Category: prose poetry

Dream you’re watching Liza wrap up a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. Dream of a powerhouse performance of New York, New York. Dream there’s a post-show party at the Mocambo. Dream the Mocambo didn’t close down back in 1958. Dream Liza asks you for a ride. Dream Liza can’t drive on account of her two hip replacements make it difficult. Dream telling Liza you’d be honored to give her a lift. Dream owning a red convertible. Dream your husband getting behind the wheel because he says you drive like an old lady. Dream you don’t care what he says. Not tonight. Dream that means you get to ride in the back seat with Liza Minnelli exclamation point. Dream the route to the Mocambo snakes through the scenic high deserts of the American Southwest. Dream it’s late at night – late at night in the scenic high deserts of the American Southwest where the only thing visible to you is the unpaved road ahead, illuminated by headlights. Like the opening credits to Lost Highway. Dream Liza sticking her head out the window to feel the wind whip through her jet-black hair. Dream neither of you is wearing safety belts. Dream how great it is to be in the presence of a bona fide show biz legend like Liza. Dream she’s regaling you with funny stories about Michael York and Martin Scorsese and Chita Rivera and Peter Allen and the Pet Shop Boys. Dream she repeatedly refers to her mother as Judy Garland. Dream that’s sort of weird, but OK. Doesn’t matter. You’re with Liza Minnelli exclamation point. Dream nothing else in the universe matters. As far as you’re concerned, this is the first point in the history of mankind that anything has ever mattered. Including Jesus. Dream Liza climbs halfway out the sunroof. Dream this is a convertible with a sunroof. Dream Liza beating on the roof of the car with bejeweled hands like it’s a bongo drum. Dream Liza belting out Maybe This Time. Dream Liza just radiates pure joy. Dream Liza is pure joy in human form. Dream you want to be like Liza. Dream you want to be Liza. Dream Liza hanging out the car window like some daredevil circus act. Dream the only things keeping Liza from flying off into the high desert night are the heels of her black patent leather boots hooked around the car door handle. Dream you’re starting to worry. Dream that’s not how a septuagenarian with two hip replacements should comport herself. Dream Liza could get hurt. Dream there might just possibly be such a thing as too much pure joy. Dream the car suddenly swerves off to one side and Liza goes airborne like balloons escaping a clumsy child. Dream you shout at your husband to stop the car stop the car exclamation point exclamation point. Dream what a nightmare. Dream having to explain Liza’s accidental death to a 9-1-1 dispatcher or the police or the folks awaiting her arrival at the Mocambo or reporters from People magazine or her legion of devoted gay superfans encircling the entertain-o-sphere. Dream how you’ll never go down in history as a poet now unless it’s as the poet who was with Liza when she met her tragic demise. Dream your husband hits the brakes just as you spot Liza climbing out of a ditch, covered in dust and gravel, smiling, laughing, exuberant, singing Liza with a Z at the top of her lungs. Dream she’s Liza Minnelli exclamation point and that woman’s a goddam survivor.

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Edward Thomas-Herrera is a native of Houston, Texas where he attended Rice University and discovered boys, alcohol, and Expressionism – not necessarily in that order. Later, he moved to Chicago, Illinois where he discovered poetry and playwriting. Edward has a very long resumé of stage credits with which he refuses to bore you, but he’s happy to inform you that his poetry has appeared in Compressed, Tofu Ink Arts Press, Beaver Magazine, and The Account. (Photo credit: Phil Dembinski)

Here is a memory. Our feet had the floor in a bar lavatory. Sean and me in the locked stall. My bare calves hugged the toilet base as I sat. He stood before me. His white, untied sneakers faced my scuffed brown cowboy boots inside a bunched blue jean. Our moans stifled.

Here is early Sunday afternoon in the park. The grass is trammeled. An elderly couple practices salsa steps near an encampment of tents, and small purple balloon flowers grow at the base of an inoculated Ash, trunk bearing an orange spray painted number.

I notice felled timber from last week’s storm, when the internet dimmed, and the subway filled with river. We’re hitched to the shiny, flat world of our phones, sitting cross legged on navy blue terry towels. Our lunch is greasy sweet potato fries. I have a fear of blindness.

What is the difference between hope and denial? After marriage equality, after so many doomed queer heroes, after hiding in stories of clandestine spies, how dare we consider divorce? I guess that is the yang of freedom.

I’m angry when lovers part before the credits roll. Sean says I’m addicted to the light of others, but describes a true optimist as someone who accepts shade. My napkin blows away. Don’t worry, Sean says, I have another.

Do we love the way Maurice loved Alec, the gamekeeper in the movie of the Forster novel? Lust like a life was at stake. I first saw Maurice when AIDS was killing us, when sex was an epic. Sean says the film is privilege porn, a British aristocrat scratching his nails across a taut workingman’s back.

Here, we’re swarmed by wasps. Their faces are my mother freaking in a stiff Elizabethan collar when Sean and me waltzed at my cousin’s wedding. Later in bed at the hotel, he whispered into my neck that I was his.

