HAD

Places, Please

Lucas Mancini — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

The vacuum was the wakeup call. It must have started itself in the middle of the night. Smart appliance: great with space, awful with time. Keeping an inhuman schedule. It woke up, overworked, slurped me out from under my topsheet like a tablecloth trick. Left the bed perfectly made. Cascaded into feedback around me. Crosshatch patterns of the basest wavelengths ciliated the carpet, plus intake hiss, static rocket launch column(s) of sound(s) buckled the bedroom. Meanwhile any circle you can see, but a circle inside another circle especially, is an optical/audible illusion. Reality is only apparently discrete. No sound is the sound of itself. Sound is a record of its surroundings, decomposable into whatever sounds its negative spaces imply.

I figured I’d ride the wave when it blew itself apart. Air manifold heaving me handfirst into hardwater-soiled toilet, anchored by my elbow like to some faulty vending machine. Pincers of frequency opportune as wasps, rattling down the toilet’s handle or targeting the chain or flapper with enough amplitude to activate, dropping the water column, extruded like involuntary pilates through litanies of pipes, passing me to the kitchen. One foot’s toes found a tee joint behind the dishwasher, got some hip behind the back foot, kicked it spigot-first from under the counter.

The top rack slid hesitantly ahead and emptied, sounding like a hasty ball pit exit or burnt popcorn. The bottom rack was catapulted then. More decisive—chorus of biohazard sharps—metal chewing glass squeakily. I surfed the dishwasher across the carnage to the garage door and jackknifed through its screen, landing a backflop on the hood of my self-driving mid-size crossover hybrid SUV, my vehicle of choice due to its nominal redundancies inspiring within me a positively bovine sense of security.

Well, yeehaw. Dr. Strangelove-splayed over the windshield, heels scrambling over the headlights, only places the eyes of a car ought to be, no detriment at all to self-driving. That would have been when it dawned on me that the car’s eyes were all over the place, distributed, and its perspective was composite, a bug’s. It would see me, my face, if it saw my face, if it did something we would call seeing to something it’d call my face, the car would see me like some trashy psychedelic painting, smeared predictably along a mystery axis, mysterious more to me than the car, which has of course never experienced the visual stylings of Alex Grey.

Would have been. 4D-faciality would have dawned on me then except for higher-priority dawnings, the sun for one, a din picking up, streets opening from neighborhood to side roads to expressways, the fact that we were not alone but joining a flock of vehicles on autonomous warpaths. Genuine revving blended with the synthetic whines of the hybrids. Cars slalomed into lampposts, telephone poles, and each other apparently at random, but adhering to a broader choreography. I got my own glorious pike through a Tesla semi’s windshield, already taking my bow, and made my exit.

Lucas Mancini is high-context / low-agency / medium-literate and edits poetry for Eulogy Press. See more at APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, BRUISER MAG, GONZOID! and elsewhere.

New York, Missouri

Macy Craig — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

The snowplow operator arrives at the county garage before the storm starts. In the parking lot the sky is grey and angry, and his breath swirls around him in the wind like smoke. Inside, and after making coffee in the little ancient coffee machine, he takes a folding chair out of the closet and sets it next to the window. There is some pride in being the only one awake.

The referendum passed to close the junior-senior high school and combine it with the next city over. The snowplow operator would occasionally drive past the school during the day and see it completely empty. He tries now to recall being at school, but it all seems so foreign to him, like a movie. He remembers some classes, some teachers, though he is sure that they all have passed away by now. He remembers Frau Smith and her German lessons, and he had been able to retain that German for so long. But without youthful memory or use, he had lost it all, barely even noticing until one day the words escaped him.

At his age, there is no state other than exhaustion, and it becomes a baseline for the world itself. As the world became more fuzzy, it also became more grey and cold. It never used to snow here. Two years ago, the town scrounged together enough money to add a single snowplow to the school district bus barn and pay the operator minimum wage each day that it snowed. Henry Stellmaker the farmhand, the store clerk, the retiree, then the snowplow operator.

As a younger and more energetic man each Christmas Eve, he would cut through Schmidt’s harvested corn fields to a little fenced plot which held the New York pioneer cemetery. He would find the Stellmaker graves and sing them Macht hoch die Tür and Stille Nacht. It was only after the derecho took down the shed and the crops that Schmidt sold the land to a developer who leveled it all for houses, each newly finished and like teeth in the horizon.

The snowplow operator cannot help but wonder if it has always been like this. There has been no New York, Missouri for over 150 years. He imagines himself like one of those last pioneers, silently watching the name of his home changed by the young men and women who never knew the people who founded the town. Their hopes and plans for the acres of land, now below houses, their ears only hearing a language that they cannot understand.

It is integral that each main road be passable so the residents can leave to their various jobs and responsibilities. The snowplow operator imagines himself sometimes as a shepherd silently leading them by lamplight through the snow and ice. They still complain when the plow is slow or the snow pushes up and creates a mound in front of their driveway or car.

