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JOY
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, Lance Mazmanian, C. Oulens, Tracie Renee, Kathryn Reese, Slawka G. Scarso, Brigitta Scheib, Sumitra Singam, Karen Walker, Huina Zheng.
Fiction, Emily Rinkema
Lou
The day before the Dairy Princess finals at the State Fair, Lou sits in a refrigerated room for six hours while a sculptor carves her shoulders, her neck, her chin, her cheeks, her ears, her hair out of a 90 pound block of Grade A Minnesota butter.
Her mom promised this would be it, that if she just did this one last pageant, she’d never ask her to wear a dress again, and yes, fine, she could even cut off her hair. But Lou won her county last weekend, a surprise to everyone except her mother and Judge Mackey, her mom’s high school boyfriend, and now here she was, one of ten Dairy Princess finalists having their busts carved out of butter.
After, Lou waits in the cold room for her mother to pick her up. She stares at her butter self, at the smooth skin, at the gentle curve of the nose, at the high, feminine cheeks. She wonders if this is what others see when they look at her, if her own image of herself could be this far off. She runs her finger down the cheek. The sculptor had left off the scar on her forehead. The inch-long half moon above her right eyebrow is her favorite thing about her face. With her thumbnail, she cuts the scar into the butter.
*
The next afternoon, Lou stands in the kitchen holding her Runner Up sash while she watches her father make room in the refrigerator for the sculpture of her head. She’d gone straight to her room to change into shorts and a t-shirt when they got home, and then she’d practiced what she would say when she handed the sash to her mom. But now that she’s here, sash in hand, she can’t do it.
Lou’s dad stacks tupperware on the counter in order to make space. He works quickly because it’s 90 degrees in the kitchen and already the butter is starting to soften. They’d driven it home in the back of the air conditioned van, but moving it from the refrigerated room at the state fair to the van and then from the van to the kitchen in this summer heat has caused the left cheek to droop.
“You’re lucky,” her mom says, staring at the sculpture. “When I won Dairy Princess only the winner got to take home her bust. All the others were donated to Craymore’s for the pigs,” she laughs. “Those were some happy pigs!”
Lou’s dad lifts the head into the refrigerator. She notices he doesn’t look at it while he’s moving it. He hadn’t been at the judging this afternoon, said he had to help out at the calf barn because they were short handed. She wonders if he knew she was going to lose, if he didn’t want to be there with all the other fathers when her name wasn’t called.
“Done,” he says, and walks out of the kitchen. The screen door slams shut behind him as Lou’s mom turns the pale yellow sculpture a little bit to the right, and then back. She squints at the face, lit by the fridge light, the up-do that had been so carefully carved into hundreds of distinct strands now melted together into a helmet and the left eye slightly lower than the right. “So pretty, Louisa,” she says, and sighs.
“That’s not my name,” Lou says, which is as close to honesty as she can get.
Her mom shuts the refrigerator door. “Remember this moment,” she says, but all Lou can think about is the face in the fridge, stuck between the iced tea and a tupperware full of chicken broth.
*
Lou can’t sleep thinking about the head so she sneaks into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. It’s late and the house is silent. It’s heavier than she imagined, and she knocks over the mayonnaise as she tries to lift it off the shelf.
“Need some help?” her dad says from behind her. He must have been sleeping in the living room again. He says it’s cooler. He doesn’t wait for her to answer, just reaches his hands in next to hers, and after a moment, they have the head on the table.
“It looks nothing like you,” he says.
“It melted some,” Lou replies.
“Even before,” he says, and then gestures at the head. “What next?”
“I hadn’t thought it that far through,” Lou says.
*
Lou’s dad cradles the head in his arms like a newborn calf. They stand by the creek, her favorite place on the farm. She used to fantasize about building a tiny house right on the bank with a porch that hung out over the water, but now all she can imagine is getting as far away from this town as she can, from people who will never see her.
“Sure you want to do this?” Her dad asks, and she nods. They take a step towards the water.
“I don’t know what to tell mom,” she says.
“I’ll take care of your mom,” he says. “She’ll get there, Lou.”
He passes her the head. The butter feels cool against her skin and she looks down at her face, at the girl looking up at her.
“I hate it so much,” she says. She waits for her father to say something, but he clears his throat and turns away.
Lou steps forward and drops the head into the water. She wants it to float away, to be carried swiftly by the current, but it just bobs for a moment and then floats into the bank, where it wedges against the exposed root of a tree. Her father takes off his boots and steps into the water. He leans over and gently pulls the head away from the bank. He guides it into the middle of the creek and lets go.
