13.1 Septillion Pounds by Emily Rinkema

On September 19, 2025February 4, 2025 By steve cIn flash fiction1 Comment

To help her sleep, we give the baby a basketball, a full-size regulation ball that my husband, CT, puts in her crib one night. He writes her name on it with a black Sharpie, bold letters like they would appear on a jersey.

“Ten months is a little young,” I say.

“Never too early for our little athlete,” he says. CT played college ball for a season until he blew out his knee. The first thing he said when he held her was that she was the longest baby he’d ever seen. She came home from the hospital in a UCONN onesie.

When I check on her before I go to bed, she’s still awake with one tiny hand on the ball. She’s never been a good sleeper, but the last month has been significantly worse. She just stares at the slowly spinning mobile of the galaxy above her head, sometimes reaches for it with her fists. I kiss her on the forehead and whisper that the basketball is like the earth. A little poet is never too young for simile.

In the morning, CT makes us coffee while I go get the baby. She’s asleep. The basketball is on the floor under the crib and the Sharpie is clutched in her hand. I turn on the light.

The walls are covered with math. Math formulas and numbers and equations and graphs and angles and shapes and arrows that direct us from next to the crib to above the changing table to the closet door to behind the rocker and under the window and then back to the crib.

“Oh, fuck,” says CT, handing me a mug of coffee.

“Language,” I whisper.

“But,” he says, looking around.

“Yeah, fuck,” I say.

CT calls a mathematician while I try to feed the baby, but she wants nothing to do with the Cheerios or blueberries I put in front of her. She just bangs her spoon on the table. She’s got dark circles under her eyes and it’s like looking in a mirror. I can’t remember the last time I’ve slept through the night.

“We did this,” I say to CT, who is now Googling “baby math.”

“Did what?” He asks.

“Stressed her out,” I say.

“Maybe it’s just math,” he says, putting some pumpkin puree down in front of the baby. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

I spoon out some puree and bring it towards her, but she just clamps her mouth shut and grabs the spoon. I call my mom and ask if she can come over for a bit.

My mother agrees to take the baby to the park while we meet with the mathematicians. The park’s only a few blocks away, but with all the gear, I suggest she takes the car. On her way out the door, baby on one hip, car seat hooked over her elbow, she raises her eyebrows at me and says, “I told you she was gifted.” She kisses the baby on the top of her head and coos, “Gramma’s little genius.”

Two mathematicians arrive a few minutes later. They are younger than I expected. One is wearing a sweater vest. They both have glasses and are carrying briefcases. The men stand in the middle of the nursery and turn slowly from wall to wall to wall. The taller of the two men takes off his glasses and cleans them. He puts them back on. He opens his briefcase, takes out a notebook, and writes something down. He closes his notebook.

“Well?” asks CT, sitting down in the rocker.

“Wow,” says the shorter man. “Amazing, really,” he says, taking a deep breath. He points at the wall under the crib. “She starts by calculating the weight of the earth,” he says.

“She’s a baby,” says CT.

“That’s pretty simple math, actually,” the mathematician says, “She just needs the weight of any sphere,” he points at the basketball, “and then she can plug it into Newton’s formula for universal gravitational attraction.”

The taller man interrupts. “It gets much more sophisticated over here,” he says, pointing to the left of the closet. He bounces a bit on his toes. “It looks like she’s using semi-parametric predictive modeling to determine existential risk.” He leans towards the wall and squints. He wipes his hands on his pants. He looks at the shorter man and shakes his head.

“Wait,” the shorter man says, “Is that strategy optimization for carbon reduction at the bottom of the door?”

I stare at him, waiting for something I understand, a word, a phrase, a gesture. CT puts his head in his hands. “I have no idea what’s happening,” he says.

“I think she’s looking for a solution,” the tall man says, and when we don’t respond, he says, as if we’re children, “To climate change.”

“But,” I say, and I don’t know what comes after that. I don’t even know what to ask. I think of everything we’ve ever said in front of her, thinking she couldn’t understand. We watch the news during playtime. We listen to NPR in the car. We fight about solar panels and electric cars and how much meat to eat. When I was pregnant, we even fought about whether it was responsible to bring a baby into this world. Did she hear all that? Did she feel it?

CT stands up. “This is fucking ridiculous,” he says. He’s the one who suggested Meatless Mondays. He’s the one who wants a Prius. He’s the one who thought we should skip flying to see his parents this year so we could afford panels on our roof.

