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VIEW ALL CONTENT Gush Less Stephen Mead Do you mind? I came here for the view & you're staining the menu. Come on now. The mood is ruined. Get up. Take your face out of the soup bowl. Sneeze out those stars. People are looking. Don't spot the carpet. Your wounds are very rude. Think of someone else for a change. What? Call an ambulance? You might take advantage. Do I look like a witness? My goodness, how ravenous I am. Come, put back your spilled guts & please use a spoon! 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 Helping My Niece Move in Brooklyn Kevin Grauke 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 Sun-stained sands Jack Love You sat on the rising mounds of sand, hesitant, legs askance With the strong, summer sun lighting up the grains of sands And shells scattered beneath us. Fresh winds of salt and sand brush against your smooth face, Eyes squinted; fists clenched; your hat brim blows off your Precious head in the cool salt breeze. What is it like? To see the world through eyes anew. How does it feel? To sink your bare toes in sands unknown, Among salts and stones. You will forget this moment, this May-time beauty, rolling blues and greens Cascading into foams of roaring whites. Your memory will flicker, even fade, but this moment will be perpetually Out of reach. I’ll be here to remind you of your early days, to tell You who you were: a reflection of who you will be. Though you may soon forget, I will forever cherish Sun-stained sands, Moments like this, You. Jack Love is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at Texas A&M University. He has published creative work in Literature Today, Taj Mahal Review, The Soliloquist, Educator's Room, and DOXA. 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 Galactorrhea. Fatihah Quadri The night Aunty Tolu returned, we watched as she pour herself into the sink, fresh milk pulled out from her body. Her breast, a swollen wound; a Lazarus of nameless feeling. Leaking nipples; squeezed by the grief of a slacked hand. Another name for pain is a mother’s breast, longing for the mouth of a lost child. 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 The Wall Skivjana Neza When I lean over and take a bite out of the clouds I taste the turquoise wall I ate when I was four Crumbling in my mouth Hard becoming soft enough to swallow I can’t tell - Do our prayers Fly at different speeds? 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 Three AM Anne Mikusinski Outside The rain whispers Playing counterpart to the sounds Inside Soft tapping of keys Give birth to ideas Baby-stepping their way Across blank pages. From another room Brushed drumbeats and low strings Spread light upon a scene of Quiet work And little sleep. Anne Mikusinski has always been in love with words. She’s been writing poems and short stories since she was seven. Her influences range from Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas to David Byrne and Nick Cave. She hopes that one day, some of her writing will impress others the way these writers have had an impact on her. 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 An Apology for Flying an RC Helicopter Through the Leaves of Tessa’s Monstera Ali MacLeod Like many of my life’s mistakes, this is one I wish I could say I didn’t make on purpose. And the truth is I didn’t intend For plasticky black blades to slice through green So vibrant and shiny it might be plastic itself And leave there a gash with stringy green veins Like the nasty parts of celery. But one cannot accidentally fly an RC helicopter. One cannot accidentally fill its back chamber with batteries; Trip, and flip two switches to on; Push forward the joystick that sets it airborne With nary a thought to what “up” might mean. When I cried later it was at the look on her face, When she stood to retrieve the shears When she excised the tattered leaf with the stoic countenance One might use to put down a laminitized horse. Tessa: I have never touched the RC helicopter again. Tessa: you would scoff if you knew I’d written this. Tessa: that monstera is lucky to have you. Unlike me, it cannot feel How satisfying it is to say something you find smart. It does not know that you are funny In the way that making you laugh Is a tremendous accomplishment. The monstera cannot wear jeans that make you ask “Where’d you get those” And feel a rush of satisfaction that Stylistically It did something right, for once. A plant has no sisters and cannot understand such things. But it is lucky to have you nonetheless. 