The palm-of-the-hand stories anthologized in this collection span decades of Yasunari Kawabata’s life, from 1923-1972, and far pre-date the recent moniker “flash fiction,” though they could be classified now using that label. Most of these stories are realistic, detailing families at home, strangers on the train, and past lovers’ meeting by chance. There are a […]
i. your desire for the moon holds the weight of a steam-powered whaling ship. it is why we braid wreaths for the cows, why the light after dusk behaves like startled deer. when the moon’s lamb-face appears through the forest’s mane, your skin begins to bloom, mantling me in its petals. a memory lets go […]
This is the sound of drunkenness held +++++on the last twilit gunshot. The sound ++++++++++of your voice carrying from the flat lawn +++++and up past the sleeping baby, past ++++++++++the boys whose ears have tuned ++++++++++to this semblance of fury. +++++Tonight, Texas folds itself down +++++into the hollow of your throat and nestles there ++++++++++++++++its […]
Daniel José Older is the type of writer many of us writers aspire to be—careful, intentional, eminently aware of the ecosystems that produce literary work in our society, and the role this work plays in the context of a predominantly white narrative. His Twitter following is large (sitting at over 22k followers), both because of […]
I’m driving through your neighborhood. It’s quiet and lonely, like a summer lake without a boat. In the air, white silk light, slow as milk. I can see through the houses. They’re more than themselves, like a minuend before the subtraction of the subtrahend. My thought music points me north. I’ve forgotten one of my […]
There are only two interesting structures in Tustin, California, the city where I now live. They’re a pair of identical military blimp hangars, built in 1942 from Oregon Douglas fir. The city is tearing them down. These are among the biggest wooden structures on the planet; indeed, they contain the largest covered, unobstructed open space […]
The naked woman in the video I study—double mastectomy—tosses me into possibility, presses the soft muscle of what remains of self against self, sternum and rib shucked clean by surgical steel. She stands sculpted, a torso hewn to scarred catastrophe— emptied parentheses. The Mayans called it zero, this mussel shell emptied of its muscle set […]
I say poem, the phone hears problem. Maze, no escape. Driving with my mother in a manic state. The sharpness of her no. Telling it like it is. She says “Crazy!” trying to explain. Unanswerable strangeness of the human brain. Equations, undoable. How to keep sane the status she wants to return to. I say […]
We squat unbroken, faces toward the earth, feet on the shoulders of the one below us, fingers covering their eyes as we cup their heads between our palms, as if reading their minds, feeling the weight of others on our backs, their warm hands blocking our sight, generations of shiny bodies stacked like vertebrae pierce […]
Bonnie started stripping the moment her bedroom door latched behind her. She undid her blouse buttons. The white fabric stuck to her back, and she peeled it off and let it crumple to the floor. She tossed it so that it sat in a small, sweaty mountain in the corner of her room. Next to […]
I could play the guitar just barely and I would try when we’d arrive home all liquor dilated, hearts more capable of loving. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing that lights me up like this once did. The magic in my life is quieter now, but grace, once parsimonious, now crackles through my […]
The sea like a coarse mirror of silver reflects a metallic sky of zinc; distant flocks of cormorants tarnish its polished bottom of pallid gray. The sun like a glass, round and opaque, paces to its zenith with a halting gait; the ocean breezes settle in the shadow making a pillow of a black clarinet. […]
[flash creative nonfiction] Every once in a while, I dream of the impending apocalypse. I dream that I am watching it swallow Manhattan from the shores of Brooklyn—a transmogrified landscape where the outline seems more distant but provides an uninterrupted view from a row of dilapidated brownstones and the “beach” of Kent Ave. No fences, […]
I He cared for her whimsy and for the way her shyness played out. At some gotcha point, in the negative spaces of photos spotted at some exhibition downtown, he started to imagine her silhouette, her T-shirt a burst of yellow competing with Cape Cod pelicans and stealthily-erected Jotunheimen high-rises. She confided in him like […]
The second I escaped high school, I went to work at my father’s full-line music store in the little corner hovel called the M.I. department, which stood for Musical Instruments. There wasn’t much to do but restock the clarinet reeds and trombone grease, make sure the ¼-size violins had bows in their cases, and dust […]
“Come on, Daddy. Wake up! It’s time for our Saturday walk.” “Okay, okay, I’m waking up.” He opens his eyes expecting to see a child, but the sunlit room is empty. Where is he? He sits up, puts his feet on the floor, then looks around. Nothing looks familiar. Not right. Name things. Start naming. […]
That was one of my favorite parts of it all—of Allie and me being friends, I mean—sitting there in her passenger seat, with the streetlamp on my neighbor’s lawn glowing in on us through the dashboard, the night’s playlist soft in the background. I liked when I could just barely see her, except for her […]
My Wife It was at the end of a dinner of men, married men, old friends who get together sometimes without their wives, boys as in the past. They would eat a long time; they would drink a lot; they would speak of everything. Old and youthful memories would move them; those warm memories that […]
Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Immigrants In Our Own Land, published in 1979, the same year Baca was released from prison. Other poetry titles include Healing Earthquakes (2001), C-Train & 13 Mexicans (2002), Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (2004), […]
In a chemical reaction, when compounds combine to create something new, or when one compound breaks into two or more new materials, some form of energy is expelled or absorbed. Heat, light, electricity. Things light up. They flicker, blaze, melt test tubes. Out in the world, they can burn mountainsides. Later, we pull over to the shoulder […]
The Catalina Express docked alongside the pier. The ride from Long Beach had been choppy as the boat bounced over swells; passengers stumbled on deck and spilled drinks while waves hammered the bow. I’ve traveled the Channel every year since I can remember, but this was the first time going to the island without my […]
[flash fiction] The Barrow, the Nore and the Suir. Three rivers. Sister rivers. I remember. Three coins in a fountain. Gallia in tres partes divisa est. A new fountain pen for Christmas. Father was proud of my best copperplate. Miss Quiller pointing to the blackboard. Speak up, child. I emancipated the slaves. Who am I? […]
My new boss is a zombie. I do not mean one of those overworked and sleep-deprived corporate types; I mean rotting flesh, back from the dead, eat-your-family-at-night sort of beings. Think Night of the Living Dead. See Re-Animator. She is, however, gifted with speech. At our first staff meeting, she stood at the head of […]
My obsession with Michael Jackson began the day he died. Before then, I owned a handful of his albums and clawed my arms in the air like a “Thriller” zombie at dance parties, but so did millions of other people. On June 25, 2009, I was working in the office of a museum in Seattle, […]
Feeling classically teenaged and outcasted in my freshman year of high school, I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999)—an epistolary novel by Stephen Chbosky, narrated by a young boy named Charlie. On the first day of school that year, I’d eaten lunch in a bathroom stall. Over the next ten months, I endured […]
Fantasma Ghost (n.) The soul of a dead person / A disembodied spirit Incapable of passing Freely to a peaceful afterlife, Usually imagined as wandering among living persons. ++++++From Old English gast “soul, breath, life; good or bad spirit” ++++++From Proto-Indo-European *gheis “to be excited, amazed, frightened” La gente no cree que existo. Paso por […]
My grandparents, Henry Bullock and Lucille Ford Bullock, were farmers and owned their land. They grew corn and tobacco. As a child I helped remove eggs from the chicken coop and heeded the warning to stay away from Henry’s old mule. Lucille canned peaches, pickled cucumbers, made applesauce, jellies, and strawberries stewed in sugar. She […]
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