With the baby boy’s birth came the wolves.

Outside the National Archives a man with a scraggly beard and no teeth sells four of my 8th grade boys t-shirts celebrating the steroids-enhanced, “Trumpinator” caricature of our current commander and chief.

At first Tenny and I rode the tunnel bus up the hill and ran right back down on the streets outside.

Congrats and good luck to our nominees! Click on the links to re-read their stories.

Six days of burnt bulbs. Of whispers, no vowels and nothing

Emergency contact refers to a person designated by an individual to be contacted in case of emergency: like lying unconscious in a hospital bed, overwhelmed by life in America...

I have my own secateurs. They are springy and sharp, still new. Each cut makes a crisp snip.

An inner urgency remains the lowest common denominator in my creative motivation.

When the walls are dismantled, the roof taken away I find myself sitting not on a chair but on a stump of a tree

You didn’t think you could do it either, but you don’t say that part out loud.

The Smart Search List of the Day is: Fee-Free Literary Essays feat. @agnimagazine.bsky.social @jmwwjournal.bsky.social @spotlyts.bsky.social et al. https://duotrope.com/search/smart/nonfiction/fee-free-literary-essays-hOLN59Uf

It's the son's birthday and they are headed to a steak restaurant and the dad is talking about steaks.

I think the one thing that unites the stories—at least in my mind—is the idea of grace.

White bass are running again, tempting time

White bass are running again, tempting time

The knee I’d scraped defending my cousin at the playground still stung, a dull, constant reminder of the fight.

The knee I’d scraped defending my cousin at the playground still stung, a dull, constant reminder of the fight.

Daisy had been his everything since forever, but especially after she got sick and he gave up his job and his friends and his garage projects to take care of her.

Daisy had been his everything since forever, but especially after she got sick and he gave up his job and his friends and his garage projects to take care of her.

Overestimating my sociability I go to an AWP afterparty at a pub across from the Convention Center and am the last person to be granted entry before the bouncer turns people away which is to say there-is-no-room-

Don’t force it. Let it come out in the form/style that it wants to.

Congrats to our 2027 Best of Net nominees! Thank you everyone for your continued submissions throughout the year.

and my mind folds immediately to Hiroo Onoda,

There’ll be a procession, the hours stretching like molasses on that most beautiful of days.

Sure, sure. It started with plants. Then cattle grazing the plants. Then people eating the cattle. That was supposed to be enough.

I have a recurring dream in which I live on a leaf that floats in a puddle.

JMWW is open for submissions September 1st-15th. We are reading all genres (except for Blended & Beyond) this month.

The tree of the mind bends in the wind and dreams of the savannah.

“Hold me to sleep,” I said to Mom. I promised myself over and over I didn't need her anymore, but this would be the last time.

He took her bowling because it sounded like the sort of thing fathers took children to.

Look here! Say much

Permission is probably the worst thing you can wait around for. You already have it. 

I walk down the stairs – concrete, the edges smoothed away by time and the march of many mothers.

Inside the girl is a shadow, a swelling mass or cursive hill, a memory

There’s a fist sized jagged rock being kicked down a sidewalk in Portland. There’s a guy kicking the rock, and this guy is filming the kicking and rolling because the act is slowly, over months, transforming the rock.

I emerged from the womb on the seventh day of the seventh month with a big ol’ birthmark on my ass, a magnificent splotch shaped like a spade—or, at least, that’s what Momma said.

Congrats Ari Contreras on her promotion to Associate Flash Fiction Editor!

Even if you’re someone who doesn’t “believe in climate change,” you know the weather has changed—it’s hotter; there’s less water, droughts, wildfires, floods, the ocean is warming, rising. Farmers are running out of water. What’s incomprehensible is that we even know how to stop it.

my father’s grease-stained hands tucked me in at night, the black sky my window.

“I’m just not very good at it.” I think about fractions. A humiliation to be only part of a number.

I’m not entirely sure when the old man showed up or why I took an interest in him.

Welcome Andrea Damic, Stephen D. Gibson, and Divyasri Krishnan.

Dziadek’s version of a smartphone was a Pomegranate; those plum red seeds captivated his attention, one by one

She told me, more than once, that she wanted me to grow up in one place, to make friends I’d keep forever, to know what home felt like.

Like this, Anisha hates living. Like this means unwashed, today again.

Open now! Submit to JMWW by August 15th. All categories (except for Poetry) are open, but some have limited entries.

I love a shoplifter and a Polaroid

I moved to Inwood, West Virginia during one of the worst phases of my life.

Ennie’s world was small, but it was massive—a continual orbit of Frank Sinatra, Sandy Becker, TV commercials, JFK, and the Beatles orbited his mind.

Here are the quintessential rules of etiquette that I think every submitter should remember.