great weather for MEDIA is delighted to announce our nominations for the next Pushcart Prize – Best of the Small Presses Series.
These nominations are for work published in 2024 and were selected from our anthology Beacon Radiant.
Congratulations to all our nominees and good luck! It was very difficult choosing six from the sixty-two amazing writers we have published this year.
FROM BEACON RADIANT:
Austin Alexis - The Barber
Philip Fried - Comfort
Catherine Gammon - Swimming Home
Aimee Herman - Until the Right One
Richard Loranger - The Extraction
Rowan Tate - it’s a girl
“He knew what he was doing
when he leaned his body
with its clean late-middle-aged maleness
over my stick figure nine-years-old frame.
The timing of the haircut he was providing
lasted and lasted like the slow-motion Time
a backyard bug lingers in, or dragged-out Time
a child paddles through and endures
as she or he dawdles in a garden.”
“Pet or rifle in my arms, you’re seeing
me in the selfie I took on the day I decided
would be the first of…you know the saying. Hell-bent
on a program of rapid self-improvement. I’d lower
my blood pressure as I stroked the flank
of the rifle or therapy animal, a highly
trained dog with an excellent work ethic and pleasant
ways. ”
“You were swimming home with a bag on your head. You were swimming home because the boat sank. You were swimming home to get the butter you forgot. You were swimming home because no one knew you were away so no one could miss you. You were swimming home in thunder and lightning and didn’t get out of the water because you knew you were dead. You were swimming home because your country was at war and the streets were full of men and guns. You were swimming home because walking wasn’t possible anymore. You were swimming home dragging a bag of memories behind you.”
“When we met, she identified as girl, briefly as woman, and now: Monster. She had hair in all the places hair should be, but also elsewhere. Hair so dark, you needed a nightlight. In high school, she covered her converse in math formulas because she could never remember them. When we both failed at college, she briefly worked at a Wendy’s because she loved the idea of wearing a uniform. In our twenties, she only dated men with curly hair. ”
“The emotionally unstable dentist made his way to the office. He was often a little out-of-true, but today was particularly bad, though he had no idea why. These things just happened sometimes—he called them the free-floating fuck-a-ducks. The shoe was particularly intense today as well. For as long as he could remember, even as a kid, his heart had felt like a clothes dryer with a single shoe clattering around inside. Kthunk. Kthunk-unk. Weird thing was he could swear he’d had that image pretty much forever, long before he’d ever heard a pair of shoes in a dryer, and he was certain that he’d never heard just one. Whatever the case, it was always there. Kthunk. Sometimes it was a moccasin and sometimes a tennis shoe and sometimes a good old wingtip. KBANG.”
“some days i borrow my mother’s body to see how much she had to love a man
to make a thing like me. no one ever asks you to imagine
the shape of faceless flesh, passageways of nerves
predatory like fingers
digging into the mass of you like a hand in a drawer
except i am not a drawer, even if you are a hand, you cannot
put something in me and take it out.”
