by Tyler Dempsey...If I cared about linear progress, I would’ve never gotten picked up by a plane hitchhiking. Had I taken my friend’s offer to drive me from Anchorage to Denali in early-May of 2017, after arriving in the 49th State from a winter in Missoula, MT, I wouldn’t remember a single damn thing of that trip today.

by Abhinav...That was the day childhood ended. Time no longer a yard but a funnel tilted downhill and revenge suddenly a possibility, not just desire. I knew I could do it. She saw it in my eyes. She knew I could do it.

by M.M. Kaufman...There is as likely a chance as not that under those giant wipe-o-matic’s you side-step into another reality. Maybe in this one you love yourself. At least in the reality that brought you here, you showed up for yourself. That’s a start.

by Sacha Bissonnette...My girlfriend and I were buying birdseed for the feeder on the back porch, because sometimes, the yellow finches, the little ones, get so close you can wrap your hands so gently around them. And they’re precious like glass but soft and also warm.

by Lisobel Tang...My mother hates dogs. A city child in the sixties, she often stayed with her aunt in a rural village south of Shanghai. The dogs there, she assures me, reveal the true nature of the species

by Angela Townsend Ryoji Iwata I can’t give up on humanity, because when I drive by Taco Bell at ten p.m. on a Wednesday, the chalupa line wraps around the building twice. People in friendship bracelets and people in button-down shirts and people in a state of grace are making mischief. People are here because they are hungry and people are here because other people make the food and people are here because visiting hours just ended at the hospital. People arrive in Priuses a

Road Ahead/Unsplash Reviewed by Scott Neuffer Nevada poet and essayist Dani Putney takes documentary poetics to a new level in Mix-Mix (Baobab Press, 2025). By documentary, I mean a certain relation to historical reality, which is not to say this is historical poetry. It is vivid poetry — lyrical, cynical, ironic, touching, sexy. Because the poet approaches history with all senses and emotions aflame, with heart beating beneath the inquiry, letting itself be known, the result

by Jeanne-Marie Fleming Shamblen Studios Scott pops a wheelie in the schoolyard. And another. We watch until Marky rides up, ridiculous, on a tricycle. We circle Marky and cheer. I like them — the boys, their jerky moves. Even Sal, who speaks Italian, and broke all of our pencils. In the classroom, he holds air till he’s purple. Girls smack his cheeks to pop the air out. Frank makes cartoon flipbooks at his desk and sells them. It’s like watching television. I want one. My fr

Jeswin Thomas Reviewed by Scott Neuffer Tolu Oloruntoba’s new poetry collection, Unravel (McClelland & Stewart), offers something strangely mesmerizing — a deconstructed mind tethered to what it haunts. It’s a dynamic collection impossible to pin down but about which I can provide some descriptions that hopefully point to certain forces of a groundbreaking work. Oloruntoba, a trampset contributor, describes himself on his website as a lapsed physician. He practiced medicine i

by Ulrik Andersen WrongTog/Unsplash On the rare moments Ola sat still, you’d catch how handsome he was. His eyes would slip closed long enough for you to take in his long brown eyelashes that would curtsy down his cheeks, pointing daintily to his high-cut cheekbones, the straight crest of his nose and the bright blush of his lips, too red for a boy’s. In those moments Ola looked peaceful. Serene even. But then, a twitch would bubble up from below the surface, tugging a corner

by Peter DeMarco Marco Furioso The smell of waste filled the hospital room because his mother’s kidneys had failed after a year-long battle with leukemia and chemotherapy, common vocabulary at the dinner table, those dreaded words with the harsh ‘k’ sound signifying something deadly, but now at barbeques there were condolences for his father and more disturbing words, like arsenic and carcinogens, as neighbors waved cigarettes and talked of pesticides farmers once used in the

