The Book of Failure

By Matt Leibel

My book failed so badly that I was put on trial, because I lived in a country in which failure had been made illegal, and I was convicted by a jury of critics, and spent my time in captivity reading other failed writers, ones who had failed far worse than me, frankly, and I started to forget what good writing even looked like, until the day I was slated to die (I would be stoned to death with stone tablets on which all the great works of literature I couldn’t live up to were inscribed) and as the tablets were about to smash into me, I had a sudden vision, a vision for the greatest work of my life, a story that couldn’t fail, only now I knew I’d never write it, which made me sad, but just for a moment, because I knew that even if I had written it, even if it had been a critical smash, even if it had mass popular success and sold 10 million copies, even if it had been translated into hundreds of languages, even if it had been tattooed onto the chests of people on distant islands discovering the written word for the very first time, even if it been used by primatologists to teach sign language to monkeys, even if it had been turned into a wildly popular musical whose percussive elements involved the rapid opening and closing of multiple copies of the book, even if my book was the first thing people thought of when they awoke each morning and the last thing they remembered when their head hit the pillow at night, even if people in cold climates saw my story spelled out letter by letter when their own breaths materialized in the frosty air, even if skywriters were hired to reprint my book above the earth, even if my book was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace and Medicine as well as Literature, even if it led to breakthroughs that alleviated human suffering and pointed to a new way forward that reconnected us with our shared humanity, even if my book could be converted into edible form to feed the entire world, even if all that happened, the likelihood was that my next book, the one I wrote after that, whether by comparison or objective measure, would likely be a clear failure, an utter flop, a linguistic crash and burn, and through the same inevitable punitive measures of the merciless, memoryless society I lived in, I would end up right back here, in the same position, staring at angry, unsatisfied readers, ready once again to pelt me with the heavy, deadly words of my betters—so perhaps, I thought, I should embrace failure as the one thing I hadn’t failed at yet, I should make an argument that instead of a successful book, I’d set out to write an unsuccessful one, and by that standard I’d succeeded spectacularly, and I should be celebrated, feted as if I’d written something truly great in its terribleness instead of a forgettable, even-keeled mediocrity, but even as I thought this, I could already see the critics gazing at me askance, stone tablets in hand, bloodthirsty and ready for bear, primed to punish me for my crimes against literature, and my last thought, the one I hoped might bring me some consolation in this moment, was that at least these people cared about words; at least, I knew, there were people who believed that stories mattered—even if this time around, I didn’t much care for the ending.

Matt Leibel is a San Francisco-based writer whose work has appeared in Wigleaf, Lost Balloon, Electric Lit, and elsewhere.

Art by Liz Worthy, a Bay Area writer, illustrator, and ceramic artist.

Rhapsody of My Horizons

By Adrianna Sanchez-Lopez

Early in the morning, before the sun elongates her limbs through darkness, I watch you watching me and I don’t want to hear I love you; instead, I want to stretch my body into dawn’s vast reach, tongue unsubdued—reckless, tasting the shape of language like fermented earth, like air, I whisper: husband mine/sagrada tierra/misericordia/swallow my heart/digest it in the four chambers of yours/breathe through the pores of my lungs until each exhale squalls through this bruised lacuna between us, my secrets escaping your organs, unveiling my distorted reflection as if it’s staring back at me; carbon dioxide escaping lips like an explication, searching, refrain after refrain until you understand why I cringe away from touch (even your touch), gripping my mom’s pain with clenched teeth; eyes closed, her spirit crushed to colorless dust strewn across cold linoleum; witness how two quick blows to her abdomen recur in my dreams while my father turns, walks away and leaves child-me to run to her ashen remains; witness as decades later, still thinking about this moment, adult-me checks her pulse, removes her oxygen tube, calls hospice to confirm her death, levers the window open for doves to carry her soul away—I want you to know these junctions like I know them; wild, rapacious sounds gush from my lips: sanguis/sangre/blood—pebbles of speech pocketed into small, nebulous lexicons: from childhood Sundays spent at mass; from listening at my grandma’s kitchen table; from mourning the many devastations of my mother, craving the safety of your earth like a hunger in me that seeps into every splinter of memory, every dream, every lie, every promise (fear) that threatens with poisonous, rotting seams.

Adrianna Sanchez-Lopez is a writer, teacher, and mother living in the San Luis Valley.

Photo by Jason Thayer.

The Garden Lights Itself on Fire

By Lee Anderson

The garden lights itself on fire and the first thing I smell through the kitchen window is burnt tomatoes, zucchini, basil, like a dinner party for inviting no one but ex-lovers to, and I am stuck gripping the ceramic edge of the counter while my husband rushes out, stamping on blades of fire, billowing his shirt like he can produce a big enough gust of air to simply blow it away, wondering why we don’t have a garden hose or anything at the ready for emergencies like this—like what if it were planned and this implosive bonfire were something where we could throw the past or present or just anything we felt we could no longer hold close into the flame—and the white paint on the scalloped cabinetry overhead begins to crinkle and sizzle, melting, dripping on my forehead like Ash Wednesday; I know it’s over, it’s all over, peppers and squash consumed by something we can’t predict or even stop, when he looks at me through the smoky window, eyes pleading, and I can't even look back at him when my ring slips off my left hand and into the sink basin, circling and circling and circling the drain.

Lee Anderson is a trans writer with roots in the Pacific North-, Mid-, and Southwest, landing in Chicago with an MFA from Northern Arizona University; their writing can be found in Salt Hill Journal, The Rumpus, and Gertrude, among others.

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon, by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.