Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction work has been published in CRAFT Literary, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gordon Square Review, Pidgeonholes, trampset, and other literary journals. She is the co-translator of the hybrid memoir-novel of My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) and a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Her publications can be found at www.christinehchen.com
The Universe, your dad, sometimes wear his hat a little too late / appear in his blue Volvo when the storm has had its full of you, and you’re a spilled mass of blue dress on your classmate’s doorstep after a birthday party, or your naming ceremony / one in which you were given a name you’d rather not repeat to something as lifeless as the doll you own.
He would wrap his hands around you, sing you a song about a girl who learned to trust her wings, and tame the winds. He would wash a smile up your face with impressions, while you bob your head to “This Little Light Of Mine” when the traffic light turns a bright red.
You would make a promise, the third that week, that you’d never make friends because they hold storms in them. Urged by the universe to wear your Elsa dress, and your combats. To “freeze the world, and stop ‘em,” you would go to school. Psyche pilled off, and sitting in the corner of an empty classroom, he’d pick your frozen and combats body, and you’d listen to “This Little Light Of Mine” again when the light turns red.
Micro by Sunmisola Odusola
Photo by Adam Strong
Sunmisola Odusola is a young Nigerian writer whose short story is forthcoming from Brittle Paper.
We tittered over words like bosoms and knockers and jugs, peed our pants giggling over Venus de Willendorf, fretted over the possibility of our own boobs hanging low someday like Gram’s, conducted pencil tests. We graduated from hopscotch to wincing from brain freeze at Dairy Queen to heavy petting with all the wrong boys in semi-public places to barely passing driver’s ed. Sniffing cheap perfume in the mall, we pretended to be French, flaunting gestures and accents we imagined Parisian, never thinking we’d be more credible speaking the actual language. We thought we were traveling in a straight line. Decades on, whiskey on the rocks in hand, we cry “uncle” as gravity takes us down. As starlight bends, lays foundations for darkness, we rock in silence and stare.
Micro by Mikki Aronoff
Image by Adam Strong
Mikki Aronoff’s work appears in New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Tiny Molecules, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Citron Review, Atlas and Alice, trampset, jmww,, and elsewhere. She’s received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.
Whenever the fire engines wailed their warnings, Mom came alive, eyes flashing, and Dad glanced up with that far-away smile before drifting back into his head where he mostly lived. But we’d jump into the car with Mom to chase that campfire-gone-mad smell and throbbing red lights. From afar we watched the little men in yellow rubber coats and fireman hats climbing miniature ladders as in a videogame but with real smoke ballooning, brilliant blasts of amber soaring skyward, the inevitable collapse to embers. Perhaps this fire-lust foretold the day our family would snap like sparks swirling and drifting away.
Micro by Kathryn Silver-Hajo
Photo by Adam Strong
Kathryn Silver-Hajo is a 2023 Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing nominee. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, The Citron Review, CRAFT, Emerge Literary Journal, New York Times-Tiny Love Stories, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary and others. Kathryn’s flash collection “Wolfsong” and her novel “Roots of The Banyan Tree” are both forthcoming in 2023. She is a reader for Fractured Lit. More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo
Father felled an oak to build an ark for the flood that would wash away the world. Mother mourned the tree, the dryads she swore burrowed in the antiquated avenues of its hardwood grain. The world never ended, but Mother did, whose grief spread like cancer, like the roots of an ancient oak.
Poem by James Callan
Photo by Adam Strong
James Callan grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He lives on the Kāpiti Coast, New Zealand on a small farm with his wife, Rachel, and his little boy, Finn. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Bridge Eight, White Wall Review, Maudlin House, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. His novel, A Transcendental Habit, is available with Queer Space.
for all the skinny lovely wistful brilliant brave unread poetry collections out there with their spines leaning left or right or maybe posture perfectly straight like our own beloved children standing at attention chin up chest out name tag showing or else horizontal piled supine like the dead like so much dust collecting dust
Poem by Paul Hostovsky
Image by Adam Strong
Paul Hostovsky’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com
We’re swinging interlaced fingers as we march past monuments and museums, pretending to stop
and look, I catch your eye instead. We paint our initials in indigo streaks on rocks we stole from Olive Garden. Your finger
traces the scars on my thigh and I whisper you their origins. Time pretends to stop, don’t believe
it. Tomorrow, you’ll head back on Route 50 and I will press the flowers you gave me, so they don’t seem dead.
Poem by Julia Shorr
Photo by Adam Strong
Julia Schorr has a BA in psychology from Salisbury University. Her poetry has appeared in The Shore Poetry and The Allegheny Review. She currently works at Cornerstone Montgomery as a Supported Employment Specialist and is a reader for Poet Lore.
A scurvy laugh. Eviction one was from the crib. Mama called my bluff. Tonight, in the roundabout, showing full ass, leaning hard against these other shoved-ashore mutineers, who burn tatters of sails till their faces burst flame into his, the dug up, treasureless sky nearly but not really gone enough to sleep, he hunts the blacktop’s thin scatter of past blizzard’s sand for that lost last drop, not hearing over the traffic how it rattles deep in the hull of the bottle in his hand.
Poetry by Pete Miller
Photography by Adam Strong
Pete Miller is the author of the chapbook Born Soap (H_NGM_N). A graduate of Arizona State University’s MFA program, he lives in Omaha, Nebraska where he works in homeless services. He co-edits the online poetry journal A Dozen Nothing.
Under whisky, he forgets life expectancy, itches for those knockoff pills that arrive with a discount code, some octogenarian dating site. This lady’s dentures click the dark fable of someone else’s mouth. Only 64, she oozes her tease, Make you feel 78. His railroad check soon mists. The landlord’s knocks, holstered like it’s Waco. At the Mission now he excites a prickling pity from a worker, who, just 22, can’t suspect he’s only one handful of her bra away from a permanent ban and bar, from begging time on the back porch of his stepdaughter who, still bearing a heart bored clear through, points to the doghouse.
Poetry by Pete Miller
Photograph by Adam Strong
Pete Miller is the author of the chapbook Born Soap (H_NGM_N). A graduate of Arizona State University’s MFA program, he lives in Omaha, Nebraska where he works in homeless services. He co-edits the online poetry journal A Dozen Nothing.
Backwards Trajectory 