October 2026 | nonfiction
Nuns & Spoons
We hold our cards in front of our mouths to hide the smiles. Draw, check your hand, discard. Keep an eye on the line of spoons. Tonight I’m the only kid still awake, surrounded by my mom, aunties, grandma, and my great-aunt, who is a Catholic nun. I sit tall among the women seated around the dessert table as we pass cards and scrutinize each other for any motions.
Then an auntie pulls a winning hand, and the stealth begins. She reaches out and slowly slides a spoon into her lap. Waits for others to notice. I see it happening, manage to grab another spoon. Others follow. My mom and the nun are the last to notice. And only one spoon left.
They reach at the same time, hands locking on either end of the spoon. “I got it! “No, I’ve got it!” They collapse into giggles but their grips stay strong. I’m entranced, watching. I can’t believe the women are acting like this. My mom, wrestling over a spoon with Sister Sharon Anne.
They are out of their chairs now, standing, gripping the spoon. “You’re a nun!” my mom exclaims as she tries to twist the spoon away and instead falls to the ground. “What about generosity of spirit? Turning the other cheek?” My great-aunt follows her to the floor. “Not….during….Spoons!” she responds, and with a final twist, wrenches the spoon free.
How to stay calm on the plane
When the message comes to you, pinging your phone as you watch Dune on the seatback screen thousands of miles up in the air, your mind a galaxy away as your body flies through space. It surprises you – who knew you could get texts up here, somewhere above the Atlantic. The zeros and ones convert to a most unwelcome message that detonates in your aisle seat: your neighbor, wondering about the ambulance at your house, wondering if everything is okay.
There’s a ringing in your ears you hadn’t noticed before. You can’t reach your husband at work. You can’t reach your mom, who is caring for the children. So you watch Dune. And breathe deep. You are terror-still in your seat. On screen they move across the sand in skips and slides to mimic the wind, to hide that they are humans, to fool the sand monsters underneath that would rage up and swallow them whole simply for being human, for carving out a little space for themselves on this earth.
You watch Dune. You breathe deep. You perch-cling onto the edge of your inner optimist, the one who says that your identity is probably still intact. The flight attendant comes down the aisle. Would you like peanuts or cookies? Are you now a wife or a widow? A mother or…the unspeakable? You recall that Dune was a favorite of your grandfather’s, who, when he saw it in the theater, was able to recite line for line from memory. Who, in late summer last year, passed away with library books still checked out. So don’t sweat the small stuff, you suppose. But also, people die.
You watch Dune. You breathe deep. You want to be on the other side of this, to stand in your too-white kitchen and trade stories about your week away. You don’t want to know. You must know. Outside, your spaceship speeds through the sky, but inside you barely dare to move.
Sarah Barbo
Sarah Barbo writes about family, identity, and sense of place. Her work has been published in Hippocampus, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, In a Flash, and The Ekphrastic Review, and nominated for Best Small Fictions. Find her in the Colorado mountains and at www.sarahbarbo.com.
October 2026 | poetry
The Haunting of Winter People
Patches of flattened brown grass
like those that would peek
through snow, a mid-March
yawning into spring.
Dust motes masquerading
as silver snow trickling
from above. Dendrites
settling without shivers .
The fossilized riverbed
begging for cold fingers
to play crystalline tarantellas
down desiccated spines.
Mud caked deer prints
the echo of white snow drifts
etched with broken hearts
that mend when melted.
A stripped maple smooth
as icicles sheared and raw
under the moon’s cool
and unblinking glare.
Exhalation from an open freezer
that whispers like a long deceased love:
How can this heat be anything
but apocalypse? The answer –
A painting of a cabin in a forest
carpeted in soft white
with footprints that lead toward or away,
a lost trail, invisible
under sun and summer sweat
that never ceases, while winter
becomes an artifact
in the amber of memory.
Permafrost
How did we get here?
Weighed down by the unsung
sorrys in our pockets, dragging
the hems of loved ones
like beggars, seeking
a redemption colder,
more remote than the tops
of distant mountains.
Even though permafrost
never melts, it still blooms
in summer, green blades
pearled with buds. And if
it does melt, if somehow
that ground, known
for its hardness, its inability
to change with seasons,
suddenly finds change rooted
ripening in the hard soul
of its body, carbon kept
cozy and restrained
between soiled arms, then
the silent bomb will spill
like our emptied pockets, eking
secrets into soft places, destruction
that comes like a warm pillow
across a wet mouth.
It’s the simple things that bring
us to our knees, that make us
ask how did we get here? And also
is there any way back?
Lesley Hart Gunn
Lesley Hart Gunn is the winner of the Fall 2022 F(r)iction Poetry Contest and has upcoming or previous publications in Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, Litmosphere, West Coast Review, Avalon Literary Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Phantom Drift Journal, and others. She is originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, but currently teaches college writing at Utah Valley University, where she lives with her partner, three children, and two cats.
October 2026 | poetry
An Awful Way
“Have you ever imagined what it might feel like
to pee in perpetuity on the outie bellybutton
of the first or worst person to shatter the mirror
of your heart?” would be an awful way to start
a poem, when one should really begin (why not,
you know?) with septillions of daisies in parallel
universes Big-Banged from daisies, into daisies,
all daisies, and only then turn into the love-hate of
animals with oxygen, each breath rusting us
beasts to dust. Since even the entertainment
poetry provides means you’re a bit bored with you
(as I am with me!), any tonight might become
sincerely solo, a loneliness capable of comedy
and killing. Oh, isn’t nearly every pleasure—
from apples to oranges to the comparison of any
metaphoric fruit—the most wonderfully forsaken
action on Earth and a best bet of bad bets to help
tolerate our treks to a never- or forever-ending
whatever, surely any hereafter an impossible
darkness with the strangest reflected lights?
Matt Zambito
Matt Zambito is the author of The Fantastic Congress of Oddities and two chapbooks, Guy Talk and Checks & Balances. New poems are forthcoming in Swamp Pink, Tampa Review, Cottonwood, Slipstream, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Niagara Falls, he has lived in Ohio, Idaho, Washington, and New York, where he now resides with his rescue dog, Sadie.