“Wait,” the shorter man says, and looks at his partner for confirmation. He points to the right of the door. “There. Is she using partial differential equations to see if…” and then he stops, squatting in front of the wall nearest the crib. He shakes his head. The taller man keeps putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out again. “It looks like she gave up.” He’s tapping the wall where our baby scribbled with the Sharpie, age appropriate markings that in another world could have been made with crayon or finger paint. “She gave up,” he repeats.

“She’s a fucking baby,” CT says, and his voice cracks. “A fucking baby.”

“I just want her to be happy,” I say. “I just want her to write poetry,” I say. CT pulls me into a hug. “Or play basketball,” I say into his neck.

“She can be a poet-athlete,” he says, and we both start to cry.

I check on the baby before I go to bed. Her room still smells of fresh paint, a new color CT picked up at the hardware store after the mathematicians left this morning. Butter yellow to match the stuffed duck he bought on his way home. While the baby napped this afternoon, I took down the universe mobile and replaced it with the one his sister bought us for the baby shower–green giraffes and purple hippos–and CT painted over the math. We’d thought about keeping it, but decided it was all just too heavy for a baby.

“It’s a clean slate,” he’d said when he finished.

The baby is awake and content. She moves her hands in front of her face as if she’s in awe of them, as if she’s still working out whose they are. It’s the way she used to look at me.

“It’s a blank page,” I whisper to her now, and kiss her on the forehead. And before I leave, I tuck a Sharpie into the corner of her crib, just in case.

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Lit, Variant Lit, and Flash Frog, and she has stories in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash, and Oxford Flash anthologies. She won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work on her website (https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).

Pete the Cat: All Grown Up & Alone In His Car by Emily Dressler

On September 12, 2025September 1, 2025 By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

with help from my daughter

At the library,
we walk past Pete the Cat
and you say it’s weird and sad
how you grow up with these books
but they don’t keep growing with you.
Like, Pete the Cat doesn’t go to 5th grade
and lose a preschool best friend,
find humiliation from a teacher,
have ALICE drills
(but you did those in kindergarten too, I
want to remind you, but don’t
because Pete the Cat never does that shit),
strategize about how to take his pads
into the bathroom.

Like, Pete the Cat Gets Braces? I ask.
You smile and say, Pete the Cat Kisses a Girl with Braces.
That’s good, I nod.
We walk past a book titled
My Parents Forgot How to be Friends.
Pete the Cat Has Two Houses Now
you say, pointing.
I laugh. Poor Pete.
We’re going to put him through a lot:

Pete the Cat Learns to Lie
Pete the Cat Becomes Lactose Intolerant–
That comes later, I say,
when he cares more.
For now, he is carefree:

Pete the Cat Finds Joy,
in which he learns how to love
being alone, and eats vegetarian
crunchwrap supremes in his car. He’s
happy, he really is. He doesn’t tell
anyone about the parking lot meals
even though they feel like the most
real part of him.

EMILY DRESSLER lives and works in Northeast Ohio. She works as a proofreader for a global ad agency. Her flash fiction has recently appeared in Villain Era Lit.

All the Friends I Could Have Made are Having Fun Without Me by Mackenzie McGee

On September 5, 2025January 29, 2025 By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

Alexis throws a big party and everyone’s invited. She lives a half-hour drive from her childhood home, the one with the big bay window and the basement where we had sleepovers every other weekend for most of high school.

I imagine she’s done well for herself. Her new townhome is in the affluent suburb that kids in our marginally less affluent suburb used to mock. Her Instagram is all pictures of her rescue corgi. Her Facebook is all tagged photos of her at friends’ weddings and thirtieth birthdays, but she’s not thinking about any of them right now. Tonight, she’s fifteen again, and she’s worried I won’t show.

It’s a cool summer evening in Minnesota. From the street I can see the glow of the string lights crisscrossing her treeless backyard. Citronella wafts through the air. I imagine there are two coolers on the concrete patio. The one on the right is stocked with beer and sparkling water. The one on the left is full of Monster Energy Drinks, the Zero Ultra flavor we were obsessed with in tenth grade. Alexis used to buy them two-for-three on her way to our 7 a.m. social studies class. She’s wearing a bracelet made from the can tabs we saved.

