Dishsoap Quarterly

@dishsoapquart.bsky.social

1489 Followers 314 Following

Uncool & nerdy lit mag that's way too into dish-cleaning products. New piece every Tuesday. Subs always open! https://dishsoap-quarterly.com 🫧

Juno by Trinity Richardson: February was concrete in its application; October was more theoretical. The cashier tells me kittens shouldn’t have cow’s milk. The bottle splatters against the pavement in a way that reminds me I don’t know what I’m doing. I keep her cradled to my chest hoping if she can hear my heartbeat she’ll know what I can’t say. The years wash over me—what feels like one is actually three. This is a confession. The powerline hums and I imagine an angel running through the wires. I imagine taking the train to work. I am afraid I will never know what has become of you. Or worse, what will become of us. I am lonely in a way I’ve never been, because this time there is no reason for it. I go to work. I pick up groceries. I make cheesecake and let her have a small bite. It’s not that good, but it keeps me busy and I like the way the cream tastes before I bake it. She likes it. She is fixated on fire and sometimes I forget to put a candle out of reach and she singes her fur. I always feel guilty. This is a confession.
Nick van Osdol Things I thought about while driving across the country What goes on in McDermitt, Nevada. What goes on in Unadilla, Nebraska. What it’d be like to drink four beers in Montezuma, Iowa (I only had two). What it’s like to live in Palestine, Tennessee. You know, considering. What Cape Disappointment in Oregon is like (foggy). Whether New Moscow, Ohio, harbors a statistically significant number of latent communist sympathizers. Who named it that. How many European cities with a population above 50,000 have a namesake somewhere in the United States. How many, beyond, say, Paris, Texas, the modal American could name off the top of their head. Here’s another: Prague. There’s actually a Prague in both Oklahoma and Nebraska. The more you know. Whether the thought of giving a Turkish hair transplant to a bald eagle has ever occurred to anyone but me. Whether the medium-sized creature I saw scampering over ice and snow near Jeffersonville, Indiana, was a woodchuck or some other similar species. Why hawks so often sit on telephone wires or electrical distribution equipment near roadways. What percentage of Americans know that a prairie is a scientific term for an ecosystem, not just some other amorphous, ambiguous thing. Whether there are personal injury lawyers who write breathtaking poetry. Why there aren’t billboards adorned with poetry. What it would cost to adorn a billboard in a random, out of the way place with a poem of my own. Which of my poems I’d put on it, and why. Whether anyone would stop to take a photograph of it. How many road fatalities there are on different states’ highways every year (in Nebraska, in 2024, there were 252, as reported by a sign cautioning drivers to drive safely and wear a seat belt). Whether and when we, as a society, will look back in abject horror and astonishment at the level of senseless vehicular violence we once acquiesced to.
Jack B. Bedell Slow It Down somehow. That's what I keep telling myself. And then the sky burls all pink along the horizon, then purple, then deep blue to black, and a nighthawk chases mayflies across open space, and breath after breath after breath just escapes into sky.
The generator's name is Mike. I named it this when I was six because it was loud and it came on at night and it smelled like something working hard, which seemed like a Mike kind of thing. My father thought the name was funny and then forgot he thought it was funny and started calling it Mike too, and then my mother started calling it Mike, and now when NEPA takes the light — which is always, which is every day, which is the basic grammar of existence in this country — someone shouts Mike! from wherever they are in the house and my uncle who is actually named Mike no longer flinches because he has learned that the house has two of him and one of him requires petrol. Mike the generator is twenty-seven years old. I have friends who are younger than Mike the generator. Mike has survived three house moves, two floods, a thunderstorm that bent the zinc roof of the outdoor shed at a forty-five degree angle, and my father's periodic conviction that he could fix Mike himself, which always ends the same way: my father crouched over Mike's open body with a wrench and a look of deep personal betrayal, and then the mechanic from down the road arriving on his okada and fixing it in eight minutes flat for five hundred naira. The mechanic is also named Mike. We pay him in cash and sometimes in fried plantain and he has never once commented on the coincidence. What I am trying to tell you is something about reliability. About the way that in the absence of reliable things, the things that do work become sacred. Mike the generator is sacred. We do not speak harshly in Mike's presence. We do not run Mike dry. We check Mike's oil with the seriousness of a man checking his own pulse. When Mike coughs — and Mike coughs sometimes, a low diesel cough that means the petrol is getting low or the air filter needs cleaning — there is a quality of attention in the house that I have never felt in any other context. Everyone listens. No one moves.
Jeffrey Heath Still Life With Lithium and Light This morning, the honey caught in the jar’s rim glows from within, a cathedral window rendered in clover and glass. I watch it tremble when I reach past, hand not quite steady. No grand lurch, just the quiet rehearsal of what I might become by noon. There are days I am a house with all the lights on, radiant, overdrawn. The mirror won’t meet my eyes.