Photo by KoolShooters (pexels.com)
DB Jonas
In the Beginning
on Joan Miró’s Birth of the World, 1925
There just aren’t that many of us left. I myself have reached an age where it’s almost impossible to remember anything of it in detail. All there was, best as I can figure, was the summer morning. The sky was streaked with blue. And in the park a snarl of strollers, prams, vendors. Children laughed and screamed. Nannies scolded. Some say the sun grew huge and reddened in the sky that day. As I say, I can’t remember much. I only know some toddler let his ice cream tumble from its cone, and as that globe of lost delight lay there, inert, recumbent, unapproachable as a diva, mournful as a moon, and as he reached for the softening sphere that languished on the gravel path beside the pond, his other hand absent-mindedly released the other prize he’d tightly held, a red balloon that, liberated, swiftly rising, drifted over us in that frozen instant. The morning light streamed above the trees as the brilliant orb, its trailing tail waving a desperate, cheerful farewell, disappeared into the improbable blue of impossible distances.
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DB Jonas is the author of three poetry collections: Tarantula Season and Other Poems (2023), Flight Risk (2025), and In Dubious Terrain (forthcoming). Further examples of his work can be accessed at jonaspoetry.com.
E. M. Franklin
Two Sandals Sitting on the Tarmac Outside a Pret a Manger
One by itself you understand. The result of a drunken dalliance with a friend or a stranger or a lover — one comes off, the other hangs on; siblings separated, maybe for life. But two sandals? Two is deliberate. Two has motive. The brown leather had blackened into two ovular smudges across the footbeds. Their parent’s DNA mingled in their material, cells attached like microscopic puzzle pieces. A forensics report would identify the owner. The police could interrogate as to why both shoes. Why not one or none? Maybe the twist is they have it backwards — maybe the sandals escaped the feet. Maybe they knew they had to leave. Maybe the parent had never left them alone, washed in them, slept in them. Now, they’re free outside a Pret a Manger. Both siblings realise: a soleless existence freezes them in a world of thunderous footwear. Shoes race past with a scraping, blurring pity. But at least they’re free; at least they have each other.
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E. M. Franklin grew up in Kent, and started writing at seven years old. He wrote a lot of fantasy, but after discovering David Lynch, he went more surrealistic. After graduating, he worked as a film/TV critic for several years, but never stopped writing for himself. He's currently redrafting his debut novel.
Tina Barry
Finding the Light
My nursery school teacher, Mrs. Brothers, pointed to a spot of light and asked the class what it was. A spot of light, I said. But it was God, at least according to her. I was a tiny Jewish Jesus, two years younger than the pre-school giants in my class. Before nap time, when we curled like croissants on our rag rugs, the other kids prayed, probably for me not to return. I searched for some clue to the meaning of God. I wondered if God was something other than a spot of light. Could God be a person? Could it be the hairstylist at Mother’s salon with the blonde bouffant and butterfly hair clip? Was God the stain on the kitchen ceiling, shaped like a one-eared rabbit? Mother bummed cigarettes from two nuns who lived across the street for a while. She said they were married to God, called them “the sisters.” I assumed she meant siblings, the taller one the oldest.
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Tina Barry’s third collection is I Tell Henrietta (Aim Higher, Inc., 2024). Her writing can be found in SoFloPoJo, Flash-Frontier, The Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction awards. Tina teaches at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.
Liza Wolff-Francis
We see what we think we see in the light
Photo by KoolShooters (pexels.com)
Three days after I knocked at the large door of the morgue to ask to identify his body, Chad Brown stands on the side of the road east of Little Five Points. Impossible. I drive toward him like a fire spreads, and when I get to him, it isn’t him at all. It’s some other alive person, white and small, and female, looks nothing like Chad. I want to run that person over, but don’t. For a moment, that person had been him, then was not. Had I just wanted to see him there one more time, as if all of the death-talk had been a joke? It was like a mirage. I pinch my leg, but I am awake, alive, still here. Chad is not. Or maybe he is everywhere. Maybe death is a concept. Maybe everyone is alive and dead all at once. No, Chad is gone and I am in my car, talking to myself. As if in a painting, a man beside the fake-Chad-woman had been almost kneeling, holding a single red rose. A police siren screams. I pull over. It goes on past.
