JOY

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Welcome to JOY, a special popup edition of Temple in the City. This edition isn’t meant to change the world or make light of the darkness so many feel and see around them. But we hope it will act like a sudden sunburst. A reminder that good things, beautiful things, glorious things happen all the time, all around us. Life grows in the most inhospitable places. We grow with it, whether we like it or not.

Some of the work here is just a few words. Or just the right words. Sometimes nonsense words or nonsense use of words. Words to make you smile or laugh or feel, for a moment, the warmth of a friendly sun, the touch of a loving breeze, the touch of another being, human or animal, equally in the dark, equally looking for strength to keep going. That moment can fuel the next moment, and the next. It doesn’t need anything else. It just is.

This idea started as a single, one-off micro edition but joy can’t be captured or limited. So we’re going to keep it alive and moving by making it an ongoing, open-ended issue. When a spark of joy comes our way, we’ll add it here.

Please let this issue wash over you. Let it give you some relief amid the burdens of being alive, with all that trying. Don’t ask it to be anything more or less than it is, then give yourself that same kindness.

We hope you find joy, here and everywhere you can.

Contributors

Karen Baumgart, Denise Bayes, Jessica Coles, Kristin Houlihan, Patrick Johanneson, Rachel Abbey McCafferty, Ben MacNair, Kathryn Reese, Slawka G. Scarso, Brigitta Scheib, Sumitra Singam, Karen Walker

Micro fiction, Brigitta Scheib

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The offering

The boy painted the sky pink, purple and gold, holding tight to the boar bristle brush as thick paint globs ran down the handle.

“One splash, two splashes,” he recited as he threw the inky colors into the air. Then he swirled and swirled until they married into one long, feathery horizon.

“Hello, Grandma,” he said, kneeling down to touch the smooth stone, cold and wet from the morning dew. He smiled and held the messy paintbrush out in front of him like a bouquet, clutching it with both hands, stained by the soft warm colors. “I brought you the sunrise.”

Brigitta Scheib lives in Harrisburg, PA with her husband, daughter and 3 orange cats. She just recently got back to writing, a hobby she last pursued in high school and college. @bscheib.bsky.social

Two poems, Ben Macnair 

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A poem about Christopher Walking

This is a poem about Christopher, walking,

because he doesn’t feel like driving.

He just needs some bread and some milk,

easy to carry in his on-ya bag.


I know that you are expecting this poem to

be about the Hollywood star Christopher Walken,

with his idiosyncratic way of speaking,

of dancing, and being in some classic films.


But no, this is just a poem about some bloke

called Christopher, going for a walk

because it is a nice day.

Cairo

We didn’t speak until Cairo,

I felt it rude to interrupt,

and he did seem to be having,

such a good time,

telling himself stories that 

no one else would believe.


Every sentence lasted ten minutes,

every paragraph was an hour,

every silence, a wasted opportunity

to shoehorn in another topic,

that wasn’t all about him.

Ben Macnair is an award winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair

Flash fiction, Sumitra Singam

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You-and-Kate in a Field, Loving Me

You and Kate are you-and-Kate with no interruption and that is how you love me. You-and-Kate found me, a mouse hiding in a hole and enticed me out with bits of cheese and memes of wet cats. You-and-Kate laugh like the earth is yearning for your voice and you-and-Kate make me open my throat with your smiles like staves waiting for my notes. You-and-Kate make dinners of bacon-baked bean-avocado-toast and I suggest vegemite to round it out, and you-and-Kate smack your foreheads and say, of course, the very thing! Like my idea has completed an unfinished puzzle, my mouse body nestled within you, the perfect filling to the sandwich. You-and-Kate say it is time to explore now that we are fed, and you-and-Kate hold my trembling, saying I’ll be okay because I’ll be with you. You-and-Kate lift tiny, empty travel bottles from the chemist for our road trip to the Big Banana, and fill some with vodka, and I fill some with hummus so we can be drunk and also responsible, and you-and-Kate hug me and thank me for my mouse sense. Me, and you-and-Kate drive across the vast, red country eating banana-shaped lollies, making banana jokes, singing banana-themed music that is mostly Bananarama. Halfway there, in a field at dawn, the grass thigh-high, none of us thinking of snakes, you-and-Kate run zoomies around me saying you love me like the field loves the burrowing of small animals. We collapse onto the grass, bindis seeding our skin, me, and you-and-Kate. The sky is ink, waiting for our story to unspool into the night. And the story is this. It is you-and-Kate in a field, loving me. 