The wind picks up outside and lightly rattles the windowpane. The snow begins to fall. It is time to get up and begin the rounds down the streets of the town that was once New York. The coffee pot goes silent and all is ready.

He remembers making coffee for his father on the stovetop: the way his father would smile and gently take the hot saucer, always thanking him and telling him it was good coffee, even when he burned it. At the store, he would stand on his tiptoes, reaching his little hands up for a tin, which his family would always get for him to make despite rationing.

This exhaustion is overcoming him, and the darkness of the night makes the town seem as if it is no longer for him, that one day he woke up in a different place with a different name and different people in it. He lies down on the floor and decides to nap; let the earth do as the earth does, let it blanket itself with snow. He is old now. If they sleep, shouldn’t he be allowed to as well?

With his eyes closed, he begins to hum a tune, imagining the words in German, though he no longer fully remembers them. He feels the hard CHs and Ts, and the soft consonants that float between them like cold breath in winter. There is another sound, almost like a snowplow, though it is only the furnace kicking in as snow rests between wind gusts on the blacktop outside.

Macy Craig lives in Missouri. She wants you to know there are towns in the state named Albany, Coney Island, Cleveland, Denver, Dover, Houston, Waco, Memphis, Sparta, Troy, California, Beverly Hills, Berkeley, Nevada, Miami, Florida, Louisiana, Lebanon, Cairo, Cuba, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Manchester, Milan, Paris, Mexico, Glasgow, Vienna, Versailles, and Holland. It feels a little bit like the state is trying to run away from itself, which is funny because she often enjoys it there.

Three Alarms

Stephanie Anderson — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

By the time I’m home from work, the longest stuffed monkey in the world is hanging its head in my apartment complex dumpster. Seven feet of monkey, beautiful almond fur, four-foot legs dangling with its throat crushed against the rim. “Rough night?” I ask, and pull the car into a spot.

Lately we’ve been getting emails from our apartment complex, subject line TEENAGERS, that encourage us to call the cops if we catch any youths loitering. This is an aggressive escalation from their last request for photographic evidence of people not picking up after their pets – flash photos of men in ski masks, I guess, dropping shits discretely in the night. I climb past two teen girls in the stairwell, fear beneath their eyes, begging me not to rat. By the time my mouth opens, I’m already up the stairs.

This is the kind of place where a car alarm sounds every night from somewhere, presumably the parking lot, though we can never rule things out when living above an amateur DJ. It is a different car every time – sometimes we can even see them from our balcony when overlooking our U-shaped asphalt colosseum – though usually we only spot the neighbor’s crusty maltese, yapping on its patio, outside alone in all weather. Once a month a fire truck arrives as if scheduled, red lights raving across faux brick. EMTs move in and out, hit their vapes when no one’s looking, but otherwise their habits are a mystery.

After several days of our oven not igniting and several maintenance requests unanswered, I finally get the leasing office on the phone. “No one has even been out to look at it,” I tell her, “I don’t understand the problem.”

“Did you scan the QR code on the front?” A woman named for a continent snaps. “When you do, your phone will sound an alarm. Hold your phone behind the stove until you hear a clang, and then your oven will turn on.”

“Oh,” I say, “I’ll give that a try.”

The complex sends another email, subject line POOL SAFETY TIPS. It wasn’t written by a person, but I don’t blame them; I would have hired the stuffed monkey, too. Next I get an email from a man who informs me that there is metadata inside every picture I have ever posted that could lead someone to my address. Cool, I email back. I’m off on Mondays, if you’re free.

My partner gets a text one afternoon, standing at the kitchen island. “I heard about the fire,” he reads out slowly, “Hope you and your loved ones are safe.”

“The what?” I reply.

That evening we walk to the other campus of our complex, over a mile from where we live. We don’t get out there often, only when the treadmills in the gym are broken and we have to use the second gym, or if we want to scry the algae blooms in the second pool, or if we want to encounter elderly women with early-onset dementia in their silver Honda Civics who don’t quite know how they got to Baltimore from Northern Pennsylvania. Admittedly, that only happened once.

On that evening, without a teen in sight, my partner and I round past the second pool and there it is: opaque plywood fence, waft of char, bright orange paper: NO TRESPASSING. ACTIVE ARSON INVESTIGATION.

“Well shit,” he says.

“Isn’t this the building we toured?” I ask, squinting up at the scorched-out windows, the blighted shell of siding. Popcorn ceilings traded for a better view of the rising moon.

“I thought that was over there,” he points across the parking lot, toward the building wrapped in Tyvek that burned down this time last year.

