Four Stories by Tim Frank

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

Another Breakdown

The T is missing from the front sign of the shop across the street from my flat. The asymmetry is a killer and it’s breaking my heart. I talk to the owner but he just devours a peach, juggles some change, and ignores me. He’s always been hostile and I wonder if he removed the letter just to make me suffer. One time I heard him whisper about me on his hands-free. “The freak is here again,” he said, “getting some more cheese puffs for his dead mother, no doubt.”

Anyway, I sit in my flat and think about the missing letter, while watching YouTube reels about serial killers. Sometimes I think my dad could be the Zodiac killer. But I doubt it. Maybe he just likes to polish his knives and play the daily jumble. It would be nice to believe he achieved something in his life. It goes on like this for days. I can’t sleep. I begin to notice strange arrangements of letters everywhere. The labels on my frozen package meals are missing some vowels. My threadbare T-shirts have faded capital letters. I feel distinctly unwell—my stomach is throbbing like a heart, my tinnitus is singing frail songs, and I think about checking myself into hospital. Instead, I paint a giant T upon my forehead and jump into my car. I sit for an hour and pump the theme music to 2001: A Space Odyssey. I throw my arms around like an orchestra conductor. All tearful and snotty, I drive into the front window of the shop with the missing letter, taking out the fruit stand. I call out, “I’ll take those fucking cheese puffs now!” then walk the short journey home, bleeding from my knees. I look forward to cooking a ready meal three years out of date, and then I’ll call my daughter to discuss her warlike demeanour. She claims I’m trying to freeze all her assets. She’s nine.

The Healer, the Guru, and the Patient

“He’s with us now — in this room,” says the healer, with a subtle smile, “of course, only I can see him.” 

The patient, perched upon a stool, looks around the kitchen. All she sees are shadows.

“He’s lurking by the window,” says the healer, “ranting at the sink. That’s just the way he is, the afterlife is tough. He says, yes, you’re dying, so join him, and smash your lucid prison.”

“I knew it,” said the patient, falling into tears. She grabs a metal toaster and hurls it at the guru, as he emerges from the gloom.

Beyond

The land Beyond is a thing of abstract beauty. There’s cracked LED lightbulbs, glowing like distant suns. There’s a blushing coral ocean, healing septic sores. Flowers flourish in gentle winds, humming Spanish jazz, stirring swollen soil. Yet the land Beyond is helpless — it’s haunted by the dead, those fiends in haute couture, drooling and refined. They climb the padded walls, and laugh with schizoid thunder.

Kaleidoscope

The newspaper’s a kaleidoscopic whirlpool, a new world on every page. Combat drones, the ozone layer, and trashy network films. But you just read to sleepwalk through the day, and mask your stillborn moods. As your kids dance through the fire, chewing white-hot coals, madness clogs their veins.

Tim Frank’s work has been published in Bending Genres, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Hobart, The Forge Literary Magazine, New World Writing and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and 3x Best of the Net. His debut chapbook is, An Advert Can Be Beautiful in the Right Shade of Death (C22 Press ’24) His sophomore effort is, Delusions to Live By (Alien Buddha Press ’25)

Cooter by Rebekah Morgan

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

Cooter don’t mean for his butt, half of it at least, to have to be chopped off. He had to have his right butt cheek and some of his thigh cleaned out good and that meant cutting and digging and cutting some more so as to get rid of the infection that was starting to go in and eat up his pelvic bone, up top near by the iliac crest. I saw it myself cause Cooter came to me looking for help with caring for the wounds and didn’t wanna deal with no more hospitals. He was all cut up and it was like looking at a piece of exotic fruit, trying to identify something familiar.

Cooter had gotten skin grafts that set like two little islands of meat from his thighs and saw where the doctors left them in the ocean of red where his butt shoulda been. He said the doctors who had done it were jerks and he told me that he didn’t want to go back for more skin grafts. I told him he should go back cause the edges of the grafts had all rolled up and there was pus everywhere and it was hard for him to find any parts of his butt left to inject his dope in. I told him I’d go with him to see the jerk doctors even though I knew he was brave and could handle himself.