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Variant Lit, Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema)
Flash fiction, 2 stories, Huina Zheng
The Pin Inside My Body
There’s a pin beneath my skin. It’s lodged under my right breast, between the ribs, like a stubborn thorn. X-rays show nothing—I’ve been to five hospitals. The doctors all say it’s anxiety.
But at night, the sharp sting wakes me. My fingertips can trace its shape—sometimes upright, sometimes flat, sometimes slanted deep in the flesh.
Is the pin real?
Or just a figment of my mind?
Yet the pain is undeniable.
When my daughter runs through the park, the ache returns. Just as I open my mouth to call her, she falls on the gravel path, blood beading on her knee. Her cry sharpens the sting, drives it into bone. My husband’s key turns in the lock—it digs deeper. When he vents about clients, reeking of alcohol, I feel it drifting through my veins. My father’s fist. My mother’s trembling arms. The dull thud of flesh against flesh. Maybe that’s when it pierced me—quiet, unnoticed.
How do I ask a surgeon to find the pin buried between my bones?
The Cloud on the Balcony
When the humid spring days in Guangzhou came to an end, a tuft of white cloud appeared on the first-floor balcony behind iron railings in my building. The balcony faced the narrow path I took home from school, right beside the main entrance. Every day after class, I’d tiptoe to peer inside until one day, the cloud moved. It was a puppy. She let out two soft barks, her nose pressed against the gaps in the railing.
Before long, she learned to squeeze through the bars, darting toward me like a bolt of white lightning before rolling onto her back, pink belly exposed. “She wants you to pet her,” my mother said. “Dogs love that.” And she did. As I stroked her soft stomach and the fluffy fur on her forehead, her eyes would drift shut. But if my father was the one picking me up, he’d march straight upstairs, muttering “Disgusting,” the same word he used when fighting with my mother.
Seasons passed, and the puppy grew familiar with everyone in the building. On rainy days, her fur hung in damp clumps; on sunny ones, it fluffed up like dandelion seeds. One evening, I watched her bound joyfully toward a neighbor carrying grocery bags. But the woman kicked her away with a sharp “Scram!” The puppy whimpered. That same night, no matter how many times my mother explained the math problem about ratios and age differences, I couldn’t understand. She slapped me and I cried, but the numbers still refused to make sense.
Most days, the puppy had little freedom. Often, she was locked in a tiny cage, watching me pass with wide, dark eyes. Other times, they tied her up, and no matter how hard she strained against the rope, she couldn’t reach me. She never barked because her owners would beat her with clothes hangers if she did. My father would pull me upstairs, and we’d stare at each other through the bars until I was dragged out of sight.
Now, she’s gone. I don’t know when it happened. Just that one day, the balcony was empty, as if she’d never existed. Like my father, whose slippers vanished from the doorway one afternoon, whose clothes disappeared from the closet. “Don’t ask about him,” my mother said. “He is a terrible and irresponsible man.” So I filled my notebook with white clouds, one of them with chocolate-brown eyes, wagging its tail on the balcony.
Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her stories have been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other reputed publications. Her work has been nominated thrice for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her family.
Fiction, June Gemmell
The Homecoming
She stood in front of the old house and breathed it in. The summer breeze lifted the dust from the warm pavement, ruffled the bushes at the front door with its fingers. The windows seemed different now, darker, empty of life. But the front garden looked broadly the same, just more tired. Overgrown shrubs framed the lawn, untidy limbs spilling out in all directions.
She hadn’t been here since the the clearing out of her mother’s furniture and belongings. The boxes of photographs, assorted cheap jewellery and tea sets still lay untouched in her garage two hundred miles to the south. She had selected one photograph from the box, her favourite, and put it into a silver frame. It was of her mother as a young woman wearing her new summer dress and a homemade daisy chain, hair windblown and eyes squinting into the sunlight.
Someone else lived here now. She didn’t want to trespass, but no one seemed to be around. The driveway sat empty of cars. Someone was sawing in a distant garage, and she could hear the murmur of a lawnmower further up the street.
The first paving slab on the path was still split in two and she traced the line with her toe. A parched little geranium at the front door tipped its head to the side and stared at her sadly. She raised her eyes to the windows again. The curtains were different, alien. Unfamiliar ceramic cats sat on the windowsill.
