~Friends of The Disappointed Housewife ~ Now that we’re a few months past our five-year anniversary, I’ve been thinking a lot about the lady at the top of our home page—how steadfast she is, how stern but fully loving, just like the kind of mom who turns out a Greta Thunberg, a Michelle Obama, or… Read More Contest: Help name our disappointed housewife!
The Disappointed Housewife is a literary journal for writers, and readers, who are seeking something different. We like the idiosyncratic, the iconoclastic, the offbeat, the hard-to-categorize. Out of the universe of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, we want to attract work that plays with form and presentation. Work that’s not just outside the box but… Read More Editor’s foreword
PROTEST V Flaming shingles fly above the streets outside neighbor’s apartment – playing NBA 2K21, blasting DJ Screw, Wretched of the Earth on the end table, white fist raised, curtains closed. Young folk out walking rawly the expanse of reality. PROTEST IV Sky closes on elm trees and metal-throated birds above street crowd flushed out… Read More Two Poems ~ poetry by Adam Day
Take the loot from the Saturday night knockover and lock it in the box; wash the stash on Sundays at the track and glom a little for yourself and stuff it into the mattress; never leave the house without one of the fellas; fry up eggs in butter, not oleo, and make a lot more… Read More Moll (After Kincaid) ~ fiction by Richie Narvaez
Andromeda Among Asphodels, 2005 Cassiopeia Nix Oil on canvas In this work, the artist has painted a field of half-bloomed asphodels, flowers that crawl up their spear stems in the hyper-detail-rich style that has become her signature. The features of the flowers are sharp and minute. When viewed from a distance they become so myopic… Read More Andromeda Among Asphodels, 2005 ~ fiction by Spencer Nitkey
Siobhán picked me up from the apartment and drove us into Brooklyn. She sang along with Bowie’s “Golden Years” playing off her iPhone. She turned to face me as we barreled up Bedford Avenue near McCarren Park. “ANNNNGELLLLL.” “Oh, good fuckin’ Lord. Watch the street,” I said. She laughed. “I always keep one eye on… Read More Ourselves ~ fiction by Mike Lee
Oak Ayling is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet from North Cornwall, and Editor-in-Chief of Spare Parts Literary Magazine. Her debut pamphlet With Love from the Curator was released in 2021 from award winning publishers Indigo Dreams Publishing. Her other works can be found in literary magazines and in the print anthologies Light… Read More Mixtape Stax 3 ~ playlist poetry by Oak Ayling
a prisoner spit at me and I stopped and he looked at me like I was a vulture and he was a corpse and I would usually just keep walking but the spit hit my arm and so I looked at it when he was looking at me and I looked up and the… Read More when I was an EMT in the prison ~ poetry by Ron Riekki
Sometimes, when we feel like aliens, which is most of the time (but whatever), we wonder: Do you know us? If not, it’s okay. It’s okay. Who knows us, really knows us? Gets us? The woman with a YouTube music reaction channel, the woman with a slow-rolling teardrop in her voice hearing feeling believing in… Read More The Ones Who Know Us ~ prose poem by Pat Foran
We come out at night to scurry from between the cracks in your foundation. We explore every crevice in search of crumbs, a warm place to rest, or to infest. We never go near the traps your husband placed in the corners, and though we would love to lick the peanut butter he positioned just… Read More We Are the Mice That Live in Your Basement ~ fiction by Sara Dobbie
Wednesday, May 11th, 11:30 I appreciate you seeing me on such short notice. You came highly recommended. It’s just … well, you won’t believe what’s happened. I almost didn’t believe it myself until she popped out. I call her Calvia—because she came from my calf muscle. And I’m not trying to look a gift horse, or… Read More Vestigial ~ fiction by Coleman Bigelow
I inspect floral enamel coating spoons and forks, hand-painted cherries across white porcelain, slices of slouching golden brioche like giant dominoes. I run my finger across the whetted blade. Yellow, uneven circles tumble on laminate. It’s a choice between reading Kafka or covering beech wood with glossy hortensias, poppies and bluebells. In eighteen minutes and… Read More The Not-So-Sudden Walk after Reading Kafka ~ fiction by Isabelle B.L
Anatomy of Melancholy From lapidary inscriptions, from signs, from stones, in the beginning, I try to rebuild you. The sky says, “Take this boot-knife, consider it a gift from a friend.” Was it then I noticed death can be a lesser misery? “It may well be.” quips Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy.… Read More Anatomy of Melancholy ~ poetry by Laurie Rosenblatt
VAGINAL CLAW® PRESS INFORMATION: January 31, 2032 Positive Data Reports for Vaginal Claw® and Development of New Claws Out! Product Claws Out! proudly announces that from 2026–2031, wherever our best-selling Vaginal Claw® is legal and available, reported vaginal rapes and unwanted pregnancies fell by 60% and are forecasted to continue falling. Data also indicates that… Read More Vaginal Claw Press Information ~ press release by Meredith Wadley
They descend in clattering droves, sag telephone lines, drip from the tulip tree like rotten fruit. You watch from the window, push your nose against the pane. Your mother tells you about a sudden spring snowstorm, about a speckled egg found on the doorstep. How she candled the shell and saw a sleeping girl tucked inside. Saw… Read More When the Cowbirds Come to Carry Your Sister Away ~ fiction by Audra Kerr Brown
Against Beginnings Each night I grow my second self a quarter inch and now her girth fills the bed, soon the room. By noon next Tuesday month she’ll fill the garage, then the block. Next year I’ll enter a city and change the weather, bringing what’s blue and open, like legs. Each night I grow… Read More Three poems ~ poetry by Barbara Lock
The Disappointed Housewife is delighted to announce that Lynn Mundell’s terrific flash story, “Centaurs in the Laundromat,” has been chosen to appear in the Best Microfiction 2023 Anthology. This is our second award since our inception, and we’re awfully proud to be able to offer a platform for works like Lynn’s so more readers can… Read More Best Microfiction selects one of ours!