The next morning I watch drone footage of my apartment on fire again and receive an email from the complex, subject line WE ARE COMING FOR YOUR DOGS. I am lying on the carpet beside my cat, who is deep in thought. “Look, that’s where the couch is,” I tilt my laptop toward him and tap the screen repeatedly. “And our fireplace. Those should be our bedrooms – that’s where we are right now.” He stands to stretch, takes five steps away from me, and lays down again.

Stephanie Anderson is kind of in Baltimore. She recommends Two Poems by Gwen Aube and nat raum's poem in which you become the "you" from the HAD archives, then she'd like you to sign her guestbook at whoastanderson.com.

Hollywood Grill

Julián Martinez — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

– North & Ashland, Chicago IL

Reggie’s alone tonight. She’s sucking on a sucker that she got at this diner, the one her father took her to as a kid, the mural of Elvis Presley and Mickey and all the all-Americans kissing and chewing on french fries, stenching it up with their fat ugly overfed mugs. She’s on less drugs than she’d like to be. Chicago’s where Bill her ex-husband used to live, Mr. Indiana Man. She’s thinking about his mess of hair, his nose. The mole on it. A green code in her head is scrolling like The Matrix. It glows but she doesn’t understand the message. She’s hesitant— this is where the guys with guns who her daughter’s been hanging with are from. How did Reggie get here? She slept weird on the bus. A Greyhound! She couldn’t sleep for 48 hours so she decided to go somewhere, wherever, for the weekend. Euphonia hasn’t been home for days so she thought she might bump into her while eating, here at this 24-hour diner somewhere in their family’s DNA. So much of Reggie’s imagination is shared with her funny father’s. Could the same be said for her daughter? She feels deja vu, staring at the post-dusk traffic on North and Ashland. Where is her daughter tonight? Are Bugs and Taz and all the Looney Tunes co. keeping her safe? Did her daughter walk through that mural, like she feels the urge to do right now, and go skipping into that golden-red center? Disappear like Bugs when the show’s about to begin? Or when it ends?

Julián Martinez is working on a novel called Reggie. His debut book of short fictions is out next year with Future Tense Books, baby. He recommends "Farewell Taco Charlie's" by Joshua Hebburn from the HAD archives.

The Astronomers

Guy Cramer — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

Sliced my thumb cutting an onion
while liver burns on the stove

If it’s not one thing it’s the whole universe

All the Band-Aids are kid-sized
I put them in a memorable place

Same drawer as therapy receipts
delinquent student loans

The payment plan for the discounted pool with scattergun marks

Things are safer without water
The kids could spend all day down at the bottom

Watching sunrays leaking through pinhole constellations
Yelling Cassie O’s peeing again

Guy Cramer is from Texas where it is currently 1,000° Fahrenheit. Instagram: guy.cramer

Nothing In Life Has Prepared Me

Jeffrey Hermann — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

I dream of giving up on working hard for a living and instead finding a passion project like designing hats that bring hats back into style for real which will probably never happen because people want to be free and not held down especially on top of the head what they want I think is freedom on a large scale and freedom on a small scale but they also want to be in love which means you are not free but a captive held in a prison of irrational attachment a person who wrecked their own ship on the rocky coast of a beautiful island from which you do not want to be rescued you want to be happy doing nothing but admiring the island and claiming it as your own and searching the horizon on the lookout for danger for someone who wants to take the island for themselves or maybe it is just a boat full of tourists who want to have a drink on the beach and buy a t-shirt and sleep in a nice bed in a nice hotel and you look around and think yes I want that too and so you sell the island you throw away passion and corrupt the love you fostered and the island never ever forgives you even though one day you see what a fool you’ve been and you beg for forgiveness but she will not listen she is watching dolphins leap from the surface of her sea

Jeffrey Hermann writes short fiction and prose poems in his spare time. One day when he retires he will write in his regular time. His work is out there if you look. His wife and two children and dog mean everything to him. He has two books forthcoming in 2027, from Unsolicited Press and Gnashing Teeth Publishing.

Puff Rib

Mary Sauer — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

Barbara,^{^[1]}

It’s stupid to spend my summer drinking beer and knitting wool,

warped humidity held, we’re outside and my lemon yellow

friend climbs the pergola, her fingers tendril trellis. Wisteria, too,

its roots are grounded, the art critic says of allover painting

(lattice, nets, rows), in vernacular practices, previously

feminized domesticity, non-sexist.^{^[2]} “Non-sexist?” I press

into the pattern, an allover fabric, “like wallpaper,”^{^[3]}

I say of its texture, isolated vertical panels

and a good deal of lateral stretch. Like modernism,

he scoffs, but I am only working in response to bing cherry

stems purled on my tongue twenty-seven aromatics flush

OFF! Deep Woods, and your garden fruit flies find tart sweetness

on my fingers cornflower blue yarn dampens. “Missouri,”

I say, “in July.” It is after midnight. Suppose I return

home before the wash sours, tumble dry fold, before wrinkles

settle into my own bed, wake to make coffee and scramble eggs,

wait for my children to rise. Still, there is space on the couch inside,

and I look up at my friend whose skin shines through knit eyelets

like a kaleidoscope, I’m interested in the fragmentation,

I say, in the dropped yarn and empty space where you find give.