On summer days she had sat on this doorstep, mixing rose petals with water and sugar in jam jars, making perfume. On winter days she had kicked snow off her boots against the top step, fingers numb. Her mother would be there with a hot cocoa to grasp between freezing hands. Her mother was always there, for scraped knees, cut fingers, and later, wiping away tears when boys broke her teenage heart.
She had no memory of her father. He had left before she was two, and he was never spoken of afterwards. For her whole childhood it was just her and her mother.
For a moment she thought she saw movement at the window, and she caught her breath, but it was just the reflection of clouds scudding across the blue sky. No sound came from the house, no shuffle of slippers up the hallway, no call of a voice.
On either side, the neighbouring gardens were altered, fences pulled down, walls put up, driveways pushed into front gardens. She wondered if any of the ghosts of the long gone neighbours were still there, looking out of their windows, watching her.
She hadn’t been here much in her mother’s later years. Mainly because she lived so far away. She should have phoned more often, she knew, but after she moved, her mother was more sullen over the phone. She would give short, clipped answers to her questions, always giving the impression that there was something else she would rather be doing. And at the end… well she hadn’t made it up from Manchester in time. She swallowed hard at the memory. She should have left earlier, but there were things to be organised at work.
Her mother had died as she drove over the border. The hospital phoned. She sat in the lay-by for a long time, not sure how she felt, not sure what to do next.
In the end she had driven to the hospital to see her mother who was serene, but absent. She felt she should say something, but what? Goodbye? She couldn’t break the silence in the death room with words. None were sufficient or appropriate.
The next week was spent in activity, funeral preparation, lawyer’s meetings. She arranged for the house to be cleared except for the few boxes she took home with her.
She walked up the side of the house. The old lilac bush had seen better days. It still pushed out a few isolated blooms here and there between the bare twigs. She held back from pressing a blossom to her face. She was worried the remembered fragrance would be missing, or not the same. But the flowers reached out as she passed, and brushed her arm.
Like a thief, she padded round to the back. She remembered the ping and echo her footsteps used to make in the small narrow space between the two high walls. She breathed in the air, as if the same air would still be there after all these years. She did feel in a strange way that something of the small child she had been was left here. And she searched, in vain, for a sense of her mother.
The washing line between the two concrete posts was gone, replaced by a modern whirlygig hung with striped towels, spinning in the drying wind. There was a new garden hut, a scattering of colourful plastic toys across the lawn, and a swing with a shiny aluminium frame and a red seat.
She knew that her mother hadn’t come to terms with her move to England, but it was where the work was. She ran her fingers along the ridged plastic seat of the swing. She seated herself on it and scanned the back windows for signs of life. Nothing moved.
Slowly, slowly she moved her legs to and fro. Higher and higher she swung with flushed cheeks and hair blown backwards and forwards, above the fences and hedges. She laughed aloud. Just at that moment she pictured a dark haired woman hanging out the washing, sheets flapping on a summer day. The woman bent down to pick up a peg and a small child encircled her neck with a daisy chain. They exchanged a smile and the mother kissed her forehead.
Her sob caught in her throat. She whispered something but the sounds were fragile and got lost in the air. Then, louder over the fences and treetops she called out ‘Sorry’.
June Gemmell writes short stories and flash fiction. She is a reader for Fractured Lit. Her words have been published by Frazzled Lit, Trash Cat Lit, Moonlit Getaway, Gutter Magazine, Northern Gravy, Hooghly Review, Gone Lawn, and The Phare. She is working on her first collection of short stories.
Two poems, Yuan Changming
To depart (free haiku)
Means to move along with sunlight
& leave your shadow longer & longer
Behind, or the other way around
The Chinese Spirit: a Mythological Review
Unlike your legendary Alexander the Great
None of us has come to conquer; nor are we
To be conquered (even by God), let alone any
Human artifacts or behaviours, including science
And tech blockades & tariffs. Rather, as Confucius
Has taught us, we always avoid talking of strange
Phenomena, feats of strength, disorder or sprits
Whereas we do worship our
Ancestors, especially those never accepting defeat
Such as the ever stubborn Houyi who persisted
In shooting down all the nine extra suns as they
Made the world too hot; the determined
Xingtian who soldiered on long after his head
Was chopped off; the old Mr. Fool who must
Remove the mountain blocking his way rather
Than relocating his cottage; the simple-minded
Jingwei who kept filling the East Sea with twigs
Where she was drowned; the devoted Dayu trying
To contain the Flood instead of escaping from
It in an ark as did your Noah, (so cute & creative)
Yuan Changming co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Writing credits include 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and 2149 other publications worldwide. A poetry juror for Canada’s 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began to write prose in 2022, his hybrid novel DETACHING, ‘silver romance’ THE TUNER and short story collection FLASHBACKS available at Amazon.
