Congratulations!

We are over the moon to have prose poems from The Mackinaw honoured in Best Small Fictions and two honoured in Best Microfictions!!!!

Congratulations to Mikki Aronoff and Cassandra Atherton for the inclusion of their works in Best Small Fictions, to follow below.

Congratulations to Alexis Rhone Fancher and Francine Witte for the inclusion of their works in Best Microfiction, to follow below.

We encourage everyone to purchase each of these anthologies to support the small presses that publish them and the writers inside.

Best Microfictions
Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke, guest editor Dawn Raffel
Pelekinesis Books

https://www.bestmicrofiction.com/

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Best Small Fictions
Michelle Elvy and Nathan Leslie, guest editor Robert Shapard
Alternating Current Press

https://altcurrentpress.com/best-small-fictions/

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Thread 
 
1. Thread has no memory, thread has no mercy. Mercy is something you bestow. There is no bestowing with thread. Thread is dispassionate even though it is usually blamed for problems. Take tangling, for instance. You couldn’t tangle thread unless it was there to be tangled, so its presence makes it look guilty. Same for tethering. You could tie your dog or your uncle to a pole and they wouldn’t like it, especially if there’s no shade, but is it the tether’s fault? 
 
2. Cotton gin? Not what you think.
 
3. Playtime weaves jet and crimson dreams, takes her to the edge of the woods. A cowbell clangs her home. Her father is out back with the hose. He grows cotton plants, a dozen or so. It’s just a hobby. Her mother sits on the porch and waits for the bolls to open so she can spin and weave the fluffy fibers they encase.  Later, they’ll eat a dinner of leftovers off plastic placemats with scenes from Yellowstone and The Appalachian Trail, and then it’s early to bed.
 
4. To mercerize is to chemically treat fibres to impart strength and luster and reduce fabric shrinkage. Shrinkage is what happens when penis meets pool.
 
5. Break down a cotton plant and you get lint, seeds, seed hulls, stalks, stems or canes, roots, leaves, bolls, and flowers. Break down a flower and you get tears. When she (see #3) started to flower, someone stalked her. She was afraid to turn around and see who it was, but she was able to sense his shadow. She quickened her steps the closer she got to home.
 
6. Her grandmother took an old sheet, cut and sewed it and embroidered her a Russian peasant blouse for her birthday. She cross-stitched it red and black to mark the knots of their lives. The stain of revolution, of iron, weigh heavy. She is thirteen and wants a t-shirt.
 
7. Linters are the short fuzz on cotton plants. They provide cellulose for making plastics, explosives and other products, perhaps the tugging strings of tampons.
 
8. Ariadne’s Thread is a method for solving a problem with multiple apparent means of proceeding. Take our flowering stalkee (see #5). How can she evade that person? She could disguise herself, but for her scent. The stalker’s nostrils expand to take her in. Okay, let’s get real. Throw that guy in the clinker. Do you really want to lock up a budding young girl? No, you’d sit her down and talk to her. A lot. Until, years later, tired of her sulking, you send her away to college, where she has a crush on her physics professor. She fastens her eyes on his thighs, invents theories about cotton thread and crucibles. Her heat is need, is threat. Later, a real lover leaves her for another. Miffed, she stitches his photo between two pages of her sketchbook. Trapped, airless. Empath that she is, she starts gasping for air, runs to the bathroom in a panic. Where are her pills? Arachne scuds across the shower stall floor. Thin limbs, fire on the belly. Black widow. She nearly slips on the tile floors escaping to the bedroom. She opens the window, sticks her head out over the fire escape. She cannot read the stars, as the city lights are too bright in the muggy heat. She unravels some, then some more, then rewinds her way back to bed. Problem solved.
 
9. A Harlequin Dane lugs his tonnage past her and a Vietnam vet in the coffee line, gets them talking of their fondness for oversized dogs. Both of them now too old to manage. Their thirst knits them till they get to the counter. She drives home, not recognizing the flesh and fur that flanked her that morning. Someone’s walking little dogs just like mine. Her dog-walker on his phone. All sense spooling from her head. 
 
10. Cotton belongs to the genus Gossypium but learned early to keep its mouth shut. It knows what kind of trouble telling tales out of school can bring (see #1-9). 
 