^{^[1]} “Puff Rib” from A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara G. Walker. Pg 47

^{^[2]} “Issues in Pattern Painting” by John Perreault in ArtForum, November 1977

^{^[3]} “Cast-off: Revisiting Modernist Abstraction Through Vernacular Craft Practices,” By Eirini Boulka in pianob., 2024

Mary is a poet, short story writer, and knitter from Kansas City where she works with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. She is a Best Small Fictions nominee and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Timber, Pleiades, coastlines, [light study], Seam Allowance, and Amenia Free Review.

Naz Reid

Brian Oliu — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

Take care,
stay safe,
see you soon,
be good,
thank you,
may your sleepless nights
haunt every person
who enabled this
if not in this life
but the next,
appreciate you,
don’t worry about it,
next time,
next time.

Brian Oliu lives and writes in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Naz Reid is from a collection of works written during the federal occupation of the Twin Cities in 2026.

If not friend then why friend shaped

Chloe N. Clark — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

How an animal might strike when

fearing for its life

How you can hold disaster in

the cup of your hand

A bullet, a pill, a

resolution

How men once tried

to navigate the arctic

Even their boats no

better than splinters

The cold a match

for everything

How when a man searched

for lost bodies

He found them

by imagining how they got lost

Following a path yields less

than following fear or foolishness

Pride or indecision

each step an asterisk

How you can see

shapes in clouds

And it's not delirium

but a tether

Dragon and dog

fire or home

How you can see the shape

of a friend

Long after they're gone

even in the dark

Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Escaping the Body, and more. Her most recent book, Every Galaxy a Circle, is out now from JackLeg Press.

THREE HAIKU

Cletus Crow — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

jellyfish in tanks

their tentacles tangled

like our lives

retired palm reader

ashamed of his past

claims we make our future

massage parlor

does happy endings

i'm actually sore

Cletus Crow is mostly a poet. His latest chapbook, Flying High, is out from New Ritual Press.

Can I Get You a Seltzer or Anything?

Zac Smith — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

I saw a bus run over a man in Chicago. First, the bus jumped the curb. Then the bus squished the man. I remember blood squirted out of the man from a few different places. Then the bus driver stopped the bus. He got out of the bus and looked around at the blood. He seemed confused that there was so much blood. He looked at the blood pooling on the sidewalk and dripping down the curb into the street. I remember feeling impressed by how much it sparkled in the sunlight. Now, every time I watch my dogs run in the back yard, I think about the blood squirting out of the man and pooling on the sidewalk and dripping into the street. I'm not really sure why. Oh—look, see? Look how fast they are. Damn! They go so fast, right?

Zac Smith wrote this >:^)

recently i started measuring everything in ribs

Ben Starr — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

At first it was just height, like making sure the basketball hoop where I practice my windmill dunks sits at a relatively impressive twenty-four ribs, or pledging not to date anyone shorter than the national average of just over sixteen ribs tall. But lately I’ve started using ribs to measure everything. When I bought my truck I made the dealer pinky promise it had horsepower equivalent to two hundred fifty-six ribs. Convinced the DMV to state the age on my drivers license as just over two thousand ribs old. I even had my dietician make me a meal plan that ensures I get up to eighty ribs-worth of lean protein per day. My therapist tries to say this is somehow all about my mother. About childhood. About faith. But what does she know? Her office is barely two hundred square ribs in total leasable surface area. Besides, she still thinks you left just because your new boyfriend makes over two hundred thousand ribs per year. She still thinks you won’t come back.

Ben is a proud member of the Bursky Collective, the Oracle Menagerie and other well-known literary cults. Find more of his work at benstarrwrites.com

Before you fall in love with me

Sean Cho A. — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

I need you to know

I get anxious making phone calls & need a fair amount of warning before social events My biggest hobby is walking my cat & I’m terrified of highways I usually only own one pair of shoes at a time & I’m really bad at keeping herbs alive

It’s much too late
for me to become
anyone else.

