This week’s feature…
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…
Keep readingMicro Monday features brief fiction, cnf, and poetry. It’s like a shot of literary adrenaline to jump start your week.
Previous features:
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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Valentine’s Night in County Clare by Dan Thompson
“the crashing Atlantic forever tackling the rocks below the village – it wasn’t the cold that froze me there or anything else that might have prepared me for what I saw when I looked up…
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House Party by Dory Rousos Moore
When her new boyfriend’s black Grand Am swerves into our complex, she jumps up, her drink spilling over the edge. The way she falls in love is with a whoosh, like she’s being sucked into a vacuum, and the way I fall in love is by pretending not to…
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The Taste of Absence by Bethany Bruno
My father drank black Maxwell House from a repurposed Big Gulp cup, the kind with a faded NASCAR logo and a plastic straw he never used. Every morning, long before the world stirred, he filled it to the brim and cradled it between his knees as he drove to work. No cream. No sugar. Just…
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Chia Shower Pet by Crockett Doob
and what else besides chop sticks could get in the hole but then I thought, the shower head (the water gun setting) and I tried it and it worked, nailing the middle of the funnel, blasting the seeds out and I made my chia drink, finally, with herbal tea, and it looked beautiful and red and I…
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The Echo of Footsteps by Ibrahim Abdulhakeem
Each step carried the weight of exhaustion, of dreams deferred and dignity swallowed in silence. Ayo would listen from his room, curled up with his homework, his hands clammy as he gripped his pen. Would today be different? Would the tension in the air dissipate, leaving room for laughter instead of raised voices?…
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Rocks by Mk Smith Despres
In the waking world, she asks for pajama pants for Christmas so she can wear them to school. So she can go cozy up the front walk, the one where she saw her friend last week, neck red and swollen with trying and trying and trying. So she told, right away she told. The friend…
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wedged together we are flying by Reva Elise Johnson
The spinning top is a tailbone stuck upright, wrapped in broad swaths of gluteus, squashed into the middle seat of an airplane row that my favorite 9-year-old would say smells exactly like a freezer full of farts. We are wedged together; we are flying. There was someone on a plane when the divorce decree was…
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Return by Adesiyan Oluwapelumi
You did not understand the words but that didn’t matter. God hears his creations in all the dialects of their yearning. You remember weeks of the storms on the ship sailing the Caribbean Sea where God was a thin thread you hanged on for dear life…
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Issue #10 Cover Art: Scarred Beauty by Gerburg Garmann
