We had an idea that started as a joke. We had an affinity for that minimalist look and feel of early online journals. We do spontaneous, popup submission calls.

We had an idea for a journal that started as something of a joke... until it became a real thing. We had such a love for those early, minimalist web journals (elimae, McSweeney's, eyeshot, Surgery of Modern Warfare...) and so thought we would nod back toward them. If submissions are open, we've probably had a couple drinks. We're HAD.

Aaron Burch

Crow Jonah Norlander

Fucking weird. Love it

Make you feel at home: cozy, meme-friendly, a sense of community, all that stuff

Submission windows are really short - you have to be fast!

We don't have a specific theme, though we have a method. Submissions will be open for a few hours at a time, with the goal of everything receiving a reply as quickly as possible—within 24 hours, max. This will happen sporadically and spontaneously—open submissions will be announced via Twitter and/or sometimes through email or text messages. Sign up to receive notifications.



Opens Randomly

The Joke

if you scratch my back / I will continue to scratch / my own back

🖐

Here’s the truth, as I understand it.

There is a place surrounded by the mountains that no one has ever returned from. There was a town there with living people at one point and there’s some reason to believe people are still alive and well there.

A Place I'd Like to Go 

A Christmas Message from Phil Spector (December 2020)

I got back into vampires and couldn't stop thinking about Interview With A Vampire (the movie) and this is what came about! Thankful for Aaron Burch for helping get this piece to this version!!

To Answer LeStat's Last Question

"Never Handle Grounded Bats"

Supposedly it’s ok to be slow, to be late, at least occasionally, for work or appointments. Come to think of it, if not everything is pressing, maybe nothing is.

Deflations

Broadway, Baby!

WHY I SCREAM/CRY/BREAKDOWN/SCARE THE NEIGHBORS/YOU/MYSELF

father figures

We tour the graveyard with a lead on a Scyther. I feel bad about this, but Scyther is a big deal. We make sure not to step on any plots, and I read aloud the names and dates on the stones. Penitence.

Summer of Pokemon Go

Apple Stickers

"you can learn to love this version of me, one ear and my mouth in the wrong place, everything where it shouldn’t be. it’s kind of like us, isn’t it?"

WEEPING WOMAN WITH BUTTONS FOR EYES

“I can be creepy with just a ladder,” Ladder Man said to me on the other side of my second-story window.

Ladder Man 

A fish walks onto the bus

We met at a fancy restaurant and she
was served to me on a porcelain dish, porcelain tentacles writhing,
a tiny thing.

The Octopus That Controls My Body Is Angry

"It’s the end of the world and we’re going to the grocery store."

Your Local Giant Eagle Grocery is Proud to Serve You in the Event of The Apocalypse

One Night

Jean? She wasn’t the crying type. Not that she thought tears were unbecoming or a sign of weakness, no, Jean was just someone who operated in clear returns: what does this get me? Crying wiped her out.

The Caterwauls

Just after dawn, I mumble you awake with my dream
that a lizard has been elected president.

Reptilian Aubade

& plunging from transbay tube into the unwashed light of the west oakland station, i notice your hands first. sorry — only. i only notice your hands shedding the black gloves, plum veins mapping forefinger to ring, knuckle & valley...

east bay bound

"WE SAY POETIC SHIT ALL THE TIME," SAID ONE POET TO ANOTHER

"You close your eyes and all you know is popsicle—balmy juice thick as blood and sugary enough to sing in your teeth. You do not know that in four weeks you will come back to this hospital"

The Popsicle Is Not A Metaphor

Nobody knows what a horse looks like.

Harry Styles Threw Up Here

Working on my night moose

You Wouldn't Steal a Car...

Then I could smirk, like in the movies when the good guy swings at the bad guy but it doesn’t hurt the way it was supposed to, and the good guy gets a look like “oh no” and the bad guy smugly straightens his jaw.

I’m here if you need to talk

Cookies

Summer Boyfriends

I am trying to teach my brother Micah to write poetry. I don't want him becoming one of those tape measure men, coiling inward, showing nothing to no one. He’s only fourteen, but he's at risk. 

The Structure Underneath

Drawings of groundhogs dressed up as Bill Murray. I ♥️ Bill Murray & have a complicated relationship with groundhogs. 

Groundhogs at a Bill Murray Party

The office bathroom

Picture this: you’re in the bathroom, trying to rinse off your hands, but the automatic faucet won’t acknowledge your existence.