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Liza Wolff-Francis is the eighth Poet Laureate of Carrboro, NC. She has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College and is a feminist ecopoet. Her chapbook is Language of Crossing (Swimming with Elephants Publications, 2015), about the Mexico-U.S. border, and she has a full-length book, 48 hours down the shore (Kelsay Books, 2024).
Gary Young
What little I know about ghosts
What little I know about ghosts, I learned from my father. I saw one at the door leading from my bedroom to the backyard, neither glowing nor vaporous, but murky through the screen. It came back night after night, and though it never spoke, I knew somehow that it would always return. When I told my father, he was silent for a moment, then he said, alright, so you’ve seen it, and he walked away.
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Gary Young’s most recent books are American Analects and Taken to Heart: 70 Poems from the Chinese. His many honors include the Shelley Memorial Award and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.
Belinda Rowe
The River Burst Its Banks
In the morning, brackish water eddies through the front door, cascades down the stairs to the basement. Max’s mum asks him to go down to the basement to get the shovel, but the water is alluring. He begins folding newspaper ships. He wades up to his ankles through the silty whirlpool of river water floating ships. A sea snake swims around a crate of empty beer bottles but Max isn’t worried; they’ll only bite if provoked. He hears, ‘Max, the water’s rising.’ He hurries, locks the basement door, continues folding paper ships. In total, he’s folded ten ships including carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes. The squadron is on a mission to fight a fleet or save a fleet, he can’t decide. The sea snake swims around the squadron using its tail to paddle, its brown skin the colour of the water. The brown water’s up to Max’s calves now. As Rear Admiral he has grave responsibilities and pulls his paper admiral hat down on his head so it doesn’t blow off. The wind’s picking up. The squadron of ships is sailing out the river mouth, setting a course across the Indian Ocean. Max’s mother’s knocking is drowned by the roar of the wind and the crashing waves but he hears ‘now’ and ‘die’. Then the water is above Max’s knees. The head of a rake and bottle caps and his dad’s fishing rod float by. Max catches ‘now’, ‘fool’, ‘drown too’. The river burst its banks in the morning, water whirling through the front door, down the stairs like a waterfall. Max yells that a rear admiral doesn’t abandon his squadron. His mother roars ‘for Christ’s sake!’ Max thinks about his dad, which he doesn’t do very often because he can’t remember him, other than a photo of his parents on the mantlepiece — his dad smiling, cradling newborn Max in his arms. He wonders if his dad liked to make paper ships when he was a boy, then wonders what it felt like to drown and if it hurt, and if so, is the hurt from drowning worse than dying from a snakebite. The sea snake’s swimming around Max’s admiral’s hat which has started to sink when he abandons his flagship and his squadron. By this time, Max knows that the snake is his dad, come to say, it’s ok, I’m looking out for you. Max unlocks the basement door, his mother is crying. Max says, 'it’s ok, I’ll be back in a minute.' He goes downstairs, picks up the bending, pushing sea snake with the shovel. He carries it up the steps past his mother, carries it along the hallway to the open front door, releases it in his front yard — releases it to the river.
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Belinda Rowe is an emerging short fiction writer. Born in Aotearoa, she now lives in Walyalup, Western Australia. She has words published in Gone Lawn, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Ghost Parachute, Lost Balloon, Fictive Dream, and Literary Namjooning. She has words forthcoming in BSF 2025, Fractured Lit, and Vestal Review. She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow for 2025.
