Your Impossible Voice

@yourimpossiblevoice.com

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Publishing brash and velvety prose, poetry, CNF, translations, reviews, art, and more. https://linktr.ee/yivjournal

Abduction III by Jo Ann Clark First unmanned—un-aliened, make that—. First starboard-tack at the Red Planet. Scores of others encapsulated here, too. Snatched dolls, transitioning objects blink-blinking
Properly Dark By L.M. Moore My memory’s not what it should be. Not for someone my age. Sometimes I forget where I parked my truck. But that’s not even it: I’ll be looking at it, standing there in the parking lot, holding grocery bags, and not recognize it. Sometimes I repeat myself, get lost inside my own tangled sentences.
Apartment 304 by Rowan MacDonald The apartment was on the fifth floor, and the building had no lift. I barely knew where I was, had lost sense of time and place somewhere over the Pacific. I had been living on Monday for two or three days. I could barely lift my legs. And those stairs.
The Sigh of a Man By Davey Long camping in the back seat of my boyfriend’s car. he’s trying to explain engines to me: clutch piston crankshaft axle pressure explosion he creases his forehead and i am a toddler.
To Understand Light By Ricardo Bernhard When Porter sits on his favorite bench in late afternoons in March, there’s a quality to the square’s palette that takes him to the faux Eliseu Visconti painting he did while bored in his thirties.
Little White Monkeys by Manshuk Kali, translated by Slava Faybysh The woman lays the ultrasound results on her doctor’s table, to the right of the desk calendar advertising low-hormone birth control pills and next to the life-sized model of the female
Missiles Like Low Ceilings by Will Falk Missiles like low ceilings, helmet-to-helmet contact, or a ski accident. You don’t remember snow but you do remember your basement. You’ve never had a basement. You do now. You used to have children. You never had children. You don’t have children now. You’re not sure if that should make you sad or whether you’re sick of cleaning up vomit, baby shit, bits of violently vibrant coloring book confetti. But that party already ended.
Two Millimeters In By Jade Kleiner Doing her mascara, Ashley more than poked her left eye. The applicator went two millimeters in. A yellow fluid came out and Ashley gagged. Her name had become Ashley only recently.
After the Simulation Learns to Listen By David Anson Lee I have watched universes / fail their stress tests. / I have watched one succeed / by accident.
Montara By James Nulick It’s hard to tell time this close to the sea, it’s always grey and misty here, like the sun is camera-shy. I don’t wear a watch, watches remind me of old men, like Papa, but my iPhone is close.
Hot Tub Paul Hollywood By Garth Robinson Jarrett’s hot tub arrived and my heart ached. What a life of impossible good fortune, I thought. It was the same as if he had bought a one-million-dollar yacht, or a fridge that talked at you and made ice on command.
Poor Thing By Claire Salvato I’d begun practicing feeling the way I wanted to. Last night, I dreamt I was standing in front of an open landscape composed entirely of garbage:
New in Town By Alex Dodt We descended on rented birds of fire, runted gods porting power cords and lording neck pillows. We pulled the chute and touched down outside Terre Haute. We putted in on a hometown tank of gas; hoofed it halfway from damn near Milwaukee; emerged from fields, our past on hard plastic wheels. We are not tourists. We are eager to own and waiting for you
In Heaven Everything is Fine by Grant Maierhofer. It was June. He sat on the couch, bound firmly in his marriage, his fatherhood, his life. The dog sat next to him, or lay further down the couch on a small pillow.
witness to the non-arrival By Stacey C. Johnson "i. echo logic some inherit land, and others silence. I took in the riddle of loam— where the unspoken ones are buried and in the vapor rising from forgotten names,
My Priest Predicted I’d Be a Spy By Garima Chhikara "My kundali—my Hindu astrology chart—says I must not keep a weapon at home. That’s not even a thing in kundalis. I googled it, checked my sister’s too."
Slingin’ Pearl By Itto and Mekiya Outini Everything was going according to plan until Sequoya had to take a shit. “Guys,” she radioed over to Jared and Cleo in the cruiser, “it’s a code brown. Cover me.”
Excerpt from Another Place by Addy Evenson: Two months ago, a man she had never seen before promised her his life. He coaxed her behind the back shed and undid her tulle dress. “You ever think about touchin’ ‘em?” he asked. “What?” “Their bodies.”
Excerpt from Of the Lovers by Addison Zeller: There seems no limit to the night’s ability to darken. It must be that the woman let the man into the house. The woman was clothed to begin with, then she was naked. The man was naked a little after that.
