You meet so many people in life. You hear so many promises and plans. Visions and ideas. Art and dreams. Oh yes yes yes. Words words words. I am guilty of these words and dreams. These grandiose thoughts. These hearty slaps on the back. I remember leaving a birthday party, for Timmy, on a Sunday […]
Author Archives: Dale
If the Corner of Your Eye was a Compass by Kristina England
Arrow pointed northeast, New Hampshire forest home, no street sign to direct the post truck, I could use your rounded lips, your sense of puns to guide and steer my car until I was forced to go on foot, give up the city, give up these shoes, give up the cubicle, the talking heads on […]
Forty-Love by Matthew Dube
Brenda liked that her husband Clement felt almost weightless on top of her. She could control him with her pelvis like she was driving her Honda, her progress toward orgasm steady as parking in the garage. A tennis ball hung from the ceiling of the garage on a clothesline, and she knew to stop when […]
Seeing Her on Her Birthday by Jessica Van de Kemp
It’s like using a stereoscopic toy. I load all of the other days of my life and click through until I reach this day. She’s in her forties, this woman who isn’t my mother. She talked me out of changing my name when I was nineteen. Every year, on this day, I call her. Today, […]
Gap Year by Julie Oldham
Alone in Barcelona, having visited the Sagrada Familia, she descended into hell but on the third day rose again. And walks to the window to see a pool of children gathering in grey light. She crawls back to bed. All morning, playground noises, waves of voices, crash on the brick of the hostel walls. Highs […]
Cloud to Ground by Sheldon Lee Compton
Sheets of rain toss the husband’s vehicle. It’s a hard surprise rain trying to beat dents into the earth. Every second that passes, the upper mantle could reverse bloom and open wide to take in the husband and everything else. She gathers hope like wildberries. She gathers hope like fistfuls of gorgeous chicory. She hides […]
Epilogue by C.J. Miles
I Google how to write a poem. It takes me to an essay on how to shoot yourself in the head. The essay informs me that there is no guarantee that shooting yourself in the head, from any angle or into any part of the head, will guarantee death. Shooting yourself in the heart is […]
2017 Best Small Fictions
Hey, guys. We’re sending in our nominations for the 2017 Best Small Fictions, and proud to announce our nominees: Calamity by Matthew Smart From Horseshoe Beach by Kelly DuMar Come Light by Randal Eldon Greene Nimbus by Elijah Matthew Tubbs Skin by Lucy Palmer Congrats, and good luck to our nominees! Winners will […]
Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly by Darren C. Demaree Review by Ani Keaten
For readers of Unbroken, Darren C. Demaree needs no introduction; but if you haven’t read him, you can find several of his stunning prose poems in our past issues, the latest being his, Here We Are, Sore, in the October issue. I recently had the privilege of reading an advance copy of Demaree’s latest book, […]
Descriptions of Heaven, by Randal Eldon Greene
I was delighted to read an advance copy of Randal Eldon Greene’s literary novel, Descriptions of Heaven. Some of you will remember Randal’s, Come Light, from Issue Eight of Unbroken. If you haven’t read him, head over there and read that now, and you’ll get a taste of the author’s voice. It is that voice […]
Susan in the Woods by Zebulon Huset
She wore a black velvet shirt, the kind that shows you where you’ve been last and is only still cool in places like Nebraska or Chechnya maybe, though it might pass as kitsch today. Almost ten years ago, now, they found her in the woods behind the school as the leaves turned to rust and […]
Formaldehyde by Daniel Bennett
She touched the dead. Muller told me. I would spend my weekends on a chrome BMX, riding the channels of the old river. Orange earth, dust from powdered sandstone. A broken up mill. A red bow and arrow, stolen by a boy who resembled Popeye. The shallow water like bitter tea. Red cranes on the […]
Here we are, sore by Darren C. Demaree
We chased those butterflies for miles, Belle says & I can’t believe I caught one, Belle says quietly & I can’t believe I tore one wing off, Belle whispers & then there is silence for a while. There are a hundred butterflies in the field we are sitting in, but Belle can only look at […]
Concentricity by Shane Vaughan
Says she, what’s the purpose of life if it falls like chestnuts to the fire, to be roasted and devoured by little mouths unaware of their parents’ debts, where the random fall of seed can make or break a tree, with fruit picked by fingers reaching out like tentacles, feeding, until the leaves can’t grow, […]
La Doncella by Derwen Morfayel
Still, we can see her five-hundred-year-old young face. “Your little sister,” I begin, “was touched by lightning. Were you a virgin for the sun? Who was the boy who sits, tied up so tightly, blessed with vomit and with blood?” But the Maiden doesn’t answer. I think of asking whether old Llullaillaco’s water is dark […]
Thorns by Shawn McClure
The Roundleaf Briar has unyielding vines, harder than wood. It has thorns as big as cat claws, and can leave you bleeding. They stand guard over the woods, a dense and complicated barrier between civilization and the wild. They only hurt those who dare enter. Nettles have an invisible sting. You can walk through the […]
By the Third Week Two Prose Poems by C.C. Russell
