Nonfiction

by Scott Mitchel May Smoke Honest/Unsplash Daves will fuck your world up if you let them. They just will. A Dave is a guy you meet when you are fifteen and he says he has pot and asks if you want to smoke some pot and you say yes and next thing you know it is two years later and you and Dave are sitting in a car tripping balls on that fluffy cloud blotter outside the house of the girl you are dating and it’s ten PM and you are picking the girl you are dating and her friends b

Anne Nygård Too Much Tongue by Adrienne Marie Barrios and Leigh Chadwick, Autofocus, 2022 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer I’ve never read anything like Too Much Tongue, a collaborative series of untitled prose poems by trampset contributors Adrienne Marie Barrios and Leigh Chadwick. Reading it is like finding a nest in your refrigerator, slapping yourself to wake up, then noticing how each wispy thread of the nest is throbbing, changing color. A feeling of magic emerges, concurrent

Walter Martin Just Outside the Tunnel of Love by Francine Witte, Blue Light Press, 2023 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer To say I know what makes good flash fiction would be a lie. I have no sheet of metrics, no firm rules. One of the Internet’s most popular literary forms, flash fiction appears to have the economy of poetry, the weight of each line, but also narrative leaps reminiscent of novels. Flash fiction does less than the longer short story in terms of space but, given the r

by Marshall Moore Joseph Chan Let’s talk about ceramic knives. I’m convinced I shouldn’t move to England without one. I don’t want to arrive in my new home and have nothing decent to slice with. Ceramic blades cut like lasers but I’m worried about chips and breakage. Durability. We’re in the Wing On Department Store in Sheung Wan, downstairs in the household-goods section: neither Hong Kong’s most upscale hypermarket nor its most gentrified district. If you’re the sort of odd

Ricardo Cruz The Reluctant Journey of Manfred Bugsbee by Michael Farfel, Montag Press, 2022 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer Right off the bat, I will tell you: I’m not the best person to review this book. I don’t regularly read fantasy, and I recognize trampset contributor Michael Farfel’s The Reluctant Journey of Manfred Bugsbee is some kind of epic fantasy. That said, I enjoyed the book. And the fantasy genre elements I did recognize — arduous landscapes, battles, mythic swords —

by Erik Kennedy Uwe Conrad 1. The best beach in Manhattan was located directly south of Pier 76 on the Hudson, across from the Javits Center. I say “beach” — and technically I’m right, because it was a flat, sandy area adjoining a body of water — but I don’t think it was commonly thought of as a beach. I doubt many people thought of it at all. From the seventies until 2021, Pier 76 was a police tow pound. That had a certain effect on the ambiance of the spot. Also impacting t

The Australian National Maritime Museum Ambrotypes by Amy Cipolla Barnes, word west press, 2022 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer If inimitableness on the page is a sign of genius, then Amy Barnes is some kind of genius. To review her collection of stories, Ambrotypes, properly, I would need to get a stack of children’s construction paper, cut it to stars and shards using oversized antique scissors, soak it all with the spittle of a dying garden hose, then catapult the resulting mess

Bill Fairs The Book of Rusty by Benjamin Drevlow, Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2022 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer Well, I’m not a Jack Mormon. I’m an apostate, which is different. Seeing Benjamin Drevlow’s 2022 novel of sorts, The Book of Rusty, formatted like The Book of Mormon is fun. It is fun because Rusty is a miscreant with no wisdom to impart. He is a pervert. He is highly offensive. In fact, I’m not sure I like Rusty. He wallows in the tragedy of his brother’s suicide. He has a

Jacek Dylag Poems for the People by Nicole Tallman, Southern Collective Experience, 2023 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer “Not bad” says Dale Tallman, poet Nicole Tallman’s father, in the introductory blurbs to her new collection, Poems for the People. It is this spirit of fun that carries the collection forward. Here is a clear, candid, funny voice exploring what it means to address readers on the page. Poems for the People is less a political tract and more a colorful convocation.

