NEW SUBMISSION PERIODS / PUBLICATION SCHEDULE

Hello, friends!

We're excited to announce a streamlined submissions and publication schedule! (But, as always, for more information on what we're looking for, or how to submit—when we're open!—please check out our submissions page.)

Starting in 2018, CHEAP POP will have (2) consistent publication seasons. This also means we'll have (2) consistent submission periods. We hope this consistent schedule helps you as your write, edit, and finalize your pieces for submission.

Please note: We will not respond (accept/reject) pieces until after a submissions period is closed. You are free to query us, but our method is to read every piece we get, even ones submitted at 11:59 PM on the last day. It's important to us that every piece gets the same care and attention. This also means we generally need a small buffer of time after submissions close to read and gauge pieces.

Submission Periods

• Open the month of June Only (to be published August and September that same year)
• Open October and November (to run starting in January of the next year)

Publication Schedule

• Season 1: Pieces run mid-January to end of March/into April
• Season 2: Pieces run August and September 

That means submissions will be opening in a few short months, for the month of June, so start getting your pieces ready! For all other info, click here!

ENAMEL — CAROLYN OLIVER

Eugene Dunderforth, DDS, did not expect his wife to titter when he told her about the affair with his accountant one Sunday morning over eggs, fruit salad, bacon, and coffee.

 “Oh Gene! What a joke, today of all days. And Gwen is such a nice person—maybe we should have her over for dinner. Do you think she’s a vegetarian? So many young people are, these days.”

He laughed halfheartedly, stunned by his own daring. “No, I don’t think she is,” he muttered, unfurling the newspaper that he’d crushed in his hand. It had escaped his notice that this particular Sunday in June was their wedding anniversary—thirty-two years. After he registered the date, smudged with sweat, his face relaxed into its usual expression of mild boredom. He idly wondered where he might buy his wife some flowers. Would she care if he had a bouquet wrapped up at the supermarket? He speared a piece of melon, which dripped pale green juice onto the lace tablecloth.

Mabel Whitcombe—she had, thank God, kept her name, despite the talk it had caused—caught her breath and pushed a starched napkin underneath the blossoming stain. Nothing escaped her notice, including thirty-two years’ worth of emergency root canals on Saturday nights and crown fittings after office hours. For the best patients, the ones who paid promptly, he’d assured her, waving at the quiet, inviting rooms of their four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath colonial, which Mabel tastefully updated every few years.

She considered marriage as rather like a visit to the dentist: salutary to both parties, likely painful to one, and temporary. For some years she had cultivated a faith in statistics, believing that once Eugene blundered off around seventy-six, she’d have fifteen years or so to enjoy alone the fruits of his denture placements and pain-free fillings. But as the years without orange juice and ice cream and raisins (notorious enablers of decay) had passed, it became clear that her faith—and her husband—might very well outlast her patience.

She sipped her black coffee, avoiding Eugene’s infrequent glances and watching orange-yellow egg ooze toward the edge of her plate. It was a good plate, part of a set she’d bought without consulting him. Porcelain with a thin gold band around the rim. All these years she’d been so careful not to nick them, scooping each piece out of soapy dishpans and drying them by hand. If she looked closely she might find a nest of tiny cracks, but from this distance the surface was smooth as cream. Except for the encroaching yolk.

After the day’s stock report had transfixed Eugene, she scraped up the egg with her knife’s edge and licked the blade clean, immediately chastising herself for risking damage to the plate. At least she had avoided one of his gratingly cheerful lectures on endangering her enamel.

---

Carolyn Oliver’s fiction has appeared in Day One, Tin House’s Open Bar, Slush Pile Magazine, matchbook, and elsewhere. A graduate of The Ohio State University and Boston University, she lives in Massachusetts with her family. Links to more of her writing can be found at carolynoliver.net.

BETWEEN THE SKY AND THE SURFACE OF THE WATER — ROCCO RIVETTI

On my back, in the smooth depth of the green hull, I was rocked gently back and forth as the rowboat turned slowly counter-clockwise.

Circling there, experiencing the unique tension of buoyancy occurring beneath me, it felt as if the boat was performing a miracle, some kind of impossible balancing act between the sky and the surface of the water.

Evening sunlight pressed against the branches of a willow tree overhead. My stomach felt warm to the touch, though my shorts were still damp from an hour’s swim at four. As I spun away from shore, patches of light defined by shadow splashed upon the bare skin of my torso before spilling from the boat into the water below.