By the Third Week Coating darkness. Snowflakes corkscrew through the branches of barren trees. Breath nearly the only thing visible before our faces. James was the first of us to go, but none of us had quite been able to see what it was that had dragged him away. Only the tracks of his heels—twin […]
October in Kokomo by Eva Roa White
It’s that time of year when cloud-free skies kiss great blushing trees and mums and roses fight it out. When busy squirrels dig into the newly laid mulch under the jaded eyes of an old Sylvester cat. Stunned bees taste the red fallen apples whose skins have been pierced by the beaks of a murder […]
Hell Is Where You Find It by Howie Good
There’s a moon and the night is clear. A man camping in the woods wakes up from a dream of a bear biting his head to find a bear biting his head. But you know what? Some mystics seek out difficult situations in order to improve their ability to meditate. One even tried to meditate […]
Middle Age by Tom Fugalli
At night the scarecrows come down and walk through the wheat field. I don’t know what they’re up to and am not interested in finding out. Still it bothers me to hear them step into the wheat with their silent feet. I want to leap out of bed and shout, “I live nowhere near a […]
# 40 by Joseph Victor Milford
when i hang my skin up on the hook every night, it hovers over me. i try to hide in others’ hurts. you woke up with a mountain on your face. a pressure. now you hold a volcano in your hand. in December, i hung my October costumes about the palisade to make ghosts look […]
Sinus Pressure by Carrie Conners
is a euphemism for being afraid to fall asleep (even if you could, which you can’t) because you just know that one or both of your eyeballs could shoot out of your head at any second. It’s not necessarily that you’re frightened of this event, you’ve always been fascinated that your eyes are attached to […]
Mass Casualty Drill by Peter Vanderberg
Bodies lined on the flight deck warm in the sun, joke & fake death. Clear skies, light breeze: perfect day for a Mass Casualty Drill. Doc leads his new guy over to practice CPR. The dead man shouts, He’s not gonna kiss me is he? On the bridge they wear helmets & hesitate over laminated […]
Rotten by Kirk Sever
Gristle and pores wet soft aroma, gorgeous, soft, grainy, loud opulent musk. Decaying sack of gladiolas, mushy brown. Sweating. A syrup made for the poor. Browned sugars and weeping rot. The corroded insides, the brown, sweating skin on the outside. The smell of artificial maple syrup, the trees, the dead leaves becoming earth, turning black, […]
Moonscape Two Prose Poems by Jess Mize
Moonscape The moon was once worshiped by our ancestors. Secretly, and with much fuss, but only in certain company. She had a sex, obviously, and was called Salome, Cynthia, Astarte. The lovers sleeping with mouths agape are intertwined upon a cool grass bed at midnight. There are emerald serpents which about weeping willows perform the […]
Intelligence by Ken Poyner
The ants we found to be the size of house cats. They wore ruts in the land, created virtual canyons, at times encouraged river beds. The enriching surprise was that the aardvarks were the size of garden spiders. One ant could feed an entire clan of fidgeting aardvarks for weeks. Everywhere there were decaying ant […]
Facultative Friends by Matt Alexander
Facultative friends will grow inside your intestine like microbiota, as an active culture of rape and pillage and the types of violence we allow our thirteen-year-olds and hookworms to watch on the silver screen, but despite their apparent innocuousness they will eat away all your food as you ingest it, as you atrophy away and […]
Phobia by Karen L. Egee
He dreaded Halloween all year, asking even in the winters of deep snow, while other children were reveling in no school days, making snow forts, rigging up turkey platters as sleds, asking even in summers, at the beach, while other children dared themselves in and out of the freezing water, tugged on each other’s shovels […]
Stopping to Let the Catholics Cross North Street in Salem by Jennifer Martelli
as they spilled out of Saturday Mass, I saw a family raking leaves from their small front yard: mother, father, and a young daughter about nine who sat on the curb with her DS or smartphone. The fallen leaves would call for one, maybe two more rakings before they’d be gone for another year with […]
family friend by Philippe Shils
when after much deliberation we went to my woman’s old family friend about the damage we’d done to his place and he said with a charitable laugh that he wouldn’t keep the deposit all I could think of was the juices we’d left on the chair upon which he sat. as he chuckled about the […]
Thirtyeightmississippi by Evan Anderson
I sometimes imagine that the sky is a giant roll of toilet paper and laugh. Same as I sometimes imagine that the monster slobbering under my train set table is a pile of toys tangled like intestines from those movies where the monster is cut across the belly and its insides spill out like the […]
All the others nights are darker by Chad Musick
If the doors would open, if hands would relinquish sweet baubles of mercy to ward this child against evil, then the hungry ghosts, the wolves dressed up as humans, could be chased back to their lairs by the candy of my breath. For tonight. They know that tasting this sweetness requires less, requires patience: razor […]
Heart-stopping by Richard Baldasty
The nomads departed, quietly as nomads often do, not saying goodbye, leaving us willow baskets they’d filled, some with stones the color of noon, some with stones the color of twilight, and some with the song that rises from fathoms deep of perfect darkness. We packed their gifts away. Put them in the room for […]