Spry Literary Journal

17/01/2024

HEY FORMER SPRY CONTRIBUTORS!

Have you ever wanted to volunteer for a literary journal? We're currently looking for a new team to help us vote on submissions for issue 16. Shoot us an email or let us know you're interested in the comments below.

16/02/2022

We are thrilled to announce that we have a full staff and an open submissions manager. Please send us your fiction and creative nonfiction UNDER 2,500 words, flash (fiction or nonfiction) UNDER 750 words, poetry (3 submissions or less), or artwork. Everything is currently being considered for issue 14. http://sprylit.submittable.com/submit

Look. We want to read your work. We want to read your work if you’re an undiscovered writer, or if you’re established. We want to read your work if–and especially if–it is concise, experimental, hybrid, or flashy. If it’s modern. If it’s vintage. If it’s vulnerable. We want to read you...

08/02/2022

That’s it! We’d like to take a moment to thank our team of readers for all the hard work they put into issue 13. We’re a team of volunteers, and many of our current readers were former contributors who offered their time years later! We’d never be where we are today if it wasn’t for our great Spry family of volunteers. So, thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you! http://sprylit.com

  Table of Contents Note from the Editors   Flash Borderlands by Melissa Ostrom How to Commit Arson and Not Get Caught by Chels Knorr The Flight Attendants by […]

07/02/2022

We invite you to check out today’s artwork “Noelie and Her Beehives” by Jane Bregoli https://www.sprylit.com/archives/noelie-and-her-beehives/

    Jane Bregoli is the author and Illustrator of “The Goat Lady” published by Tilbury House, which won the “ASPCA Humane Heroes” award and “Teachers Choice Award” by the International Reading Association. She currently lives in Dartmouth, MA where she was an elementary art teacher in ...

06/02/2022

Carolyn Adams’ “Home” is available for viewing in our 13th issue. Check it out today. https://www.sprylit.com/archives/home/

    Carolyn Adams’ poetry and art have been published in the pages, and on the covers of The Hunger Journal, Steam Ticket, Apercus Quarterly, Apeiron, and Red Weather, among others. She has authored four chapbooks, with one being a collection of her collage art, entitled What Do You See?

06/02/2022

We invite you to check out today’s artwork “After the Flood” by Jaap Bos https://www.sprylit.com/archives/after-the-flood/

    Jaap Bos is author, artist, and psychologist working in Utrecht, the Netherlands, specialized in graphic art.

03/02/2022

Nanthini Rajarethinam’s artwork “The Ship'' is in issue 13. Did you get a chance to see it yet? https://www.sprylit.com/archives/the-ship/

    Ms. Nanthini Rajarethinam is a 38-year-old Advocate from Penang, Malaysia. Painting is her hobby and she applies a free style concept in creating her artwork. To date, she has painted more than 40 paintings

02/02/2022

“Those tired, hopeless eyes. You see it now, the resignation. She’s someone’s distant daughter.” https://www.sprylit.com/archives/bad-translation/

Yesterday, you could swear she was saying “Help! Help!” so you couldn’t sleep at all, pacing, your mind focused on the p**n film, chained to the one instant the young blonde woman turns to the camera, on hands and knees, the instant you paused repeatedly, locked on her lips, straining for the ...

01/02/2022

Today’s the day to see “After the Rain,” Emily Salisbury’s artwork in our 13th issue https://www.sprylit.com/archives/after-the-rain/

    Emily Salisbury is a graduate of the University of Portland. Salisbury painted the cover for the chapbook, Come What May, published by Finishing Line Press in 2014. One of Salisbury’s digital art paintings was published in Beyond Words Literary Magazine in 2021. This piece, After the Rain, w...

30/01/2022

Have you seen “One Painting,” Steven Ostrowski’s artwork in our 13th issue? https://www.sprylit.com/archives/one-painting/

    Steven Ostrowski is a painter, poet and fiction writer. His written work appears widely in literary magazines, anthologies and chapbooks. He has a book of poems forthcoming from Wolfson Press and a novel forthcoming from Lefora Books. His paintings have been shown in galleries and published in...

29/01/2022

“They will bring the suitcases up from the basement and down from the closets. They will suction out the air of their clothes and seal up the packing cubes they buy at Bed Bath & Beyond.” https://wp.me/P2Zg1c-1Hl

The Flight Attendants do not leave the ground. Their feet are firmly planted. On the sidewalks. On the playground. Where the moms stand. On the grass of the backyard at the neighborhood picnic. Their purses are full of snack-size almond packets and power bars and their teenagers’ new favorite orga...

27/01/2022

Check out “A Clean Cut,” Marjolijn van Raaijl’s artwork in our 13th issue https://www.sprylit.com/archives/a-clean-cut/

  Marjolijn van Raaij is a writer and photographer from the Netherlands. Her work often focuses on people’s relationships with themselves, others and nature. She is studying to be a journalist, and likes small animals and music.

26/01/2022

“To repeat release until I feel lifted / yet grounded. To be okay with giving up. / To learn to describe the way I look / most like myself after I cry.” https://www.sprylit.com/archives/i-began-making-resolutions/

To sit outside for thirty minutes with a notebook and draw a bird. To learn to describe the animal: It looks the same as the others around it. It’s brown. It looks nothing like the ones people post pictures of. To go on a bird walk. Though, frankly, it’s impossible to get by around here […]

24/01/2022

“Nothing in between, no commas / no colons. Only rain wets the edge / of even and odd, sealing / unsealing lips.” https://wp.me/P2Zg1c-1HM

One is the green stone that slipped off her index finger as she sat on the bench in the pallid afternoon glare. It fell over white gravel and should have screamed, emerald like a lizard, a frog, a tropical bird. It did not. Two is the scarlet skirt of plain cotton, how it flares, giving […]

23/01/2022

“this is a love song to all of my failures, to the bird i stayed with as it died / that through its life perhaps had so many failures but death was not one of them,” https://wp.me/P2Zg1c-1HG

this is a love song to the CPTSD that has worked so hard to rewire my muscles and organs and neurons into the shell of a two hundred year old tortoise so i may now be impenetrable. this is a love song to the pulse punctuated staccato and stark that pushes my veins deeper than […]

23/01/2022

“Plant them in the body / of the earth where they belong, and watch till spring / blooms: fingers wide, rice-scented, like sampaguita.” https://wp.me/P2Zg1c-1Hh

for my siblings The hands that bless us don’t move invisibly. At times they block the sun out so we only see the puppet show: the shapes they make as they arch over oil to get under the left shoulder blade, or jump a rainbow slick for a tin can. But even under the cover […]

21/01/2022

“Embrace the pressure framing you, / be more than thinning sediment / holding layers together like cheap glue.” https://wp.me/P2Zg1c-1Ha

The Post-it night fits neatly in its perfect yellow square. Yellow not like American cheese but a decommissioned coal mine coughing up canaries. It’s the archaeology of layers that’s the most surprising: A rubbing of a self portrait revealing your great grandfather smiling at you. The family cat...

21/01/2022

“I tell her I’m mining / for gold, my own / mountain of ash, / crescents of porcelain, / white pages of poetry.” https://wp.me/P2Zg1c-1Hd

When my house burns down, amongst the sifted smell of burning things, my sister says, I wonder what it means— her voice a shard. All the small familiar. I am without a toothbrush, the book I was reading last night, the hand painted dress I wore when we got married in the Peninsula Rose Garden. [.....