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Beverley Sylvester 11/14/25 Beverley Sylvester 11/14/25

(Maternity) Leave

There is a stretch of the most precious time in the mornings, after your husband has gone to work, when the baby wakes up and you feed her and she falls asleep on your chest, her small arms holding your torso, their full length barely reaching the edges of your back.

There is a stretch of the most precious time in the mornings after your husband has gone to work when the baby wakes up and you feed her and she falls asleep on your chest, her small arms holding your torso, their full length barely reaching the edges of your back. You can't move, of course, so you listen to an audiobook and lie there in the mostly-dark room and you are two places at once: this most precious place with your daughter sleeping on your chest (which she does not do throughout the day, high on milk scent too close to your boobs, demanding to be held but a safe enough distance away from the food of you) and the other place of deep deep sadness that in 35 days you have to return to work and these small morning hours will go away. Bad mother. She will sleep this last stretch of night sleep instead in a pack n play or not at all, having to be woken up more fully and moved around, crying while you get dressed and cannot hold her. She is so small. Impossibly small. Bad mother. This most precious time is a gift and you are squandering it thinking already of when it will be over. Your neck hurts because you spend so much time staring at her. You don't eat enough in the day and you've been crying more at night again and my God there are already so many things you are doing imperfectly (which is to say, wrong). Bad mother. She already grew out of her newborn clothes and you cried when you packed them into a little plastic bin for storage. The beginning especially was so hard and exhausting, and there was so much pain (the literal, physical kind) it was almost unbearable but now you worry you missed it and you're missing it and you aren't ready to leave her. It is perhaps technically far away but it feels far too close and you aren't ready for these small hours between night and day to disappear, packed in a small plastic bin. You aren’t ready.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Filiz Fish 11/1/25 Filiz Fish 11/1/25

Laws of Motion

once, you said everything keeps moving until something stops it / so I wonder if it was time that slowed us / or the quiet between what we meant and what we said

We don’t talk the way we used to / but sometimes I still feel the pull / the air thick with what used to be gravity / your voice dimming / a hum caught between rooms / I think of you in motion / in fragments / your voice screaming against the faucet / steam ghosting your face / how even light, stretched too far, forgets its source / once, you said everything keeps moving until something stops it / so I wonder if it was time that slowed us / or the quiet between what we meant and what we said / distance growing like a crack beneath paint / invisible until it splits / last spring, I found your handwriting on a grocery list / cursive thinning at the edges / paper softening where your hand once pressed / now it’s just residue / Newton would call it equilibrium / I call it the stillness that comes after naming / each law another way to say silence collects / settles / fills the room like dust / when I pass your doorway / the air still shifts / slightly / measurable only in ache / someone told me sound never dies / it only travels / maybe that’s why, some mornings, I hear dishes clink / the soft drag of your slippers across tile / and pause / certain for a moment / that nothing has moved at all.

Daniel Couch 11/1/25 Daniel Couch 11/1/25

Sinkhole

Containment percentages, mass layoffs, budget shortfalls, 9-1-1 hold times: The sinkhole felt like another in a long list of calamities we’d learned to accept.

A sinkhole appeared in the street over the summer. It hadn’t rained in months, and wildfires were burning across the state. Containment percentages, mass layoffs, budget shortfalls, 9-1-1 hold times: The sinkhole felt like another in a long list of calamities we’d learned to accept. My dog sniffed at the edges. The darkness went on forever, mute and terrible, sunlight unwilling or unable to find the bottom.

Walking her again in the evenings, I called out to neighbors, “Watch out for the sinkhole,” or sometimes, “Somebody ought to do something about that sinkhole.” I could swear it was growing. Eventually, the City came and set up two worn, wooden barricades and a pair of bright, orange cones ringed in reflective tape.

I stopped seeing the sinkhole for a while after that, at least until the plastic tyrannosaurus appeared. Frozen in mid-roar, back leg emerging from the hole as if it was scrambling up to the surface, it carried all the fearsomeness of that immeasurable darkness with it. “Did you see the dinosaur?” we asked each other now. I told my neighbors not to get too close. They laughed like I was joking.

One afternoon, the dog and I passed the spot where the sinkhole had been and saw that the City had cut a large rectangle out of the street. The bottom was just two-and-a-half inches deep and covered in gravel and sand. Some of the neighbors expressed disappointment, as if the sinkhole had deceived them into believing it was more than it was. I knew better, though.

The sinkhole was still there, waiting to swallow up anyone who dared to step on it. The dinosaur was probably hiding nearby behind some compost bins, surviving on squirrels and blackberries. I had not forgotten. Not while there was still sunlight in the evenings. Not while the red sun chased the night sky away every morning.

