Do Cubists Dream of Jazz Quartets?

The haze of smoke swirls; a miasma in the cool, dark air of the club. The band launches into a new tune; the bass takes an introduction, plinking out dark tones that spell the body of a song. ‘Autumn in New York,’ and so it is. The cool outside air has no dominion here; the warmth of bodies grows to nearly unbearable levels. One almost imagines cigarettes lighting themselves. The tenor blows softly through the head while the clinking piano builds into a soft pad of notes which swirl with the cigarette smoke. I dance the ice cube around my drink; its orange hue reflecting the smoke and shifting it to amber.

Behind me, the clinking of glasses and gentle, quiet conversations; the movement makes this place feel external to time. The club holds us together, a physical manifestation of our collective—the sanctuary we seek from the music. The musicians begin to improvise, the pianist taking the lead, rushing the tempo out of the gentle ballad they had begun with. He plays with the geometrics of music, up and down the ivories, tapping out gentle rectangles in the upper register of his instrument. For a fleeting moment, he himself seems to be rectangular.

The band is afforded a moment to cool off as the tenor takes a brief, lyric solo; I again waltz with the ice cube in my drink as it slowly dilutes the liquor at the bottom of the glass. The ice cube, it seems, has not felt Time’s expansion. The notes of the band fade and fall to nothing.

The tenor takes the lead, deftly dancing around the melody and announcing the musicians as they launch into a swifter tune: ‘Four.’ They play everything more loosely now, time expanding and contracting with the music’s pulse. The sprint of the bass, the insistent tink of the ride, the crashing of the keys create a hole in time and space. The smoke rises again, choking the room and dancing to the roiling beat of the music.

Before my eyes, the musicians shift and change. The pianist crushes down to a rectangular face with branching, triangular hands that break off at sharp, odd points. The music crushes, the sound of the piano becomes harsher, faster; the world turns on its axis when he smashes out a new chord. The bassist becomes swiftly ovoid, melding into the great beast of his instrument; the hollow wood of the bass smiles wide, its splintered grin suggesting a perverse, voyeuristic joy. The tenor player is now a cube, his saxophone a simple tube which makes noises seemingly impossible for an instrument of its shape and bore: it howls, screams, roars, trumpets as if summoning the magnificent elephant. It speaks of the desert, of a Savior, of a mirage, of truth, of lies, of darkness.

The music boils; the tempo, frenetic. The volume is all consuming as the shape of the drummer becomes incomprehensible; he is a mess of geometry, thousands of square limbs screaming towards the heads of his battered drum. The musicians howl as a mess of color and shapes blooms over their heads; a current of squares blows by the stage and dissolves into a choking whirlwind.

The saxophone shrieks a narrative gospel of a man born into a timeless world where he alone ages, and all others are static. As the tenor climaxes multiphonically, I see this Grand Tube’s beak point directly to me.

I begin to scream, shriek, howl alongside the music, a great devilish sound, though those in the club may misinterpret it as piety. The roiling shapes within me strain and struggle to burst forth from my pale chest. I have been discovered! The figures in the club all turn to me as one; the whispers begin, yet I cannot discern anything that has been said. In the back of my mind I think I hear them say, “He isn’t dancing…”

And they are right. I have never danced. I have only watched the geometry of other men’s movements and called it understanding.

The whispers grow and shift into the haze of cigarette smoke, the letters joining the great current of swirling, choking geometry in a choir of omniscient judgement.

I see the doorman of the club speaking to the owner, pulling at the inside of his thick jacket. A man near him falls into a coughing fit, sips his water, and falls silent. The stares continue unabated, a thousand fractured prisms which scythe the fabric of time in two.

The club spins around me, its pace matching the tempo and dances with them. In and out, the music dictates the orientation of the room; glasses clink and fall about like bullets from an assembly of executioners. The people remain still, as if glued to their chairs. They, too, have become geometric.

I feel my foot begin to collapse into a dead cube of flesh, molding my shoe to a new shape. I am breathless, panic rising in me unlike anything I’ve known. Viscera falls into marching order, obeying a new master, some other God of shape and substance. On cue, the drummer and his octopian limbs morph into a perversion of a snare, the beat reverberating as if played by a million cloned musicians, all milliseconds apart from one another. The sound is both harrowing and all consuming. Beside this train of snares, the tenor commands Time to halt his efforts until the story has been told.

The music stops abruptly. The crowd breaks into a gentle applause and the shapes return to their anthropomorphic forms, seemingly unfazed. Yet, in the corner of my eye, I see the cubic form of an ice cube clinking in an empty glass at the edge of the bar.

I order another drink, my dry mouth reminding me of my thirst. The bartender obliges silently, looking at me with a modicum of concern before passing me the drink. The man beside me lights a new cigarette, his previous smoked to a nub during the performance. He inhales sharply and looks around, impatient.

My breathing slows. I had been panting through the performance, and the sheen of sweat on my brow draws strange looks from the couples around me.

The tenor thanks the crowd for their time and announces one final number. The drummer begins, abrasively up-tempo, unceasing: ‘Countdown.’ Suddenly the room again contracts, more surgical and mechanistic than before; the shapes coalesce into being. The Grand Tube screams “Countdown” and the precise, brutal mathematics of the sound forces geometry back into being. Again, the room wakes to life, spinning, spinning, spinning. I dance with the room itself now, and feel my rectangular soles leave the floor as the tenor continues to proselytize. The Tube’s gospel swarms, infesting my mind and body with holy geometry. The shapes are brutal, machines made to torment, to kill, to change. Tessellation overcomes the room.

Time snaps. The world shatters into anisometric form, millions upon millions of shards. My body contorts of its own will; there is nothing but deference to this gospel. My flesh disintegrates into thousands of shapes, their pointed edges sharp.

Incomprehensibly, a shape emerges from the din. A man, standstill yet free-floating in Time’s vacuous world. The Tube chants of the man observing life from the outside, of seeing the great dance of humanity, collisions and all. He stands at the edge of the dance floor, unable to step into the rhythm. His limbs answer to a different metronome. My body contracts and I suddenly become that man, or some perverted form of him. My bones snap, angling themselves into predestined, geometric form. The pain is unbearable, and again I scream in harmony with The Grand Tube.

The band grinds to an aching halt, basking in the afterglow of performance. A grinding noise overcomes the room as the music’s machinery collapses to dust. Severing geometry from flesh, the sound seems for a moment boundless, until its work is done. Everyone again turns to their original form. I move to stand and leave, but as I try, my eye is drawn to the empty glass on the table. The drink, empty, is now missing its ice cube. The final shape is gone, and I suddenly understand. The music has no room for witnesses.

Liam Eichberg is a writer from Tampa, Florida. He loves coffee, weird & paranoid fiction, and jazz loud enough to confuse the neighbors. He has been published in GossamerWight and the talking chair, among others. He can be found on instagram as @liameichberg.

Fried Eggs for Breakfast

My dad in a white tee

shirt. Collar stretched,

starched in old sweat, reading

yesterday’s paper slowly, tilling it with

a dictionary.

His chopsticks scratch a Kmart

plate, next to him plastic-wrapped Kmart

cake. His paper sighs as he folds it back

again, for tomorrow.

We don’t eat in the dining room, it’s been

cellophaned for fine furniture.

We eat in the kitchen,

on sticky mats that say

it’d be Prudential to buy insurance.

A fried egg leaves its first home

“But you try to keep the center,”

my mom says. “And we don’t call it fried

we call it held, 荷包. Like a pocket,

like a purse.” A small sun housed

in a purse of exploding clouds,

“And you have to flip it,” she says,

“To hold the center.”

First published in “A Thin Slice of Anxiety” (March 2026)

Albert Hwang is a Taiwanese American poet from Illinois. He writes about alienation, distance, and inherited grief in the Asian American experience. He is a 2004 James B. Reston New York Times Gold Key winner (Scholastic Arts & Writing). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Inscape Journal, Unbroken: Prose Poems, Heavy Feather Review, DIHP, Anxiety Press, Pen Pushers, Longmeadow Literary, and other publications.

Desert Rose

Orange Italian tile as far as the eye can see on which floats

A wood island bar, high vaulted ceilings flooded

With natural light. Tortillas and biscochitos wafting

Into three dining rooms leading off in as many directions,

Crystal glasses in the corner cupboard among the white

China grooved with painted pink flowers and green leaves.

The dinner platter, two dozen plates, cups, etcetera, all heavier

Than the other in their authenticity.

Their hollow clatter echoes throughout the gallería

As the Franciscan desert rose takes its rightful place

On the white tile counter.