Sean Cho A. asks you to double tap, comment, and share to give him the small serotonin boost that we have defined as joy.

everything I know about my mother's hometown

Jen Hallaman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

to reach my mother’s hometown from my hometown, it takes 2.5 hours by car on a crooked highway carved out of sprawling shale
1. by carved, I mean blown apart with dynamite
2. look closely and you’ll see the hillsides shudder
you’ll know you are there when you see shore butting up against a muddy river
1. my grandfather once swam across the river
  1. I do not know how old he was, or whether he was drunk
  2. I do not know whether he was scared, how forcefully the river’s currents flowed, or how long he was suspended between shores
2. it only takes a minute to cross the river via bridge
  1. I used to imagine the green-tinged metal crumbling beneath us, our car plunging into the river
    1. Once or twice, I dreamed about it
    2. Assuming we escape the car, I think I could make it to the riverbank
the front porch of the house where my grandparents once lived has disintegrated, leaving a chasm between the door and the overgrown yard
1. last time I paused by the yard, the crabgrass climbed to my knees
  1. once, the lawn was dotted with pink and yellow and violet
  2. I think there was a tire swing hanging from that tree
2. I want to drive by once more to see what I can remember
  1. maybe park and stand on the fringes of the sidewalk. see what memory occurs to me.
    1. thus far, haven’t been able to bear
nothing here ever changes except the buildings and the people grow older
1. there is the porn mart off of the highway. the CVS, the Wendy’s
2. my grandma’s favorite donut shop
3. the near-vacant mall where we bought back-to-school clothes
my aunt replants her garden each year
1. what is the point of growing a garden in a dying city?
2. my daughter teeters from flower bed to flower bed, picking me zinnias, daffodils, pansies
  1. I leave the flowers on the patio overnight and by morning they are wilted
    1. Should have pressed them or hung them up to dry
      1. like the sun could bake my water-thin memory into these paper petals
      2. like I could hold this day in my palm
walking northeast from my aunt’s house, everything is familiar but I don’t know where I’m going
1. the sidewalk ends
  1. I can’t see where it picks up again
2. the yards are dotted with yellow and white and violet
My grandparents are buried side by side somewhere in this town, but I don’t know where their graves lie
I used to press the flowers that I plucked from my grandmother’s yard
1. as though she, too, had grown from that soil &
  1. I might be able to keep her
2. sometimes I happen upon one in an old book: Heidi, Little House on the Prairie
  1. I leave them there for fear they’ll disintegrate at my touch
3. I thought I’d remember the day each flower came from
  1. but the days I spent here mostly blur together
    1. what is the name for a place that you can only access in memories or dreams?

Jen Hallaman lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband, daughter, and two twenty-pound cats. She works at an independent bookstore, where she spends her lunch break writing poems. Her creative work appears in the New Orleans Review, Pithead Chapel, DIAGRAM, SWING, and Orange Blossom Review, among other publications. Find her at www.jenhallaman.com.

Two Things

Wheeler Light — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

Hidden Movements

for Sho

Language wants to grow up to be color and color wants to grow up to be sound. When it was a child, politics wanted to grow up to be a firefighter but ended up being fires. When it was a child, fire wanted to be alone in its room away from its terrible father. Everything becomes many of itself as though the world were breaking the mirror of you before trying to put it back together. On the job application not knowing to say if you have a disability. What you have is what a kaleidoscope has when no one looks through it. In you is so much color, it burns to think about. When you were young, you thought you wanted to be older and when thinking was young, it knew it’d never have the answer. If you open the door, you will live a life full of shape and color. If you don’t open the door, you will live a life full of shape and color. You thought you had a choice. Your choice wanted to be the right one. When your choice grew up, it didn’t want to be on fire. It wanted to be the sky. The sky looks down at you and winks its one good eye.

Character Development

I went to bed sick convinced I’d wake up feeling sicker, but it was just the opposite. When I woke up, I was a better man and the floorboards weren’t creaking. The construction on main street had finished, though I couldn’t tell the difference between my past and its present. When I woke up better, I didn’t need to get better anymore so eventually I became worse. The people I hurt in the past, I hurt again. The lapel pin I wore to work for the cause of the week found its way off my suit jacket. My pleated khakis wrinkled in the bin. In this way, I again incentivized myself to become better. I went back to grammar school and failed every class. I wore glasses thicker than envy. I learned how to spell my own name backwards. I learned that Atlas was a man punished by having to hold up the entire world, and then I learned that a man in power never receives it as punishment. I went to bed as a miracle and woke up as a flower. Bees wanted everything to do with me and so I felt famous until winter came. When my petals fell off, I could see a dead bee in the snow. I wondered if I was a perennial or something grown from a bulb. If I was grown from a bulb, I hoped I shone brightly. When I woke up, the morning was long and terrible. Sunshine wanted a word with me, but I wanted more.

Wheeler Light (he/him) received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia and lives in Denver, CO. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Inscape, Western Humanities Review, and South Broadway Press, among other publications. He is the dad of a cat named Betty, twenty-something plants, and can kickflip on a good day. You can find his work at www.wheelerlight.net.

Something Like a Life

Dana Chiueh — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:25:00 -0400

In the middle of the room is a big hole you and I have been working smooth.

We put things in the hole to see how they interact with each other.

Dana Chiueh (b. 2001) is calling on you to support the liberation of the Palestinian people. She lives in Minneapolis, where she is a beginner at knowing things and advanced at thinking.