The scent of wild sagebrush hung above me like a cloud while the boat pushed further outwards. Then night fell.

I could hardly make out the shore on the other side. As I floated towards the center of the lake the boat continued to spiral, turning backwards to face the willow tree on the receding shoreline.

I saw you standing there in your green dress, your left hand gripping the cloth below your waist, raising the hemline slightly upwards of your ankles already submerged in water.

You looked perfect, as if you’d just emerged from the lake.

I raised my hand to wave. You started to smile, growing smaller by the minute. Water lapped against the sides of the rowboat as a sparrow crossed between us. It may have landed in the willow tree but I couldn’t be sure before the boat’s rotation swept you out of my sight.

I’d brought with me half a bottle of red wine.

It seemed useless to me now.

You called to me, and as your voice carried across the lake it passed through the last rays of twilight, willow bows and foxtails, over ripples, tadpoles, and scurrying crayfish, beneath the slowly turning stars over head. Only as your voice reached me through the night did I realize I was cold.

I turned my head to find you, and caught you spinning.

Spinning along with the fish and the plants and the crumbling lake house and trees that covered the shoreline. Spinning with the hills in the distance and the quickly darkening sky with no moon. Everything was spinning now, except for me.

I had never spun like you. You made it seem so easy, turning along with the rest of the world. Before long the spinning picked up, you and your surroundings churning together, boundaries absorbing each other until everything was combined into one dizzying, terrifying whir.

I held my breath, then sank slowly into the night.

---

Rocco Rivetti has lived in various towns up and down the coast of California his whole life. As a graduate of UC Berkeley, Rocco studied under authors Joyce Carol Oates, and Namwali Serpell. When not writing, Rocco makes music videos for bands, and his video work has appeared in publications like Pitchfork, Spin, The Fader, Dazed Magazine, and Stereogum. 

I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU — YAEL van der WOUDEN

Two months after my mother passed away my daughter woke me up to tell me she was sorry. I was half in a dream and said, "Honey it’s late go back to sleep," but she didn’t. She put her cold little hands on my face and said, “No” and tapped my cheeks until the dream dissolved and I was up. 

"What," I said. "What is it, yes, what," and my daughter said: 

“I died in the night. I’m sorry.” 

"Honey," I said, like there was more to that sentence but there wasn’t. I put my hands on her and she was solid, why wouldn’t she be. Standing in a hedgehog shirt, smelling like milk, the way kids do. I gathered her up and arranged her under the sheets and said, "Honey, why do you think you died?" and she shrugged and asked if she could have a soda, and would she have to go to school tomorrow, now that she’s dead. 

"You’re not dead," I said, quiet, and my eyes began to weep like they’d decided their own sadness had nothing to do with me. 

“I don’t know what to tell you,” my daughter said, knocking her foot against my leg. I used to say this to her. Then, “Can we turn on the tv?” 

The next day we stayed at home but the day after I said, "Now life doesn’t stop, okay?" and sent her back to school. Then school called and asked where my daughter was. I thought no and no but it turned out she’d hid in a bathroom stall because she was dead and didn’t want to go to class. "Her grandmother just passed away," I told her teacher, later, an explanation. I was tired and unwell, half an eyeliner on. One bottom lip lipsticked. 

"So what’s happening?" I asked her in the car on the way back. "What’s this? You’re a ghost? What?"

“Yes,” she said. “I’m a ghost.” Then made a long ooooh-sound that made her laugh and so I laughed too, which made her laugh more. "What do I do?" I panic-whispered on the phone that evening, talking to my sister. My daughter walked into the room with a white towel on her head.

“It’s my ghost hair,” she said, then danced to the tune of a candy commercial.  

"What can you do," my sister said, and told me she loved me, and yes you too and good night, shabat shalom, I’ll call again tomorrow. "Yes. B—What? Yes. Okay. Bye."

That night I wrapped us up in blankets and asked my daughter what her favourite colours were. She named every single one she could come up with, picking her nose. "Do you think you’ll be dead for much longer?" I asked. 

“No,” she said. “Maybe a day. Or maybe two.” 

"Okay," I said, and rested for a moment in the mess of her hair. My own breath smelled like milk, and she, wet from the shower, like every memory I’ve ever had.  

