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Your Impossible Voice

@yourimpossiblevoice.com

Publishing brash and velvety prose, poetry, CNF, translations, reviews, art, and more. https://linktr.ee/yivjournal

409 Posts1247 Follower 194 Folgt

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 6d ago

New from Art Beck: Personal Things — essays and poems! A miscellany of essays, poems, translations, and reminiscences from Shearsman Poetry Book that coalesced around a “rather difficult convalescence” the author now looks back on as the "formal introduction to his 85th year." bit.ly/454ioyK

Keith Woodruff @keithwoodruff.bsky.social · last wk.

Sending children through the mail. Chekhov and Bowie. It’s all here. Big happy to appear in @yourimpossiblevoice.com wrote this with the house and mailbox in mind where I lived in my teens in the Michigan countryside. Much thanks to @keithjpowell.com

Your Impossible Voice@yourimpossiblevoice.com · last wk.

"hey, you look pretty badass out there. Weathering this weather. I am one of those people who can’t get warm in winter. You can see me peeking out the window above the flower bed, looking like a nomad in my furred coat hood." #flashfiction Letters to My Mailbox by @keithwoodruff.bsky.social!

Emily Hall @emhall47.bsky.social · last wk.

Incredible moments of beauty in this piece! #writesky #grief #fladshfiction #write

Your Impossible Voice@yourimpossiblevoice.com · last wk.

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · last wk.

Letters to My Mailbox | Your Impossible Voice

By Keith Woodruff — Monday dear 9535 hey, you look pretty badass out there. Weathering this weather. I am one of those people who can't get warm in winter.

yourimpossiblevoice.com

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2w ago

"I am off kilter, I am out of whack, and any other saying that softly describes a body that will not function as it should. There is an echo of a sound and it could be a cleaver, the slip of bone on bone, a tear in a vertebral artery." Don't miss To Cleave by @rachelmsmithnz1.bsky.social!

To Cleave | Your Impossible Voice

By Rachel Smith — The C spine snakes upwards; from its mouth lines of blue and red and mustard yellow. Blue for veins, red for arteries, and yellow where the spinal cord merges into brainstem.

yourimpossiblevoice.com

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2w ago

To Cleave | Your Impossible Voice

By Rachel Smith — The C spine snakes upwards; from its mouth lines of blue and red and mustard yellow. Blue for veins, red for arteries, and yellow where the spinal cord merges into brainstem.

yourimpossiblevoice.com

Matt Jakubowski (he/him)@mattjakubowski.bsky.social · 3w ago

My debut chapbook, “Ghost in the Rain,” received a lovely review from the literary journal @yourimpossiblevoice.com. Grateful for this thoughtful, close reading of the 12 stories in my collection. yourimpossiblevoice.com/review-ghost...

What keeps us alive?
Words. Stories.
The stories in this collection take on mystical, mythical scenes that stretch our imaginations and language to their limits.
- Kelsey Squire Reviewing for
Your Impossible Voice

Matt Jakubowski (he/him)@mattjakubowski.bsky.social · last mo.

My debut chapbook got reviewed and it’s a rave. Beautifully written. I’m still processing. So grateful to @yourimpossiblevoice.com for such a close, thoughtful reading of my work. yourimpossiblevoice.com/review-ghost...

Review: Ghost in the Rain by Matthew Jakubowski | Your Impossible Voice

Review by Kelsey Squire — In Matthew Jakubowski’s chapbook Ghost in the Rain, the story titled “Particles of Death” opens with a question: “What is it that keeps us alive?”

yourimpossiblevoice.com

Matt Jakubowski (he/him)@mattjakubowski.bsky.social · last mo.

Thrilled to have this thoughtful, stellar review in @yourimpossiblevoice.com for my debut story collection, “Ghost in the Rain” (Bottlecap Press). Review link: yourimpossiblevoice.com/review-ghost... Link to book: bottlecap.press/collections/...

Fiction Collective Two @fictioncollective2.bsky.social · 4w ago

Our 2025 Doctorow Prize winner Karen An-hwei Lee on MARIMO, MON AMOUR (coming this fall) in @yourimpossiblevoice.com ~ read more: yourimpossiblevoice.com/karen-an-hwe...

