iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 24/08/2026

Just over a week left to get your submissions into Your Impossible Voice! yourimpossiblevoice.submittable.com/submit

Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 31/07/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 22/06/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 18/06/2026

"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.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 17/06/2026

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.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 09/06/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 08/06/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 05/06/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 04/06/2026

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.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 03/06/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 02/06/2026

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.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 01/06/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 29/05/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 28/05/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 27/05/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 26/05/2026

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

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 22/05/2026

Enjoy an excerpt from Witness to the Non-Arrival—the first of two poems by @stacecjohnson.bsky.social in our latest issue! bit.ly/3PWx9zB

witness to the non-arrival By Stacey C. Johnson "i. echo logic some inherit land, and others silence. I took in the riddle of loam— where the unspoken ones are buried and in the vapor rising from forgotten names,

the echo of their absence bewildered my mother tongue, a language orphaned of reply. Her grammar hewn from hunger, each clause reaching through absence. read more at the link in our bio

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 21/05/2026

Garima Chhikara is a writer from Bangalore, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Forge Literary Magazine, Hypertext Magazine, Hobart, Cherry Tree, Lost Balloon, BULL, and elsewhere. Read the full story now! tr.ee/TjQbNl6C3g

My Priest Predicted I’d Be a Spy By Garima Chhikara "My kundali—my Hindu astrology chart—says I must not keep a weapon at home. That’s not even a thing in kundalis. I googled it, checked my sister’s too."

Strange. He didn’t predict an armed officer or a serial killer. Also, I don’t live in America, or plan to, unless a few crores I don’t have suddenly buy me a visa. No guns here in Bengaluru, only startups. Unless he meant spy. A real spy wouldn’t keep a weapon at home. Maybe “teacher” or “designer” were just cover jobs.

Maybe I’ve been recruited by RAW or a ghost agency using this code. Writing this might be my round-one clearance. read more at the link in our bio

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 20/05/2026

Let's do issue 34! tr.ee/3DcpE2V3cG

Slingin’ Pearl By Itto and Mekiya Outini Everything was going according to plan until Sequoya had to take a shit. “Guys,” she radioed over to Jared and Cleo in the cruiser, “it’s a code brown. Cover me.”

They’d never agreed on a system of codes. It would’ve made no difference if they had. They wouldn’t have covered her. They hadn’t heard. Jared’s elbow had knocked the walkie-talkie’s volume knob a few minutes earlier, when he’d reached into the backseat for the cocaine.

“Is this really the best time for drugs?” Cleo had wondered aloud. She’d just rolled a joint and was smoking it, but weed wasn’t drugs. Weed was just weed. It was legal now, mostly, and anyway, they were the authorities. They were the ones with the cop car. Read more at the link in our bio.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 11/12/2025

Guest editor @alvinlu.bsky.social said it best when he described Another Place by Addy Evenson as "a perfect and poisonous dose of Southern Gothic." What more do you need to know? bit.ly/492zcZE

Excerpt from Another Place by Addy Evenson: Two months ago, a man she had never seen before promised her his life. He coaxed her behind the back shed and undid her tulle dress.

“You ever think about touchin’ ‘em?” he asked.

“What?”

“Their bodies.”

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 10/12/2025

Delighted to have @addisonzeller.bsky.social back in our latest issue with not one but two micros! bit.ly/4pqfUmR #flashfiction

Excerpt from Point of Comparison by Addison Zeller: Of the lawn, a photograph exists, dated more than a century ago. The size of the camera has reduced over time, but at the date of the photo, it was still clumsy and large, the lens still projecting from a kind of foliated snout, and the face behind it still obscured by funereal drapery.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 09/12/2025

"Crow dreams an eerie peacefulness laced with fear" is the second of two new poems from Peter Grandbois in our latest issue. Check them both out today! bit.ly/48I7tvR

Excerpt from Crow dreams an eerie peacefulness laced with fear by Peter Grandbois: And wakes, trembling at the emptiness of it, the vast cavities / And begs God to squeeze him, to crush out the air of protest / The wind carrying a hornet’s nest buzzing is the only response / He chews on the answer until it’s dark on both sides, / Until it cracks

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 08/12/2025

We’ve all been there—propositioning our therapists for some light nude modeling. Catch a glimpse in The Robinson-Barber Thesis by Joyce Meggett in the latest issue of Your Impossible Voice! bit.ly/48VDv94

Excerpt from The Robinson-Barber Thesis by Joyce Meggett: Maybe I’ll draw you. That’d be rich, right? My parents would be paying you to sit for me. We have a deal, okay? You don’t have to take your clothes off if you don’t want to, although it would be good practice for me. It’s harder than you would think to hire a nude model when you don’t have a real studio. Or maybe you’d want to wear a costume.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 05/12/2025

The final poem from our new issue burns bright! Finish off your week with "past is a flame" by Karen Earle!