---

Yael van der Wouden is a writer, editor, and a mixed-bag-diaspora child situated in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She co-founded Chaos Press, a Dutch feminist publishing house. In her off time she waters plants, walks into rooms to immediately forget why, and reviews books for Platypus Press' literary guide 'The Wilds.' Her work will soon appear in The Sun Magazine. Find more at yaelvanderwouden.com 

THE BIRD — MAX ANDREW DUBINSKY

A bird took my eye. I was just sixteen and in love and content to simply stroll down the sidewalk with a soda pop in one hand and my girl’s in the other when the bird, spooked by a certain hawk or the exhaust of a passing bus or deranged in its own way, descended from the heavens and collided with my face, its beak bursting my retina, tearing through my iris, and devouring my cornea. The bird flew away, spectators said, unharmed. Satisfied, I imagined it was, full of me while I lay there on the ground, writhing, shouting for vengeance, for my girl to still go to the Homecoming dance with me despite my hideous appearance. 

I think of that bird still today when I eat breakfast, drink my coffee, drive to work. I think of that bird when I make love, go for a jog, take a swim. I think of that bird every time I see my old flame at the Grab-N-Go Gas Mart on the corner, and make her give me change for things I don’t need: a Hershey bar, a bar of soap, a bag of skittles. I only ever carry a twenty. I think of a bird that is surely dead all these years later and its little bird children, dead now too, I suppose, if someone asks what I was like in high school. I spent my time in trees, on rooftops, and climbing telephone polls. I sat atop ladders, awnings, and rafters. Were you an acrobat, they ask, a thrill seeker? A bird watcher, I say. 

And it’s a bird I’m watching this morning as I slink closer to the edge of the roof, the soft gravel taking the shape of my foot with every creeping step. A bird. The bird. Impossibly still alive. And there, in its hideous black beak, my eye! Somehow after a wife, two children, an affair, testicular cancer and surgery, two houses, a college degree, a bad traffic accident, and a bet on black that paid off in roulette, the bird persists. I have no choice but to kill the bird now and take back what’s mine. I snatch its wiry leg midflight, dragging it down from the sky, and throttle the thing between my knees. I push a long index finger into each side of its precious neck, waiting for its final flutter until at last my eye is my own again. I remove my patch and let sunlight wash into the dark hole of my face one final time. The Gas-N-Go for a tube of cherry chapstick—that’s where I’ll go first. I stand and plummet from the roof—a false step misjudged by a depth perception I have not known in decades. In the commotion, the lifeless bird falls too. And though dead, it is not without one last act of cruelty, crashing into my face once more, its dead beak gouging through and taking my other eye.

---

Max Andrew Dubinsky is the creator of the online graphic novel Dislocated. His work has also been featured on Chicago Public Radio as audio fiction, and on McSweeney's Internet Tendencies. He's the narrator and curator of the podcast The MAD Fictioncast, and his favorite animals are Godzilla, Bigfoot, and the giant squid. Follow him on twitter @maxdubinsky for more.

SHE'LL ONLY COME OUT AT NIGHT — KRISTINE LANGLEY MAHLER

Our guts churned as Kelly Tucker dared us into a game of “Who’s Got the Nerve to Hit Me” on those viscous, smothered-summer nights at the park backboning our neighborhood, our parents encased in the air-conditioned houses, watching Friday-night-family-programming beside our siblings on the couches. But we’d melted out our front doors and swiped our kickstands with our insteps and the yellow streetlight streamed off our exposed shoulder blades as we cut swathes through the swelter, merging, drawn together to the park. We didn’t underdog on the swings, pretending to be children, or climb on top of the soccer goals like the boys would; we weren’t lured by the tobacco fields on the other side of the broken wooden fence the way they’d called to us in the daylight. We met right at the front of the park, visible to anyone who had the guts to join us, anyone who might have the guts to follow our instantaneous desire to actually hit Kelly Tucker in the face when she dared us. 

We all wanted to do it, we all disliked her, disliked how mean she was, how unafraid. We disliked the natural bleach-streak in the ponytail she sleeked back to expose her sharply-featured, hawk-like face; we disliked her father whom we feared as she invoked his orders to elbow aside her absence at cotillion, invoked his pride in her for doing boyish things. We feared Kelly Tucker as she pushed us all out of the way on the basketball court, played harder, shot harder, slammed home-runs like a boy, wore gym shorts low like a boy, talked back to the teachers like a boy. She was mean but she was one of us; no one would punch her, no one would slap her, no one would say anything mean to her face. And she knew it.

