For those Sunday afternoons caught between doing nothing and everything,
for the insomnia-driven, for the wanderers and wonderers,
for the unwritten stories of a blank page: please—tell us your story.
“Two or three moves along from that town, and long after the much defrauded F.W. Woolworth had ceased trading, I decided
that it ought to be told. The phone calls, by then, were fewer and further between even than when I’d first moved out.”
By Mike Hickman
“We guzzled filtered water just to wet our throats because we were too busy wasting our youth by slapping our arms ... I thought of his unquiet hands and how his throat searched for something to swallow as if it was the first time he ever had to do this.”
By Tyler Jacobs
“I knew he had died / Because every day he woke first / To bring a nice cup of tea in bed. /
And that morning the kettle / Didn’t wake me and he lay / Still beside me...”
By Sadie Maskery
“I did not expect you to ask about our death so soon. We are both / still young, but lately, hesitation joins us in places it hasn’t before. / Reckless on the highway, a student driver in every car. Unassuming / at the library, preying on our introspection...”
By Megan Nichols
“Years later, Mama cries through the rain, / tells me that the marigolds do not bloom like they used to. /
I want to tell her that there is only yellow around us, / And that the tree outside melts at her touch.”
By Mitali Singh
“It’s been a long year yet / the old adage rings true: /
absence makes the heart / grow fonder and I love you, too.”
By Jay Miller
“TECHNICALLY, SINCE CENTURY FOX IS NOW OWNED BY DISNEY, THIS MEANS THAT THE XENOMORPHS
FROM THE ALIEN FRANCHISE, BEING BORN FROM THE XENOMORPH QUEEN, ARE NOW DISNEY PRINCESSES...”
By Shawn Berman
“i’m sorry that i called you master in the nightclub / i was thinking about the time we'd combined change for a coffee; / you’d put your arm between me and that street preacher / then we kept your rusty bike lock closed too long”
By Palaces P.
“I only heard the cello / as it whined and reverberated and mocked / me, my gloves, my powder, us /
as if it were warning me that this life / I perceived was slipping away from me...”
By Riya Cyriac
“There is a house on a cliff by the sea. It’s a washed-out, barely-there shade of blue, with a lopsided picket fence
and a handful of flowers kept alive only through rain and the kindness of others...”
By Rowan Levi
“I kept every bouquet of roses, / wrapped in layer after layer of gaffer’s tape and / throw it from the roof of the state’s second highest building. / The incense sticks extinguish in my carpet / like cigarette butts alongside / rotting beheaded from the summer.”
By Rachael Gay
“I tried to hold hope on the tip of my tongue, / but it turned into wishes and those never come true. /
Once a prayer flew into my window. / It landed on my bed shaped like a leaf.”
By Amy Soricelli
“...to go to church and Sunday School to know / that but I guess it helps because there’s hope /
for the dead they tell me, I mean the folks / at church tell me, not the dead tell me...”
By Gale Acuff
“I stand as tall as I can these days, feeling spent with change. Ten years ago /
I moved a tree with a hug and gritted teeth. I flipped a boulder with my bare hands / and lifted a fallen tree off of the trail.”
By John Dorroh
“I followed / the arc of rainbows / and found / the pool /
where all the / water / stops / and their prism / corpses / float / bloated...”
By Riley Bounds
“I just wonder / if I’m missing something, / like a three headed dog, / licking itself as a soul sneaks away /
towards a monotheistic heaven, / while Hercules is left to wrestle / his midlife crisis.”
By Richard LeDue
“...I’ve been trying to weigh / how alone I should be, and how / long.
Measuring / tape and fabric pins / cannot wrap me / in a barricade.”
By Kris Hiles
We group all our writing by the month in which they were published;
to view work from previous months, check out our archives page.
We’re always looking for new pieces to be published in Anser Journal. We’ll respond to all submissions within one week.
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