Month: June 2026
CNF: Snow Globe of Returning
by Alexandria Peary
My mother from Pforzheim joins a Facebook group about the Pforzheim dialect and is told that she’s not echt Deutsch, not a real Pforzheimer anymore, is corrected, feels insulted and hurt. And so, she says Gell, Alla hopp, Dess find ich glasse, sag dess nochemol! Baggewaddsch. * My mother, born in the gateway city to the Black Forest, at the security gate at the Frankfurt airport, tells the Customs officer it’s her first time on German ground since 1964. It’s 2023. Inside the plexiglass booth, the guard in his twenties, unsmiling, “Then you should have never left your country.” * My mother, daughter, and I search Pforzheim for a restaurant serving bratwurst. For a slice of Black Forest cake with cream, for a real pretzel. * It was brave of me. * It was brave of my fifteen-year-old daughter to join us. * It was brave of my mother to return to the place that hurt her as a girl, though her body hurt so badly she couldn’t walk two city blocks by trip’s end, looking at buildings that didn’t fall from the sky that night in 1945. * It was hard on my mother to stay in an Airbnb with cockroaches dropping from the ceiling and a window falling out of a wall, cabinets sticky, and a freezer of stale food. I bought her a tote bag covered in dialect, Gell, Alla hopp, Dess find ich glasse, sag dess nochemol! as an apology. In the souvenir shop selling tote bags, a shelf of snow globes but not snow globes of the city’s destruction on February 23, 1945. *
Somewhere I know there’s a snow globe with my grandmother picking up rubble for a bowl of soup. I keep looking for her. * My mother who cleaned house every day throughout my childhood––lemon Pledge, Windex, shag carpet, bathroom sinks––owns a robot vacuum that steers around the legs of furniture. * My mother, seventy-nine, bikes twice a day with her boyfriend in Tennessee, who is seventeen years younger, gell. Seventeen was her age when she left for the United States, so he was born the year she emigrated. * She texts updates of her virtual tours on her Strava bike through Prague, the Alps, and places in her homeland she’ll probably never see. She speedwalks on virtual sidewalks in Panama City Beach, Florida (where she has been) but also Mittenberg, Germany; Florianópolis, Brazil; Vansbro, Sweden; Gemünden to Hammelburg; and Innsbruck. (I have a yellowed photo of her Wehrmacht father stationed in Innsbruck at the start of that war.) * * * * Somewhere there’s a snow globe with my grandfather in a tattered uniform in a door to a cellar, what is he doing?, so I keep looking for him.
*
Now at night I am preparing for my solo visit to Pforzheim, so I am reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a library book, and on the television, watch a series about Hitler narrated by William Shirer, long dead, his voice generated by A.I.
Alexandria Peary served as 2019-2024 New Hampshire Poet Laureate and was a 2024-2025 Fulbright Scholar in Germany. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in the New England Review, Southern Humanities Review, Brick, Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. Her books include Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak (poetry) and Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing (prose).
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Snow Globe of Returning”? “Snow Globe of Returning” is part of a series of snow globes about my relationship to my mother’s birthplace. I am in the middle of processing what it has been like all my life to not know 50% of my family. (There’s a somewhat clunky academic term for this sensation: “lost intergenerational identity.”) My relationship to Germany has been “at a Slant,” to borrow Emily Dickinson because of the amount of unsaid information and the number of unknown people. In the summer of 2019, I suddenly realized, chewing on a drinking straw outside a kebab shop in Pforzheim, a city my husband and children I seemingly casually decided to visit, what happened in Pforzheim. An unconscious city was made conscious in my mind. In the summer of 2021, I navigated stressful international pandemic travel restrictions to return for seventeen days by myself. In the summer of 2023, what felt like a miracle occurred when I convinced my mother to return to Pforzheim, a place she last saw in 1972, and reunited her with her brothers (my uncles), sisters-in-law, and childhood best friend. Then in 2024-2025, another miracle happened when I was able to spend multiple months in Pforzheim on a Fulbright researching the city-hall rhetoric of 1933-1950 in Pforzheim, and I engaged in very strange detective work. In “Snow Globe of Returning,” I am sitting with the 2023 confusion I felt after returning to Germany with my mother (and teenage daughter), knowing my future connections with Germany would probably be done without my mother. by Grace Keir I fear the dentist because I do not like anything in my mouth that I cannot hold onto myself. A fork, a toothbrush, a sandwich, a cigarette — these are okay. For me, the fear is not about the sharp steel instruments, the mechanical whirring, the blood, or the pain. These discomforts are acceptable to me, given the situation of the dentist’s chair. I am a logical person. But I do not like my hands in my lap with my mouth open and all sorts of things going in and out of it. So I found a dentist, a kind and compliant man of sixty or so, who lets me hold onto his thick, hairy wrist while he scrapes at my gums and inspects my molars. I found a psychologist, too. He tells me that my particular fear of the dentist is indicative of a suppressed childhood memory. He doesn’t say molestation, but I can tell he is thinking it. He says my dentist enables this suppression by allowing our routine to continue. He says just because I am holding the wrist does not mean I control the hand. So I fire the psychologist. There is no part of him I can hold onto while he goes into my head. Grace Keir is a writer from New York based in Columbia, SC. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the University of South Carolina, where she also serves as Fiction Editor for Cola Literary Review. Her work has appeared in Gordon Square Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “In the Chair”? I wrote “In the Chair” after my friend Fiona sent me a short nonfiction piece she’d written about getting a root canal. Fiona’s piece explored the medical debt that comes with treating a tooth problem. Another friend of mine has to take drugs for her anxiety before every routine cleaning. So I was thinking a lot about fear and teeth and the dentist and how weird and intimate and vulnerable it can be to lie in that chair. From those thoughts, this narrator and her own fears were born. As it happens, I was just told by me and Fiona’s dentist — we see the same guy — that I need a root canal, too. In the Chair
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
06/10 • Grace Keir
06/15 • Alexandria Peary
06/22 • Kel Rocha
06/29 • Chao Wang
07/06 • Adrian Potter
07/13 • TBD
07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD