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yourimpossiblevoice.com
Your Impossible Voice
@yourimpossiblevoice.com
1.2K followers 180 following 360 posts
Publishing brash and velvety prose, poetry, CNF, translations, reviews, art, and more. https://linktr.ee/yivjournal
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yourimpossiblevoice.com
The final poem from our new issue burns bright! Finish off your week with "past is a flame" by Karen Earle!
Excerpt from past is a flame by Karen Earle: bird-boned singer I / smoke-and-mirror you / minor-keyed to confusion/hovering ash-to-ash auras all / star-prick constellations/the broken wheel the lucky strikes / in spider-sticky spins
December 5, 2025 at 2:04 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Who said family get-togethers had to be dull? Pull up a chair for "Brother From Another" by Jaryd Porter! bit.ly/48S9Ptq
Excerpt from "Brother From Another" by Jaryd Porter: We were three blocks from Mom’s house, and all of the houses looked copied and pasted with different earth tones and a few objects on the driveway and porch to make them look lived in. The whole neighborhood looked like a white town, and appearances weren’t deceiving—my sister Paula and I were the blackest people on the block, and we were only half.
December 4, 2025 at 6:57 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
A truly great short story tells you everything you need to know about it from its very first line. This is one of them. Check out "Storing Dinosaurs" by @supernaturalfeat.com in our latest issue! bit.ly/3XY7fMa
Excerpt from Storing Dinosaurs by Dan Weaver: A fter Carmen married Phillip I couldn’t chase her with my lizards no more since it scared Phillip and he would hide in the room and the one time it made it so that Carmen couldn’t drive Phillip to work and he was late and he didn’t want to tell his boss that Carmen was getting threatened with lizards.
December 1, 2025 at 3:20 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Congratulations to this year's @bestmicrofiction.bsky.social nominees! Check us out online to read all of this year's award nominations.

Ryan Griffith
@sarpsozdinler.bsky.social
L.F. Khouri
Mathieu Parsy
@ashdoeswords.bsky.social
Congratulations to our Best Microfiction nominees: The Abbreviated Kafka by Ryan Griffith; Ash Wednesday by Sarp Sozdinler; The Lemon Trees Don't Care You're Sexy (But I Do) by L.F. Khouri; Your Body is a Wolf by Mathieu Parsy; The Summer After Kurt Cobain Died by Ashleigh Adams
November 28, 2025 at 7:23 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
What could be better reading for the day after Thanksgiving than a story about family? A story about family by Robert Ontiveros is what. bit.ly/4p8NzkU
Excerpt from The End of My Sentence by Roberto Ontiveros: "At the funeral, Dot’s secret pedigree felt like a palpable fact, with all of my legitimate cousins lined up by Uncle Seth’s twenty-nine-year-old widow and even Dawn: Dawn, the one love child we all knew of. I never saw Dawn, Seth’s mid-career creation. The woman was twenty-five but looked twelve at 4’11” and had inherited from her father that juvenile glow he wore even as he succumbed to his disease. Dawn was a nurse in another county, I had heard, but of course never mentioned in the family newsletter."
November 28, 2025 at 6:28 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Congratulations to our nominees for Best Small Fictions 2025 (or 2026, however they calculate it)! @hughbehmsteinberg.bsky.social
Dana Wall
@brettbbl.bsky.social
@sagetyrtle.bsky.social
@addisonzeller.bsky.social
Congratulations to our Best Small Fictions nominees: The Last Lipstick Factory by Dana Wall; Hotdogs by Hugh Behm-Steinberg; Anthem by Brett Biebel; A List of the Reasons Women Feel Shame by Sage Tyrtle; Of the Lovers by Addison Zeller
November 28, 2025 at 6:11 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
The great Peter Grandbois returns to YIV with two new poems in our latest issue! bit.ly/43Ndxlq
Excerpt from "Crow Calls From the Top of a Pine" by Peter Grandbois" With a voice made of rain drawn from the deep / grey of another Ohio winter. // You swore you would not let him in again, / but here he is threatening or apologizing, // you can no longer tell the difference."
November 26, 2025 at 3:08 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
We're thrilled to have @israelbonilla.bsky.social —"One of the great prose stylists around right now" according to our very own @alvinlu.bsky.social— back in our latest issue!
bit.ly/4rkNQT7
Excerpt from “from Cityscape with Sybarites” by Israel Bonilla alongside the cover of Your Impossible Voice #33: "Guadalajara has never been for the sober. It preys upon the senses of the robust and the frail, which results in murderous apathy and in unhinged receptiveness. I needed, at the very least, a cup of coffee and a quiet table. Nevertheless, I had to gain distance. I couldn’t afford an encounter with Aparicio.”
November 25, 2025 at 4:31 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Congratulations to @illepitaph.bsky.social, @geoliminal.bsky.social, Elisabeth Sheffield, Peter Grandbois, @kabusharekh.bsky.social, and @molarawood.bsky.social—this year's Pushcart nominees!
Congratulations to our Pushcart Nominees: The Temperance of Heretics by Steve Barbaro; Leeuwenhoek’s Lens by Eric Williams; Cate’s Upstate or Fashion After the Apocalypse by Elisabeth Sheffield; Crow calls from the top of a pine by Peter Grandbois; Clotheslines by Khalil AbuSharekh; Requiem for the Golden City by Molara Wood
November 24, 2025 at 8:55 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Don't miss "Blueberries" by Edward Manzi in our latest issue! bit.ly/44vKnY7
Excerpt from Blueberries by Edward Manzi: "Excuse my ambition, it’s lacking. / I’m not even here. Isn’t that enough? //The blueberry blossoms are freezing. / You’re not getting your blueberries this summer. // Will you even notice? / I practice and practice. // What’s the score? / Blueberries, blueberries, blueberries."
November 24, 2025 at 4:05 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
It's a convoy of the dead in today's Tuesday #flashfiction, courtesy of @victordavid.com!

