Category: prose poetry

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.

The dress rack at the Goodwill is packed today. The crimson, sapphire, and emerald prom dresses, sway awkwardly side to side across the gymnasium floor, the smell of roses off her wrist, the hopeful condom in his pocket. The hangers click click as they are pushed down the greasy poles of the rack. Five dusty rose bridesmaid dresses, crinkling organza, a champagne stain on a skirt, slightly slurring, stumbling across the dance floor, all joined together in I’ll never wear this again. A royal velvet evening gown, a slit up the side, bourbon, cigarette smoke, and perfume, holding court at the bar. The silver and black sequined party dress, flashing and winking, wrinkled from the sweaty back seat of a taxi ride. Then the queen, the frosted confection, sweetheart neckline, pearl encrusted bodice, cap sleeves, tulle skirt, smelling like lilies, virginal, pure, as if it had never been worn, a dress left at the altar.

Norma Zimmermann worked for many years as a medical technologist. She is now retired and loves to write flash fiction, prose poetry, and poetry. Her work has appeared in BrightFlash Literary Review and Turtle Way. She lives with her husband of forty-eight years in Massachusetts.

When the ice age strikes, I grow an extra limb, then two, then three. They spring from my body, rows of suckers popping up along their muscular length, wiggling in the air like newborn tongues. My husband stands there in the kitchen and shouts at me, his face turning coral pink, goddammit Beth you stop this nonsense right now, but his words freeze in mid-air, his grubby, creaking fingers snatching fruitlessly at my powerful swirling tentacles. By then, I am already slipping out the door, my new limbs slapping wetly on the pavement, and the last I see of him through the window is his gaping fish mouth as his eyes burst open with ice crystals. Down down down I surge into the ocean, escaping sub-zero temperatures, escaping oxygen, shooting water through the holes in my body like a rocket as I gurgle out salt bubble laughter. I am classified as a dumbo octopus, I can fly, I can fly, I’m soaring. The colder it gets, the faster I propulse. In the dark, I become gelatinous, the purple bruises dotting my skin now just a part of my shimmering chromatophore camouflage, and I live there in the abyss for thousands of years, because down in the midnight zone, you can be soft-bodied and still be a predator.

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, JAKE, Exposition Review, Your Impossible Voice, and Gone Lawn, among other publications, and has been nominated for Best Microfiction 2024. You can find her on Twitter @ezhang77.

Being microcosms of the whole, even the individual pieces of me repel light. Hence I play crosswords until I see floaters while a grid of shadows imprints the inside of my lids. My finishing times ricochet like birds move in shifting constellations, swarming blue from the sky. Some days I am brilliant, mostly idiotic. My shadow scares me in the way it morphs, splaying long over dark lawns at dusk, joining me with things I don’t want to touch. I don’t want the constellations to morph but they already are, like how I pull and twist vectors apart in Photoshop. I don’t want to look that strange but I still turn up the brightness on Instagram. I want to be the identical fractals of the wave, not the one riding it. But in real life its certainty is indiscernible. Iterations surge and crash day and night, day and night, and each one splaying over the shore is random at best, at worst, enough to drive me to despair.

Emily O Liu is a second-generation Chinese American writer from San Diego, California. A former Fulbrighter teaching English in Taiwan, she is currently studying learning design and technology at Stanford GSE. Her work appears or is forthcoming in No Tokens, The Gravity of the Thing, HAD, Gone Lawn, and other places.

In the dunes, the morning of the equinox: a snail, a wet pine stump, a plover. The sunlight
changes. Long blades of grass shine like mirrors. Waves throb. The sun appears, warms
the skin on my forearms and all blades of grass. Waves roll, hidden behind tall dunes.
Waves and plovers together partake in wind and silence. A snail creates a path alone,
through grass, hidden. A wave compresses wind and ocean. Sunlight shifts, shifts again.
Shadows fall in response to the shifts, like a thin rain of darkness on the grass. Clouds
compress, pass, dissolve. The snail does not change their course. The grass undulates, the
pine tree listens. The air, low above the grass, fills up with water. The snail moves in
rhythm with the grass. The pine stump, in the future, will disappear into a wave. The snail
accepts me as a disciple. Sun rays spring up from the mud. Both my body and the dead
tree absorb the rain. Thousands of long sand stems create yellow grass and green silence.
Undulations in light and water. The hidden snail offers me their protection as I have no
shell. Blades of grass open. Wait. Grow. Grow from the middle. Breathe from all sides.
Breathe air, water, and all the colors. Imprint wind, clouds. Absorb mossy rain. Breathe
in sunlight and lengthening shadows.

Lucie Bonvalet is a writer, a visual artist and a teacher. Her writing (prose & poetry) can be found in Catapult, Puerto del Sol, 3AM, Phantom Drift Limited, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fugue, and elsewhere. Her drawings and paintings can be found in Old Pal magazine and on instagram. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University in May 2021. Originally from the Dordogne, in the Southwest of France, she lives in Portland, Oregon.