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · last mo.

Hovering exquisitely on the line between flash fiction and prose poem, @mattjakubowski.bsky.social "uses deft twists and turns of language to launch readers into completely unexpected scenes, each grappling with unique takes on this question." #flashfiction

Review: Ghost in the Rain by Matthew Jakubowski | Your Impossible Voice

Review by Kelsey Squire — In Matthew Jakubowski’s chapbook Ghost in the Rain, the story titled “Particles of Death” opens with a question: “What is it that keeps us alive?”

yourimpossiblevoice.com

Matt Jakubowski (he/him)@mattjakubowski.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Hi, friends. Some news! My debut chapbook, “Ghost in the Rain,” is out now from Bottlecap Press! It’s got 12 micro & flash stories: lost ghosts, immortal siblings & haunted lovers. I poured years of my heart into this book. So proud & thrilled to see it in the world! bottlecap.press/products/gho...

Ghost in the Rain: Stories, by Matthew Jakubowski

Prose, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features. In these 12 microfictions and flash stories, Matthew Jakubowski traces a terrain of otherworldly-ness populated by lost ghosts, haunted lovers, immo...

bottlecap.press

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · last mo.

Smoke by Gabriela Alemán, translated by Dick Cluster, “Rather than a work of ‘historical fiction,’ per se, Smoke is a literary work that indagates and interpellates the concepts of history, historicity, and historiography, while asserting the collective nature of knowledge and memory.”

Smoke by Gabriela Alemán, translated by Dick Cluster - Latin American Literature Today

“Rather than a work of ‘historical fiction,’ per se, Smoke is a literary work that indagates and interpellates the concepts of history, historicity, and historiography, while asserting the collective ...

latinamericanliteraturetoday.org

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · last mo.

Look straight ahead. Keep your eye on the light. Wait for it. Go. Now! Tuesday #flashfiction: Sign Language by Gary Finke.

Sign Language | Your Impossible Voice

By Gary Fincke — My thirteen-year-old daughter Olivia and I drove out the strip tonight for dinner like we do every week on Wednesday when I have her.

yourimpossiblevoice.com

Pam Avoledo @pamavoledo.bsky.social · last mo.

My flash, a retelling of Cinderella, is out today. Thank you to @yourimpossiblevoice.com!

A Princess From Another Land | Your Impossible Voice

By Pam Avoledo — A glass slipper is found in a closet, you: a) Start to sing with the birds.The bluejay tells you it has traveled from a park in Canada. Have you been to Canada, it asks, and you say o...

yourimpossiblevoice.com

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · last mo.

#flashfiction Tuesday: Pop quiz time. Are you ready for "A Princess From Another Land" by @pamavoledo.bsky.social?

A Princess From Another Land | Your Impossible Voice

yourimpossiblevoice.com

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · last mo.

Our final poem from issue 34 arrives courtesy of Jo Ann Clark. Stop by and check out Abduction III! tr.ee/iJUgIoants

Abduction III by Jo Ann Clark First unmanned—un-aliened, make that—.
First starboard-tack at the Red Planet.
Scores of others encapsulated here, too.
Snatched dolls, transitioning objects blink-blinking

impatience when tipped on/off our axes—there
yet? there yet?—, funhouse-mirror Mona
Lisas smiling into the domes of visors
whose gilting is radiation proof if not fun-
ctional—fool proof? fool proof?—So says the man-
ufacturer labels printed in our mothers’ tongues.
Soon

we’re far beyond the pull of a star

we’d called Sun. An earthmoon called Moon. Nostalgia
sets in for their swing and glow. The trippiness
takes hold.
Read More at the Link In Our Bio

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

"Properly Dark" by L.M. Moore appears in Your Impossible Voice #34! tr.ee/R0tggMTmr9

Properly Dark By L.M. Moore My memory’s not what it should be. Not for someone my age. Sometimes I forget where I parked my truck. But that’s not even it: I’ll be looking at it, standing there in the parking lot, holding grocery bags, and not recognize it. Sometimes I repeat myself, get lost inside my own tangled sentences.