But he wasn’t gonna go and he didn’t have much money. Cooter picks up scrap metal and other useful things from the yards of hoarder houses while chickens and sometimes guinea hens run about in the yard. Cooter just wanted simple things like gauze or period pads or baby diapers, anything that could be put across the area where a butt should be and keep the weeping things a bit more dry.

Lisa, Cooter’s sometimes girlfriend and sometimes thorn in the side, was creative and torn white sheets into large strips, large enough to cover a man of smaller stature’s butt, but she had torn all the sheets she had, cut up the towels for padding, got him puppy pads at Dollar Tree and then would tape it all down to him like she was wrapping a present. Lisa was a good friend to Cooter even though she said he doesn’t always treat her right and he spends more time in jail than with her cause he don’t listen to the things she says when she tells him all the things he shouldn’t be doing.

Sometimes I bring him puppy pads and abdominal pads and medicines in a big brown paper Kroger bag. Sometimes my friend The Nurse helps me out and I can bring antibiotics when the place where his butt is gone turns red and green like Christmas with little drops of plasma weeping a twinkle light in the sun where he’s working and you can see it on his jeans where the wetness has come through. I give him a shot in his other butt where the cheek is still there and it gives him some antibiotic coverage for a bit. It’s hard to keep wounds clean when everything you love has touched the dirt. Sometimes after I leave he texts me and says “baby, ur blue eyes smile in the light” and I say “u idiot my eyes are green”.

Rebekah Morgan is a writer based in East Tennessee. Their writing can be found in Oxford American and Joyland Magazine among other fine places.

Jack Nicholson Complains To Me About Nurse Ratched in a Dream by Ambrielle Butler

On By okaydonkey7In poetry1 Comment
He says don’t mind the cicadas’ whispers, don’t listen
to their hushed velvety wings dripping syrupy night
over the valley, and don’t mind the waffles they’ll serve
you in the cafe. He says don’t mind the staff and they won’t
mind you, says don’t start picking at a loose thread until
you have something in you that you’d like to start unraveling.
He says don’t you unwind yourself like that, says it’s lazy,
says you’re better than that, wasting your own time waiting,
trying to figure yourself out just to stitch you back together again.
He says don’t fear the things you see, says surviving is about
looking deep, says you can’t fill a fishbowl without skimming
beneath the surface of a rib cage. He says don’t tap the glass or
you’ll scare them, says he ain’t going nowhere though, says
nothing really scares him, not anymore.

AMBRIELLE BUTLER is a writer and poet from Texas. Her poetry can be found in publications like On the Seawall, Superstition Review, Valley Voices, Plainsongs and others. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @ajbutlerwriting.

Protocol for Sonar by Ellen Wiese

On By steve cIn flash fiction1 Comment

⦆

The sound goes out from my dark little room at the end of a long metal pier, collides with something, and returns.

Protocol: note all targets. The sonar display doesn’t give details, submarine or creature both just blurring dots. But I know that’s her, on the scan at last.

I can hear the stories in the ultrasonic echoes, the specifics that the machine can’t detect. I was slow to learn to keep it to myself. Aboard the Suffrance, I said too much, became a standing joke.

Now the closing shape’s a beacon, lit by spinline. Bright as the line passes and fading through the next rotation. Flaring another tick closer. Moving towards my dark little room, chasing the source of the sound she can hear.

In the log, I write: unknown target, though I know what it is.

⦆

One of the stokers on the Suffrance had something wrong inside the chambers of his chest. When I told him so, he said I could keep that to myself. But he took a shine to me. Rankled like a bear at the other boys’ derision.

Radio crackles. Downcoast checking in. Bored, congested with a cold.

Ears, this is Downcoast. How’s the view?

Can’t complain. Over.

Got a name on the monster they pulled up. Over.

They hauled the young one in at the downcoast station just yesterday, tangled in a trawler’s net. Whether or not it was dead when they caught it, it was lost to the world an hour later.

What is it? Over.

Architeuthis, he says. Big old squid.