Flash fiction, Kyla Houbolt
Generation
Like this:
There will be snow, abundant and thick, the branches of huge firs bowed down with its weight. Beneath such a canopy one can find a small room roofed by icy white and crisp green needles. She crawls in there and leans against the trunk for a minute to catch her breath. It is not quite as cold as you might think but still she rests for a little while and then gently, with no force at all, she exhales from her open mouth a prolonged sigh, the vapor crystallizing instantly, and as her breath turns to ice clouds, shapes begin to coalesce, large and furred with the slightly greyed white they need for camouflage, and one by one as she breathes out, they step away from the small room until seven or eight have gathered. Then as a pack they bound forth from that place into invisibility, the forest swallowing them whole.
They will have everything they need. She has seen to it. No other magic is required. Not by the wolves, and not by us.
Later, if you were to look there you’d see she is gone–leaving only her own large paw prints on the snow.
Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina, USA. Her full length collection, Becoming Altar, is forthcoming from Subpress Collective in the fall of 2025. https://www.kylahoubolt.us/index.html
Micro fiction, Elizabeth Rosen
Endeavor
He looked away sadly, picking at the seam of his hospital gown. “I thought it was something I might be good at.”
I knew what he meant. I had a memory of holding his hand as a boy while our daddy told us we’d always be failures.
That was the time after I’d been benched for the season, but between us later there would be hunting trips with no blooding, carpentry that resulted in wonky structures, creative writing classes that yielded no poetry, auto-tech training foiled by an aversion to dirty hands, marriages foiled by an inability to share.
I’d remember those things my brother tried later, after he jumped.
Elizabeth Rosen (she/her) is a native New Orleanian and a transplant to small-town Pennsylvania. She misses gulf oysters and Southern ghost stories, but has become appreciative of snow and colorful scarves. Colorwise, she’s an autumn. She still wants her MTV. Her stories have appeared in places such as North American Review, Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, and New Flash Fiction Review. Learn more at www.thewritelifeliz.com.
Poetry, Toni della Fata
Baby, are you a believer?
I don’t believe in God anymore.
But I believe in foxes, standing on the hood of my neighbour’s 2024 Toyota,
in blood moons in the dead heat of summer,
in gravestones with handwritten notes taped to the marble, spelled incorrectly in a foreign language,
in crumpled birthday cards and sun-stained photos in a shoebox underneath my mattress.
“Ci vediamo,” see you soon, I remember telling myself,
at the foot of your bed,
the mausoleum,
the pier,
at an apartment in Montreal’s east-end.
I believe in the text messages you sent me,
in the accidental photo you took of yourself in the hospital,
they sit undeleted, like cremated ashes on my phone.
“Don’t remember me like this,” you said in broken English, because you wanted me to understand,
I promised that I wouldn’t but of course that was a lie.
I believe in the clock reaching half past noon, one April afternoon, sitting in my high-school’s music room, dread creeping like a morning glory up my throat.
I believe in early spring sadness, budding with the daffodils in the ditch off the cemetery’s main road.
I believe we’ll always be tethered together, your electric pulse in mine,
Though I spent years fighting it,
I close my eyes,
Watch our images,
blur,
overlap,
collapse.
Maybe if I can’t believe in God, I can at least believe in You.
Toni della Fata is a lesbian writer based in Toronto, Canada. She is a professional daydreamer, whose work focuses on the fringes between fiction and reality. When she isn’t writing, Toni can be found in a nearby stream counting fish or somewhere on the coast collecting sea shells.
Two coloured pencil drawings on paper, Karen Walker
Katharine when older and more red. Nose straighter
Not me
Karen Walker draws and writes in Ontario, Canada. Her recent work is in or forthcoming in Club Plum, Feral, Switch, Weird Lit, Underbelly Press, and Wallstrait.
