FLEX — MARIA POULATHA

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Content Warning: Animal Cruelty

Teddy pulled a conger eel out of the sea and hung it from a tree branch. We watched it whip the air as if a current danced through it, stupidly searching for a path to the ground. By morning it swung in the breeze like wet pants. A small crowd had gathered round and my aunt had to take to her bed for a whole week at the sight of it. Teddy and his friends peeled off their soaked shirts and took turns squeezing their fists along the eel’s length to dissolve its spine. I didn’t think an eel had a spine but Teddy read it somewhere and they swore they heard bones cracking like ice as their shiny bodies flexed and constricted the muscle out of the surrendered thing. They pared it with kitchen knives and tugged at the skin but it tore, leaving patchy pink strips.
           Alice walked by in something short and Teddy wiped his hands on his jeans and did an about-face. They kissed for the first time with their zippers tapping metallic clicks and the stench of rotting eel wafting between their eager faces. I had seen Alice first, then Jim saw her, and then Mark but she didn’t see any of us. We all got lucky that summer, grew spiky hairs on our chest and came out of our shells in sticky pools under the pier but Teddy moulted, grew glimmering and taut like something that didn’t need legs.
           Teddy got his sea papers and sailed off and when years passed and he didn’t return, we pictured him ship-jumped in America, serving whiskey colas to cruel and easy women in smoky clubs.
           Alice still didn’t see us. She dressed in black and chopped her daughter’s hair to the ears. I went over to hook up a washing machine and saw her from the window, splayed in a garden chair, inner thighs pink as tuna. When I turned away I saw the girl staring at me with her weird hair and I never went back there again. 
           The sun set, the sea turned purple. Children swatted the stinking eel like a piñata to scare away the bees. It was finally taken down after one got stung in the face and couldn’t see from his left eye. My uncle threw the eel back into the sea or buried it in the garden, no one actually remembers.

Originally from New Jersey, Maria Poulatha lives in Athens, Greece with her husband and daughter. Her stories have appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Copper Nickel, SmokeLong Quarterly (finalist for the Grand Micro contest), Flash Frog (finalist for the Blue Frog contest), Okay Donkey, trampset and others.

NO ONE TALKS ABOUT HOW A TWINKIE IS AN AMERICAN MADELEINE — ALLIE MARIANO

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no one talks about how a twinkie is an american madeleine & what would proust have to say about that? twinkies—a small chill runs through me—i see the end shelf in the old piggly wiggly stacked high with little debbie cakes, sicksweet and creamfilled. grocery store feet, shoed but still dirt-rubbed into the soles. we spent the weekend at my great-grandmother’s house in sardis, ms: the grand old house was falling apart and later the wooden floors in the kitchen buckled in the humidity and became like ocean waves. the way that the humidity hung in every room and the pecan tree persisted next to the crumbling garage, we found an old doll in the bedroom and named her clara bella. her plastic skin had turned green, and we knew she was haunted. my cousin hung her from the light pull in the bedroom. when the weather came through, we moved to the old parlor and sat on the floor. thunder shook around us, and we unwrapped the twinkies. the cake stuck to our fingers in thin films of shocking sweet.

Allie Mariano is a Southern writer. Her writing has appeared in CutBank, The Citron Review, december, New Orleans’ The Times-Picayune, and other places. She can currently be found in Arkansas, where she is an editor at the Oxford American.