How many heads of state have drunk

From these glasses or eaten finery from these dishes—those dead

Presidents and accused Governors—a large crack

Runs down from the lip where once it might have cut

Them, a small and insignificant justice, if only to knock

Them down a peg. The China breathes

Through that crack as labored

As its current owner, the last matriarch

Outliving all the high-titled men of the family, enough

For sole ownership over these ceramic pieces which may soon

Be distributed, separated, and collect dust in lesser cupboards, dethroned

From the mansion’s ridged perch atop the Sangre de Cristo,

Dissolution to her poor children, their inheritance stolen

By a capitalist society. That cornerstone laid by her husband,

Their father, grandfather, great grandfather, now belongs to the Bank.

Acknowledgment for the poem: In loving memory of my grandmother, Eloisa L. Block, and the home she built. Madame Butterfly

Dorian Block (he/him/il) is a poet whose words are drawn from living as a transgender Canadian immigrant contending with the loss of access to his homeland in the American Southwest, Oga Po’geh, NM. Dorian's writing won international awards at the National Model United Nations Conference in Rome, Italy, while earning his B.A. in English with an Arts Administration concentration. He wrote for and served as Editor of The War Hawk Herald and Art Editor and Prose Editing Staff for The Galleon. He co-founded one of the ‘75 Top Cosplay Blogs’ on Feedspot, covering national conventions as press with features in Cosplayzine, ClexaCon’s online Press Room and the Cosplay Savant column of FangirlNation Magazine. Dorian writes marketing copy across the entertainment industry and maintains an artistic practice in multimedia three dimensional scale. He currently resides in the unceded land of Amiskwacîwâskahikan, AB with his brilliant and beautiful wife and three fur babies, a German Shepherd, a cow kitty and a dust kitty.

Alaska’s Secrets

Eighty miles north of Fairbanks, the road narrowed until it was no longer a road at all, just a suggestion pressed into the land by habit and stubbornness. Beyond that, there were cabins spaced by miles and silence, where the sky stretched so wide it could swallow a person whole.

That was where Lila went in May.

She met him on a bright afternoon that seemed impossible for Alaska, with the sun high and warm, the air smelling of spruce and thawing earth. His name was Aaron Hale, and he came into the small trading post where she worked part-time that summer, brushing dust from his shoulders as if he’d just stepped out of the wilderness itself.

He smiled easily, chatted about many subjects, and knew everyone.

“You’re new,” he said.

She nodded. “Just for the season. Got a room in the back.”

“You won’t wanna to leave,” he told her. It sounded like a promise.

By July, she believed him.

They spent evenings by the river, the light lingering late into the night, turning everything gold. He brought her grayling wrapped in foil, cooked over a fire. He laughed often, loud and warm. He told her about winters that made men honest and summers that made them forget everything else.

“Y’ever seen the aurora?” he asked once.

“No.”

“You will,” he said. “First winter. It’ll change you.”

He kissed her then, sudden and certain, like the rest of him. By August, they were married. It happened fast. Everyone said that’s how it went up there. Short summers, short patience for waiting. You grabbed what felt right and held on.

His cabin sat back from a stand of black spruce, its logs dark with age and weather. A woodpile stacked neatly in a row beside the walkway. There was a small porch leading into an entrance shed, the muck room, he called it.

“You don’t bring th’ outside in,” he told her, showing her the place. “Boots stay here. Always.”

Rows of heavy winter boots lined the wall even in August, Sorels, Bogs, Muck Boots, including hers, like silent sentries waiting for their season.

She laughed at them then. Winter felt like a story someone else had told.

***

It came in September, quiet at first.

Frost edged the windows. The river slowed and thickened. The light shortened day by day until it seemed to vanish altogether.

By November, the world had closed in.

Snow fell and did not stop. It buried the path, the porch, and the old truck. It buried everything until the cabin sat in a white silence that pressed against the walls.

Aaron moved through it easily. He knew where to step, how to use showshoes and cut a trail, how to read the sky. Only he went out.

“Too deep,” he told her when she offered. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

He took the snowmobile to the trading post, to the road, to wherever it was he went when he disappeared for hours at a time. He came back with groceries, with bottles, with a mood she learned to read the moment the door opened.

The muck room became her boundary. Like everyone else in the area, she tossed the household garbage out onto the snow at the edge of the yard. It’d be covered the next day and frozen there till summer.

Inside, the cabin smelled of wood smoke and close air. Outside, the cold could kill you in minutes. Between them, the muck room, unheated, dim, lined with boots and stiff coats. That was where the outside stopped, and the inside began.

She dreaded the sound of the snowmobile returning.

At first, it was small things. A grip too tight on her arm. A sharp word when she spoke out of turn. The way his eyes would harden when she hesitated.

“You’re muh wife. Do whut I say,” he said once, as if it explained everything.

By the time the sun stopped rising altogether, she understood.

There was nowhere to go.

Even if there had been, she didn’t know how to get there. No road she could follow, no neighbor she could reach on foot through snow that swallowed fences and swallowed paths and swallowed sound.

The nights were the worst.

The cabin creaked in the cold, the wind scraping along the logs like something alive. He would drink, and the man she had married in the golden light of July would disappear entirely. Something harder remained. Colder. Demanding. If she resisted, he made sure she wouldn’t the next time.

Bruises bloomed and faded and bloomed again. She learned to move carefully, to speak carefully, to exist in the narrowest way possible. Time blurred. Days and nights lost their edges. The world became the cabin. The cabin became him.

***

It was in December that everything broke. The storm had been going on for two days straight, the kind that erased even the sky. He came back late, drunker than usual, his face red with cold and anger.

She had done something wrong. She never knew what. The first blow came before she could speak. She went down hard against the table, the breath leaving her in a rush. He shouted words that tangled and slurred, but the meaning was clear enough in his hands. It went on longer than the others. Long enough that something inside her shifted.

Not fear. That had already filled every corner of her. Something quieter. Something that waited. When it was over, he stumbled into the chair by the stove, breathing hard, reaching for the bottle.

She lay on the floor, staring at the underside of the table, at the knife marks and burn scars etched into the wood. Her ears rang. Her body ached in places she couldn’t name.

He laughed once, a low, ugly sound. “Git up.”

She didn’t move.

“Get. Up, I said.”

Her hand found the handle of the skillet where it rested on the lower shelf of the stove. Heavy cast iron, blackened from years of use. She didn’t think about it. If she had, she might not have done it. She stood slowly, the skillet hanging loose at her side.

He looked at her, irritation turning to something sharper.

“What are you—”

She swung. The sound was dull. Final.

He dropped where he sat, the bottle slipping from his hand and rolling across the floor. For a long time, she didn’t move.

The storm outside swallowed the noise. The cabin held its breath. She waited for him to get up.

He didn’t.

***

The muck room was nearly as cold as the outdoors, the rest of the cabin, warm. She worked through the night. Breathing out puffs of smoke, the boards came up easier than she expected, the nails old and loose. Beneath them, the ground was already hard, the frost pushing up from below.

She didn’t dig far. Just enough.

By the time she finished, her gloved hands were aching from the pointed shovel handle, her breath coming in thin clouds that lingered in the dim light. She put the boards back carefully. Set the boots in place. Sorels. Bogs. Muck Boots, except for the ones she’d put on his feet. Everything where it belonged.

***

Winter settled in fully after that. The snowmobile sat where he’d left it.

She learned to use it. At first, she kept her trips short. To the trading post. Back again. No one asked too many questions. That was the way of things out there.

In January, the sheriff came.

He knocked, stamping snow from his boots before stepping into the muck room, removing his boots, then into the cabin.

“You seen Aaron?” he asked.

She shook her head, wrapping her arms around herself.

“He went out hunting,” she said. “Took snowshoes, rifle, and backpack. Said he’d be back in a couple days.”

The sheriff frowned slightly, looking around the cabin.

“That was when?”

“Couple weeks ago.”

He nodded slowly.

“Storm could’ve got him turned around,” he said. “Happens.”

She lowered her eyes.

“I figured.”

He lingered a moment longer, then sighed.

“Let me know if you hear anything.”

“I will.”

He left, the door closing behind him with a solid finality.

***

The months passed.

She worked part-time at the trading post when she could, using the snowmobile he’d left behind. People were kind in the distant way people are in places like that. They offered help without asking too much.

No one looked too closely. No one asked what they didn’t want answered.

Spring came slowly, the light returning in hesitant increments. The snow softened. The world began to breathe again.

In the muck room, the boards stayed firm. The boots remained in their places. By the time the thaw came in earnest, the ground beneath had held its secret well.

And Lila, who had come north in the golden light of June, stepped out into the first real warmth of the year alone.

No longer waiting. No longer afraid. Just quiet. Like the land itself.