Ashkan Forouzani Talking to Ghosts at Parties by Rick White, Storgy, 2022 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer I’m trying to quit smoking while writing this book review. I want words to be enough, spiritual entities that, like ghosts, animate the moment. But how I crave the smoldering wreck of a well-smoked cigarette, the way one crushes the butt into concrete, leaving a black smear. Words are not enough: images on the verge of flight pulled back to the shore of embodied reality, the gr

by Charlotte Hamrick Denisse Leon Our last year together felt like your beloved game of chess, the board of us nestled nonchalantly under your arm one day, stuffed in your locker the next, kings and queens rolling against each other in repose waiting for the interlocking of fingers. You were a tire swing launched over a river of turbulent waters, swaying from side to side. Landing on my bank one week, on hers another. She was Elton John, piano lessons, only child, 16th birthd

by Abigail Oswald Andras Vas are ghosts real The story goes that there’s no room left in the afterlife, so all the ghosts without a home flood back into our world through the internet. The computer screen is a window, or a door — one which can be opened from either side. can ghosts live in the internet I have a theory that we are all creating ghosts of ourselves in real time. As we collectively bear witness to the pain of others, our posts and messages add to a greater body o

by Kirsti MacKenzie Simon Berger Not that you give a fuck, but hello. It’s July and my toes are painted orange. I’m sat twenty-one storeys above a city fifteen hours away, thinking of car rides to nowhere in the dead of January. You’d hate if I came cheap and sentimental — hello, old friend — like some kind of asshole. Because we’re not friends, not anymore. You taught me the cost of sentiment. Would you be surprised to know I never learned? My insides are soft and gooey. The

by Beth Kephart Ricardo Gomez Angel A I fell and an ankle bone broke — a sound that rose up through the shaft of me and also knelled the air. So that I heard myself break twice, in the same instant, and then I couldn’t stop hearing. B An ill-begotten mash of wrongful circumstance. An incident on my own front lawn. God, it was hot. C Like what? Like the sound of a boot snuffing a dry stick. Like the yank of a knot. Like the wind knocked out of a hollow. Like it wouldn’t stop.

by Jacqueline Doyle Rock Staar I remember what I was wearing that night: a tight, short, sleeveless white dress embroidered with blue and yellow flowers. Espadrilles, smudged with sand. Gold filigree hoop earrings that he’d bought me in an expensive jewelry store that afternoon. I had a rare tan. The candle on the restaurant table flickered as we gazed into one another’s eyes. His smile lit tiny fires all over my body. It was my last night after a year abroad in Europe. I was

by Katherine Grasso Hamza Baig An image: a digital timer above my head. The numbers ticking upward, the red digits rolling. * In elementary school my mom bought me a dark purple leotard for ballet class. I hated the way it made my hips look. I tried it on in the kitchen without my usual pink tights, stood there, looking down at my pale skin, the yellowed linoleum a blur in the background. It was cut so high that when I développéd my leg I could see the fold of skin between m

by Chila Woychik Carlos Veras “We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…” ― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek We learn to count by number. There were two raccoons and two snakes dead on this three-quarter mile stretch of road these past seven days. I have also noted in the recent past that I wrote more before I had a cell phone, I ate more after my childhood teeth came in, I lived more after I was born. Like the Piraha tribe of Brazi

by Guillermo Rebollo-Gil Scott Rodgerson For a few months after the student strike, this cop and I would run into each other in Walgreens, at the gas station. The first couple of times he would ask hey, weren’t you one of the… I had answered yes , the very first time. One day, he called me by my name, asked if I had graduated already. Another day, I walked out the store to find him smoking next to my car. One thing we would do to cops during the strike was shame them into lo

by Christy Tending Annie Spratt I love the way my child says make sure-ing, rather than making sure. I’m make sure-ing of you, mama. He tells me not to laugh. Remember, this is important. I love the way the cat’s paw rests on my hand in bed, in the dark, in the soft space between now and sleep. She is making sure of me. Or make sure-ing. What is the word for certainty in cat? But when she is satisfied, she sighs, and that is the signal that I can move my hand somewhere else.

by Wendy Oleson Johannes Plenio I. A child, decades before I’ve met you, I climb my father’s wing-backed chair to be as close to Heaven as possible when the light passes through the stained-glass circles and breaks over Reverend Mother. She glows. On our TV she sings to Fraulein Maria — nun or governess, I’m not sure which woman I love more — about finding her dream. # In a dream I’m wearing a white t-shirt so large it must be a nightgown. Bloodied and torn, I stretch it over