Category: Bad Survivalist

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…
“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…