M.D. Smith of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bewilderingstories.com, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. You can find him at https://mdsmithiv.com/

Enlightenment

As the heron lifts it free,
the fish suddenly
understands

Credit: The Grace to Leave (Anhinga Press, 2012)

Lola Haskins’ 16th book of poetry Like Zeros, Like Pearls (Charlotte Lit Press, 2025. The collection prior to that, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press, 2023), was named Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Literary Review and the one before that, Asylum (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), was featured in the NY Times. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two Florida Book Awards, two narrative poetry prizes, a Florida's Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America. She has served as Honorary Chancellor for FSPA since 2016.

(JK): Hi Angie, Congratulations on winning our WIP Prize for your story collection Waiting for Glinda! We’re thrilled to feature a sample of your work, “Daylilies.”

Before we get to the story itself (below), I’d love to delve into your journey as a writer and with this particular WIP. Tell us: how and where do you find inspiration? What inspired this particular story?

Angie Curneal Palsak (ACP) Hi Jen! Thanks so much for this opportunity! I just want you to know that I am so excited and so proud to be a WIP prize winner. Thank you.

As for inspiration, I’d like to think that it finds me—that I’m just a radio tower: I pick up signals and then I transmit those signals into short stories, art, and other creative projects.

“Daylilies” is a story about burnout. It was inspired by my experiences working at a community college. I worked there for eighteen years, which is just one year shy of the amount of time Andy Dufresne was imprisoned at Shawshank.

JK: Who are your favorite authors?

ACP: I have favorite authors for different decades of my life. At 15 I discovered Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and that just cracked open a whole new world for me. It was the first time I read something that was edgy. In my early twenties, I read far too much Anais Nin, which got me into stupid situations. In my late twenties, too much Bukowski, which fueled my job-hating years. My thirties were Margaret Atwood. She helped me through this endless loop of bachelorette parties/weddings/and baby showers I was always attending. In my forties, I immersed myself in the non-fiction self-help space via audiobooks and podcasts. Now, in my early fifties, I’m trying to get back to fiction. Right now, my goal is to read one short story a week that I randomly find online.

JK: What is your revision process like, and how do you know when a piece of writing is complete?

ACP: My gut tells me when a story is done. Unfortunately, I often mishear my gut; I am guilty of sending off plenty of half-baked stories to literary magazines, just so I could feel like I accomplished something. I have noticed that some of my best writing is the result of melting several unfinished stories together, so maybe for me revision is more like welding. (Which gives me total Flashdance vibes!!)

JK: What is the best advice you’ve received as a writer?

ACP: I have a complicated reaction this question.

I earned my MFA when I was 24 and then spent the next couple of decades doing a little writing here and there but I mostly abandoned it.

I never had a mentor or a coach before, during, or after that time, so no one really pushed me or called me out for being an a-hole when I needed it.

I also never asked for help, and I take full responsibility for that.

One time I did ask one of my professors if I had what it takes to “make it” as a writer. This prof completely avoided answering the question, totally changing the subject. That stuck with me for like…forever.

It wasn’t until last year that I realized that that was a totally dumb question to ask someone. For one, I should never have given my power away like that. Secondly, I was both putting this person in an awkward position and perpetuating English Professor God Complex Syndrome. Anyway, that’s what Waiting for Glinda is all about—wasting time waiting for permission to do what you always knew you were meant to do.

So, the best writing advice I’ve ever received is what I finally told myself at 50: Angie Rae, just sit down, shut up, and do the damn work.

JK: What’s next for you as a writer?

ACP: I’m working on getting Waiting for Glinda published. I already have a sequel brewing in my head. I’m not sure if I should write it as a book though. I’m considering writing it as a television pilot. I could use the WIP prize money to pay for a script writing class…

JK: What did winning the WIP Prize mean to you?

ACP: Winning the WIP Prize meant that I gave myself good advice! I like it when the Universe occasional provides evidence that I’m not a total idiot. Also, winning WIP was a wake-up call—maybe it’s not good mentally and spiritually to be writing this intensely, all alone. So, because of the prize, and talking to you, Jen, I’m going to take some baby steps and try connecting with some other writers—like attending the Unleashed Creative Resilience Circle. This is actually very hard for me. I don’t like breaking my routine. For example, when the workday is done, I go home and put my jogging pants on. There is no “other” like having a drink with a co-worker or stopping by a bookstore. Except for my life with my husband, I’m pretty much a loner. My husband, Tibor, is great at encouraging me to put on pants that don’t have drawstrings and getting me out of the house to see the world…which is important if you are going to write about it.

JK: What didn’t I ask that you’d like to answer?

ACP: How about… Name a guilty pleasure that you’re into lately?

My guilty pleasure is the band, The Doors. I’ve loved them since I was 14. I flew myself to Paris at 20 to visit Jim’s grave and then flew myself to Venice Beach at 50 to pay homage to the band’s birthplace. This year is their 60^th anniversary and they are everywhere right now. (I was super geeked when Daryl Dixon noted Jim’s grave in an episode of The Walking Dead and there’s a fun cover of “People Are Strange” in Pluribus.) This means a lot to me because I think The Doors are just true poetry and they speak to some little barefoot hippie girl buried inside me.

Thank you for sharing a little more about your journey, Angie!

Angie Curneal Palsak is a short story writer based in South Bend, Indiana. Her work examines the emotional weight of stuckness and the struggle to move beyond it. She has stories published in: Academy of the Heart and Mind, 10 by 10 Flash Fiction, Prosetrics, and The MacGuffin. She was recently shortlisted for The Letter Review’s quarterly short story prize, was a finalist for Short Edition’s “Money Chronicles: A Story Initiative” contest, and the winner of Unleash Press’s 2025 Works In Progress award. When not writing, she and her husband of twenty-plus years, Tibor, travel in search of live music, good food, dog-friendly breweries, celebrity graves, and amazing art. Find her at angiecpalsak.com.

Daylilies

by Angie Curneal Palsak

It’s August—the ground is dry, the air humid. The hotel parking lot is cracked and crumbling. I nearly trip over a chunk of concrete that’s broken loose from one of the landscaping islands floating in the middle of the long-faded blacktop. Maybe I should have just let myself get taken down. A broken nose would probably excuse me from this godforsaken professional development workshop I have been forced to come into town for.

Upon closer inspection, these little islands of misery, all unkempt, are nothing more than highway daylilies gone wild. Poor things: their season is over. Once glorious orange blooms, now dry and withered, litter the ground. Nothing remains but stalk and stamen. I pass more of these little patches of green, trying to estimate at what angle I would need to land to just sprain, but not break my arm.

Not having the guts to throw myself down on the pavement, I slowly drag my rolling suitcase through the automated doors of the hotel lobby. The wine bottles inside clink as I pull up before the front desk. The air conditioning is on full blast and goose pimples my arms.

The receptionist moves slowly, as though she’s doing me a huge favor by handing me the room key before three. If she really wanted to do me a favor, she could’ve said there wasn’t any reservation in the system for me, Nancy. Nancy Drew. Now that would’ve been doing me a favor. (And yes, that’s really my name. It’s what happens when you marry Bill Drew.)

I make my way to the elevator observing the people. This hotel isn’t that bad, but it’s not that nice either. It seems to be a stop-gap, a place people stay when they can’t make it to where they are really trying to go. There’s nothing nearby. To go somewhere I would have to get back on the highway. So, I decide right then that I’m in for the night.

I get to my room, bolt the door, and crank the air conditioning up. I’m still chilled—for now. Soon enough, the menopausal inferno will rise and I’ll be lowering it. But for now, I just feel cold and worn out.

I change into my floral pajamas. I hate them, but they were the last thing my mother bought me before she died. I’m afraid to let them go. Loose bottoms and a short-sleeved top, they look like something a sick person in a nursing home would wear. They’re the only pair that fit me anymore.

The phone rings. It’s Bill.

He asks how the drive was, if I remembered my charger, tells me about a gigantic woodpecker he saw drilling away on the roof to our garage. Asks me if I’ve eaten, if I’m going anywhere, how’s the room.

I answer the questions. We hang up.

I stretch out on the bed, open up a new bag of Lays and then crack open the wine, pouring it into the little plastic cup that was tucked inside the ice bucket. I click through the channels and end up watching some show about two women who ran someone over. Or maybe just one did. I can’t quite tell yet. They’re in worse trouble than me and that makes me feel better. I kick my legs wide open and fling my arms back on my stack of pillows, finally feeling a bit more relaxed. I realize I am sticking to the left side of the queen-sized bed. I scoot over so I’m in the middle. I’m so used to having just one side after twenty-some years of marriage. I fluff up the pillows, slosh a little wine on them, shrug and settle back in. This is kind of nice.

