Issue #32.1 A Triple Issue: Steve Lambert, J.R. Solonche, Zebulon Huset & James David Adams
A Poem by Steve Lambert
A Genius of Mood and Setting
Reading in our small house by The beach was something. I can Remember. Mississippi tried to Sleep with her. Being in a bookstore With a mother. He drank the sea. Something done with a child, like Coloring. My father, my black hair Is turning gray, slowly. My mother Read to me nearly every night. Every night before bed. One evening After a long day of Cutty Sark Drinking. She bought lots of books, Ordered them from the TV. She Read Dr. Seuss, and she read the Story of the three Chinese brothers. One evening after a long day of Cutty Sark drinking. All the Sweet Pickles and on and on. Mississippi, whose real name Was Jon Lowry. Frog and Toad Was my favorite. One drank the sea. When I was fourteen, I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail With my dad and his best friend. Mississippi I’m afraid is dead. One day one drank the whole sea Up, he drank himself into oblivion, Daily. A genius of mood and setting. With Scotch. Arnold Lobel. Coconuts. My mother never minded reading These things over and over, either. He was my godfather, even though We weren’t Catholic. My mother Told my dad and he thought it was Funny. She heard voices. Hears voices. And has no memory of it. He confronted Him about it later. She did voices.
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Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana but grew up in Florida. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Saw Palm, Trampoline Poetry, Chiron Review, The Pinch, Northampton Poetry Review (UK), Broad River Review, Longleaf Review, Emrys Journal, Bull Fiction, Into the Void, Cowboy Jamboree, Cortland Review, and many other places. In 2015 he won third place in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest and in 2018 he won Emrys Journal’s Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations and was a Rash Award in Fiction finalist. He is the author of the poetry collections Heat Seekers (CW Books, 2017) and The Shamble (CW Books, 2020), the book-length poem Dutch Ears (2025), and the fiction collection The Patron Saint of Birds (Cowboy Jamboree, 2020). He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Texas at El Paso and teaches at the University of North Florida.
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A Poem by J.R. Solonche
Dream
I was in my kitchen, which was just the same. The toaster was on the counter. The kettle was on the stove. The window looked out on the backyard. There was a tree. A single tree. It was not an apple tree. It was a pine tree, but it was covered in apples. Big, red apples that hung so low they almost touched the grass. I was in the dream long enough to see the apples glinting in the light. To notice how heavy they looked. Then I woke up. I thought about the dream. I was sure it was a pine tree, not an apple tree. I was sure they were apples, not pinecones. I looked everything up. Freud said apples were symbols of the breasts, especially if there was more than one apple in the dream. Yeah, I saw a lot on that tree, and the pine tree itself symbolizes spiritual connection and longevity, not to mention being sacred to Dionysus. And the kitchen? That’s where I had the best sex I ever had with my while we were drinking cabernet sauvignon, and she was wearing nothing but an apron.
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Nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, twice for the National Book Award and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
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A Poem by Zebulon Huset & James David Adams
from Stanza Trades
Juvenilia
Roman candles and bottle rockets shriek acrid streaks through crisp suburban dark
calypsoing into jacuzzis. On tiptoes, this is how the night begins its ministry.
Resting tulips genuflect and collect dew on their pastel backs while sneakers tromp
down the wet grasses of spring. What is the lesson here? The world asks everything
of our developing brains while we're still getting a handle on our maelstrom of hormones—
poor, moaning, pitiful things. Mademoiselle, I remember I once wrote, is it not poignant
how fleeting our flames, how short our time alive, like the burst of a firework? Of course,
like a dew-filled tulip, she refused to answer. There is so much you have to get used to.
So many perpendicular pathways angling into and out of your life despite your desire
to have a cup of tea and read a decent story. You might as well be flying a kite in the woods,
skipping stones in the wishing well, or begging the clock to talk the calendar into
turning back its pages to the heart of winter— when the slow, frozen explosion of roots
tipped boots and tripped you into the future of uncertainty and surprise and fireworks.
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James David Adams was born in New Hampshire. He now lives in the Shenandoah Valley.
Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and others. He edits the prompt-based Sparked Literary Magazine, which is back from hiatus in 2026.