Excerpt from past is a flame by Karen Earle: bird-boned singer I / smoke-and-mirror you / minor-keyed to confusion/hovering
ash-to-ash auras all / star-prick constellations/the broken wheel the lucky strikes / in spider-sticky spins

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 04/12/2025

Who said family get-togethers had to be dull? Pull up a chair for "Brother From Another" by Jaryd Porter! bit.ly/48S9Ptq

Excerpt from "Brother From Another" by Jaryd Porter: We were three blocks from Mom’s house, and all of the houses looked copied and pasted with different earth tones and a few objects on the driveway and porch to make them look lived in. The whole neighborhood looked like a white town, and appearances weren’t deceiving—my sister Paula and I were the blackest people on the block, and we were only half.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 01/12/2025

A truly great short story tells you everything you need to know about it from its very first line. This is one of them. Check out "Storing Dinosaurs" by @supernaturalfeat.com in our latest issue! bit.ly/3XY7fMa

Excerpt from Storing Dinosaurs by Dan Weaver: A fter Carmen married Phillip I couldn’t chase her with my lizards no more since it scared Phillip and he would hide in the room and the one time it made it so that Carmen couldn’t drive Phillip to work and he was late and he didn’t want to tell his boss that Carmen was getting threatened with lizards.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 28/11/2025

Congratulations to this year's @bestmicrofiction.bsky.social nominees! Check us out online to read all of this year's award nominations. Ryan Griffith @sarpsozdinler.bsky.social L.F. Khouri Mathieu Parsy @ashdoeswords.bsky.social

Congratulations to our Best Microfiction nominees: The Abbreviated Kafka by Ryan Griffith; Ash Wednesday by Sarp Sozdinler; The Lemon Trees Don't Care You're Sexy (But I Do) by L.F. Khouri; Your Body is a Wolf by Mathieu Parsy; The Summer After Kurt Cobain Died by Ashleigh Adams

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 28/11/2025

What could be better reading for the day after Thanksgiving than a story about family? A story about family by Robert Ontiveros is what. bit.ly/4p8NzkU

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 28/11/2025

Congratulations to our nominees for Best Small Fictions 2025 (or 2026, however they calculate it)! @hughbehmsteinberg.bsky.social Dana Wall @brettbbl.bsky.social @sagetyrtle.bsky.social @addisonzeller.bsky.social

Congratulations to our Best Small Fictions nominees: The Last Lipstick Factory by Dana Wall; Hotdogs by Hugh Behm-Steinberg; Anthem by Brett Biebel; A List of the Reasons Women Feel Shame by Sage Tyrtle; Of the Lovers by Addison Zeller

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 26/11/2025

The great Peter Grandbois returns to YIV with two new poems in our latest issue! bit.ly/43Ndxlq

Excerpt from "Crow Calls From the Top of a Pine" by Peter Grandbois" With a voice made of rain drawn from the deep / grey of another Ohio winter. // You swore you would not let him in again, / but here he is threatening or apologizing, // you can no longer tell the difference."

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 25/11/2025

We're thrilled to have @israelbonilla.bsky.social —"One of the great prose stylists around right now" according to our very own @alvinlu.bsky.social— back in our latest issue! bit.ly/4rkNQT7

Excerpt from “from Cityscape with Sybarites” by Israel Bonilla alongside the cover of Your Impossible Voice #33: "Guadalajara has never been for the sober. It preys upon the senses of the robust and the frail, which results in murderous apathy and in unhinged receptiveness. I needed, at the very least, a cup of coffee and a quiet table. Nevertheless, I had to gain distance. I couldn’t afford an encounter with Aparicio.”