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 Selling Mrs G’s Elizabeth Cox It’s admirable, how well this home is kept. Yes, you heard, bit of a celebrity. No, I’ve not watched any either, but in the office they say she was a demon with the duster. You’ll have noticed already with your shoes off, the depth of the carpet here, where your toes in winter will sink into the slate-diamond grey shag and keep you from remembering the rubber-soled slippers kicked deep under the bed on Thursday mornings, when you’ve heard the trundle of rubbish trucks entering the estate crunching on the not-quite-gritted tarmac and so quickly gathered the offending sacks, moving from carpet to doorstep and forcing you to maybe pad upstairs, compost bag still in hand, heavy, sodden with coffee grounds and slimy with the remnants of a bag of bistro salad, getting on your knees to tease the slippers out from under the bed, bag spending too long over that rich fur, moisture gathering at the weight of its bulge, precipitously close to dripping. Or the carpet might have you so fooled that you rush outside in the frost, abandoning all thought of shoes, so nurtured have you been by the carpet, that you slide on the strangely frictionless front garden, being as it is bricked up for extra parking, and the rough soles of your feet are too frictionless, softened by the comfort you’ve moved into. Downstairs WC, just along here, toilet bowl wiped several times each day. Yes, wiped. Three times, at least. No, inside. Toilet brushes are ineffective, aren’t they, when you have hard water and a family digesting three fibre-rich meals daily? Not a tap of limescale on these thrones, the porcelain as pure as it was when Victoria Plum dropped it off. Here, give me a hand with the lid. See that floating bulb? Pristine. I’d never show that in another property, but nothing shines as the inner workings of Mrs G’s downstairs tank. Value added. Now, you must remember that this part of the hallway, and all up the stairs, oop, let me shut that there, are the most traversed areas of the home. The lushness of these carpets are nothing to the less frequented parts of the home. If I could just bring you to the guest bedroom, rarely explored, even by the in-laws and school friends that stayed here, eager at they would be to get cracking on the day, a sort of attitude that occurred by osmosis, spending bright moments in this space. If you were to take off your socks and place yourself over there, far from the bed, not near the door, in the northeast corner away from the window, and feel for your toes and heels and the knife-edge of your feet, back and forth, breathing slowly and letting yourself sink into that carpet, pressing down to meet your high arches, the thick weave coming up all around to smother and blunt the bone of the blade of each foot, more so the right at first because that’s where you rest your weight and then soon the tendrils would start to brush the knob, the knuckle of your ankle, filling the interior dimple as you slipped deeper and deeper, the length and width of each foot paving the way for the rest of your legs, pulling past your slick calves and the knob of each knee, pausing as your thighs encourage it to crank wider, the inverted pear slowly starting to allow you to be sucked in, held in warmth, until the great sticking point of your hips try to bury themselves in the weave of the carpet, puffed up like the feathers of so many birds, slate-grey pigeons, whose amethyst and emerald collars have always been there, waiting to be admired, the deeper you go, the smaller, softer, warmer the feathers become, pulled into his fluff, you’ll find yourself also sucked into the heat of meeting skin, the silken soft chicken skin of your bingo wings mirrored by the undulating heat of the carpet’s base, nesting into the soft flesh of mother, supple and hotter than you could have ever imagined, the heat of protection of illness of tear-burnt cheeks, fat and muscle underneath with such give that by the time your breath has met the frame, you see no way of pushing out again, of leaving this chance for preservation, of exiting the deep pile carpet in the corner of the guest bedroom, needing to face the pain and crush of birth to return to a world where care and industriousness is value not added and three bedrooms is three bedrooms is three bedrooms no matter the limescale chipped from the tap or the blood sweat and tears I’ll just leave here absorbing into the carpet as I leave you a moment to think over the offer. 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 Blame My Mother, Sometimes I Still Do Anni Martel He told me not to which was the only information I needed to make the opposite decision and let go. Anni is on an intense spiritual path which includes raising four children, working a corporate job, fighting for intimacy in her partnership relationship and a search for God. She is grateful for the words of others to help her feel connected to them and herself. 