“Always I passed away, quickly, unnamed.”

“Then one day I am born and I do not die.”

@lynnmundell.bsky.social in @fracturedlit.bsky.social fracturedlit.com/again/

Open for submissions - always a brilliant event 👇

excruciating read but so, so vulnerable and human.

I'm still vaclempt. This is a hard one, my Lil's Joe. Way too soon.

Current Issue

Yes, this is a milestone. @bendinggenres.bsky.social Issue 50!!! Published today! Chock full of hybrid poems, CNF and flash, this issue is on FIRE with springtime! Thanks editors, both previous and current. And thanks lit community, for thriving during these unsettling times. www.bendinggenres.com

cover of a book with water color wash in blue and green, a small drawing of a tree bending in the wind at the center; titles and copy read: BENDING IN THE BREEZE The Bending Genres Anthology Edited by Amy Marques & Robert Vaughan

printed text: Michael Todd Cohen (italics) A Rental in the Poconos (end italics) I. At 7pm on Saturday evening at an air...blasts rip through quiet twilight. Some...nivalesque ding! as the bullet richoets...

honored to be in the @bendinggenres.bsky.social anthology, with "A Rental in the Poconos" about guns and queerness and escape...

(deep thanks to @writesloud.bsky.social and @jmwwjournal.bsky.social for originally publishing this work and to @rgvaughan.bsky.social for celebrating it)

Loved this, Jeff! Thanks for sharing it.

a complex biosphere in vivid color in an illustrative style inside a circle and outside all white with shadow, with suggestion of complex ferns and other vegetation; art by rogan brown

Thrilled that my first new short story in several years, "Constellations," about astronauts crashlanding on a distant planet, has been published by the @technologyreview.com. Acquiring editor Rachel Cortland. Art by Rogan Brown. Free link to avoid the paywall: ter.li/r3tbrsgr

Pleased as punch to have some new flash fiction in the very amazing @bulbregion.bsky.social today. Consider our sky here ---> bulbregion.com/The-Wrong-Sk...

Fuck

This is the famous painting Red Balloon (German: Roter Ballon), created in 1922 by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee.

Ghost Parachute: 175 Flash Fiction Stories 175 Flash Fiction Stories

To order your copy: bookshop.org/p/books/ghos...

I have a piece, "Slips," in the new amazing GHOST PARACHUTE Anthology. Thanks EIC Brett Pribble and editors!!!

“Its color begins in your hand. // Its shape is your touch.”

— Richard Brautigan

Loved this new essay marveling on life, reviews and more by @amiesouzareilly.bsky.social

And also, how to be a better listener.

How to show up on time, or better yet, ahead of time.

Such terrific ideas, Roxane!

On Promising Young Women (and the Nameless Men Who Get in Their Way) “The woman is a footnote in the man’s history.” –Rebecca Hazelton * There’s this photo of Lana Clarkson that I think about often. She’s outside, backed by a blue sky, the green and brown spotted hi…

My essay is up at @literaryhub.bsky.social about the late, great Lana Clarkson and other promising young women whose lives have been derailed or destroyed by men. It’s also about my childhood sexual abuse and how I have tried, and failed, to reckon with it.
lithub.com/on-promising...

Feeling heartbroken on a Friday night? Send something in: brokenheartsliterary.com I plan to start posting in April so get your submissions in. Responses coming soon to those who submitted this month.

Calculations, by Claudia Monpere — The Bulb Region Calculations — Claudia Monpere THE GREAT THING ABOUT THE SUFFERING HIERARCHY  is...

“You don’t have to be good at math or philosophy. But you have to be smart. Which I am. Very.”

Don’t miss Claudia Monpere’s (@claudiamonpere.bsky.social) breathtaking short story, “Calculations,” in The Bulb Region today.

bulbregion.com/Calculations...

Madison, WI says #NoKings

Hang in there, Jay. Sending you a hug.