At the end of the summer, the City paved over the hole. The rains came a few days later, steady and soft, clearing the haze from the skies. But underneath that benighted patch of gravel, sand, and tar, I hear the quiet contracting and swelling of the street, of all the other dinosaurs working at the seams. My neighbors have forgotten they are there, but I still whisper to the sinkhole as I pass, careful not to let the dog get too close.

Mary Grimm 11/1/25 Mary Grimm 11/1/25

Two Pieces

“Make me a promise,” she said to him when they were lying in bed, although it was not night, and he said, “What promise?” and she said, “You shouldn’t have to ask.”

Once More

“Make me a promise,” she said to him when they were lying in bed, although it was not night, and he said, “What promise?” and she said, “You shouldn’t have to ask.”

She half lay back on the pillows, peeling an orange, one of those small ones that have their own name. She dropped the peels on the floor, which was meant to annoy him, but he hardly cared about things like that anymore. Once, the brightness of the day was nothing beside a look from her, and it still was, most of the time.

“I'll make you a promise if you make me one,” he said.

The orange peels were like little boats, curved and clever.

“Okay,” she said. “I promise whatever you ask for, even if it means my own death.”

“So dramatic,” he said.

“Always,” she said. “Now you.”

He looked out the window. The sun was halfway down the sky, moving toward night. “I promise, if you like,” he said, “a blank check. So what have I promised?” But he was thinking that, after all, there was nothing that would hold him to it.

“Oh, no,” she said. “We’ll write them down and take them out at the right time.”

“Which is when?”

“We’ll know,” she said, “or one of us will.” Her hair was hanging down her back, snarled and lank. She never combed it anymore but it was still beautiful. “Give me a drink,” she said, “and some paper as well.” He gave her the half-drunk glass of almond-flavored water. When he gave her the paper, she tore it in half and wrote on both pieces. “There,” she said. “There’s yours and mine.”

“You don’t know what I asked for,” he said, and she said, “Oh, but I do.”

“Don’t look now,” she said, and lay back on the pillows, drawing the sheet up over her. When she was sleeping, he went out into the hall and looked at the two papers, each ragged down one edge. She had written “I Promise to Die” on the one meant for her. His was blank except for the sketch of a bird flying out the window.

The House Is Burning

Tom and Evie’s father came back for a while when Tom was five and Evie was three, but she didn’t really remember, except she thought a bear had come to visit because he was big and was wearing a brown robe. He said he was wearing a robe because he was living in an alternative community, which they pretended to understand. He stayed one day and when he left, their mother went into her room and didn’t come out for a long time.

Tom found Evie’s pajamas and arranged her animals around her and told her a story about a squirrel who couldn’t find a nut until a kitten helped him. He had read the story at school. He changed the ending because in the book it was a crow who helped with the nut, and he thought Evie would like a kitten better.

When she was settled, he went to his own room and thought about their father. He hadn’t liked the robe, which was rough and dusty. The hem was ragged, which his father explained was because the rules where he was living said that you couldn’t try to look nice, which was also why he had a beard and didn’t cut his hair. He told them this while their mother was making dinner. Tom sat on the floor under the dining room table, and his father sat on one of the chairs. He tried to put Evie on his lap but she ran away, which was probably because she thought he was a bear. Tom’s father said that Tom would understand when he was older, but he didn’t say what it was he’d understand.

He didn’t come again until Tom was fifteen and Evie was just starting high school. He was wearing a suit this time and a tie he took off and folded up into his pocket. His beard was gone. “You’ve got another brother and sister now,” he said. He told them he wanted them all to get together so they could be one big family, but that didn’t happen until many years later when he was dead.

Sean Thomas Dougherty 11/1/25 Sean Thomas Dougherty 11/1/25

I Am in a Room Alone

with the only music of the morning traffic, those who must rise to drive to labor, and a window often curtained and closed, and in winter, the radiator hissing, the kind from another century, the kind you must be careful or it will burn you. And there is a bed in the corner, and a small kitchen with a pot of coffee, and the murmurous speech of neighbors waking, for they too must return to the world where we are owned by others, who take the hours of our lives in return for wage. I would bet no one in this building could tell you my name or that there is a man who lives here all alone, long after the ones he loved, if ever, have left him, in this room. But then what are the names of the Chechen family who lives upstairs, who speak their difficult tongues, and the daughter who is late for the school bus every morning and runs calling after it in sounds of words I cannot translate as I pray she doesn’t fall? For who would lift her and bandage her knees? I peek out from behind the curtain, but the bus has stopped, and there is her mother on the porch yelling at her, smiling though. And then she pauses to look at the sky, the sky I have not looked at in days. There is absence and wholeness here, departure and what remains. The mother, now, is upstairs getting ready for work. The father and mother walk out in blue uniforms to work on a factory line. I once read the name of the pie factory on their clothes. To spend all day in the smell of sugar and sweetness must be a form of hell. I would learn to hate what I once loved to eat. There is something too often beautiful and terrible at the same time in this world. And then, the quiet of absence returns and fools me into clarity. And then, I look up to see starlings flying over the tenement roofs. I see the pale daylight moon staring down over the boat works and the refinery. Dear Lord, if now is the moment for a full confession, then now is when I will offer it if only you will lesson me on what I have left to learn.