Like a lot of people, I started experimenting with bugs in high school. My first time was at a party after homecoming sophomore year. A girl wearing her hair in a towering beehive do fluttered a baggie of monarchs the color of Halloween in front of me. Butterflies were no big deal, I figured. I cupped a… Read More Glow ~ fiction by Keith J. Powell
She calls from the top of the jungle gym. Look at me, look at me now. I’m feeding the baby mashed fruit from a tube and still only have two eyes. Sure, I say, as I try to squeeze just the right amount of yellow goop into his half-open mouth. Look at me now! She… Read More Look at me ~ fiction by Hege A. Jakobsen Lepri
Late one night, Becca gathered her supplies—flashlight, spackling knife, rubber spatula, shovel, and scalpel—and walked into the woods behind her house. The breeze rustled her black hair, and the tall trees waved back and forth as if to welcome her. Far in the woods, she found a spot she liked: desolate, and so dark it… Read More Scrape ~ fiction by Victoria Mack
The fourteen-year-old twins watched Doris in her push-up bra lipstick blot rouge pluck pencil thicken shape all the while listening to Mel Torme and talking nonstop to them about which of the boys she hoped would come to her table and ask permission from her date to dance and then she stood and danced and… Read More The Emerald Room Awaits ~ fiction by Paul Beckman
Author’s note: Scan the QR codes for an instant look at the artworks. Or visit https://andreaswannerstedt.se. Mikaela Nyman writes fiction, non-fiction and poetry in English and Swedish. Her first poetry collection in Swedish was shortlisted for the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2020. Recent poems have appeared in The Spinoff Friday poem, the climate change anthology No… Read More Oddly Satisfying: a meditation ~ poetry by Mikaela Nyman
Edgar Rosenberg. Remember me? Joan Rivers, your wife, and partner for twenty-two years? The funny one? The one Carson loved? And Robert Mitchum. Yeah-yeah, cuckolding’s not nice. I’m not nice. You can’t get where I got with nice. Can you hear me? No, of course, you can’t hear me because you’re dead. Deader than my… Read More Can We Talk? ~ fiction by Lucinda Kempe
And now for our final nominations for the 2022/2023 awards season: Sonder Press’s Best Small Fictions. A couple of years ago, one of our stories, The Apparitions by Kirsty McGrory, was chosen by the judges, so we’re on their radar. It’s nice to know that we’re reaching a wider audience thanks to that honor, but… Read More Best Small Fictions Nominations 2023
My death every day is the idea of being made invisible I die of invisibility, my blackness devalued by lack of empathy from slavery up to Breonna Taylor, I am here to make space for blackness to be visible. The words that I write must show you how invisible you are to me because you… Read More I Feel Like a Mosquito Taking on Godzilla ~ poetry by Ilari Pass
You will watch TV with Mrs. Beasley, sitting on her two-seat sofa, and it will not be dangerous. Your mother trusts her. You will play cards and checkers. You’ll draw dinosaurs. You’ll iron leaves in wax paper, and she’ll let you close your eyes and run your palm, warm and waxy over it, to feel… Read More Radio on the Fish Tank ~ fiction by Nancy Freund
Attention, readers of The Disappointed Housewife: As our fifth year of publication comes to an end, we’re finally on Facebook. At the urging of a recent contributor, we thought we might as well go ahead and at least attempt to increase our readership by connecting with thousands of readers and writers there who have no… Read More The Disappointed Housewife is now on Facebook
You were eleven and I was twelve, Irish twins, and I was always telling you to come on, move faster, hurry up. I already felt so far behind the rest of the world. And there we were in summer exile at our grandmother’s house in Boring, Pennsylvania, a town with no mall, no movie theater,… Read More I’ll Be Your Mirror ~ fiction by Kathryn Kulpa
Craig Foltz is the author of three books of prose / poetry (available via Ugly Duckling and Compound Press). His work has appeared in numerous journals (Fence, Conjunctions, Diagram and others). He currently lives and works on the North Island of New Zealand. For more info or collaborative pitches: http://www.craigfoltz.com.