I’ve heard the young one and its mother: long heads, too many limbs for me to count, eyes that scatter sound. But the sonar carries more than shapes. Today, the whole resounding space of the sea is raw with grief.

Huge, he says like this is news. Six meters long.

Under the floor, the pier’s bearings groan like men. Where the beams meet the platform, the metal is red with rust. It comes away on my fingers, sticks under my nails, leaves smears on the lid of the coffee machine.

⦆

I first saw the mother and the little one as smudges on the sonar screen. Listened as they feasted through a school of fish. The little one was slow to learn.

Once, when they wandered close, I paused the spinline and pinged them a hello. The baby darted forward, echo full of curiosity. The mother set her body in the sonar’s path. Mantle wide, she rushed the little one away. Broad like the stoker, squaring his shoulders at the others’ mockery.

On the scan, she flares bright again as the line continues its rotation. I calculate her distance and her speed and note it on the clipboard.

○

Hey, Ears, Downcoast calls again. Boys’re saying they’re gonna pay to stuff it. Sell it to a museum or something. The monster. You wanna buy in? Over.

Under my tight fingers, the pages of the log crumple, nearly tear. The rust under my nails leaves red lines across the neatly labeled rows.

I’ll pass. Over.

Your loss, he says. Dull as rocks otherwise. Anything down there?

Her outline etched by the reflected sound. The billows of her long limbs, her vast intent. Two kilometers and closing.

Protocol: call in unknown objects. The whole point of dark little rooms at the end of long metal piers. Safety and security and the national interest.

All clear, I say. Out.      

⦅

After a dive off Peterhead, the Suffrance surfaced in a bank of fog. Nobody knew yet that we’d drifted. Only blurs on the sonar screen. But I could hear the edges through them, some dead volcanic peak.

I told the control crew we would break our hull along the ridge. The navigator took my collar in his hand. Not going to change course because a sparker thinks he’s better than the scan.

The bow took water and we sealed it off too slow. Saltwater hit the batteries and turned to chlorine gas. By the time a merchant steamer reached us, 46 hands were lost. No one could tell me what happened to the stoker, if it was sea or gas that put him on the roster of the dead.

⦅

The radio again, static before his voice crawls through. Always wondered, he says. Did you believe it? Your magic hearing thing.

Don’t clog the channel. Over.

Boys down here say you’re really crazy.

Jeers in the crew mess. The stoker standing, head scraping the ceiling, asking if anybody wanted to say that one more time.

I put my thumb on the switch that stops the sonar’s spin. She’s closing now, her jets in the display’s revolving beam.

⦅

Protocol: maintain and observe the rotation of the scan. Whether gas burned through the fluid in his lungs or breakers trapped him in the hull, I never found out how the stoker died. As the mother nears, the only sound she makes is the rush of water through her body like blood in the valves of the heart. She won’t find her baby’s body here, but I know where it is.

I thumb the switch, a narrow slice of ocean stranded in its range. Direct it south, a degree offshore, where the downcoast station and the body of her little one sit just beyond the sonar’s beam.

For a moment the scan is empty. But then a blur on the display. The echoes contort behind her as she follows the signal’s course, her intention sharp and set.

At the sonar’s farthest reach, she slows. In the sound I see her drift a moment upright. Her eye turns towards my sound, smooth and round and shining black. As though she can hear me in the echoes too, I lift my hand.

Ellen Wiese is a Chicago-based writer. Ellen’s previous publications include Portable Gray, AGNI, Wigleaf, and Lost Balloon, and her writing has appeared on the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize shortlist, the 2022 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize Long-Longlist, and Glimmer Train’s 2018 Very Short Fiction Top 25. She graduated from the MA Prose Fiction program at the University of East Anglia.

The Office of Nobody There by Jeffrey-Michael Kane

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

There is an office where they keep sounds no one was present to hear, the tree falling, the glass crazing, a man in 1943 saying the name of a woman he would not see again, into a telephone that had already gone quiet on the other end, metal cord dangling frayed.

The clerks are very organized, everything is filed by frequency, then by grief, then by the peculiar sub-category they call almost—sounds that arrived one room too late, or one year, or one translation, nothing is named, the radio in the office tuned between stations, songs burning white in static.

