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Best Microfiction & other small things

Matthew Jakubowski

Lately with my writing I’ve steered away from novels, book reviews, and novellas. I’ve been writing smaller things. Journal entries, poems, flash fiction, notes and jottings. In a way, writing in these forms feels easier, a way to keep up with the pace of life. But it also helps me feel like I’m slowing down, too, with a sort of conviction to stop and feel and listen. Revising these things also yields a different sort of satisfaction than my longer works.

I’ve been submitting these shorter pieces, too, of course, when they feel like they’re worth the effort. This past fall, I published “Ghost Story” in the wonderful flash fiction journal Milk Candy Review, thanks to editor Cathy Ulrich, who I had submitted to many times before. My luck didn’t end there, though. I was honored when Cathy nominated it for her picks for the Best Microfiction anthology. Then came the huge surprise last month–Grant Faulkner, guest editor of the 2024 edition of the anthology actually picked my story to be included. The anthology, with my little ghost story, will be in stores in June. I’m still in shock.

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In terms of what I’ve been reading lately, when I gathered things up from one room and another, I wasn’t surprised. Pretty much all of it has been poetry and short fiction, even some nonfiction about the linguistic nuances of writing brief things that carry power. Not that I no longer want to read good long books. In fact, I’m itching to re-read some favorites like Nights at the Circus and The Sea The Sea. But below are some books of shorter things that I’m either reading at the moment, or have really enjoyed over the winter. Here’s to brief but mighty things!

Poetics, and a critical slant

Matthew Jakubowski
Credit: M. Jakubowski


In all the years I’ve been a writer, the past year has been one of the most complicated, confusing, and – in the way writing often is – satisfying, nevertheless.

One thing I’ve learned and had to learn again is that sometimes I absolutely need to be journaling, everyday. So I did and as the months passed I filled an older journal and started a new one. A few months ago the entries were turning into… poems? And one of them seemed “good,” to me, a suspicion confirmed by a friend, who encouraged me to submit it. I did, and was shocked when it was accepted. My first traditional poem, ever. It’s out in the world now in Stone Circle Review. (Many thanks to the wonderful editor and poet Lee Potts for taking it on.)

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Tadpoles of the internet, unite

Matthew Jakubowski

At times I feel utterly ravenous online, with this belief that today I can defeat it all, beat back the internet’s power over me if I can find the perfect content each day to soothe my soul. But there’s so much out there and so little of what I really desire, in between all we’re forced to view, that stays with me.

Feeling overwhelmed and frantic about the internet is also a bit like prayer, or how I used to imagine prayer might work. Neurons firing within my gray matter produce a signal? Out there some kind of interstellar transit occurs. Riding the ripple of a gravitational wave toward the God-system with other prayers. Sort of waved through the gates by the angels after dodging demons and asteroids to reach another dimension that’s not a dimension, sideways across time into time outside of time, like the “Other” category of my phone’s daily report of my screen time.  

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The Wild Jesus (Part 4 of 4)

Matthew Jakubowski

The next morning my Dad is back at his camp to start his great hunt again. The heat keeps him awake. He rarely sleeps. Cicadas buzz like little machines in the trees. He has no bullets, but he wields his knife. He eats cicadas when he gets hungry, or kills a lizard. Sometimes I ride my kangaroo to bring him pork chops and apple sauce. The part of the woods that Ronald Reagan burned down are all grown back.

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Works in progress

Matthew Jakubowski

I have a system. The one I was given. The one that was taken away. I live in between the two, developing others, which in turn develop systems within me.

So pieces develop. I find them here and there in the notebooks people have given to me over time. Years later the notebooks have things in them that I think I wrote. I definitely wrote them. But the people who gave them to me may have taken them back while I wasn’t looking. Because some of the things I find in them seem very unfamiliar.

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A phantom ocean

Matthew Jakubowski

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M. Jakubowski

Bored at night I go upstairs to the window that leads to the back roof. Parting the curtains turning the latches pushing up the glass and the screen to bend down to less than half my height with my chin almost touching my knee I side-step over the sill onto the flat rowhouse roof.

My foot is immediately assailed with the waning warmth of the July sun stored in the roof’s surface. I feel the eyes of the birds and squirrels on me, a pale giraffe joining them suddenly thirty feet above the ground to peer at each other between the maple leaves. They stay quiet until I look away. Continue reading →

Some expected pain

Matthew Jakubowski

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They saw us holding hands and made one sort of face or another. This man and a boy. A child without its mother. A father and a son walking around at midday downtown on a Wednesday. A man who wasn’t working regular business hours. Maybe tourists.

The heat as we walked across the sidewalk clamped into the air, fixing the humidity with a vaporous rigidity, giving each breath in and out a clammy form that seemed to widen the nostrils on its way into the body.

His palm was sweaty in mine and usually at the first touch of sweat he’d let go but he didn’t. Continue reading →