We paused our walk on the lip of the lake, pulling breath slowly into our lungs. A Great Blue Heron stood stilted in the switchgrass. We watched, standing close enough to see its wispy white mullet, and one yellow eye driven through with pure black. Nadine held my forearm with three fingers and did not let go. Bullfrogs bent the air with their rasping, throaty calls. Dusk fizzed along the tree line as our chests filled and emptied again and...
In the car, my son says he’s sad about the volcano, and I say what volcano, and he says the one in Europe, and I say there hasn’t been a volcano this week, and I change lanes and remember we need to pick up dog food, then remember about the volcano, and look at him in the rearview mirror, the basketball uniform that pulls across his chest, the eyes that stare out from behind the fringe that he refuses to...
I wake up on the first of January with an octopus in my chest. I do not know if this date is significant. I also do not know it is an octopus, but of course it is, if you have seen the way an octopus fills a jar, like it is liquid, if you have seen how an octopus suckers to the lid of that jar and unscrews it. I imagine her a black, oily thing. That morning I wake...
I opened a grocery store even though Nana told me I might as well stuff my money into the garbage disposal and let the blades whir the cash into bits the way tigers maul the humans who had raised them since birth. You can keep a pet tiger your whole life and it’ll still eat you, Nana said, long before it’s starving. It was only Nana and me growing up. Nana liked tigers and somehow word had gotten out about...
Lover, I slept with; Lover, I should have slept with; Lover it was a good thing I didn’t sleep with, none of you know me except in fractions, fragments, scraps. Lover, reach for the breasts, and that’s when it starts. I’m thinking of those matching plaid chairs, burnt orange couch, laundry trailing every room, clean laundry, we were always running the washing machine but never folding, the onions—Pop loved onions, made hair grow on your chest, even though at nine...
SmokeLong Quarterly has been dedicated to publishing the best flash narratives since 2003.
June 2024
I have so much to tell you. I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about why a journal hosts a competition at all–or conversely why everything isn’t a competition. I might never decide how I feel. The conversation, though, is an important one to have. I’d love to do an AWP panel on competitions:… Continue reading New Front (continue reading)
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Sara Kaplan-Cunningham received her MFA in poetry from the University of Houston. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in DIALOGIST, The Cincinnati Review, Fugue, Washington Square Review, Redivider, and elsewhere. Her story “The Conversion” won F(r)iction’s Fall 2023 Flash Fiction Contest. She loves warm brownie sundaes.
