Category: Bad Survivalist

Two New Pieces by Vi Khi Nao

MY SKIN Because I dream of you as skin and door …I know you have been sublime beforeAs engorgedAs distorted as my view of the world If I could surrender your nameYour lipsYour invasionTowards more heroic hoursI would be asking you to slingYour kiss forward as if toKill what isn’t saliva, which isn’t the fiberglass…
Flash Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Slow Burn” by Kristina Ten

The explorer wakes up on a strange planet with no memory of how she got there, clawing at the black ground beneath her, gulping against the smoke-filled air. It wouldn’t be the first time, this getting to and forgetting. She scans her surroundings: no ship, wrecked or otherwise; no rations or equipment to help with…
Poetry for Bad Survivalist: “The Bars, the Anthem” by Imran Boe Khan

Down here, spider blue’s sour candy singsong plays out like confession. On my walk home, civilians cleanse into pulpits, brining compassion as they watch me hammer euphoria into gallows. Some reach for cash, others call the cops and when the sirens come, they rise like it’s the national anthem, I’m on one knee till the…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Warehouse” by Chase Burke

Amazon’s warehouses are warehouses of commerce. Every item an American might desire, shelved and organized from floor to ceiling over acres of glazed concrete. Likewise Walmart—containing multitudes, now minus the hyphen. Likewise every mall of America. Ditto the dumpster. If trash is a record of consumption then it is also a record of purchasing power.…
Bad Survivalist Fiction: “Abandonment Issue” by Jason Hardung

Up in the corner, above my bed, a spider floats in the air. I’ve been watching it for an hour now. It must be magic, the way it hovers like that. Like everything else it’s reminding me of Krista. The first day she arrived in the Amazon she emailed me a video of a huge…
Settlers, a poetry collection by F. Daniel Rzicznek, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

In his latest collection, F. Daniel Rzicznek leads readers through a world ripe with abandonment and haunted by fragments of a past that are as mysterious as they are important, at least within the attempt to make meaning in the face of loss and desolation. Make no mistake, Settlers is full of life: fathers, dogs,…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Jeanie Loves Chaos” by Christopher S. Bell

We’d run out of things to blame. Our country, its leader, the economy, cults and crusaders, past lives corrupting an otherwise squeaky-clean soul, or it could’ve just been the Texas sun melting us into the interior of that tan sedan. We’d passed redneck stand-offs, skeletons in cowboy hats waiting for the sand to cover parts…
Lyric Essay for Bad Survivalist: “Who Killed the Nyan Cat?” by Jill M. Talbot

I stare at the barbed wire at the top of the fence. All I want to do is to go home. Home is more of a concept than a place. I wonder who invented fences that kill. Nazis? They say that the best way to survive real tragedy is to do so as if within…
Bad Survivalist Poetry: “The world in which I open up google earth and my dead mother is feeding the horses.” by Megan Merchant

I imagined it differently. The paddock flooded.The donkey and sheep a fence over, cuddledunder the mare. I want to pull up and showher my new haircut so she can make that face,then make the word okay sound like a derailment.I want to tell her about the fire and how ourneighbor scrambled the yard gathering her…