Three wishes and a secret

Lauren Kardos — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

That I’ll recognize you in the coffee shop after all these years, that you’ll see my long scraggly mop and pierced nose as the bell chimes over the door knowing it’s me, and you’ll stand from the loveseat and open your arms. That we’ll refill our mugs until our fingers jitter, our hearts race, until the baristas side-eye us near closing, two women on the wrong side of forty with Cheshire cat smiles and laughing to tears, saying remember when so-and-so jumped the bonfire with her vaulting pole, saying I hear he runs the bank downtown now. That you’ll ask me to dinner because it’s been too long and maybe, if I’m up to it, we can split a cheesecake for dessert and play what was once our favorite game, the one you always said was better than truth or dare, the one that revealed a week before graduation that I was moving away, packed and ticket in-hand for a city across the country, that I wasn’t bringing you. That behind all these three wishes is me searching for the courage to tell you I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Lauren Kardos writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in Western Pennsylvania. Milk Candy Review, Flash Fiction Online, Lost Balloon, and Best Microfiction 2022 are just a few of the fine publications that feature her words. She thinks you should read this piece from the HAD archives.

In the Mornings We All Meet at the Well Well

Sarah Carson — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

Well, well, someone says.

Well, well, well, someone else replies.

Well, well, well, well, here we are, someone’s dad inevitably continues.

It goes like this for hours.

We forget we came here alone with our empty buckets. We forget that we came here hoping to be healed.

Sarah Carson's writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Slowdown, Electric Literature, HAD, and elsewhere. You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com

Where Everybody Knows How You Died

Anna Vangala Jones — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

I like to ghost watch as I nurse my scotch. It's funny, scotch made me cough and sputter when I was a person but the burn is nice now—the warmth makes you feel alive. The bar is crowded tonight. Hit & Run Victim is arm wrestling Bungee Jump Splat (he tried to be known as Thrill Seeker but we were all too hung up on the splat.) Choked on a Chicken Wing While Living Alone is sitting at the piano, hands hovering over the keys but not touching them. Leaned Too Far Over the Yellow Line to See if the L Train Was Coming & Fell Onto the Tracks at the Exact Wrong Moment is dancing by herself, swaying to the music Choked on a Chicken Wing isn't playing. Fell Asleep & Didn’t Wake Up asks me if he can bum a cig so I go join him for a smoke. He knows I'm Abducted, Buried in the Woods, & Never Found but is polite enough to pretend he thinks I'm Lung Cancer. He asks if I ever miss it. Life, I'm assuming. I don't answer. Me neither, he says. We cheers with our cigarettes and look up at the night sky as mist floats through the moonlight.

Anna Vangala Jones is the author of the short story collection Turmeric & Sugar (Thirty West, 2021). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, Craft Literary, Short Story Long, Rejection Letters, and Fractured Lit, among others. Her stories have been selected for the 2026 Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions and Longform Fiction’s Best of 2018. Find her online at annavangalajones.com and @anniejowrites. She recommends reading “Poem in Which I Practice Optimism” by Rachel Beachy in the archives.

If They, Would You?

Jackie Hedeman — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

If the book I’ve been eyeing is unexploded ordnance, and if Peter and I are doing tequila shots at Flaming Saddles, and if Kaylee from work tells me that my openness makes her feel safe, and if I remember watching Almodóvar that Easter with Bob O, and if I’m working the golf fundraiser in rainbow nails, and if the gay cousins outnumber the straight ones, and if everyone in Ptown is singing “Dancing on My Own,” and if Molly is holding my hand, saying my name when I’m not there, kissing me, I know. It detonates.

Jackie Hedeman is a queer Midwesterner. Her work has appeared in Foglifter, Fugue, Electric Literature, The Offing, and elsewhere. With Molly Olguín, she is the co-creator of The Pasithea Powder, an audio drama. Find her at www.jacquelinhedeman.com

Texas

Catherine Weiss — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

We moved in February, left all the cars parked along on E 11th street, lumps under Manhattan snow. Rented a McMansion in the ‘burbs, filling the carpeted bedrooms up with unauthorized subletting roommates. Jake joined a band, which played covers of John Mayer songs and Wagon Wheel at bars in Austin and Shreveport. Jake, who played cello and didn’t love me anymore. None of us had jobs. I volunteered in the back office of the humane society where I was chastised for investigating petty cash thievery of another volunteer. I adopted a fluffy white puppy. I didn’t write a screenplay. By June it was too hot to walk barefoot on pavement. I tried to be good. I tried so hard to make it work. Before Texas, I didn’t know dogs could scream.

Catherine Weiss is a poet and artist living in Western Massachusetts. Their poetry has been published in BOMB, Sixth Finch, Tinderbox, DIAGRAM, Up the Staircase, Fugue, and Taco Bell Quarterly. Catherine is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Big Money Porno Mommy, from Game Over Books in 2025. More at catherineweiss.com.

