I was usually more of a doer than a thinker. That didn’t make me any better at art, however. One day I realized my heroes were getting old. One had even tried death by thunderstorm. It didn’t work. That hero was also my ex, and looking back I have no idea why I ever found him the least bit noteworthy. Sure, he rode the rails to Flint and back, survived several months on a deserted peninsula, wrote love letters so vague they could be delivered to multiple women with minimal personalization. He smelled like he had recently laundered his clothes in a stream. When I first walked into his rented room I marveled at the chipped dishes and phone books and heaps of maps. He took me to a diner with red vinyl seats after Saturday vigil Mass, the church surrounded by towering oaks. Not realizing how grungy he was, I had scrubbed myself like an altar girl and wore a sundress. The sermon was incomprehensible but uplifting. It returned me to childhood, our neighborhood corner granny side-eyeing to make sure I listened to the homily, even if it wasn’t in English. At the restaurant, my ex ordered an assortment of fried seafood that arrived in plastic baskets. I asked for vegetables because women did that back then. The waitress brought me a Dixie cup of coleslaw, a side of lemon slices. Later, we hiked through a state park that had fallen into disarray. My ex had brought along a little suitcase with supplies for performing magic tricks. I was revolted by the one where he sneezed out a cigar. Today, settling down at my drawing board among the other contestants, I blocked in the forest first. One of the hedges blended into a corona of hair for my ex, who didn’t seem to believe in scissors. Men never put their hair in buns back then and ponytails were still for hippies. His face: one of those boulders that rose to chair-height. I toyed with the idea of making the suitcase of handkerchiefs and artificial doves into his heart, but the sketch wasn’t intended to be anatomical, and I was not even trying to win.

* * *

Everyone Adores a Simple Country Tale

Best dancers in my grade, ranked. Myself, of course. Wiktoria, mostly because her mother was a famous ballerina back in Poland and the pressure was immense. Mildred, despite forgetting either her leotard or tights in alternating weeks. The O’Connor twins, with an unfair advantage because they were identical and thrashy and appeared in every corner of the stage at once. Then all the rest. I wasn’t at the top because of solid technique or innate grace, but because I looked the most haunted. Madame Fournier tried to explain this artistic quality one day after a particularly sloppy rehearsal. She began by telling us about the dairy farm her grandparents had owned in the French countryside, perfect in every respect, a bucolic paradise. It was either before the time of telephones or so remote that nobody could call. Madame glanced at the studio door to make sure it was closed. A war broke out and the only way her grandparents knew was because an unfamiliar cow wandered down the road and past their gate. Madame rearranged the scarlet knit scarf around her neck. One of the O’Connor twins started to raise her hand then pulled it back. Madame gestured for us all to huddle up, a formation she nicknamed the pain au chocolat. The farm was a real pastoral heaven, even with strange winds that carried smoke. But what about the cow? Mildred asked. So few of us had seen a heifer before that we immediately pictured smiling Elsie from the Borden truck. The beast had clearly come from far — it drank of the trough for what seemed like an hour. Madame’s grandfather led this visitor to the stable and let her rest alongside the gentlest mules. Her grandmother brought out a warm rag for comfort, and that’s when she discovered a little scroll bound with floss to the cow’s front leg. Writing on the scroll was pinched as if scratched with a mending needle, but told of horrors neither grandparent could fathom. In the morning, the cow had vanished. Madame’s grandmother regretted that she hadn’t tied the scroll back where she discovered it, and hoped the cow found its way. What does this have to do with ballet, Mildred demanded. You’re the floss holding the scroll, Madame replied.

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Mary Biddinger is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Partial Genius: Prose Poems, and her novella-in-flash, The Girl with the Black Lipstick, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2025. She teaches at the University of Akron, where she edits the Akron Series in Poetry.

Michael Mark

Twos

Photo by Capped X (pexel.com)

His life would have two endings. He knew from the beginning. Twos. He always noticed twos, pairs, odd mix and matches, any things in a proximity to each other enough to feel a potential relationship. Branches in trees — a bulky and a thin, apart and reaching, he’d pair and name them, see their twig fingers intertwine; he’d pray for them, marry them sometimes. Car headlights — one a tick more dim or yellowed than the other especially. He’d kiss them in his mind. His twin brother died in the womb. He was the first one to see his face. He was the first one to see his face.