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 24/11/2025

Congratulations to @illepitaph.bsky.social, @geoliminal.bsky.social, Elisabeth Sheffield, Peter Grandbois, @kabusharekh.bsky.social, and @molarawood.bsky.social—this year's Pushcart nominees!

Congratulations to our Pushcart Nominees: The Temperance of Heretics by Steve Barbaro; Leeuwenhoek’s Lens by Eric Williams; Cate’s Upstate or Fashion After the Apocalypse by Elisabeth Sheffield; Crow calls from the top of a pine by Peter Grandbois; Clotheslines by Khalil AbuSharekh; Requiem for the Golden City by Molara Wood

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 24/11/2025

Don't miss "Blueberries" by Edward Manzi in our latest issue! bit.ly/44vKnY7

Excerpt from Blueberries by Edward Manzi: "Excuse my ambition, it’s lacking. / I’m not even here. Isn’t that enough? //The blueberry blossoms are freezing. / You’re not getting your blueberries this summer. // Will you even notice? / I practice and practice. // What’s the score? / Blueberries, blueberries, blueberries."

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 04/11/2025

It's a convoy of the dead in today's Tuesday #flashfiction, courtesy of @victordavid.com! Check it out! bit.ly/47oRV0U

Excerpt from A Highway of Whispered Rain by Victor D Sandiego ""All the dead truckers from the pileup on the highway gathered around the afterlife elm to proclaim their retroactive innocence. We had heaven’s mist in our eyes, they said, and couldn’t see a damn thing but angels in the brake lights and rest stops rich with whiskey. Tell our mothers goodbye and tell the kids we’re sorry."

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 21/10/2025

We're back with new Tuesday #flashfiction from @sarlynh.bsky.social! (Check it out: bit.ly/48Cls8l)

Excerpt from "We Were Just Girls" by Sarah Lynn Hurd "After dark, we grew somber, watched for shooting stars, held hands while we cried. Palms pressed together, we wept for ourselves, for our small injustices, for our parents’ divorces.

We knew in that moment that we were stuck in time, frozen with slick cheeks and stained lips."

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 16/06/2025

Start your week off with not one but two new poems from DS Maolalai in our latest issue! (bit.ly/4l7Ljb8)

"look: we’re pushing / out onward – / fast over motorways / like opening a book / to an unchosen page. / look: people / get free – these are free / situations; we have nowhere / to go, so we go there, / and the road goes there too"

Excerpt from "People in free situations." by DS Maolalai

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 13/06/2025

Point yourself toward the smokecrazed horizonface courtesy of Steve Barbaro's latest, The Temperance of Heretics! (bit.ly/3SLbqbQ)

"Ah, the dreams of glorious reconquest! The golden age: an age of perfectly consummated desecration. Yes the golden age: once the sea was properly desecrated we’d be prime to march back upon the mainland. But for months and months the stuntedness persisted whilst would-be kiddiebards were delivered by the droves unto these beachniches like so many plugs for the one true name’s enduring absence."

An Excerpt from "The Temperance of Heretics" by Steve Barbaro

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 12/06/2025

Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Water Ghosts and Green Island, has an excerpt from her new novel, Anatomy, in our latest issue. Don't miss "Selected Dates (1998)" in YIV 32! (bit.ly/3SQEmz8)

"He grabbed my shoulders and squeezed, then flung his arms in the air and spun around. You make me feel so alive. I faked a small laugh. The dutiful audience, I’d barely said anything through dinner, so he must have been enlivened by my uncomfortable silence. I imagined he had a map of what to say to impress a date, things that had landed him in bed before."
An Excerpt from "Selected Dates (1998) by Shawna Yang Ryan

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 11/06/2025

Want to read something that you'll immediately want to read again? Don't miss "Black Man’s Guide to Bookselling / Snap Shot #46" by @summerwest.bsky.social . (bit.ly/4e4tnMq)

"I’m sitting on the tip of hump day, trying to count the women and the mailmen who press against the elements that betray them: fake hair, no hair, bad feet, painted toes, and thirsty skin, their eyes rolling beyond the Do-Not Enter and Back-in-15-minute signs that dangle from the thread that holds the journey close to the dim light at the end of their clumsy addictions. Veins instead of streets surge with grape soda and cheap wine kneeling into a wasted youth and a black-eyed history." Excerpted from Black Man’s Guide to Bookselling / Snap Shot #46 by Jerry Thompson

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 10/06/2025

Mary Burger returns to YIV in our latest issue with an excerpt from her new novel, The Confusion of Figure and Ground. It's a story of ghosts, real estate, and so much more. bit.ly/4jC5qNn

"I’d been bracing myself, in a sense all my life, for the moment when she would be fully, utterly gone. Because she’d never really been there, in a sense she’d always been leaving. And, of course, as with everything else she’d done, her leaving would not be complete.