In time, the bag of chips is gone and the first bottle of wine is close. I move to the desk in my room to complete a required pre-workshop self-assessment. It’s one of those damn personality tests. The first question already stumps me, I can’t decide between C or D. So I just choose A.

1 . When faced with a stressful situation, I usually:

A. Make a plan and take action

B. Talk it through with someone I trust

C. Shut down and avoid dealing with it

D. Try to distract myself until it passes

Choosing A is easy. As is B. So, I just keep that up, circling A-B-B-A over and over again. I begin to hum “Dancing Queen” and try not to think about tomorrow’s class. Which, of course, is impossible.

Stacey, my boss, is calling this class “an opportunity for growth”. It is a required part of my P.I.P, my Performance Improvement Plan. If I didn’t comply and come out here, I would instantly lose my job. So, I think it is more of a Punishment in Progress. All of my coworkers must think so too because no one asked where I was going. They all knew this is a trip no one wants to take. I’m the cautionary tale they’re glad isn’t theirs.

I mean it sounds like absolute hell. It’s called “Unlocking the Keys to Meaningful Workplace Engagement”. It’s one of those stupid escape rooms: “Your mission: Restore team morale and unlock the door to collective success.” It takes place here in one of the hotel’s windowless conference rooms. It starts at eight with a “Fuel Your Potential” continental breakfast. Then, we will be divided into groups based on our personality assessments. I already dread the moment when my teammates discover that they are solving a mystery with Nancy Drew.

I don’t know. I guess in a way, being here is better than being back in Drury. This thing is still fresh and hasn’t been forgotten yet. I can still feel Stacey’s tight-lipped disappointment when I pass her in the hallway. My co-workers are all annoyed by me. They’ve all been tasked with double-checking my work. I have to show them the schedules I make and the audits I run. I’m pretty much just a dead man walking. It’s like my brain’s been lobotomized or my head just fell off, kind of like those daylilies down there in the parking lot.

I guess I don’t blame my co-workers for thinking I’m some sort of loser just riding the wave until I can retire. It’s not like they know any better. I’ve worked there the longest. None of them, even Stacey, were there when I was good. When I dressed cute and was Advisor of the Year and even coached the girls’ swim team. That Nancy is just a ghost. One award on a plaque that no one bothers to dust, much less read.

And it’s not any better at home. I mean, my husband thinks I’m having some sort of nervous breakdown or something. No matter how normal I try to act, I still can’t quite shake off Bill’s worried looks. I had to tell him what happened, especially when he came home and found me bawling in the bathtub. And now all he does is keep an eye on me like he’s my dad or something. He’s constantly watching me, at the kitchen table, peeking at me from behind the cereal box as I sit, staring down at my empty bowl, wearing my baggy black office pants and my threadbare bathrobe at the same time, half-way dressed for work and half-way dressed to stay home.

I pause and listen to another plane roar over the hotel.

For hours, I thought it was thunder. Then I finally looked out the window and saw the low-flying jumbo jets, wheels out, getting ready to land. That’s when it hit me: I’m just minutes from O’Hare.

I get up from the desk and pull the curtains back. It’s dark now. The window reflects my face in the glass, half-lit by the desk lamp. I don’t like seeing my face anymore. I have my grandmother’s jowls.

Another jet passes overhead. From my window, I can see the tiny cabin lights and swear I see little heads and shoulders. They look like the Little People in my old Fisher Price toy airplane I had when I was a kid. I wonder who’s relieved to be home, who’s just connecting to somewhere else, and who wishes they could turn around and go back to wherever they came from.

I reach for another refill of the wine, but now we’re empty. On to Bottle #2. I twist the cap, fill my little cup, and sit on the edge of the bed. Time for sipping is over. I grab the flyer for tomorrow’s workshop off my desk. I know they’re going to make me talk about it. About the student I failed. The scholarship I cost him. The lie I told. I take a big swallow of the wine. His name was Damon Jones. Nineteen. His mother dead. Living with his grandma. Hard-working. Smart. A little too smart. He actually caught my mistake, but I didn’t listen.

“Umm, uh, Mrs. Drew, don’t I need Phys 202 for graduation?” he paused, not signing the form.

I grabbed the form back from him, looked at the classes I enrolled him in and then cross-checked that with all the classes and AP credits he had on his transcript while cross-referencing that with the Michigan Community College Graduation Requirements and the A.S. Biology Transfer Advising Guide to Western Michigan University.

“Nope, says right here Phys 201, which you are in now, satisfies our A.S. graduation requirements as well as the Michigan Transfer Agreement, as well as the Biology major prerequisites for Western.” I turned all my pages around as well as my computer screen and showed him everything. One eye on my clock on the wall, all I could think about was my Stouffer’s frozen entrée and how I wanted to be the first in line to heat it up.

He looked at everything, blurry eyed from staying up all night studying for some trig test and then just signed the form. He left and I ran like hell to the kitchenette, just beating Katie to the microwave by one nano second.

That Stouffer’s lasagna cost him graduation and a full-ride transfer scholarship he desperately needed and had earned.

Oh, but that’s not all.

I reach for the bottle.

Then came the cover-up.

I remember the filing room. The moment I forged his name on the form that would get me out of this mess, tucking it into his file. Sweating through this big, ugly brown sweater I wore almost every day, half-hiding, half-showcasing the new gut I’d earned from the meds. And the wine. All the cheap-ass wine. The very same sweater I had to peel off hours later because it felt like it was strangling me while I hacked into my bosses’ voicemail. (Yes, I did that too.) Had to erase the messages. His grandma had called Stacey, begging her to do something about me, just like she threatened she would in several of the messages she left for me.

I take another big gulp as I stare at the television. Now muted. The show with the two guilty girls is still on. Must be some sort of marathon. I sip and watch as they bury a body at night. The screen fades to black and I see myself sitting on the bed, my PJ top half unbuttoned showcasing the rolls of fat burgeoning over the elastic waist band of my pull-on pants. I see the greasy hair and the semi-arthritic hands clutching the precious plastic cup of wine. I look away just as the screen flashes into a commercial break and stare at the floor, rubbing my head.

Suddenly, I’m back in my office, refreshing the local weather report, praying for a snow day. That’s when they appeared: Stacey, the HR head honcho, and Dr. Fitz, the college president. No knock. Stacey leaned against the wall while the other two laid it out: the forgery, the tampering, the consequences. After they left, I didn’t move. Just stared at the floor, same as now.

Outside my door, the advising office went silent. Then some whispers followed by some increased foot traffic past my office, curious eyes peeking in, pretending not to look. I didn’t know it then, but the snow I’d been hoping for had started to fall quietly behind me. It piled up hour after hour as I continued to sit there and the others left. I heard them talking about the snow, but I didn’t have the energy to turn around and look out my window. Besides, I was already buried.

Just as I am now, but under the thick haze of cheap wine. I place my cup on the nightstand and flop back on my nest of white pillows. They are so fluffy that I feel like I am floating. I lie there, staring at the stucco ceiling, the fire alarm, and the sprinkler head with the warning not to hang my clothes from it. The ceiling spins just a bit as a tidal wave of wine sloshes inside me. My eyes feel so heavy. I cover one eye with my hand as I squint at the stucco, zeroing in on the sharp points. Like little bitty shark teeth, they start retracting then extending back out. That starts to freak me out, so I cover my other eye with my other hand and sink into total darkness. The darkness is peaceful. I listen to my breathing and the rumble of the jumbo jets flying over my body.

Suddenly, something wet hits my face. I take my hands away just in time to see a drop of water fall from the sprinkler head hitting me right in the eye. Then another. And another. One by one the drops fall collecting on my cheeks. The drops increase in speed, changing into a steady flow drenching my top and seeping into the mattress.

The next thing I know is that I am at the bottom of the river. I seem to have made the mistake of taking Damon out for a spin in my new sea-green convertible. We are traveling down a curvy road by the St Joseph. Accelerating with every twist of the road, Damon uses this as just cause to present his case on how horrible convertibles are.

After reason number thirty-eight, increased risk of skin cancer, I calmly interrupt and tell him that I am going to show him one thing a convertible is great for. And that’s when I give it to him. I yank the steering wheel to the left, crossing two lanes and sweep down the embankment, heading towards the river. We mow down ducks and beavers and crash through holly bushes. Before we hurdle into the river, I scream out the answer; “A convertible offers the highest survival rate should you ever plunge into the river!”

The cold rush of water fills our mouths, knocking my glasses off. The force shoves our bodies together. As if on an elevator, we slowly sink to the bottom of the river.

