TheNervousBreakdown

Online culture magazine, lit community, & indie publisher.

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“And how could he look like lightning
If he was wearing clothes?
And how could the clothes be white as snow
If there was never any snow?”

Read two new poems by Donald Berger on R&R:

https://t.co/knx5DftdqE

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“I sit around to reduce
my spending
to change
my way of life
tomato, mozzarella, basil
to look forward to”

Read four new poems by Paul Maziar on R&R:

https://t.co/kT6QojQFM4

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“The worst is feeling
I must spend my life
trapped inside a tree with you.”

Read three new poems by Elaine Bleakney:

https://t.co/HGXO9sdtMe

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“‘You don’t know a thing you’re talking about. A leprechaun could crawl over right now and whip you in the skull, and you’d think a piece of airplane had fallen from the sky and hit you.’”

New fiction by Alex Ransom on R&R:

https://t.co/dQM1NJ58js

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“That trusty time-tested
cottonwood-leaf hat, rustling,
sussing, chuckling just overhead.”

Read four new poems by Merrill Gilfillan on R&R:

https://t.co/o89kfrr6AF

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“I turned on the TV with my phone. Tight suits on men who’d played for years and still made a living from the game. They analyzed, and I checked the messages on my phone.”

Read new fiction by Alexander Fredman, with artwork by @tvbeaches:

https://t.co/4OOeaZiDzd

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“A voice came to me in the night and said
I am the voice of Donald Trump’s penis
I am the biggest penis in the room
You shall have no other penis before thee”

Read three new poems by Paul Kahn on R&R:

https://t.co/7MgwlE7Nlp

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“still you make your own life
though it begins before you are ready
and there is never enough time
there are rabbits

even the dead one
whose skin I keep
change inside”

Read four new poems by Serena Solin on R&R:

https://t.co/GJBu9yQBNR

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“That I'm not to be a poet because I'm not one now is not all that sound a reason, I sometimes think. It (writing) is what compels me.”

Read six new poems by Cliff Fyman:

https://t.co/bwQReREsNA

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“Anders and Laura walked through the door. He found it depleting. Time and energy were like disposable income for these people. They spent it just to spend it.”

Read new fiction by Benjamin Jasnow on R&R:

https://t.co/PqeTar2kyP

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“I ask him what he does, I hope he is a football player on the Lions or something, but if he was he’d never tell me anyway he says he is a diesel mechanic”

Read “The Night-Sucker” by Scott Watson on R&R:

https://t.co/JzycPk9FGO

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“I'm stuck in dread Hollywood in a two-banger on Fuller Street outside simulated introvision of purgatory. Feel like shit.

Feel like wallowing in it. Hate everybody. Can't wake up. And I'm doing a scene about love.”

Read new writing by Will Patton:

https://t.co/jl2FFBN0cs

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“I’d never done anything like this before. Berg cheated on his wife all the time. Now I was going to be just as bad as Berg.”

It’s Dale Herd (1940-2026) week on R&R. We’ll have two new Herd stories on the site, beginning today with “At the Blue Fox Inn”:

https://t.co/TixUAo5bKC

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“M. sees a fly crash repeatedly into a window and says: ‘What a stubborn girl, she reminds me of my sister trying to convince mom to do more exercise and mom saying she won’t.’”

Read new stories by Ariel Magnus, translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude:

https://t.co/Z5LlecKZxA

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“You were a semicolon in the last printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which ran to 32 volumes. You provided a crucial pause between two connected but discrete ideas about the nature of being.”

Read seven new poems by James Brown:

https://t.co/dR9snXbtZc

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“Do you like the way I have divided
this poem into six-line stanzas,
to give it more gravitas? Serious
poets divide their poems into
stanzas.”

Read four new poems by Stuart Ross on R&R:

https://t.co/L1P17rzHuk

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“A voice jumped out of a device that you had thought you had turned off. Stuff like that happens a lot these days. Just waiting for the pin to drop. Or bomb.”

Read four new poems by Gillian McCain on R&R:

https://t.co/HiLroU3hMi

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“I liked the sound the school copier made. Sometimes when I needed to clear my head, I made blank copies or copies with a single word—‘apple’ maybe, or ‘petroleum.’”

Read new fiction by Dalton Monk (@mammawmistletoe) on R&R:

https://t.co/FdFc4Giybu

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“You love poetry and baseball--are they like one another?

They both get you used to something--and then comes a surprise. You love it.”

Read three new poems by Canada’s first Poet Laureate, George Bowering:

https://t.co/g4HpPqeoJW

[R&R @RnRlitmag]

“Someone cleared their throat. I looked southwest toward the promise of a never-ending day, then we all grimaced up at the sky that now seemed to be pressing down on us like the stubborn lid of some overfilled thing.”

Read new fiction by Corey Lof:

https://t.co/uCe9zJcGSM