Two Boys

Pam Avoledo — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

Two boys run through the backyard, climbing over the steel fence, their hands on the rusted beam, the clang bruising their knees. The first one inside gets a prize.

Two boys run on the sidewalk, near the high school, sweating through their tank tops and shorts, trying to be All-American. One more race to graduation. One more letter to get out of this narrow town.

Two boys run on the subway platform, up the stairs and onto the street. They only know each other here. They’ve learned the code words. They have their tickets. Two boys go underground.

Pam Avoledo’s work can be found at pamavoledo.com.

Blink and you’ll miss it

Michael Pershan — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

But he watched the whole thing.

Michael Pershan lives in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife and three beautiful kids and some beautiful books and a recently purchased bag of cashews.

A Poem from the Perspective of the Carolina Wren Who Just Left My Window, and Had Been Making Alarm Calls Directly at Me for like Five Straight Minutes While I Lay Down on The Floor

Jonathan Freeman — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

A Poem from the Perspective of the Carolina Wren Who Just Left My Window, and Had Been Making Alarm Calls Directly at Me for like Five Straight Minutes While I Lay Down on The Floor

yeah

that’s right

eat dirt, guy

get outta here, you

sad nerd

I hate

you

A Poem from the Perspective of the Carolina Wren Who Just Left My Window, and Had Been Making Alarm Calls Directly at Me for like Five Straight Minutes While I Lay Down on The Floor; Innocent Version

hey

what

you

hey

hey you

hey everybody

everybody else

everybody just

be careful

out here

III

A Poem from the Perspective of the Carolina Wren Who Just Left My Window, and Had Been Making Alarm Calls Directly at Me for like Five Straight Minutes While I Lay Down on The Floor; Abridged Version

there’s a problem

I see you

Jonathan Freeman (he/them) is sort of like a muskrat. He currently lives in Atlanta, but soon won’t. (Not dying; just moving to Michigan)

Ways To Go

Matthew Vollmer — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

Zuexius, a Greek painter, died of laughter. The Bluebeard of Gambais was killed by guillotine. Joseph Haydn, the famous classical musician, died after a long illness but his head was stolen by two men who bribed his gravedigger and has not since been found. William Wallace—a Scottish knight who lived in the 13^th century—was hanged, drawn and quartered. However tantalizing it may be to imagine, no evidence exists of an Iron Maiden ever having been put to actual use. William Holden, handsome actor and once one of the biggest box office attractions of the 1950s, slipped on a rug, hit his head on a bedside table, and bled to death. The last words of Gary Mark Gilmore, who demanded the death sentence be implemented to punish him for the two murders he’d committed, was executed by firing squad, was “Let’s do it.” Andrea Meyer, German metal musician, died of wounds inflicted by bow and arrow. Jose Rey Escobedo, about whom little is known, died in quicksand. Grace Olive Whiley, who claimed to have tamed 300 venomous snakes, died after an Indian cobra bit her while she posed for a photographer. Gee Jon, who was a member of a Chinese gang, died of lethal gas. Boz, king of the Antes, was crucified with 70 of his nobles. In southeast Asia, elephants were employed to crush the bodies of criminals. Because he refused to grant the Japanese permission to use the convent of the Holy Spirit Sisters as a brothel, William Finneman was bound and thrown overboard off the coast of Batangas City. Soraya Manuetcheri, a 35-year-old Iranian, was stoned after unconfirmed accusations of adultery. Buster Edwards, who owned a flower shop and was a member of the gang who committed the Great Train Robbery, died of hanging. Zelda Fitzgerald died in Asheville, North Carolina, when the hospital where she was staying caught fire. The body of Peter Martinez, otherwise known as “Petey Crack,” washed up on a New York City beach with his feet encased in concrete and his head wrapped in duct tape. For the attempted murder of Henry VIII, Richard Rouse, who had laced porridge with poisoned yeast, was chained and dipped in boiling water until he died. On 9.11.19, ten years after having been diagnosed with dementia, my mother woke up happy for the first time in a long time, and then passed away. Three weeks later, my otherwise healthy grandmother, only days shy of her 101st birthday, fell out of her wheelchair, fractured some bones in her spine, and died the next day. I suspect I too will die, and as fantastic as it sounds, so will you, and in a way, because time is not real, at least according to physics, we already have, and like the majority of the 107 billion people who have gone before us, we won’t know why or how, and only the ones we leave behind will tell the stories of how we left

Matthew Vollmer is the author of six books, most recently All of Us Together in the End. He teaches at Virginia Tech and is working on a novel.

Eldest Daughter Seeks Someone To Lie To her Mother.

Shweta Katiyar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

Can you call my mother? Can you lie to her? I would do it myself but she knows me inside out—she could have been a detective in another life, the way she used to catch my lies (sometimes still does) when I was younger. I hated it. I could never understand how she did it. I hated how she saw through me. I told her I scored an A+ but she did not buy it for one second. I told her I liked coming back home. I told her I was not jealous of my brother. I told her I will take care of her husband, my father, after she died—she did not believe me.