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Issue #32.2 A Triple Issue: Brett Shaw, John Amen, Sebastian Hunter
A Poem by Brett Shaw
not hell
each daydream i wake from killing myself only to enter another classroom, absurdly i’m the most optimistic person here, should i forgive myself, less for lies than the hopes i’ll deposit, each sediment of decay embodying me american, as banking systems i’m teaching kids to be critical of the language, they are critical, but when i claim this work care they can’t buy desires unstrung from ease’s infinitive ever afters, anymore i can’t conduit the rage others seem to, though i’ve watched people kiss for decades and found it less than convincing, these slow desperations i assume we train ai models to simulate, a poet more famous than i’ll ever be once said my eyes reminded her of a cousin, she believed we shared blood, and didn’t feeling this, myself seen kin, keep me alive, continuing a need for each voice overheard, other people are the only way i survive—
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Brett Shaw is a poet living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Antiphony Journal, Afternoon Visitor, and elsewhere.
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A Poem by John Amen
For Bill Knott, after
He splashed in troughs of light, that boy who never stomped a puddle in a yellow raincoat or muddied a pair of shiny galoshes. His first girlfriend perched on a stump, the sonata prodigy who tried to verse him on major chords. Took you a while, she purred. A Jurassic hand lifted the mossy roof. A foot booted one beam, another beam, rubble strewn in a field, the orphanage gone. Violets, ivy, daffodils, a green piano blushing red. Bad Marky, Little Lucius, Jangle John who couldn’t sit still, so many kids buried in the rocks. They emerged one after another, kicking their feet in the dry dirt, laughing as they got closer. He dashed his eyes against the horizon, all those comic books & dumb diagnoses & the beautiful dawn fluttering his way.
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John Amen was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His latest collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in 2024.
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Three Poems by Sebastian Hunter
from Carrie Nation, Carrie Nation
Casual cocktail garb
You can actually just serve yourself from the spigot
Peering like an auspice through the smog
This and a megaton of tits
Popped collar when the ringtone hits
All dudded up Vienna on a midweek date night
The hell of passivity
The one topless joint in an area the size of a zone
My mind dangles where my legs won’t go
The domes open
And flocks of blushing Carrie Nations fly out
Hogs in the holding pen
somehow turned to vapor
of people from Delaware they had to shoo off the rafters
Stuck with gravity for the rest of my wilting days
when El Gaucho and Carrie Nation retire to their suite
If I'm distracted it's only because
California finally passed a proclamation
which is how I became a soft drinks lover
What isn't a fetish of my Capital District? Again
smoking menthols with the shrimpers in a ruin of living things
Infinity scarves the body, the great weakness of gold
generally
a presence craves coupling, wants to watch
Gee, nice scare quote central heating
90-proof absolution
The ornate, workmanlike shape of Carrie Nation
as she rounds the half-lit lived-in garden
with fog or what isn't a fetish
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Sebastian Hunter is a poet and drummer from Seattle. Poems recent and forthcoming in Midcult, Capgras, Heavy Feather Review, and Cult.
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Issue #32.3 A Triple Issue: Sara Eddy, Brandon Shane, Bill Keen
A Poem by Sara Eddy
I Make Men Cry
It happens again. This one shows me photos of old friends, and surprised by the image of someone now dead, his eyes fill. Another man cries in a public park
over a lost love, another in a side room at a noisy party over the trauma of being awkward in college. I’m not sure how I provoke this.
It feels powerful, pheromones or vibes. Essential, a Cassandra-gift, that some lonely demi-goddess should have the power to make men feel things.
A strong large man sheds tears in a hotel bar about the children I will never bear for him. Once, in a busy cafe, tears
during a story about Neil Armstrong. More tears on a sidewalk about people who leave while their dogs are put down,
who don’t hold them in their strong arms and say goodbye. Who failed to hold these men in strong arms? Why don’t they hold themselves?
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Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.
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A Poem by Brandon Shane
Creek Dogs
The creek dogs want me dead, stepping over cement lines, they know I have given gin to an alcoholic and kept her alive one shot at a time.
I’m too lost to care, bagboys regard me as compatriot among repeatedly scanned items, and them, something else becoming something better, while I am figurine in jostling glass.
I wander over tiles light as the ceilings and aisles, another item on the shelf, to eat or leave idle, to say I want it alone when it could really be anything else.
The alcoholic asks me for alcohol, just another shot. I just need to make it through: I tilt the bottle into a cup small enough for a single breath that professes my love.
