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VIEW ALL CONTENT Rousted John Grey The light apparently is unaware the weekend has begun, its bright insistence inappropriate for a Saturday morning. The shine has sent a wakeup call direct from blazing sun to the dust motes that roam about your bedroom, when all you wanted is another hour, maybe two, of deep drowning sleep. But the room's not on your side. Shadows fall into line. Walls open up their details. All this luster can't abide one ongoing lump of darkness - you. So you rub the night's accretion from your eyes, cough and sneeze, put the toxins in your breath on notice, begin to move your body into what the world has made available. Half-yawn, half breast-stroke, you plow through the hour's liquid brilliance, that weightless lake of many shades of white, to the bathroom on the far black and white tiled bank. The light took everything away from you. And now it offers replacements: a mirror, a toothbrush, a comb. Take them, it says. Take them. Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT Alley Cats John Grey Do I care that the two cats in the alley are having better sex than I am? Yes, I do care. You hear me. I really, really, do care. Of course, they bite and scratch each other in the process of mating. Either we’re lucky that way or it’s what we’re lacking. Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT To the Girl Who Found a Child Inside Her Body. Fatihah Quadri That night, your mother was lemon water, sour-voiced, she sat on the floor to talk about you with other women. Mama Jide sighed heavily and lost her breath. Mama Shade listened in soreness, her hand over her head. Mama Bayo hit her shadow over the wall in shock. Aunty Sola said that you couldn’t find your blood. They said that a man had broken into your body. We pressed our ears against the walls, our feet shaking upon the earth’s silence. Fatihah Quadri Eniola is a Nigerian page and performance poet who uses poetry as a tool for advocacy. She is a strong advocate for gender equality, human rights, and community issues. Fatihah is the winner of the inaugural Pawner's Paper Performance Poetry Prize for Peace and the 2025 Centre for Black Art and African civilization Poetry Prize, among other accolades. Her works have been published in Torch Literary Arts, The West Trade Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and more. She has a background in Law from the University of Ibadan. She tweets @fatihahquadri Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT Lessons in Iconoclastic Art John Grey Fight harmony where you will – sever closeness with a blunt saw – unzip unity and give each country in turn your very best castration – then when everyone’s running around like mad dogs or headless beavers pick out a color pattern for each and very one of them – rub those hues on canvas with both sides of your tongue Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT Monstrous Lover Wes Viola Sometimes you know they’re monsters on the way in, sometimes you only see their tail on the way out. Wes Viola is a pen name of Wes White. Wes is one of the Elder Bards of his home town of Glastonbury in England, and is a past winner for poetry at Wells Festival of Literature with his poem 'Catwoman'. You can explore more of his work at http://linktr.ee/wesviola Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT Linda Blair Ali MacLeod Something evil left my body and I thought Finally and I thought Why’d it take six shots of fireball and some bad guacamole to accomplish what the church has been after for years and I thought I could use a mint Ali MacLeod is a writer, a performer, and a creative producer of video and tabletop games. When she is not pretending to be an elf of some kind, she enjoys walking to the bookstore, walking home from the bookstore, and then later returning to the same bookstore. She studied Literary Arts and Modern Culture & Media at Brown University, and currently lives in Chicago with her spouse, their cat, and an ever-expanding collection of ceramic lighthouses. Her literary work has previously been featured in Pangyrus, DON’T SUBMIT!, and the Brown Classical Journal, among others. Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT Happiest Hour D Larissa Peters My favorite time of day is just after I put you down You: asleep—without restlessness—slow in and out breath Me: I breathe—finally alone—no interruption, no need for half-attention And my favorite time is when you wake up again You: looking at me with a wake-tired smile, like it’s been months since you’ve seen me. Me: my heart will break if I don’t pick you up instantly, so I do And I can’t help but love you more. D Larissa Peters grew up in Indonesia and has been somewhat of a nomad. After meandering around the East Coast for more than 10 years, she now resides in California. Her most recently published poems have appeared in Teach.Write, Ink Nest Poetry and a few forthcoming pieces elsewhere. Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT I Can't Sustain You Ewen Glass Rock-pool eyes, kindling in my cradle. I suspect he’s fretting when his arms spasm but it’s my chest he’s worrying. Stop-motion moves – at play or clutch – his head dips to bone, a plate. ‘I can’t sustain you, son, like you do me.’ In hope or sorrow, his long fingernails undo seams, finding no milk yet, but undoing all else in me, until I am a vessel afterall, before this moment Empty Empty Empty. Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT Skeleton Wes Viola Everywhere we go, they sit, grinning, behind all our masks. Even the masks we were born with. Grinning. Your bones grin at me. My bones grin back at you. When we’re gone, they’ll go on grinning: we’ll look like we finally GOT THE JOKE. And isn’t there some comfort in it? Knowing that I - you - we - every last one of us - will have the last laugh? Wes Viola is a pen name of Wes White. Wes is an Elder Bard of his hometown of Glastonbury, England; and now lives in London where he works in public libraries. His latest project is 'Thirteen Names for the West', a poem cycle inspired by representations of the Wicked Witch of the West in adaptations of L Frank Baum's Oz story over the last century and more. You can buy physical copies or digital downloads on a pay-what-you-want basis, and explore more of his work, at http://linktr.ee/wesviola Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT Running Nina Feinberg Running along the Red Hook piers, warm sun punches through the autumn wind to meet my face. Most of the time, it’s too hard to have a body: bones break, muscles tear, ankles turn. Everything can go wrong, and will. It’s only thanks to dogged will that I set out, headed for the piers. Two straight streets and then a turn at the park, where gusts of wind barrel hard against my body. I’m trying to make time go by, but it resists me. Time is nobody’s servant, will ignore the shrill demands my body makes. Believe me when I say the piers are long. Believe me that the wind is strong, the streets turn jagged, the cobblestones (picturesque) turn out to be unwieldy. There was a time I faced a different headwind, subject to a different will. Now as I approach the piers, in my fragile, worn-out body, I could be anybody. I push myself, count breaths, turn over steps and then I’m on the piers, and I release my grip on time. I keep going. I will or won’t get faster. The wind will do what wind does. Wooden slats reveal a body of water beneath me. Will the little waves return to brush the shore in time to meet me on the piers. What a turn to be in time along the piers. Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT Stew You Stephen Mead do the piss, the moan, that dance of elbows for eyes, nose, mouth entangling self as spaghetti sauced bossy by the boo- hoo screws put to, put to anyone as well who'd help to fend off the lunge, the lash, a rash of rebuttals further raising this temp----- boil, scald, the brooding silence of frozen ignition 'til you go, bent head flung round the chair's back, a Picasso, monstrous, of pathos humane. Resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall, https://thestephenmeadchromamuseum.weebly.com , Stephen Mead is a retiree whom, throughout all his pretty non-glamorous jobs still found time for writing poetry/essays and creating art. Occasionally he even got paid of this. Currently he is trying to sell his 40-year backlog of unsold art before he pops his cogs, https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/stephen-mead Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.

VIEW ALL CONTENT july, new york Penina Kessler i never want to know what time it is when we’re together. the days have grown limber and floppy and stretch into parts of the evening that i forgot they could touch. i press up against you in the newly declared subtropical air. outside has the texture of minestrone and every night i come home and slough off my salty, gelatinous membrane of sweat in cold water with unscented soap. i lay apple cider vinegar and dish soap traps for the fifteen fruit flies that besiege my apartment but i hate the smell of vinegar. i am perfectly unwell. every weekend it is three in the morning and we are at the white light twenty four hour diner ordering platters of overcooked eggs. your smile cuts into me, a tender knife. the city is overrun by fireflies and i am so charmed i almost forget that summer nights were never this soupy. climate change will kill the rich too, slowly and more comfortably. every conversation is about genai and i am bored. i want to talk about cooking with the oregano that snakes through the raised soil in my garden plot. i have lost track of everything that will kill me. anger calcifies, jagged and crusty. i read about florida and about genocide. every day i decide how large the life i carry with me will be. i split open cherries with my teeth and let the juice ooze everywhere. i mourn. i mourn. i mourn. everything left in the sun for too long will either harden, or soften. Penina Kessler is a writer and software engineer living in Brooklyn. She loves plants, sometimes a little too hard, and is proud of having never learned to drive. You can read more of her work at medusawasmisunderstood.substack.com Make literature part of your everyday life. Carefully curated stories and poems you can read in under 5 minutes, sent straight to your inbox. Email* Sign Up Yes, subscribe me to the Gotham Literature newsletter.