Literary Magazine. NYC. Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize, Pushcart Prize, etc. Available at Barnes & Noble 

LitMag is a print journal of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, a home for award-winning, emerging and unknown writers. We seek work that moves and amazes us. We are drawn to big minds and large hearts.

Marc Berley

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LitMag

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a little bummer of a story that involves a chicken attack

Erase the Line

Ashes was my entry for a micro-contest. It didn't win, but was deemed good enough for publication. Folie had been rejected a few times before being picked up by Unfortunately. 
I am super grateful to this wonderful magazine.

Ashes and Folie

The Vacation Interview in XRAY

Four seasons in a year and in the life of an older couple.

The Four Seasons

Saturday Night (at the ER)

“They’re calling it curious, the scientists. They’re saying we didn’t love them enough.”

Thunderstorm Facts

Maroon passes the window
and I wonder whether, for a single,
miraculous moment, I have been taken
to another hour, so many years earlier;
to another bus, so many miles away...

Our Colours, Their Colours

If my body was a lover’s
I would lay my head against his chest,
Run my fingers through...

If my body was a love'rs

Sometimes I think about the boy that I wasn’t
who insisted a little too loud, a little too often...

The boy that I wasn't

"we ate too many mulberries one time and got sick but 
laughed about it sometimes the boys took our spot and we fought 
with them yelling from below the tree I was 
fiercer than anything those days"

The Honeysuckle Seekers

Conversation with my son
Dear Body
I Walked
Enemy of the Gods

Assorted Poetry

This poem really goes into self love from a transgender male perspective, prioritising an erotic lens throughout the piece.

Manhood in my Clitoris

$2.29 for a 20oz coke?

"Like everyone else, when I see the plane, I get up from the table to get a better look. I’m not exactly sure at what speed planes travel, but I know a plane must travel faster when it’s diving."

Trajectory

Nesting Season

"You don’t remember being told you were dead. You just knew. You were dead and sitting in a chair and there was a woman in front of you and you didn’t understand that, because you were dead." 

Saint Maria's Home for Murdered Girls

Three Poems selected from Melanie's proposed Chapbook Tranny Judas published by En*gendered on their website in late summer 2022.

Selected Poems for en*gendered

"i wish i could say it was just summer
/ but your fury is familiar, was once/ mine, years ago, a girl/ feeling her first heatwave press/ its power through her blood"

Bertha in the Mirror

Yellow-morning

This poem describes the journey of discovering the upper body in a briefly intimate way, thinking about body shape and movement.

The Trail

This poem is about the videogame Journey, and how to me it is so much more than a narrative on a sand-filled screen.

Why Do We Play?

Life Cycle

Turkey Bend (Is that the Big Dipper?)

CW: suicidal ideation

"Friends" was published in Corporeal Lit Mag's third volume of their collection of works on the human experience.

Friends

CW: depiction of a panic attack

"panic attacks" was published in Corporeal Lit Mag's third volume of their collection of works on the human experience.

panic attacks

How Much do Teeth Weigh?

Identity Height Chart

“Behind the Scenes: Angela Acosta Discusses ‘Identity Height Chart’.” LatinX Audio Lit Mag

The Green Fairy

Bad Seeds

How to Chill in the 21st Century | Helpless on the Beach at Night

The man seemed to be crying out all that was inside him, filling up the sea. I could see his face in the sound of the waves. (2022 Pushcart Nominee)

Waves

Bruce Ford meanwhile was pining for Joe-Dog.

Joe-Dog

Wound 

"I’m inside the lobby waiting on an oil change when I hear it. Across the street, a man struggles to hold a sign against the wind. I squint to read through the shop’s window: 'You are all going to die.' 

This is what the man is yelling."

MAINTENANCE

"there’s a piece of me that got lost
in translation, in the space between
two hands jointly clasped."

Published in Corporeal [June 2022]

Autodecomposition of a Human Soul

"I lie in bed and I sweat for secrets. I sweat for the years I’ve spent hiding myself, being ashamed of my face and my voice and my body."

Published in en*gendered [June 2022]

Sweat

"To escape our universe, move faster than the speed of light. Look to your left. Look to your right. We may be living."

A zine exploring the universe-rending feelings of gender dysphoria. Something so dense and heavy, but impossible to see or hold.

The New Face

"mourning or requesting 'agnes' at karaoke forever" + "swiper no swiping"

Feet of Endurance

bougainvillea

I will hire bodyguards to protect me at all times and I will wear a bulletproof suit. The protection will cost money but if it saves my life it will be worth it.

Domestic

It was a limited conversation but one that I have cherished because I knew who was talking to me.

Work

He rolled back the flap of skin, in the same way one might open a tin of sardines. He sloshed his hands in the opening, then tugged on something that gave with a snap.

The Tournament

I love this room. I always have, I loved its sound, I loved its voice, and when other kids were tripping each other on the playground, I was watching words spill out its throat.

Come Back to Me

He still dreamt about the island, years after the returning ship had docked and his feet were planted firmly on the shore of the mainland. 

A Lifetime Spent Documenting the World

On Forgiveness

5 poems

Dusk

I wonder if I would know I had been buried. If I could feel the coolness six feet
beneath the ground. Know that my body would soon be nothing but bones. 
Certainly, I would opt for the stars as if I could. 