Sam Aureli
The Day My Father Ran Barefoot at the Dog
After dinner, my brother and I sit on the patio with our espressos, like always. This is the part of the night where things soften, where regrets spill easy and childhood turns mythic, almost funny. He lights a cigarette. I hate the smoke, but I say nothing — it helps him breathe. He takes a drag and says, You remember that fuckin’ dog? King, or Fang, or something sharp-sounding. A monstrous German shepherd. I don’t even remember what we were doing, but the sun was low, the park still simmering with summer, and then it came, teeth first, snarling like it had a score to settle. We ran. God, we ran. I scrambled up the swing set. You weren’t fast enough. It caught your shorts, ripped the hem, almost took skin. And still, the next week, we went back. That’s who we were. It chased us again, this time to the fence. We screamed, climbed, scraped fingers and knees. Then that sound — raw, terrible — cut through everything. Not fear. Not anger. Something older. Primal. And there he was. Our father. Bare-chested. Barefoot. Eyes wild. Cricket bat raised like a weapon or a prayer. Charging down the path like a man with nothing left to lose. The dog froze. We froze. Then it turned and ran. And we collapsed into the grass, stunned, trembling, hearts pounding like drums. Our father was heaving, breathless, bat still raised like maybe the fight hadn’t ended. My brother laughs now, flicks ash into the tray, says, He looked like a lunatic. I nod, sip the last of the espresso, and don’t say what I’m thinking: that kind of rescue was rare. Most days, he was the dog. We got the belt, the backhand, the silence. Love came dressed as punishment, and we were expected to bow our heads. But that day, he ran toward the danger for us. That day, we weren’t just wild boys who had it coming. We were something else entirely. We were worth saving.
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Sam Aureli, originally from Italy and now in the Boston area, is a design and construction professional whose true passion is poetry. A first-generation college graduate, he balances his day job with the refuge of writing. His work appears in The Atlanta Review, Humana Obscura, and others.
Sushant Malhotra
The Ten Minute Memory
after Meher Manda
The story of my mother running ten minutes straight to meet me at the school bus stop is a story my mother tells often. Several kids had recently been kidnapped for ransom, and she feared we were far too poor. Over time, the specifics of that fateful afternoon have blurred. I try to give her memory shape. I see her dodge cars, buses, trucks, and three-wheelers, clutching the folds of her fluorescent green saree. I hear her chappals sputter across the fuming asphalt, amid the squeals and squalls of Marutis jostling through always-rush-hour traffic. I smell the pungent earthiness of fresh cow dung. I picture the world through her eyes; the road losing its rigidity, rendered in blurry brushstrokes like a Monet painting, the empty spaces saturated by her heaving breath. I see a woman unstoppable in spite of being brittle-boned. I become the kidnapper, hands hesitating at the sight of a woman’s arms slicing through air like sickles — hoping against hope she isn’t too poor. I imagine longing to see my mother after a long absence. The hair on my back bristles at the thought of hugging her when I least expect it.
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Sushant Malhotra is a writer based in Oakland. Writing for him is a way to explore the world outside and the world within. His writing has previously appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Prose Poem, Bending Genres, The Offing, and Flash Fiction Magazine. You can find him at sushantmalhotra.com.
Andrea Marcusa
Her Last Promise
The chandelier was an extravagance for my father’s paycheck. Mom held out a prism, its angles polished and gleaming. We took turns on the ladder, setting each crystal piece in place. “Let there be light,” she declared, flipping the switch. A soft yellow glow shimmered and danced. At nine, I’d lie beneath it, watching sunlight scatter pink, blue, green across the ceiling. In my first apartment, I hung prisms to splash beauty on drab walls. “I’ll leave you the chandelier in my will,” Mom promised. This made me feel special. But Mom said many things. When my mother died there was no mention of the chandelier, anywhere. The piece of jewelry she had bequeathed, a simple string of pearls, she'd already given to my aunt. By the time my eldest sister learned that the chandelier had been meant for me, it was on its way to a resale store. “Do you want me to get it back?” she asked. By then I'd grown used to the blank space above my dining room table, which had remained empty for decades, waiting, like a scar or a missing digit.
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Andrea Marcusa's writings have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Moon City Review, Milk Candy Review, Citron Review, and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong, Best Microfiction, and Cleaver, and is the author of the chapbook, What We Now Live With (Bottlecap Press, 2024). She's a member of the faculty at The Writer's Studio in New York City.
