May - 2022

Selcouth Station

May 30

Flash Fiction: "The Romance Generation: Two Tales" by Victoria Hood

Tale I: Woman Seeking Woman I can tell by the way in which the men agreed with each other that they had conspired beforehand. Of course, there is the underlying possibility that there always is - men know that men are right and so men back up the men at hand to assure that men are right. This time felt, though, word for word. Something concocted. Something too smart for men. The way in which man two repeated what man one had said but with the air of it being an original thoug

May 27

Poetry: "Sacred Marrow" by Lauren Theresa

Pointed bones anchoring into to the wall. My body forming pained isosceles resting against the illusion of stability. This wall can hold me. But convincing fantasies have me melting into it instead… white walls dissolving to permeable matter, clouded carries toward horizontal space… bringing me to the place where atomic currents fail… the rooms between reason… not chaos or order, but a third… the tension of opposites pressured to critical mass… a completed trinity, three perf

May 25

Poetry: "Junebug" by Elizabeth McGeown

I will write a poem about Elisabeth Moss's face. So much to say about Elisabeth Moss's face! How the neat white cap rests atop hair – a modest bonnet for a modest woman. A folded peak over a delicate ear; high, unblemished forehead; her nose, the severe point of it. Flashbacks where lips are red in the time before. Casual chaos of styled bedhead, strands stick to laughter lips. Cannot reconcile this hair over face with neat as a pin Offred, makeup free Offred, wild-eyed stari

May 23

Poetry: "In The Bleak Mid-Marriage" & "

In The Bleak Mid-Marriage She’d never dreamed of a life in a northern town / a place where you tasted with your nose / where winter arrived early and never left / even when spring disembogued onto the banks / or summer’s non-daring flies buzzed the tips / where there were no kings / only Jacks (or Jills) looking for a fight He’d looked to space for miracles/ jealous she already knew the greatest one lived in them / he longed to journey in an autoerotic ejaculation / an Amazon

May 20

Poetry: "Cocktail" & "The Poet Writes a Love Letter to Herself from Her Husband" by Frances Klein

Cocktail Mix English gin, red Spanish eggs, a finger of cold comfort. Apply a sharp point of pressure to the glass. You should see heat, yellow and black. Done right, this drink is popular with the English and French, Germans and Italians, with earnest representatives of American religion. Two fingers in, you will be perfectly imperfect. After three you will be on vacation. After five you will wake up and wonder if you shook hands with the kinder end of a gun. *Words culled f

May 18

Flash Fiction: "Driven to Extremes" by Rachel Canwell

The doctor ushers Maggie in and peers at her, as if she is some oddity, an unsavoury specimen. He stares until she can feel herself start to sag, from the middle down. All her confidence, all her arguments, all the simple rationality she has brought with her ebb away. But still Maggie breathes and she tries. Tries to explain how tired she is, how her brain aches constantly. How every second some part of her is needed. How each secret thought is interrupted and splintered, ins

May 16

Poetry: "For Wings, For His Father’s Cry" by Adam Cabot

after T.R. Hummer In the ethereal clouds that cling thread-like and wilting at the tops of pine trees like wet tissue paper on concrete, he considers the woods at twilight obscured by the horizon’s gentle, pervasive shove, inquires the now colorless canopy about what’s to come, and when he finds his, father, he’s where he’s always been, for years now, in the quiet crypt, a haphazard mausoleum, a private landmark like the granite memorial of a forgotten war, he remains, still,

May 13

Poetry: "Sweet Chilli" by Roy Duffield

I go down the aisle I never go down, in fact I forgot all about sweet chilli sauce and other sauces I rarely splash out on, that sickly sweet taste: tongue stirring a mouthful of oven chips, mayonnaise and sweet chilli, winter evenings, laptop precarious on a long-scrapped dining- room chair, cables tripwired every spare inch of our carpet, a charger always on the verge of breaking for good No I don’t need that I won’t be going down this aisle again. Roy Duffield is the art e

May 11

Poetry: "A Ghost Story of Sorts" by Jane Ayres

Perhaps I’m feeding my brain with a bad narrative which can be a problem / I’ve been researching this because knowledge is power / right? / & right now I feel like any residue of power I thought I had is draining away bit by bit by bit by Is it true? Can words kill? (oblivion) Stories to share & tell & tear & sell. Those dreams upstairs kissing the space. Discard // recalibrate When I was a child, my biggest fear was losing myself. Reality is subjective, slippery – as elusive

May 9

Flash Fiction: "Commutation" by Lindy Biller

I wish I could say that no one will blame you for what happens next, but the truth is, most people will. You are tired and distracted, running late for your first meeting of the day. You’re agonizing over how to tell your boss about your latest project, which has grown a mouth and swallowed you. At red lights, you pluck tiny eggs from your hair and drop them into Ziploc bags, so that the eggs will suffocate instead of hatching. Your eight-month-old daughter is in the backseat