Sumitra Singam is a queer, neurodiverse Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected for BSF 2025. She works as a psychiatrist and trauma therapist and runs workshops on how to write trauma safely, and the Yeah Nah reading series. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). You can find her and her other publication credits on Bluesky: @pleomorphic2 & sumitrasingam.squarespace.com

Micro fiction, Slawka G. Scarso 

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And then she told Jack off

When Jack ripped my favourite doll’s arm, I would no longer play with her.

‘She’s ugly,’ I moaned.

Grandma yelled at me. She said love isn’t about prettiness. Then she put a ‘doll hospital’ sign in the front garden: 

‘Any girl can bring her doll. Go tell your friends.’ 

In line, Lorena, Angela and I we waited our turn: torn dresses, broken arms, half-shaved heads, loose button-eyes. 

She took our crippled dolls, with their lopsided haircuts, their lives already damaged, and turned them into models – like those in Paris, she said. So, when we hugged them back, we said Merci. 

Slawka G. Scarso works as a copywriter and translator. Her words have appeared in Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit and Scrawl Place among others. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport Flash Award and for the 2023 and 2024 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Her debut novella in flash All Their Favourite Stories is available from Ad Hoc Fiction. She lives in Italy. More words on www.nanopausa.com

Poetry, Kathryn Reese

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Stim

The alphabet is an instrument and she’s in the kitchen strumming  “Coco banana!”

as she goes about breakfast. All the buzz—a whirlpool of milk, cocoa, banana

vanilla, cinnamon, honey smeared on the bench. She’s gone into improv—

doesn’t need the conductor. Just stage crew to clean or pass her cocoa, banana

cinnamon cinnamon honey no mango banana pushed through a sieve 

the lumps pushed from her mouth, the fruit pushed through her fist, banana

all we did right—and even     that pushed into the underside of the red tray table

and abandoned.         She made a bridge: coco-coco-coco-banana

peels to the sky. A whirlpool of milk. The buzz. The breakfast. The honey 

the honey the honey, the love. The incorrect proportions: cinnamon, cocoa, banana

The sludge.                                           The quiet part. 

What can’t be said, the alphabet, the instruments, the broken strings. The reason (banana)

we can’t enter that room (banana) the cocoa marshmallow the soothing 

the strumming. The long note. Banana. 

 

Kathryn Reese writes poetry & flash. She lives on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical microbiology and enjoys solo road trips, hiking and chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Her poems can be found in The Engine Idling, Epistemic Literary, Kelp Journal and Australian Poetry Journal. She was a winner of the Red Room Poetry’s #30in30 competition & the Heroines Women’s Writing Prize 2024. https://instagram.com/katwhetter? BlueSky: @kathrynreese.bsky.social


Micro fiction, Rachel Abbey McCafferty

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The summer the sky burned, our town got a new pool and only opened it three times 


We held our breath above and below, heat battling smoke, our lungs stretched, the sun permanently imprinted on our eyelids. We were all new proportions and unmet potential. We were the promise of a future. We held our dreams close. We did our best to live in the moment. We did not know enough to worry about what if.

We saved our spare change for fast food and bruised fruit and cheap wine.

We saved our spare breath for each other’s lips.

Rachel Abbey McCafferty has been writing since she first learned that was a thing people could do. Her work has appeared in journals like HAD, Maudlin House and formercactus.