Violas on a brown paper background in colours that shift gently to create a floral ombré

In case you’re also a fan of pansies and violas here are a few more. Dopamine from pansies= pansamine ✔️🌿

A mature cherry tree in full blossom in downtown Victoria, Canada.

It is good medicine to stand under the soft canopy of a blossoming cherry tree. 🌸

Audience by Derrick Austin When I think on Your nearness, I picture a lizard biting my thumb. We're both rather private, and I'm not quick. That's why I'm writing. I love listening for You from this distance. Truth be told, I'm comforted by Your steady silence and absence. I know You are there by how often I feel Your absence, not at all like abandonment, not wholly like loneliness, which has its share, but also like the wake that follows when I leave a friend's potluck into cold streets crazed by ice. If You are a grammatical mood, You are homo irrealis. If You are a verb, You are a copula. You were the year I lived in a food desert. The year of the solar eclipse. The year of the abscess and overdraft fees. The year Lake Merritt reeked of death, choked by algal bloom: yellowfins, flounder, crabs, striped bass, and bat rays choked by algal bloom. The year I landed in Florence, I was the only one from my flight questioned (first in Italian, then English): Where are you from? Not African? How much money do you have on you? Where is your passport? Why are you here? In the Convent of San Marco where, once, friars tended a garden of simples and a great library of 400 books, Fra Angelico painted frescoes inside their cells, a small scene from the life of Christ beside a smaller window, and each cell I entered shook me like a good line break, a poem's leap of faith, and in my unknowing, and in my surprise, was happiness. Fra Angelico knew what to withhold, scripture being a shared language, and painted details, not props. The door to hell kicked off its hinges, indelible, sure. But the nails. The bent nail.

Happy to have a new prose poem out today that came out of a transformative morning I spent in Florence looking at Fra Angelico’s paintings.

Poets for Chicago: A Night of Art & Community Benefiting ICIRR 🗓 Friday, April 3 | 7:00pm 📍 Haymarket House, 800 W. Buena Ave., Chicago Join us for our second reading installment where all proceeds support the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights. This night will feature: 🎤 José Olivarez 🎤 Mayda del Valle 🎤 C. Russell Price 🎤 Juan Martinez 🎤 The Borderless Poets Lit for Chicago is a coalition of Chicago literary organizers & curators, including: Sunday Reading Series, An Inconvenient Hour, PO Box Collective, Neon Night Mic, Red Rover, & Exhibit B Spread the word. Support our city. See you there.

We've been hard at work behind the scenes with this one.

Spread the word. Support our city. See you there!

@joseolivarez.bsky.social / @haymarketbooks.org / @fulmerford.com / @icirr.bsky.social

Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134 On female friendships: “Hating, fighting one another, and joining men in their condemnation of ourselves [is] a typical example of what dominated people do.”

“It is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one, then you are better off alone. But there are editors so rare and so important that they are worth searching for, and you always know when you have one.” —Toni Morrison

The Little-Known Story Of Tina Bell, The Black Woman Who Pioneered Seattle Grunge As the lead singer of the Seattle band Bam Bam, Tina Bell created the sound that would eventually become known as grunge.

Thank you for sharing!
This is Tina Bell, the Black Godmother of Grunge. Before Nirvana, Kurt Cobain was a roadie for Tina's band Bam Bam. Bam Bam's bassist Scott Ledgerwood & drummer Matt Cameron, went on to find fame w/ bands Soundgarden and Pearl Jam.
allthatsinteresting.com/tina-bell

The Rumpus - El Alboroto El Alboroto es una nueva sección en español que forma parte de The Rumpus. La revista busca publicar voces innovadoras y textos que quizás no encajan en publicaciones más tradicionales. Nos interesa e...

One of our new initiatives at The Rumpus is a Spanish language section, El Alboroto, where we publish original Spanish prose and poetry. If you write in Spanish or know people who do, please send them here to read our guidelines and submit their work. therumpus.submittable.com/submit/35215...