This week’s feature…
Bespoke by Soramimi Hanarejima
Mom rode buses and trains all over the city to gather what she needed to make the best lullabies—the most mesmerizing melodies and loveliest lyrics—pieces I watched her assemble at the kitchen table in the kind of meditative trance she’d go into while kneading bread dough, her soft gaze settled on the fluid movement of her hands..
Keep readingMicro Monday features brief fiction, cnf, and poetry. It’s like a shot of literary adrenaline to jump start your week.
Previous features:
Door-to-Door by Joli Huelskamp
I open the door to a smiling girl, sixteenish, summer-camp-counselor wholesome, carrying a clipboard and a huge umbrella. She hands me a glossy brochure. “Libby Conrad for Commissioner”. Red, white, and blue. A photo of the candidate posed in the midst of her sunny family…
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Abecedarian Becomes Cancer Diagnosis by Anna Lisa Stork
No. I don’t want to meet the oncologist who tells me it’s pancreatic cancer. I ask questions that have no answer – all rust and ache. Sorry, so many apologies and yet the truth is still unbearable. Sorry pokes into another vein. Sorry don’t know…
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Animal Husbandry by Chris Cottom
My parents do not attend the ceremony. Daddy bangs around upstairs, packing for another trip. After he whizzes off, Mummy tells us they’re getting a divorce. None of my schoolfriends have parents who’ve got divorces and I worry they’ll need to be told, that the headmaster might announce it at Assembly, after the Lord’s Prayer…
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First Date at a Greenhouse by Costantino Toth
If nature, however, begets only nature, such that our tending and lining and sucking are natural, as are the noisy babies and tools, then so are the four hundred and fifty–five kilotons wearing exhaust like a wedding band, poking out of the sea—
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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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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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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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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…
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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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Homestead by Brad Anderson
My great-grandfather was a homesteader. President Chester Arthur signed his deed in eighteen eighty-three. By that time he had lived there five years, carved a small farm out of open prairie and started a young family…
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Love Fish to Wander by Jack Phillips
2 This celestial portal reflexively opens into the primal waters of your favorite pond as the refractive bend of your paddle reveals. Turtles, certain crustaceans and quite so fish other ovaline creatures (polliwog clams waterbeetle leaches) slip easily through. Show us the way that is, when not preoccupied with rolling ashore the astral egg from…
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Witch’s Butter by Clif Mason
Yellow brain fungus curls & coils on wind-toppled, black-dappled, decaying white birch boles. Look closer…
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The Softness I Owe by Joemario Umana
Where they taught me to shut the door, flowers pressed through the hinges, bloomed and held it wide open. Look, I know how to hold a butterfly and not tear its wings. I know how to water a flower without drowning it. I know how to cradle ache and not mistake it for the end.…
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She tells us how we feel and we agree. The therapist we didn’t hire. Her misremembered facts become our story. She trades in gossip: who has an addiction, a love affair. No lovers allowed. She’ll be our only love. She leans…
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Issue #10 Cover Art: Scarred Beauty by Gerburg Garmann