Teo’s the first guest to arrive. He pedals down the sidewalk on his childhood mountain bike. I crouch in my car when he passes by. Alexis notices the Jersey in his accent. She asks him, as she will ask everyone, how he knows me.

He says we met Thanksgiving weekend twenty-five years ago, oh, maybe twenty-two. I was in town visiting my cousins. We were playing basketball in the driveway when he rode up and asked if we wanted to play Nintendo. I loved Nintendo and I hated my cousins, but they were older than me, and they hated Teo. They said he was weird, and when I asked why, they said I was weird too. I’d heard this before. I thought if I could make them like me then it wouldn’t be true.

Michaela comes in as Teo’s finishing his story. She carries her sharpie-covered JanSport on one shoulder, all cool and casual. She shrugs it off to dig for the mix CD she burned for the evening.

Michaela and I—we shared a cabin at summer camp. We bonded over emo music and the art of tie-dye. We exchanged numbers. She called my house twice that August. I let the phone ring as I tried and failed to conjure a voice full of carefree enthusiasm, the self I could be away from myself. She couldn’t know that the real me was awkward and uncertain, that camp-me was a façade. This was years before I knew to call it fear, not fraud. Michaela left a couple of voicemails. She shrugs like, what are you gonna do?

Alexis nods. That is so like me.

The fashionably late arrive in clusters. Coworkers from my first full-time job sit on the kitchen counter sipping PBRs. Some of my sisters’ friends make friends with my brothers’ friends and share the wisdom I was too awkward to ask for: how to print in pretty bubble letters; how to tell when someone like-likes you, how to tell when someone likes you at all.

The nice busboy from my short-lived waitressing career is using chunks of cheese to teach Alexis’ corgi to sit. He tells her about the time I got awful hives from the wool scarf I wore to work. He brought Benadryl, just in case. He asks if I RVSPed. Alexis lies and says I texted her to say I’m running late. She doesn’t want people to give up on me just yet.

The biochem TA offers charcuterie to the cute librarian who works the closing shift. The rec league volleyball team I quit after two practices arrives in two consecutive carpools. They dance ironically, and then, a few drinks in, it’s not ironic anymore.

And then they hear it: the drumline’s cadence, the drum major’s whistle. The crowd flows into the front yard to see my high school marching band chair-stepping up the street. Their teenage bodies carry the muscle memory of these instruments, and some of them are really, really good. Someone jumps on the upright piano and leads the living room in a singalong of “Don’t Stop Believing.” The party is in full swing. All that’s missing is me.

I’m still outside, sure I’m about to go home but not ready to admit it yet. I’ll wait in my car five more minutes, and then I’ll go in. I’ll walk through the front door and everyone will cheer, like I’m a fan favorite in a sitcom. There’ll be a big sheet cake decorated with loopy icing in the shape of my name. Everyone will want to know what I’ve been up to, how I’ve been. No one will be mad at me for not calling or texting them back.

I have a minute left when Alexis steps into the front yard, carrying a corner slice of cake on a paper plate. I watch over the steering wheel as she tiptoes between the instruments scattered on the grass. She finds a clear spot to sit cross-legged with the plate in her lap. She looks down the street, down the way I came, and waits for me.

We had every one of our sleepovers at her place, every other weekend for about three years. Then one day, we didn’t. A month went by, and then another. Growing up I often felt, sometimes I still feel, there had been a lesson in kindergarten about how to be a person in the world on a day that I, and only I, had missed. I had wanted to invite Alexis over and return the favor. For a long time, I didn’t know how.

Now everyone inside is getting to know each other and having a good time. Alexis should be inside having a good time. Someone should ask her how she knows me. She was kind enough to host, after all.

I shut the car door behind me. Alexis’ ponytail whips around at the sound. She waves me over and says she’s so glad I’m here, even if the part of the party that was for me is over. The cake has been cut; the end time on the invitation has come and gone. The music is louder than ever. Colored lights flash in the windows. That party, she says, has taken on a life of its own.

She doesn’t ask me to go inside. We sit in the grass and split the slice, taking turns taking bites. The can tab bracelet shushes softly on her wrist. It’s just how I remember it—two of the tabs face the wrong way, their silver underbellies exposed. We watch as guests slowly trickle home in new configurations of designated drivers and rideshares. For each one she says, look. They came here for you. Isn’t that nice? Everyone together, here tonight, and it’s all because of you.