Excerpt from Point of Comparison by Addison Zeller: Of the lawn, a photograph exists, dated more than a century ago. The size of the camera has reduced over time, but at the date of the photo, it was still clumsy and large, the lens still projecting from a kind of foliated snout, and the face behind it still obscured by funereal drapery.
Excerpt from Crow dreams an eerie peacefulness laced with fear by Peter Grandbois: And wakes, trembling at the emptiness of it, the vast cavities / And begs God to squeeze him, to crush out the air of protest / The wind carrying a hornet’s nest buzzing is the only response / He chews on the answer until it’s dark on both sides, / Until it cracks
Excerpt from The Robinson-Barber Thesis by Joyce Meggett: Maybe I’ll draw you. That’d be rich, right? My parents would be paying you to sit for me. We have a deal, okay? You don’t have to take your clothes off if you don’t want to, although it would be good practice for me. It’s harder than you would think to hire a nude model when you don’t have a real studio. Or maybe you’d want to wear a costume.
Excerpt from past is a flame by Karen Earle: bird-boned singer I / smoke-and-mirror you / minor-keyed to confusion/hovering ash-to-ash auras all / star-prick constellations/the broken wheel the lucky strikes / in spider-sticky spins
Excerpt from "Brother From Another" by Jaryd Porter: We were three blocks from Mom’s house, and all of the houses looked copied and pasted with different earth tones and a few objects on the driveway and porch to make them look lived in. The whole neighborhood looked like a white town, and appearances weren’t deceiving—my sister Paula and I were the blackest people on the block, and we were only half.
Excerpt from Storing Dinosaurs by Dan Weaver: A fter Carmen married Phillip I couldn’t chase her with my lizards no more since it scared Phillip and he would hide in the room and the one time it made it so that Carmen couldn’t drive Phillip to work and he was late and he didn’t want to tell his boss that Carmen was getting threatened with lizards.
Congratulations to our Best Microfiction nominees: The Abbreviated Kafka by Ryan Griffith; Ash Wednesday by Sarp Sozdinler; The Lemon Trees Don't Care You're Sexy (But I Do) by L.F. Khouri; Your Body is a Wolf by Mathieu Parsy; The Summer After Kurt Cobain Died by Ashleigh Adams
Excerpt from The End of My Sentence by Roberto Ontiveros: "At the funeral, Dot’s secret pedigree felt like a palpable fact, with all of my legitimate cousins lined up by Uncle Seth’s twenty-nine-year-old widow and even Dawn: Dawn, the one love child we all knew of. I never saw Dawn, Seth’s mid-career creation. The woman was twenty-five but looked twelve at 4’11” and had inherited from her father that juvenile glow he wore even as he succumbed to his disease. Dawn was a nurse in another county, I had heard, but of course never mentioned in the family newsletter."
Congratulations to our Best Small Fictions nominees: The Last Lipstick Factory by Dana Wall; Hotdogs by Hugh Behm-Steinberg; Anthem by Brett Biebel; A List of the Reasons Women Feel Shame by Sage Tyrtle; Of the Lovers by Addison Zeller
Excerpt from "Crow Calls From the Top of a Pine" by Peter Grandbois" With a voice made of rain drawn from the deep / grey of another Ohio winter. // You swore you would not let him in again, / but here he is threatening or apologizing, // you can no longer tell the difference."
Excerpt from “from Cityscape with Sybarites” by Israel Bonilla alongside the cover of Your Impossible Voice #33: "Guadalajara has never been for the sober. It preys upon the senses of the robust and the frail, which results in murderous apathy and in unhinged receptiveness. I needed, at the very least, a cup of coffee and a quiet table. Nevertheless, I had to gain distance. I couldn’t afford an encounter with Aparicio.”
Congratulations to our Pushcart Nominees: The Temperance of Heretics by Steve Barbaro; Leeuwenhoek’s Lens by Eric Williams; Cate’s Upstate or Fashion After the Apocalypse by Elisabeth Sheffield; Crow calls from the top of a pine by Peter Grandbois; Clotheslines by Khalil AbuSharekh; Requiem for the Golden City by Molara Wood
Excerpt from Blueberries by Edward Manzi: "Excuse my ambition, it’s lacking. / I’m not even here. Isn’t that enough? //The blueberry blossoms are freezing. / You’re not getting your blueberries this summer. // Will you even notice? / I practice and practice. // What’s the score? / Blueberries, blueberries, blueberries."
