About MicroLit Almanac
Welcome to MicroLit Almanac, a Birch Bark Editing online literary magazine. Every few weeks, we’ll publish innovative flash fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Although conventional micros are fewer than 300 words, we are far from conventional. So take up to a thousand, but no more.
We hold up fostering community as necessary: a world-building endeavor focused on loving responsibility in a realm that asks much of us. Our creative actions flow, form, and sustain a community built on diversity and inclusion.
MicroLit Almanac accepts submissions from September 1-30 and March 1-30.
In Spring 2022, we collaborated with Liveright Publishing and Cheryl Pappas on a video recording project: poets and writers read a poem from Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil translated by Aaron Poochigian. Our goal was to unlock Baudelaire, and use his melancholy to shed a little light on where we are and what we’re thinking these days.
Memory Palace by David Orr
I once was encouraged to build a place
that would hold every idea
I needed to retrieve
Something elephantine
that would stand
for ages
The Light by Ann Goethals
“…And then there’s the sponge. Rank. Smelly. I have treated it with respect, drying it nightly in the dishrack, even microwaving away the microbes to prevent the rotting smell as my sister taught me. Yet here it is, punching me with its rottingness.”
Nostalgia by Sara Kempfer
At home, Cassy barely got the door open before her cat, Toby, was weaving between her legs. “Dude you’re going to kill me. The doc says it will be suffocating. Won’t he be surprised when it’s you?”
Thorns by Dawn Tasaka Steffler
People said it was safer here, away from the cities. Less shelling. But being far away means you eventually run out of things, like gasoline and medicine.
Who Could Not Love Jazz? by Sarah Oakes
…the saxophone simmers on my senses and the clarinet caresses my soul, as the baritone sings, his voice oozing like Belgian chocolates…
Ike and Rosie by Linda Doughty
He spent the day out in the saguaro garden, trying to get abducted.
Night of Ashura by F. Scott Hess
Double rows of twenty men tramped by us, swinging chain-whips on handles, whirling in time, the grit of metal snapping down on bruised and bleeding backs.
Autumn Canopy by A.K. Cotham
The guide leads us to another tree, and this one is “unique in all the world,” he says. I wonder who else in our little group, besides you and me, knows that line from The Little Prince.
A Scene from My Childhood by Lucie Fultz
Sparrows in the chinaberry tree
in my great-grandmother’s front yard
where I lay on my fat belly
book on the ground—opened—
Unstill Life by Philip Alcabes
I was flying through the woods, rather low to the ground, sometimes in fact walking rather than flying, going back and forth, actually, between on-the-ground walking and low-to-the-ground flying.
Late Summer Lover by Marsha Recknagel
The leaves of Butternut trees
Made soft, clapping sounds.
Arms spread wide, he said--
We’ll build our house here.
Revelation by John Coats
…she played music and danced on the table in that gray and maroon dress that revealed her marvelous legs.
Diary of a Flaneur by Xavier Prince
7/8/20**
In my time here I have surmised it is the easiest thing in the world to be one who is never wrong. To do this one must apply careful thought and consideration into always saying and thinking what is most fair.
Gregor Samsa in Reverse by Andre F. Peltier
Every morning is the same
for the heroic dung beetle.
Every morning he awakens
to search for that ever-loving
fecal matter.
A New Corner of Hell by Daniel Reeves
Ordinary citizens are swept away under a broadside of raging insanity and a tidal wave of blind hatred.