Mackenzie McGee is a winner of the 2021 Pen/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction can be found in Nat. Brut, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cease, Cows, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas, and she’s currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Kansas.

Vanishing Twin by Jessica Ballen

On August 29, 2025July 30, 2025 By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

dear sister with the disappearing yolk, had I been less
starved, perhaps you’d have survived the utero scramble.
who were you before I absorbed your gobbledygoo?
would we have grown sitting at the same table, watching
grandma’s slippers shuffle to the kitchen before dawn?
her birdlike wrist, swift like a woman who has always
been bird, winding up a fork for a good whipping,
two eggs whirling into one. you and I
eyeing the tidal wave, that summersault and undertow,
our mouths cracking for the carved challah soak, the wet

before the burning, the dry. were you someone
who fried whole bodies, learning to eat
yourself? I lent you my ear as a parting gift; it was only fair.
did you swallow that part of me? me? I’m always inhaling—
but you already knew that, my copycat. never mind
the mother bird who chewed and spat. were we not the same
swallow splitting the same cracked house, fork tail,
sad song, yoked together before the beak sliced
our cord? I eat things that flit outside myself.
digest them hard. I don’t make the rules.

a greyhound and her owner walk outside
the windows of my life. on the porch, while I fill
feeders and baths, I wonder if the hound is you,
skinny legs reborn. stringy like a sprinkled fawn.
when I look again, the seeds spill.
one time I spotted a red-tail clawing a rabbit,
but it didn’t seem real. so I did a double-take
from my passing car, but the field was a sea of grass,
silent. that’s when I turned to the passenger’s seat
and said that’s you, dear sister. that’s us.

JESSICA BALLEN, MFA, is a disabled poet who serves as Editor in Chief of Lunch Ticket, Managing Editor of Defunkt Magazine, Senior Editor at Small Harbor Publishing, and guest editor for Frontier Poetry. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Harbor Review, and Ghost City Review (among others). You can find them compulsively posting on their Instagram stories @_j___esus, listening to dream pop with their four cats, and dancing in the Willamette River with their writer husband, SHT.

98. by Jordyn Damato

On August 22, 2025January 10, 2025 By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

There’s something wrong with my head
It’s not a bump
I wish it was a bump
Even if it was a gross, protruding bump that made people afraid to look at me
I could handle that
I would dress it up—draw a face on it or something. I don’t know.
Make it pretty.
I can’t make the inside pretty.
I wish I could but
I can’t
These are some thoughts that infect me
Scream right now. Right now. Do it.
Flip the table. Now. Flip it or hold your breath until you pass out.
Hold your breath until you pass out. Do it.
I do it.
I have to do it.
Scream, pass out, flip things.
If I don’t, I will die.
If I don’t, my whole family will die.
My family is small and not very nice to me but I still don’t want to see them die.
I saw my twin brother die
When we were kids
I was not a fan.
I doubt he was, either.
Or maybe he was.
He doesn’t have a voice in his head.
He doesn’t have a head
Or a voice
Sorry.
I guess in many ways, I’m the lucky one
Mom told me that before
Don’t you know how lucky you are?
After I got sent home from school for stripping naked and attempting to flush my clothes down the toilet
I made a mess
A huge fucking mess! Mom yelled
I told her it wasn’t me
It was the voice
Newsflash, Tommy!
It wasn’t a yell, it was a scream.
EVERYONE has a voice in their head
It echoed in my room with two beds
You’re not special—don’t give me that bullshit excuse!
I don’t think I’m special, I wanted to tell her
I think I’m cursed
But the words didn’t come out
Instead, urine came out
Piss yourself. Piss yourself right fucking now or else your heart is going to stop.
I peed.
Mom screamed.
Dad came in
He was drunk
He pushed me against the wall
I hit my head
I hoped for a bump
(An explanation)
He spit as he screamed
Why do you have to make everything so hard on us?
No bump ever formed.
(No explanation)
He shook my shoulders
Banged my head again
You’re so goddamn selfish!
Through tears and over dad’s shoulder, I saw mom on her knees with disinfectant spray and a rag
I closed my eyes
I Imagined Tyler’s face
But it’s the same as my face
So it didn’t help
I can’t stand being in this body
My body
I miss Tyler
I miss his voice
I miss the way he could read my mind
I miss having hot dog eating competitions with him
I miss winning
I miss not having a stranger’s voice in my head
I think mom and dad think it’s my fault that he died
As if I told the drunk driver to be drunk at 7:30am
As if I told the drunk driver to swerve off the road
As if I told Tyler to walk on the side closest to the drunk driver
I broke my arm
And bumped my head
But no one seems to remember
Or care
Or miss the old me
I miss the old me
I miss my old family
I miss the warmth of the sun on my skin
The friends I used to have
The brain I used to own
It’s a scary thing
To not own your body anymore
To not be believed
To not be trusted
To keep everyone around you alive every single day, no matter the cost
And to never, ever even hear the words
Thank you

