Month: July 2026

Case of Missing Animals by Sarp Sozdinler

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment
In the natural history museum
my daughter wants to see the dodo first,
then the great auk,
then anything else
humans loved to death.
She walks ahead of me
with the speed of a tiny sloth.
Each plaque offers dates
like a wall casket.
Each glass case glows
with the muddy guilt of institutions.
Here is a bird we named
after its foolishness.
Here is a cat too beautiful
to be named after a colonized island.
Here are bones arranged
to suggest a miserable afterlife.
My daughter presses her hand
against the glass and asks
where the passenger pigeons went.
Everywhere, I almost say.
Into hats and homes,
into target practice,
into the long machinery
of war and peace. Instead, I tell her
sometimes people don’t understand
they are standing in the middle
of a miracle until all that’s left of
it is an afterthought.
In the gift shop she chooses
a plush dinosaur with furious eyes.
At lunch she feeds it half her sandwich.
Even extinction, apparently,
is no reason not to share
in her small undying world.
Walking home, she holds my hand
with such ordinary trust
I feel her whole tiny species
wobbling inside me.

SARP SOZDINLER has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, and HAD, among other journals. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region.

Winter’s Tales: Two Micros by Kathryn Kulpa

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

That Winter

In quilted bedrooms we gathered around clock radios and cheered on announcers counting up inches of snow. More, we chanted. More! And there was more. Car antennas poked from mounds of snow like spires of ancient civilizations. Last summer’s lawn chairs lay buried in white. Mountains of wet snow pushed up against supermarket light poles, getting greyer each day. That winter felt like a giant, lumbering snowman, only human enough to feel malice, cast his pallid curse on us all. We hunkered. Bandaged ourselves in scarves and mittens, built snow armies, half-hearted forts, then raced back to the warmth of shag-rugged living rooms. We blew into cups of hot cocoa, hoping the backwash of our own breath would thaw our numb noses. Even our dogs refused to go out. Cats lay in tight-curled cinnamon rolls, moving only to seek out squares of sun. Our fathers toiled, curled over shovels, hunching against the garage to light cigarettes. Heart attacks hovered, waiting. Our fingers cracked. TV a continual drone, parents cursing the cheerful weatherman talking about more of the white stuff. School was a distant dream. I hope we never go back, we said, then looked at each other sideways, wondering which of us meant it. 

Overwintering 

The night I slept in the bus station. The night I slept in the cabin. The nights I slept in the AMC trail shelter. The week I slept in the empty church, waiting for the snow to melt. Burning and shivering with fever, feeling my jawline and wishing I had a mirror so I’d know if the shadow was there — Dead Man’s Beard, people were calling it. Once I heard crying outside and thought there was a baby, and I made my way to the window in the dark and saw a kitten hanging there, yowling, but when I tried to raise the window the kitten ran away, and I called into the night but he never came back. 

Was there a kitten? How much was a dream? Days and nights melted together. I remember it rained, and I stood outside under a tree, catching runoff from leaves in my mouth. My mouth was cracked and dry. Fever burned my brain. How many days lost? I couldn’t know.

I looked for the kitten many days after that but never found him. One night I saw yellow eyes in a tree and thought I had, but it was a tiny owl, a kind I’d never seen before. Maybe it was an endangered species. Maybe it was an owl scientists thought was lost forever, and I’d found it. Maybe everything people thought was lost was really alive somewhere, hiding from the brutal grab of the world, waiting for a quiet moment to reappear. Mammoth and auroch. Dodo and passenger pigeon. Sasquatch, Nessie, the abominable snow monster of the north. All the years of logic and certainty had collapsed, and anything could be true.

Kathryn Kulpa is a New England writer with words in Boudin, Claudine, Flash Frog, Ghost Parachute, and trampset. Her work has been chosen for Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions and nominated for Best American Short Stories. Her chapbooks are A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press) and For Every Tower, a Princess (Porkbelly Press).

Planet by Kary Wayson

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment
I go out on the porch to smoke.
I’ve started again.
The night is wild and starlit
with living trees and creaking.
A single frog is somewhere near and no moon.

I can still feel you. The ancient
pine with the fencepost nailed to it
makes a letter in an alphabet of trees, backwards,
something like an F with many branches.

One car drives down Territory Road,
then another after. The red taillights
make fingertips. Blinking,
they both turn left, then dark.

Back when it was only hours
since we last spoke, I sat here in the same way
alone in the dark. I’m sitting alone
in the dark, I said. Outer space
came very close, then I stepped down

on the surface of a planet.

KARY WAYSON is the author of two books of poetry, The Slip (Burnside Review, 2020) and American Husband (The Ohio State University Press, 2009), as well as a chapbook, Dog & Me (LitRag Press, 2004). Kary lives in Port Orchard, WA and works as a freelance editor.