Flash Fiction, Monica Dickson
Friday
In the future, Marie will reinvent herself. But first she will disappear to have the baby. Then she will reappear to sit her exams, the baby safely delivered by her mother to a nice family that Marie will never meet, in a city she will never visit. She will get a place at Uni to study law, then she will use her natural talent for winning an argument to train as a barrister. She will drink too much. She will smoke too much. She will quit smoking. She will join a gym. One day she will write to Robert, the baby’s father, and she will tell him how well she is doing and how she hopes they did the right thing for all of them, and he will treasure the letter, but he will not write back. Marie will think about the child, and how and who they are, but she will only allow herself to do this for an allotted half-hour, every Friday, after work and before dinner.
In the future, Robert will sell insurance. But first he will party his way through an extended adolescence that lasts long into his third decade. He will drink and do drugs with a commitment bordering on a qualification. He will stop drinking and doing drugs when one of his friends has a stroke. He will barrel through a string of co-dependent relationships – with women who will cook and clean and care for him, until his tearful, late-night self-examinations become too difficult a form of mothering. When he finds himself alone, he will read and re-read the letter from Marie. He will keep the letter in a hanging file marked Miscellaneous and he will think about the child – now an adult – and how and who they are, and he will think about having a drink, but he won’t.
In the future, Theresa will watch as Marie’s star rises. She will congratulate herself on making the right decision. She will tell her friends how happy her daughter is, how she drinks cocktails with high-flying clients, how she stays in the best hotels. She will sometimes think about the baby’s tiny foot in Marie’s hand, just a child herself; the argument Marie couldn’t win. One day, Theresa will write to the adoption agency and she will ask them to pass on another letter, from her, to the child – who will always be a child in her mind – but Theresa will be told, kindly and efficiently, that it is not allowed under the terms of the non-contact agreement they made all those years ago.
In the future, when Theresa dies, Marie will clear her house. She will break this task down into manageable timescales: Monday to Thursday, for half an hour, after work and before dinner. One day, Marie will find a sealed envelope, addressed, in her mother’s handwriting, to a person she doesn’t know. She will think about opening it, but she won’t. She will take the letter home, she will file it under Health – general, she will pour herself a large glass of wine and she will look forward to Friday.
Monica Dickson writes flash fiction and (longer) short stories. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, jmww, Splonk, X-R-A-Y and elsewhere online, as well as in various print journals and anthologies. Her story ‘Receipts’ was selected for the inaugural Best British and Irish Flash Fiction award (BIFFY50). She won the 2019 Northern Short Story Festival Flash Fiction Slam and is a graduate of the Northern Short Story Festival Academy. More at writingandthelike.wordpress.com and @mondickson.bsky.social
Three poems, Joshua Walker
If It Still Hurts, It Means You’re Awake
That’s the rule. The rest is metaphor.
Your heart- a pit viper curled in a shoe.
Your breath- a coin flipped into a dry well.
Your name – an echo
that winces when it’s called.
If it still hurts, maybe you outlived the ritual.
Maybe the smoke didn’t take.
Maybe your ribs learned
to sing without permission.
Once, your doctor asked if you heard voices.
You said: only when they need something.
He smiled like that meant “no.”
If it still hurts,
it might be the prayer decomposing.
It might be God peeling your name
off his tongue like a scab.
It might be
you,
again,
asking to be known
and bleeding when you’re not.
You Were Born With Your Hands Full:
A splinter of moon,
a dead wasp,
your grandfather’s last breath.
You’ve never known how to be empty.
Even now
you carry pills,
lost buttons,
a girl’s hair from a bus seat in 2011
you never got to return.
Grief taught you balance.
Joy taught you guilt.
Your shoulders forgot
how to drop.
Once you told someone
you couldn’t cry anymore.
They said:
Then let the salt come through your palms.
You dig holes in the dirt
just to watch them stay open.
You believe in silence.
But not the kind
that forgives.
The Mouth Remembers Before the Mind
The salt of her skin,
the word you swallowed
so hard it grew teeth.
Your tongue is a reliquary.
There are prayers lodged
in your molars.
One cracks every time
you lie about being okay.
Sometimes you dream
of bees nested in your throat,
buzzing secrets your body
never agreed to keep.
You speak in thorns now.
You call it healing.
You call it poetry.
You call it
not dying.
Your mother’s voice
was the first ghost
to take up space in you.
You were seven.
You still are.
You wake with a taste
you can’t place
a little iron,
a little mercy,
a little god.
Joshua Walker is a poet and storyteller, also known as The Last Bard. His work explores memory, identity, and the fragile beauty of survival amid hardship. Drawing on personal experience with mental illness and a deep love for myth and lyricism, Joshua crafts poems that are raw, intimate, and unflinchingly honest. He shares his voice widely on social media and continues to build a community of readers and fellow seekers.