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Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in Rattle, trampset, Variant Lit, The Chiron Review, Stone Circle Review, IceFloe Press, The Marrow Poetry, One Art Poetry, Sontag Mag, among others. He graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English. Find him on Twitter @ HalfTheLobster
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A Poem by Bill Keen
Once More?
I contemplate the bobber on the water. It is as still as a friend’s prayer at meeting. Connected to its moment by monofilament I sit as if I were asleep.
A gust of North wind roils the surface into ridges. In the furrow the bobber dances, dances, dropping its seed into the darkness perhaps to lure forth one more wish, one more harvest from the mystery before I lose the day’s last light.
As suddenly as the wind came upon me it dies. Placidity prevails, a perfect crust of ice on new fallen snow at dawn untouched by even an insect’s wing. My bobber is a still as a friend’s prayer.
Retrieve. . . retrieve . . . a small voice urges me, unfed need dueling with sense, to cast again, to cast again. But I am wearier than I thought and it is accident time, accident time. The uncast line is better, much better. There is something hungry in the water.
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“I am William Parker Keen (Bill Keen), Professor Emeritus of English from Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, PA. During my graduate school days I spent two years at LSU (1959-1961)., learned to love gumbo, dark roast coffee, oyster po-boys, and zydeco music. I’m a dedicated reader of James Lee Burke’s novels. A couple of years back I visited the Bayou Teche.”
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Issue #32.4 A Triple Issue: Jane Ann Fuller, Kate Efimochkina, Marco Visciolaccio
A Poem by Jane Ann Fuller
Houses
“The body is a temple, a house with many windows opening.” Mary P. at the Thursday meeting.
After you killed yourself, and after my house burned to the ground, I built this house with a bathroom window, wide and low, so I could watch the yard and soak it all in. I've tried to make sense of the wren’s attempts to please his mixed up mate with nests in half-dried ferns or in a birdhouse gourd painted cobalt blue. It spun in the breeze like a piñata, moss spilling out, dried shell of a life, once a belly packed with seed.
She enters and leaves so many times. She can’t choose. Or if she does, I never see the evidence. It’s like the world
can’t give more than it takes. How things must work to survive. The woodpecker wraps a long, sticky tongue around its own bright skull to keep its brains from spilling out,
then hammers shagbark hickories all the way up the trunk. I watch until it works on me like a therapy which doesn’t last. Late fall in the yard, the cosmos gone to seed, red and orange zinnias turned to sepia and gloom. Winter, another kind of dead
resurrection, the season that comes with church basement meetings, steps to work, black coffee, store-bought pinwheel cookies, prayer with strangers who say things I want to believe.
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Jane Ann Fuller is a poet from southeastern Ohio whose book Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. A Best of the Net nominee, Fuller is a recipient of the James Boatwright III Poetry Prize. You can find her poems in Anacapa Review, Bear Review, BODY, Calyx, Ekphrastic Review, Hunger Mountain, Main Street Rag, Shenandoah, and many other literary journals. Her new manuscript Darkened Window was a semi-finalist for the Washington Prize and is still looking for a home. Find more work at janeannfullerpoetry.com.
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A Poem by Kate Efimochkina
Mother-of-pearl
Balconies, enveloped in mother-of-pearl. A vineyard and a cemetery across the river. Just one curve along the road. A wooden Jesus in the church. I looked at him until the priest quietly came out and stood behind me. He thought I was praying. But I was just watching, as I’d done a thousand times before. It was getting dark outside. It was early, very early spring with all its frenzy. The asphalt road, the trees ready to bud, the smell of dust heated by the day. Grinzing. I did not pay the fare. On my way back, I saw two people shaking a cigarette machine on a dark street.
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Kate Efimochkina is a writer and artist. You can see her work in Stone Circle Review, Lamp Lit, The Turning Leaf Journal, among others. She is the founder and editor of Odd Lobster.
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A Poem by Marco Visciolaccio
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Marco Visciolaccio is an author in Asheville, North Carolina. He edits Flash Fiction for French Broads Lit, a publication celebrating authors in Southern Appalachia. His work can be found in Johnny America, Frazzled Lit, and elsewhere. He yearns for the unsolicited email. Site: visciolaccio.com
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Issue #32.5 A Triple Issue: Kristy Money, John Grey, John Brantingham
Two Poems by Kristy Money
solar eclipse
moon over sun wind carries the vows their rings hidden behind rain celestial marriage
no polygamy in heaven for them or for me anymore I left that plane long ago
everyone hushes hill country caliche folding inside itself
Rosie's Baby Naming and Blessing Ceremony
I dared disobey twelve apostles
and a prophet
to hold you in my arms
with the wrong genitals.