Excerpt from A Highway of Whispered Rain by Victor D Sandiego ""All the dead truckers from the pileup on the highway gathered around the afterlife elm to proclaim their retroactive innocence. We had heaven’s mist in our eyes, they said, and couldn’t see a damn thing but angels in the brake lights and rest stops rich with whiskey. Tell our mothers goodbye and tell the kids we’re sorry."
Excerpt from "We Were Just Girls" by Sarah Lynn Hurd "After dark, we grew somber, watched for shooting stars, held hands while we cried. Palms pressed together, we wept for ourselves, for our small injustices, for our parents’ divorces. We knew in that moment that we were stuck in time, frozen with slick cheeks and stained lips."
"Instead of the recorded version of Whitney Houston, I plugged in my phone and played this other lady singing 'Oh, Canada.' From Game 3 of the 1992 World Series. She belted out the first notes, and I watched the crowd laugh. Then start to freak." From Anthem by Brett Biebel
"look: we’re pushing / out onward – / fast over motorways / like opening a book / to an unchosen page. / look: people / get free – these are free / situations; we have nowhere / to go, so we go there, / and the road goes there too" Excerpt from "People in free situations." by DS Maolalai
"Ah, the dreams of glorious reconquest! The golden age: an age of perfectly consummated desecration. Yes the golden age: once the sea was properly desecrated we’d be prime to march back upon the mainland. But for months and months the stuntedness persisted whilst would-be kiddiebards were delivered by the droves unto these beachniches like so many plugs for the one true name’s enduring absence." An Excerpt from "The Temperance of Heretics" by Steve Barbaro
"He grabbed my shoulders and squeezed, then flung his arms in the air and spun around. You make me feel so alive. I faked a small laugh. The dutiful audience, I’d barely said anything through dinner, so he must have been enlivened by my uncomfortable silence. I imagined he had a map of what to say to impress a date, things that had landed him in bed before." An Excerpt from "Selected Dates (1998) by Shawna Yang Ryan
"I’m sitting on the tip of hump day, trying to count the women and the mailmen who press against the elements that betray them: fake hair, no hair, bad feet, painted toes, and thirsty skin, their eyes rolling beyond the Do-Not Enter and Back-in-15-minute signs that dangle from the thread that holds the journey close to the dim light at the end of their clumsy addictions. Veins instead of streets surge with grape soda and cheap wine kneeling into a wasted youth and a black-eyed history." Excerpted from Black Man’s Guide to Bookselling / Snap Shot #46 by Jerry Thompson
"I’d been bracing myself, in a sense all my life, for the moment when she would be fully, utterly gone. Because she’d never really been there, in a sense she’d always been leaving. And, of course, as with everything else she’d done, her leaving would not be complete. I wanted to freeze a moment in time that didn’t exist yet. That would never exist" Excerpt from The Confusion of Figure and Ground by Mary Burger
"and how do you secure radiance / so it doesn’t seep in transit, trickle // from the corners into the open hands / of another and others, / /and to even send it in the first place,/ you must have access to a source, // like a sky or a god, authorized / to gift it as easily as day, not waiting" An excerpt from Ode to Sending Light by Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad
"Remembering is odd because it’s hard to say how many there were before or after but the sound of the water falling in the blue plastic basin was like silences of memory further quietened by the rust and wrack and ruin of chain-link fences swallowing up disintegrating full-service stations mulberry swelling up through cracks in the concrete tufts of dry grass and dandelion of the tracks that crisscrossed the land..." An Excerpt from The Blue Plastic Basin by Eric T. Racher.
"‘I don’t think so. I think that’s different. Minds are,’ he searches, with his eyes, for a way to accurately summarize what minds are and finds his answer, evidently, in the parking lot of a fried chicken restaurant across the street where everything tired in him comes to rest, ‘are the instantiation of possibility and the scaffolding that buttresses all being.’ ‘I heard different?’ muses Lu." Excerpt from Tabs by Austin Adams.
"As a humble dumpling-maker and poet, am I truly one of the generation of nones vanished from the Registry, erased in the data migration? If questions are banned, how do I stop asking them? Is there more to this mysterious plague than the mossy solicitude of Marimo, the moss ball, who follows me everywhere, a roly-poly buddy of maddening, sheep-like contentment?" from Xiaolongbao, My Love by Karen An-hwei Lee
"There’s talk of a ladder or stairs, / mostly bluster—quite empty / of hope. None of us want to work— / not that hard. We scuff at loose dirt / and talk. We drop ladders and stare / at ground. Maybe plant trees. Maybe." From Report to Marianne by Mark J. Mitchell.