Jordyn Damato is a writer, lover, dreamer, in that order. She is currently an MFA fiction candidate at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction and Bullshit Lit. Her favorite thing to do is hug.

Blue Persons by Emily Wittenhagen

On August 15, 2025July 14, 2025 By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

I act like a train should be sleep and sleep
should be easy but sleep is only on the far
side of this conundrum, producing a world
in which snowplows scoop up our lamplit
remains after and push us into piles.
I felt like asking you, do you own all the
planets? Or are you just this one? In my
sleep you felt like the whole earth. Like you
were borrowing it for the night like a rental
suit or had always been all along the
whole earth. At the time it made sense that
a planet could be around me, and roughly
the same size, that a planet could fit into a
bed. Easy sleep like rain sleep, sex like
rain sex, rain smoke. Opening the window
during X-Files to let in the rain. The
lightning from the stoop at intermission
turning the fields blue and the fence pink
and the trees where the chickens meander
a yellow fever and up above it comes
down like it’ll never stop coming down and
neither will we. The narcotic of our planet
as long as we are together and you are
beside me on this stoop will never leave
the bloodstream. Sleep on the drug, sleep
with the drug beside you. Sleep if there
must be a place between needing, and
read if you can’t, or imagine a slow train
taking you softly into morning.

EMILY WITTENHAGEN is a writer living in Maine, fascinated by the natural and the supernatural. She studied creative writing at UMaine Farmington where she was honored to work with Beloit Poetry Journal and be granted an Excellence in Poetry award. In Seattle, she co-created the poetry journal HOARSE which was shortlisted for a Stranger Genius Award. She is a long-time writer and editor, and also practices nutrition, hypnotherapy, and herbal medicine. She embraces herself as queer and lives with her sweetheart and their daughter who asks compelling questions like, do butterflies sit in chairs to eat lunch? Most recently, her work appears or is forthcoming in Anodyne Magazine, the Champagne Room, and Mutha Magazine.

The Passing of a Little More Than a Year by Lydia Kim

On August 8, 2025November 22, 2025 By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

The soccer field was a miracle, an oval of grass behind a middle school where she could train her new small dog, play until it trusted her and understood their togetherness. She hoped to soften its vigilance, give it less reason to erupt.

Soon they met three other women and their dogs, two also-small ones and one big, and they formed a gang. The first summer of the pandemic, when being outside was the one thing you could do, though even that was a bit fraught, it’s not like the wind knew to blow the virus away from you and never towards you. But what a gift. After months of walks by themselves, each anxious for the other, she loved the ritual of heading to the soccer field, unhooking the lead and watching her dog run, thrilled, towards the clot of its friends. The sight of them leaping in greeting pleased her, the validation that her dog could make friends. The four dogs ran and feinted and rolled, sniffed each other’s glands, hunted along the perimeter of the fence for bits of old school lunches. They stayed out there for hours.

Surprisingly, inevitably, there was the gentle creep towards human friendship, which she knew was rare among strangers and rarer still at her age, almost fifty. They laughed over “Love Is Blind,” the debut season, wondered at sudden celebrity deaths. The doodle had a birthday with party games: dogs racing towards coupes of whipped cream, bobbing for hot dog slices. One of the women had a hysterectomy, another up and got married. They drank champagne for one, then the other. Other dogs came to the field but did not become part of the gang: Julius the Vizsla, Blue the wheezing Frenchie, Lola, curly-haired and shaped like a tipped-over fire hydrant. Their owners kept it moving, didn’t have or want dog treats, just a wave and some small talk.