by Claudia Monpere Jeton Bajrami In a cottage in the woods lived a man and not even the green-eyed princess could cheer him. Not even his two children who lived nearby with his wife could cheer him. The ruby rhododendrons and azaleas, the sugar pines, the grandfatherly oaks, the bamboo fountain that trickled in his yard while he stared at the stars: no. The Wife Where is the wife in all this? Did she crank events in motion like Mousetrap, that game he loved as a child, gear t

by Rebecca Tiger Alan Calvert Frogs have delicate bones protected by a fragile vertebra. We dissect them in biology class because when you cut horizontally down the front, you can see their whole insides easily. They resemble humans enough, with a heart, and other organs, so this early exercise in examining a creature’s insides is meant to allow us to see it all easily and perhaps to incite our imaginations about the inner workings of other creatures. Other things. When I was

by Chad Sullivan abhijeet gourav I traded my soul for a cigarette. I have a written receipt of the transaction: Here you go motherfucker, one soul, it reads. It’s signed and dated, with a witness’s initials — D.W. I was twenty. We were in the kitchenette of D.W.’s seventh-floor apartment. There were bare white walls and freezer waffles on the counter. Jibiddy, the first alcoholic I knew, stood by, red-faced, laughing. Everyone was laughing. I was laughing. * * * Topher took g

by Andrea Lewis Arpit Rastogi “…but this is a sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life into them…” — Fernand Braudel Memory and the Mediterranean 1. Where do you come from? I come from Lansdale, Pennsylvania, where I was born during a thunderstorm on a July night while my father was in Tripoli, Libya, at a U.S. Air Force base called Wheelus. I always loved the word Tripoli — derived from the Greek and Italian for three cities — and felt, fr

by Daniel Addercouth Annie Spratt I’m standing in my parents’ living room by the hospital bed the council lent us, waiting for my father to finish his lunch. Except lunch is too big a word for what he’s having: half a bowl of tomato soup that I warmed in the microwave. He used to polish off a whole can plus a handful of oatcakes, even after he retired from the farm and was no longer so active. My father sits propped up in bed with multiple pillows. The front of his pyjama top

by Jill McCabe Johnson Simon Ray The doe lies where grass gives way to gravel and gravel gives way to road. A spot of fur on the side of her ribcage and another near her shoulder splays like a cowlick or bullseye. The half-inch opening of her mouth reveals a row of tiny incisors along her lower jaw and a gap where at least two teeth are missing. Both ears fan open, no longer twitching to track sounds. Inside her right ear what at first appears to be a tiny brown mouse turns o

by Charlotte Amelia Poe Yehor Litsov A thousand little entropies leading to the big and final entropy, and each time we are growing further and further away from something we once had and will never have again, our bodies becoming more and more like ghosts that ache and bleed and will inevitably fail us when the time comes, and oh, the time will come. Casting light on the fields at night, when even the moon is too shy to come out and play, green reflections from rabbit eyes a

Zdeněk Macháček Sensitive Creatures by Kirsten Reneau; Belle Point Press, 2024 Reviewed by L Mari Harris trampset published Kirsten Reneau’s opening essay “What I Remember” because we recognized a voice that needed to be heard. Now, she has presented us with the gift of a full-length essay collection, entitled Sensitive Creatures, published by Belle Point Press. Sensitive Creatures contains twenty-one essays, each effortlessly weaving together the human world and the natural

by Jacqueline Goyette Leonardo Yip I’m sorry for this morning, for the fact that I was still in bed when we heard from you, your voice was tinny and small and fearful and we were still asleep. The car crash. 4 am. You driving home on the long road from Urbisaglia to pick up your luggage, to meet us in Macerata. We still had the drive to Rome ahead of us and then a flight to New York City and then, finally, Indianapolis. Then came that phone call. Your father sent us photos of

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

by Janet Albaugh Who's Denilo?/Unsplash Either she was up early or still up. The pain throbbed all night. She went to the bathroom sink and washed her hands, dried them with a trousseau hand towel and bent toward the mirror. The blisters were worse, ugly and angry looking. Some were just appearing on her lower lip, a raised dot of red, others a few days old had a red ring around a blister of pus. Others swelled at the corners of her mouth, clustered free form, blooming a cela

