April 2025 | nonfiction
A bird shit on my head today. It was at the bus stop. The shit is black and white. I am on my way to work and—
Drop.
I like my job. I get to teach people. I get to stand in front of a room. I get the attention. Normally, I wouldn’t get attention. Normally, I was nobody.
Drop.
Everybody is a nobody. I accept that. I still like being called “professor.” Even though I am not a full professor. I feel special. I feel like I am flying. Even if it is an illusion.
Drop.
I wish the bird shit was an illusion. I don’t have napkins. I don’t want to bother people on the bus. I don’t want to bother with the shit on my head right now.
Drop.
Birds don’t bother with shit. They shit where they want to. On the ground. On my head. It doesn’t matter. Their shit leaves them. It is far beneath them. But this shit on my head. It’s unavoidable.
Drop.
My hair is curly. The shit isn’t going to come out. It’s going to dry in there. It’s going to crust. My hair’s shape will be formed by the shit. I will literally be a shithead.
Drop.
I am used to shit in my hair. Inconveniences are a regularity for me. An email here. Oh, now seven emails here. All at once. You need to come to this faculty meeting. You didn’t grade my paper. You have one day to take this course offering. It’s in six months from now. You will barely make a living. And forget your free time.
Drop. Drop. Drop.
Maybe birds do bother with shit. It seems they are always chirping. Some must be annoying chirpers. Maybe those annoying chirpers command orders. Stand on this power line. Chirp with this frequency. Shit on that man’s head.
Drop.
I consider myself quite defiant. I know how to stand up for myself. I tell my bosses when I want more courses. Or if I have other plans. Or if I don’t like a policy.
Maybe the shit isn’t so bad. I can wash it out.
And maybe I can do more for myself. Not go for status. Go for appreciation. Make a stand. Tell them who I am. Tell them what I stand for. Even if they don’t care. I will be the one to change the world, the one who makes a difference in thought, a discreet social revolutionist, a martyr of sorts, throw my syllabus on the ground, set it on fire, even.
While slim, there is a chance that I could be a part of something bigger, create an even better life for myself while doing so, no longer be treated like a pleasant luxury, be treated like a necessity that is irreplaceable. I could be valued.
But then again, I feel like I’m valued. I just need to stick through it and—
Drop.
Christian David Loeffler
Christian David Loeffler is a fiction writer, teacher, and editor for Curious Curls Publishing. His work draws heavy inspiration from interests that span science, literature, philosophy, video games, and anime. His favorite book is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and he will not stop talking about it.
April 2025 | nonfiction
I was in the waiting room of a hospital. Someone burst through from behind the reception desk, making a loud crashing sound. He was in a blue gown, tied in the back, barefoot he ran out, not seeing me, into the street. I screamed, “That’s my son!”. On a cot, he was sedated. “Mom”, he said and sobbed open mouthed into my neck. Our crying was meteoric, messy. The two guards looked straight ahead. I sat in a chair by his side, leaning towards him, my hand in his. At 4am, I drove home alone. I felt like an egg, cracked, oozing, with no way to gather myself.
Valentine Mizrahi
It took almost 50 years for Valentine Mizrahi to allow herself to write and another ten to get published. She was recently featured in the Style Section of the Sunday New York Times and won first prize for nonfiction at one of her favorite literary journals.
January 2025 | nonfiction
Steam rises in swirls, wisps, moves like a candle snuffed out, then smoke curling. This road on a Wednesday night in the middle of Italy is dark except for the headlights that cut through the fog, barely, and the city of Macerata in the distance. I know this land. I left an entire country for it and now I have it mapped on my palm, penned out in ink, twenty years — the up and down, the hills that move, shift, medieval towns that cluster and roll to the Adriatic Sea. The soft grain, fields of sunflowers like matches lit, crimson poppies that carry the wind on June afternoons. It is a homeland perhaps, and for years now I’ve been pretending it’s mine.
But tonight the road is unrecognizable. On the drive from Ancona, where sunset strikes at 6 o’clock and you can watch ships sail into harbor, see the sky go blue, my American friend Ruth is still in the hospital, one more night and then she’ll go home to her Italian town — I am not myself. I didn’t know these years would pass so quickly. I didn’t know the waiting for home would turn to wonder, turn to this shape shifting, these fields like blankets on my own made bed. What if it’s time to get out of here, to leave this place behind, opt for Lesley Avenue, Washington Street, the Taco Bell on the corner of Arlington and 10th? What if I should have left years before, back when the maps were still open, unfolded, brand new? Would I know how to get home, if I needed to? Would I recognize myself, twenty years later, on the front porch of my city? Or will I live and die right here insead? I take one turn, then another. The radio off, silence beats as softly as a newborn heart. A cat huddles on the roadside. Power lines catch the light – a swooping pterodactyl. The night shivers, goes dead. A porcupine, pale and prickly, crosses quickly just as I start to drive by.
Jacqueline Goyette
Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in both print and online journals, including The Forge Literary Magazine, trampset, JMWW, Lost Balloon, The Citron Review, and Heimat Review. She currently lives in the town of Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.
January 2025 | nonfiction
- I was born almost dead, the cord wrapped around my throat.
- A doctor(ate) actually said the words to me: “You carry Death close.”
- Death has stood by my side, time and again, and said, “It’s not her time yet.” I’ve accepted it.
- Damaged lungs from 9/11.
- Volunteering in Iraqi Kurdistan, mere hours from Mosul. The multitude of checkpoints along the Syrian border with masked men with guns far too large, held far too lazily in one-handed grips, leaning against their shoulders, as they confiscated my passport and tried to pull me to the small, windowless building that was somehow present at every one.
- A village decimated by ISIS, and in a small city where I was the lone American naively going on early morning runs and exploring the destroyed buildings, painting over the swastikas I found with paint “borrowed” from nearby construction sites, and still Death said: “Not yet.”
- The village elders of Duhola asked me to help spread the word of their people, of the Yazidi forgotten entirely by the international community. I promised I would. I still try. But I am just one, small person.
- So, Death, what is it exactly about me that you think I have yet to do? Is there a chance, however small, that you think I might make some sort of difference in this world? What is it that’s going to happen before you gently greet me, take my hand, and tell me I can rest?
Maia Brown-Jackson
After the incredibly practical literature degree from the University of Chicago, pushcart-nominated Maia Brown-Jackson braved the myriad esoteric jobs that follow, until straying to Iraq to volunteer with survivors of ISIS genocide. Inspired with new focus, she caffeinated herself through a graduate degree in terrorism and human rights and now investigates fraud, waste, and abuse of humanitarian aid in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Also, she writes.
January 2025 | nonfiction
In the Guadalajara market, I bought a pair of straw espadrilles. When they fell apart months later, I realized the soles were made out of car tires. I fed the tops to a goat at the side of a dusty road. Years later in Friuli near Venice, I bought a pair of velvet espadrilles at the base of the Rialto Bridge. That pair lasted two months longer than the first. I recycled those at our local dump. The boys, both times, didn’t last much longer.
I live in Vermont, surrounded by giant sugar maples and white birch. I kayak nearby with a Blue Heron family and five turtles. My peonies are blooming. It’s cold today when three days earlier it was high in the nineties. I’m wearing a sweater, which I also bought overseas.
My mother always wore espadrilles all summer long. I have her last pair, long past wearing but certainly better made than the two pairs I bought overseas. Just because you’re in a sexy foreign country doesn’t mean the merchandise is sexy even if the guy selling it is. Once, in San Francisco, my sexy boyfriend bought me a gardenia to wear behind my ear. I wore it everyday until it turned brown. When I got home, on my doorstep was a large oval vase with six gardenias floating on top. That boy I lost my virginity to in high school and we’re still friends, unlike the two espadrille boyfriends.
Besides peonies, I also swoon over orange blossoms. I’ve a tall branch of mock orange that comes a close second to the orange blossom grove I rode through on horseback, also overseas, with another boyfriend. It was summer then, in a desert, which enhanced the scent to swooning even more (if you were riding the other horse you would know what I mean). I keep searching for an orange blossom perfume that smells like that evening but they’re all imitations smelling acrid and cheap. The boyfriend was never cheap. He bought me a first edition of my favorite author, Jean Giono, with a woodblock print on the cover of a man shooting a boar with red fire flaring out the muzzle of his long rifle. In the background, a burning hill is ablaze in orange flames with little figures running around, their arms in the air, mouths wide, screaming. But the book doesn’t feel like that to me, more like velvet and peonies.
There’s no way around the past unless you think you’ve owned it which is like saying you have a contract signed with blood and drawn up by the State. My past with these guys is most certainly drawn with blood, thinned out crimson in the regions of my brain. I enjoyed each and every one even if they didn’t work out in the end. There’s no end to blood, or men, or memories, or the past. An ever flowing, changing bloodstream. Impossible to tourniquet, no matter how many sutures.
Dian Parker
Dian Parker’s essays have been published in New Critique, Yolk, Amsterdam Review, 3:AM Magazine, The Rupture, Anomaly, Epiphany, Tiny Molecules, Event, among others, and nominated for a number of Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She also writes about art for the Observer, ArtNet, and other art publications. www.dianparker.com
January 2025 | nonfiction
CNN: American reality show contestant kills, eats protected bird in New Zealand
Clad in their best, their most expensive, Lululemon, Nike, P.E. Nation, Versace, or Adidas, flexing their abs on national TV, traipsing all over and screwing up the last protected wild places on this planet. A so-called reality show, and it makes a hell of a lot of money. What can they tell you about the amur leopard, the western lowland gorilla, the vaquita, the Sumatran elephant, box turtles, orang utan, the black rhino?
Blond, somewhat unkempt locks curl from under an expensive baseball cap, carefully trimmed three-day beard, blue mirror sunglasses. I HAD to Google the man: Spencer ‘Corry’ Jones, an American white water river guide.
An iconic, large, flightless bird, the weka, is famous for its ‘feisty and curious personality’. It has become virtually extinct over large tracts of the mainland because of changing climatic conditions and rising predator numbers. The predators, a species until recently unknown: the second-hand Kardashians and those who would love to be as famous and as rich. The show is called “Race to Survive” no less.
Spencer Jones said he was hungry.
Rose Mary Boehm
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and the author of two novels and eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a ‘Pushcart’ and ‘Best of Net’ nominee. The most recent poetry collections: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), Saudade (December 2022), and Life Stuff (Kelsay Books November 2023) are available on Amazon. A new MS is brewing. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
