and became a millionaire. I gave most of it away to friends and family and random people on the street. I kept only one dime, which I used to place a call from the payphone that used to stand on the corner in front of the old drugstore. “Hello, mom?” I said.

One day, I daydreamed a mother. I was walking by the harbor, where the boats come in and out, and she waved to me from the deck of a catamaran. She had a tan and her hair was dark again and the wind blew it wildly, like the tail of a horse that would never tire of running.

One day, I daydreamed a horse. I looked in his eyes and I felt that we understood each other perfectly. We were brothers, divided into different species by some cruel trick of nature. “Ride on me,” he seemed to say, “and we will reach the very ends of the earth.”

One day, I daydreamed I was galloping to the very ends of the earth. A storm was chasing us, spitting lightning and belching thunder. We reached the edge and kept going and tumbled hoof-over-head into sky, endless and blue. When we stopped spinning, I saw the earth below me like a stone, veined with calcite and flecked with copper.

I took it home and showed it to my wife. “It’s beautiful,” she breathed.

 

Justin Ocelot collects unsolvable puzzles and invisible maps. He writes stories without training wheels (they aren’t safe and you might fall off). He lives with his wife and two boys in a tropical forest somewhere along the coast of California. More info at justinocelot.com.

 

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CNF: I Keep Thinking About that Scene From Buffy the Vampire Slayer

by Allison Blevins

 

Buffy comes home on a bright day, windows streaming day and sunshine. I sit on the sofa shivering, calmly stroking the soft hairs on the top of my daughter’s foot, her body half-on and half-off my body—languid. Hold music, soft violin and piano. Tell them you’re a call back patient, said the nurse who called to give me the results.

 

My husband paces the living room, plugs in the lights on the Christmas tree. My hand strokes my daughter’s foot. My husband mouths, 9 days? They don’t have an earlier appointment? And I remind myself to notice. Remember. Remember this. If you can take your memories with you.

 

The whole Summers’ house is horror movie bright. Buffy finds her mother on the sofa—eyes open and arms jutting. Joyce is all elbows and finger joints crooked. Her skirt is hitched ever so slightly higher than anyone would want for their own mother—who is soon to be found on the sofa by EMTs.

 

Later, I argue with my husband. It feels so good to scream. Get out of the bathroom. He says I’m misunderstanding. I wait motionless while he walks back and forth from bathroom to bedroom, bedroom to bathroom, bathroom to bedroom. When he finally leaves, I take a handful of pills I’ve been saving for an eventuality like this.

 

Buffy vomits on the floor, and she stares and stares, and it is so silent and the silence makes the brightness brighter. Louder. Later, Willow and Tara share their first kiss on screen.

 

Earlier, in my car in a basement parking lot, I move my body violently. After reading the report, I’d managed three floors down in the parking garage elevator. In the car, my body shakes my torso and jerks my hands from my arms—unnatural and sharp—my lungs scream despite my mouth’s resistance. I call my husband and tell him the report says right breast and multiple masses. I gasp and choke. The whole thing so desperate and raucous and embarrassing.

 

I think about those old tinny photos I took at the lake some summers. The one with my dad in a high backed wicker chair. He wears a soldier costume right out of a civil war reenactment.

 

This episode of Buffy is titled “The Body.” Apparently Joss Whedon didn’t want this episode to have an existential lesson. The point was for all of us to watch a person become a mere body.

 

I loved those photos, summers when our family rented a few nights at the lake and dad drove a rented speed boat and we ate banana saltwater taffy and raced at every go-kart track along the highway from our small town to the lake one state over.

 

The EMTs leave Joyce on the floor after performing CPR, leave the body with Buffy.  Unrealistic.  When Giles comes, Buffy exclaims, We aren’t supposed to move the body!

 

On the sofa shivering, waiting on hold, waiting to the soft, surprising on-hold music, I remember the day my mom called me to her room as a child. My mom had to tell me my friend since preschool was dead—driving to the city to shop for Christmas. I’ve had a recurring nightmare ever since. I killed her. My psychiatrist might call this a trauma response.

 

I can’t tell you much about what happens in the dream. I just know it’s my fault. In the dream. In the car after I read the report, I was screaming again and again against my closed mouth.

 

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down?, Cataloguing Pain, Handbook for the Newly Disabled: A Lyric Memoir, Slowly/Suddenly, and six chapbooks. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com

 

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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