We settle on the river’s sandy floor with a thump and a surge of bubbles. I look over at Damon. He is feverishly trying to undo his seat belt. My belt comes undone in one single try. I float out of the car, ignoring his cries for rescue.

The sand is hard to walk on. My feet keep getting tangled in seaweed and bushes. I find it easier to lightly bounce about. I kick some old beer cans and throw an alarm clock at a school of fish. They scatter, then surround my head, smacking me in the face with their tails. My arms windmill wildly as I run from them.

Some distance away I come across a little field of daylilies. They’re in full bloom. I reach down and lightly stroke one stem’s orange petals rippling in the current. One by one the petals curl up, dying on the stalk before falling to the sand. I touch another flower and the same thing happens; the entire bloom dies and falls away leaving just a nub that reminds me of my swollen finger joints.

I don’t want to believe that I’m the one causing the petals to die. I start poking each and every flower and yes, just like that, they all wither and fall away. Soon, all the stems are naked, gently swaying back and forth, hypnotic like hula dancers and I’m left to face the fact that yes, I’m the one who took their bloom the way.

It was me.

We’ll post an interview with Angie tomorrow. Look out for that soon.

Angie Curneal Palsak is a short story writer based in South Bend, Indiana. Her work examines the emotional weight of stuckness and the struggle to move beyond it. She has stories published in: Academy of the Heart and Mind, 10 by 10 Flash Fiction, Prosetrics, and The MacGuffin. She was recently shortlisted for The Letter Review’s quarterly short story prize, was a finalist for Short Edition’s “Money Chronicles: A Story Initiative” contest, and the winner of Unleash Press’s 2025 Works In Progress award. When not writing, she and her husband of twenty-plus years, Tibor, travel in search of live music, good food, dog-friendly breweries, celebrity graves, and amazing art. Find her at angiecpalsak.com.

Note: This is an Unleash Best of the Net nominee.

I do not remember Saudi Arabia, though it occupies the first line of every biography I have ever written.

I was born there, in Riyadh, when my parents worked abroad, and because I left as an infant, the country survives in my imagination as inheritance rather than memory. Saudi Arabia belongs to family photographs and diplomatic anecdotes, to stories told across dinner tables years later. It is the opening sentence of my life but not its first paragraph. The geography entered me before consciousness did. I inherited the desert the way other children inherit eye color: without consent, without recollection, and without any ability to distinguish what came from the landscape and what came from blood.

Perhaps this is always how identity begins. We are shaped first by places we cannot remember.

Pakistan, by contrast, arrived with mountains.

Some of my clearest memories involve driving through Abbottabad on our way north toward ski slopes that felt impossibly foreign to the Pakistan represented in American news coverage. Adults spoke in hushed tones about politics and security while I pressed my face against the window, fascinated by roadside vendors, painted trucks, and the gradual transformation of the landscape as the plains surrendered to elevation.

Children possess a remarkable indifference to geopolitics. We remember textures instead.

I remember motion.

I remember roads curving upward.

I remember realizing, perhaps for the first time, that a country could contain multitudes. Pakistan was not a headline or a security briefing. It was families drinking tea, mountains dissolving into clouds, and the strange exhilaration of understanding that the world was much larger and more complicated than any single narrative could contain.

If Saudi Arabia taught me nothing consciously and Pakistan taught me movement, India taught me abundance.

Delhi remains, in my memory, a city that refused minimalism. Everything existed in excess: sound, color, traffic, conversation, heat, possibility. My twin sister and I wandered through Dilli Haat, passing textile stalls and spice vendors, absorbing the ordinary miracle that entire worlds of craftsmanship could coexist within walking distance of one another. At Khan Market, I rummaged through bookstores with the seriousness of a child who already suspected that books might someday become a profession rather than merely a pastime.

And always there were Lay’s chips.

It seems absurd that something so mundane should persist in memory with such precision, but childhood frequently preserves the trivial alongside the profound. The yellow packet in my hands. The dust settling on bookshelves. The satisfaction of discovering some forgotten volume while eating a snack that, for reasons I still cannot explain, tasted better in Delhi than it ever has in America.

Outside our house, cows grazed quietly on green grass.

No one shooed them away.

One simply accommodated their presence, rearranging human movement around animal dignity. I remember learning that harming or disturbing them carried religious significance, and even as a child I recognized that I was living within a moral framework fundamentally different from the one I would later inherit in the United States. The world did not exist solely for human convenience. Sacredness occupied public space. It wandered into front yards. It chewed grass beneath ordinary skies.

Meanwhile, I ate streetside samosas whose heat exceeded my patience and whose flavor exceeded anything I have found since.

The smell of frying oil.

The crisp exterior.

The brief burn on the tongue.

Memory is often less intellectual than culinary.

India taught me that civilization could be overwhelming without becoming alien. That crowds and beauty and contradiction might coexist productively. That an entire civilization could organize itself around assumptions utterly unlike my own and still feel, somehow, deeply familiar.

I sometimes wonder whether my later resistance to rigid categories began there.

Pluralism is difficult to abandon once you have lived inside it.

Russia arrived when adolescence did.

This was unfortunate timing.

We moved to Moscow in 2007, and suddenly everything hardened: the winters, the architecture, the politics, and, unfortunately, my own body. Putin and Medvedev occupied their peculiar constitutional dance, exchanging offices while preserving continuity. The newspapers spoke of modernization. Everyone understood where power truly resided.

As a teenager, I found something perversely comforting about Russian honesty. Not honesty in the moral sense. Honesty in the aesthetic sense. Moscow made no apologies for its seriousness. The city expected endurance. It rewarded composure. It had survived emperors, revolutions, famines, invasions, and ideological experiments. My adolescent confusion barely registered against such historical scale.

And yet I carried it everywhere.

Spaso House became one of the central stages of diplomatic childhood. Reception after reception unfolded beneath chandeliers and history. The Nutcracker performances arrived with winter. Tables filled with cookies, blinis, caviar, and conversations I only half understood. Adults moved through rooms with practiced confidence while children occupied the margins, absorbing rituals we could not yet interpret.

Diplomacy possesses its own theater.

Children of diplomats become unwilling actors within it.

I learned how to shake hands before I learned who I wanted to become.

Outside those formal spaces, Moscow offered other educations. Red Square under fresh snow. The Metro stations that resembled underground palaces. The immense confidence of Soviet architecture, which seemed less interested in accommodating individuals than in reminding them of history’s permanence.

My body, meanwhile, was becoming something I did not recognize.

The timing felt almost cruel.

Adolescence demands certainty precisely when certainty is least available. Friends discussed crushes and futures with an ease that struck me as anthropologically fascinating. I participated in the conversations. I performed the expected role. Yet somewhere beneath language itself sat a persistent wrongness I lacked the vocabulary to describe.

I often think that geography and gender operated similarly in my childhood.

Both preceded understanding.

Both imposed expectations.

Both shaped possibility before I possessed the ability to consent.

Jordan, finally, taught me history.

Not the abstract history of textbooks, but history as landscape, as stone, as something one physically traverses.

Jabal Amman became a place of routine and affection. Rainbow Street, with its cafés and conversations stretching into evening, offered a gentler rhythm than Moscow’s severity. One café in particular, owned by a gay man, introduced me—though I did not fully appreciate it at the time—to the possibility that alternative lives could exist openly, even within societies outsiders frequently misunderstand.

The world, once again, proved more complicated than its stereotypes.

We traveled to Wadi Rum, where the desert expands beyond ordinary language. The scale itself becomes philosophical. Human concerns diminish. Identity diminishes. One stands among stone and silence and recognizes how temporary all categories truly are.

Petra offered another lesson.

Civilizations disappear.

Empires collapse.

What remains are the traces people carve into landscapes and into one another.

Floating in the Dead Sea, I discovered a peculiar form of surrender. The body refuses submersion. It insists upon remaining visible. Gravity negotiates differently there. Ordinary assumptions cease functioning.

I often think about that sensation now.

The realization that environments alter what bodies can do.

The realization that identity, too, may depend upon context more than we care to admit.

We speak constantly about becoming ourselves, as though the self were an archaeological artifact waiting patiently beneath accumulated debris. The metaphor is comforting because it preserves autonomy. It assures us that identity originates entirely within.

I no longer believe that.

I think geography participates in authorship.

Saudi Arabia gave me origins without memory.

Pakistan taught me movement.

India taught me plurality.

Russia taught me endurance.

Jordan taught me history.

America, when I finally returned to it in any meaningful sense, taught me estrangement.

The great irony of my life is that I became American only after spending most of my childhood elsewhere. The country existed as abstraction long before it existed as home. I knew embassies before suburbs. I knew diplomacy before local politics. I knew departure before permanence.