When the guys at the bar start up a conversation, I can tell they regret it. They stare at their own lonely faces in the mirror behind the bar and start to clear their throats.

But far-off things, I can remember them like yesterday. Like today. Like I could walk up the steps to a burned house and step inside.

I can still hear the radio playing on Mom’s old Sears boombox, the one she’d kept on the kitchen counter since I was a little kid. That last morning, it was playing a country song, some goofy shit about a guy spilling coffee down the front of his jeans. Read More at the Link in Our Bio.

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

Everyone, we've been away but we're back with new highlights from issue 34. Stop by "Apartment 304" by Rowan MacDonald and catch up! tr.ee/kR63DhE7lR

Apartment 304 by Rowan MacDonald The apartment was on the fifth floor, and the building had no lift. I barely knew where I was, had lost sense of time and place somewhere over the Pacific. I had been living on Monday for two or three days. I could barely lift my legs. And those stairs.

WELCOME HOME

The multi-colored letters were strung across the door how birthday banners hang above someone with cake. It was doubtful I could stomach cake. My body craved sleep, or something resembling it. I wanted to sleep for twenty-two hours like koalas did.

She accidentally smashed the koala candle I gave her at the airport.

Slipped from her hands onto the polished floor at the arrivals gate. I hoped it wasn’t a bad omen. The welcome message across the door was a nice touch though. I reminded myself of that—despite nothing feeling like home, and everything screaming foreign. Read More at the Link in our Bio.

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

The Sigh of a Man by Davey Long. Long's work has been published in the UVic Community Campus Garden journal, Sundew, Wayfarer Magazine, and 149 Review. She serves as creative nonfiction editor for The Warren Undergraduate Review. tr.ee/-mKu5Yj5wF

The Sigh of a Man By Davey Long camping in the back seat of my boyfriend’s car. he’s trying to explain engines to me: clutch piston crankshaft axle pressure explosion he creases his forehead and i am a toddler.

we are four feet away from the hood and my shoulders are sore from hunching in our makeshift bed. he’s been too quiet since i don’t get the transition from piston to crankshaft. palms swish the sleeping bag. i’m sorry i don’t get engines, i’m actually a really smart girl— i can turn the night sky into a dashboard.

we peer upside down out the window at the faint milky way and the airplanes are like radio dials. he breaks the image to shove his ribcage between read more at the link in

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

Ricardo Bernhard's "To Understand Light" can be found in our latest issue. Bernhard is a Brazilian writer and diplomat currently based in South Africa. His fiction has appeared in Neon Origami and is forthcoming in Litbreak Magazine. tr.ee/fkmsDTE2nk

To Understand Light By Ricardo Bernhard When Porter sits on his favorite bench in late afternoons in March, there’s a quality to the square’s palette that takes him to the faux Eliseu Visconti painting he did while bored in his thirties.

A lady wearing a red hat, drinking tea before one of the obelisks along the path, distracted by some pigeons, in the Luxembourg Gardens. Is that what’s happening in the painting? That Porter was able to reproduce it perfectly without having the answer only proves to him that light is its own language. The contrast between the bright obelisk and the dark tree trunks, the green of the leaves’ tapestry dialoguing with the red hat,

the shade and the sun engaged in a dance significant enough to produce life, if you wish. How did he achieve that? With mirrors and intuition, which is just another word for knowledge that presents itself as the clarity of night. read more at the link in our bio

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

It's almost the weekend and you deserve something special. Check out "Little White Monkeys" by Manshuk Kali and translated by @slava8.bsky.social appearing in our newest issue! tr.ee/GUrbjAIzdG

Little White Monkeys by Manshuk Kali, translated by Slava Faybysh The woman lays the ultrasound results on her doctor’s table, to the right of the desk calendar advertising low-hormone birth control pills and next to the life-sized model of the female

