Chekov studied maps how palmists study hands. He would look at starred cities with scars of quakes and molten mountains fabricated into mansions. He traced streets that turned into curvy lines running up into sky and touched the royal bluish patch of the sea at the right uppermost corner. Slowly the characters emerged. First, a […]
Author Archives: Dale
I Am Three by Christina Scott
“I was raped when I was six.” She keeps driving. She will never talk about it again. “I was pulled up the stairs by my hair when my mother was drunk and high.” I picture blood seeping into her light brown hair. I eat a french fry. “Then she beat your uncle with a crowbar.” […]
Soliloquy by Sheila Packa
I. My grandmother poured a shot of brandy into her coffee. Puna, she called it. She kept the liquor bottle in the kitchen cabinet, top shelf. Years later, I learned puna meant red. Years later, I learned the word for river, the kind that one can’t step into twice. A photo in black & white: […]
2,9418 by Rim Afana
Holes in his fingers. From trimming 1,400 hot plastic bottles (for $13 a day). Holes in diaries. Curated voids at times shield y’all (from elves or selves). Holes in my teapot. Diced ginger burning my lips (that lipless visage once subdued me). Holes in bark leaves. Caterpillars break their fast at dusk (bask in shrill […]
To My American Friend by Maree Reedman
No offence, I couldn’t live in the US. The butter depresses me. It’s so pale. They served Lurpak when I was in San Francisco, which is over here too. I hate it. Danish. What is going on with the cows in America? Are they mad? Should I send you some Australian butter? Western Star is […]
Rocket Surgery by Tom Fugalli
You’ll need a light source of course, but it must be bioluminescent: a jar of fireflies or some deep-sea nightmare fish in a saltwater tank. You should hold the surgical instruments with your feet. Wearing a mask is frowned upon. Don’t think of that Elton John song. Unlike what you’ve seen in the movies, you […]
Slave Ship by Herbert Plummer
My buddy says she’s easy so I say fine, a date. We go to this little spot in the North End, some joint called the Equal Exchange Cafe on Causeway, then hop on the T to the Museum of Fine Arts, joking & poking at each other, working my charm, trying to find some common […]
The bone music maker by Claudia Serea
The bone music maker is a bootlegger of jazz and rock and roll. His name is Sasha and he lives on Resurrection Street. Each week, he looks for X-rays in the hospital dumpsters and takes them home to turn them into records. The hospitals are full of sick people. The dumpsters overflow with X-rays. And […]
Dream ending on a verb by Merridawn Duckler
In my dream, we are rich and shop without price tags. You toss me nice things while strolling the Chanel Boutique. We shop assiduously around a woman lying naked on a raised platform. Waiting for a massage? Or just too rich to even bother with clothes anymore? I struggle into a huge sweater and question […]
I Imagine Myself in Australia by Sara Backer
I sweat in a crowded bar with lots of chairs—chairs to sit on, chairs to stand on, stunt chairs to throw against plywood walls. I’m in my thirties again, single, in tight indigo jeans and a white tank top. My hair thick again—a ponytail of auburn frizz. Australian cowboys arrive in jumbo pickups with roof […]
You arrive in the city by Sam Payne
bare shoulders in a turquoise dress, walking in the shadows of dusty tower blocks past a hair salon, a bank, an Indian takeaway. You pause outside a pub & scratch away the midge biting at your leg. From the dim light within you hear voices echoing, glasses clinking & the soft static at the edge […]
Questions Resulting from an Exchange of the Hungry Caterpillar by Sara Mann
Why do I have four words for your maduro, but only one for your four slices? I give you mature for a child, seasoned for a professional, aged for a cheese, ripe for a fruit—and you give me trozo for a part of a whole, but rebanada if it’s thin, rodaja if it’s round, and […]
Ants by Brad Rose
Tiny feet scurry toward the tunnels of home. Like motorists crying and driving. The sky is asleep, the day hourless. If they could speak, I’m sure they would ask, “Where are all the bachelorettes?” but they’re carrying little boulders in their jaws, the way a lion carries an impala by its broken neck. I wish […]
On the Isle of Unst by F. John Sharp
Should you care to look, you may one day find me on the isle of Unst, near Haroldswick and Uyeasound, and a fair walk from Muckle Flagga. I may be sitting on a stool on the shore, waiting for Aurora lights, my woolen sweater and cap as defense against bitter winds tossed shore-ward off the […]
Paper Atmosphere by Brooke Larson
This isn’t a story. This is stage direction. The circus has come to town. The circus has never left. You are seized by a sense of running away to the circus. Of having always already arrived. You find yourself here. You are seized by the need for the audience to understand. We are each a […]
Changes to Unbroken and Unlost Journals
This is a copy of an email sent to Unbroken Journal’s mailing list subscribers on July 3, 2018. Big Changes! I have decided to step down as EIC of Unbroken and our sister journal, Unlost. Dale Wisely and Howie Good will be taking over as co-editors. Sam Frost will be staying on as Social Media […]
Unintended Consequences by Marissa Glover
With all the sadness in the news, I can’t afford to mourn each reported death. Such grief is unsustainable, says my therapist. It’s like Red Rover: Only the choosy side survives. Send over the small stories too weak to breach the wall—don’t call for suicides, bullets, bombs, children ripped from their mother’s arms. So I […]
