by Geoff Watkinson In the opening pages of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, she asks the following question about creative living: “Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?” If someone had asked me that question a few years ago, I would have felt incredibly uncomfortable, not believed I… Read More The Creative Life is an Amplified Life: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic

Lafayette, Indiana In Lafayette, Indiana, in 2003, sometimes the air smelled like steamed milk for no reason. The restaurant with the best enchiladas was tacked to a used-car sales lot. I swear a bead curtain marked the line between them. But maybe nothing marked it. In winter, on the same block as a tattoo parlor… Read More Micro Prose: Lafayette, Indiana by Sarah Green

Eve’s Diary after Mark Twain Last night I walk so far across the tide that I think I see stars floating. When it gets cold I sleep with the tigers since they smell sweet from eating strawberries. It is not safe to trust me with a moon that belongs to something else. There are too… Read More Micro Prose: Eve’s Diary by Simona Blat

by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor If you’ll forgive me, I’m going to use this space to talk about myself, because I am both the subject I know the best and also—it sometimes seems—not at all. As these nonsermons are inspired by e.e. cummings’ nonlectures, I am drawn to his reasoning for spending so much time on the… Read More nonsermon #2: my selves

Deep End At the local pool waiting in line to use the diving board, a young boy named Randell turned to me and probed his pinkie into his ear, producing a picayune ball of wax that he claimed to be his eardrum. “Go ahead,” he said, “scream into my ear. I can’t hear a thing.”… Read More Micro Prose: Deep End by Nick Bertelson

Fear Mindy was afraid her sister put spiders in her ear as she slept. She was afraid the spiders crawled inside the canal that led inside her. She was afraid one of the spiders was pregnant—baby spiders oozing from her ear like eight-legged lava. Mindy was afraid her father’s dead grandmother watched her as she… Read More Micro Prose: Fear by Jennifer Gravley

by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor In 1952, e.e. cummings was invited to Harvard for a series of what he referred to as nonlectures. From the outset, cummings clarified that he had no interest in the traditional lecture form: “Lecturing is presumably a form of teaching; and presumably a teacher is somebody who knows. I never did, and… Read More nonsermon #1: my religion

Tamiami Trail   Call me salt bones stumbling from beach to beach looking for water clean enough to see my feet in. Not so dirty that I’m wondering if it’s the red or the green kind of bloom mucking it up. Not so dirty that if a shark decided I was her breakfast, I wouldn’t… Read More Micro Prose: Tamiami Trail by Magdalena Waz

At The 4th Of July Potluck The Year She Moves Back Home I suck the marrow from the chicken leg, slurp the devil from its eggs, swill it down with the good beer then make room for a sheet cake slice the size of a house shingle. All this while other ladies skirt the table,… Read More Micro Prose: At The 4th Of July Potluck The Year She Moves Back Home by Amanda Bales

Southern Hostess I hadn’t expected to get dumped. Especially while naked. Dumping a lover who lay beside you naked had to be about the lowest thing you could choose to do to somebody. The evenings Grandy hadn’t called, I wore T-shirts with Daffy Duck on them, pants with elastic waistbands, and my hair scraped back… Read More Micro Prose: Southern Hostess by Shoshauna Shy