Month: May 2026

CNF: A Life I Can Inhabit

by Clayton Eccard

 

I grew up in houses my father built the way some men build prayers—by hand with a faith that could be squared and made to last. We moved often. Each house arrived as an attempt at permanence. He believed stability could be earned the way a man earns calluses: through repetition, through doing it right.

His hammer echoed through whatever neighborhood we were trying to become, a steady insistence: here. It took me years to understand what that rhythm was teaching me. Home was something you built, occupied, and sometimes left. Movement did not feel like loss. It felt like progress.

When I returned home as a young man, nothing was wrong with the house. The rooms were finished. The kitchen smelled familiar. My parents welcomed me without hesitation. Yet I moved through it like a guest. I left my bag zipped in the corner. I shortened stories before they reached their endings. No one built walls around me. I built them myself, room by room, until I could pass through the house without revealing what I was still learning to name.

New York felt like distance enough to become whole. For years I lived as I had grown up—temporary. Roommates, sublets, apartment shares. Spaces that worked until they didn’t. An apartment near the World Trade Center was the first place that felt chosen. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked directly into the South Tower. At night, the office lights glowed. That glow carved shadows from everything we owned. We never hung curtains. Too beautiful to block, the glow did not feel temporary.

Then smoke replaced sky. The glow vanished. The room felt smaller without it. What we owned remained there for months. The lease dissolved into paperwork. The relationship fractured under pressures neither of us had rehearsed. I moved again. I began to understand how quickly a structure could vanish.

The years that followed were a series of iterations—different apartments, different versions of myself. I stopped mistaking square footage for security. Home was no longer attached to someone else’s future or a skyline I believed would hold.

Meanwhile, my father kept building—homes, rental properties and a retirement imagined in mortgage-free rooms. He achieved what he wanted, but even that foundation cracked. Alzheimer’s came for him and there was only one house left—a structure he never knew he no longer owned. Then, as I held one of his hands, he turned toward me and said my mother’s name. He told her she would be fine without him. He said that their son had always managed alone. I stayed quiet.

I inherited my father’s hands but not his faith in walls. He measured twice. I measure again. Each of us believed that if the work was honest enough, something would hold. When he framed a room, he did not ask whether it would last forever. He asked if it was level. He drove the nail clean. He moved to the next beam.

I am standing in a similar moment now—between addresses, between versions of myself that once felt incompatible and now feel less divided. I can remain.

 

Clayton H Eccard is a New York–based writer exploring intimacy, perception, and the quiet structures that shape human connection. His work has appeared inOUT Magazine and Lavender Rising, with work forthcoming inWelter, Beyond Queer Words, and the Southeast Review.

 

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CNF: Morning Stars

by Chris Clemens

 

I have things to worry about, but first I must unload the dishwasher, making sure that the plates don’t clink too much. I can’t wake everyone up to clatter downstairs into these quiet hazy sunbeams, to shatter my tenuous peace with their unavoidable messy living. Hopes and dreams begin and end with breakfast. And so the coffee mugs are gently placed into the cupboard, slowly enough that I can consider the printed rocket ship and angry morning bear, the summer sun shimmering through the window, the garden already under siege, heat waves rising against the noise wall like an unchecked tide on the horizon, yet still far away on the other side of that wall so calm down already or I’ll shatter another mug on the floor. Cutlery jingles, each utensil placed into a plastic-moulded sense of order, comforting and restorative until the last spoon is neither large nor small, but something in-between. In a dream I might open the back door and throw this irregular spoon outside into the sweltering garden, as if to say: see? Look what you made us do. This categorically difficult spoon is your problem now, because we have worse things to worry about. In my dream I might scream something like this, irrationally, disturbing the neighbours. In reality I would dig the weird spoon out of the wilting tomato plants and tenderly return it to the dishwasher, terrified of what the raccoons might be capable of, equipped with such a tool. In reality I would never scream at all. Screaming might wake everyone up.

 

Chris Clemens teaches and writes in Toronto, where he has defeated 8.5 raccoons (with help from his wonderful family). Nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net, his stories and poems appear in Best Microfiction 2026, The Literary Review of Canada, Baffling Magazine, Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere. Find more at linktr.ee/clemenstation.

 

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My Hiding Son on the Fourth of the July

by Chris Pellizzari

 

He’s hiding from lost house keys, from curls fallen from homemade haircuts swirling on orange carpet, from unplugged wires seeking their place in the galaxy. He’s hiding from the baseball he can’t wrap his fingers around, dropped and forgotten near the refrigerator in favor of a cherry popsicle. He’s hiding from baby sister’s bottle nipple pointing towards the fuse box that connects clean teeth to itchy fingers and from the steak knives his mother left out on the kitchen table, telling me to stay away. He’s hiding from promises I could not keep thanks to my diabetes, anxiety, insomnia, and cowardice. He’s hiding from the puppy that scratched his hand last week in mutual excitement and from the fireworks outside his window and the windless night carrying sulfur into today.

What is that humming sound coming from the kitchen sink, my boy’s hiding place? Come out, show yourself my son. There is a July cricket in the garage who wants to meet you. His voice is the truce between the earlier explosions of the fireworks and the quiet. Come my son, listen to the cricket, who keeps perfect time, like your heart when the fear is gone.

I hope, for both our sakes, the next decade is not too loud. I hope, for both our sakes, that time is kept perfectly.

 

Chris Pellizzari is a writer from Willowbrook, Illinois. His work has appeared in The Citron Review, Lake Effect, and Hobart. He is a member of The Society of Midland Authors.

 

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Saint

by Leath Tonino

 

They burned her alive, pretty standard, and soon after a cloth-and-stick effigy was constructed, carried to the town square, and committed to the flames of a new fire. Burned her dead this time? The ashes were spat upon, pissed upon, scooped up and thrown down, and additional bodily fluids were gleefully discharged. Then someone had an idea: Mix the ashes with hay and clay, build a sculpture, cut its head off! The crowd did this repeatedly, five executions, six executions, seven executions, and stopped only when the point was convincingly argued that too much recycling had diluted the essence. This prompted a lengthy debate about the meaning of the word “essence.” Questions led to more questions, and more questions, and more questions, and the anger fizzled, the energy drained away. A sleepy boy mutilated a rabbit. An old stooped man tidied the town square up in preparation for the Sunday morning market. All of the above occurred many years before she was canonized, obviously. The surprise, I suppose, is that everything started over again in response to her canonization, i.e. nothing really changed, nothing except this: The boy with the rabbit was now the man lugging the bucket, the old stooped man almost sort of dancing, under the full moon, late on Saturday night, across the ancient cobblestones, the moony cobblestones, with his disgusting mop.

 

Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections: The Animal One Thousand Miles Long and The West Will Swallow You. A freelance writer, his prose and poetry appear in Orion, The Sun, New England Review, Outside, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies.

 

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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

06/29 • Chao Wang
07/06 • Adrian Potter
07/13 • Lissa Staples
07/20 • Emily Kingery
07/27 • Eipsita Kumari
08/03 • Ryan McGeeney
08/10 • Suzanne Martinez
08/17 • Courtney LeBlanc
08/24 • Barbara Diehl
08/31 • Richard Hurst
09/07 • Michael Okafor
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD
09/28 • TBD