November 30, 2023
Flash Fiction
Trapped Inside
by Thomas Elson
He has lived in the middle of combat all his life. A heavily armed truce with fortified borders and occasional explosions - some so close it felt as if they came from inside...
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October 13, 2022
Poems
by Christian Anton Gerard
Elapsed Time, or How a Drag Racer Lives or Dies
by Christian Anton Gerard
The empty by the pedal’s the one that got me
going like a wolf post-equinox...
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October 06, 2022
After the Honeymoon
by Heidi Seaborn
Darling, if your second marriage is anything
like mine,
you will be invited to his mother’s home
to crush the garlic, swirl the sauce to a simmer, whisk...
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October 06, 2022
How to Throw a Communist Party
~from Marilyn Monroe’s party menu notes, 1956
by Heidi Seaborn
Champagne? At least some kind of wine with dinner Buy—liquor—scotch—gin—vermouth—Hors d’oeuvres—caviar—Others? Is that Copeland on the turntable?—Marilyn are you cooking up a Communist plot?—Wanna Martini Comrade George... read more >
October 06, 2022
TAKE THAT BOW THEN SLAG OFF
by Heidi Seaborn
How is it I always find myself here face to face–
serum eye cream mascara brow liner blush & lipstick o lord
when did I become such a drag
queen of you...
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October 06, 2022
THERE WAS NO HONEYMOON
by Heidi Seaborn
You ever think of getting married again? & there it is just like the dog’s vomit that everyone steps around. O, I loved Art alright. Willing him free from McCarthy’s clutches, I said I do, said yes to be a stamp on his passport. So, if your third marriage is anything like mine you will call him Daddy... read more >
October 06, 2022
REFUSING TO BOW
by Heidi Seaborn
Marilyn’s been so accommodating—smiling in her winning winsome way
for decades now
& now
on Instagram & Twitter
O the things said
@marilyn.... read more >
June 09, 2022
The 13th Element by Taylor Miles
by Taylor Miles
Nadia looked out at the scrap metal mountains in the yard. The two silver reflective stripes along the back of her neon orange jacket glowed in the sunset. She opened her mouth and bit down on a chip. Crunch, crunch. Tangy salt and vinegar sting, slight numbness of the tongue... read more >
June 09, 2022
The Memory Activists
by Jefferson Navicky
They knew surprisingly little about the world. At least in its current state of wireless access and passwords and data. Their purview went back further, deeper. Many led campaigns against the Memory Activists, the many for whom forgetting is a more advantageous pursuit. This included not only the expected governmental forces backed by clandestine power and fear... read more >
April 28, 2022
Sex on the Beach
by Hillary Flynn
Before I went to rehab for the second time I dated a rich southern guy so comfortable with his masculinity that he wore bright pink polo shirts to nightclubs in the South Bronx. We met through a dating app where he swiped right on a profile I had made of a girl who looked like a more relatable version of me... read more >
January 09, 2018
Like a Norwegian
by Vincent Chu
About Vincent Chu
Vincent Chu was born in Oakland, California. His fiction has appeared in PANK Magazine, East Bay Review, Pithead Chapel, Cooper Street, Stockholm Review, Forth Magazine, The Collapsar, WhiskeyPaper and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications Best of the Net. Like a Norwegian is a story from his debut collection, Like a Champion , available February 28 from 7.13 Books. He can be found online at www.vincentchuwriter.com and @herrchu.
Arrival:
“If the ship sinks, just grab hold of that,” said Mr. Potts inside the elevator, pointing to a poster of Nelly Vasquez, the whale of a woman scheduled to sing each night after dinner service in the Moonlight Lounge. A mother near the doors glared and told her son, “Ignore the stupid idiot.” Oh what, thought Mr. Potts...
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February 27, 2017
Kitchens
About Ellene Glenn Moore
Ellene Glenn Moore is a writer living in sunny South Florida. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University, where she held a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship. Ellene's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Raleigh Review, Brevity, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Critical Flame, and elsewhere, and her chapbook The Dark Edge of the Bluff is forthcoming from Green Writers Press in 2017.
I cannot explain what I am doing in the kitchen so late, the house chilled and black, and I cannot explain what my father is doing here. In my thirst I have opened the fridge, alarming him to my presence... read more >
February 09, 2017
Dear America
About Jennifer Parker
Jennifer Parker is a freelance writer and improviser living in New York City with a background in film and television studies.
Dear America,
Or at least white, liberal America. You seem so confused. Don’t worry, it isn’t your fault. You meant well. You voted. You did something that I could never have done. You voted for the 45th President of the United States. I couldn’t have voted for two simple reasons, one is that I am Canadian and the other is that I’m super dead...
