Category: Bad Survivalist

Two Poems for Bad Survival by Jiji Lubis

Reluctant superhero eats brains for supper I sometimes butter them with diesel / and fry them at one-hundred-eighty-degree heat / for three hundred sixty seconds. / Or boil them in freezing rose water, / pricking them till they become mushy / as I wait for the water to boil. // Of course they seek to…
Bad Survivalist: “And Our Flag Was Still There,” a short comic by Jesse Bradley-Amore

Jesse Bradley-Amore is a writer, cartoonist, and (occasional) improviser based out of Winter Park, Florida. His stories have been featured on RISK! and The Volume Knob. His comics have been published in Oyez Review and Action, Spectacle. Under his J. Bradley pen name, he’s the author of Teenage Wasteland: An American Love Story and has fiction in Short Edition dispensers. He’s…
Bad Survivalist Poem by Frances Mac: “What we lost”

was our car and supplies for a Girl Scoutsurvival—protein bars, extra underwear, a beliefin fossil fuels. It was not like the movies.You cannot whisper or roundhouse kickan entrance to test for danger. They don’t waituntil you’ve tiptoed inside to take a jugular.We scattered like buckshot when the firstscream sliced the air like a mandolin. You…
Poetry: Three Bad Survivors by Kristin Lueke

the idiot imagines the last year as her last on earth (at last) i watched my dog disintegrate, drank more water than god.thought about divorce but didn’t. get divorced i mean. imaginedwhat it would be like to move a sofa. i didn’t move a sofa.didn’t do a single puzzle i didn’t want to do. i…
Three Life Sentences for Bad Survival: Original Poetry by Susan Lewis

From Each her deadlift limitation, to each her accordion need. Wandering towards wonder at the old one-two as if physics could say if not save the day, steal if not seal the deal, stave if not stow the dole drilled from the spoils of this ever spill. Weep if you think worse of anyone than…
Short Story for Bad Survivalist: “Clashing Perspectives” by Kim Farleigh

Waiting on the top of a hill to catch a bus to Agra, we saw vehicles below fleeing from traffic lights. Then: deceleration, swerving, horns bleating, collisions narrowly avoided, vehicles creeping around something on the road fifty meters from the lights. Seconds later, another metal spine started accumulating behind the lights. Unsuspecting vertebrae, stretching on…
Bad Survivalist Short Story: “Hexed” by Chelsea Catherine

I sprinkle a hex over six dead mice and bury them under the oak behind my rental. “Sick, sick,” I say, sprinkling bay leaves over the mounds. “Remember what congestion tastes like.” Normally, I would never, but the townspeople here have done me dirty for too long—my coworkers, neighbors, even people at the supermarket. Markle…
Five Poems by Bad Survivalist Elizabeth Zuba

On Water and Habitats Oceans are flowers. I am made fertile in the land of my affliction. Any terrestrial salamander halfway through being an egg will swim away and be aquatic forever if you crack it open and drop it in water, or at least that’s how it was the last time I tried it!…
Poetry for Bad Survivalist: “Three Weeks Post-op with a Lightning Bug” by Gary McDowell

Friends and family keep checking in. Keep her safe, they say. Keep her comfortable, they say. Tell her we love her, they say. And you too. Early this morning, maybe 6:30, I stand in the kitchen making her breakfast, the dogs at my side—they herd me, sun-up to sun-down, are never more than a body-length…