Bluesky@bigjosh84 Insta/threads@bigjosh84thelastbard
Flash fiction, Vijayalakshmi Sridhar
I heard you became a father again
A son this third time. Here. Take a laddoo. It is from your favourite shop. Jalaram’s. Motichoor. Not the Besan laddoo that you upturned a plateful during our third year Diwali celebration, leaving floury bits all around, like a bomb explosion. That day my heart sank at your disrespect.
There she is – your second wife. Here. Feed her a laddoo. She needs to be lauded. For producing a heir. For helping you shed your skin as my husband, the cover for all the love shared for thirteen years. You said I must learn from her, by drinking her urine, borrowing and sleeping on her pillow to absorb lessons on how to be a ‘good’ wife.
Where is your mother – the evil goddess who held your dubious honour aloft? Has she ever played any role other than being a yes-woman, refusing to see my side? You’d say I planted the bone of contention in the first place. In your eyes, she is infallible and tolerated all my mistakes too. You owe her for today. Celebrate with a laddoo.
Why am I at your son’s naming ceremony with a box of laddoo? Why laddoo? Because by its shape it represents the universe. The fried flour pearls are the human lives; the sugar syrup is the love that is supposed to give the binding. Fried cashews and raisins are the good and bad tidings and the cloves- those spicy bits are the real deal. They are the tests for love.
Fine, don’t buy all this. Don’t fret about guilt and conscience, duty or the failure of it or the energy exchange that has happened all these years in the give and take between you and me, just come forward. Take a laddoo.
Come on, take one; Make a move.
Vijayalakshmi Sridhar is a writer of features and fiction in Chennai, a coastal city in South India.
Two poems, Peter Cashorali
The Lover
If you’re a hallucination that’s okay. If you’re the relationship with my mother when I was two that’s fine. If you’re the product of my having been born in 1954 and living since then in a temperate zone of the planet, sure. An aspect of capitalist consumer culture? Okay! Maybe you are just a trick of the light, made of the afternoon light and Thai food. Don’t you get it? I don’t need you to “really exist.” Just be with me.
Real
You’re faking it, and suddenly you’re not. You’re fooling yourself, and the real thing assembles out of your foolishness and is here. Surely there are wrong ways to go but on every path here it is, the where, the what, the who you seek, and despair of finding, and always knew was fake, that dug the cellar of your grief, that was how your family made its fortune, that your father gambled away when he was young, and the fortune roamed the world, searching for you on every road in back country so no road was the wrong one, that one morning at daybreak steps up to you, clasps your cold hands in its own and says, “Oh my God. You really do exist.”
Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist
Fiction, Travis Flatt
Say: “There’s a Dragon, Camel Boy!”
“Watch out, King Arthur, there is, there is…” my son, Jay, says. He stands teetering on stage in his little burlap robe, his Merlin costume, swinging his arms and shuffling his feet. He looks to the side of the stage where his kindergarten teacher, Miss Katie, sits smiling in an honest-to-God director’s chair. She mouths something, but my son only furrows his brow, looks out at us parents, and scrunches his face. His mouth and chin are obscured by the cotton ball beard his mom, my Ex, made for him. His eyes are huge and I worry that underneath his lips are quivering.
At home, during my weeks with him, he and I practiced his lines. He’s only got three of them. He’s supposed to warn Rylee Faulk, who plays King Arthur, that there’s a dragon protecting the sword in the stone. Not part of the legend, but they’re only six.
The parents titter in the silence.
Rylee Faulk, in her cardboard armor and Burger King crown shouts. “Say: ‘There’s a dragon,’ Camel Boy!”
Gasps from the parents. Miss Katie hops up from her director’s chair. My Ex, seated at the far end of my row, stands and makes a choked outraged sound alarmingly close to a death rattle.
Rylee’s mom, in the third row, stands and says, “Oh my God. I’m so sorry darling.” (Whether “darling” refers to my son or my Ex, I’m unsure.)
At the beginning of the school year, Miss Katie texted all parents to warn/admonish that students were mocking my boy’s cleft lip. His scar divides the flesh between his nose and upper lip, which puffs out below either nostril. This engendered “Camel Boy.” A plastic surgeon in Nashville said he’ll fix it once he’s older.
My son raises his wizard staff, a large piece of brown construction paper rolled into a cylinder, shoulder high, then levels it at Rylee to hurl like a spear and says, “Die, Pants!”