Check it out! bit.ly/47oRV0U
Excerpt from A Highway of Whispered Rain by Victor D Sandiego ""All the dead truckers from the pileup on the highway gathered around the afterlife elm to proclaim their retroactive innocence. We had heaven’s mist in our eyes, they said, and couldn’t see a damn thing but angels in the brake lights and rest stops rich with whiskey. Tell our mothers goodbye and tell the kids we’re sorry."
November 4, 2025 at 2:17 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
We're back with new Tuesday #flashfiction from @sarlynh.bsky.social! (Check it out: bit.ly/48Cls8l)
Excerpt from "We Were Just Girls" by Sarah Lynn Hurd "After dark, we grew somber, watched for shooting stars, held hands while we cried. Palms pressed together, we wept for ourselves, for our small injustices, for our parents’ divorces. We knew in that moment that we were stuck in time, frozen with slick cheeks and stained lips."
October 21, 2025 at 2:37 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
"Instead of the recorded version of Whitney Houston, I plugged in my phone and played this other lady singing 'Oh, Canada.' From Game 3 of the 1992 World Series. She belted out the first notes, and I watched the crowd laugh. Then start to freak." From Anthem by Brett Biebel
July 8, 2025 at 12:29 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Start your week off with not one but two new poems from
DS Maolalai in our latest issue! (bit.ly/4l7Ljb8)
"look: we’re pushing / out onward – / fast over motorways / like opening a book / to an unchosen page. / look: people / get free – these are free / situations; we have nowhere / to go, so we go there, / and the road goes there too" Excerpt from "People in free situations." by DS Maolalai
June 16, 2025 at 12:57 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Point yourself toward the smokecrazed horizonface courtesy of Steve Barbaro's latest, The Temperance of Heretics! (bit.ly/3SLbqbQ)
"Ah, the dreams of glorious reconquest! The golden age: an age of perfectly consummated desecration. Yes the golden age: once the sea was properly desecrated we’d be prime to march back upon the mainland. But for months and months the stuntedness persisted whilst would-be kiddiebards were delivered by the droves unto these beachniches like so many plugs for the one true name’s enduring absence." An Excerpt from "The Temperance of Heretics" by Steve Barbaro
June 13, 2025 at 12:43 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Water Ghosts and Green Island, has an excerpt from her new novel, Anatomy, in our latest issue. Don't miss "Selected Dates (1998)" in YIV 32! (bit.ly/3SQEmz8)
"He grabbed my shoulders and squeezed, then flung his arms in the air and spun around. You make me feel so alive. I faked a small laugh. The dutiful audience, I’d barely said anything through dinner, so he must have been enlivened by my uncomfortable silence. I imagined he had a map of what to say to impress a date, things that had landed him in bed before." An Excerpt from "Selected Dates (1998) by Shawna Yang Ryan
June 12, 2025 at 12:45 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Want to read something that you'll immediately want to read again? Don't miss "Black Man’s Guide to Bookselling / Snap Shot #46" by @summerwest.bsky.social . (bit.ly/4e4tnMq)
"I’m sitting on the tip of hump day, trying to count the women and the mailmen who press against the elements that betray them: fake hair, no hair, bad feet, painted toes, and thirsty skin, their eyes rolling beyond the Do-Not Enter and Back-in-15-minute signs that dangle from the thread that holds the journey close to the dim light at the end of their clumsy addictions. Veins instead of streets surge with grape soda and cheap wine kneeling into a wasted youth and a black-eyed history." Excerpted from Black Man’s Guide to Bookselling / Snap Shot #46 by Jerry Thompson
June 11, 2025 at 2:41 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Mary Burger returns to YIV in our latest issue with an excerpt from her new novel, The Confusion of Figure and Ground. It's a story of ghosts, real estate, and so much more. bit.ly/4jC5qNn
"I’d been bracing myself, in a sense all my life, for the moment when she would be fully, utterly gone. Because she’d never really been there, in a sense she’d always been leaving. And, of course, as with everything else she’d done, her leaving would not be complete. I wanted to freeze a moment in time that didn’t exist yet. That would never exist" Excerpt from The Confusion of Figure and Ground by Mary Burger
June 10, 2025 at 12:28 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Because your timeline could use a little light: Ode to Sending Light by Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad in our latest issue! bit.ly/43I1zIE