I applied for a position there once, they said the work required a certain tolerance for unresolved vibration, I said I understood completely, they said most people say that, they said come back when you can hear the difference between an echo and an answer.

I am still standing outside the building, the brick hums at a frequency I recognize but cannot name, this is, I believe, the interview, this not naming.

J.M.C. KANE is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk UK). Disabled, he writes from this learned experience as an ASD-1. His prose work has been published in more than two dozen literary journals & magazines. Kane was a finalist for the 2025 Welkin Prize for Fiction and received the Reader’s Choice Award, was shortlisted for the 2025 Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction, was a finalist in the 32nd Annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest (2025), was longlisted for the 2026 Bath Flash Fiction Contest (UK), and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kane admires compression and exhibits a willingness to trust his reader. He lives in New Orleans with his dogs, family, and a house filled with art.

Three Stories by Brendan Todt

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

Sarah met an old acquaintance

Sarah met an old acquaintance who confessed there was something wrong with her, that her taste buds registered cilantro as soap, that she had noticed this only now, somehow, in her thirties, when she had eaten it for the first time entirely by itself, with two fingers, out of curiosity, out of a tiny glass dish among other garnishes, at a party of respected peers. Sarah asked her if her taste buds might change or change back but the friend admitted it was something elemental, genetic, final. Sarah thought about how strange it was that her eyeballs remained spherical and eyeballs. Her father had once called a stray dog licking at his ankles at a gas station a stinking miserable cunt of an animal and then asked Sarah not to tell her mother. The friend cried. Her boyfriend had confessed to her to loving Tex-Mex far more than authentic Mexican cuisine, which he had tried only once, and not been impressed by. The friend admitted she loved the boy—she kept calling him boy, boy—and insisted that the sex was fine, yes, perfectly fine, that she appreciated it, even, the break it afforded her, the opportunity for leave and release, just lying there, understanding there were some things she could have and others, finally, she could not.

Sarah receives by mail a letter

Sarah receives a letter, written by hand, from her nephew who has also drawn a picture of Sarah as the sun. Giant and yellow and happy and rare. Sarah’s sister has children whom she often sends photos of, who fold themselves like letters, sitting cross-legged on the floor or hanging in some abominable shape from the playhouse out back. Sarah has held these very same children like letters in her lap. 

The children like to share secrets, but only if they are written or drawn, and therefore able to be found out, and only therefore worthy of being kept secret in the first place. The children fold up these pictures and notes and sometimes stuff them into Sarah’s travel bags or the drawers of Sarah’s own house when they visit. Sometimes they stuff them in her pockets. Once, the nephew, who had seen his mother do this with her money, stuffed his note discreetly inside Sarah’s bra. The mother had a talk with him because that is the mother’s place. 

Sarah remembers folding very tightly the notes she passed in class. She remembers folding the large bills her own aunt gave her when she visited when she was a child. She remembers the same aunt teaching her how to cross and how to not cross her legs—and pushing her out into the sun when she had been too long inside reading a book. She remembers being scolded, many times, by a professor who told her she must never fold the poems she submitted to class. Henceforth she never did fold the poems because henceforth she never did permit herself to submit.

Sarah runs through the neighborhood knocking loudly

Sarah runs through the neighborhood knocking loudly, not exactly shouting, not exactly waiting for each neighbor to come to the door before moving on to the next, hollering back behind her as the doors open, Look up there, look up there!

Above the cul-de-sac swoop eleven bald eagles, all white-headed and grown. She’s a little out of breath now as she settles in for another good look herself. She hands off a spare pair of binoculars to a child and his father beside her. Can you believe it, she says, with the kind of enthusiasm she usually reserves only for the classroom when a student has come upon—typically stumbled upon, by accident—something very nearly magnificent.

I don’t need it, no, I don’t need it, says the boy as he pushes the binoculars back into his father’s hands. I can see them now, on my own. I can see them, I can see them! Out come sister and mother next. Will you hold me, the boy asks Sarah, and she does. He is only a little bit closer to the eagles now, but together they are much closer to something else.