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Michael Mark is the author of Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, which won the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize. Some recent poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, 32 Poems, and The Sun. His work also appears in The Best New Poets, 2024. His poem “Devotion” received a Pushcart Prize, 2026. See more at michaeljmark.com.

John Paul Caponigro

Pooka

One little black cat ran across dew-silvered fields and disappeared into thorny hedgerows, but not before my mother fired three shots, lens cap off. Black cat. Black cat. Black cat. It wasn’t a curse. It was a blessing. Fairy tales told spirit animals moved between realms. Weeks later, we departed the mists of Ireland, wending our way to Little River, which snaked through dark Connecticut woods. My mother unsealed her white envelope stuffed with drugstore snapshots. She shuffled them once, twice, too many times to count. Her mouth fell open; no words fell out. All the pictures were there, but the black cat was nowhere.

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John Paul Caponigro is an internationally collected visual artist and published author. He leads unique adventures in the wildest places on earth to help participants make deeper connections with nature and themselves creatively. View his TEDx and Google talks at johnpaulcaponigro.art/poetry/.

Marcus Silcock

Elephant in the Room

Father was bling king. His gold necklace hung between his hard coconuts. He pulled apart cars but forgot to put them back together. The engines leaked blood in our driveways. Mother made chocolate santa sleighs and sold them to the local sensei. Plus oils to lighten the eyelids. Plus 12 children for daycare. Our home was also graced with the lucky elephant. I walked out into the world and the elephant followed me. He’s been following me ever since. Sometimes he sits in the corner blowing pink bubbles (how delightful), but other times he flips through the hair book. Shaving the jungle of my hair, my eyes were bright inside there, like some long lost military general. Salting my hair in salt brine, my eyes squinting into scattered clouds, like some long lost beach bohemian. The elephant can balance on one leg like a ballerina. Other times roaring and stomping, clearing a destructive path through the brambles.

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Marcus Silcock teaches high school in Barcelona and co-edits surreal-absurd for Mercurius magazine. His poetry has been translated into Slovak, Turkish, Polish, and Danish. His book of microfictions and prose poems, Dream Dust, is available from Broken Sleep Books. Find out more at Never Mind the Beasts (nevermindthebeasts.com).

Jordan Watson

The story etched in my right arm

Let’s begin at the wrist with the cutlass and broken bone that form the letter “W.” I got this one when I was up to my ass in debauchery. After the band broke up, we spent more nights than I’d like to admit drinking cheap rum until sunlight poked through the tears in my graffitied paper window shades. We listened to our own songs on burned CDs and went all misty-eyed. The artist was a pale, thin girl with a pixie cut. She brought her own soul and style to the sketch on a ragged loose leaf we showed her. What does this one mean? That there is salvation in the scrawl and rescrawl of lyrics on a page. That you can create a wall of sound so loud and so raw that you can blast yourself out of even the deepest hole… Next we move above the elbow. Here you find a ratty red star set in a thick black band. I got this one when I was up to my eyes in essays by dead anarchists. Once, a charismatic preacher shot me up so full of God’s authority that I nearly OD’d. As a result, I went down one too many clunky computer, left-wing rabbit holes. The artist was a short, fat man with devil horns surgically implanted into his forehead. It was a total scratch job. Does this one mean I'm a communist? No. It does mean that I want to believe in a better world, however naive. To know a charlatan when I see one. To rise up against the downpresser and bring the fight… We creep at last across the cobweb draped over my shoulder all the way to the base of my neck. I got this one when I had finally had it up to here with living the life. I cropped my hair short and pulled the steel from my crusted septum. I swapped my overflowing ashtray and graveyard of empties for a chin-up bar and a fresh copy of Plato. The color and flesh slowly returned to my gaunt cheeks. The artist was a tall guy with a beard. He threw in some white highlights and told me to tell my friends. This one? It represents a time when I was stuck. A self-constructed cell that used to hold me but no longer has the power to… With the last drop of ink needled into my arm I went to the rockabilly show. On the way home, my power steering went. I rolled my T-shirt all the way up, revealing the true sleeve beneath. My muscles twitched against the weight of the wheel to the steam train rhythm of the snare in my head. The ragtag tapestry danced in the dark.