#poetry #literaryjournal #writingcommunity
"and how do you secure radiance / so it doesn’t seep in transit, trickle // from the corners into the open hands / of another and others, / /and to even send it in the first place,/ you must have access to a source, // like a sky or a god, authorized / to gift it as easily as day, not waiting" An excerpt from Ode to Sending Light by Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad
June 9, 2025 at 12:23 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Happy Friday, all! Please welcome @ericracher.bsky.social to YIV. His story, "The Blue Plastic Basin," is the breathless prose you didn't know you were missing. Check it out! bit.ly/4jAUnUM
"Remembering is odd because it’s hard to say how many there were before or after but the sound of the water falling in the blue plastic basin was like silences of memory further quietened by the rust and wrack and ruin of chain-link fences swallowing up disintegrating full-service stations mulberry swelling up through cracks in the concrete tufts of dry grass and dandelion of the tracks that crisscrossed the land..." An Excerpt from The Blue Plastic Basin by Eric T. Racher.
June 6, 2025 at 6:05 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Are you ready for the ultimate truth? Well you've come to the right place. We took yesterday off from posting, but the latest from Austin Adams will more than make up for it! bit.ly/3FKBNf
"‘I don’t think so. I think that’s different. Minds are,’ he searches, with his eyes, for a way to accurately summarize what minds are and finds his answer, evidently, in the parking lot of a fried chicken restaurant across the street where everything tired in him comes to rest, ‘are the instantiation of possibility and the scaffolding that buttresses all being.’ ‘I heard different?’ muses Lu." Excerpt from Tabs by Austin Adams.
June 5, 2025 at 12:10 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
We're honored to have the amazingly talented Karen An-hwei Lee return to YIV in our latest issue! (bit.ly/3ZGC3Cw) #literarycommunity
"As a humble dumpling-maker and poet, am I truly one of the generation of nones vanished from the Registry, erased in the data migration? If questions are banned, how do I stop asking them? Is there more to this mysterious plague than the mossy solicitude of Marimo, the moss ball, who follows me everywhere, a roly-poly buddy of maddening, sheep-like contentment?" from Xiaolongbao, My Love by Karen An-hwei Lee
June 3, 2025 at 1:53 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Start your Monday with a celestial traffic report courtesy of @mjmitchellwriter.bsky.social! bit.ly/43mYJdk

#poetry #poets #literarycommunity #literaryjournal #MariannevanHirtun
"There’s talk of a ladder or stairs, / mostly bluster—quite empty / of hope. None of us want to work— / not that hard. We scuff at loose dirt / and talk. We drop ladders and stare / at ground. Maybe plant trees. Maybe." From Report to Marianne by Mark J. Mitchell.
June 2, 2025 at 12:43 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
Do we need to exist within delusion in order to live? Find out in "An Impasse" by @ianmacclayn.bsky.social (bit.ly/3ZH0EHc)

#shortstories #literarycommunity #literaryjournal #fiction
"When the radiance of an epiphany looks into every culpable flaw of your heart, it will not feel heroic or divine. Things long dormant within us grope for growth and all struggle to breathe. Even in winter, when the freezing interior plains are relieved by warm chinook winds, an unbroken wall of clouds still obscures and darkens the region." From An Impasse by Ian MacClayn.
May 30, 2025 at 2:26 PM
yourimpossiblevoice.com
We are pleased to welcome @kabusharekh.bsky.social back to YIV with a new essay, "Clotheslines." AbuSharekh is a three-time YIV contributor, whose essay "Zeppole (aka Awama),” was selected for Best American Essays 2025! bit.ly/4dGYflR
#CNF #essay #essaywriting #literary #literaryjournal #gaza
"My mother never blamed anyone for our circumstances. But this house was built the way her mother-in-law, Yousra, wanted it, a fragmented memory of the home Yousra had left behind in Majdal. A collective memory compressed into a tent in a refugee camp." From Clotheslines by Khalil AbuSharekh.
May 29, 2025 at 12:51 PM