Summer passed into dry fall, foxtail season, discussions of whether or not to cover a dog’s snout with protective netting. When the days turned even shorter, she bought four light-up collars so the dogs could play past dusk, a canine rave. They dressed the dogs up for Halloween, again for Christmas, and watched them learn the hard way to give a wide berth to the geese wintering on the field – the geese hissed and chased back, clouds of steam fuming from their beaks. Week after week, she walked to the field and sent her dog to its friends. Her dog looked for her now, came when called. She never quite got over the surprise of it all.

In the spring, she learned two of the women were moving to Oregon, one to Arizona. By summer, everyone was gone. Big dogs found the field, huskies, pit bulls. Sometimes the owners yelled at her even though their dogs were also off-leash, barking and coming too close.

She walked to neighborhoods with big houses and through the shopping center where she tried to pose her dog for a photo on a bench, Depressed Dog Sitting, c. 2021. It wasn’t the same. Her dog pulled her back to the field where it could spend time free, even if alone.

She threw the ball and her dog fetched it. This much they did for each other.

The two of them were not a gang, but they weren’t nothing.

The hot days evaporated into another autumn, and as the sky began to pink, her dog’s collar lit up. A husky entered the empty field. Her dog stopped, let the ball drop from its mouth. The husky considered the geese, then her dog. She moved towards her dog, who moved towards her. The husky chose the geese, sprinted at them. They pushed themselves aloft, rising, gaining smooth altitude, except one at the back, flying, but too low, too heavy.

The husky leapt, caught the goose in its teeth, snapped its neck left and right, thrashing the bird into the cold grass of the field, a spray of red on two white necks.

The goose lay in the center of its broken wings, the black feet pedaling as if trying to walk.

For days, she saw the carcass from the gate. She didn’t enter, didn’t want her dog to sniff the goose, hated to see it there, exposed and undefended, picked at. Finally, someone moved it by the fence to make room for soccer goals.

Within a week, the crater filled with new growth.

They went south, to the trail along the ocean, thick on one side with sea fig and saltgrass, land kelp. Dogs were not allowed on the beach, only the trail, saturated with animal smells and pocked with tiny tunnels that made her think of rabies.

Her dog strained at the limits of the lead, head lifted at the scent of endless brine. They stopped in a narrow pedestrian-trampled break to watch waves foam the shore below. Waves pushed in, and waves drained out.

The far water was dotted with freighters and ferries, carrying cargo and commuters. The world was grinding its way back to rush-hour traffic and holiday sales. The day had begun to blue. There wasn’t another creature for miles, so she did the calculus and they walked onto the beach. She freed her dog. It stayed with her at first then started to wander away, braving good distance, nosing along crab husks, fifty feet, a hundred feet away, more. Stopping at crushed cans and torn wrappers, the possibility of scraps. Even after a good year, it was hard to trust one’s luck.

She turned back to look, the apartment buildings squat and flat, the gate to the field ajar, the only way in or out.

Far away, the dark of her dog glowed against the pocket of sky.

She opened her mouth and made a sound, two clicks of the tongue, a half-trill, not even her dog’s name. The silhouette bent, held, then the shadow moved, began to run.

Lydia Kim has published in Longleaf Review, Peatsmoke, Catapult, The Hellebore, and in the anthologies And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing and Non-White and Woman. She’s a Tin House alum and 2024-25 Tin House Reading Fellow and her work has been supported by the Kenyon Writers Workshop, Rooted & Written, and the de Groot Foundation. She is currently at work on a novel and story collection, represented by Ashley Lopez @a_la_ash.

feelings come & go but teeth are forever by Kristin Lueke

On August 1, 2025July 2, 2025 By okaydonkey7In poetry1 Comment

bring me lord a herd of teeth big as buffalo to wrap around this apple.
i ask so little, really—eight hours for sleep, eight hours outside, eight hours
for what i will. what i will is water, mostly hot, to sit in til i’m decent.
what i won’t is die working. i won’t shut up about solace, starlings,
what i read on wikipedia. i won’t give my body to science, just birds,
if i’m lucky. if anyone’s listening. i won’t listen to barbarous bullshit
churned out by chickenshit senators paid by a body count so high it chased
god from the room, i’d rather kiss a caterpillar, kick a cop, marry moonshine.
i won’t make promises i can’t keep, i can’t promise i’ll be more patient.
wouldn’t you know i won’t stay up past midnight if i can help it,
you wouldn’t believe what i can help. i can’t help that i won’t wait
for what i have to beg for. i won’t tell my body give me up, give me
quiet but no more hells. there is no better devil. i choose nothing
but us & by us i mean all of it, everything i won’t call anything but holy,
bring me what i want.

