Manzanita
that night we were on the beach in Oregon and our friend disappeared just vanished into the night or the ocean or something else and after a while we got worried and went looking and ran up the beach calling his name and nothing just the waves and the night sky and a sense that this would be one of our last moments together a sense of chapters and damp and melancholy and then a second later a man emerging from the surf and sprinting right at us like a Greek god reborn naked and screaming for beer
method
a poem about the writing bros lifting weights on twitter and let me just say I worry about their wrists and no it’s not the masturbation it’s when those weights flip over and it slaps the back of their arms and I just have this mental image of bones snapping like twigs like mine would and then how would they write I think they would have to hit the keys with their nose and that would slow down their output they’d have to do more with fewer words although then again maybe that’d be a good lesson for us all
nevada
when they ask you how you are and your shoulders move but not your face never your face even when there is blood even when you have broken a bone even when you are in the old house and you are alone you have learned to stay quiet to stay unseen to stay flat and featureless like the high desert where you grew up, that palette of grey and green, a world of sagebrush and thin air and open sky and occasionally, if you’re lucky, the faint companionship of something on the horizon, something looking back, something like deer or antelope, something that also lives and dies without expression
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James Lindley is a human person writing things on the Internet. He is currently working on a sequel to Beowulf – it’s about a guy that has a tough time doing the dishes but ugh he gets around to them eventually. You can see his recent work on Twitter at DuendeonFuego (@duendeenf) and in Whiptail: A Journal of the Single-Line Poem.
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image: Andrea Damic lives in Sydney, Australia. She has been published in 50-Word Stories, Friday Flash Fiction, Microfiction Monday Magazine and Paragraph Planet with her photographs occasionally featuring in Rejection Letters. Recently one of her photographs got included in the Fusion Art’s 4th Annual Lines, Shapes and Objects Exhibition (July 2022). You can find her on Twitter @DamicAndrea or Facebook. One day she hopes to finish and publish her novel.
Rejection Letters 