At the church’s gate, until the town people surrounded them, the women not spoke the horrible truth. They not talked about the man’s wives who, when they saw him, dropped on the ground at his feet like fallen twigs, about our town people, including men, who ran away from the man like they running away from an incoming lightning. The truths they tentatively spoke, they spoke, after looking around, making sure no one around to hear them—except me and I...
CW: molestation In our second year at the University of Michigan, my friend Nadiya and I decided to run a series of spoken-word poetry workshops together. We hoped it would culminate in a campus-wide People of Color Monologue performed the first week of April. Nadiya squeezed my shoulders, offering thick slices of homemade bean pie that crumbled into buttery nuggets as soon as I put them in my mouth. Neither of us had made it past the first round of...
Karina and I didn’t like the work. And we didn’t like our bosses. And we didn’t like to talk about love unless there was pain involved, otherwise we found it so uninteresting. She liked to say things plainly. She called the runway soul-eroding, laughing. I said we were girls made of limestone, our faces glossy on magazine paper, our spines indented with tragedy. She liked to talk about forgiveness and I never chose to. Before shows we would touch each...
strangers dressed as a tarantula, an angel, & a puerto rican ghost are drinking the night into quicksand, & they are hoping to pour tequila shots in me, screaming, COME ON! BE FLEETING WITH US. i drink & drink & drink, & we dance raw, all as rivers in cumbia. when our hips ache & tire, a boy barbie shouts, slurs, stutters, LET’S TELL SOME WHOREOR STORIES, which gets everyone going, squealing & spilling: we tell tales of growling married...
Don’t forget that Grandma’s birthday is on September 14 and Papa’s is August 30 and that he won’t care if you’re a day or two late but she will; don’t lose the master password for my Bitwarden vault where all my other passwords live because Papa won’t know how to find it; remember he’s too proud to ask where is the smoked paprika or how do I use compost or would you have time to come with me to a...
SmokeLong Quarterly has been dedicated to publishing the best flash narratives since 2003.
December 2024
I have so much to tell you. It’s been a crazy few months. The SmokeLong Grand Micro Contest is in the bag, and we have the top six micros in this issue. Writing a memorable, fresh micro is hard. It’s an art. A burst, a spark. And we are in love. In March we are… Continue reading New Front (continue reading)
SmokeLong Fitness--The Community Workshop
The core workshop of SmokeLong Fitness is all in writing, so you can take part from anywhere at anytime. We are excited about creating a supportive, consistent and structured environment for flash writers to work on their craft in a community. We are thrilled and proud to say that our workshop participants have won, placed, or been listed in every major flash competition. Community works.
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Now in the shop
So you’ve drafted some micros, but you’re unsure if they’re ready for primetime. In this 90-minute webinar/workshop we’ll look at why some micros feel incomplete and some micros feel overstuffed. And we’ll discuss actionable steps to editing these micros so that they feel complete, subtle, and exciting. Date: March 23 Time: 2pm NYC. This event… Continue reading “When Less is More and Less is Not Enough: Compression and Expansion in Flash” with Christopher Allen
Banchiwosen Woldeyesus (she/her) is a black woman, a teacher, short fiction, and nonfiction writer. She was born in 1980 and raised in Addis Ababa. Her work appears on The/Temz/Review. And is forthcoming on midnight & indigo. She has published 400+ posts and essays on her blog, Banchi Inspirations, since mid-2018. She publishes essays, flash stories, and curated reads on This Precious Dark Skin, her newsletter on Substack. She’s a Submissions Reader for Narratively. She lives in Addis Ababa where she teaches.