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January 12, 2017
An Owner’s Manual
About Mercedes Lucero
Mercedes Lucero is a writer whose prose, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in Curbside Splendor, Paper Darts, Chicago Tribune's Printers Row Journal, The Pinch, Heavy Feather Review, and Whitefish Review among others. She is a recent Glimmer Train "Short Fiction Award" Finalist and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently the Fiction Editor of Beecher's and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University. Read more of her work at www.mercedeslucero.com.
When a white boy in fourth grade tells you on the playground that you woulda been his slave, put the memory in your chest. Let it sit there for years. Let it tremble. Keep it with the others... read more >
December 16, 2016
Obama Butcher Chart
About Jonathan Duckworth
Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University and a reader for the Gulf Stream Magazine. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appears in or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, PANK Magazine, Thrice Fiction, Cha, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.
In a warehouse in Toledo are copies of a poster commissioned in 2012 by a Super PAC. Part of an abortive multi-media attack campaign, it was nixed not for being too incendiary, but because the metaphor was deemed “too complicated” for thirty second-long television spots. The poster featured a silhouette of one Barack Hussein Obama (the big, listing ears gave it away), sectioned up like a cow in a butcher chart... read more >
February 18, 2016
Everything You Need
About John Scott Dewey
John Scott Dewey is a husband, father, fiction writer, poet, and middle school English teacher living on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He received his MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. His fiction has been recently featured in The Wilderness House Literary Review and PennUnion.
Around 10:15 that night Lorraine returned home from her dinner shift with a stack of Styrofoam boxes—chicken fingers and fries, courtesy of the cook staff. She dropped her keys and food on the kitchen table, beside an open page of her Hurst Review, and climbed up the stairs to the kids’ room... read more >
January 14, 2016
Royce is Not My Father
About Audra Kerr Brown
Audra Kerr Brown lives betwixt the corn and soybean fields of southeast Iowa. Her fiction has appeared in Popshot Magazine, People Holding, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, and 100 Word Story, among others. She tweets under the clever handle of @audrakerrbrown.
I don't know why I lied. Maybe it's because someone finally believed me. So maybe it didn't really happen in exactly that way with exactly those boys on exactly that night. I'm not sure any more. But things have happened to me, on nights like that, with boys like that... read more >
September 17, 2015
SOMETHING LIKE THAT
About Jacqueline Doyle
Jacqueline Doyle's very short prose has appeared in Café Irreal, PANK, Monkeybicycle, Sweet, Vestal Review, The Rumpus, Literary Orphans, Corium, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I don't know why I lied. Maybe it's because someone finally believed me. So maybe it didn't really happen in exactly that way with exactly those boys on exactly that night. I'm not sure any more. But things have happened to me, on nights like that, with boys like that... read more >
May 28, 2015
Peter
About Ingrid Wenzler
Ingrid Wenzler studied Creative Writing as an undergraduate at Connecticut College and is now a graduate teaching assistant and a second-year MFA candidate at the University of Arizona. Her work has appeared in Cleaver Magazine.
A heavy fog, typical of that time of year and Peter, looking like he knew where he was going, was pushing an off-white pram so lightly that it seemed to glide on and on ahead of him. The night was cold, and there was a thin layer of moisture on the sidewalk, the pram, the heavy branches overhead... read more >
April 23, 2015
Stage Violence (or Un Bacio Ancora)
About Lisa Annelouise Rentz
Lisa Annelouise Rentz lives in a three hundred year old village in the Lowcountry and is part of the Do No Harm Artists of South Carolina.
Once I passed thirty years of age and once I finally acquired, via scalpel, the ass I always wanted, my life settled into a gratifying routine. I had found the right seat, as it were, in the place where I lived and the livelihood I chose and the person I cuddled... read more >
March 26, 2015
from ATTRITION
About Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey
Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey was born in the Philippines and raised in Wisconsin. Her work appears or is forthcoming in TAYO, Construction Literary Magazine, and The Volta’s Evening Will Come. She recently graduated with an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University and currently works for Woodland Pattern. She blogs at spaceinsideborderline.com.
- What are you thinking?
- About home. I don’t know why I’m here; it’s time
to pick the mangoes. I paid. You’re here now. Get used to it.
The closer you look, the more you’ll see how less she is, how many gaps there are in a history. We look at textbooks to read about the social implications of a dictatorship and find erasure... read more >
February 26, 2015
THE INVENTION OF THE ALTERNATIVE
by Len Messineo
About Len Messineo
Previously published in Shenandoah, Tampa Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The New Novel Review, The Sun, and other magazines, my stories have twice been nominated for inclusion in the Pushcart Prize anthology. I teach at Writers and Books of Rochester and my prose poems are an occasional feature on PBS affiliate WXXI’s Salmagundi. Two of my one-act plays were performed as part of the Geva Regional Playwriting Festival.
