Reminder to give this a read if u missed it earlier this week!

Juno by Trinity Richardson: February was concrete in its application; October was more theoretical. The cashier tells me kittens shouldn’t have cow’s milk. The bottle splatters against the pavement in a way that reminds me I don’t know what I’m doing. I keep her cradled to my chest hoping if she can hear my heartbeat she’ll know what I can’t say. The years wash over me—what feels like one is actually three. This is a confession. The powerline hums and I imagine an angel running through the wires. I imagine taking the train to work. I am afraid I will never know what has become of you. Or worse, what will become of us. I am lonely in a way I’ve never been, because this time there is no reason for it. I go to work. I pick up groceries. I make cheesecake and let her have a small bite. It’s not that good, but it keeps me busy and I like the way the cream tastes before I bake it. She likes it. She is fixated on fire and sometimes I forget to put a candle out of reach and she singes her fur. I always feel guilty. This is a confession.

Lovely doozy of a prose poem up this week. Find a cat, hold it, and read "Juno" by Trinity Richardson together.

Link: dishsoap-quarterly.com/4-14-26

I really love this poem

"after midnight my friend & i sat
in the dark car, doing the linger,
streetlit.
i was saying something about the way
the universe talks, i was saying,
i want to protect ur desire
when we saw the fox."

"girl, what r u summoning
from the henceforth? from
the future? from your guts?"
(@taralabovich.bsky.social // girl, possessed!)

Link: dishsoap-quarterly.com/2-18-25/poss...

ALOCASIA'S EcoFutures Issue. Deadline 11/11. ALOCASIA.org. computery futurey background.

ALOCASIA is now seeking new unpublished queer creative writing for our upcoming EcoFutures issue, to be published December 2026. Deadline: 11/11. Pays $50. Absolutely no AI.

www.ALOCASIA.org

Haunted swimming pool on greens and golds

ANMLY is looking to add new members to our all-volunteer team! Come make cool stuff w/ us! Roles = 1-3 hrs/wk

- Translation Co-Editor
- Translation Readers
- Fiction Readers
- Poetry Readers

Email editor@anomalouspress.org w/ a brief statement of interest & a CV/resume to apply

Deadline: 5/1

🌼2 more days to submit to Buds & Blooms: Volume 2🌸

Check out our website for more information:

cosmic-daffodil.squarespace.com

“just before that, as a theremin warbles a dramatic theme, there’s a left turn that leaves the boat in perfect darkness. 

That’s where the trans people sneak off.” (Tomorrow // @lilliekoi.bsky.social)

Link: dishsoap-quarterly.com/5-13-25/tomo...

If u missed this earlier this week make sure to give it a read!!!

Smart Search List of the Day The Smart Search List of the Day is: Fee-Free Mainstream Poems feat. @dishsoapquart.bsky.social et al. https://duotrope.com/search/smart/poetry/fee-free-mainstream-poems-QRLiL4mB

The Smart Search List of the Day is: Fee-Free Mainstream Poems feat. @dishsoapquart.bsky.social et al. https://duotrope.com

Read latest issue of @gooseberrypielit.bsky.social with 12 amazing stories by @lucindakempe.bsky.social Mikki Aronoff @jekwriter.bsky.social @emilyrinkema.bsky.social @karenc.bsky.social Jeff Friedman @pleomorphic2.bsky.social

Don’t forget to submit to our writing comp. Details inside.

"There are two ways we can end this, my therapist says. The first is by putting your brain in a pasta jar. The second is by lying down on a bed that no longer exists." (Closure // Ashley Varela)

Link: dishsoap-quarterly.com/3-10-26

Excited to announce that our team has grown even more!!! So thrilled to welcome M. J. Young, Lillie E. Franks, and Cameron Vernali to the small but mighty Dishsoap family :)

3 days! left!

"We couldn’t forget the milk or the eggs or the sugar because we would have to go all the way back or do without. We had to strategize because between work and life, we could only do laundry on weekends in the basement." (Kijiji Couch / @lindsaymcdonald.bsky.social)

dishsoap-quarterly.com/2-3-26

Wondering what to submit? This week we're especially interested in: grass, 17776, witch hat atelier, frogs, snow in april, running, appliances, thrift stores, found forms, run-on sentences, fruit, evenings, anxiety, city life, outer space, storms, and conversations