Tracy Royce
Undead
Photo by Cottonbro Studio (pexels.com)
The phone in my pocket comes alive to the tune of a goth anthem. It’s the one about the actor best known for his portrayal of Bram Stoker’s bloodsucker. He’s dead, they’re all dead: Bram Stoker, his famous vampire, staked in the final moments of the film, the actor who brought him to life on screen. I prepare to silence the song and answer the phone, knowing it’s Mom’s memory care facility. The place she had to go when her mind unspooled. When she was beset by delusions, resurrecting my long-dead Dad, then killing him off again in a dozen bloody ways. When she began menacing people with her walker and striking strangers. Mom’s nurses don’t reach out to say, Your mother’s napping peacefully. So, I know this incoming call means one of two things. Mom fell and got hurt. Or Mom got agitated and hurt someone else, perhaps another stumbling sufferer. My ringtone chants a dirge as I gird myself and answer.
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Tracy Royce's words appear, and are forthcoming, in Bright Flash Literary Review, Does It Have Pockets?, The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw, MacQueen's Quinterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking and watching Richard Widmark movies. You can find her on Bluesky.
Peter Anderson
Grief
My friend suggests we take Grief to a ball game, Triple-A. “Might help him to get out of the house,” he says, “be around people.” I’m not so sure, but here we are, ordering hot dogs, settling down in our seats. Mine is sticky from spilled beer. We watch the players warming up, tossing balls back and forth. Would Grief be relieved if I brought up the thing everyone’s been avoiding? Or is my job to distract — cheer too loudly for the home team, boo the ump, point out clouds shaped like tragic movie stars from the 1950s? A young girl in a wheelchair sings the anthem and the game gets underway. We order beers but Grief refuses to let us pay. Between innings, children dressed up as sushi race around the infield, chased by dachshunds wearing team jerseys. Bottom of the fifth, the scoreboard flashes the wrong score, then quickly corrects it. An announcement too garbled to understand comes over the P.A. Top of the eighth, the Visitors put the game out of reach and Grief goes quiet. We can’t tell if he’s absorbed in the action, or thinking about the unthinkable. He orders another beer, then another, mumbles something neither of us catch, gets up, stumbles down the stairs, heads to the washroom. Maybe this was a bad idea. When he returns, we ask if we should leave early and beat the crowd, but Grief’s not going anywhere, not till it’s over. “You never know…,” he says. Down on the field, a pinch hitter fouls off pitch after pitch after pitch.
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Peter Anderson is an ex-Michigander now living in Vancouver on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish people. His work has appeared in filling Station, The Mackinaw, Unbroken, Sublunary Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Best Microfictions, and elsewhere. Iggy Pop’s father taught English at his high school.
Fran Schumer
Arranged Seating
My aunt, accusatory, a vigilante aggrieved, asked, “Who changed the place cards?” I admitted it was me, then baked in shame for the rest of the night: my stepson, not looking at me though I could feel his eyes boring a hole in me; my husband, sending out a life raft to save me, sprinkling holy water on a raging fire, small and potent but still the fire raged; my uncle, half angry, half resigned to the unpredictable wild people around him; his wife's flat, brown eyes, suddenly wide with surprise, gleeful because of all she could now pass along to friends; and finally, my twin, full of justified outrage, the juiciest kind, her dark cheeks coloring a strangely beautiful tawny red though I professed to hate her, and she me. In her anger, such lust, a cheetah salivating before raw meat.
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Fran Schumer’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She is the winner of a Goodman Loan Grant Award for Fiction from the City University of New York and a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing poetry fellowship. Her Chapbook, Weight, was published in 2022.
Josh Jacobs
Shabbat Timeline
The second thing we do on Shabbat is light the candles. The first thing we do is take a deep breath together. Before that we each spent a year thinking about Jews being killed and killing. And before that we bought these candlesticks from a doe-eyed Orthodox man under a stone archway in Jerusalem. The shop was filled with religious articles, grief ashes and triumphal ashes, and honey. And for years before that we wove songs from right to left through our days and nights, as best we could, to stitch ourselves together against just such a tearing within and without. The table operates as a time machine. We do not agree on which past times to visit to change the course of history, or in which direction. The last thing we do on Shabbat is open the challah bread with our hands to avoid the violence of a knife.