So she scowled and narrowed her eyes with pleasure and we collected behind her as Kelly Tucker strode away from the park, right down the center of the darkened street, and we were pumping our fists in the air and yell-singing Kelly’s lyrical twist, SLAM, duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, LET THE GIRLS BE GIRLS because we weren’t boys, we didn’t want to be boys, we would never have sung LET THE GIRLS BE BOYS. Who wanted to be a boy, all that visible desire poking pleats into their Duck Head shorts, sweaty and slapping tennis balls against the gym wall before school, the endless dirty rhymes they made from each other’s names? Who wanted to be a boy? We were girls, unbent, belligerent, say-it-to-my-fucking-face girls, though under the fluorescence of eighth grade we were soft, secret, clenching our right fists under the demure cover of our yin-yang-ringed left hands, low in our laps beneath the lab tables, hiss-whispering about Kelly Tucker, smelly fucker. But we would meet her at the park when the cicadas shrilled into the thick night quilt, the husks of our guts burning with the things we hadn’t done. She knew that too.

---

Kristine Langley Mahler lives on the suburban prairie of Nebraska, where she is completing an erasure book on Seventeen's advice to teenage girls, a grant-funded project about immigration/inhabitation on native land through the lens of her French-Canadian ancestors, and a graduate degree in creative nonfiction. Her work received the 2016 Rafael Torch Award for Literary Nonfiction from Crab Orchard Review and has appeared/is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Quarter After Eight, Sweet, Storm Cellar, Split Lip Magazine, (b)OINK, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. Find her online here or here.

FLIGHT HELMET — KATHERINE GEHAN

She thinks about it mostly on airplanes, when the pilot deploys the landing gear and the whirring machinery vibrates her seat. Her final wishes stipulate cremation and one day her charred hip replacement socket and ball will be recycled into rivets or significant metal, wings, a rudder. She could affect directional flow. Through scratched Plexiglass and misty cirrus, the cars below are toys. She traces where the highways intertwine and kiss. Her metal fillings could become road signs and announce 106 miles to Topeka, or Children Playing.

The six year old’s bicycle had hooked the undercarriage of her car and threw off steering. All she heard was the scream of another pop song chorus, baby baby baby, cheery as the last. She had looked at the radio knobs so briefly. Six was too young for cavities, and the boy had been lucky, never broken a leg, no doctor had screwed metal into bone. He left behind no pieces for wing flaps, no parts to help lift her up. 

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Katherine Gehan’s writing has appeared in McSweeny’s Internet Tendency, Literary Mama, The Stockholm Review, Sundog Lit, Split Lip Magazine, People Holding, WhiskeyPaper, (b)OINK and others. She is nonfiction editor at Pithead Chapel. Say hello @StateofKate and find her work at www.kategehan.wordpress.com. 

BACK WHEN YOU WERE RIVER PHOENIX — JENNIFER HARVEY

You wore crop tops and flashed a peek of soft abdomen from above denim cut-offs. Rubbed the frayed edges between your finger and thumb, and listened to what all the other girls were saying. How they dreamed of him. Then, one day, you dreamed of him too.
             You were wary of Cobain, but pretended not to be, because fitting in was all that mattered. You thought maybe one day you’d try and explain this to him, just to see the frown crease his ice blue eyes. Understanding him, took a long time.
             You drew an index finger across the map and searched for Idaho, listened to the squeak of skin on paper, as the friction pulled you westward. The sound returning, unbidden in the night, as you dreamed of black bitumen, and yellow lines fading to some point in the distance. When you woke you could still feel the longing in your thighs.
             You thought becoming a man meant being this boy. This boy who stared at flowers, and let his head fall upon the shoulder of someone stronger. Someone he knew would outlive him. You thought, when you fell in love, it would be with this boy. Always this boy.
             You thought the world would evolve towards something like him. Something softer, kinder and a little slower. And as you waited for it, you pretended not to hear the hiss and spit of vipers, and the motorcycle roar of the future as it revved down the strip towards him.

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Jennifer Harvey is a Scottish writer now living in Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies in the US and the UK. She is a Resident Reader for Carve Magazine, and when not writing can be found wandering the Amsterdam canals and dreaming up new stories. You can find her online at: www.jenharvey.net or on Twitter at @JenAnneHarvey.