Category: prose poetry

Children throw their bodies into darkness, daring each other, further, surfing steel, blurring through tunnels, daring their bodies, further, further towards somewhere that is nowhere but feels like something, their lives linear, their stories circular, their bodies just a small vantage point in time and space. Beyond their outstretched hands is the beginning of everything else that has ever and will have ever existed, bodies pleading. Adrenaline rushing through their luminous veins. If only someone had told them of still water and brine. How iron rusts and blood is red. Further, further. How alive they feel as the despair for the world swells inside them, their hearts, their chests. How oaths and myths are nothing in the face of death. How joy and grief in their bodies, further, shaking, further, gentle, further was brilliance enough.

Mizuki is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with her half moon and two very spoiled farm dogs. Her writing has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Frog, Your Impossible Voice, The Citron Review, HAD, and is forthcoming at Does It Have Pockets and other places. Mizuki was the winner of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2025 and was shortlisted for the 31st Bath Flash Fiction Award. Find her online at mizukiwrites.carrd.co and on BlueSky.

Our dog, dachsund-and-chihuahua, fell redly to us from her family tree. After the usual medical exam, shots, spaying, and licensing, she was with us for 17 years. But one day in her middle age, we had just finished dinner and were eating fruit, and someone gave her a dark purple plum. Instead of immediately eating it, though, she gently carried it away. Later, we saw that she had chosen a place apart to lie down with it. There she lay on her side, with the plum lying in the place a puppy would if it were nursing. If any of us made a motion to remove it, she would raise her head, bare her teeth, and growl. The plum went with her wherever she went, for three weeks. Her nipples even appeared to have swollen. Eventually, the plum became wrinkled, covered with lint, and riddled with tiny inadvertent toothmarks. Then she carried it to a corner, set it down, walked away, and mourned for several days.

Michael Nickels-Wisdom has written minimalist poetry since 1990 and very short prose since 2011. Some of his short prose has appeared in World Haiku Review, A Hundred Gourds, and Scifaikuest. He is retired after 38 years’ service in a public library in the Chicago suburbs.

showing off, you kept track of individuals defined as drumming. trill. nasal yank. the birdiebirdiebirdie or the squeaky wheel. the calls that signify distress. the complex songs of courtship. i followed what you stalked, without distinction: nuthatch. warbler. ruffed grouse. through pine and spruce, through ash in patches. the grassy sod, forb covered. you weary of my inept step, my stumble keeping up. my little chirp of where? what? my cheepcheepcheep of questions. what pierced the mob before the gloaming? the second note descending—kee-ahh! before i saw the hawk i said nothing.

Kathleen Hellen is the recipient of the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. She is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks.

It’s true, I stole it, from the rock display in the children’s museum. I was picturing my breasts turning blue. I thought they’d inject me with something like food dye or ink, but gadolinium dye is invisible, and wouldn’t pool in my breasts either way. So I’m at the beginning, a ‘73 field guide, waiting in my gown with an IV in my arm. Almost all solids are crystalline, even organic materials form crystals when in pure state. Which is to say, I’m rock and they’re going to inject me with rock. All rocks disintegrate slowly due to weathering. I’m out of time. I tuck the field guide in my purse to return later. Sister. It’s my first time. Day six. There is comfort in patterns, until it runs out. They put me and Sufjan Stevens in a tube that bangs like the bowels of an excavator, but there’s a warm blanket across my back, and lavender oil and sometimes I hear that “terms and conditions may apply” because even in an MRI machine, there’s ads. A man designed it, one of the technicians says when I emerge with my ribs aching. I rip out the first page of the field guide, but can’t find the line I’m looking for and wonder if I imagined it—it made everything feel all right, the way when I was twelve and bleeding I remembered the patriarch’s daughter hiding her idols. It would be white in dark field. The end, that is, were it there. Turns out I’m blue. I hold the moon and an occasional unblinking fish. I am the mother everyone talks about, blue breasts dipping like bells. They make a mess of my sweater so I go naked to guard the field where my son is driving a wooden tractor through a cornfield made of wire and fabric. I help him harvest wild rice and sugar beets which is all he’ll ever have to track time. We go to the quarry and practice lifting rocks with tongs. We set them on a scale—taconite and petrified wood and honey agate. Honey, we say together. Honey, I say until he swallows me.