Nick van Osdol Things I thought about while driving across the country What goes on in McDermitt, Nevada. What goes on in Unadilla, Nebraska. What it’d be like to drink four beers in Montezuma, Iowa (I only had two). What it’s like to live in Palestine, Tennessee. You know, considering. What Cape Disappointment in Oregon is like (foggy). Whether New Moscow, Ohio, harbors a statistically significant number of latent communist sympathizers. Who named it that. How many European cities with a population above 50,000 have a namesake somewhere in the United States. How many, beyond, say, Paris, Texas, the modal American could name off the top of their head. Here’s another: Prague. There’s actually a Prague in both Oklahoma and Nebraska. The more you know. Whether the thought of giving a Turkish hair transplant to a bald eagle has ever occurred to anyone but me. Whether the medium-sized creature I saw scampering over ice and snow near Jeffersonville, Indiana, was a woodchuck or some other similar species. Why hawks so often sit on telephone wires or electrical distribution equipment near roadways. What percentage of Americans know that a prairie is a scientific term for an ecosystem, not just some other amorphous, ambiguous thing. Whether there are personal injury lawyers who write breathtaking poetry. Why there aren’t billboards adorned with poetry. What it would cost to adorn a billboard in a random, out of the way place with a poem of my own. Which of my poems I’d put on it, and why. Whether anyone would stop to take a photograph of it. How many road fatalities there are on different states’ highways every year (in Nebraska, in 2024, there were 252, as reported by a sign cautioning drivers to drive safely and wear a seat belt). Whether and when we, as a society, will look back in abject horror and astonishment at the level of senseless vehicular violence we once acquiesced to.

How disgusting the modal motel room must be, if you could really see everything. How many people have sex with strangers they meet at motels. How disgusting the modal gas station restroom must be, if you could really see everything. How many people have sex with strangers they meet in gas station restrooms. What the finer intricacies and social norms of sex work at trucker rest stops entail. Whether someone has written a sort of ethnographical or sociological study thereof. How many people actually pray in the truckers’ chapels they sometimes have at some rest stops. Who pays for the chapels. How many people have sex in those truckers' chapels. Whether there’s a term, like the mile high club, for the people who have had sex in them. What a catchy term for that might be. What the heck I’m out here looking for, doing all this driving, besides for interesting photo opportunities, and a way to pass the time. Whether and when the next unexpectedly wonderful thing will happen to me. When I will see a coyote again. What the larger theories and symbolism of encountering coyotes is across different belief systems and traditions. What it would feel like to be a coyote. How the way they think must differ from how I do. Why coyotes are alone at times and why they travel in packs at others. Why I’ve decided to push myself to the periphery, both to the physical periphery—into and across America’s hinterlands—and the social periphery, isolating myself, once such an ardent pack animal, now mostly alone in the cab of my truck. Whether the way I and coyotes think might not differ that much. Whether I’ll make it to the next gas station as I cross the notoriously treacherous, six-mile, six percent grade over Dead Man’s Pass in Oregon. Why I missed the last sign saying “no services for [X] miles” before going over the pass. How much effort, time, and money that will cost me if I run out of gas on this pass.

Whether I might meet my demise out on these roads someday. Or today, because this fog is so dense, and the night is so dark, and I can barely see ten feet in front of me. Statistically, in aggregate, it’s more likely with every passing mile, I guess. Though any individual, modal mile isn’t any more or less risky than the last. They’re like a roll of the roulette wheel; no matter how many times it’s landed on red already, that doesn’t make landing on red more likely on the next spin. Whether the modal American understands that about statistics. Whether I digress on tangents like the one above and drives like this to distract myself from the real stuff, whatever that is. Whether putting another fifteen thousand miles in behind the wheel will put sufficient distance between me and the past to create the space for something new to arise. How remarkable it is how little can happen for so long. How I keep revolving around the same spaces in my interiority under the same sun, moon, and stars. Whether and when, someday, maybe tonight, I’ll finally run out of gas without making it to a station, or my engine will break down, and my cycles of rumination will cease alongside my car as it grinds to a halt somewhere in a ditch. Whether I might finally stop thinking of you then, too. Whether all this isn’t an attempt to decrease the frequency with which those thoughts return. Then again, given how far I’ve driven and how faithfully my thoughts still return to you, I’m not convinced it will work, nor that that was ever my project. In fact, the further I drive, the longer I go, the less convinced I am that any of this ever ends at all.

Wonderful, meandering piece that coasts at a nice speed limit groove up for y'all this week. Strap in and enjoy "Things I thought about while driving across the country" from Nick van Osdol

Read it on our site: dishsoap-quarterly.com/4-7-26

“That's what I keep telling myself.”

@jackbedell.bsky.social in @dishsoapquart.bsky.social dishsoap-quarterly.com/3-31-26

Very grateful to have this one up at @dishsoapquart.bsky.social ! 👇🏻

Jack B. Bedell Slow It Down somehow. That's what I keep telling myself. And then the sky burls all pink along the horizon, then purple, then deep blue to black, and a nighthawk chases mayflies across open space, and breath after breath after breath just escapes into sky.

Poem up this week that's fresh like a breath of outdoor air. Take a moment and read "Slow it Down" from @jackbedell.bsky.social

Find it on our site: dishsoap-quarterly.com/3-31-26

Whatever’s easier :)

"I stare / at the back of your head—framed by pleats of plum-honeyed clouds, / framed by the door jamb, framed by the limits of my periphery." (Mulbery // Adam Gianforcaro)

Link: dishsoap-quarterly.com/11-12-2024/m...