KRISTIN LUEKE is a Chicana poet and author of the chapbooks (in)different math and here i show you a human heart. Her work appears in Sixth Finch, Wildness, HAD, Always Crashing, Birdcoat Quarterly and elsewhere. She writes and reads poems at www.theanimaleats.com.

The Way My Mother, Who Refuses to Die, Is Like A Ford Taurus by Danielle Barr

On July 25, 2025July 24, 2025 By steve cIn flash fiction2 Comments

My mother died of a massive stroke, but she swears she didn’t. Dropped down dead right there at the breakfast buffet, then climbed back up to her feet—pardon me, she said to the coveralled man behind her—and went on ladling gravy over her biscuits.

It seemed kind of presumptuous to no-thank-you dying, bald-faced rude like a lingering party guest. After all, sometimes folks dying at the all-you-can-eat is just supposed to be the natural order of things, and—between you and me—the secret best thing about mamas is that they’re temporary.

By the time we had driven her home from Fancy Rick’s Breakfast Rodeo, her limbs had locked up into a rigor mortis so profound we sat her in the La-Z-Boy and for three days her eyes slid around in their sockets, tracking our comings and goings but never blinking.

Death is like this, though: first soft, then hard, then soft again, but different—mealy, mushy, like the slow rot of a stone fruit, the innards swelling and skin sloughing off and the flesh-fat yellow then brown then black underneath. A more apt description, in fact, I can’t seem to finger than an overripe plum: a bruise where a woman used to be.

You’re dead, Carol-Ann, says her cardiologist—who she swore was a hack, who she once accused of pumping her full of forever-chemicals to keep her just sickly enough to keep needing him but not enough to die—but she turns her chin up at him and gathers her pocketbook up under her elbow. He presses his stethoscope to her chest and waves me over to listen; the stillness between the lobes of her ribs is stark and stunning, a soundproofed room wallpapered in egg-crate foam, and it’s beautiful and horrible both. On the drive home she snuffles out a series of short gasps I take for crying; later, she pores over the Yellow Pages, points a dagger-finger at a few promising options, and despite myself I promise I’ll call and schedule a consult—not a single cardiologist in the county, I’ll report back after, is accepting new patients.

Bobby-Dale’s new girlfriend says it’s kind of romantic, isn’t it, how much she must’ve loved living, hanging on so tight. Heroic, even. Rage against the dying light, and all that.

And Mama, limp-flopping like a Raggedy Ann behind the cordless vacuum says in her parched voice, sandpaper rubbing together, Why thank you, CiCi, how nice of someone to notice, even though just last night she’d rasped that CiCi was a pointless sack of fluids and phlegm with not a thought bobbing around in all that sinew to spare, and I thought she’d sounded just a little jealous.

I consider telling CiCi that it’s actually a haughty refusal to be caught out that courses like sap through the veins that used to ferry blood and lymph across her cells, a kind of stubbornness that stretches deep into the clay like pipsissewa, but instead I chew the inside of my cheek to a pulp; the balance of things is delicate, after all.

Ronda my therapist says, Have you considered she’s gaslighting you? And I sigh and nod but then shrug because of course I have but also what am I going to do? She’s obviously dead but also won’t die and so I get my parking validated by the little Portuguese woman at the front desk and Mama’s waiting in the passenger seat when I climb behind the wheel, dust and ash pooling on my leather seats underneath her naked pelvis, sharp and moon-white in the sun. I almost sneer to At least tidy up after yourself, why don’t you? but instead I pretend I don’t see; instead I say nothing and she says nothing and when we get home I Amazon Prime a dustbuster to keep in the glovebox because this is the sort of thing family does for its own, isn’t it?

For Christmas, I work back-to-backs at the Down-N-Out and take out a personal loan with 33% interest to buy her the Rolls-Royce of caskets, a shiny lacquered thing with pink satin lining and polished brass hardware and a concave pillow to cup her skull: a real swanky place to spend eternity, and cost as much as a mortgage too, which I guess it kind of is. After dinner she lugs it out to the burn pile, price tag still swinging from the handle, and douses it in kerosene, and for a split second I think how easy it would be to tip her over into the bonfire, too, her beef jerky limbs catching like kindling.