11. She careens between the moistness of stream banks. 
 
Blessed thread, holy filament, 
tie my heat to my wanting, 
flame my dread,
make safe my travels.  
 
Skeins of copper wire bird-nesting the dark. 

Mikki Aronoff

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Tokyo Panorama Suite
 
1.         Century Southern Tower
At 5am the sky wraps the bottom of our king size bed in a thick lavender stripe. Your hand is resting on your cheek, fingers fluttering against your eyebrow, as light from Docomo clocktower tints your pillow lemon and lilac. I have grown into a deep silence, and into the cramped voicelessness of morning. Time presses, but I’m the only one who feels its weight. I smooth out crinkles in the bottom sheet with the balls of my feet and you turn toward me—too early to rise, too late to dream, you fill the space between my arms and thighs in a tight enfolding of skin and bone. Later, we wait for the sound of the trains, imagine their coloured stripes snaking through the mazes beneath us. Just above the tip of my toe, Mount Fuji is a tiny white triangle.
 
2.         Kama-Asa
In an intimate handshake, the saleswoman fits the knife’s thick green handle into the crease of my palm. It nestles there as my fingers encircle it. I chop the air in rocking motions, imaging onions, heads of garlic, habaneros; and the rhythm builds in my hobbyhorse wrist. When I hold up the blade, my face is a bisected, matte rectangle. The woman places the steel in a vice, hammering my name, before I trace the hiragana’s indentations like reverse braille, learning its inflections and gradients. At the airport, as the exit doors slide open, the customs officer asks if the knife is for cooking. My fingers curl again into my palm.
 
3.         Yomiuri Land
On the ferris wheel, you pop a button on my long coat as you press your knee between my thighs. I hear the clink on the bottom of the carriage as the disc spins off the edge. We’re a third of the way to the top and the shadows of spokes and struts snag on our bodies. With your olive coat pulled up to your waist and my stockings binding my ankles, I free fall in your arms. Turning my head, I see the roller coaster climbing its track before catapulting into a cloudy sky.
 
4.         Narita Shrine
Your arm is a question mark around my waist, a curve that begins at one hip and ends at the other with the round of your elbow. We walk from the hotel lobby into the lucent morning as darkness lies between your arm and the small of my back. It’s a sort of beginning—squeezing down sloping paths as our footsteps count the years like a series of stretched ellipses. When an ending nags at my collarbone, I sweep it under my hair and touch the back of your neck. At Narita-san Shinsho-ji temple I perform misogi, rinsing my hands and mouth. You feed the gosanke koi in Ryuchi pond and I watch mottled sunrise bloom on their cycloid scales.
 
Cassandra Atherton

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​Cruel Choices
 
When my husband’s two grown daughters are in town, the three of them go to the movies, or play pool. Share dinner every night. Stay out late. I haven’t seen my stepdaughters since my son’s funeral in 2007. When people ask, I say nice things about the girls, as if we had a relationship. When people ask if I have children I change the subject. Or I lie, and say no. Or sometimes I put them on the spot and tell them yes, but he died. They look aghast and want to know what happened. Then I have to tell them about the cancer. Sometimes, when the older daughter, his favourite, is in town, and she and my husband are out together night after night, I wonder what it would be like if that was me, and my boy, if life was fair, and, rather than my husband having two children and I, none, we each had one living child. His choice which one to keep. Lately when people ask, I want to lie and say yes, my son is a basketball coach; he married a beautiful Iranian model with kind eyes, and they live in London with their twin girls who visit every summer; the same twins his girlfriend aborted with my blessing when my son was eighteen, deemed too young for fatherhood, and everyone said there would be all the time in the world.
 
Alexis Rhone Fancher

This was also published in Askew, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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Where Did You Go?

I went thin as pears, all sliced-up and see-through. I went halfway to happy. I went to a place where I don’t have to answer. I went sniff in the air. I went to the arms of another. I went bent as bones. I went to a job without a computer. Where I stand in a field and the sun wets my back. I went behind the numbers on a wristwatch. I went hundreds of miles from your eyes. I went all unmarriage and you cannot stop me. I went where your questions stop smack in the air and long before they can get to my ears. I went to before I even know you. That spot in the morning about to begin, that curl of a mouth turning into a smile, that moment a flower opens up like a hand.

Francine Witte

This poem was first published at Unbroken Journal.