(There was another incident where Rylee had an accident, wet her pants on the playground, followed by a similar email to the parents.)
Unphazed, Rylee readies her sword, also construction paper, only more elaborate in, well, construction.
Jay throws. Rylee effortlessly bats the spear aside with a twirling parry. Some parents actually cheer.
Saying, “No, no, no—children, this is not how we [something inaudible],” Miss Katie charges into the fray but skids to a halt. Rylee and Jay cross and grasp each other in a bear hug, giggling, squealing.
My son, I know, has an enormous crush on Rylee. She’s all he talks about. My Ex, in our “updates on Jay” chats during drop off exchanges—which are generally the two highlights of my month (the chats are)—insists our kid is too young for a crush. But I had crushes at his age.
At the smattering of applause, Rylee and Jay bow. Miss Katie steps forward and insists they finish the show.
Two of Jay’s friends push on a wooden backdrop, a mural of a green dragon coiled around a gold hilted sword. The quality of the painting far outstrips the costumes, the props, and the other backdrops, which were made/painted by the kids. The dragon was the work of Miss Katie. Our printer paper handbills, mock programs with bios for each little actor and stagehand, concludes with a page-long bio of Miss Katie, who apparently earned a technical theater MFA at UT Knoxville.
The final scene is supposed to be Rylee alone, though Jay remains onstage holding her hand. Rylee, after proclaiming “Have at thee” whacks the dragon painting, then—although she already has a sword—kneels in front of what one assumes is Excalibur.
A blackout, the show’s only light cue, and lights up on Rylee and Jay appearing to contemplate a first kiss. Again, Miss Katie rushes in, this time making it, and grabs their hands. She raises them, which earns an enthusiastic, if confused, second applause.
In the elementary school’s lobby—White Plains is K-6th—we parents mill about congratulating one another and one another’s children. I find my Ex and say “What the fuck was that?” a little too loud.
“Right?” she says.
“The sword thing was cool,” I say. “The kid’s got a future in that.” (I don’t know what “that” is, but this is how most of our conversations go.)
“I guess,” says my Ex. “Nice dragon.”
Rylee’s mom shoulders through the small, needlessly congested crowd and apologizes for the “Camel Boy” thing.
Jay rushes between the three of us and announces that he and Rylee are “betrothed”—his words—then demands someone take them out for ice cream to celebrate. Rylee’s mom and Jay wander off to join the crowd-within-crowd praising Rylee.
Tonight is supposed to be my Ex’s handoff of Jay to me. It’s now the two of us alone. “Ice cream?” I say.
My Ex stands frowning, looks back and forth from me and Jay, says, sharp and sarcastic, mocking,“Are you asking me out?” But looks instantly, deeply embarrassed. We both flush. We both teeter on the tile of the lobby. We sway, swinging our arms, and shuffling our feet. Look off into the wings.
Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in Fractured, Variant Lit, Prime Number, Gone Lawn, and other places. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs, often with his wife and son. @WriterLeeFlatt (Twitter/X) @travisflatt.bsky.social Travis Flatt, Author (Facebook)
Micro, Colin James
Pork butt salad
Thought about stealing Amazon packages off doorsteps to generate some extra income, but all of my generous neighborshave cameras with speakers, sometimes having long conversations with me from across the street. A bit nerve wracking what with all the questions they ask. Amazing what one normalizes. I haven’t reconsidered attending the Abominable Absurdism Reunion, still pretty firm on that. Then there are the watchdog animals behind electric fences that run at me aggressively and suddenly stop. Pretty sure their vocal chords have been removed cause when I stop for a little chat they just groan. The stabled horses are doing much better. The arses that sit atop them call to me imaginatively in various degrees of missionary undress. I have a beat-up but clean van that might pass for an emergency vehicle, inclusive or exclusive at a moments notice. Uniforms I don’t aspire to but then again, if they could help get me in why not? I’m game.
Colin James has a couple of chapbooks of poetry published. Dreams Of The Really Annoying from Writing Knights Press and A Thoroughness Not Deprived of Absurdity from Piski’s Porch Press and a book of poems, Resisting Probability, from Sagging Meniscus Press. He lives in Massachusetts.
Poetry, Todd Matson
Author/Artist Todd Matson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in North Carolina, United States. His poetry has been published Feminine Collective, San Antonio Review, The Brussels Review, and featured in Poetry for Mental Health. He has also written lyrics for songs recorded by several contemporary Christian music artists, including Brent Lamb, Connie Scott and The Gaither Vocal Band.
