Only You Know Stuck on the shoulder but it feels like the edge of a knife Cut to the right and your ninety years older Swerve to the left and feels like the end of your life It’s just like they always say You can’t take it with you when you die or drive away […]

the darkness was such  i hadn’t even noticed  the lillies had bloomed  Claire enjoys writing poetry, CNF and flash fiction, and is thrilled many of her pieces have found wonderful homes, both in print and online. When she isn’t tramping through the West Yorkshire woods she can usually be found on twitter. You can say […]

Mother Kali I wanted to love my daughter in the way of a sweet Madonna, my Moonchild nature well-suited caregiver. She came to us fierce, furious, spitting spice and salt, refusing my breast, reaching for him through night feedings.. She loves too hard, my mirror child, knows her soul is her own. Motherhood has made […]

My family has the luck of a penniless black cat at a high-stakes casino. When I was twelve, my mother, my father, and my older brother Jeffrey took a vacation to Hawaii. Jeffrey went surfing in the deep, blue ocean while I stayed ashore and observed jittery sand crabs as they popped in and out […]

POPOL VUH The children held a competition, building snowmen. It was an all-day affair, bundled munchkins with red cheeks and furrowed brows scampering from yard to yard like little Giacometti gods at work on the Art of Man. In the end, there was no one to judge who won, nor guidelines to rate the melting […]

A Poem Written After a Bad Night in June 2021 I have never much liked thinking About parallel universes. Order is so tempting When faced with The terror of chance.  It is easy to believe that We are the result Of one special Sperm, That our happiness Is not dependent  On two people Swiping right, […]

‘Appendices’ is part of J.A. Pak’s Chaos Back to Me. A Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee, her writing has been published in Firmament, BHP, Litro, Lunch Ticket, Joyland, etc. More of her work can be seen at Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness

ACTS 17:16  paul left rome for athens where he found a city full of idols  & cried out  for they did not do as he did if you left the emerald city without taking off the glasses,  you too might scoff at someone  who pointed at a pomegranate and called it red EXODUS 20:5 God […]

In lane 1 squats a racoon,Thanksgiving Day at noon,motionless, on its haunches staring at I64 pavement. Along the creek’s unfrozen soft soilthrough a blanket of brown oak leaves, green briar whips push out red buds,brush my hand, thorns blood mefour months before spring. Barn cat retracts its claws from a mole,seized from a burrow nestnear the firewood […]