SCAVENGE — ROBIN BISSETT

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Well, when the sun ran down and the sky turned red, we left Austin for the country. We pitched our tent on a farm with a pond where the fish wobbled up and gasped. We couldn’t eat them. They were alive. They had long legs and they could walk. They were radioactive, Powerade blue. 
           For days, we waited for a sign. We wondered if anyone was watching. For sustenance, we chewed grape-flavored Kool-Aid powder, inhaled whippets from a finished can of Cheez-Wiz, and slept on the earth like worms, like splintered ceramics. Our lungs bled yellow. We were everything, waiting for the end of nothing. We didn’t know what to believe.
           On our second anniversary, the first since the partition of Texas, I burnt the mac-n-cheese, left it sitting too long atop the Whisperlite, and you grimaced and said, “Not romantic, hardly even Italian.” Yes, it stung, but you were worldly, you were trilingual. You had all the words. I had nothing. I had known this when I married you.
           But still, I tongued the goop, stirred in brown sugar with a plastic spoon. Tu sei un ragazzo; io sono un uomo. I asked you a question. You pretended not to hear me. Green owls and ghouls flew from the branches overhead. Their teardrops fell, searing our skin. 
           The next morning, I woke alone. I went to find you. Inside me, I had all of these bare shelves, waiting for an apology. Instead, you were building an altar. A walking stick in hand, you were spitting out smooth stones from your mouth like sunflower seeds. They spelled out S-O-S. You had sent a message up to the gods, without me.
           “Fuck,” you said. “You snuck up on me.”
           “It’s sneaked, Mikey,” I said, disappointed. “Not snuck.” I grabbed my pack and stalked away.
           Months have passed, and I’m underground now and I don’t know who you are or where you are. But I have thought of you every now and then. And should I find you, I will know what to say. I have harvested these words like organs. I have imagined their taste. 
           “C’mere, baby,” I will whisper. “Look at me. Yes, look at me.”
           “You are barren,” I will say. “You are barren, and hopeless and a wasteland. And I, I am a city.”

Robin Bissett is a writer, editor, and teaching artist from West Texas. She is an alumna of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program Summer Institute and a first-year fiction MFA candidate at the University of Montana where she serves as the Online Managing Editor of CutBank.

WHAT REMAINS — DW McKINNEY

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After the garbage truck hauls away the tea trays my grandmother cannot pack and a man claims the house and land that had been ours, I scroll through the real estate listing online to see what remains. There’s too much Black history in the photos. Fifty years. It’s caked into the red brick fireplace and lines the1960s floral wallpaper. Outside holds the greatest parts of myself, so I dwell in the backyard.

The earth is exposed and muddy brown. The sun has chased the grass to the far corners of the yard. Tufts lay huddled along the fence line spitting out planks like rotten teeth. But I can still feel the Kentucky bluegrass underneath my feet. The stiff blades served as a wedding altar for my mother and stepfather. The grass cradled tangerines when I stripped them from the trees and they rolled from my hands. The once unending blanket of green caressed my stomach as my first child poked her way forward from inside me.

There’s a haint somewhere in that yard. The listing photos don’t show her, the Ol’ White Woman, my grandfather called her. The nape of my neck would prickle as I peered out his den windows. My eyes skirted the shadows for fear of seeing her there, formed from my panted breath gathering on the dusty window panes as I stared into the twilight. That Woman was my woman.

My sister’s longtime friend who lives in the neighborhood says a Filipino family now rents the house from the man who discarded my grandmother’s belongings, things folks would call vintage or antique. I imagine the Ol’ Woman floating in between the barren trees, offering her mournful elegy for those of us who can no longer hear it. Would this new family hear her cries and call her by another name?

But the Ol’ Woman is still my woman. I want to lead her by the hand, take her down the road, and show her where my grandmother now lives—where she too belongs.

DW McKinney is a Las Vegas-based writer whose work appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Bitch, Mom Egg Review, and Narratively, among others. Her writing has also been anthologized in I’m Speaking Now (Chicken Soup for the Soul, 2021). A recipient of the 2021 Shenandoah Fellowship for BIPOC Editors, her nonfiction was a finalist in Hippocampus Magazine’s 2020 Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction. The founder and current instructor for We Are The House: A Virtual Residency for Early-Career Writers at Raising Mothers, McKinney also serves as a nonfiction editor at Shenandoah. You can drop a line on Twitter @thedwmckinney or at dwmckinney.com.

THANKS, NEWS & OUR FALL 2022 LINEUP

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Dear friends!

What a summer it’s been. Wherever you are, we hope you’re doing well as can be. So much has been going on—and still is, truly—so we thought we’d give you a quick rundown of what’s in the works.

DONATIONS

We are grateful to everyone who submitted to our Nostalgia call in July. We received far more submissions than we thought we would, and we apologize again for taking longer than expected getting back to folks. We are also thankful to everyone who showed proof of donation with their submission to support reproductive rights—y’all donated over $2,000 to various groups and campaigns, and it means so, so much to us. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

SUBMISSIONS

With all that the CP staff has going on, we’re going to take a break from submissions for the rest of the year. We’ll be back in 2023 and announce WAY IN ADVANCE, we promise. Sorry about this, but hope y’all understand. In the meantime, we have stories lined up through most of November of this year, so there’ll be a LOT OF CHEAP POP STILL ON THE HORIZON.

