Category: Bad Survivalist

“Lux”: A Bad Survivalist Flash Fiction by April Bradley

Clarey sits on the toilet in the shine of the morning and studies the crotch of her panties. The liner she wore overnight shows a faint bit of color, a familiar blush that indicates the tail end of another pregnancy. Clarey hasn’t told her husband that she’s known about this one for fifty-nine days. He…
Bad Survivalist: “On Catfish,” a poem by Ryan Keeney

At nine, Dad taught me how to gut a catfish. Thick-skulled, even out of water they are survivors, known to flop and thrash for hours before succumbing to suffocation. If catfish could speak what kind of wretched pleas would drift from their cavernous mouths? The first step: nail the catfish to a board. The nail…
Matthew Feinstein: Two Fraternity Poems for Bad Survivalist

Portrait of Pledge Being Left in the Middle of Nowhere on Shrooms It’s Fall. The Pledge Master has me blindfoldedin his car. We are going somewhere. A place I hopethat’s not too hard for my mother to find. But I canalready feel the rumble of winding roads beneath me,and although I’m mostly blind, specks ofmoonlight…
“Lunch Break”: A Bad Survivalist Short Story by Stephanie Austin

The sky over my chosen park bench is summer and painful. Fold my hands. Block out the kids running with the little red ball. Close my eyes. Breathe. The bench shifts. Another woman, an older woman, situates herself next to me. She smells like cinnamon gum. She reaches into her coat pocket, and her elbow…
Sara Quinn Rivara: “Instructions for Surviving the End of the World,” a hybrid piece for Bad Survivalist

x The road to Mouth Cemetery is gravel, hardly a road. Runs past a falling-down yellow farmhouse, three air conditioners thrumming in the windows, a sign nailed to a dead oak: trespassers will be shot! The road slips into beech-maple woods, becomes dirt, then disappears into long grass. Over the dune, Lake Michigan sluiced the…
Bad Survivalist: “there is this instrument called a gnomon,” a poem by Ryan Rowland

—for Nicky J There is some tool called a gnomon I guessit measures shadowsSprayed by the sun I’ll tell you this now I know nothingOf tools I speak more of shadows shitYou can’t measure. Ask her for the truth theseShadows from the sun and only the oneSun strong enough to make an orchidpossible at Home…
“Bear Control”: A Short Story by Jennifer Lynn Christie for Bad Survivalist

Part I: The Beginning When I was small, I had dreams of the zoo. Putting mammoth-sized kibble in a bowl for the elephants, communicating with gorillas by hand, making sure the seal got her little fish. The painful, but necessary vaccine, the shot that might put a suffering tiger out of an agony that, even in…
“Owls in the Palms : The Uninspired Apartment : Notes from a Lost Decade (1)”: A Bad Survivalist Short Story by Reagan Wiles

The police left my iPod behind on the hillside in front of Red Lobster with my red leather journal, seven dollars and the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, which I had bought only hours before; they put me in the squad car without incident. I did not resist. In fact, I was so cooperative that I…
“On ‘Starlings, Caravans’ by Kay Sage”: An Ekphrastic Essay by Nadia Arioli (nee Wolnisty) for Bad Survivalist

Once, I broke my own heart. Listen. Miscarriage is normal, expected, considered fine. We get our hopes up. We say, Yes, yes, we can do this. Our bodies know what to do. Kay Sage is a painter with rules. I can’t quite figure them out when I’m awake, which makes sense, is right, for a…