Heikki Huotari 11/1/25 Heikki Huotari 11/1/25

Lunar Logic

There is a prequel and a sequel, then the cataclysm returns to its chrysalis, an odorless and colorless but very viscous liquid. It's been nanoseconds since my last deathbed confession.

There is a prequel and a sequel, then the cataclysm returns to its chrysalis, an odorless and colorless but very viscous liquid. It's been nanoseconds since my last deathbed confession. Be my albatross or alibi or flying folding chair.

There is a shoe for every scorpion, and every scorpion is in its shoe. Causation is only a partial order. At one end of every spectrum is an oxymoron; at the other, a redundancy. The continents have shifted in submission.

I thought you were serious until you said, But seriously. Just give me a place to pirouette, and I'll say it's an honor to be othered. Do you take the absentee to be an absolute? Each ethical dilemma is a trolley problem and—

today's the day the great apes have their picnic. I pronounce them separate entities. They want to know when will the bliss kick in. If I'm no angel, you're no angel. Keep your hands and feet where I can see them.

Although Sisyphus goes bowling with Narcissus, Sisyphus is no Narcissus. Quadrupeds are penitent and up in arms. This segue takes place in the nth dimension, and the tango and the bossa nova take the credit and the blame.

The butterfly was in the Bible but was only joking. That catastrophe accompanies the rapture is a given. In a bubble, I'm as probable as not. The butterfly said rest in peace but didn't mean it. Breathe on this piano, and it will go out of tune.

Richard Jordan 9/30/25 Richard Jordan 9/30/25

Morning in the Burbs

Rain or shine, goldfinches light up my day with their bubbly chatter. Unless they perceive a threat then they turn stone quiet.

Rain or shine, goldfinches light up my day with their bubbly chatter. Unless they perceive a threat then they turn stone quiet. Early this morning the threat was a fat black bear hunched over the torn-down suet feeder. I led the cat to the window to witness, but apparently her neurons couldn’t process bear. She only wanted to sniff my buttered bagel and be brushed. I’m writing this not because I have anything deep to say, but come on—a bear on my front lawn! Also, the truth is, for a moment in those tricky morning shadows, I thought the bear was my neighbor, who's a survivalist of some sort and rather hairy. Grizzly Adams, we call him, though not to his face. On weekends he disappears into the mountains of New Hampshire and eats only things he kills or finds dead, or else beef jerky. The goldfinches fall silent fast when he’s out and about in the neighborhood. They hole up in my forsythia. Perfect camouflage. Once I asked him why he scares the birds and he said, What birds? I wouldn’t want to survive without birdsong. I even love the sorrowful coos of mourning doves at 6:00 AM. In no time, the bear devoured the glob of grease and seeds and waddled off through the neighbor’s yard, leaving behind a pile of scat. By then the cat had licked my bagel clean, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I knew shortly the forsythia would rustle and, one by one, bright goldfinches would rise.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 3, “Might Micros”. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

David Daniel 9/18/25 David Daniel 9/18/25

Spells

On Christmas Eve as teens, we amble Georgetown’s lamplit streets, fingers linked, kissing, your upper lip prickly with that faint mustache some girls get. Your dad is a basement shut-in, a bald guy with myalgia. I had been sipping pink sherry at a gift exchange at my grandpa’s house, my crystal glass prisming the festive fir’s icicle lights into rainbows. Recrossing the tall arch bridge, I scale the patina green parapet rail. The steel chills my fingers as I teeter above the tree crowns, the void of the wide black river. Through those balusters, I ask you if I should do it. Not missing a beat, you snuff your cigarette cherry on my half-numb knuckle and a moment later, faint. I scramble back over and kneel beside you, jostling your limp shoulder. An ambulance slows. Driver says someone phoned in about a jumper. I play dumb and say you fainted. The medic loads you on a stretcher and we pull away as a news van arrives. You come to in a panic, demanding they let us off at the Metro stop. After your dad sends you to an all-girls boarding school on a distant river, we pen each other letters. Yours land in my mailbox, a mauve wax seal on the back flap. God, our paths cross decades after, you having refound religion among snake handlers, spirit talkers.