When I first read Allison Funk’s poem, it lingered with me for days—not just because of her fiery last line, but also this concept or, rather, this fact that sometimes children’s physical cells can remain with a mother forever.
Congratulations to these four pieces we chose to nominate for the Best Small Fictions anthology, which seeks “flash and micro fiction, haibun stories and prose poems published in 2019”:
Nancy Chen Long’s poem “Reverberation” fights back against silence and erasure. The poem’s title points toward the resonance of sound, and this is exactly what Chen Long’s words do: even in stillness the music of her language ripples across the page.
At home working on a client’s website—an archive of Yiddish memories—I look up in time to see a yellow poplar topple.Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day.The hummingbirds have arrived like they do every April,flitting toward the lower branch of a weeping willowto the only one of five feeders that remains.Year after year, even their offspring remember. …
Through an explosion of the idiom “empty nest” and a vocabulary that swings from tender to profane, Stuber asks: how can a mother survive knowing what the daughter must survive?