He jots down her medications on the pad and recommends sexual abstinence. The woman is on edge but still listening to her doctor as she glances at the wall clock. But by the time the appointment is over, his words are barely distinguishable in the pressurized tick … tock … tick … tock …. read more at the link in our bio

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

Incoming! Don't miss out on "Missiles Like Low Ceilings" by Will Falk in YIV 34! Falk is a poet, attorney, and community organizer. His first poetry collection is When I Set the Sweetgrass Down (Wayfarer Books, 2023). tr.ee/dxIwNpEfVV

Missiles Like Low Ceilings by Will Falk Missiles like low ceilings, helmet-to-helmet contact,
or a ski accident. You don’t remember snow but you do
remember your basement. You’ve never had a basement.
You do now. You used to have children. You never had
children. You don’t have children now. You’re not sure
if that should make you sad or whether you’re sick
of cleaning up vomit, baby shit, bits of violently vibrant
coloring book confetti. But that party already ended.

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

Two Millimeters In by Jade Kleiner from our latest issue! Kleiner is a writer from New England. Among other places, her poetry can be found in Neologism Poetry Journal and manywor(I)ds, her haiku in Haikuniverse and Cold Moon Journal, and her fiction in Bright Flash Literary Review. tr.ee/wyEFtz1ugz

Two Millimeters In By Jade Kleiner Doing her mascara, Ashley more than poked her left eye. The applicator went two millimeters in. A yellow fluid came out and Ashley gagged. Her name had become Ashley only recently.

You could poke through the helixes in her cells, unspool her intestines, invert and splay her lungs, lay out every inch of her veins, and you wouldn’t find her name printed on any of it. Ashley existed as a legal construct approved by a judge and announced in a newspaper, an arcane legal requirement of changing your name for the pre-internet debt collectors.

And when the applicator went two millimeters into her eye she had sworn like a man, loudly, gutturally, because she was alone and her guard was down. Then she swore more quietly, more softly, more weakly, more hopefully. read more at the link in our bio

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

David Anson Lee makes his YIV debut with After the Simulation Learns to Listen in issue 34! David Anson Lee is a physician, poet, and philosopher. His work has appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears, Braided Way, Right Hand Pointing, Eunoia Review, Silver Birch Press, and other journals. tr.ee/G9iT5QPg4P

After the Simulation Learns to Listen By David Anson Lee I have watched universes / fail their stress tests. / I have watched one succeed / by accident.

It began with listening: / humans to oceans, / machines to uncertainty, / nations to the cost / of pretending forever / was free. / AI stopped trying to replace / and learned how to translate./ Quantum engines practiced / restraint: / too many answers / require wisdom, not speed.

Wars paused / when silence went viral. / Inequality shrank / once it was named / long enough to bruise.

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

James Nulick returns to YIV with an excerpt from his novel. Don't miss "Montara" in issue 34! James Nulick is the author of several highly acclaimed novels including Plastic Soul, The Moon Down to Earth, and Valencia. “Montara” is an excerpt from his new novel-in-progress, Saint Velour.

Montara By James Nulick It’s hard to tell time this close to the sea, it’s always grey and misty here, like the sun is camera-shy. I don’t wear a watch, watches remind me of old men, like Papa, but my iPhone is close.

I don’t go to school, we’re always on the road, moving. I’m never in one place long enough to see my shadow. Papa wears a watch. Papa’s old, Mama’s not as old as him. Today I’m wearing sandals, no socks, basketball shorts, my Yosemite National Park T-shirt, a surfer bracelet of gold and orange string, and a handmade necklace

Mama made especially for me from a silver chain, white-cubed letters NICO gathered at the bottom of the chain, the edges of each cube rounded, babyproof. read more at the link in our bio

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

Missing Bake Off? Garth Robinson has a piece to help with your Hollywood craving. Robinson lives along the Chesapeake Bay and holds an MFA from Hollins University. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in DIAGRAM, Iron Horse Literary Review, Oyster River Pages, and elsewhere. tr.ee/Seh7XRRiTi

Hot Tub Paul Hollywood By Garth Robinson Jarrett’s hot tub arrived and my heart ached. What a life of impossible good fortune, I thought. It was the same as if he had bought a one-million-dollar yacht, or a fridge that talked at you and made ice on command.