Dom Fou Time as a Sort of Enemy by Tyler Dempsey, Gob Pile Press, 2022 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer Tyler Dempsey’s new story collection snaps with dark energy, leaving the texture of dried blood on the mind’s fingers. The eight stories in the collection range from a scrappy, elliptical prose style to more sprawling stream-of-consciousness constructions, and they plumb settings from the Midwest to Mexico City to the advent of Internet life. What could be called satirical in thes

by Michelle Guerrero Henry How-Soon Ngu Move back home after three college semesters away. Get the first job you can. Your father is furious you moved back. Agree to be a companion to a short, elderly woman whose brown eyes light up when she smiles; observe the constellations on her round freckled cheeks. Listen to her mischievous laughter when she asks, Guess where I’m from? Lean in when she whispers about the song of her Jamaican accent, about also being Chinese, about all

by Maxwell Suzuki martin bennie In Ancient Egypt, it was believed that acne was created from the scattershot of leaded lies. Each one for the lilt of the boy’s tongue. And even a palm full of pustules would instill skepticism in everyone around him. # Two Truths and a Lie: 1) I was prescribed a healthy dose of Clindamycin in my youth to cure acne vulgaris and prevent any future lies from warping my skin. 2) I find pleasure in the excessive popping of puss in the reflection o

by Emily James Dzordzoe Noamesi When the girls are asleep, the sounds come back. The neighbors clinking corona lights into the recycling bin after a long afternoon, the hum of the air conditioning that keeps shutting on because of a cracked bathroom window, the dog scratching the throw blanket to get it set for her to lay. The girls are asleep, and now there are sounds, and I’m leaning into my husband’s arms on a tufted couch, his index fingers rubbing my back. The tears come

Nick Fewings Best Microfiction 2021 edited by Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke and Amber Sparks, Pelekinesis, 2021 Reviewed by Kate Blackwood Why to read Best Microfiction 2021 is clear enough: here we have in one volume 102 of the most remarkable small fictions published in the past year, thoughtfully chosen and artfully arranged by guest editor Amber Sparks and series editors Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke. And 2021 is a particularly exciting time for microfiction, with several of t

Fazly Shah One Person Away from You: Stories by Andrew Bertaina, Moon City Press, 2021 Reviewed by Andrew Gretes Andrew Bertaina’s debut short-story collection, One Person Away from You (winner of the 2020 Moon City Short Fiction Award), is the answer to the counterfactual: “What if Proust wrote flash?” Like Proust’s wayward narrator, Bertaina’s characters are simultaneously pursuing and pursued by the past, and it’s precisely this position (smack in the middle of the tempora

by Nick Olson insung yoon We pulled into Chuck and Mary’s with all my earthly possessions packed on, around, and behind me. Left an eight year relationship, put in notice at my job, and I was set to leave the state next day. Clean slate. Chuck wasn’t an uncle. Technically a second or third cousin through marriage, but the age difference made him feel like an uncle. He fought in Vietnam, and I was eleven years old when 9/11 happened. I wasn’t yet sober, so I drank with family,

The Northern Line: Stories by Mike Lee, Atmosphere Press, 2021 Reviewed by MK Sturdevant “I could see the hole. I knew it was a plane.”— from “The Details of Time” I made a decade-long career out of understanding and teaching seventeenth-century early modern philosophy. I know exactly what to say about the year 1641, but until reading Mike Lee’s collection of stories, I had no idea what to say about 2002, or 1997, or 1988, years in which I actually existed (a category of exi

Fer Troulik Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection by Tara Campbell, Aqueduct Press, 2021 Reviewed by Katharine Blair In my early twenties I worked for a year in a convent-run Home for Unwed Mothers, which is odd given that I was neither religious nor living in the Victorian age, but need does as need must and at that point what need needed was money for school. I’d be a mother myself two years later. Wed, if you’re nosy, like I tend to be. Any birth story — ask me, if you like