The asshat in an ascot quoted Foucault. He made faculty senate holy hell. I think he was in English, maybe History; I knew he wasn’t in athletics!

Paper or Plastic?

From Guest Contributor JD Clapp

The sky looked heavy as darkening clouds pressed hard against the planet’s surface. The two dominant elements fought. It was like an unstable ballet.

Samael bowed his head crying as the real thunderstorm began.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

Sometimes I think I must have imagined that night. It was like one of those direct-to-video action movies with Bruce Willis or Nicolas Cage – blah blah, pow pow, and over in something under 90 minutes. We tugged at each other’s clothes, moaned each other’s names, rubbed, sucked, writhed. I was bleeding so severely afterward, my bottom lip split open, my eyebrow practically torn off, that I almost passed out. Instead, the world persisted in behaving recklessly, ringing the doorbell and then running off. I knew without knowing how I knew that all things were the same thing to the dark.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s newest poetry collection, Heart-Shape Hole, which also includes examples of his handmade collages, is available from Laughing Ronin Press.

The waiter comes around to check on me again. I avert my eyes in embarrassment and try to discreetly check the time on my phone. Going on two hours now. I should really give up.

Man. Remind me to never use this app again.

From Guest Contributor Rachel Martz

I left the cabin against my wife’s wishes and ventured into the woods hunting for anything that might feed my family. Within minutes the wind picked up and I found myself struggling in knee-deep drifts and knew an arduous journey was ahead. Would there be any rabbits or deer to hunt? Am I the only one who has a starving wife and children?

I closed my eyes and knew my hunting days were over.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

Blessed Morrissey. Everyone sings. Jennifer’s a junior and she has her own car. She starts the engine and on the summer night highway she says, “Wanna get kicked out of the Hilton?”

“Yeah.”

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction on paradox, rebellion, transformation, and enlightenment from Unsolicited Press. Her work has won contests at Loud Coffee Press and A Story in 100 Words, and it has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, The Alien Buddha Goes Pop, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and other journals and anthologies. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal and a professor of creative writing. Read her work and learn more about Only Flying at https://brook-bhagat.com/.

We found a house out on the dunes, beyond the golf course. The conservatory had crumbled already but soon a jagged fissure opened up across the living-room floor. Soon the front door burst from its hinges and other people started to show up. A tramp slept on the wrong side of the crack one night; he was gone in the morning but we didn’t know where. You know we’ll have to leave here soon, she said one night as she held me. Maybe head up the coast? I squeezed her back and we watched a window slip from its frame.

From Guest Contributor Geoff Sawers

I sighed as my breathing slowed. The sun rose over my head, and I felt the power inside me waking, like the tree in the woods that had grown into giant oaks, covering the forest floor in the summer. I would sit in the shade of those trees until nightfall, waiting for the stars, reaching for the promise of sleep. The light in the sky became a distant memory, and I could almost feel the joy that the moon brought to those born in the middle of winter or during those spring showers that brought new life to the earth.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

I didn’t grow up surrounded by art and culture. There were newspapers scattered around the house but few books on the shelves or paintings on the walls. One day I sat drawing in my room – I must have been 12 or 13 years old, just starting to figure shit out – when my mom stuck her head in. She watched me for a moment, then she said, “Why are you wasting paper?” I have had kind of a bad feeling ever since, like the farmer’s wife is still back there in the kitchen torturing three blind helpless mice with a knife.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s newest poetry collection is Heart-Shape Hole (Laughing Ronin Press), which also includes examples of his handmade collages.

When you said, “I value your effort, not the result,” I believed you loved me; when you said, “Four students got full marks, why didn’t you?” I believed you tried to motivate me; when you said, “You are too stupid even to understand the simplest function,” I believed you were disappointed and didn’t see my pain; when I said, “I don’t want to study. I just want to lie in bed,” you said you wished the boy next door who aced all the subjects were your child, and Mum, how could I believe you loved me and not my grade?

From Guest Contributor Huina Zheng

Huina either coaches her students to write at work or write stories for fun after work.