Elizabeth Torres is a writer in southern Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Ecotone, Pleiades, AGNI, and elsewhere. Visit her at elizabethtorreswriter.com.

When my mother still cooked me scrambled eggs, I thought that eggs were magic. I watched her melt butter in a pan and swirl it around for an even coat. She poured whisked eggs out of a bowl, waited awhile as they warmed, then pushed them gently with a wooden spoon until they solidified. Butter melting made sense to me, just like the heat of a summer day can melt ice cream and a candle’s flame makes wax drip. But eggs transform from liquid to solid with just a difference in heat. This was alchemy, surely, the golden yellow elixir becoming something delicious to eat.

Caitlin O’Halloran is a biracial Filipino-American poet living in Rochester, New York. She has a Bachelor of Arts from Boston University in Philosophy and History. Her work has been published in Vast Chasm Magazine, Midsummer Dream House, and Apricity Magazine. http://www.caitlinohalloran.com

at the speed of moonlight, hedges breathe easy, insects sleep. purple smudges lawns and these are not her shadow, but the shadows of everyone in her light. she casts an aura like a pregnant belly, the curve so wide it arcs underground, illuminating spaces between grains of soil, worms, bones of the dead, and cicadas waiting for 13 years. everyone touched underneath the ground, underneath the moon in the light of her undoing.

Carrie Sword is a Jungian psychotherapist with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and a B.A. in English. Her writing has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Ink Drinker’s Magazine, and Sledgehammer Lit. She also holds an Associated Press Award for Feature Writing (Series).

I liked looking at the poster because the lead actress and I shared a first name, and she had her hair cut close to the scalp like Mom, and I guess I have a weak spot for women with short hair, so I bought a ticket from the front booth and entered the first hall to the right to see the movie. In the half-dark of the hall I let my eyes flit across the screen to catch the subtitles: The cards can’t see you yet. The tarot will reveal more if you choose to show up. At the end of the row to my left stood a man. An old man. A man who looked like the older version of the man in the movie. Minus a mustache. Minus half his hair. Minus his unsalvageable youth. I imagined him coming here to see himself on the big screen after all those years. Forty years. Fifty years. And it would make him what today—eighty? ninety?—given that the movie came out, as the poster had it, in 1962, the year my mother was born. I turned my head back to screen and tried to watch the rest of the movie. The movie was about a young pop star who wandered the streets of Paris from five to seven, in the two hours that she had to kill before hearing from her doctor about the result of her biopsy. She was a nervous wreck, the kind I liked. Mom had given me a poor taste in men and a poorer taste in women. That was before she died of leukemia herself, severely lacking in healthy cells and happiness. She, too, liked to cut her hair short and walk around the house with nothing but a dotted white robe on. I knew she would like the man sitting at the end of the row if she were still alive. She would like his manners, she would like his bespoke tweed jacket. She would like his deadness on the outside. She and he would enjoy a cup of tea together, at the downstairs cafe of the movie theater. They would talk about the weather, they would talk about God. They would discuss what a fine year 1995 had been, the last happy time before I was born. They would kill time, she would kill me, and I would kill myself. Her eyes would turn to me and say: It’s okay. I’m okay. The cards can’t see me yet.