Wondering what to submit? This week we’re especially interested in: carrots, fathers, doorways, chronotopes, apocalypse, long drives, ink, baked goods, seasons, habits, magical realism, appointments, poems from fiction writers (and vice versa), ekphrasis, and origin stories.

The generator's name is Mike. I named it this when I was six because it was loud and it came on at night and it smelled like something working hard, which seemed like a Mike kind of thing. My father thought the name was funny and then forgot he thought it was funny and started calling it Mike too, and then my mother started calling it Mike, and now when NEPA takes the light — which is always, which is every day, which is the basic grammar of existence in this country — someone shouts Mike! from wherever they are in the house and my uncle who is actually named Mike no longer flinches because he has learned that the house has two of him and one of him requires petrol. Mike the generator is twenty-seven years old. I have friends who are younger than Mike the generator. Mike has survived three house moves, two floods, a thunderstorm that bent the zinc roof of the outdoor shed at a forty-five degree angle, and my father's periodic conviction that he could fix Mike himself, which always ends the same way: my father crouched over Mike's open body with a wrench and a look of deep personal betrayal, and then the mechanic from down the road arriving on his okada and fixing it in eight minutes flat for five hundred naira. The mechanic is also named Mike. We pay him in cash and sometimes in fried plantain and he has never once commented on the coincidence. What I am trying to tell you is something about reliability. About the way that in the absence of reliable things, the things that do work become sacred. Mike the generator is sacred. We do not speak harshly in Mike's presence. We do not run Mike dry. We check Mike's oil with the seriousness of a man checking his own pulse. When Mike coughs — and Mike coughs sometimes, a low diesel cough that means the petrol is getting low or the air filter needs cleaning — there is a quality of attention in the house that I have never felt in any other context. Everyone listens. No one moves.

My mother says Mike has a spirit. She says this lightly, the way she says things she knows sound absurd but means completely. My father says the spirit is German engineering, because the brand is German, because my father trusts German things with a faith that no church has ever inspired in him. My uncle Mike—the human one—says nothing because he has made peace with sharing his name with a machine and this peace is a kind of spiritual achievement that I respect enormously. NEPA came back permanently in 2019 to the street two blocks over. Permanently means most of the day, which is not what the word means in English but is what it means in Lagos, where language has learned to be realistic. When this happened the neighbors bought fridges and stopped rationing ice. They stopped tensing when clouds gathered. They learned, slowly and then all at once, what it felt like to not be listening for the generator. We still have Mike. My father cannot imagine not having Mike. He says: you never know. He says this in Yoruba and in English and sometimes in both at once. He says it the way a person says something they have tested against reality for so long that the testing has become indistinguishable from believing. Last month the light went for four days because something happened to something and no one was sure which something. The whole street ran generators. The whole street smelled like petrol and heat and that particular quality of noise that means everyone is paying to be alive right now everyone is burning something to stay on. Mike ran for four days without complaint. My father patted the casing when it was over. Just once, with his open palm. The way you'd put a hand on someone's shoulder after they'd done a hard thing well. I watched him do it and did not say anything because there was nothing to say. Some things that happen in a house are not for words. They are for silence and for the memory of the silence and for the person you eventually become who carries them.

Piece with a whole lot of energy and buckets of heart up for y'all this week. Enjoy "My Father Bought a Generator in 1997 and It Is Still Running" from Oluwanifemi Bakare

Link: dishsoap-quarterly.com/3-24-26

"I am bareback on a dirt road picking out the planes from meteors & fighting / time right there in the garage & he is picking up my childhood bike" (ode to lucy dacus & whatever is in the streetlights // Noralee Zwick)

Link: dishsoap-quarterly.com/10-29-2024/o...

"You open the door. Inside is a lake, or a fire, or the edge of a cliff. Inside is the girl who kissed you and laughed when you cried. Inside is the car you rolled into a ditch and never told anyone about." (Portrait of a Skeleton // Ziqr Peehu)

Link: dishsoap-quarterly.com/3-18-25/skel...

"You open the door. Inside is a lake, or a fire, or the edge of a cliff. Inside is the girl who kissed you and laughed when you cried. Inside is the car you rolled into a ditch and never told anyone about." (Portrait of a Skeleton // Ziqr Peehu)

Link: dishsoap-quarterly.com/3-18-25/skel...

Wondering what to submit? This week we’re especially interested in: fish, paradoxes, chalk, weird weather, malls, loneliness, fun facts, the sublime, hybridity, video games, cnf, grass, spices, heliocentricity, movies, spun sugar, and warmth.

Our 9th issue is all about 🌈 CO-LLAB-OR-ATION!!

There's NO THEME / subject restrictions. The only rule is that the work submitted must be a collaborative effort!

🚨 Fill out our Google form IF YOU NEED A PARTNER: buff.ly/OtPlTWY

Deadline April 30

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