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Jordan Watson is an educator, writer, and old punk rocker based in Japan. Putting pen to paper has gotten him through a lot in life, so he continues to do it whenever he can.

Heather Sweeney

Impermanence

How many do you have? he asks. This is my fourth minus one. His eyebrows crinkle into question marks, breaking the ice of the awkward closeness between strangers, the artist and his canvas. He leans over my forearm, dotting it with black ink as he tells me a friend once likened the hurt of tattoo removal to the repeated splashing of hot bacon grease on naked skin. Thinking back to the lasers stinging my exposed backside, I have to agree the description is accurate. It was worth it though. One tattoo subtracted, another one added. Old mistakes forgiven, fresh pain healing.

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Heather Sweeney’s work has appeared in Brevity Nonfiction Blog, Five Minute Lit, Maudlin House, Roi Fainéant Press, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Camouflage: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage, will be published in October 2025. Learn more about her at heatherlsweeney.com.

Nicki Youngsma

Humility: a Definition

Humility: [hyoo-MIL-i-tee], noun. The quality of having a modest opinion of oneself, minimizing one’s own rank, station, importance; self-awareness infused with a sense of relational scale. It is the quality of being humble — from Latin humus (“earth, soil”) and humilis (“on the ground”) because the ground is the fringe of an expanse, and drawing oneself closer to the brink is no easy task, especially to do so willingly, as going near it means risking all which gets illuminated, swathed in sunlight. But thieves lurk to sate their hunger, delivering crushing blows with thick, hard boots, taking what remains after trampling. And so, in that quality, in the ability to bow low to the earth, to hold oneself close to the edge, to reside in that threshold with glassy eyes because the urge to reach up and kiss flaming lips is intoxicating — that fire its own power song — and instead stay put. Stay still. Stay low. Low enough to hear a different kind of music, one that sings of darks and long arcs. Of mountains and molten cores, of oceans and deep caverns plunging into the unknown. It is the quality of staying sunken to let one’s heart soften, to commune with damp loam so it ruptures, for its radicle to break through the seed coat and reach below, rooting its grip on the earth. It is the quality of surrendering to this downward motion, to the breaking open of hearts, so that human hearts don’t break apart.

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Nicki Youngsma is a writer and illustrator, and her service work includes building horticultural education nonprofits and raising young people. She is working on a memoir project. Find her at nickiyoungsma.com.

Joseph Cooper

The Green Almanac

The Gardeners

for Gabriel Gudding

There is an old wives’ tale which states that if you bury a horseshoe in your garden it will ensure rich soil and a bountiful harvest. After the first thaw I went into my garden with an old horseshoe, dug a hole, and buried it. When nothing grew, I headed out to the garden plot to tear down the raised beds and fencing. I looked down into the soil and saw a foal huffing the crisp morning air buried up to its neck, its chest cresting the dark earth. I had read somewhere that one is never advised to help free a chick from its shell, so I watered it and left the foal to struggle against its roots. By morning it had freed itself from the raised bed, and was feeding on the dewy grass. Several others had blossomed and were seeking their freedom. My yard was full of colts and foals running and leaping, eating the grass, and challenging my flimsy chain-linked fence. When I realized I could no longer contain them I opened the gate and let them run free in the neighborhood. One or two stayed behind, but the rest ran off. As I walked through the yard with the colt I named Gabriel, I noticed that my neighbor, Rich, had just harvested several great white sharks. They were flapping mightily and snapping at his hands and legs as he attempted to salt and water them. Jerry from across the street walked over to me to get a better look. Rich noticed us watching him, and nervously smiled then waved as one of the great whites nearly tore off his foot. “He must have planted a shark tooth,” said Jerry. “What kind of an idiot plants a shark tooth?”