We noted as far back as the Dark Ages that one’s station in life was wholly determined at birth. Whether one were cobbler or king, wore homespun or sable, carried scepter or spade, was a matter of historical inevitability. It was our idea, as against the hardships of destiny, to create the Holy Mother Church and the consolations of the afterlife... read more >
January 29, 2015
Scene Safety
by Ron Riekki
They tell you, when you start paramedic school, that one out of sixty of us will get hepatitis. They tell you that we will all get colds within the first few months. There are five different versions of HIV, but the odds of us getting AIDS is less than getting hit by lightning... read more >
December 17, 2014
Ten One-Sentence Stories
by Robert Earle
About Robert Earle
With more than sixty stories in print and online literary journals, Robert Earle is one of the most widely published short story writers in America. He also has published three novellas, two novels, and two books of nonfiction. His book reviews and topical essays appear at robertearle@wordpress.com. He has degrees in literature and writing from Princeton and Johns Hopkins and lives in Virginia after a twenty-five year career as a diplomat that took him to Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.
1. The knife sliced twice through the side of the tent and a hand yanked the girl out by the hair.
2. She struggled to find a way to talk him out of it, demanding, persuading, coaxing, pleading, begging... read more >
November 20, 2014
The Goya
by Matt Sailor
About Matt Sailor
Matt Sailor is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. He earned his MFA from Georgia State University, in Atlanta. He currently works as an associate editor with NANO Fiction. His fiction and essays have appeared in PANK, AGNI, Necessary Fiction, Barrelhouse, and Hobart, among others. His first novel, 1985, for which he received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, is in progress.
There’s this painting that you’ve probably seen, a Goya: “Saturn Devouring His Son.” It’s in the Prado, but I first saw it at the University Library in Valdosta. I would sit on the floor in the stacks with this girl I was dating, flipping through art books, our fingers brushing as we turned the pages...
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October 23, 2014
What We Can’t Remember
About Melissa R. Sipin
Melissa R. Sipin is a writer from Carson, CA. She won First Place in the 2013 March Glimmer Train Fiction Open and Honorable Mention in the 2013 September Glimmer Train Fiction Open. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, 580 Split, Kweli Journal, and The Bakery, among others. She was the Community Engagement Fellow at Mills College and Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2013 Sewanee Writers' Conference. As a VONA/Voices Fellow and U.S. Navy wife, she splits her time writing on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. She blogs at www.msipin.com.
Patricia, do you remember when your father told you the story of your lola’s kidnapping? Do you remember how old you were? How young? How scared? How hopeful? Do you remember it was same day your mother left: her in a car, a beautiful, beige Toyota, dolled up with red lips and big sunglasses that reflected the sun and everything you wanted to be?... read more >
September 18, 2014
Dogs Without Men
by Steve Wade
The alpha female made her way along the worn track by the river. In her jaws a live thing. The pack members picked up the scent and the sounds. They rushed to greet her. .. read more >
August 30, 2014
Saved by the Reaper
by Ana Prundaru
About Ana Prundaru
I am a native Romanian, but I grew up in Japan and all over Western Europe. Currently I live in Switzerland, where I work as an independent translator and editor. In between translations, I enjoy creating fiction, non-fiction, poetry and art, as well as volunteering for animal charities. My work appeared in Toad, Halcyon, Vagabond Journey and the Urban Fantasist, among others. www.a-prundaru.wix.com/portfolio
The essay topic read: "What was the most unexpected moment in your life?" If only he could disclose that, Will thought. But better not write about that time the Grim Reaper saved him from his Mom's evil spirit... read more >
August 17, 2014
Auto Portraiture: The Artist at the Scene
by Kelli Allen
About Kelli Allen
Kelli Allen is an award-winning poet, editor, and scholar. Her poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Echo Ink Review, Poetry Quarterly, Fjords, Abridged, Other Poetry,Lyre Lyre, The Blue Sofa Review, WomenArts Quarterly, The Caper Review, It Has Come to This: Poets of the Great Mother Conference, Foliate Oak, Greatest Lakes Review, Lugh Review (where she was the featured author), Blackmail Press, The Chaffy Review, Euphony and elsewhere. She has been the featured poet for Desperanto Press's segment "Tea With George" for September 2011. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she was a finalist for the 2011 Rebecca Lard Award. She is the author of two chapbooks (Applied Cryptography; Picturing What Breaks) and has served as the Managing Editor of Natural Bridge. She is also the founder of the Graduate Writers Reading Series for the University of Missouri St. Louis. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Missouri St. Louis. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of English at Lindenwood University and Florissant Valley. Allen gives readings and teaches workshops throughout the US. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, is forthcoming from Fjords New Book Series October of 2012.