And perhaps that is why transition later felt, in some strange way, familiar.

I had already spent a lifetime crossing borders.

I had already learned that maps change, governments change, languages change, and even names change. Entire worlds vanish behind airplane windows while new ones appear beneath descending clouds. The self survives these migrations, but it does not survive unchanged.

Nothing survives unchanged.

The geography of becoming is precisely this: the recognition that we are collaborations between interior longing and exterior landscape. We are not merely born. We are continuously composed.

By roads through Abbottabad.

By books discovered in Khan Market.

By cows grazing peacefully outside Delhi homes.

By caviar at Spaso House.

By sunsets over Wadi Rum.

By salt water holding us above the surface of the Dead Sea.

The places we inhabit do not simply witness our lives.

They participate in their construction.

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Isaac Amend is a transgender man and writer based in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in the Yale Daily News, the Washington Blade, the Los Angeles Blade, The Advocate, Streetlight Magazine, and Brevity. In 2017, he starred in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary, hosted by Katie Couric. His author’s portfolio is here: www.isaacamend.com and you can catch him on Instagram at: @isaacamend

‘The Dog Is Lost + My Brother Is Not Here’
                                                                        after Marisol


In the basement under the stairs where the tools 
are kept 	the affection I feel for them now is 
foreign		I am fixated by the way a screw is 
fastened to the duct work 	the way duct work fits 
inside dry wall 	the way dry wall is set up 
so it supports a roof or a subfloor which I could easily 
slip through if this were another kind of story 	and 
if it were that kind of story I would drop into a 
winter scene from our childhood wonderland	
even a common junco could be so charmed 
by snow falling on snow falling on snow-laden limbs 
that it’d think this was a life worth living	But we 
know better	the blower needs gas and the bucket of 
ice melt is empty	something might be dying 
underneath the wisteria and skeletal trees like pole grabbers 
pull at us as if we were litter on a walkway 	the weight of it all is
crushing 	just this morning I had to use the burl 
of my thigh to lift a shovel-full	This is the last time I 
look for you   

My first collection of poetry, Border Crossing, was published in April 2018. My work has been published in Quiddity, High Plains Literary Review, Sugar House Review, Kestrel, San Pedro River Review, Borderlands: Texas Literary Review, Louisiana Review, Askew, Poetry International, Freshwater and elsewhere. I have won awards from Poetry International, the Women’s National Book Association and the CNY chapter of the National League of American Pen Women. I hold an MFA from George Mason University.

Sometimes Love Sounds like Silence

It’s a glint in the flip of your stomach,

a crack in the catch of your breath,

a shock when I love you is whispered into the fog of a steamy shower,

the slow reveal of the heart’s purpose

like a balloon accidentally

released into the sky,

its path tracked from the tip of your head to the top of the trees,

through the cloudy veil until it disappears,

a disposable truth winding its way to nowhere.

Jodi Morton is a designer and poet based in Evanston, IL. Her poems have appeared in The Write Launch, Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Stay connected to Jodi on Instagtam @jodimortondesign.

Postcard from the Smithsonian
                                                            after Bar Italia, by Paul Cadmus


The carabiniere looks straight at me,
watchful or just wary. 

If the female patron’s hair 
draped just a little more toward earth

she could be careless.
Carefree.

Older tourists look around—
‘is that architecture from this century?’ 

Who knows the city’s history 
when you come from a town

named after a river named 
for a neck?

A jug of wine weighs down my back.
I brush hair from my ear

as if I’d like to hear you better.
What did you say?

You say you’ve finally OD’ed 
with a needle in your arm.

Or you say you saw a fox 
one morning in November.

But then upon reflection
maybe it was your imagination.

We come from a town
with a willow

and a trickle of a creek
in the farthest corner of the yard.
I could be somewhere
eating gelato

in the piazza.
What is fear if not frozen?

Everyone wears white.
The color of cream.

The color of blow.
The color of museum sculptures.

A shirtless man speaks:
‘Go away, Americans.’

I already am away.
A docent makes a move

as if he means to touch me.
What if you were still alive

in the backyard near the willow, 
the creek and Virgin Mary

statuette? What if I’d taken you 
with me when I left?

 

My first collection of poetry, Border Crossing, was published in April 2018. My work has been published in Quiddity, High Plains Literary Review, Sugar House Review, Kestrel, San Pedro River Review, Borderlands: Texas Literary Review, Louisiana Review, Askew, Poetry International, Freshwater and elsewhere. I have won awards from Poetry International, the Women’s National Book Association and the CNY chapter of the National League of American Pen Women. I hold an MFA from George Mason University.

As a token of gratitude to subscribers and contributions to Unleash, we invite you to join us for a Creative Resilience circle on Friday, June 19th, 4-5 ET.

Theme:

Ekphrasis: a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art

This discussion and workshop will explore the ways art influences language and storytelling, inviting participants to explore their own interpretations in response to an artistic prompt.

Outline:

• Introduction

• Discussion and Q&A

• Ekphrastic prompt

About our presenters:

We will be led by guest teachers Alex Stolis and Catherine Arra, who have been featured in Unleash Lit and are the authors of the new Dos Madres chapbook The Razor Tip of an Arrowhead.

Poet: Catherine Arra is the author of four full-length poetry collections and five chapbooks. A former English and writing teacher, she now facilitates local writing groups. Her newest chapbook, Perennial Cosmology, was recently published by dancing girl press. Her newest full-length collection, Last Evening With All the Versions of Myself, was first finalist in the 2025 Donna Wolf-Palacio Poetry Book Prize and will be published by Finishing Line Press, September 2026. Arra lives in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York with her partner, Alex Stolis, and their dog, Daisy. www.catherinearra.com

Photographer/Poet: Alex Stolis’s photographs have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Ink in Thirds, San Pedro River Review, Unleash Lit, L’Espirit Literary Review, and Anti-Heroin Chic. His full-length book Pop.1280 is a poetry and photo collection, available from Amazon. His chapbooks Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife was released by Louisiana Literature Press, 2024; RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024; and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press. He lives in upstate New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra, and their dog, Daisy. He can also be found at https://alexstolis.myportfolio.com/

How to join:

RSVP here. https://luma.com/zjaejkzl

(We will limit space to keep this an intimate group.)

This is a free event made possible due to supporters of and .

Wishing you prolific days and creative clarity until then!!

Jen

Director / Founder

Unleash, The Resilient Creative

Your Old Afghan

You took a trip alone and dropped me at the house with the sunken living room and plastic sofa covers, the house where Grandfather rocked alone in a wood chair in the back bedroom, and the air hung in a smoky haze filtered through drawn window sheers. There were no toys at Grandma Rocky’s except the child-sized plastic dolls she dragged out of a basement closet when I showed up. No home-cooked meal, just what she spooned from a can. Sometimes I’d sit at her desk, slip her rubber finger-tip on my thumb, and add numbers on the oversized calculator with the trailing paper roll, pretending to be office-important. Shocking that you had a Band-Aid for every wound, a hug for every heartache, when you came from such icy beginnings. I found a carton of Fruit Stripe gum in the guest room nightstand. Chewed piece after piece until she asked me why I was so wasteful, but I feigned sleep under your old afghan full of holes.

Jodi Morton is a designer and poet based in Evanston, IL. Her poems have appeared in The Write Launch, Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Stay connected to Jodi on Instagtam @jodimortondesign.

This past winter/spring, Unleash Press partnered with the Leighton Art Centre in Millarville, Alberta on a land-based writing project. This project was created with the intention of encouraging visitors to slow down, explore their natural surroundings, and engage more deeply with both the landscape and the creative works they encounter along the way. By weaving writing into the land itself, the installation invites moments of reflection, curiosity, and connection between art, nature, and community. We received so many fabulous enttires (you’ll see many of them featured here at UnleashLit in the coming months) and thought we’d share the top five entries.

Words to Wonder, by Adele Bright

Did you think that you came to look?

Or is a gentle breeze/ ikinnai sopo lifting your hair and caressing your cheek?

Is the welcoming heat of the sun/ naatosi entering your being?

Are the Swifts accompanying you with their twitters and the insects insisting their busy repetition?

Can you rest down on the blanket of the earth/ kss’ahkom and sense your connection?



Did you think that you came to look?

Are the wild flowers and flowing grasses crashing into your vision?

Are you taking in the abundance that covers the earth’s verdant skin

Or are the steadfast mountains/miistakists winning your gaze?

Are the dancing Silver Birch trees fascinating you or the sacred water/ aohkii at the 

bottom of the hill drawing your rapture?



Did you think that you came to look?

Or is this land looking at you?