* * *

The Lawn Mower

On Saturday morning I finished my coffee and walked into the garage to get the lawnmower. I checked the oil and refilled the gas. I tugged hard on the pullcord and it started right up. As I mowed the lawn someone walking by stopped to tie their shoes and then just stood there watching me. I nodded and continued mowing. After a few mowed rows many of my neighbors had exited their homes, some even arranging lawn chairs on the sidewalk watching me as I mowed. I stopped the mower to remove a few sticks and said, “What are you people doing?” A young woman in pigtail braids said to her friend, “I didn’t know this was a spoken word piece.” Her friend shrugged, keeping her eyes on me. “Don’t you people have anything better to do?” I asked. Cars had begun parking, even double-parking along the road. A couple of food trucks opened their serving windows and proclaimed that they were open for business. A few vendors even walked through the yard shouting “POPCORN! HOT DOGS! ICE-COLD BEER HERE!” I yanked the pullcord and it ripped off. “Oh hell,” I said. “There’s a problem,” someone said. “He’s going to have to fix the mower,” said another. “This is fantastic,” said yet another. There came a persistent murmuring among the crowd followed by a light applause as I reappeared from the garage with tools. “Don’t step on my lawn,” I said to a teenaged boy passing a joint to his friend. Without much trouble I fixed the pullcord and started mowing again in front of an even larger audience. The crowd applauded, some even hooting and hollering as I waved. “I haven’t seen anything this good since the immersive Van Gogh exhibition,” said a man wearing a top hat. “Yes,” said a woman in a sequined gown. “It’s quite remarkable how the artist has managed to create an interactive experience with the commonplace, the clichéd suburbanite.” Once I had finished mowing, I started to weed the garden. The crowd began slowly dwindling. A rotund woman with opera glasses sneered at me and then to her long-suffering husband said, “It’s alright, but it’ll never be as groundbreaking as his original work.”

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Joseph Cooper is the author of six collections, most recently Splash Fields (VA Press, 2024). His latest work appears in Scud, DMQ Review, and Assignment Literary Magazine. He lives in Lewisburg, WV.

Summer Hardinge

The Summer Our Neighbor’s Roof

Caught Fire

Photo by Elias Tigiser (pexels.com)

Ribs of trees and colors like sun’s organdy. Tumbleweeds rolled behind my daughter, threatened her ruffled skirt the color of new grass, lunged at her shell pink sandals, toes exposed. She was only three years old. I prayed out loud, please sky, trees, not my dear ones and somehow my arms found their way to her. Her hair smelled of clover and char. When the roof flashed and grass sprayed fire-blades across the lawn, flames reached tips of lacey trees. Windows shattered. For weeks after, we picked up glass shards, my daughter tumbled in her sleep, flame whispers of aerial ladders, hoses, the sound of splintering. We visited the firehouse with the bright braided rug, the yellow jacket draped around her like petals of a sunflower, and we came home and planted snowdrops among cinders.

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Summer Hardinge lives near the Potomac River in Maryland. A former high school teacher, she leads Amherst Writers and Artists workshops in the Washington, D.C. area. She received the 2024 Ron Rash Poetry Award, and her poetry appears in Stonecoast Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Literary Mama, Mid Atlantic Review, and elsewhere.

David Henson

In the Season of Storms

We fall hard for lightning — not a horse, pet, or friend with a nickname. No, we’re palm-sweating, tongue-tied, infatuated with the streaks that crack the sky, rattle our homes, and shake the humdrum from our lives. When low pressure churns, we fog picture windows as rain drums the roof to the beat of our racing hearts. We imagine our skeletons flaring white-hot as fire splits seconds, turning night into day. We track warnings on our phones and chase the storm’s breath, longing for wall clouds and thunderheads as if they’re former lovers. We sit for hours in parked cars, peering past cornfields to the horizon, waiting for a flash to lift us from our seats. Clear skies make us restless. We shuffle our feet on the carpet and touch each other’s cheeks. Days stretch into weeks. We drift again in Horse Latitudes. As black skies rumble back, we rush outside barefoot and wild-eyed, sniffing for ozone, knowing we should sprint if our hair lifts or our fillings buzz. But when lightning splits an oak and splinters fly like shrapnel, we don’t run. We stand unblinking, arms wide, welcoming back the love of our lives.