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Josh Jacobs lives near Boston. He won the 2023 Common Ground Review Poetry Prize and participated in the 2024 Yetzirah Jewish Poetry Conference. His work appears in Cider Press Review, Pangyrus, Right Hand Pointing, and the anthology, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood.
Fred Muratori
Next
In the waiting room we share an expectation that one of us will be called any second. All the chairs are taken and no one's name has been ceremoniously announced for at least half an hour, but people keep looking up from Golf Digest and People Weekly as if they've missed something important. Those who have never played golf nor ever intend to discover how to eliminate a chronic slice or choose the correct iron for chip shots on a hard late-summer fairway. Others are now well-versed in the food addictions of a television actress they've never heard of. A truck passes noisily outside: did someone say 'Sullivan?' An unseen woman in the hallway sneezes and clatters down the stairs: was that 'Kushinsky' I just heard? Droplets splatter on the window panes. Time is passing, it really is, though it's easy to forget why we're all here and why our appointment books said nothing about this place. But there must be someone keeping track, someone behind the door who will tell us when and where to go next.
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Fred Muratori has published three poetry collections. His prose poem noir, Nothing in the Dark, is currently seeking a home. He lives and works in Ithaca, NY.
David Anson Lee
Cataract Morning
Light spills across the cornea like a river, and I steer with scalpel and coffee-stained hands, the patient blinking, unsure whether to trust me or the blinking itself. The cataract sits heavy, like a coin dropped in a coat pocket, dull and stubborn. I joke about grudges and stubborn lenses, and they laugh, or maybe it’s a twitch. For a moment, our eyes meet in the sterile theater, and they see something new, the edge of a world before and after, a sliver of sunlight they didn’t expect. I tell them nothing about the colors they’ve lost; I just let them blink into it.
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David Anson Lee is a physician and emerging poet. His work draws on years of medical practice to explore the intersections of observation, human fragility, and the unexpected moments of wonder, humor, and revelation that punctuate everyday life in the clinic.
Nicole Brogdon
The Bad Doctor
You’ve got an elbow growing from your eardrum — we’re going to have to biopsy that. And there’s a buttock rising from one eyelid — that definitely needs to come off. I’ll give you an injection, and I won’t feel a thing. You remind me of a pound of ground beef, sitting on that parchment paper on my exam table. You belong in a Picasso painting — there, one ear higher than the other, sawhorse for a cheekbone, hatchet marks for lips. Your bumpy arm skin is curdled on top like an old glass of milk, florid as petunias. We’re running out of time. This might sting, you’ll feel a burn, this won’t hurt a bit. Your heart is a broken alarm clock, clanging in my stethoscope. Your blood, anemic, sluggish, cold, and wet. I’m gonna generate a stack of referrals to specialists right now. You’ll need a transfusion, stat — scalding coffee in the veins to perk you up, infusions to clear confusions. We’ll make you a full-time project, we’ll prep you for surgery, wrapping you in gauze. Shooting your medical bills through the ceiling. Exhausting every option, exhausting you. You’ll need medical leave, experimental drugs, PT, OT, herbal tea. Anti-inflammatories, fish oils, and a team of doctors working on you round the clock. You’re an oozing ticking time bomb. I’ve got a headache just looking at you.
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Nicole Brogdon is an Austin TX trauma therapist interested in strugglers and stories, with fiction in Vestal Review, Cleaver, Flash Frontier, Bending Genres, Bright Flash, SoFloPoJo, Cafe Irreal, 101Words, Centifictionist, Best Microfiction 2024, Best Microfiction 2025, and elsewhere. She earned a Master's in Writing at the University of Houston. Social media: Twitter NBrogdonWrites! and nbrogdonwrites.bsky.social.
