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trampset,
a literary journal
If Only in His Nose
by Brett Stuckel...I asked the clerk at the smell store for the Vanillaroma rearview yellow-tree sunbaked-dashboard velvet-cloth light-and-sweet coffee aroma of Kenny Serafini’s Dodge Daytona on the way to high school at seven a.m. on a black-ice morning.
14 hours ago2 min read
The Strange Sad Ballad of Jimmy Sutton
by Dale Bridges...I grew up in a small town in rural Nebraska across the street from a kid named Jimmy Sutton who was born with a gun for a penis. This was back in the ‘80s before the Internet. The world was a bit more mysterious back then...
14 hours ago7 min read
Steel Wool from Steel Sheep
by Jenny M. Liu...How the sparks flew as shearers cut.
How the sheep gleamed so cleanly sleek.
How their trusting silver eyes blinked, baby calm.
14 hours ago2 min read
Have You Ever Seen a Unicorn?
by bailey loveless...I try to arrange the hair of her forelock to cover it. But the foam is as yellow as a highlighter. Misty the unicorn plushie did not transform into a horse—as in Chincoteague. She is now just Misty with a massive, oozing head wound.
14 hours ago4 min read
Bury Me in the Valdez Graveyard, the Place the Glacier Used to Be
by Mar Prax...If I have the time, I’d like to dig my own grave. I’d purchase a spot in the graveyard back home, the one with baby dolls and stained glass and bear prints adorning dead grass.
14 hours ago4 min read
A 10,000 Maniacs Song
by Jamie Zerndt...I think for some love can be like the first hit of a powerful drug. Maybe you just chase after that feeling for the rest of your life, but some never really reach it again.
Sep 2511 min read
A Jar of Dirt
by Mitchell Ny...We lie on the switchback, you atop my chest, and become immovable—like my nerves had been pulled gently from my navel. I am denervated meat and cooked clay.
Jul 313 min read
Fleeting Sun
by Elisabeth Giffin Speckman... They come to him again and again. He never needs to stalk, just holds a pinky to the sky and they come. They come and they land and he smiles. You try to snap a picture but it's always blurred.
14 hours ago2 min read
To expunge this memory from the record.
by Naa Asheley Ashitey...Watch the way the clavicle collapses
Beneath the heel of the boot.
The strain it placed on the bone
Was too fast for angiogenesis.
14 hours ago1 min read
Notes Toward a Midwestern Tarot
by Adam McOmber... Because even if you did, even if you drove two thousand miles, you wouldn’t have gone far enough. You’d bring all of it with you. Cornfields and Ruined Love and Backroad Graveyards.
14 hours ago2 min read
Macro Minds, Micro Talks with Mandira: Writer and Artist Koss
Interview by Mandira Pattnaik..."The world is not my oyster, and I find the lit world also, especially poetry, to be very colored by classism, the ism no one here talks about."
4 days ago13 min read
The Non-War Between Heart and Style
by Paul Chuks...Frame narratives are stories and plots with internal pocket-sized stories and subplots that meet at the nerving point of narrative.
4 days ago4 min read
Sonnet for Black Girls (and another poem)
by Paul Chuks...not even birds should
answer for the songs in their mouth.
not even lovers should
answer for the sins of their tongues.
Oct 12 min read
Book Review: Theophanies
Reviewed by Paul Chuks...In Theophanies, Sarah Ghazal Ali is a master of querying faith with poetry. She is sometimes investigative in her approach, sometimes confessional...
Sep 157 min read
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