"When the radiance of an epiphany looks into every culpable flaw of your heart, it will not feel heroic or divine. Things long dormant within us grope for growth and all struggle to breathe. Even in winter, when the freezing interior plains are relieved by warm chinook winds, an unbroken wall of clouds still obscures and darkens the region." From An Impasse by Ian MacClayn.
"My mother never blamed anyone for our circumstances. But this house was built the way her mother-in-law, Yousra, wanted it, a fragmented memory of the home Yousra had left behind in Majdal. A collective memory compressed into a tent in a refugee camp." From Clotheslines by Khalil AbuSharekh.
"—Oyinbo people’s eyes have opened, no more European or American mugu, 419 rarely bangs, these days, went the refrain. Now Yahoo scammers were dab hands at money rituals. Even rituals involving murder, grave-robbing, and carnal knowledge of vulnerable women in ghostly places, their panties spirited away for occultic ends." From Requiem for the Golden City by Molara Wood.
"On the ice, everything held quiet, and after— / marks from knives we wore on our feet. / It takes practice, living cold. I was convinced / a partner was needed to survive it. I scuttled / blood into blue territory for later extraction. / It isn’t as if we won’t die. Poet and sister. Equinox" from Mooring by Kirsten Kaschock
"You might believe this is a dream, or a nervous hallucination brought on by the pills you swallow. You might reassure yourself with a litany of “this isn’t real, this isn’t real.” Of course, it isn’t real, you dunce. What’s real about any of this?" From My Voice Will Not Be My Own by Vincenzo della Malva
Excerpt from Kelsey Squire's review of The Confines by Anu Kandikuppa. "“Through nuanced, precise, devastating language, Kandikuppa provides readers with stories of yearning and discovery that will remain with them long after finishing.”
Excerpt from The Longest Day of the Year by Jeff Harvey "Mom and my sister went to bed, and I stayed up to watch a TV movie about a man coming out to his son. I’d read about it in the TV Guide. Dad staggered in, smelling like Jim Beam, and asked what the movie was about. When I told him the father was gay, he unplugged the TV and told me to never use language like that in his house again."
"Israel Bonilla’s debut short story collection, Sleep Decades, is a feverish example of erudite style ... exuberant without bouncing off the walls, and Bonilla throws highbrow cultivation around himself like hoops." Excerpt from Flaubert’s Heir: A Review of Sleep Decades by Israel Bonilla. Review by Hugh Blanton.
"Kafka goes on vacation. Darkness gathers at the railway station, preparing to board. It brings eyeliner, keys, a list of demands. Kafka visits all the theme parks of the moon, collecting tiny spoons." From The Abbreviated Kafka by Ryan Griffith
An excerpt from "A Fire of Her Own" by Pegah Ouji. "A fire: fed by shouts of women and their tossed Roosaris. Their hairs, naked, speckled with the pollution particles, ruffle under the remnants of the day’s last breeze. Perhaps twenty, fifty, one hundred women. More gather, shouting: ‘Women, life, freedom!’"
"I have not seen that man in a number of years. I wonder if he is still in the crawlspace of his bi-level, with the wind report in one hand and the edicts of AccuWeather in the other. All he wanted was a fair fight with the flukes of Barnegat Bay." From "Well Situated" by Angela Townsend.
"He’d hum the melody or sing nonsense syllables to replace the words. He thought his voice could chase away the spirits that haunted him, that caused his severe headaches and dark moods, but he couldn’t sing long enough or beautifully enough." From "My Father Singing" by Jeff Friedman
Quote from English Teachers by Sophia Carroll. "There was the one who always picked the same girl to be Juliet. He read for Romeo. Called her “statuesque.” Looked out at the row of bare knees under our desks and told us in Charles Dickens’s time, the sight of an ankle could drive a man crazy."
"In the stillness of my apartment, I boil water to watch something move. I like bubbles when they grow into noises I can notice like the ghost of someone’s laugh." from White Cold Winter by Willow Campbell
Quote from "I Once Was a Witch" by Joanna Ruocco. "To what or to whom is he comparing me? I corner the bed and move closer. I use my weird gaze. My right eye is perfect math, and my left eye is perfect verbal. I hold a hum in the lashes of my larynx. My teeth shine with cosmic light." Quote is next to an image of a skull and candle.