Georgia Ofelia Predescu
The World Is Kind
The walls were corrugated tin, the hospital built to echo suffering. Cold seeped through everything, settling in newborn bones. No one knew where the light came from; the bulbs were dead, yet something buzzed overhead like a dying insect. My sister was days old — thin as paper, her cry raw enough to strip the air. No milk. No formula. No one cared. Nurses moved like shadows, sneezing into their sleeves, indifferent, immune. Pain was the building’s language. My mother’s breasts had dried from fear, or shock, or the cold. The doctor coughed into his hand — unwashed. At midnight, glass shattered in the hallway. No one flinched. A nurse said, “She’ll survive if she wants to.” My mother dipped a rag in warm water and pressed it to my sister’s mouth like communion. She hummed a lullaby without melody, only the rhythm of defiance. She whispered, “The world is kind,” a lie she knew. But lies are how we survive the truth.
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Georgia Ofelia Predescu is a writer and educator based in Spain. Her work explores memory, survival, and tenderness in harsh environments. She shares her time between literature, language, and caring for a rescued blackbird.
Patrick G. Roland
Marble Jar
In her doll house, a plastic girl collapses in my coughing fit. Make-believe stalls. My daughter waits for my noise to die. For lungs to stop tearing. “Daddy, what is cystic fibrosis?” A question she’s too young to understand. An answer I’m too young to accept. I look down at my body — the thrift store inside my chest, each organ patched with meds, my lungs, a pre-owned bellows, cluttered with memories not mine, like a thought I can’t cough out. The viscous mucus threads its tentacles from lungs to pancreas — a rusted appliance behind the checkout counter, leaking bile, enzymes curdled, function returned with no receipt. It creeps into my intestines, coiled like forgotten cords behind the shop’s TV wall, each knot pulled tighter by every meal. The mucus moves like grief through a narrow throat and into dreams. The doll house overturned, roof peeled away like a wound. Inside: a single marble, trembling in a jar labeled last breath. I look back at my daughter’s doll house. I reposition her fallen doll beside a tilted shelf with its plastic jar. A toy, a warning, a memory mislabeled. A jar I don’t remember sealing.
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Patrick G. Roland is a writer and educator living with cystic fibrosis. He explores life’s experiences through poetry and storytelling, seeking to inspire others in the classroom and through writing. His work appears, or is forthcoming, in Hobart, scaffold, 3Elements, Maudlin House, Trampoline, and others.
Mandy Ruthnum
Meteorite
Photo by Narsimha Rao Mangu (pexels.com)
A postcard arrived today from a great distance. Inside the hurricane of texts and photographs, he sent me the quiet breathing thing I wanted the most: his handwriting. Black ink on unbending paper. The o’s not quite closed, leaving room for escape. The t’s crossed low. The announcement of his signature. Straight lines, careful words, and not too many. He chose this just for me. It rested in his unusual hands for a moment or maybe ten. Long tapering fingers with big knobby joints. As though a pianist spent his spare time hauling in crab traps and reeling cod. The postcard had a creased corner; from careless mailbox-cramming, or maybe it was his fault. It smelled like nothing but nothing is the real bass note of everything. The stamp perfectly crooked in the corner. My name in the right place. Once upon a time we didn’t know each other and now we think we do, we might. On the front: a black craggy cliff glowing with white seabirds by the thousands. Snuggling together against the face of the rock, exposed to the uncaring wind. Ready to fly away at a moment’s notice over a disturbed sea. Feathers, friendship-love and all the guano that comes with that. But all that struggle and precious nitrogen makes green things grow. This postcard a small meteorite from the outer space of him to the molten core of myself bringing new elements I never knew I needed.
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Mandy Ruthnum is a Mauritian-Canadian writer living on Vancouver Island. Her work has been published in The Ogham Stone, Room, The Fabulist, and others.