Is the intensity of the sky/ spo’ohtsim expanding this moment?

And are our ancestors/ niisitohkaa’ahssiks welcoming and holding you?





“Words for wandering” has led to “words for wOndering.”

In Blackfoot, one of the original languages of this land:

gentle breeze- ikinnai sopo

sun- naato’si. naato meaning sacred

earth-kss’ahkom

mountains- miistakists – the Rockies being regarded as the backbone of the world

water- ao’ohki

sky- spo’ohtsim

ancestors- niisitohkaa’ahssiks

Acknowledgements and gratitude to Siksikai’powahsin teachers generally and for checking these seven words.

*****

Seedling, by Arcana Shanks

I often imagine what it would be like

To be a seed

To be buried by loving hands

Beneath the damp, dark earth

Gently pressed down into the soil

And left to rest among the roots

To hear the heartbeats of all who came before me

To unfurl myself piece by piece

Guided by golden light and whispered hope



I wonder how it would feel

To be connected

To be a part of something greater

Transmitting signals like secrets

In a language only we could understand

To breathe my fears into the darkness

And have a chorus of voices echo back

To be loved by so many

Bound together and entangled as one



I dream of finding you there

Of opening my eyes

To feel your hands in mine

Clinging to each other in awe

As the dapples of sunlight sway above us

I imagine the way my name would tumble from your lips

Pouring forth like a river

I would rest my head in your arms

And know that finally I am home

*****

Traveling Mountain Bluebirds, by Kelly Kaur

Meander these winding pathways

marked by quaint

painted bird boxes

Migratory summer visits

mountain bluebirds return

every single year

Alberta’s blue skies summon

prairie green grass expands

crickets sing in curious delight

Transformation

resilience

immigrant hearts unite

Wandering feet firmly planted

grateful for this land

bird songs beckon my heart

Nature’s

genuine

welcome

*****

The Two Bird Feeders, by Kim Hanson

Harlow swung the bird feeders, one in each hand, in rhythm with her steps. Bird seed sprinkled the ground. The late afternoon sun filtered through the hazy clouds of this fault-less October day, illuminating the ethereal quality of the waxy, yellow leaves.

The ravine was just barely past its prime. Aspen trees abounded in this place, thriving in the mugginess of the high water table. Spruce trees, majestic, proud, and erect, modelled their year-round colour of deep evergreen. The fragrance of the bull rushes, so near the end of their life cycle, clung to the air.

My granddaughter noticed none of these things, intent only on finding the right spot.

Leaves already devoid of their life’s blood cloaked the asphalt in a slippery compost, as we made tracks to the old, wooden bridge. Two splintery benches beckoned all.

“This one!” she said.

Climbing up on the square, weathered railing, my hands around her waist, she reached as high as she could. Slipping the wire loop onto the branch, spilling a few more seeds, she jumped down onto the bridge. She looked up to admire her craft, and it was now my turn to hang my feeder. I reached a bit higher and strung mine just above hers.

Harlow is now in her mid-teens. Gone are those cherished days when she loved to craft, to paint, to dance, to walk, with me. All these years later, two empty bird feeders hang, one beneath the other, on the tall aspen tree, by the old wooden bridge, deep in the ravine. I can’t help but smile; no one has disturbed the feeders. All these years later, as I walk the path, my heart is full, reminiscing about a young, sweet child and her grateful grandma.

*****

First Spring, by Marcia Lee Laycock

Green. 
Green so fills my eyes 
I sway 
with spring 
a song 
alive and swelling 
out of winter grey and white

the colour 
in fields and ditches 
dances 
and I wonder 
was there life 
before this day?

Adele Bright is from Okotoks and think the Leighton Art Centre and setting is a beautiful space. I was inspired to write something as the views and lands are spectacular. I also wanted to make use of this opportunity to recognize the previous custodians of the land on which the center stands. Equally, I hoped to allude to a two way relationship with our earth, without being too strident.

Arcana Shanks is a visual artist and experimental vocalist residing in Mooniyang / Tiohtià:ke/ Montrèal, Canada. Her practice is inspired by the entangled connections between humans and more-than-human beings, particularly beings that exist beyond the traditional definitions of life such as fire, water, minerals, and other biological entities. Archetypes of nature are key elements within her artwork: the anthropomorphic “Mother Earth” and “Mother Nature,” the sacred and untamed energy of wild spaces, and the delicate relationship between creation and destruction are core concepts across her portfolio. Shanks’ work is characterized by immersive, multi-sensory elements fused with poetic narrative and storytelling, often creating artworks that cross the boundary between mediums and exist in liminal, hybrid spaces.

Kelly Kaur grew up in Singapore and came to Calgary to get her degrees at the University of Calgary. She is a writer, author, and speaker. She was recognized at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton for her writing and for honoring Punjabi Sikh heritage in her children's book, Howdy, I’m Singh Hari. She was awarded the 2025 South Asian Inspiration Award for Achievement in Arts and Culture (SAIA) and was a recipient of the Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award in 2024. She has a novel, Letters to Singapore. Kelly was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won Honourable Mention in the Creators of Justice Literary Awards, New York. She is a two-time TEDx presenter. Her poems, short stories and nonfiction have been published and landed on the moon, on beer cans, danced on stage, travelled around North Dakota and published in Canadian and international journals and anthologies. She is a reader for the International Human Rights Art Movement, New York.

Kim Hanson writes creatively from her home in Calgary, Alberta. She has come to her craft much later in life. Her debut children's picture book is scheduled for publication by Hancock House in 2027. She has published stories with children's magazines, essays with websites and in print, and articles and patterns for quilt magazines. Kim loves to write about nature and about children. In addition to writing, Kim enjoys spending time with her grandchildren, Jacob and Harlow, practising yoga, and walking her two dogs, Sophie and Bertie.

Marcia Lee Laycock is a prolific writer and speaker with 15 books now in print. Having lived a short distance from the Arctic Circle and a few degrees from the equator, her work is steeped in winter with a few palm trees tossed in for colour. Marcia's focuse is on paying attention and honouring this incredible world in which we live and the one who created it.

During his nighttime excursions out and about on Manassas Island, Artemus had overheard rumblings about degradation and death in the big city. The great horned owl—a truth-seeker and natural skeptic—determined he had to see it for himself. Anything less was mere rumor. He prepared himself for flight, thoroughly preening his feathers and expelling a pellet of fur, bones, and teeth, remnants of the rodent or small rabbit that had been his last meal. He set off at dusk on a field trip into Portland, charting a direct course above the Columbia River Highway, past the tidy but unremarkable burg of Linnton and the Northwest Industrial District, where railroad tracks, storage tanks, and warehouses dominated the skyline.

The elderly cock was careful to fly low, with as few wing-beats as possible, to preserve his energy. He took a westerly hop over the copper-colored bridge connecting the suburbs to the island, then headed due southeast. Smoke from the city’s northeast industrial section choked him and further slowed his journey. He exhaled relief when the tree line above the largest, most popular park appeared in the distance. Though the annual fall leaf display was past its peak, he marveled at the fading oranges, reds, and yellows. It was his favorite time of year. The chill morning air. The best hunting. And winter nesting season was nigh.

He soared beneath the small group of black helicopters hovering above him, ready to zigzag if one of them started to drop. Their rotors moved in time with his wing-flaps. The copters might’ve been feds, possibly homeland security. The raids had picked up steam. There were reports that masked agents had shown up at Kramer’s farm and taken an entire family of seasonal workers away. That much was in the local paper, the Manassas Island Bugle.

Spying the Salmon Street Springs fountain, Artemus felt he was close to the point of engagement. His exceptional hearing, ears that picked up sounds from up to ten miles away, would stand him in good stead. He settled on a high branch in a Gingko tree off Naito Parkway. A perfect perch for discovery. What he witnessed while keeping vigil above the waterfront, more than anything else he’d encountered in his twenty-five years as a rural forest-dweller, stunned and staggered him.

A kyphotic man—black skin, thick salt-and-pepper hair—fell to his knees on the sidewalk, bending over a rectangular plastic bag. It had a zipper on the side with a “Jane Doe” tag attached. Artemus could make that out. The bag’s top was open, revealing a dried-up face. He could hear the man keening. “My wife! My Nelle!” he cried, repeatedly, in a high-pitched wail that seemed to come from the very deepest place inside him. The man’s stooped shoulders shook.

The owl turned his head right, then left. There were hundreds of body bags lined up on downtown streets, functional pouches containing the leftovers of old people who had lost their homes, their health insurance, their dignity, and—at long last—their very right to exist.

