Buzzwords

@badaude

A View From the Window By C. D. Rose. I crack open the window, noting how dusty it’s got, stick my head out of the narrow gap and look up and down the street I live on. To the left, there’s a late 70s low-rise industrial unit, steel mesh over its few windows, a corrugated plastic roof. A plume of white smoke still rises from the chimney and occasionally vans come and go so I assume they’re still working. Next to it, a handsome late Victorian workshop, three floors, redbrick, big arched windows. Anywhere else it’d probably have become apartments,

By Chris Kelso. SINGLE ORIGIN COFFEE Isolation It’s meant to be an introvert fantasy And it is In a way Replacing dreams of single origin coffee I’m the pride of the Empire Left in the soul, right in the head With my colonial breastplate And zero-hour contract Identity is fluid in quarantine Meet me at the emergency night-shelter Bring Starbucks, Pret, There’s pesticides in my vegan sausage roll And I’ve been begging for gluten-free poverty since 2006 Seeking solace, Dreaming of my own funeral Now I’ve got my dream coffin All I want is . . . LIKE SOLZHENITSYN One

We Are All in This Alone By Fernando Sdrigotti. I A sticker to be added after the final stop of every book: AND THEN COVID-19 HAPPENED AND ALL OF THIS DIDN’T MATTER ANY MORE. II Days in which writing feels useless. Or it risks becoming a cave, a place where to hide from the cataclysm. The worst possible people are in charge at the worst possible time. If my writing isn’t leading the right heads to the guillotine it is worthless. III “There is no such a thing as society” — Maggie Thatcher, 1987. So go for a walk in

Human Wishes By Nicholas Rombes.   All time is down time, now. Outside my window here in Michigan the Black-capped Chickadees and the Red-breasted Nuthatches come and go from the leaning clutch of Boxelders. What do they know of human wishes? The small artifacts, the remainders, become important in down time. Striving against boredom by turning to boring things. The passed over, the clicked through. The half-forgotten. On the remarkable site Shorpy there is a photograph from August 194l: “Blasting crew in the Danube iron mine. Bovey, Minnesota.” The month Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter. They would be

By Benjamin Myers. I do what I always do: roll out of bed with the assumption that the world is nigh, and from that moment on the day can only get better. I pour nuts into the bird feeders and wait for the crows. When they’ve squared off, elbowed each other out the way, come to blows, had their fill and made a mess, those further down the pecking order — those classier customers, with manners and style — arrive. There’s a chiffchaff out there, peregrines up on The Rock and today I hear the first woodpecker, drilling a telegraph

Normal People By Christiana Spens and Ant Lehane.

Isolation Notes to Self By Heidi James. Got up early and bought a tin of ratatouille and some kidney beans from the Co-op. Smiled and said thanks to the person on the till. Feel full of love for humanity. Worry that all this Covid-19 is a ruse by the world order to overthrow democracy and destroy all civil liberties. Confuse myself with questions such as ‘What is democracy?’ And ‘Are civil liberties a delusion?’ Do the hoovering again. Dust accumulates quicker in a crisis. Tell myself not to be paranoid. Conspiracy theories are for dummies! But are they? What if

This video-poem reading was devised, filmed, edited and read by writer Susanna Crossman and her three daughters: Liliane, Alice, and Sophia: “As we’re stuck indoors 24/7 in France, we thought we’d hang out with the #InternationalPoetryCircle, dress up, dress down, and read The Bed Book by Sylvia Plath. We breathed, forgot, and had fun, because as Bachelard wrote, ‘Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul’.” @crossmansusanna

The Republic of Consciousness Prize longlist was unveiled today: Broken Jaw by Minoli Salgado (The 87 Press) Love by Hanne Ørstavik, tr. Martin Aitken (And Other Stories) Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession (Bluemoose Books) Aliasing by Mara Coson (Book Works) We are made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner (Dostoevsky Wannabe) Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del-Amo, tr. Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo Editions) Patience by Toby Litt (Galley Beggar Press) Under Pressure by Faruk Šehić, tr. Mirza Purić (Istros Books) That Lonesome Valley by Melissa Lee-Houghton (Morbid Books) Fatherhood by Caleb Klaces (Prototype Publishing) El Llano in Flames by Juan Rulfo,

Eloise and Sam aka Galley Beggar Press in Paris, following Lucy Ellmann‘s wonderful appearance at Shakespeare and Company yesterday.

  For the month of January, 3:AM Magazine will be open for fiction submissions that are 1,000 to 5,000 words in length, double-spaced, and in Word format. For qualitative guidance, consider the stories we published in 2019. Send your work to mark.desub@gmail.com; if we are interested in publishing your story, you will hear from us no later than April.   Mark de Silva Fiction Editor 3:AM Magazine