On a few other porches stand a few other neighbors. Some have their own binoculars. One a giant telephoto lens. White heads and white tails, shouts the boy. I never knew they had both! I’ve seen them in the zoo, says the sister. You can put me down now.

The group breaks off into compartments, still visible, but heading in their own directions. Maybe families. Maybe soon-to-be mating partners. Are there even more awaiting them at the river? What’s a group of bald eagles called, again? She used to know.

The harder the eagles are to see, the closer the neighbors gather in the street. They pass among them the binoculars. Even the boy wants them now. I will never forget you, he says, and as Sarah hands him back off to his father, she is quite content to imagine he is no longer talking only to the eagles.

Brendan Todt lives and writes in Sioux City, Iowa. He has been working on a series of short prose that follows a character named Sarah. Other Sarah pieces have appeared in Necessary Fiction, Moon City Review, The MacGuffin, Complete Sentence, and elsewhere. “Sarah draws little moustaches” was a finalist in the Smokelong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. A book-length manuscript of these stories has been recognized in the Cider Press Review Book Award (Finalist) and Word Works: Washington Prize (Semifinalist).

In the Other World, They’ll Receive Mitzvahs by Daniel Lurie

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment
I’ll commission a dollhouse door
just below my collarbone, with a toothpick
for a handle. Inside, there’s a brand-new
laundry line, where I pin their worn clothes:
the mother’s denim, the daughter’s opal shirt
with mustard stains and daisies, the father’s ratty
briefs. I set the dinner table in my palm.
It only takes a moment. I could close my fingers
to protect them from blue jays. I could close
my fist to end it all. The father crawls into my ear
so I can hear him better. From the lobe, he dangles
a pickax fashioned from the melted-down gun
metal and bullet casings he used to keep
in the basement safes. I want to wield it
to shatter the links clamped around the mother
and daughter’s wrists. They’d dance on my index
finger, rubbing at their irritated skin. Here
is where the real work would start. More doors
needed, coaxed from the raised flesh of my kneecaps.
One opening into grocery store aisles full of other lives,
without price tags. The other holding a dark
room a man’s voice has never touched.

DANIEL LURIE is a Jewish, rural writer from eastern Montana. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho. Daniel is co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal and a Poetry Reader for Chestnut Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in swamp pink, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and others. He recently won the 2026 Mississippi Review Prize, was awarded the Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellowship from UW-Madison, and will serve as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford in 2026-2028. Find him at danielluriepoetry.com

Feed by Debbie Urbanski

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

Bird cam: a pair of hatchlings squat inside the twiggy nest while the mother hawk perches on top of a metal rail, fanning her tail feathers beside the spring green
(scroll)

Somebody’s trip to Bali
(scroll)

A turtle begins to cross the road with intention then somebody picks the turtle up and carries the turtle across the road then this person stands at the guardrail, holding the turtle in both hands before they reach out over the water
(scroll)

So what is the tipping point when what might be adorable in singular becomes worrisome or even menacing when it arrives in multitudes? Essentially when does a group become a swarm
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Nobody is using the word monsters, that would be ridiculous
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A woman beside a turtle positions her fingertips on the turtle’s shell
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Take a deep breath
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A map of the country. Arrows point westward and northward. Red circles = services are down (unconfirmed). Yellow circles = barricades are up (unconfirmed). Orange circles = sightings (unconfirmed). Orange triangles = levitation (unconfirmed). Orange squares = destroyed (unconfirmed) 
(scroll)

The perfect everyday work bag. Four colors. Shop
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14 years ago, a sitcom in Syracuse premiered
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Recommended reading: War of the Worlds, Ways of Seeing, Frankenstein, Regarding the Pain of Others, Annals of the Former World, The Voyage of the Beagle, Black Hole Survival
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How do we turn dialogue
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What a difficult thing for which to provide commentary, as we are not appearing to have the same experiences during such “effluences.” In the present footage, for instance, I see a plume of green extending from the horizon line like a cloud but a cloud that scrapes across the ground so slowly and with such great intent, though once that green solidifies, then — well in the comments, tell me
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A turtle beside a woman positions its fingertips on the woman’s shell
(scroll)

