Category: Bad Survivalist

Bad Survivalist: Five Plane Crashes by Chance Dibben

The Disappeared The airliner is not at the bottom of the ocean. Nor is it blown to bits over a 1000-mile radius of uninhabited water. No one’s dead. Hostage situation perhaps, the airliner flown to a dark forest, stored for a ransom that never comes. Maybe the passengers are contented. Maybe they will reappear in…
Lee Patterson: Two Essay Poems for Bad Survivalist

an essay about funerals I want to set a car on fire, set guns on fire, set love on fire—grow skin so crimson we call it fire. I want to grow a more giving heart, set it on fire, watch what crumbles crumble. trumpets blare against the wall. a temple falls, a medicine cabinet cracks…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Unrecorded Existence” by Sebastian Castillo

“It’s when you gallop that your parasites are most alive.”—Henri Michaux I used to be a poet of great fame and intellect, but now I’m a dairy farmer. The circumstances under which I came to this station are not particularly unusual. Like many poets, I grew tired of the attention and accolades. I couldn’t…
“After the Animals,” a short comic for Bad Survivalist by Nick Francis Potter

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Nick Francis Potter is the author of New Animals (Subito Press). His work has recently been published in 3:AM Magazine, Quarterly West, Big Other, Typo Magazine, The Offing, and Entropy. He teaches writing and theory in the digital storytelling program at the University of Missouri.
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “The Woodcutter” by Mike Itaya

In the medieval woods of 1307, a gentle woodcutter and a spinsterly-type lived in a pristine cottage and shared a lonely life together, so lonely that in a moment of fraught miscalculation, the couple agreed to board Trina, a terrible person from Pascagoula, Mississippi. Trina had a chainsaw tattooed above her bottom, and used “blow…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Karen” by Eleanor Levine

She speaks thirty seconds, a mere thirty seconds, after I ignore her for five years, and then I’m back. I’m always back. * I am like the trappers in Werner Herzog’s movie Happy People—the trackers of the Siberian Taiga—happy in their solitary hunting, but I’m not solitary. * Karen was my girlfriend for six months,…
Bad Survivalist: “Up next,” a visual story hybrid by N.D. Brown

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. _____________________________________ 1. The following are real YouTube videos generated from the search, “Protect My Family.” 2. Times Watched: 3 3. Times Watched: 6 4. Times Watched: 2 5. Times Watched: 4 6. Times Watched: 8 7. Times Watched: 1 8. Times Watched: 1/2 9. Times Watched: 3/4…
“When It Was Over,” a Bad Survivalist poem by Tyler Dillow

It was like coffee spilling on my shoes. The insects: beetles, ants, mosquitos. You—repeating—and flies on my feet, in my ears, on my feet. It was the buzzing that filled me. Mayflies, the color of your skin. Caterpillars, the color of your skin. Their eyes, the color of your skin. My name—you kept saying it—over…
Five Antarctica Poems by Dennis James Sweeney

70°5’S 65°40′E In the Antarctic Circle, our main concern is self-husbandry. Cutting dark chops from the dark sky. Identifying lifelong manacles. Feeling for the key. Suspending paper katydids from the ceiling at just the right angle: the difference between Hank’s breath and the hot, light breeze of the radiator. They trigger different flights. At times…