Unbroken is a quarterly online journal that seeks to showcase prose poems, poetic prose and haibun, both from established and emerging voices. We desire to give the block, the paragraph, the unlineated prose, a new place to play.
The paragraph is an extremely difficult form. Just as the wind brushes the underbelly of the idea, a new indent appears. All this hubbub about access and the idea, the idea and cohesion, the idea and liquid space. Polymorphs, snowglobes, a barrage of supporting examples, whirligigs that flutter about before falling into the netting of the idea. Seven ideas total, or one? Suddenly before a recheck for sentence completion it’s rounding up, prosaic summations, concluding with modular force. Sonnet-shaped yet unmusical, the paragraph is fast enough.”
~ Tom Snarsky, Unbroken Contributor
From our current issue . . .
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Pet Sitting a Spitting Iguana by Monica Flegg
It turned out pet sitting iguanas wasn’t for her, and this particular iguana didn’t make it any easier. His name was Michael, and he perched atop the curtain rod above the slider door she had to enter, making every entrance a spit showered death wish. Coaxing him into his cage by prodding him with a […]
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I Knew a Cop by Hannah Vanderhart
Probably not a great cop. He worked undercover for the county for seventeen years. He collected narcotics. When his wife grew angry, she would walk gently through their ranch, stroke the corner of every picture frame until the lines of the house registered a 1.5 on the Richter scale—a microquake. Not enough to break a […]
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Caregiver by Megan Wildhood
Our team of doctors gave us a choice for recovery: sleep on a bed of nails, walk hot coals with a refrigerator strapped to your back or swim the Arctic with hungry sharks and we chose bed of nails because it’s close to work. You just wish you could take ten seconds and do the […]
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Dreams by Emile Benoit
You’re supposed to remain calm in an emergency, even in a dream as hordes of hungry jackals surround you discussing dinner plans while you’re two hours late for the only plane leaving this nightmare until tomorrow night. Good decisions come from a mind free of panic and confusion, yet it’s often impossible to remain composed […]
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Big Rigs, Whales & Gravity by Fred Vogel
I’m smarter than most people I know. You know, those people who say stupid things about things they know nothing about. At least when I open my mouth I have something smart to say. At least that’s what the stupid people tell me. And they should know since they’ve never said a smart thing their […]
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Delaford Street by Ann Howells
Assassins crouch behind an oleander hedge turned yellow in rejected city light. Textures and folds are visible within the darkness. Flies in mournful swarms descend. Bombings might become less common did we not seek to read about them so avidly. Protest groups named with forced acronyms picket the door; I consider turning off the neon […]
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Lacrimae Rerum by Howie Good
They killed and killed and piled the bodies up high. In the pile there was someone’s neck, someone’s head, someone’s leg. A neighbor’s child was able to crawl out, I don’t know how. He kept begging for water in a faint voice. It takes a long time to get over everything that’s happened. People no […]
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Ella Fitzgerald Sang “Summertime” While California Birds Issued Hazardous Substance Warnings by Lyndi Bell O’Laughlin
California birds were always chirping something in the background. One oleander leaf can kill you. So don’t eat it. Me and Bonnie, strumming guitars, trying to sing our teenage girl ways into the future. My voice quiet, not sure if everyone’s house held the same secrets, her voice wide as Ella’s, Your daddy’s rich and […]
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This is a Universe by John Michael
I – Instantaneous Eternity Universe There is a universe where humans never evolved to tell time, and everything happens all the time and all at once. Every person lives their entire lives for an instantaneous eternity. It’s like they’re binge watching their life stories while playing games on their phones. They miss out on the […]
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Dreamsympathy by Logan Ellis
(after Dorothea Tse) In the dining room of your dream, our families are joined for dinner. Fire sits cross-legged at the table in my sister’s place, arms outstretched, leaning & expectant like a punctured crucifix. It doesn’t even know what to say. Get your elbows off the table my mom shouts to Fire, and it […]
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Contributor’s Note by David Spicer
Jack Doe, known as the Unknown Poet, has had poems published in over 50,403 poetry journals, online sites, e-zines, and newspapers—almost every one of them insignificant, irrelevant, and inconsequential. They are his prized possessions that he has crammed on bookcases around the perimeter of his poet-cave. He also has had four sonnet-sestinas published in The […]
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The Way We Should All Go by Jack Caseros
There’s a Financial Analyst at the far end of the meeting room, running a finger along an over-sized spreadsheet. She wants to know how I over-spent. It is troubling—double over budget. The Board of Directors doesn’t understand. To their shareholders, they said environmental stewardship was the cost of doing business. Now that cost was too […]
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Deer Crossing by Kristinha M. Anding
I swear you paused at the edge of the road and looked me in the eye before you chose to step out. Car brakes slamming the dull thud of contact between metal and body 40 miles an hour but it was a curve so maybe we had slowed Renee said it could have been worse […]
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Quitting by Greg Emilio
We smoked. We smoked. We smoked one, then another, then another. Our smokes held hands, daisy-chained like lemmings into the abyss. We smoked because of that third drink. We smoked because our conversation was just getting good, because our words needed silver flesh. We waved our smokes like wands, cast love-spells over each other. The […]
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Iris Tree Smokes Hashish, 1916 by Benjamin Goluboff & Mark Luebbers
That was the summer at Bognor, back in the dunes, when Iris at nineteen held in Nancy Manners’ Kirby Grips a tiny smoldering ember of hashish wrapped in a strip of The Telegraph (Father called it The Tory-graph), inhaled deeply and waited, as Nancy vomited on the sand, for what would come. Some aspirant boy had […]
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Instagram Poem #11 by Rebecca Gaffron
Weeknight and there they are–Farmer and the Master of the Manor–the two of you, queens of nothing and kings of even less. Embodiment of some Freddie Mercury song (it doesn’t matter which). You’re gagging for it. Now that you’ve connected the dots of drowning men lost in the undertow of who you might have been–actor, […]
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We Know the World with Our Bodies by Di Jayawickrema
I began to think of you last night in the dying hours of a house party, sitting on a low couch in a dim room with a man I just met and will never see again, watching my friend dance with a stranger; their feet flying freely, palms pressed together, holding the space between them. […]
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This is a Thing You Think by Ben Slotky
There is a scene that you think you remember but can’t remember from where. It is in a book. Something you wrote. Something you will write. Something you imagined, something that happened or didn’t, and in it a man is walking up a long driveway. It is in the forest, the driveway is. The man […]
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Growing Up in a Basement by Jeff Burt
Lego Men Galvanized water pipes three-quarter inch soft to sight like crushed gravel beneath the soft soles, six and twelve inch ducting dull silver, a few copper tubes. Nails, chalk marks, a plumber’s hieroglyphics, and two Lego Men hidden years before and forgotten, staring down onto the tan futon couch and the bleached wicker chairs […]