I wanted to freeze a moment in time that didn’t exist yet. That would never exist"
Excerpt from The Confusion of Figure and Ground by Mary Burger

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 09/06/2025

Because your timeline could use a little light: Ode to Sending Light by Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad in our latest issue! bit.ly/43I1zIE #poetry #literaryjournal #writingcommunity

"and how do you secure radiance / so it doesn’t seep in transit, trickle // from the corners into the open hands / of another and others, / /and to even send it in the first place,/ you must have access to a source, // like a sky or a god, authorized / to gift it as easily as day, not waiting" An excerpt from Ode to Sending Light by Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 06/06/2025

Happy Friday, all! Please welcome @ericracher.bsky.social to YIV. His story, "The Blue Plastic Basin," is the breathless prose you didn't know you were missing. Check it out! bit.ly/4jAUnUM

"Remembering is odd because it’s hard to say how many there were before or after but the sound of the water falling in the blue plastic basin was like silences of memory further quietened by the rust and wrack and ruin of chain-link fences swallowing up disintegrating full-service stations mulberry swelling up through cracks in the concrete tufts of dry grass and dandelion of the tracks that crisscrossed the land..." An Excerpt from The Blue Plastic Basin by Eric T. Racher.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 05/06/2025

Are you ready for the ultimate truth? Well you've come to the right place. We took yesterday off from posting, but the latest from Austin Adams will more than make up for it! bit.ly/3FKBNf

"‘I don’t think so. I think that’s different. Minds are,’ he searches, with his eyes, for a way to accurately summarize what minds are and finds his answer, evidently, in the parking lot of a fried chicken restaurant across the street where everything tired in him comes to rest, ‘are the instantiation of possibility and the scaffolding that buttresses all being.’

‘I heard different?’ muses Lu."

Excerpt from Tabs by Austin Adams.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 03/06/2025

We're honored to have the amazingly talented Karen An-hwei Lee return to YIV in our latest issue! (bit.ly/3ZGC3Cw) #literarycommunity

"As a humble dumpling-maker and poet, am I truly one of the generation of nones vanished from the Registry, erased in the data migration? If questions are banned, how do I stop asking them? Is there more to this mysterious plague than the mossy solicitude of Marimo, the moss ball, who follows me everywhere, a roly-poly buddy of maddening, sheep-like contentment?" from Xiaolongbao, My Love by Karen An-hwei Lee

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 30/05/2025

Do we need to exist within delusion in order to live? Find out in "An Impasse" by @ianmacclayn.bsky.social (bit.ly/3ZH0EHc) #shortstories #literarycommunity #literaryjournal #fiction

"When the radiance of an epiphany looks into every culpable flaw of your heart, it will not feel heroic or divine. Things long dormant within us grope for growth and all struggle to breathe. Even in winter, when the freezing interior plains are relieved by warm chinook winds, an unbroken wall of clouds still obscures and darkens the region." From An Impasse by Ian MacClayn.

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Your Impossible Voice @yourimpossiblevoice.com · 29/05/2025

We are pleased to welcome @kabusharekh.bsky.social back to YIV with a new essay, "Clotheslines." AbuSharekh is a three-time YIV contributor, whose essay "Zeppole (aka Awama),” was selected for Best American Essays 2025! bit.ly/4dGYflR #CNF #essay #essaywriting #literary #literaryjournal #gaza

"My mother never blamed anyone for our circumstances. But this house was built the way her mother-in-law, Yousra, wanted it, a fragmented memory of the home Yousra had left behind in Majdal. A collective memory compressed into a tent in a refugee camp." From Clotheslines by Khalil AbuSharekh.

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