While CHEAP POP may still be on hiatus (read about our decision here), we’re excited to nominate two pieces for the 2024 Best of the Net:
Plase help us celebrate these incredible authors and pieces, and check out all of our award nominees here!
We are delighted that two of our nominated pieces from 2022 have been selected to appear in their respective anthology publications!
Will McMillan — “We Beasts” (Best Small Fictions 2023)
Vivian Zhu — “Saltwater Dog” (Best of the Net 2023)
You can view the full list of pieces that were accepted here.
Check out our list of who we nominated here.
Help us in congratulating Will and Vivian!
Dear Readers, Writers, Friends, and Family:
As the Editor-in-Chief of CHEAP POP, I wanted to take a moment to address our current status and the challenges we’re facing as we navigate the ever-changing landscape of the literary world.
First and foremost, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your continued support and enthusiasm for what we do here. We’re a small operation and y’all have always been the backbone of our success. To be an editor, to be a lit magazine, means you are only as good as the pieces you are able to publish. And we have been so, so lucky to be able to run your beautiful work.
CHEAP POP has been on hiatus for a bit now. This started as the CP staff got busy, and we didn’t want the journal or your submitted pieces to get anything other than 100% of our attention. Since then, we’ve also had to take into account the evolving nature of Twitter, which we have heavily utilized in the past to engage with our readership. While Twitter has undoubtedly provided us with valuable opportunities to connect and share the work we publish, we have reached a point where we no longer feel comfortable utilizing it due to the proliferation of hate speech and general toxicity that has taken over in recent months.
We strongly believe in fostering a safe and inclusive environment for both readers and writers and we will not compromise on these values. We’re actively exploring alternative avenues to engage with our audience that align with our principles, but, to be honest, I’m not sure what that looks like just yet. Like many of us journals, CHEAP POP makes no money whatsoever, focused solely on providing a space for writers to showcase their work. However, what does this look like if we no longer use Twitter? Do we navigate to another social media platform, like Instagram? Do we not advertise in the way we used to, and just hope people find us?
Again, I’m not sure yet what the future holds for CHEAP POP, but I’ll say this: I am committed to finding a solution that allows us to continue our mission of promoting outstanding literary work while respecting the values that underpin our journal. We may still be on hiatus, but we will be back—I love what we do here too much to not return.
In the meantime, we encourage you to check out our story archives and to continue to check our website for updates. I can’t thank y’all enough for your support over the years and your understanding as we try to sort through where CHEAP POP goes from here. ♡
With so much love and warmest regards,
Robert James Russell
Editor-in-Chief, CHEAP POP
We are delighted that two of our nominated pieces will be appearing in the Best Microfiction 2023 anthology:
Judith Osilé Ohikuare — “Occur”
Jamy Bond — “Tattoos”
You can view the full list of pieces that were accepted here.
Check out our list of who we nominated here.
Help us in congratulating Judith and Jamy!
It was a summer of sweltering heat. Of Studio 54. The Son of Sam. It was the Summer a city blacked out. The darkness came in one long wave, disappearing an iconic skyline along with it. And, for a moment, the neighborhood was still. The kind of still you see in movies before a big scare. When my sister sneaks up on me, I almost scream.
Minutes ago, I was heating Arroz con Gandules on the stove, my sister dancing in front of the air conditioner to Donna Summer's I Feel Love. Now, I'm lighting the sainted candle Mama keeps in the sink while the cockroaches scatter. The apartment becomes an oven. My sister opens the kitchen window, and the stench of garbage that hasn't been picked up for days slips in. It smells like the forgotten. We're suffocating, glued to the window because Mama isn't home from night school after working all day. Sweating bullets as trash cans blaze, and the streets fill with shadows. The silence shattered by breaking glass and pop, pop, pops.
Later, I'll want to remember this night like my father does—in his midtown apartment with his midtown wife and tell his story like it's my own, where neighbors share candles and meals and cocktails. But up here on 116th street, Mama doesn't have a midtown husband. And doors stay locked, and rallying cries of "It's Christmastime!" are bouncing off faded bricks and metal fire escapes.
From our window, we witness the wilding. Friends. Neighbors. Thieves. The powerless suddenly powerful. Pillaging storefronts. Running with televisions, stereos, boomboxes... food. We press our sweaty palms together in solidarity until we see Mama racing up the block, dodging looters being looted. Her long caramel hair flying. A beacon in the dark.
Karen Crawford grew up in the vibrant neighborhood of East Harlem in New York City. She is a writer with Puerto Rican roots and currently lives in the City of Angels, where she exorcizes demons one word at a time. Her work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Rejection Letters, A Thin Slice Of Anxiety, Six Sentences, Unfortunately, Literary magazine among others. You can find her on twitter @KarenCrawford_.