SADEE BEE - corporeal

1. Setting serves as the introduction to the story. The sky, gray and looming with thunder and sideways rain, withholds for this moment, this moment when...
2. The characters meet in a bus stop kiosk, the glass kind with the light blue and yellow...

How to Tell a Love Story

Best of the Net nominated; Pushcart Prize nominated

trans people gather for a name reveal party and play Apples to Apples except all the cards are fill-in-the-blank

Because Someone Said, Make Art About Risking Delight

Topographic maps are measures of

depth,

like dowsing rods, or
sonar, or
unexpected tears.

Proximity to water
always reveals
the shape of shores...

Topograph

"Naomi spends her drive home from the bookstore listening to her favorite true crime podcast, Caught Red-handed. It has become a game. By now, she knows the signs of serial killers, the buttons that need to be pressed to push a stressed wife over.." 

Hatching Naomi

An interview with Diamond Braxton over her published fiction piece "Hatching Naomi" and the idea of how true crime impacts the narrator and the world around us today. 

Author Interview - The Forge - "Hatching Naomi" 

My Parents Do Not Meet

​I was thirteen when I decided to shave for the first time.

Pluck

to grow a friend

Cheers to FEED Magazine for publishing "Dropping the Universe" in Issue 2.21

Dropping the Universe

Rooted

This piece explores my relationship with the concept of being transgender.

Short King!

Some topics, I just find easier to explore through poetry than plain speech. Living with chronic illness is one of those. 

Chronically

Omens Aside, I Kenned It Wouldn't Last

big, easy, fast, money

Sami was given credit for A-Plus At-Home Dialysis's new marketing campaign, which included, among other things, car decals with the company's name and URL. Now, a van bearing the company's name has been involved in multiple car chases.

Endless Violence at APlusAtHomeDialysis.com

i know you don’t like flowers so i put a blanket over our headstone

two poems (and some photos)

four poems from preparatory school for the end of the world

But something that’s at the heart of most of these pieces is the feeling of anger, a sense of injustice. That anger could be for or at herself, or for or at someone else, but it is a constant undercurrent throughout the collection.

Finding Calm in the Rage: A Review of Laurie Rachkus Uttich’s Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt 

This poem delves into touch-starvedness in an intimate and personal way to me.

To Touch Me Is To Love Me

"fumes"

"If you asked any customer about the anglerfish, they would smile vacantly and say, Oh, are they serving fish now, and go back to looking at the ketchup stain in the corner of their table and arguing about whether it does or doesn’t look like Italy."

Anglerfish

Sea Women

Pretend Your Foot is a House

The ghost of squirrels with half tails dangling off power lines; even in death anxiety rises like steam off their flayed insides. Bright pink mixed with gravel mixed with marks from tire treads. 

suburbia

"The pen exploded through her crisp white shirt. The ink bled through and spread like the microcosm of a galaxy onto the polyester, and the girl remembered her small thumbs staining as she held a copy of the newspaper." 

The Night Journey

Blood Suck

you may notice changes in your perception of the senses
when you
touch things they may
            feel different*


selected poems

a poem about New York City & breakups & Salvador Dali

In the Stairwell of the Museum of Modern Art

Conversation explores the importance of speculative fiction in realm of the Palestinian imaginary, as Palestinians write their own narratives, worlds, and futures.

Panel: Palestinian Futurism, FIYAH

Moonblinde

Published on 06 April 2022 by En*gendered e-magazine.

I Shouldn't Be Here is a non-fiction piece about what it is like to grow up in the wrong body, with everyone telling you you are something you know you aren't.

I Shouldn't Be Here 

I’m in California now, where bees die in the light. Where everybody dies first, then lives forever. The bees are alive. Their flattened bodies tattoo the pavement, stain the places pressed flat with a concrete leveler.

All The Bees in California are Dead

Perhaps by now they weren’t the most well-adjusted people they’d ever been. Perhaps by now they’d become, even to themselves, a little strange.

At The Well

"Algorithms are giant slot machines and success with them depends on factors almost entirely out of our control. Maybe we should just make what we want to make and forget about the algorithms altogether."

algorithmically speaking

two poems from a forthcoming chapbook/collection later in 2023!

the unifying theory, autostereogram

...
some clever puns about shots of serotonin or electro-
convulsive shocks to stimulate their flaccid brains
to desire screwing in a lightbulb in the first place,
...

How many depressed people does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 

three poems about my experience with gender up on the mag as the spotlighted author :)

gender poetry!

To Become Unwild and First Surgery

[Insert Trauma Here] and Wound-Watcher

Symphonic challenge "Ingebar Music" winner: shape poem written to an artists song; dipity adds a short visual video in keeping with the poem. Freely available to read online.

wishes in fishes

Tara's Favorite Song

Longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2022

Sonata

X-R-A-Y Fall Special Issue 2022, Guest Edited by Daisuke Shen. Co-edited w/ Crow Jonah Norlander and Liz Crowder.

X-R-A-Y Fall Special Issue

It was merely a build-up of tonsil stones; small, calcified clumps of debris ensnared in the tonsillar crypts. They were harmless, she promised, and waved off my concern for my torn, bloody throat with a pamphlet boasting [...]

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