Next to the park is a string of cars. I notice two birds on the street, one with beak nestled into the wing of the other. Our dog James, the coroner, assembles the puzzle of a battered body, running away and returning with mysteries hanging from his drooling mouth, gifts dropped at my side.

He can smell sadness, the way elephants smell rain from miles away. First, he brings me a severed wing, jagged line of blood at the bite mark, matted feathers, a hooked beak, then a sharp pink foot.

I change into the corpse, leathered skin receding to bone.

There are no eyes.

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Gordon Taylor is a queer emerging poet who walks an ever-swaying braided wire of technology and poetry. A 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have appeared in Narrative, Malahat Review, Poet Lore, Arc, and more. He writes to invite people into a world they may not have seen.

Two models sit uncomfortably on a table draped in a sheet to look like a bed, wishing they’d struck easier positions. Her: one knee bent to touch her chest, her spine spun into an S, but at least her chin rests on her fist, at least her maple-hued hair is held tight in a high bun away from her face. Him: halfway through movement, leaving the bed, maybe leaving her—actually, she has turned him away, spurned a shy advance just as shyly, or cut the tie of a years-long relationship by saying, “I just don’t love you anymore.” And his eyes are downcast, sad really, one hand with a light grip on his own skin (I am really here, this is not a dream) and about to say to a spot on the wall, “It’s not a light switch, that’s not how love works,” to which she won’t respond, will just look at the opposite wall until the silence over-churns and she gives finally to the butter of it and says, “It’s been happening for some time now,” and they both just stay there, like the glue of the moment is dry and neither can peel from the bed full of memories, like the day they bought it, their first joint-purchase, and she was wearing in fact these same pleated jean shorts because they are not a fad for her, she got them from her mother, one of the only things she had to leave her along with some trinkets and costume jewelry, and as he remembers them slipping down to her ankles someone calls, “One more minute,” and the dog lifts his head just slightly off the dusty floor to sigh, stretches a paw, scratches a claw against the wood, and suddenly the girl smiles, turns to the guy, but he stands up and, not looking back, walks out of the room.

 

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Laurin Becker Macios is the author of Calling Me Home, a Young Adult verse novel forthcoming from Holiday House in 2026; Somewhere to Go, winner of the 19th annual poetry award from Elixir Press; and I Almost Was Animal, winner of the 2018 Writer’s Relief WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Gulf Stream Magazine, [PANK], and elsewhere, and is currently nominated for Best of the Net 2026. The former Executive Director of Mass Poetry and former Program Director of the Poetry Society of America, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from the University of New Hampshire, where she taught on fellowship. She lives in Connecticut.

I longed for memories and I have begun to receive them. Like exotic birds flying through nondescript Toronto skies. Grade six and going to sleep away camp, breaking up with my boyfriend at the beginning of the trip and finding a new one by the end, enthralled by the drama of it all. The boy I broke up with is still cute, I don’t know what happened to the second.

I remember being four years old and enraptured with my babysitter, Sylvia. She was sixteen, approximately the age that I imagined all my dolls to be. She was the only teenager I knew and just knowing her was like being in on a secret. We watched girlie movies together, the kind my brother would protest to, but with Sylvia on my side, we would watch them anyway. She’s living in New York, I think. I wonder if it would be strange for me to contact her. I wonder if I’m ready to take the beat of seeing her almost 40. I guess if I waited, she would only be older. The beat comes whether you like it or not. Swing sets make me nauseous now. I buried my dog and I wish I didn’t have to, but the fact is, I did.

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Tessa McHattie is a Canadian writer living in Brooklyn, New York.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Shoegaze Lit, Eunoia Review, and Star*Line, among others.

There are things that are easier to say in the dark. Things that bubble and ferment inside until we’re drunk with distended stomachs. Exhaustion rolls in like the tide. We beg for sleep and prostrate ourselves before the deities of the dark. When that fails, twisting and turning, we bump into each other and all that bubbling and fermentation overpowers our barriers. In the dark it’s just easier to say,

“I love you.”

“I’m not sure I’m on the right path.”

“My brain is always on fire and I can’t find a bucket for water.”

“I think I’m wasting my life.”

“I’m not sure she’s going to make it.”

“Welcome to the Dead Moms Club.”

“I’m not sure we’re going to make it.”

“I wish you had more faith in me.”

“I wish you had more faith in yourself.”

We brush our fingertips across each other’s collarbones as our secrets spill into the moonlight where they are seen but not exposed because neither of us could handle that. We can’t handle losing each other either. Our competing desires see saw across our quilted queen bed. Secrets wisp into ears and out the windows into the fresh air where, weightless and powerless, they can finally dissipate. “You’re my best friend,” we say. Skin to skin, all our worries seem more manageable, and sleep visits again.

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Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbooks Everything’s Changing (Thirty West Publishing, 2023) and Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her stories appear in Passages North, The Citron Review, Peatsmoke Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and 2025, the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022 and the Wigleaf Longlist in 2023. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Learn more at chelseastickle.com.

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.

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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