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Thirteen Black by Sanum Patel
The dealer shot the ball, rippling up and down the wheel. Red, black, red, black. The odd green swirling in. Every roll held a blissful future — the world collapsing into nothing or blooming under my palms. It wasn’t a fool’s bet. It was the opposite of marriage…
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The Good Life Review Buzz is our hotspot for exciting news, interviews, book reviews, AND… Micro Monday where we feature brief fiction, cnf, and poetry. It’s like a shot of literary adrenaline to jump start your week!
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Interview with Carolyn Williams-Noren and Lee Colin Thomas
My dad’s career was with an oil company in Alaska, and I worked for the company myself one summer. My life today is very different from that—I live in Minneapolis, doing work that feels distant from the project of taking oil out of the ground, if not always its opposite. The poems look back at that time “close” to oil with curiosity. I basically asked myself over and over, “When was I closest to oil? What did that do to me? What did I learn?” and wrote the answers…
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Introducing Issue #24 ~ Summer 2026
Welcome to the beating heart of summer… Days when the heat lingers long into the evening, and the cicadas serenade the sun as it slides out of view. Today, we are beyond thrilled to announce the winner of this year’s HoneyBee Poetry Prize, Mara Lee Grayson, and with this exciting news, the release of Issue #24! We highly recommend pouring a glass of ice-cold lemonade and spending some quality time with this one!!…
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Author Q&A with Christopher R.A. Adams
What keeps me coming back to the keyboard is the chance to live beyond myself. Unlike the restrictions of my singular life, writing allows me to step into new modes of being, to see new perspectives, and learn from them. If I want to know if there’s life after love, I can step into being a widow and all its burdens. If I want to confront my mortality, I can become a man in his final days. If I want to be betrayed by God, I can become a prophet. I can’t deny writing, because it…
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Brumation by Melissa N. Vincel
We hold each other before meals from then on, one sleeve each grasped by my hand and his, a circle of human flesh and wool. We tell my mother’s coat about the day, fill her pockets with plastic dinosaurs, and sniff air around the notched collar…
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Author Q&A with Kenton K Yee
What I learned is that life and everything in it—especially poetry—is a journey, not an end-goal or trophy, so one had better enjoy the journey, which means one has to pay attention. With each poem, I learned to pay closer attention, attention to every pattern, turn, break, word, comma, and surprise…
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At the Printer’s During Election Season by Cheryl Dyer
When I mention artwork, I see you soften, like, I really see your shoulders relax and you lean
forward as I pull out a piece from the portfolio that shimmers with speckles of patent gold….
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Author Q&A with Ayoung Kim
Although this essay came from a memory, the danger is transcribing it instead of allowing space for other images and narratives to come through. I first wrote this three years ago, and have periodically returned to it with fresh eyes. Each time, a bit more would reveal itself. Also, there is the part of me that retains visceral emotions as the child, but as the adult, benefits from distance, and I worked to include both perspectives. I’ve learned to not rush the revision process…
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You Ask Your Husband if He’d Do it All Over Again by Victoria Melekian
You spend the day making lists—reasons to stay, reasons to go. You try to keep them even, but staying is losing and that’s when you know. The man’s been leaving for months and you—too slow to see. You’ve got the dog, an orange cat in a sunny windowsill, and three miscarriages…
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Letter I Wish My Mother Wrote from Virginia by Daniel Lurie
I can’t lift my head to see, so Ivy painted birds onto the glass in acrylics. She made it look like the scene from our backyard in Montana, down to the green paint flaking from the old feeder. It has the bluebird duo, the towhee with its demon eyes, the rafter of turkeys, the tanager looking comically out of place…
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2026 Honeybee Poetry Prize Finalists
Hello friends! Happy almost-summer! Today, we’re pleased to report that the team has completed combing through the 1200 poems received for the 2026 Honeybee Poetry Prize and cherry-picked eight finalists. Poems from the following people have been sent to the fabulous MARYA HORNBACHER, who will select this year’s winner…
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Interview with Kelsey Smoot
I certainly wanted the concept of soulmate to function in this collection as a tool, a lens through which we can see ourselves, our loved ones, our communities, and also our political orientations more clearly, and determine how to embody a practice of love that is less about predestination and romantic alignment and much more about commitment, agency, and devotion to others…
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Author Q&A with Shayna Brown
I wrote my first pieces of fiction when I was about ten. I was homeschooled and obsessed with becoming a novelist. That continued until college, when life got too busy for written exploration. In my early adulthood I focused more on creative non-fiction, but not in a serious way. When Covid hit, I started writing short stories again. I made a schedule and took classes and started working on pieces I wanted to release out into the world for the first time. And that led me here…
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The Mother Tree by Georgene Smith Goodin
She insisted on doing it herself and I followed her, carrying her IV bag because its pole couldn’t glide across the mat of dead grass our backyard had become. That watering was the closest she got to prayer…
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