LINEUP

Speaking of new stories, we are THRILLED to announce our Fall 2022 Nostalgia Issue lineup! It was so hard to select pieces, but can’t wait to share these with y’all! Find more information on our stories and publication dates here.

With lotsa love,
The CP Team

JULY SUBMISSIONS + FEEDBACK WITH DONATION

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Hello, friends.

A reminder that CHEAP POP will be open for nostalgia-themed submissions from July 1 - 15, 2022. These pieces will run from September - November 2022.

(As always, for more information on what we're looking for, or how to submit—when we're open!—please check out our submissions page.)

Additionally, in light of the Roe v. Wade overturn, during this submission period, you have the option of

(1) a regular submission, or
(2) you can submit + SHOW PROOF OF A DONATION to an ABORTION FUND or a REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS CHARITY in any amount. With proof of donation (a screenshot of the receipt or email confirmation), we will provide feedback in the event your piece is not accepted for publication.

A few examples:

Remember: Any amount helps at all.

Please note: We will not respond (accept/reject) pieces until after the submissions period has closed. You are free to query us, but our method is to read every piece we get, even ones submitted at 11:59 PM on the last day. It's important to us that every piece gets the same care and attention. This also means we generally need a small buffer of time after submissions close to read and gauge pieces.

We’re excited to read your work. For additional info, click here.

ON HOW TO SURVIVE AS A BARN OWL — OLIVIA KINGERY

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  1. You have to be quick, Tyto alba. Make your nest on the side of a high cliff. Work your body into the clay. This will be helpful when you’re hundreds of years older, making a nest in a barn wall rather than a tree. Don’t worry about that yet. You’re in Europe where your species was first discovered. This is before.

  2. In the reflection of the ocean under your cliff home, you see a ghost staring back, but you are the ghost, a heart-shaped face of symmetry. When you mate, it is for life unless your partner is killed, unless you are killed, in which case a new bond can be formed.

    They’ll call this monogamy, you call this life. As a female, the male will court you with dance and song, swooping high into the sky before love diving towards what will become your nest. This thrills you. He brings you mice, voles, snakes, shrews, rats, never earthworms.

  3. You sometimes hunt together, gliding low to the ground over possible meals. This will be your downfall—the need to hunt on the move, explore your space in freedom.

  4. Learn your voice. It is not a hoot like your other owl cousins but a screech, a cry. Humans will fear you for this, call you the demon owl, death owl, ghost owl. Humans will kill you for this; seek you out in nature and then in their own buildings and then one day the searching stops because you’re gone.

  5. You’ll never be ready for the end; for the developing of grasslands and draining of wetlands and soon there is no space left to nest. But the largest threat is one you never dreamed of because you can’t dream of metal before you know it. You’ll never be ready to maneuver between windshields, between the force of a steel body meeting an earthly one.

  6. In the night, maybe it is your last, you will be hunting over open land. Part of this land is a road but you don’t know this. You’re on the move and hungry, hoping to find a vole before returning back to your nest in the wall of a barn close by. You’re on the move and sweeping low over the black earth as a shrew scurries across the void. You’re on the move but there is something so bright you cannot keep moving. Overwhelmed by the rush of sound and force and headlights, you’re hit by a family on their way home from the zoo. They saw barn owls. They didn’t see you.

Olivia Kingery is a farmer and writer living on 80 acres in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She chats with earthworms in the summer, snowshoes with the dogs in the winter, and hangs out with her chickens all year long. More of her work can be found at oliviakingery.com, and her farm adventures can be found on Instagram at @pileatedfarms.

WELCOME aureleo sans, OUR NEW ASSISTANT EDITOR!

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We’re thrilled to welcome aureleo sans to the CHEAP POP family as our new Assistant Editor! So excited for all the great experience aureleo brings to the team—get to know her below!

aureleo sans (she/her) is a Colombian-American, non-binary, queer, formerly unhoused writer with a disability who resides in San Antonio, Texas. She is also a 2022 Tin House Scholar, a Macondista, a VONA alumnus, and a Periplus fellow. She was named the second-place winner of Fractured Lit's 2021 Micro Fiction Contest and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction. Her work has been published in The Offing, Shenandoah, and Electric Literature and is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Passages North, Salamander, and elsewhere.