These unfortunates had died in poverty, without reasonable end-of-life care or even, it appeared, a second thought. No federal disaster relief personnel had been dispatched. A cadre of fired former employees showed up to fill bags, catalog and tag who they could, and notify families when information was available, preparing the corpses for loading onto refrigerated trucks and, later, gargantuan transoms for disposal.

Downriver, to no one knew where.

Cleanup people in hazmat suits that protected them from cadaver-borne diseases collected the bags. Their company van had a “Where Trash Becomes Treasure” logo on its side.

“Irony is doing some heavy lifting there,” one volunteer was heard to say. She scratched her dreadlocked head and kept on attending to grisly tasks.

Zip. Tie. Tag. Lift.

Flies buzzed around in the mid-autumn air, lighting on this bag and that, looking for a way in. Folks with money, on their way to brunch and business appointments, stepped over the unfortunates laid out on Northeast Hawthorne and Southeast Grand and Northwest Burnside, their Jimmy Choo slingbacks and Cole Haan oxfords making dust marks on the bags’ plastic edges.

The Portland Spirit steamed up the Willamette River, its fancy passengers drinking Italian champagne at midday, oblivious to the carnage.

All the while, Artemus watched and listened. The owl trained his asymmetrical ears on conversations between paramedics and police officers drifting up from the grid below. Not even one spoke honestly or directly about what had happened—they didn’t dare!—but the bald truth was this: across America, from east to west, scores of people died from new and more virulent strain of influenza that hit like a tsunami, the frail elderly left vulnerable and helpless after a cadre of toadies gutted the government’s social welfare programs and immunizations went the way of the dinosaur.

Health care for the poor? Such a joke. Medicare ended in 2030, replaced with personal savings accounts that barely covered aspirin. Pay-to-play rich folks got their stem cell infusions for wonky knees—not to mention brow lifts and Botox—while the have-nots suffered and perished.

“To the victor …” one white-suited do-gooder began, no need to finish. His comrades knew the rest of that story.

Flu deaths were just the tip of the iceberg. Who among the elderly could afford care at the tail end of their journey? Even a middling nursing home room cost upward of ten grand a month. The 250-year plan to abolish democracy made sure of that.

Demeaned, dismissed, and consigned as collateral damage, America’s old folks paid the ultimate price. Spotty access to vaccines meant no protection. No health care meant little opportunity for life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Programs that had kept citizens healthy, fed, clothed, and housed over the generations—imperfectly, but also with intentional care and appropriate empathy—were history.

“The least of these,” Jimmy Carter had called them, biblically so. After a hundred years of living, he hung up his hammer at just the right moment, December 2024, so at least some flags flew at half-staff on the morning of the orange one’s second swearing-in, a tawdry festival of self-congratulatory backslapping.

Artemus’ panoramic view showed him who the people were, the ones who merited saving the most as forests and whole towns in southern California burned because of climate change; books were banned and libraries were defunded; trans people were terrorized; immigrants were rounded up without due process and deported to countries they knew nothing about; journalists were investigated, harassed, and jailed for telling the truth; and women were made to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or die trying to get reproductive health services in certain politically unrepentant red states.

It had been a dark time of dispiritedness and despair. A season out of which could only come redemption, if anything better at all was to rise from the ashes of a country in retreat from itself, from what it had allowed itself to become.

Such unnecessary suffering. Up from Artemus’ throat came an involuntary whistling noise as he hovered over the sad avenues and boulevards and thoroughfares, mourning for humanity. There were fewer red and blue police car flashes. The authorities had dispersed. Dusk was coming. Tonight, the veil would be thin. He left his temporary roost and started back toward his beloved island. The flight home would take less time without daytime distractions.

On his silent approach, the flickering yellow lights of farm workers’ ofrendas came into view, intricate altars memorializing their ancestors, beckoning them back from the next realm, if only for a few hours. Artemus saw them, but the migrants in their homes didn’t see him. Nothing could give him away in the hours of deepest night, not even the bright pink band the animal rehabilitators fastened to his talon after his fierce fight with that big bald eagle. He might have lost his life that day if not for humans with good intentions. If not for the timely phone call and the rush of the ambulance. The skillful folks at Cascades Owl Rescue cared for him in his time of need, nursing him back to health before releasing him back into the wild. Eight weeks of confinement.

Like hundreds of fireflies glowing at once, the ofrendas illuminated the darkness. Artemus breathed in their magic, their mourning, as he descended, He landed without a sound and stumbled around for a safe spot to rest.

It was Día de los Muertos, the day of the dead.

In the morning, at first light, he would go and find Carson McClintock, an ordinary man with an extraordinary dream to save everyone he could from an atrocious end they did not deserve. McClintock, who was meeting the present moment with everything he had to give.

From the author: I'm an essayist and novelist living on a floating home west of Portland, Oregon. This submission is an excerpt from my second novel, CARSON McCLINTOCK IS NOT DEAD YET, an exploration of what could happen to the impoverished elderly at the end of their lives in a near-future America.

My debut novel SUNSHINE GIRL, a lived-experience journalist story, was published by Heliotrope Books of New York in 2025. My writing has also appeared in Newsweek, Hippocampus, The Big Smoke, Nailed magazine, the Timberline Review, Elephant Journal, Mountain Bluebird Magazine, and several anthologies.

Echoes of Puglia

At the top of a narrow stone staircase,

in the white-washed bedroom

of a crumbling farmhouse,

she lay in a wooden platform bed,

shutters unlatched and knocking

in the late afternoon breeze,

echoes of mumbly Italian from

the olive trees beyond,

a lullaby on her heavy eyelids.

It doesn’t matter that she spent the night

face deep in a porcelain toilet,

expunging the bug-eyed shrimp

she ravaged at yesterday’s lunch,

or that she felt too weak

to swat mosquitos off her cheek.

In this moment, she’s celestial,

as close to beautiful as she’s ever been.

For many summers after, she would remember that day,

the fragrant air blowing through the open windows,

the divide between life and death thin as the

percale sheet draped over her bare legs.

Jodi Morton is a designer and poet based in Evanston, IL. Her poems have appeared in The Write Launch, Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Stay connected to Jodi on Instagtam @jodimortondesign.

Mallet & Bloom

My heart became tender

with the mallet of grief and grace.

Not shaped by silence,

but by every echo I tried to bury

and called strength.

Shaped on an anvil

made of storms I never named.

On the spine

of unfinished apologies

that still know my posture.

Each crack,

a lesson.

Each bruise,

a doorway.

opened to the ache of others.

Ash fell like lullabies

on the fields of my chest.

And the wind,

once full of knives,

learned to touch me

without asking for blood.

Moons slept in my throat,

whispering languages

made of salt.

I walked barefoot through mirrored forests

where every branch remembered

a name I forgot.

I drank from a rusted cup,

still warm from the sun that left

without notice.

The stone in my stomach dissolved into soil,

and wildflowers,

uninvited,

grew softly along my ribs.

Grief wore the mask of a lion

but laid its head in my lap.

Now silence sits beside us.

I stay

just to listen.

Dayanna Almeda is a poet based in Tucson, Arizona. Her work explores intimacy, memory, chronic illness, resilience, and the emotional terrain of survival through precise imagery and sensory detail. This is her first submission to a literary press.

American Medical Billing Dept.

They do not call it a body.
They call it an opportunity.

Light pins him open.
The ceiling keeps its distance.

No one has asked yet.
His face waits.

I promise someone will come.
Circles replace what he is called.

Lines decide where he is cut.
Someone measures the noise

inside his chest.
Someone else measures the silence.

A small machine learns his birthday
and deletes it.

Metal enters.
Paper follows.

His mouth opens.
Something inside him agrees.

In another building
a number puts on his coat.

The table hums.
The walls listen.

Outside, he walks out carrying
a second name he did not choose.

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and lifelong New Englander. Her writing explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, memory, and the human experience. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, with work appearing in ONE ART: a journal of poetry, The Berlin Literary Review, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook is forthcoming this spring. Visit her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com or on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.

Water of Life

You’d follow me to the bathroom, 
like 3 baby ducklings, 
all squeals and fleshy rolls.
I’d toss in squishy letters 
and candy-colored finger paints.
You’d plop one at a time
in the lukewarm water, bubbles in the air,
in each other’s hair, best time of day
was let’s get ready for bed.

Now the tub is mine alone, the paints 
long spoiled, the bubbles bad for my vulva. 
Just Epsom salts for my weak ankles 
and lavender oil for my menopausal moods. 
One arthritic toe at a time I ease in, 
my baggy belly a life vest.

Jodi Morton is a designer and poet based in Evanston, IL. Her poems have appeared in The Write Launch, Half and One, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Stay connected to Jodi on Instagtam @jodimortondesign.