Coils of it appear in the shallow grass and he is satisfied with the rough pattern, though wishes the egg-blue loops shone brighter. Dragging the length from abdomen to street to lawn is exhausting, though rewarding in such a necessary scene... read more >
July 17, 2014
Friendly Wars
About Ndaba Sibanda
A former National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA) nominee, Ndaba has contributed to many anthologies including: Its Time, Poems For Haiti- a South African anthology, Snippets, Voices For Peace and Black Communion. His latest anthology, The Dead Must Be Sobbing was published in March 2013. Ndaba`s debut novel, Timebomb has been accepted for publication in the UK. He has just completed writing two more poetry anthologies, Love, Light and Greatness, and Time To Walk The Talk respectively.
Ever since his appointment to the lofty position of defense minister, he seemed to be gripped by some phobia... read more >
May 15, 2014
Darlene had finally found a place
About Dennis James Sweeney
Dennis James Sweeney hails from Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of the chapbook What They Took Away (CutBank Books) and writing that has appeared in Alice Blue, DIAGRAM, Juked, and Unstuck. Find him in Corvallis, Oregon, in the MFA program at Oregon State University.
Darlene had finally found a place where everyone was as wrought as her. The Venice Beach Pot Head in his white suit with the leaves... read more >
April 03, 2014
Hungary, 1944
About Sarah Kobrinsky
Sarah Kobrinsky's poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Magma Poetry, Jewish Quarterly (UK), Bayou, 100 Word Story, The Molotov Cocktail, Shampoo Poetry, Berkeley Fiction Review, among many others. She is the 2013-2015 Poet Laureate of the City of Emeryville, CA.
A family is in hiding under a house. The youngest, a boy barely two, is the only one to sleep on a bed. The others sleep like well-dressed sardines on the floor—well-dressed, even here... read more >
March 06, 2014
Sundowning
About Trevor Ketner
Trevor is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Minnesota. He has work published or forthcoming online or in print in The Sycamore Review, Pif Magazine, Fjords Review (web), The Conium Review, Fourteen Magazine, The Round, The Sheepshead Review, and elsewhere. His work is also slated to be included in the anthology Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartlan (Ice Cub Press, 2014). He was recently named a finalist for the 2013 Wabash Prize for Poetry.
In the stained light of a small hospital office, Dr. Kensey said he had the cure captured in a syringe. Mom was scared. Mom was ready for it to end one way or the other. Mom signed the consent forms, the DNR. The night before she thought she was back in grad school and drank half the gin Jen and I kept in the freezer. I woke up when she fell and the bottle filled the house with shattering. She woke lucid and hungover... read more >
February 04, 2014
The Girl
by Joe Hessert
About Joe Hessert
Joe Hessert earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is the founding editor of ARDOR Literary Magazine, his short stories have recently found homes in The Los Angeles Review, New Haven Review, Pebble Lake Review, and McSweeney's (Web). He lives in Maine with his wife, Danielle and his dog, Jake.
The girl hadn't meant to kill the man. No, not really. She had merely meant to stop him - to halt this intruder on the stairs and to keep him from her wounded mother—fluttering against the railing like a bird just flown into a window. The girl saw her mother's blood on the deep-pile stain-resistant Berber carpet—fabric her father had installed in the stairwell and upstairs hallway of their split-level Billerica home during the summer the girl had turned eleven—and something caught within her chest. Her Pop had ripped out the old carpet himself and she had watched him roll it and carry it outside, shirtless, his back and shoulders covered in fine dust and wiry hair... read more >
December 26, 2013
The Smudge Between The Stars
About Irene O'Garden
IRENE O'GARDEN'S poetry has found its way to the Off – Broadway stage (Women On Fire), into hardcover (Fat Girl,) into prizewinning children's books, and into many literary journals and anthologies. She won a 2012 Pushcart Prize for her essay "Glad To Be Human," (now in e-form; e-Fat Girl forthcoming from Untreed Reads) O'Garden has received other awards, fellowships and residencies for her writing, as well as an annual listing in Who's Who in America and Who's Who of American Women. She blogs at ireneogarden.com
The evening news bursts into our imagination: a possible "Comet of the Century!"
Comet ISON was discovered last December by amateur astronomers, and if all goes well, in late November of this year (2013), ISON will appear in the night sky brighter than the moon! A whoosh of memory follows like the comet's tail: the ache for and the arc of wonder.
Hail ye, Comet! Blasty, sunbright Comet! Cast my shadow on the boardwalk;... read more >