Anti-Heroine

04/29/2026

"I am clear about cancer
and what it will do.

I can now see the outlines,
why she would want to die,
the image taking shape
the detail and color almost
unnecessary to imagine.

The damage is doing, being
done. The pen doesn’t have to
try."

Christian Collins CC The Picture - Vermont with my mother, September 2025 She is dying in a field that will die and be reborn in a new season, not guise. Take my picture. I am...

04/28/2026

"Packed my bags on one coast and fled
to the other. Pack up all my cares and woes.

The only time I ever felt safe
was when dad sang— Here I go,

singing low. If he was singing,
he wasn’t slaughtering."

Kyle Pearce CC Daughter of a Salesman Packed my bags on one coast and fled to the other. Pack up all my cares and woes. The only time I ever felt safe was when dad sang — Here I go, ...

04/26/2026

Last chance to submit to our May issue. Submissions close at midnight. Thank you to all who have shared their hearts with us so far. The issue is shaping up to be a thing of wild hope, of hard pastures yielding to a fickering light. Can't you almost see it through them darkening woods? A lighthouse calling. https://heroinchic.weebly.com

04/26/2026

"I will tell her out loud
that I am still here.

That I am learning
how to make room.

That I am building a life
where she does not have to disappear
in order for me to survive.

I am not trying
to go back.

I am trying
to bring her home."

-- Zahn CC Paper Boat There was a girl I used to be. I never got to tell her goodbye. She slipped out of my body somewhere between heartbreak and motherhood —​ quiet as breath leaving a...

04/25/2026

Some of it we remember darkly, some of it we remember sweetly. Few things are as hard to make sense of than the fact that even the most difficult families were not without their love. We try to untangle it as best we can in order to grow our gardens differently. Is this not the gift creativity gives us? We'll probably never have known it as truly as we did as children. Nevertheless, we tend to the new stories growing in us. We become the things we needed then. Submissions close in two days. Share your growing pains with us. https://heroinchic.weebly.com

04/25/2026

"One summer I drove roads that didn’t lead anywhere I recognized,
dust cloud following like a good dog, gravel and space,
a lone farmhouse... I drove with a void in my chest, drove
through lands so hushed I could almost believe
that silence was insight, that I was learning something
I wouldn’t have to learn again."

David Antis CC So Much of Living is Undoing It’s always a field, ghost of nectar on the wind, peaches devolved into lather the ground sips. On the porch, ristras the future will turn to...

04/24/2026

"Doing the things we ought to do, saying the things we ought to say." Inner work yields us results by no proper measure. It's small little noticings at first and last. How our insides feel slightly shifted. How subtle the change. How painful and beautiful and ongoing. It could go so differently. But we choose the struggle. We stay with it. It leads somewhere worth being led. Once we burned and burned and now we wonder why we needed to be so on fire to see it. That all we needed, like Susan Sontag says, to begin again, is our lives. Submissions close in 3 days. Share it with us, that noticing. https://heroinchic.weebly.com

04/24/2026

"you can’t
take it with you, whatever you’re trying to keep,
you can’t take nothing, I mean not anything
at all, not
if you love it more than even
your own precious sense of You"

Sean Benham CC Can’t Keep Anything A Cameron Winter Golden Shovel Go begging, admit that there’s something wrong and get on your knees praying, hope anyone is even out there to hear you...

04/23/2026

"When I see past myself, past my dim corner of suffering, I see the broad vista of all there is to love in this life and how we share it, all of us. I see I am not special, for which I thank the god of my understanding."

Sean Benham CC To Leave Behind a Trail of Light, a Trail of Goodness Decades ago, when my husband and I were young and still unmarried, our friend John’s parents frequently extended their house...

04/22/2026

"You were never broken.
Only scattered.
And when you gather yourself
it won’t be to be fixed
but to move
like something
that finally belongs
to itself."

Camille Bouliere CC Sea without Witness One day you’ll walk under those trees, same sky, and it will hurt differently. All the shaking, all the wrong rooms, all the unnamed hunger, not...

04/21/2026

"It's like anything in life, you just gotta walk into it", I heard someone say the other day. Just putting that down for whoever needs to hear it the way I needed to hear it. Submissions close in less than a week. What are you walking into these days? https://heroinchic.weebly.com

04/21/2026

"There were four kids: June (my mother), Frank, Gus, and Mimi. Living out of motels and old cars. Laundry in sinks. Family in tow. Money an afterthought.

You called beer “Milwaukee Tea” and drank too much of it."

Sean Benham CC Freight Johnny : I remember you always seemed so tall. You and your mother toured the South with a captured N**i fighter plane, selling war bonds at carnivals. You worked the...