Category: Bad Survivalist

“Out Goes the Blot,” new poetry for Bad Survivalist by David Kruger

I sit at the free clinic like a tailor stitchinga hidden nest in a jacket. After the hat wagafter the chromatichandkerchief I pukeas rainbowafter the scruff of white under-fuzzto rabbit a glove,the doves get out. I imagine my veins as birds in the rafters.I imagine my veins as after-magic,akimbo, still sparkling but unattended. Somewhere a…
Original Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “A Hunger Boy” by Blake Planty

Simon weasels his way out of every trap I set. I dirtied my paws a long time ago, getting my face right into the putrid filth of his scheming little plans. I wanted to snatch his body. A conniving genius—Simon kissed me flat on the lips—and I said absolutely nothing in his wake. I was…
Three Poems for Bad Survivalist by Clare Hogan

Going, Going It was an act of love to go for the throat, blood slipping out, making of the neck an hourglass. Then stillness. There was a dog. A precise lunge, its mouth opening to let the death out. Death sliding, with the teeth, into the slack flesh of a deer. Now that deer’s slung…
Katie Willingham: Two Poems for Bad Survivalist

What we eat in my dreams is always the forbidden: bread and more bread, a failure of imagination. We are not calling it the long emergency, but we are not not calling it that. Is this like the first silence that fell between Adam and Eve?: what needed to be named, what shook with…
Four Poems by Jessie Janeshek

A Winter Weather Event I’m home to being the worst girl on earthbinge-eating almonds but Carole Lombard is still an absurdistso I start the purple volume again.I wait for the Las Vegas plane crash/blue talkand it’s important to exerciseeven if you’ve got nothing to saylong walks in the snow/everyone knows this is nowhereyour pink hair…
Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Devil’s Hopyard” by Jennifer Makowsky

I know something bad will happen by the end of the night. Maybe it’s the trees overhanging the winding dirt road, blocking out the daylight and making it look like midnight even though it’s only four-thirty on a June afternoon. Or maybe it’s that this area is always off in some way and gives me…
“Report of the Justification Committee,” original fiction by Jona Whipple for Bad Survivalist

We could not take the polar bears. We tried, but we couldn’t do it. By then, they were mostly extinct anyway, and the specimen that survived weren’t worth the trouble. We couldn’t take the snowy egrets, but downloaded all of the poetry about them and scanned every major work of art featuring them, which we…
Bad Survivalist Poetry: “Self Portrait, Australia” by Annie Hulkower

You could bounce a quarter off the soles ofmy feet, thanks to a lengthy study in not wearingshoes, this keeps me moving across the outback.I smell like: hard muscles, desolation,am swift like a mammal. If you peeledthem back, you’d see somethingelse snaked through my plantar facea—it’s what keeps me moving. These days, it seems my…
Serialized Essay: “The Great Indoorsman, Part the Last” by Andrew Farkas

The Great Indoorsman PART THE LAST From A Philosophy of the Indoors—The Out-of-Doors vs. Outside: In Lawrence, Kansas, a Lyft driver asks me where my accent’s from, says she’s lived lots of places, says she has a good ear for accents, says that I do a good job of covering it up, but that I…