My uterus carried you but birth’s the end of the line if you’re a Mormon mother.
After that we must watch while in church men do the
holding
withholding
exaltation
unless we submit
I’d rather hold
you
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Dr. Kristy Money is a writer, university lecturer, and neuropsychologist in private practice. Her writing and interviews are published in The New York Times, Guardian, Salt Lake Tribune, Atlanta-Journal Constitution, and Exponent II, and forthcoming in Past Ten, Little Old Lady, Blood and Honey, and Eunoia Review. Her book, Overthinkers Guide to Orgasm, is currently on submission to publishers by agent Paige Sisley of CookeMcDermid. Find podcast interviews and more writing at kristymoney.com, on Instagram @drkristymoney, and on Bluesky @ofjacob.bsky.social. Kristy loves to write about the intersection of science, art, and spirituality.
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A Poem by John Grey
Home from Brazil
I should have known the contrast would be too fierce. The winter I once knew has been replaced by something stranger, an alien landscape, dark in its ascendancy. Every window frames my reflection in frost. And the air, sharp, insistent, lashes at the tan I earned under a more forgiving sun, with a threat to fade it all away into transparency.
January bites down hard. Only the stereo has my back, sending out a warm-blooded samba that taps at my ankles, coaxing movement, reminding me of heat. My eyes insist on cold, but my ears, traitorous, tender, summon the ghost of a linen shirt lifting in a tropical breeze, and the soft, sure breath of a woman drawing a butterfly’s path from my ear to the nape of my neck.
I tell myself I need to relearn this climate, let it seep into my sleep, find a way to see past its indifference. Otherwise, my old routine will feel like exile. I must be stubborn, resist recent memories. I stack logs in the fireplaces. I smother the bed with blankets. I pretend that sufferance is a kind of wisdom.
But then there is Brazil. My head won’t let go even as my body shivers. A pandeiro cracks the air, a cavaco thrums, and a scatter of impossible birds takes flight behind my ribs. There’s no commanding yourself in moments like that. You dance, whether your body moves or not.
And that world. There’s no separation between man and what is out there. You’re either inside its pulse or watching from far away.
Right now, I’m watching.
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John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and The Alembic. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, White Wall Review and Flights.
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A Poem by John Brantingham
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The late John Brantingham was a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work was published in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He wrote twenty-three books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. https://www.johnbrantingham.com/
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Issue #32.6 A Triple Issue: Margie Banker, Karina Longo, Darby Myr
A Poem by Margie Banker
reclusion(s)
They want me for my body, this flesh and bone and skin, for their desires only, for the sins of their fathers, for the anger towards their mothers. They bend me, over beds, over backwards, to quench their thirst. I never hear their voice again, not aloud or in my head, fade into the depths with the others, skeletons of my own creation–see, this is why I do not touch my own skin, for fear of the recoil, the backlash, the hideous inside-turned-out. I am not built to withstand the weight of desire, would rather become, like a recluse, the spider in a dark corner, poison that eats away at your skin,
the one no one knows or fears but should.
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Margie Banker (they/them) is a dyke poet born and raised in the Upper Midwest. Confessional by nature, Margie writes to survive. Margie holds a BA in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Macalester College. They're currently pursuing their Master's in Creative Writing while working in administration at a small liberal arts school. Their work has been featured in Boshemia Magazine, Issue 7. They have too many animals for their studio apartment, and have rocked a bowl cut for well over a decade.
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A Poem by Karina Longo
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Karina Longo is a neurodivergent Brazilian-Italian poet. She's the editor-in-chief of La Rotonde Review, and her poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in Expat Press, Be About It Press, Eunoia Review, Apocalypse Confidential, Some Words, Dodo Eraser, Michigan City Review of Books, and other places. Find her on X: @TheDarkestStar
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A Poem by Darby Myr
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Darby Myr is a queer writer, textile artist, trained anthropologist and tree planter. Her work is forthcoming in SQUID literary, Raiya Magazine and Qu literary. She is based out of Montreal when she is not stuck in the teeth of the northern Rockies.
