This can only last so long. There’s stuff I have to do. I gotta catch up on work and go for a run still today. I have papers due by midnight and I just put a pizza in the oven. I don’t have time for this. My friend keeps texting me “get on the game.” This can only last so long. I’m organizing due dates, scheduling movie nights with friends and stuttering replies to my mother. This can only last so long. My phone lights up with her face again, but like this poem love can only last so long.

From Guest Contributor Anonymous

I’d prefer to remain anonymous however I’d like to say a little about myself. I am not a writer but a teenage kid trying to graduate. I enjoy thinking deeply and taking the chance to put my thoughts on a page in a creative writing class is nice.

It wasn’t a new year; it was the new year. Margo watched the clock tick down to midnight with bated breath. Her hand tightened around the stem of her bubbly champagne flute until her fingers turned red. A fresh start; a new beginning. As the clock struck twelve and the ding sounded the glass stem shattered in her grasp, forcing crystal shards into her palm. Blood ran down her wrist. With a resigned sigh she flopped back on the couch and watched the red drops dripping from her fingers permanently stain the rug. Oh well. There was always next year.

From Guest Contributor Madison Randolph

Madison is a reader by day and a writer by night. Her works have appeared in Friday Flash Fiction, The Drabble, Bright Flash Literary Review, Spillwords, The Chamber Magazine as well as 101 Words under the name Ryker Hayes. She can be found on Instagram madisonrandolph17 or Twitter @Madisonr1713

Mother waters her garden at midnight, with tears of the moon, she says. I can sometimes hear her crying, but I don’t tell her. Her garden is beautiful, with pale petals on willowy stems and dew clinging onto their souls, she says. I asked her once to see her budding seeds, but she insists that she must tend to them alone, fragile blooms. I nod because I know she is right, and because I am scared that if I don’t, she will find out, and my heart is too fragile.

Mother’s garden has no flowers, and I am still wilting.

From Guest Contributor Zeyneb Kaya

He: I know I’m a Midnight Rambler, but I can come to your Emotional Rescue. Won’t you Tell Me you want to Live With Me? I am through with Honky Tonk women.

He: I can’t get no Satisfaction. I thought that we could have a rosy future, but now I will just Paint It Black. Won’t anyone Gimme Shelter? I don’t have a Heart Of Stone.

From Guest Contributor Doug Hawley

Doug lives in Oregon (spelled wrong / pronounced right) and escaped actuarial work to hike, snowshoe, volunteer, and string words together.

Sometime after midnight I stepped into a smoky cellar bar, gave the miserable clientele the once-over, and located an empty stool toward the back. The bartender, a cigarette between his lips, was drying glasses with a dirty rag. In my beret and belted black raincoat, I might have been taken for a fugitive Trotskyite – or perhaps the assassin sent to execute him. A woman slipped onto the next stool. She had a face like that of a 13-year-old girl who died of heart failure following prolonged laughter. “I am here to entertain you,” she said, “but only during my shift.”

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and The Trouble with Being Born (forthcoming from Ethel Micro-Press).

Carol heard the front gate creak; someone had come into the garden. “Who could it be? Who is out at midnight?” The doorbell rang. She quickly put on her bathrobe and started for the door, then hesitated. Should she answer it? What if someone wanted to harm her?

The next morning Carol learned that her mother had died of a heart attack the night before at 11 pm.

From Guest Contributor Janice Siderius

Before going back to the backyard she checked on her husband and her two-month-old kid who were fast asleep. The bed was undone, the dishes were huddled up in the sink unwashed, the rugs were clumsily rolled up. She knew that the child would wake up in an hour exactly. Those midnight crying fits. Last Sunday the infant was inconsolably crying, craving for milk, while she was in the backyard. She wanted to feed him, but couldn’t. Her breasts were heavy with ghost milk. The newspaper on the table read, “Delhi woman electrocuted by wet electric pole in the backyard.”

From Guest Contributor Anindita Sarkar

It’s like a post-apocalyptic movie. A usually bustling city is eerily vacant. Essential supplies have come to include liquor, guns, and toilet paper. Who isn’t secretly embarrassed? Around midnight I take a puzzle apart just for the hell of it. The next morning my department holds a Zoom session on how to prevent cheating in online classes. Other professors mention they also have been having strange dreams. In mine, I’m eating Crown Fried Chicken on a bench while eyeballs the size of boulders roll across the grass and dirt, and a woman I recognize from TV weeps into her hands.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of What It Is and How to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections.

I bring her diamonds. My hands are full of them.

Every full moon I come to her porch at midnight, to show her how they shine in my open hands. But every time she only holds her head and softly cries.

From Guest Contributor Eric Robert Nolan

in this silent graveyard,
no one mentioned death.
the hair on my arms stood at attention,
like soldiers in the cold war.
temperature below freezing,
any moisture turned into ice
and fell onto his eyelashes.
just before midnight,
we grabbed a bouquet of
plastic
yellow
roses.
he quivered from the cold,
but his smile never faded.
vows spilling from his lips,
like a waterfall made of his soul.
his nose was cold against mine,
after the final words of our connection.
pulling away he looked at me,
a shimmer in his eyes,
knowing,
that forever,
he will always be mine.

From Guest Contributor Neyalla Ryu