Bobby-Dale and Tammy-Rae and me, once enough is enough, sweet-talk Mama into a meeting with Father Johnson at First Harvest, to get his opinion on what it is Jesus and Mary and the whole subcommittee might think about all this, and it’s easy enough getting her there, rubber waders billowing around her waist to keep her soggy snail-trail of putrid something-or-other from soaking the wall-to-wall in God’s living room. For a while she’d been convinced they’d call her a saint, call the Pope, and her face falls when after some discussion the priests decide that she is an abomination and not a miracle. Father Johnson says it’s a sin against God, her refusing to die, but that just makes her dig her heels in all the harder. She spits a dusty wad of coppery scab at their robe-hems and says she’d rather be an abomination than a Catholic anyway, with that attitude and when we sweep her toward the door she shouts over her shoulder that it turns out there’s no God or heaven or point anyway, and sneers wickedly when they hurry off because she knows they know that there’s no one knows better than her.

Bobby-Dale takes Mama up to the house—There there, now, Mama, can’t everybody stomach these things is all, like field dressin’ a deer, or the Yankees—and Tammy-Rae and I idle out at the curb and suck down a pack of Marlboros, one at a time. Tammy-Rae wagers this whole business is all on account of Mama’s Taurus sun, Taurus moon, Taurus rising. Trip-Tauruses, that’s about as Taurus as you can get, according to her. I don’t know much about astrology save for what I read in the weekly, but I’ve been driving this Ford Taurus for fourteen years and can’t get the tranny to shift into second to save my life. I figure Mama with stubbornness etched into her bones by the universe itself is like that too: can’t shift.

You’re just like her, y’know, Tammy-Rae says, dustbuster in one hand, cigarette in the other, and I scoff that I was born in June.

No. Long-suffering, I mean. Joan of Arc-type shit. She flicks her ashes onto the floorboard, then vacuums them up.

Leave it, is what I say, this time.

Danielle Barr is a full time stay-at-home mom and sometime-writer. She was the winner of the Driftwood Press annual short story contest, and her works have appeared in The Milk House, The Hooghly Review, Querencia Press, and others. She is currently querying her debut novel. Danielle lives in rural Appalachia with her husband and four young children, and can be found on Instagram @daniellebarrwrites, Twitter @dbarrwrites, and Bluesky @daniellebarrwrites.bsky.social.

Time Only Looks Human by Lynne Jensen Lampe

On July 18, 2025June 30, 2025 By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

Everything starts with a start. You emerge from the lake in August, a toddler covered with silt. The neighbor’s mastiff cleans your face and noses you to the glass of cold milk on the porch. An hour later you’re nine, wearing a Scout uniform and no longer thirsty. In the crook of a linden tree you find a small package wrapped in brown paper. Inside is a matchbook and a diagram of a log cabin fire. You gather kindling. The wood flames. You turn thirteen. After eating a salad of dandelion greens, nettles, and wild violets, you sprout breasts and begin to bleed. The mastiff teaches you the word estrus, tells you to go to the c-store for tampons. It’s almost noon. You’re almost twenty, clad in t-shirt and jeans. A car stops. The driver wants to sleep with you. A paper in your pocket reads Sleep = Sex = Death. You think of the lake and sunfish darting in and out of pelvic bones, yellow perch laying opalescent roe along strands of hair. The sun shifts in the sky. You’re thirty-two and ache for motherhood, hike back to the lakeshore. If you wade into the water, you must remain. You decide against this sacrificial birth. The mastiff drops a pup at your feet. You feed the campfire. Before blue spruce can hide the sun, you reach fifty, t-shirt now a fair isle sweater. By the time Ursa Major emerges, you’re seventy-four. Arms empty woolen sleeves, then cross your breasts. Skin heats skin. Fire dies.

LYNNE JENSEN LAMPE’s poetry appears in journals such as The Inflectionist Review, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and THRUSH and anthologies in the US, UK, and Germany. Her debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), an Eric Hoffer Book Award winner and finalist for the McMath Book Award, concerns motherhood, mental illness, and antisemitism. A Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize finalist, she edits academic writing, reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and lives with her husband and two dogs in Columbia, MO. You can find her online at https://lynnejensenlampe.com; Instagram @lynnejensenlampe; or Bluesky @ljensenlampe.