In October the town hosted a pumpkin-weighing contest. Each year, Jarrett loaded his pumpkins with different combinations of chemicals. Still, they never grew large enough to qualify. He backed the trailer up into his pumpkin patch and deposited the hot tub right there. That fall he didn’t grow a single pumpkin. Instead, he spent his time building a gray slat shed around the hot tub.

Have you seen Jarrett’s cabana? my father asked. Later, I realized that Jarrett resembled Paul Hollywood. This is a British TV actor who watches people as they bake cakes. read more at the link in our bio

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

Next up in issue 34 is Poor Thing by Claire Salvato! Salvato's work has appeared in The New York Times Learning Network, The Eunoia Review, Nowhere Girl Collective, and Magus Mabus magazine. Click the link in our bio for more.

Poor Thing By Claire Salvato I’d begun practicing feeling the way I wanted to. Last night, I dreamt I was standing in front of an open landscape composed entirely of garbage:

cellophane tubes, striped straws, metal braces, cobalt magnets, lithium batteries, soup cans, plastic bags, leather fabric, frosted wine bottles, apple cores, dryer sheets, lint fibers. All of it piling up and up, springing out of the Earth like tuberous roots, blooming like megaflora. I listened to the soft hiss of my breath as I tried shoving all the air out of my lungs.

I stood at the edge of a cliff in my dressing gown, clinging to my white fleece like it was going to pacify me. I wasn’t angry. I remember feeling tired and nauseous and sick with grief—the way you get when you know something has to come out of you, like when something inside of you wants to go. read more at the link in our bio

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

Have you stopped by our latest issue? If not you are missing New in Town, a triptych of poems by Alex Dodt! Dodt's poems, stories, and essays can be found in Epiphany, BOOTH, Florida Review, and others, which he shares on various social media hellscapes @alexisapoet. tr.ee/omE3Nx7zUH

New in Town By Alex Dodt

We descended on rented birds of fire, runted gods
porting power cords and lording neck pillows.
We pulled the chute and touched down
outside Terre Haute. We putted in on a hometown
tank of gas; hoofed it halfway from damn near
Milwaukee; emerged from fields, our past on hard
plastic wheels. We are not tourists. We are
eager to own and waiting for you

to open your door. We are hovering in the home
goods aisle at Target like that daddy
longlegs in the corner of your bathroom
watching you floss. . . . that cartoon cloud of limbs
and POW? We got broken up with, fired, evicted,
or broke up, quit, packed up
without forwarding address; got restless, foot-
loose, a snake in one or more of our boots, or had no
boots and wanted to feel the snow; got disowned,
discharged, disillusioned, or had a surprise
child, a leaky premonition, a fender-bender and never

looked back. We regret. We
[redacted]. We shouldn’t be here today, one way
or another: errant blade missing our head
or a vein by an inch, or two years
flinging open every door looking for an exit,
or the impossibly calculable probability of that
one ancestor running into that other ancestor
then . . . and could we not stretch

read more at the link in our bio

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 2mo ago

In Heaven Everything is Fine by Grant Maierhofer appears in our latest issue! Maierhofer is the author of over ten books of fiction and nonfiction, and the founding editor of Index Press. bit.ly/4f96M3H

In Heaven Everything is Fine by Grant Maierhofer. It was June. He sat on the couch, bound firmly in his marriage, his fatherhood, his life. The dog sat next to him, or lay further down the couch on a small pillow.

His youngest daughter dangled a small toy in front of the dog’s face, sort of mock-hypnotizing the dog with a growing excitement, a ferocity. No, not ferocity. It was simply a tiny bit more aggressive, and that was all. He had yelled at the dog to stop eating different things, which he did at various times—as did the mother—throughout the day—and had become self-conscious about yelling at the dog.

The mother was upstairs talking to somebody. There were several toys on the ground that the dog could eat, and chew, and play with all it wanted. There were others it could not. read more at the link in our bio