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Issue #32.7 A Double Issue: Nikki Ummel and Paige Stephens
Three Poems by Nikki Ummel
Dream Where I Am Nana, the Mother of Attis
after reading Catallus’ 63
I bit through the stick of willow’s bark. You were quiet (so quiet, I thought my prayers answered). But the crying came, and you, blue, eyes wide and skin slick: a protest. Attis, I did not ask for this. I did not ask to nurse you or watch you seed the world.
I heard my father scour the field, he called me and I left you, splayed on almond husks afterbirth-sticky, left you shell-shrouded in swaddled silence, to seek my father, to hold his hand in the dying light, too dim to see my spurned milk bloom, my choice, this poem, my own.
long day
cotton tongued & cheeks clawed, i am trapped in terminal restlessness / its clanging cymbals. this body a living current / my meds popping buttons to keep the electricity contained. lamictal comes dragging her rope / scorches my fields. where are my brave? my cousin texts me from jail, says he can’t sleep / demands, am i a ghost? then tells me i am not real. two different words in my mouth: living / alive. time is a puddle in my hands. i keep living because i don’t know what else to do.
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Nikki Ummel is a queer artist, editor, and educator in New Orleans. She has been published or has work forthcoming with Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, Texas Review Press, Black Lawrence Press, and others. Her debut poetry collection, Swamp Elegies, is the 2025 winner of the New American Poetry Award and will be published in late 2026. Nikki is the Executive Director and co-founder of LMNL, an arts organization focused on providing free and accessible workshops, readings, community events, and more. She has two poetry chapbooks, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and Bayou Sonata (NOJHF, 2023), funded by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com
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A Poem by Paige Stephens
Check the Trash Can for a Condom
My sister can’t get pregnant. She never started bleeding, and she can’t get cramps like I do. I think about this as I slide out of his bed, stalling to remember where I left my things. I tiptoe to his bathroom and check the trash can for a condom. My skin feels wrong. Like there were sand grains in my sunscreen and somebody made me rub it in anyway. They’ll all be able to tell—that I’ve added another tick mark to the mirror in my bathroom.
***
He grumbles something in my general direction when I walk back into the bedroom. He calls me Brittany. And I don’t even look like a Brittany. A Brittany would have blonde hair and cherry-colored little lips and would never wear toe socks with flip-flops. I grab my shoes and leave without bothering to slip them on.
***
As little girls, my sister and I played husband and wife. We took turns taking care of the baby, washing the dishes, doing the laundry—pretending the future was something you could rehearse. Now she lives in a cute cottage with her understanding husband, Rick. They have a garden and flower boxes under their windows. I rent a run-down townhome from a sketchy real estate company that fixes things only when they’re already broken. I don’t live with my mother. She lives with me—downstairs, in the room that used to be my office.
***
She pretends that when I come home early in the morning it’s because I’ve been out getting coffee or sitting on the patio talking to a friend. But she knows. She knows I’m going to stand in my bathroom with lipstick and do math with my body. She thinks she counts my birth control pills every week, secretly. She says it like it’s concern, like it’s love: I just don’t want any illegitimate grandchildren. But I see her sitting at the tiny breakfast nook, helping herself to the intimacies of my life. I guess that’s why she moved in with me—because I’m the daughter who might get pregnant.
***
I’ve only had one real relationship. He was handsome, but not in the prince charming kind of way. He had a nice face and broad shoulders, but he wore wife beaters and flat-billed baseball caps and called himself a poet. He didn’t want his work read—only said out loud to music. I called him a rapper. We argued about that a lot. He changed his name often to give himself “character,” like Eminem. He was BJ when I met him, and by the time we broke up he had evolved into Zenzo. My friends used to tell me stories about him after it ended. Now, even if someone tried, I wouldn’t know who they were talking about. He’s probably changed his name again.
***
After my shower, I stand in front of the mirror and study the tick marks—lipstick, bright as a bruise—like they’re proof and not a plea. Fourteen. I always thought a man wouldn’t notice. That he wouldn’t know what he was adding to.
***
The next one will be a long tick mark—one that goes across the whole line.
Not a tally.
A sentence.
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Paige Stephens is a writer and middle school teacher from South Mississippi. She writes flash fiction and poetry with Southern bones—voice-driven work that leans tender, sharp, and occasionally sideways.
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