Ian Willey
The Art of Suffering
The Accident
After prom, Y and I were driving to a motel to lose our virginity together when a deer leapt across the road. There was no time to react — the front of the car was smashed; the deer, totaled. We got out and found a buck quivering by the curb. Why don’t they stop and look both ways? Having hunted deer with my father, my first impulse was to choke the animal, to end its suffering. Y watched in horror. “I can’t believe you did that,” she said afterward. I was at least equally disturbed. A guy in a truck stopped and offered to give us a ride; we left my car and were driven to our separate homes in silence. I called Y the next day, but she was distant. Something between us had died.
* * *
Moving On
We suffered in that house for nearly twenty years. Someone else is suffering there now. It’s a nice house, very sufferable. Of course, my wife and I were suffering together before we moved into that house. She wanted to suffer in the suburbs, while I would’ve preferred suffering in the city. I’d always wanted to try suffering without a car — to suffer more sustainably, you know. In the end we settled on that house, and began suffering the American dream. Now we suffer in a smaller house. With the kids gone there’s no need for suffering large. We liked the blue carpet in the suffering room. To be honest, there was a time when we contemplated suffering separately, but that’s behind us now. You suffer, you learn.
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Ian Willey was listed as one of the ten best English-language haikuists writing from Japan in 2023. His poetry and microfiction have been nominated for multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes. Connect with him on Instagram (@idwilley) or X (@en_willey).
Michelle Brown
Nine years ago
It was nine years ago when you sent a mayday to me at the shops. With a sharp intake of breath, I dumped everything in my arms and rushed home. You picked a fight with me, yelling so loudly in the enclosed space of the car that the oxygen competed with the thickness of the despair oozing through your rage. I snapped — jumping out, primal in my escape from your rage… your need. It was nine seconds ago when I walked home for two hours, calling you all the way, stopping at the chemist to order a packet of Mersyndol — instinctively dreading what was to come, needing to escape… desperate to escape. It was nine years ago, you did not come home, when I shot bolt upright in our bed because I heard you scream my name. Crying, I reached for you. You were not there. The police knocked on my door, the constable with a twelve-year-old's eyes gravely informed me that your body was found in the Brisbane River near the Indooroopilly Bridge.
The whole of time and space roared in my head. In those elongated seconds, breathing into my present, the world froze. In slow motion, I drew your phone out of the plastic bag they had given me; stared blankly as the water and your life force bled into my hand. I stared into the abyss and all hope died. Your decision ended both of our lives, when the abyss stared back at me; did not think I could look away. On a school excursion, police found me to tell me your head had been found. A Fibonacci spiral of primal screams inside my head, as I fought to control my voice. The abyss drew my soul closer, swirling invitingly at the edges, seductive promising of oblivion, promising you. Your death changed my heartbeat, I could not run, breathe, hope. It was nine seconds ago. I want you back. I can look away from the abyss a little. I think a future may be possible.
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Michelle Brown is a writer living on Turrbal land in Brisbane, Australia. She has not smouldered in the ditch, but knows what it feels like to be brought down by ungovernable feelings. She has been published by Florencia Bay Books' Weekly Poems, the WILDsound poetry festival website, and has a poem upcoming in the Zest of the Lemon.
Michelle Ortega
She Sees
We slip into the car, not quickly or frantically but cautiously and jarred, adjusting because it’s after dinner on a school night, not the time to be leaving, but settling in. We throw her backpack and my work bag with some clothes we stuff into pockets on the back seat. Pull out of the driveway before he awakens from the blackout to an empty house. It irks me. It’s my rental he took over, he should be the one leaving. I touch the skin on my neck and swallow gingerly. My daughter looks up at me, tells me it’s good that I’m leaving, that some moms don’t, and I wonder for a quick second at her knowing. She was upstairs in her room and must have heard the scuffle. When she was younger she watched me make French toast for dinner after a sunny day at the pool. She watched me fold laundry at the laundromat. Now in seventh grade, on the verge of her own becoming, she asks me where we are going. I am unsure. I park at Stop ‘n’ Shop and we roam the aisles. I push a cart. She holds onto the side. She picks out sushi. Makes sure to get chopsticks from the cup on the counter. I don’t eat sushi. I don’t remember what else I put in the cart. We land at a hotel not far away. I used to waitress at the restaurant there when I was in college. I make some calls while she eats, handles the chopsticks adeptly. We get back in the car. I drive to the police station across town. Once inside, I cry so hard it’s hard to speak. I file the restraining order. The police press charges because of the marks on my neck. We return to the hotel. In a few hours he’ll be in jail. She sleeps soundly by my side. I do not sleep. I curl around her form, listen to her gentle, easy breaths.