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David Henson and his wife have lived in Brussels and Hong Kong and now reside in Illinois, USA. His work has been selected for Best Microfictions 2025. See more @annalou8 on X, and writings217.wordpress.com.

Lorette C. Luzajic

Apocalypse/Revelation

and I saw before me a landscape who was a woman, a faceless woman, a woman without eyes, and her body was a labyrinth of drawers; and in each cabinet were rags and broken baubles, and unruly serpents, and in her hand was a divining rod, held high like a flag; and in the distance, a volcano, a volcano whose lava transformed into a broken angel, and the angel was also faceless, and the angel was weeping from her soul; and I saw behind them, the burning cities and the desolate world and the empty sky; and I heard a voice from the pavement under them, and the voice said, behold, the beginning and the end and the beginning again, the first and the last, the mountains and rivers, those that will come and those that will go; and the parched earth will turn to ashes, and out of the ashes and filaments there will be firmaments and vines, and all will come and all will go, in my time

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Lorette C. Luzajic is the founder of The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry. She writes prose poems and small fictions from Canada.

Abbie Doll

No Such Thing as Uncolonized

Astronauts have to get their real estate licenses now. NASA’s expanding their astral domain. We’re going to have houses on the moon, they say. Kids on the moon. Bakeries on the moon. MoonPies on the moon! Or perhaps we’ll drop the obvious and just call them pies now. We’ll munch on moon cakes during autumn harvests…well, we will — once we’ve made a breathable atmosphere in our lunar settlement. There’ll be moon attorneys, moon doctors, moon cops, and moon monkeys, just you wait. We’re gonna have it all up there. But first we’re going to have to tone down that awful, suffocating grey. Replace it with a flamingo pink or raspberry red, perhaps. Then we’ll iron those basketball craters out — eradicate any and all evidence of former impact; there’ll be no new collisions on our watch! Look out, lunar suburbs coming your way…which can only mean no more reverse-acne dimples, no more cellulite-ridden terrain. We can’t live in the skies like that, not on a surface that reminds us of us. This fresh start must be absolutely flawless. She’ll need acupuncture and Botox and a whole new skincare routine, we gotta get that girl looking young again! Attractive. Presentable. Lucrative. Then someday, a long, long time from now, we’ll glance over our moon shoulders, look back, and spot Little Miss Marble Earth hovering on the horizon, and it’ll be a pure-happenstance glimpse of an ex — another former lover, one of oh so many that didn’t pan out for one reason or another, but it won’t matter because it wasn’t our fault and never could’ve been ‘cause the thing about blame is it’s got this ethereal habit of leaning external, and besides, the grass — once we get it growing up here — will be much, much greener…well, once we vacuum up all that unsightly dust, that is. You’ll see, just you wait. It’s gonna be great.

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Abbie Doll is a writer residing in Columbus, OH, with an MFA from Lindenwood University, and is a Fiction Editor at Identity Theory. Her work has been featured in Door Is a Jar Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, and Pinch Journal Online, among others. Connect on socials @AbbieDollWrites.

Part I

Unbroken is a quarterly online journal that seeks to showcase prose poems and poetic prose, both from established and emerging voices. We desire to give the block, the paragraph, the unlineated prose, a new place to play.

Unbroken is edited by Ken Chau, Dale Wisely, Katherine DiBella Seluja, Tom Fugalli, and Tina Carlson.

Roo Black is founding editor emeritus. Our literary and spiritual advisor is Dr Boyd Razor, Ph.D., who sometimes answers to "Brandon" or "Craig", depending on his mood. Our Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press doorman is Chen Kau. His current favourite songs are The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" from Pet Sounds (1966), Elvis Costello and the Attractions' "Man out of Time" from Imperial Bedroom (1982), and Bruce Springsteen's "The Little Things" from Tracks II: The Lost Albums (2025). He is currently reading Cheng Lei: A Memoir of Freedom by Cheng Lei.

Our thanks to the contributors to this issue and all who submitted their work.