For the first time, The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate a few works for the annual Best Microfiction competition. This one has a 400-word limit, so I’ve been remiss in combing through our archives to find eligible pieces. We have a nice debut stable of short fiction for the 2023 prize: Now Look… Read More Best Microfiction 2023 Nominations
The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following stories and poems for the 2023 Pushcart Prizes: FICTION How to Vanquish the Demon Raktabīja ~ Emily Hoover From the 2354 Galaxy Museum Exhibition of Lost Civilizations ~ Andrea Marcusa Forbidden Fruit ~ Karen Schauber POETRY Painting Party at an Indian Buffet ~ Megan Denese Mealor… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations 2023
Your Mind Wanders Because Your Brain Whispers a found poem [You store] memories in a new place when you daydream. Electrical impulses encode like different barcodes identify a product in the stores. This happens thousands of times a day without us being aware. We think we are not doing anything useful, our brain is very… Read More Two Poems ~ poetry by Laura Grace Weldon
It’s hard to believe, but The Disappointed Housewife is five years old this month. Our first piece was published on November 30, 2017—that is, our first piece by someone other than me. I had contributed a faux book review to get the ball rolling a couple of weeks earlier. I remember back then wanting to… Read More The Disappointed Housewife is 5 Years Old!
Maximilian Speicher (https://www.maxspeicher.com) is a designer who writes, mostly sitting on his balcony in Barcelona, watching his orange trees grow. Although he’s been writing poetry on and off for many years, he only recently started submitting it. His first published poems have appeared in Impspired, and more are forthcoming in Otoliths Magazine and The Avalon Literary Review. Show Maximilian… Read More Vacation ◦ by the Pool • Three Variations ~ poetry by Maximilian Speicher
Riley says it’s five o’clock somewhere and that’s all I need to hear because that means he’s off on a tooty-toot-toot and that can happen any day at whatever o’clock but does it have to be an hour before my parents get here and last night’s dishes still a crusty mountain in the sink and… Read More Same Old, Same Old ~ fiction by Francine Witte
The bandoneón grinds out a sultry Piazzolla tune, and Consuela chassés across the dance floor in leather evening gloves and smoky Chanel sunglasses, like she’s forbidden fruit. We swoon along the back wall, expanding and contracting in our Amish pencil skirts and Mary-jane slippers, studying her every move. Our parents willing us home before curfew.… Read More Forbidden Fruit ~ fiction by Karen Schauber
30th March 1997: Around a thousand days left until the end of a thousand years. More pressingly, just two hours and forty-seven minutes for Clayton to crack the code. On the face of it, the atmosphere in the conservatory of 30 Lowfield Gardens was more placid than a month of Easter Sundays; for the four… Read More Straight In ~ fiction by Aaron Becker
Ann Keeling was Editor-in-Chief of the Pitkin Review and is a fiction/poetry reader for Wild Roof Journal and Reservoir Road Literary Review. Her work has been published or will appear in SEAF’s literary art anthology, Jellyfish Review, Lucky Jefferson, defunct magazine, and others. Her fiction work was shortlisted for the 2022 Force Majeure Flash Contest. She holds an MFA-Creative Writing from Goddard College.… Read More Memorable Story ~ poetry by Ann Keeling
Now that The Disappointed Housewife has quite a few miles on its odometer, it’s time to announce a change in our submission requirements. Prose pieces should now come in under 1000 words. Different editors have different ideas of what flash fiction and CNF are—some, unreasonably, I think, limiting it to less than 500 words—but here… Read More New Prose Word Limit
Victoria Nordlund’s poetry collection, Wine-Dark Sea, was published by Main Street Rag in 2020. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize Nominee, whose work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Rust+Moth, Chestnut Review, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com. Show Victoria some love via PayPal at Goodsirbob(at)gmail(dot)com.
You don’t know—but I do—that you’re going to break her. She is a mountainside carpeted in heather and lupine. Whether or not you intend to, there are these fissures you will chisel, and she will carry the itch of them into every future man’s arms, and they will never be able to reach them to… Read More To My Daughter’s First Boyfriend ~ poetry by Kerry Trautman
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