Can you call my mother? Can you lie to her? I cannot lie to her anymore. I am not an actor. She will catch the insincerity in my voice (I think!)—I am not supposed to miss her, I am thirty-three, I have a home, a mortgage, a dog, a husband, a vacuum cleaner, a PHD—I am not supposed to miss her.

Can you call my mother? Can you tell her I need her? She won’t believe me. I am not sure why. I do not understand where I went wrong? When I chose my own husband? When I chose my major? When I chose to live in sin? When I left her womb? When my brother was born? I sift though the sands of time wishing to upend everything, and to start from the beginning.

Can you call my mother? Can you tell her I need her?

But I don’t think she will believe you.

Shweta Katiyar is a baker currently based in Mumbai, India. She recently began writing and submitting fiction. When she is not spending time with her green-cheeked conure, Zeus, she practices Kathak and obsesses over cheese. She can be found on Bluesky.

Love Is Blind S9E10

FM Stringer — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

So She’s mad because He drinks too much

well not just that he drinks too much but

that he lies about it. When she asked

what happened to the tequila in the fridge

he stood there looking for it

like he didn’t know exactly where it went.

This is how Haley catches me up

anyway since I dozed off watching.

We’re at either end of the couch

we bought together years ago. It’s linen

or is it a mossy corduroy. Hang on a second

I say rubbing my eyes but my wife she’s

gone has been replaced

by the view of the woods outside

the house that I grew up in

from the upstairs bedroom window.

Something moves or there is

the suggestion of something moving

behind the white oaks. Where’ve you been

my mother asks through the mouth

of the labrador drooling on my comforter.

I was in the night evading capture.

I was on the lam I was accused they

said I vandalized the church marquee

rearranged the letters to read

HELL AIN’T REAL

which doesn’t sound like me

because I know otherwise. A hand

I recognize as mine grips a doorhandle

and pops a refrigerator open. I reach

inside and grip the doorhandle pop the

gunmetal fridge door open. I reach inside

for the bottle in the fridge pop

empty. It was here. The bottle in

the fridge I reach for

gone only doorhandles more

doorhandles more gun-

metal fridge doors opening. More bright white

rooms empty

bright and empty rooms. (Pop.) An engine

turns over and a bowling ball return

ejects a summer squash.

Smooth and oblong and the half

green of an oxidizing cup. HEY

it says to me (the squash does). Are you

listening? Have you heard a single thing I said?

FM Stringer’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, North American Review, EPOCH, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and dogs, but you can find him on IG @fmstringer or at fmstringer.com.

I Am Being Very Normal About the Fact That the Pigeon Outside My Window Has Been Looking at Me for Three Weeks and I Think He Knows Something

Anisha Arvind — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

The pigeon is back and I have named him Gerald which my therapist says is a form of attachment and I said yes that is correct I am attached to Gerald he has information. He has the look of someone who has been sent. I have started leaving bread on the sill not as an offering exactly but as a gesture of good faith, a way of saying I am open to whatever this is, I am a reasonable person who is willing to hear Gerald out. My roommate says he is just a pigeon. My roommate has not looked into his eyes. I have looked into his eyes and I will tell you that there is something there that predates me, that predates this building, that predates probably the concept of rent, and he is very calm about it, Gerald, he is not in any hurry, he has all the time that pigeons have which I am beginning to suspect is a different kind of time than the time I have, slower and older and not organized around the things I have organized my time around, the meetings, the laundry, the texts I am composing and deleting, the thing I almost said to you last month that is still living in my chest like a small bird, actually, like something with feathers that keeps moving around and won't land.

Anisha Arvind is a writer and editor from Seattle, Washington. A 34-time Scholastic Art & Writing Awards recipient, she has also been recognized by Hollins University and won Polyphony Lit's Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Contest Award. She is the co-founder of Temple Literary Magazine, a youth-led publication dedicated to amplifying AAPI voices.

Errands

Daniella Sinder — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

To lie in the mud first in childhood and later, eternally

To watch a former love grow old from behind a dog's Instagram account

To buy the bottle for its label and laugh at the first sip

To divorce your pain from your personality and find that nothing remains

To speak kindly to yourself (but only out of spite)

To manage expectations and still say, I love you

To envision a future held by arms merely reaching for the next morning

To fear the intuition you once fought to understand

To learn new terminology for your experiences and wish the world had fewer words

To fall asleep entwined and yearn for infinite language

Daniella Sinder (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based poet, essayist, and yearner.

Missed Connections

Theo Nguyen — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

Theo Nguyen is a video game archivist, librarian, and unaspiring poet. His work appears on Waffle House receipts and the occasional sticky note. He begrudgingly lives in Atlanta.