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Michelle Ortega’s latest chapbook, When You Ask Me, "Why Paris?” (Finishing Line Press) was released in July 2025. She is a board member at Arts By The People, where she creates and facilitates workshops for The Writing Lab, including the annual Ekphrastic Residency. See more at michelleortegawrites.com.
Juan Pablo Mobili
The Capriciousness of Crime
The lifeless bodies are no longer on the sidewalk. Even the contours of white chalk are fading, after a rainfall of which no one remembers a single drop. By now it is safe to walk on the concrete where they were slain without the risk of feeling anything at all. The faint white chalk could be the drawing of a child dreaming of his guardian angel.
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Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems have appeared in many journals around the world. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times, and his chapbook, Contraband, was published in 2022. In 2025, he was appointed Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York.
Lauren Camp
Manipulation
Photo by Adiardi Zulfansyah (pexels.com)
Back then I played the animated version of myself every week in a room called Control. None of my body parts wanted to be touching. In those hours I sat sealed in that parching unwindowed room at the far flat edge of a flat school and slid levers, dressing my musical mixture to the underside of the mic. Every week I unknotted and completed the sonorous. The sounds leaned against me and sweated. Every chord in its place. I didn’t say much, but what I did rippled out to each car and ran off to the planet. It felt volatile to backtrack the soluble tunes with metered emotion. That was all I’d let tremor, those sonic adjustments as time counted down its deep wisdom, conspicuous enough. I don’t miss it, how I murmured vibrations, careless but graceful at the beginning and end, as though I could breathe into the ether forever. Now my voice is less fire, more shadow. Now when I turn myself on I only do it to linger — not repeated, not public. No one need be out there to pick it up.
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Lauren Camp served as the second New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books, including In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew from her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Honors include a Dorset Prize and Arab American Book Award finalist. See more at laurencamp.com.
Adil Munim
Dressed for the End of the World
I am sitting at a coffee shop and the man next to me is on a Zoom call. He's holding his upper body steady — stiff neck, stiff shoulders, stiff white collar. He must be important, I imagine. His accent is American and he’s using words like scalable and margins, each one clipped by that nasal nonchalance that young men use to sound invested yet, at the same time, unbothered, unfeeling. Off camera, he grips the table and taps his foot against the tiled floor. He speaks in numbers and sums and money. He is moving it around, renewing portfolios and minimizing risk. Suddenly, he is silent. Nodding. Listening. He must be important, I think, or else he’d be dead. His foot taps faster. I worry he's heard me. The nervous thrum pulses against the air and he raises his voice over it, ignoring it. But if I look closely, I can see the edge, the delicate seam where his world begins, trembling under his foot, threatening to toss him out here with the rest of us.
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Adil Munim (he/him) is a writer, poet, and former lawyer. His writing draws largely on his experiences as a Queer Muslim and touches on topics of identity, faith, and freedom. He can typically be found at a local coffee shop or on Instagram at @__adilm.
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 libretti consultant is Dr. Boyd Razor, Ph.D., who is currently forming a punk band, Boyd Razor and the Woke Logos, and is seeking a bass player. Our Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press usher is Chen Kau. His current favourite songs are Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" from Led Zeppelin IV (aka Four Symbols, aka The Fourth Album, aka Zoso, aka Untitled, aka Runes, and aka The Runes Album) (1971), the innocence mission's "Brotherhood of Man" from We Walked in Song (2007), and Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland" from Born to Run (1975). He is currently reading Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin.
Our thanks to the contributors to this issue and all who submitted their work.
Photo by Paul Green (unsplash.com)