Poetry, Kristin Houlihan

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Hibiscus


Lone blossom

First of the season 

Fuschia joy

Kristin Houlihan is a disabled poet, wife, and mother striving to live and love to the fullest while bedridden with Long Covid. She is cofounder and Poetry Editor at Epistemic Literary and Nimblewitlit Magazine, and her chapbook of micropoetry, Lift the Mask, is available widely. www.kristinhoulihan.com, Bluesky: kristinwrites.bluesky.social

Poetry, Karen Walker

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Roof Manifesto as read atop 4402 Zurich St E on July 14 2026


Tomorrow, everyone will be talking about our art. Will be looking up.

Terribly simple the art. The word. 

Roof. 

Three letters on four walls. 

Art expects trouble:

“authorities” broadcasting, “Come down immediately,”

know-it-all pigeons (warning: they’ve actually read the roof literature we said we did) cooing rooftop psychology about why we don’t and therefore write

about rooftop bourgeoisie

: infinity pools, potted palms, spiced chicken lettuce cups. 

Roof Viktoria and Roof Allison, that’s why we’re up here. 

Never ever take the shining corrupting elevator, Roof Akiel. 

Fire escape escape. 

Roof revolution, Roof Michelle and Sherri and

others barely in favour of ourselves. 

So repeat after me: 

Roof, roof, roof. 

Roo roo, roo, 

Oo, oo, oo 

then just f. F this, F that far, far below.

F everything heavy and rotting, sticky or not worth the $29.99. 

Go mad. Up here, lose consciousness but carefully.  

Roof is where world soul goes to get away. 

In the question of aesthetics, height is key.  

I shall now dispense with gravity. 

Float hand in hand Roof Joe and Roof Kamal.  

Blow away, risky Roof Rosa.  

In the question of connections, key is how the roof sits on the building and hangs from the sky. 

Dispense with convention to free the o to fool and roam, to meow and moan as if in the throes:

yoof  

moof  

yoof di moof

Roof is where it ends and begins. 

poof

boof 

goof 

boof boof

spoof 

proof.   

Karen Walker draws and paints and writes in Ontario, Canada. Her recent work is in Full House Literary, Weird Lit Magazine,Trash Cat Lit, Blink Ink, Switch, Turn and Work, and Temple in a City. @kawalker.bsky.social

Flash fiction, Denise Bayes

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Becoming Mrs Dalloway

It is an ordinary Wednesday afternoon when she is suddenly overtaken by the spirit of Clarissa. She has been going about her usual chores after a dreary day in the office, dashing to the supermarket to get some frozen pizzas for dinner and checking that the dry cleaner will still be open by the time she gets out of the store. Carrying out the endless chores of a single mum. 

And then it happens.

She stops in the middle of the street. A sudden impulse fills her.

 She must buy flowers. 

Peonies, she thinks, imagining blousy pink blooms in childhood gardens.  She turns back towards the independent  florist shop in the high street.

She has never been inside before, has always thought of flowers as an unnecessary luxury.  As the bell announces her entry with a tinkling tune, an unfamiliar calm descends upon her. The owner  is behind the counter, her fingers twisting stems into a bouquet of roses and gypsophila.

Walking between rows of zinc pots filled with a variety of blooms, her fingers drift across the petals, releasing a whoosh of perfume. She leans towards a rose, inhales it. She  is an elegant lady in a Waterhouse painting.

“I need peonies. For my party.” She says to the florist, already visualising an imaginary soiree in her dining room.

Reaching home, she drops her parcel of blooms onto the rarely used dining table. As the children have grown into teenagers, they have migrated to sprawling on sofas at meal times. Screens have replaced conversation.
 But tonight will be different. 
 She trims the stems and arranges them into a glass vase, rescued from beneath the sink.  Soon she has covered the table with a glitter of forks and knives.

She can see the children’s shock when they return from school. They  halt, stunned by the  heady scent of flowers filling the hallway.