A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Vestal Review, Maudlin House, and American Literary Review, among other places. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies (Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50) and awarded a finalist status at various literary contests, including the 2022 Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.

at 17, I superimpose where things used to be, bunking down in what remains of my near-empty childhood bedroom colored ankle-vein blue, just days before dad gives me and mom the boot to rent the place out as an additional stream of revenue for himself, post-divorce, it’s January in Minnesota and though it’s a worn-out cliché, dad won’t turn the heat on, so I sit crisscross applesauce on the floor listening to Paul Simon sing about armor and islands, rocks and poems out of an old bulbous Macintosh computer, no joke, I can see my breath, shivering as I wait for a girl, who, with my assistance, occasionally cheats on her out-of-state boyfriend to pull up by the streetlight at 3am in her brand-new Ford Escape and I’ll sneak out of the dead house, cold as a corpse vacant of soul, to brave the snow with 4-wheel drive but this time, the boyfriend will call just as we slip off our coats, demanding a word, so I’ll turn down the music and totally redeem their relationship, unlike my parent’s, but if you think about it 1-for-2, or batting .500, is actually quite good.

Paul Rousseau is a disabled writer. His debut Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir is forthcoming from HarperCollins September 10th, 2024. Paul’s work has also appeared in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Catapult, and Wigleaf, among others. You can read his words online at Paul-Rousseau.com and follow him on Twitter @Paulwrites7.

“To call you my friend? My wife? My love, my editor, my pet? I don’t know. Already you move hazy through my life & then out of it again.” – Essay on Crying in Public by Cameron Awkward-Rich

some friends have boyfriends some friends are pregnant some friends are abroad and play it like they’re at the end of a road near extinction let us say i once had a dog i never told my sister certainly not my brother i cannot remember if i loved my dog all i remember is life was as a scaffold to sweet bliss i was the coupler and the dog was the brace this is a difficult thing to say but it isn’t a difficult metaphor to use we needed each other weeks passed my lover i mean my friend i mean my dog would leave bowls full of stale meals in my wake which is to confess unfed by my hand it grew still i wondered why i asked why expecting my dog to talk back to me like waiting for a door at the fore of a solid brick wall if ever you had your echo return to you you probably figured how this tale would end so allow me skip it would you scratch that i know how the illusion of life can joyfully strain a thing suffice to say weeks passed my dog died which is to say it entered an unreachable place i didn’t shed a tear but i felt a tear in my chest like a piece of fine cloth splitting its weaves yes i was distressed like a bird without wings but who could i tell it is a wretched thing to serve an end without a beginning like waking up one morning with so many happy things that do not belong in your head

I Echo is a Ghanaian-Nigerian writer on a neverending search of self. He is confident in one thing: He would like to explore the world, realise new cultures, create new conversations and hopefully save the world by saving himself. He tweets as @AyeEcho

While she was babysitting me, she used to put load after load in the washing machine, sweep before lunch and after lunch, wash the dishes, dry the laundry, vacuum, get on her knees to sponge the bathroom floors, iron our clothes while watching soap operas all afternoon. I remember how she smelled of dishwater and the almond hand moisturizer by the sink and how, when I said, “But you just sweeped!” because I wanted her to play with me, not sweep the kitchen again, she pinched my cheeks with her slippery fingers. I don’t believe in Heaven, don’t believe she’s up ship-shaping it, polishing the gates, tsk-tsking those who come through them with mud on their boots, sweeping angel feathers into a dustpan, pinching the fat cheeks of the cherubim. No: I don’t think she believed in God any more than I do. I think she liked going to church because everything there was so clean: the floors, the pews, the windows, the light. I see her rocketing into space, though. Grandma the astronaut, leaving the galaxy on her ironing board, the dishtowel tucked in her apron waving behind her. There she is, a little woman polishing the stars, mopping up the spill of the Milky Way, washing the yolk of the Big Bang from the walls of the long hallway of eternity…

Amber Burke is graduate of Yale and the Writing Seminars MFA program at Johns Hopkins University. These days, she teaches writing and leads the 200-hour yoga teacher training at the University of New Mexico in Taos. She has written over 100 articles for Yoga International, and her creative work can be found in swamp pink, The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, Flyway, Mslexia, Superstition Review, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Quarterly West, and on her website: https://amberburke3.wixsite.com/amberburkewriting.