Daily Dose of Lit

We close the year with this terrific story from Carly Plank.

Close Quarters

I worked too much for too little pay, I cried for trivial reasons, and I watched people smoke more than was healthy. My clothing smelled of grease and oil on too many nights, I slept in too long on too many days, spent too many hours after work in the unkempt apartments of people I worked alongside for forty hours each week, just trying to understand each one of them. I tried to…

A Farewell. A Thank You.

This week Extract(s): Daily Dose of Lit will publish our last poem and story.

We have been floored by the amazing work we have had the supreme fortune to publish in the past four years, as well as the support from YOU. We will finish with more than 193,000 all-time views (more than 83,000 this year alone) and nearly 56,000 all-time visitors.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in this…

From Blood Oboe

Nugatory

memory itself is not welcome—a match then unlit in my pocket to want to bloom a grief and give up this feeling but grief is my own number, coming late, disremembering

Valerian

inch except not in silence I mean to be crippled if anything smeared in a dream to sleep by “breathing” in a closing logic to view your body above your body a perhaps love…

Remembering family holidays and seeing now what we didn't see then, in this story from Kirkley Mehndiratta.

Thanksgiving, 1991: Eight

​I was leaning back in my chair. Two legs of the chair were suspended in space, balancing: precarious.

My mother’s trilling voice merged, staccato, with the clinking of a glass. My father: reticent.

​I was eight. My younger siblings sat beside me—Little Eddy, 6, and Molly, 4.

​My mother and father stood up from the table. Eight—an auspicious number. Toward nine, which…

Another wonderful poem from another wonderful Extract(s) alum--Sandra Kolankiewicz.

The Nature of Nature

So I had to test it repeatedly and in various places, not content and unable to trust, yanking up the flower to make sure the roots were taking, continuously lifting the lid from the pot to ask of the rice, inquiring the obvious just to be affirmed. Still it never let me down, did not make me say a name nor demand I be confined to predetermined delineations as removed from…

Excited to feature an excerpt from Meg Johnson's fantastic new collection on the day of its release!

From The Crimes of Clara Turlington

Girly Bear

I thought I had a good idea coming on, but it was just a nap. When I woke up, I looked up a dream dictionary website on my iPhone to see what "dresses" and "playgrounds" and "parks" and "jewels" meant. I was still laying down as I dug into my unconscious. How lazy am I? It's not my fault, really. It's the technology. At least I don't have a…

Teaching and learning in this story by Jeff Burd.

State of the Union

Mrs. Jackson is sitting across the table from me. She has been concerned about her daughter’s grade in my Remedial Reading class and requested a conference to discuss what can be done about it.

She hasn’t taken her coat off, or even unbuttoned it; nor has she taken her purse off her shoulder. She clutches it across her chest to keep it closed. The zipper needs sewn back into…

Fantastic excerpt from Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories by Katie Cortese.

From Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories

Physical Imperatives of Entropy

It was early, but I was up already, getting the coffee made, pulling out eggs and cheese for breakfast when Dan woke. It wasn’t masochism, like Dan always said, just that I couldn’t sleep the way I used to anymore. Couldn’t move the way I used to. Or stand, or sit, or shower, or work, which was why I’d been home all…

How many stories will you read today that use the word "kerfulffle?" This one from John Gorman does.

Monkey Bars

It’s too damn quiet. Nothing but the kerfuffle of wind-strewn leaves, and the occasional plop of an acorn. Sometimes a squirrel scampers across my shoulders, but they’re gone before I can say, “pumpernickel”. It gets so lonely at night, and cold. Even in summer. Nobody cares enough to wrap me in a blanket. My knees have gotten rusty and there’s this awful kink in my lower back. What I…

It has been nice to publish blog alums so much recently. Here's an encore from Bruce McRae.

Smudge

The world is being drawn badly, the sun like the sun, the moon like the moon, stars likened unto other stars. Here’s a town that’s a smudge, a sea that’s smeared, hills painted with outlandish perspectives, a few stick-figures added on as an afterthought, giving us some idea of the scale, of the limited grandeur. The shape of this world is predetermined by those who would shape it. A…

Pleased to welcome Holly Day back to the blog.

How It Ends

my hands wrap around the room, tie us together with open palms filled with sharp teeth and words that keep you here. outside is nothing but streetlights and hunger sleazy bars and one-night stands I have made myself so heavy here you won’t be able to make me leave.

Holly Dayhas taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota since 2000. Her poetry has…

So pleased to have Tim Tomlinson back on the blog, this time with a story.

Shanghai

I met a well-known English poet in Shanghai. I’d gone to hear him read at an upscale international literary festival. He seemed really out of sorts, jet-lagged and culture shocked. No one knew how to drink the way English drink. That’s where I came in. I knew how to drink with all nationalities. I’m a flag of all nations drunk, one or two territories, too.

After a couple of rounds, he…

Sometimes a grapefruit is just a grapefruit. But not in this delicious poem from Charlene Taylor.

Grapefruit

I sang to you hot and hollow, a distant rhythm. My own pulsing howl at night. You flew to flush my face, beating heat between wings. My own cicada summer. You were my own sweet and sour seasonal hybrid. My own acidic forbidden grapefruit. You shed your shell – held back your peel, with juice in ripples. My own fingers sticky with sap. I gripped your skin, tough with moist tart.…

So pleased to feature a story from Erynn Porter today!

Hushed Days

The involuntary spiritual experience started when Rick wanted to introduce me to his neighbors. Trailing behind him, the first thing I notice is that it’s dark. Really dark, but the stars seem to puncture the blackness surrounding us. How can people live here? Rick is telling me how beautiful the landscape is during the day. He grins as he says they plant their own food to harvest and…