“Just time to change for dinner…” she announces in a calm voice. And smiles. The muscles in her face twitch at the unfamiliar upward movement.

The children nod, walking upstairs in bemused silence.

Tonight, she thinks,  they will eat together and share stories of their day across the table. They will laugh, smile. And for one glorious night, she will be Mrs Dalloway.

Denise Bayes’ writing has appeared in various places including NZ Micro Madness, Oxford Flash, Free Flash Fiction, NFFD Anthology, 100 Word Story, Thin Skin, Temple in a City and Underbelly Press. Denise lives in Barcelona, Spain with her husband and a cavalier called Rory, who is usually under the desk. @deniseb.bsky.social

Two poems, Jessica Coles

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Meet the enchantress, wherever she is

on the way to the pond where

I contemplate the innocence of frogs


I remove my shoes, leave behind 

scarf and belt that disrupt ecosystems of narrative


hem of my skirt teaches forgotten lessons 

how to rot with purpose


who could reject an offer of metamorphosis?

I grow extra joints to leap from logic


weave moss, reed, algae into wisdom

this marshy garment redefines sweetness:


witch-selves I drowned re-emerge 

to croak twilight joy 

Ignius Benevolus

Joy is an elusive light, a path that leads 

to insubstantial ground


in dark forests, untrustworthy flutters

and sparks at the edges of sight:


what guides my doubtful steps?


Perhaps not all flickers of 

luminescence intend deception.


What if delight can be captured, what if hope’s phantasm 

has solid edges—in the right shadow?


Perhaps you teach my feet 

lightness, how to dance through swamps 


so that when toes meet water’s edge

reeds coalesce into cobblestone


shifting shape like the joy of being

beckoned down a safe path that restores


my faith in ethereal candles 

that lures me 


home.

Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where she lives with her family, a tuxedo cat named Miss Bennet, a tarantula named Miss Dashwood, and a green keel-bellied lizard named Bao Long. Her work has appeared in print and online at Prairie Fire, Moist Poetry Journal, Full Mood Mag, atmospheric quarterly, Stone Circle Review, CV2, The Fiddlehead, Capital City Press Anthology (Vol. 4), Ghost City Review, slips slips, and elsewhere. She has self-published two chapbooks, Unless You’re Willing to Evaporate and The Lyrics Prompt Poems: Ultimate Collector’s Edition (prairievixenpress.ca). Find her on Bluesky @prairievixen.bsky.social 

Poetry, Karen Baumgart 

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Karen Baumgart lives in Australia and adores beautiful quotes, pink things, cats, and chai lattes. She loves working in human services policy, especially when it enables marginalised people to have a voice. Karen used to be an English teacher and is quite certain that writing is, indeed, the best therapy. Instagram: @miss.cake.girl Bluesky: @cake-girl.bsky.social Twitter / X: @cake_girl__

Creative non-fiction micro, Patrick Johanneson

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Patrick Johanneson

The light, the light

Just two days before this, I turned fifty. It’s possible, if unlikely, that the sun launched the coronal mass ejection that caused this display on my birthday; maybe even at the exact moment of my birth + a half-century.

I sat out under this sky for a couple hours, watching the lights dance for everyone but also for me. They were better by far than candles on a cake. I thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle’s saying—If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is—and I smiled.

Patrick Johanneson writes prairie-flavoured science fiction & fantasy. His work has been published in On Spec, Tesseracts 14, Daily Science Fiction, and Parallel Prairies, among others. He won the Manitoba Short Fiction contest in ’04. He’s also a WordPress Multisite maven, an amateur photographer who appreciates a good aurora, a judo instructor and referee, an aficionado of Canadian and indie cinema, and a lover of Norse mythology. Patrick lives in Manitoba with his wife Kathleen. Check out his website at https://patrickjohanneson.com/

Outtake

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Inquisitive photo bomber interrupts the shoot.