Ghosts of the Mundane

Adriene

V—GER

After the earth becomes a brutalist’s wet concrete dream 
and every fragmentary farm town I ever loved is razed, 
Monet’s Haystacks will still hang on the eggshell 
walls of a museum where my wife and I take our children

Future Pastoral/Curatorial

cool-de-sac

Hurricane Party

From Across the Living Room

He would be as open about his feelings as he is about his medical issues. He would not have as many feelings about Big Vitamin. He would still have a too-long and-too convoluted theory for explaining John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Imagining My Father If, Instead of My Grandfather, He Had Been His Own Father

Charleston Girl

perhaps he and she exist simultaneously,

parallel to each other, each their first and last lives—



schrodinger's kitten

Without Measure

The Rat-Filled Chasm

I GOT SO HIGH IN THE OPERATING ROOM BEFORE MY SEX CHANGE I THOUGHT I WAS A BIBLICALLY ACCURATE ANGEL MADE OUT OF BARBIE DOLL PARTS

Square poem + Sestina that can be read in three ways. Shaped like a calendar.

The Emmy Belongs to February

Who Am I, When You're Not Looking?

Thirteen

The Things We Don't Say Are Plenty

The Daughter's Escape

One of the only poems I've written that I did not rip to shreds the week after hehe

"What I Discovered before our Wedding Day"

IF I CALLED WOULD YOU SWALLOW THE WATER I'M TREADING

"Grenadine. Tangerine. Trampoline."

Re-entry

 i am not/ afraid to know what’s out there. everything that wants/ to kill you is carbon & alive. already here.

TWO POEMS: yeah that's a bleeping dead alien body if i ever bleeping saw one & syzygy

You cut yourself in half. Rarely at first. Now, every day.


Willingly

Elegy for a Captive Bear

"Nails" & "Note to Self"

Grind

Till

THERE WILL BE KILLER CLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE 

post-lobotomy dreams 

And They Don't Stop Coming: A Decaying Shrekstina

"GUNSEARCH"
"That’s Just What They’ll Do"
"gun rap"

3 POEMS?????

but the cove of my desk couldn’t muffle the audible chirp of food inside its little pixel mouth when I tried to feed it during math class and I honestly don’t remember if your Tamagotchi was a boy or a girl or what it’s four-letter name was but…

Michelle, I’m Sorry I Killed Your Tamagotchi

 Not Me Being a Pick Me Girl, Surely !!

Maybe If You Let Me Hear You Do That Again, I Can Immortalize You Just Right

Tog(ether)

OPEN LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF MY HOMETOWN

"He’d introduced himself to us as ‘Mr. Stevens,’ but the man we recognized from the stories told by our older siblings and cousins and parents was ‘Herr,’ and none of us could reconcile the two."

PATRON SAINT OF TEENAGE SOCIALISTS

All Beef

father's daughter's baby

Decoy

You have to be vague in your beliefs to accept a new god so easily so often.

True On Two Ships

I’m witnessing my own memories. The further the distance between Henry and me grew, the more I felt a separation not unlike a spirit and a body divorcing.

The Edible Part (or The Bottom Half of a Cut-Up Strawberry)

After Saying John Ashbery’s Poetry Is Like Getting Out of a Bath When It’s Still Warm, And My Workshop Instructor Laughs and Tells Us He’s Going to Tell His Friend I Said That...

Relaxing on the Holodeck

"... even water / and its delicate warm hands could ruin you."

how to lie on your back underwater and not drown your fool self

Anything is vegan at Taco Bell if you substitute the meat with beans. Oat milk is the most environmentally-friendly dairy replacement we’ve got, but it is terrible for your skin. Can we ever have it all? 

Telling the Truth

Let me go is what I mean when I say nothing, Let me go is what I mean when I say Let me go, not the opposite, not another image of you letting go, not letting go and coming back with more hands

THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE IN WHICH I HAVE ASKED YOU TO LEAVE ME AND YOU DO HAS BLOWN UP IN SPACE AND I CANNOT FIND IT

To feel like I’m siphoning myself to you / to feel the insurmountable agony of being / witnessed fully

Don't look at me I love you

[to create a new body]--[a kind of staving]--[to remain familiar] / [to create a new body]--[to mourn a new reality] 

I Want to Burn the Years

Two Truths, One Lie

Villanelle for my Villain Era

if they dreamt
she'd have a hard time
sitting in chairs & she’d laugh
too loud in restaurants.

if they dreamt of restaurants.

if they dreamt of a daughter one day without daughters

after Divine, who said filth was her life,

on i-80 east to winnemucca, where i tell you about how plato should have beaten the shit out of that other guy

Grandma told us once that great-great grand uncle John lived in the part of the country that gets the coldest… 

HAD

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