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 Snatched & Stranded Miranda Jensen She doesn’t hesitate when she confronts, at last, the airport; her boarding pass nearly slips between the jetway and the plane, but she snatches the paper as she would her sheet music, frantically, and stumbles through the narrow aisle for her middle seat. If you stopped wasting cash on overpriced coffee, you could see off home, Andy. True, she’d love the window all to herself, wake to the London skyline, but she’s just fine sleeping through her first climb into the sky. Fauré’s mélodies lull her into something almost restful, but her stomach churns when the attendant nudges her—“Seat up, please, we’re landing.” Her breath is heavy but steady as she shoulders two bursting duffels and a one-wheeled suitcase onto the Tube, and though the silence of her phone is unsettling, she leaves airplane mode on a little longer. He probably texted her while she was flying, eager for the last word. Maybe for once, it’ll be hers. The smooth, hard lines of her flute case dig into the flesh of her thighs when she pushes through rush hour. Don’t be careless with your instrument, Andy. That’ s your livelihood. A pizzicato of rain kisses her almost-smile when she climbs out of Kings Cross, a clock encased by redbrick boasting a new time zone. Men with suits shove past, scowling at her stupor, so she hauls her life’s belongings and herself out of the way. When she laughs, it tastes sour, and she has to clamp her lips together to keep from puking. Andy, you’ve never even left the country. You hate big cities. Why on earth would you go to London without me? His words land hard in the chaos of the intersection—double-decker red, hackney carriages, and blurs of motorbikes—but when her earbuds return to Fauré, those reasons to second guess ripple into soft triplets. The sky moans in displeasure when she finds her flat, equipped with a mattress more springy than soft and an absent landlord. She braves the downpour regardless, itching for a bite of something British, but really, a glance at her future. Not even he could question this—she thinks as she stands before the conservatory’s arching doors, a blue historical plaque gleaming with pride and rain. No one plays like you. She catches a few raindrops on her tongue, then takes shelter beneath her umbrella in search of fish and chips. It feels good, skipping over puddles and window shopping a medieval, modern metropolis, everyone determined to keep moving no matter what. She wants to keep moving too. She needs to move forward, and she will, she’s certain. She’s here, after all. The city’ s indifference will wear on you, trust me, Andy, you should stay. Please, stay. She pulls out her phone to replay Après un rêve , determined to wash his words away like the rain does the grime of a red-eye. But after an engine sputters behind her, a black glove snatches the phone from her grip. She stumbles after the motorbike careening off the sidewalk and into the evening traffic. Fauré plays even after she’s lost sight of it, of that last tether to home—to him. Then the music cuts out, leaving her stranded in London. And Anya grins. 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 Still Life Calynn Liong Harris The square framed scene of a white surface balancing a silver bowl pregnant with luscious abundance is interrupted from the lower corner by a tiny cherubic hand eating a green grape Calynn Liong Harris holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry from the University of Mary Washington. She is a former professional ballerina and lives in Alexandria, Virginia with her husband and two daughters. 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 Animation: "Pearl" by Xaviera López I have an obsession with haunted houses Ashling Meehan-Fanning because I am one. We all are. Big empty corridors filled with lilting melodies and cobwebs where dust motes and dead insects have been caught and strung up for the all ghosts to see. The ghosts are versions of ourselves we’ve abandoned, laid out to dry, left out to burn. Finding them dressed in Victorian sleeping garb is a weird coincidence. Within me is a childhood home, a bungalow in Chicago, a suburban rental, a freshman dorm room, and a cottage perpetually soaked in rain. They’re stacked against each other under my skin, wall to wall, brick to stucco to rotting wood with thatch roofing. Inside each, another ghost waits for me, fed up with my visits, reluctant to let me back in. I’m a lurker, they tell me, a parasite within myself, unable to move on. Don’t they know that ghosts can be the living too? Ghosts can live inside bright eyes and tight smiles, ghosts can haunt your bathroom mirror while you brush your teeth, staring back at you while you contemplate skincare. Ask, did you take your meds today ? There is someone behind me, not there when I look and she follows me into the bedroom where I lay in darkness and contemplate saying yes to that boy in middle school. Squint hard enough and I’ll see - ah, there she is . Hanging above me. Eyes and mouth open wide. Like a ghoul in the rafters. Is that blood on the ceiling? Give her the opportunity and my ghost will hide inside my chest, my hands, my throat. The next time I feel vulnerable she’ll remind me of her possession. That I’m a haunted house. A ghost cage, a drafty mansion, a final girl, a woman running through the moors wearing white. This piece was previously published by Livina Press Ashling Meehan-Fanning is a poet based in Wisconsin whose work often includes themes of magic, ancestry, and the American Midwest. She spends a lot of time thinking about ghosts and trees. You can learn more about her work at www.poemsbyashling.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.