The question, really — is a broken reality fixable? Or does a break lead to a new and different reality or realities, in which case
(scroll) 

Monkeys in trees, monkeys on the ground, monkeys on the curving boardwalk, monkeys piled onto the stone statue of a god, monkeys nursing their pups, monkeys balancing on a man’s shoulder, monkeys lifting and lowering
(scroll) 

Vapor, elbows, the sidewalk, the sky
(scroll) 

I don’t know, I looked outside and it wasn’t fucking there. The tree. All the trees. They weren’t there. They were just gone. They were fucking gone
(scroll) 

A public service announcement about the importance of identifying and protecting the monarch
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Can the absence of something prove its existence?
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As a working historian, I’d like to now place the current events into an epistemological context. We may want to believe that a shared reality has been a constant throughout both modern and ancient history, but that’s merely a story we tell ourselves. There are numerous examples in our past when a multitude of groups observed an event or events in real time yet came to radically different interpretations. Take any civil war or revolution or reformation or sub-reformation. The difference here: what’s happening now isn’t interpretation   
(scroll)

A sunflower sea star unfurls
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Ice bubbles in Pennsylvania
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Your Wednesday Wellness tip
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Yet was it a violent force to begin with? Or did we transform what it was into a violence because of how we met the force when it arrived?
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The secret to stress-free travel
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It was right here. You can see where the roots were, right? Those holes over there? It used to go up, I don’t know, 40 or 50 feet
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Snow falling locally and leisurely, wide white flakes
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Yesterday, I woke up
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State emergency services advises individuals in affected areas to:
* shelter inside
* wear a face mask or respirator
* secure the premises
* reduce exterior visibility 
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It has become difficult to write dystopias, fantasy, or any form of literature without sounding naive
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How would you like to receive a letter
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Revealing teeth
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Shelter inside, mask up, windows closed, blinds closed, don’t
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A woman walks out of the frame
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It would be useful to know what is happening
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Stay inside, mask up, windows
(scroll)  

Stay
(scroll) 

Break
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What
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There
(scroll)  

Red
(scroll)  

What
(scroll)  

Hand
(scroll)  

(low battery warning)

They’re trying to help us. What if we became
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Bird cam: empty nest, rain 
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I feel like a sense of narrative has been destroyed among other
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Don’t believe what you
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Fractured house, roof on the ground, the aluminum siding rendered
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The rain isn’t rain (low battery warning)
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Trees holding rope
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It appears this world got tired of pretending
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Enormous tracks
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A turtle (low battery warning) being
(scroll)

I have started writing on
(power down)

Debbie Urbanski is the author of the novel After World (Simon & Schuster, 2023), the collection Portalmania (Simon & Schuster, 2025), and a lot of essays and short stories. She lives and hikes in Central New York. Find her online at debbieurbanski.com

Upon Hearing a Lecture at a Halifax Burial Site by Kallie Blakelock

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment
Janet’s husband stands bowlegged, thin
grave-digger and former smoker, his hands
shake when he holds her

purse. He and I prowl
along the edges of the graveyard
while Janet goes on and listens.
At home in Toronto

he cremates bodies,
tells families that they can’t watch
him work, even when curiosity begs,
because only he, only Kevin, can handle the lifting
and shutting, only he can handle

lighting the furnace, lighting the fire that shivers
bones back to dirt. Yes, only Kevin knows

what happens when faces disappear real slow.
              He says he just has to think of them as logs.
And aren’t you glad it’s not you? Aren’t you lucky

that he does that
and that you can kind of ride
behind the car on a skateboard
with a rope and a helmet.

KALLIE BLAKELOCK is a former high school teacher who recently relocated from Charm City to Tampa. She is a poet who explores things like sorrow, bodies of water, and her own mind. Though she’s far from the salty Eastern Shore of Maryland where she was raised, Kallie loves the sunshine and community she has encountered during her time as an MFA student in poetry at the University of South Florida. She lives with her obese cats, Mowgli and Mona. This is her first publication.