Steve tells Nancy Wheeler his Winnebago summer dreams: screaming kids, a map and an open road, American as apple pie. Then later he reveals that it’s always her with him by her side in that Winnebago. My ears catch that word, Winnebago, a gold nugget stuck in the sieve. Sounds so Uncle Sam. Stranger Things season four reminds me that in the Philippines, we loved everything American and said idioms like ‘you’re the apple of my eye’ when the only time we’ve seen apples was when the Americans came in fatigues with MREs and their rations of SPAM and Hershey’s chocolate bars looking for go-go dancers in makeshift bars near American bases. Even when the American soldiers and their generals left, the places festered and now John Does from everywhere ask for virgin ten-year-old boys and girls to deflower. And sometimes we’d read news that put us all through a looking glass of circus mirrors: like how in 2014 Jennifer Laude gets murdered by a U.S. marine in Olongapo City.
Ask us where we’d like to go and we’d say Disneyland even though most of us won’t leave our small sleepy towns to go to Manila. We dream to leave everything behind. Go to where the Statue of Liberty lives. Eat McDonald’s every day. We heard the streets were paved with freedom fries and Fort Knox gold.
Steve and his Winnebago dream bring me home to that time when I looked longingly at America. Now that I’m an Amerikana, courtesy of my formerly OFW mom, the pixie dust left by reading Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High, and Archie’s comics as well as the smoke and mirrors of celluloid films like Rambo and Terminator and stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Travolta, and Tom Cruise, I know better. There is no gold on the other side of the rainbow. Only the white neighbor asking us why we don’t have a flag outside on the 4th of July.
Cherry Lou Sy is a writer originally from the Philippines. She graduated from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a BA and received an MA in English Lit and MFA in Playwriting in Brooklyn College.
When the tinnitus starts, it will sound like crickets. Soon, everything will be crickets, but I won’t mind, because it will remind me of my father, and it won’t matter that all the real crickets have been lost to paved-over streets, because I will carry them inside me.
But for now, I am ten, and I am building a scrap-wood longboard in a dilapidated half-shed, and my father is sanding two-by-fours for somebody else’s home beside me. The bandsaw keens. Plywood splinters into my skin. Nails nestle the calluses on my bare feet. I spread epoxy with my fingertips and the fumes stain the air saccharine, and I breathe it in and hold it in my lungs and think that nothing this sweet could hurt me. Nothing this sweet can hurt me.
Selena Langner lives on the prairie with her husband and their six very excellent chickens. She likes to make things. You can occasionally find her on Twitter talking about projects at @SelenaLangner or online at selenalangner.com.
Suddenly no one can stop talking about rebirth and renewal. Spring cleaning in attics, in basements; searching for fresher air and finding the windows stuck closed. The allergists are booked solid and so are the psychiatrists, but there is no treatment for this season’s disease. Everyone is drunk on shots of clover honey. Everyone is weeping over the little April lambs; the smallest so achingly small; the ones who can’t walk quite yet and still try to run. Everyone is sobbing helplessly over the spores that come to us on the wind and pollinate our sinuses for months, leaving us raw and teary, as asexual as the sexual parts of plants.
But it’s all worth it, we say to each other, over each other, isn’t it, for the bloom? Poppies doping the foothills, algae suffocating the lakes. We can’t shut up about it. We can only speak in the desperate code of new beginnings and second chances and no, we can’t stop weeping; we’ve tried. But it’s worth it, we keep saying, isn’t it? The bloom; the newborn lambs in fields of clover; the endlessly looping visuals of endlessly waving grassland. Soothing as swallowing another ounce of honey. Soothing as anything could be when not one of us has been outside since last season at least; more likely another year altogether; another age that we don’t remember.
I’m not blaming the poppies or the pollen, but I can’t think of an age that I do remember. I know that fifteen years ago I had never seen a poppy and the doctors still thought that there might be a cure. Maybe I was sixteen for just a moment too long. What was the bloom like that year; what kinds of flowers choked the hillside? Was it worth it, right up until they died? Maybe I was a child once, so briefly, and so small that I made everyone cry.
Christine Barkley is an artist and writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her writing explores themes of chronic illness, trauma, and nature. When not writing, she can be found wandering in the woods and baking too many cupcakes. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Rust and Moth, CLOVES, and elsewhere.
New stories Tuesdays and Thursdays (when we’re open for submissions). Have a question for us? Email us at CheapPopLit [at] gmail [dot] com. Let's do this! ♡
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