Behold the Beauty of Effort by Elizabeth Paul
In spite of ourselves, we become things we never expected. We are trying in a world that is full of trying. Notice the straight lines and close joints of careful, confident trying. Note the rash, pragmatic diagonals of impromptu trying. We call this trying problem solving, but its slanting dynamism reveals it is far from […]
In Light of Recent Events by Elizabeth Freestone
I consider becoming a witch. I kill the blue light, sit at the wall and stare at my hands. At the backs of my hands. I spend the hours considering. In the dark, I consider gathering armfuls of heather, cradling them, like a child, barefoot in the grass. I’d adorn the buds with honeysuckle and […]
As Girl Children Do by Abby Burns
Without turning around, the girl child spills purple paint out the car window from her seat in the back. Her wrist straining on the window edge, hair glistening white with the afternoon. Purple suffocates windshields and lampposts and stop signs and people. It weaves between clouds until the sky turns Van Goghic and anyone who […]
Understanding Each Other in the Dark by Matthew Smart
The shadow messages from passing traffic shine through the bedroom curtains to flash their plans onto my ceiling. They tell me that things should be clean. The darkness of my room reveals all of the world’s imperfections. But what is clean nobody agrees. I used to think the smell of rotting pine needles in the […]
Some Days It Is Better To Say Nothing by Grant Guy
Some days it is better to say nothing, unless you are Tom Horn about to get hanged. If you are Tom Horn you get to say, “You are the sorriest looking bunch of damned lawmen.” & & & &, what is even better, if you are Tom Horn, you get to select your own hangman. […]
Also into you by Bryan D. Price
There is something unmanageable about subtlety in such dark times. Soon there will be nothing to recognize as familiar. Landscapes of our youth have long been forgotten in the service of mobility. It is in our historical cruelty to blow indiscriminately across the maelstrom. I have lived among beautiful people but never said so to […]
Extinction in Four Causes by Daniel Uncapher
Material: of the wood in the table, the marble in the statue, the plastic in the stomach. Concerned citizens in colorful suits drew water from certain measured depths and recorded the pH levels while whales, confused by the pounding, beach themselves on candy-colored shores. On closer examination the reproduction cycle of frogs is once again drawn […]
Niespodziany by Benjamin Niespodziany
The dentist’s receptionist leaves me a voicemail in Polish because my last name translates to Grand Surprise. I tap dance on dumpsters when no one is watching and still I hide behind a lengthy curtain when I eat my porridge. I am a puppet that stinks like an uncertain sea urchin. Enough algae around my […]
Desafinado by Adam J. Davis
In a green field threatened by a swarm of bees or the hum of refrigeration and each time I close my eyes Tony Soprano is sitting before me, picking his nose. A woman in black and white puts her finger to her lips and shushes me silently. Brazil is closer now: Sao Paulo. Fortaleza. I […]
Morningtime by Samuel Lieb
Yesterday I woke up trying to fuck a lemon; the acid didn’t sting so bad as the last time. The juice was everywhere: on my chest on my pillow on the framed picture of my sister on her french-braided hair. I was on top, I was on my knees, one hand against the headboard and […]
Letter by Steve Passey
Hey. Long time no chat. I was thinking how there used to be this sign above the bar in the Club Cigar in Great Falls, Montana (where the girl behind the bar had a mouth full of Skoal and bought me two beers on the house once and smiled at me.) The sign said: “We […]
The Ways We Were Gifted by C.C. Russell
There’s a certain quality to the air in that memory, a certain way the cigarette smells. It has been a decade since you last smoked, but the sour taste is still there in that breeze, still a hard swallow and burn at your first gulp of smoke. First cigarette in a graveyard. It’s funny in […]
Glow by Erik Fuhrer
Momma was a Kangaroo. Daddy was a mouse. Momma had a pouch to store the time daddy gathered from running up clocks. They loved me dearly: called me pink little flesharoo with a whiskery voice, rubbed my skin with linseed oil so it kept its fresh rosy tint. We left our home in 1914 to […]
Dermatographia by David Joez Villaverde
after Jon Davis This is not a dirge because I am sick of mourning and we are not a thing to be mourned. Because apologies are just a commemoration of self-pity and we are pitiless. Because words cannot hold themselves. I wanted to tell a story. Say something about forms and formlessness. Where indelible is […]
Flora by Carolyn Oliver
Outside in Massachusetts it is February. Yesterday it was winter. Today the heat runs thick, like raw honey. Inside the botanical garden the plants are awake and rioting. Camellias, hibiscus, birds of paradise, orchids. Stamens and pistils, spindly sex. Overwhelmed? Go back. In the alcove, there, time hasn’t gone so far. Find sun worshippers, extracting […]
Funeral Parlor by TS Hidalgo
Silence. Silence. Death has come (and you can have success, despite it, if one gives everything one has). The week has also come, and with it an evolution of the lowest temperatures. They’re still talking about precipitation, winds from the north; we don’t rule out frost. Unmistakable dreamlike atmosphere: women and men turned into red birds, that cross an equally red cloud study us. All of this […]