Flash fiction, Denise Bayes
Goddess
Before she came, there was only darkness. Unremitting night surrounded, moonless. Their limbs shrank, conserving energy within their bodies like bulbs sheltering in winter soil.
And then she dropped into their midst. One of them caught sight of her in the woods, a bright sphere of light, illuminating the world. They stared at her from the grey shadows. They watched the warmth of her smile that radiated light into dank corners of the forest. Her fingers stretched wide, leaking flashes of brightness into their world.
They turned to each other, shaking their heads in puzzlement.
Could they trust her lightness?
A few of the braver ones began to move towards her. As they tiptoed closer, their bodies shivered as brightness began to pulse through their limbs. An unfamiliar energy photosynthesised their veins. As their pinprick pupils began to adjust to the glare, they shrugged off the frowns of the dark years. Etiolated limbs began to stretch and lengthen in her powerful rays.
Then she began to speak and her maple-syrup sweet voice reached them. She spoke of love and happiness, filling the woods with the beauty of words. Soon the reluctant ones drew closer, taking slow steps towards the new world, she had revealed. There was joy in their faces. They formed songs with their new vocabulary and smiled in her presence, shrugged off the old world.
One morning, she was gone.
The people halted, fearful of the past returning as they gazed into the void she had left. They waited in silence for the darkness to return.
But as they turned towards each other, they saw light throbbing through each of them.
Denise Bayes has been published in NZ Micro Madness, Free Flash Fiction, Oxford Flash,100 Word Story, Ellipsis Zine, Firewords ,Roi Fainéant press and the recent NFFD Anthology. Originally from Sunderland, Denise lives in Barcelona, Spain where she lives with her husband and a lively cavalier puppy called Rory. Bluesky @deniseb.bsky.social
Poetry, Peter Gutierrez
Afterparty
There were tides inside, lap-rolling and full of swimmings with and
Against the waves, lagoons of shifting plastic, and seabirds fighting
With the shore birds fighting with the waterfowl, intarsial contrails
Of diving, flying over, falling into. Nearly every morning she awakens
Only partly, the slosh of dreams and the chilled saltiness of reality
Staggering her back into jumbled half-action.
The clear light and the unclear, and how the two of them liked to switch
Between the two.
The clear undercuts the unclear, which is fun in a jungle
Sort of way—you never knew what phenomena you’d encounter in the fog.
Focus on breath in, hate out.
Breath in, hate out.
Janus felt the negative leave his core, or
At least decided that’s how he’d describe it
Later.
Breath in, hate out.
Or should that be breathe? He hated those online
folks who didn’t grasp the difference. (Spells & spellings.)
In any case: in through the twins, observing thoughts
As they froth and ferment. Then: out through the lips,
Fumigating the caverns of contempt in the digestive knowledge
Management system.
Distantly, a jet plane quiet-thundering through the clouds;
On the next block, a Sonata slides by, its tread smooth and humming.
He could sit here and listen to the dawn-sounds, the sound-
Makers afar and invisible, and be happified for the rest of his
Life, he mused.
His wife, Eleanor, enjoyed a different pathway into the light:
Influenced by an influencer, she went out each dawning before
Anything else. Barely dressed, barefoot or flip-flopping along,
Ellie followed the notion of forcing undesired action into being,
Doing that which she didn’t want to do to skill her mind into
Facing the unknown; specifically, the rest of the unraveling day.
As a strategy, this swelled and broke like an egg. Those summer
Mornings in Maryland, inches past daybreak, and she could feel
The hint of heat, the tingly precursors of rain, the immediate world
Still coated in night’s silences. This emergent love of the pale,
Creeping minutes in a pale and creeping hour derailed the project
(As happens sometimes). Later, a post she drafted explained it,
How what she’d avoided became what she desired, and undid all
The wisdom of the shift. Yet also brought the amor fati peace that
Newsreel chatter, sparkly cocktails, party favors, and elbow-brushings
Had failed to.
Her husband, whose name is likely Janus, was, is, and will be
Ever unaware of the sutured joinings of her Buddha nature.
Peter Gutierrez is a poet and writer with work in Bruiser, Exist Otherwise, Not One of Us, and Lxminxl; his books include the story collection From Bad to Worse and the novella The Trees Melt Like Candles. You can find him online @suddenlyquiet.
