Showcase Relaunch July 2026

Welcome to Showcase!

This is our July relaunch edition. We’re very happy to be moving again.

A note from Bethany Leger, our new editor:

Thank you to these writers. We now present their work. As we relaunch Showcase, I look forward to exploring the ways each of you dares to wrest every scrap of hope and beauty back from the clutches of darker times.

Sincerely,
Bethany

Without further ado, this week’s selections are...

• David Eileen for Poetry

• Annie Raab for Prose (Short Fiction)

Some Housekeeping:

We will be in touch with everyone regarding their work very shortly. If you were not selected this month, we may yet ask to keep your piece, so please read any messages sent via submittable. Thanks to all who have submitted. If you submitted, and your work was not selected, please wait at least several cycles before resubmitting that same work. We thank you for the opportunity to have read or to read again.

As a reminder, we feature writers of all origins and all levels.

Let’s build a positive and positively enticing writing community such that readers, casual and devoted, continue to find us and make a type of home in our midst.

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Short Fiction by Annie Raab
—Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea.

When my father’s memory regressed from the near past into the distant past, he thought we were all his employees.

“Boss announcement,” he shouts one afternoon over the table covered in white doilies since 1989. “I should have never hired my assistant, Margaret. She’s a thief!”

Margaret is my mother, sitting to his left with her fork in a coin of roast beef. They share a home, a bed, three children. But they do not share any more memories. My father thinks she has stolen an expensive pen from his office, a room with a desk and a standing lamp missing a bulb. My siblings and I shuffle papers when we visit, recreating the office he left after retirement as best as we remember. Sometimes, we take a pen.

“Maybe time off’ll do her some good,” he bends forward, focused on his mashed potatoes. My mother shifts in her chair, quietly, while she dims within her husband’s mind.

He had ways to cope with fear when what he feared was still mysterious. I think of when we welcomed him home one summer afternoon. We leapt from the hedges and screeched his name. Who could have known our father would react that way as he belly-flopped to the ground and rolled sideways under the car? My mother shipped us away for the weekend, giving the whole house over to him and to quietude. When we returned, the photograph of my father in his handsome green uniform had been removed from their bedroom wall. She was good to him that way. She was gentle with invisible wounds.

Many years ago, he held my mother’s hand in crowds. “Help me find my way,” he said and shut his eyes tight against the mass of bodies. With my mother’s hand in one of his and our three small hands in his other, he grinned with eyes shut and let us weave him beyond the throng to safety. Our joke at the end, when we reached the car or the festival gate where the crowd was thinnest, he said, as if he’d navigated himself, “I knew I’d find my way.”

Last week, I stole the expensive pen. I didn’t think he would notice. I will fess up so my mother can keep her job. But in this episode of his slipping memory, even when our mother says she’s sorry, that she will return the pen and pack up her desk, my father cannot find his way to forgiveness. At the end of the meal my mother takes his hand. She can lead him there.

What I love about flash fiction is the challenge to write with clarity and narrative momentum without going over 500 words. Memories exist in the realm of flash fiction—we have subliminal images and sensations that last less than a second, but can deliver these powerful messages and change the way we feel. Even more interesting: they change over time, and in many ways we can’t control. The year I wrote this story, I wrote others in the theme of regression: one about a past life specialist, one about a museum object, one about a horse jockey, one about a historical mystic, and a couple others. This tiny format is very good for taking big leaps into the world and then retracting back into the narrator’s mind, which creates a whiplash experience that is so pleasurable to read. But you need to be exact in your vocabulary. When I wrote this story, I was inspired by a spoken sentence and then drew from modern influences to tighten the narrative. If I could go back and write this piece again, I think I’d incorporate more contemporary ideas and pose myself a bigger challenge to clarify and condense without chasing the lust for closure. I think this piece could be shorter, clearer, and more ambiguous without losing its core, which is tenderness.

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Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it? How did you come to write your 2 favorite lines/sentences? What do you like most about this piece?

In 2018 I spent the summer in writing conferences and workshops. Mid-week of the second conference, a few of us from the cohort went to this supposedly legendary Hamptons bar where famous writers used to drink. There, another writer told me that as her grandpa’s dementia progressed, “he thought his family were his employees.” I was instantly gripped by this sentence and the story wrote itself the next day. That first line is my favorite.

What motivates you on a thematic level? At what point do you consider the nuts and bolts of technique, style, word choice, and other craft items?

At the time I wrote this story, I produced many others about regression and altered or imagined histories, each under 600 words. I enjoy working small sometimes and setting limitations on theme or beginning with a simple image or a found sentence. You can go quite big on your ideas in the micro form with the correct vocabulary. I typically apply craft during the second pass, starting with verbs and nickel words, cutting words like “it” or “thing” that have no place in flash. Narrative momentum is my biggest challenge, so I try to write a punchy first draft and then work to condense and clarify.

Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical or social level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?

The bulk of my formal training and deepest literary engagement occurred between 2010 and 2018, and that is definitely reflected in the prose. Those were the years I was searching most intensely for my style and reading a broad range of materials to influence that development. I read a lot of mid-century short story heavyweights (Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway, Amy Hempel, Jorge Luis Borges) and narrative-driven poets (Ben Lerner, Bhanu Kapil, Claudia Rankine, Louise Glück, Anne Boyer). So those were my early influences with regards to learning about narrative structure and linguistic play. As for where the aesthetics fit in the timeline, I think The Guide belongs to the end of the flash fiction heyday. It probably isn’t vogue to write the way I do anymore.

As we explore themes of personal agency and empowerment, sometimes difficult conversations arise between those closest to us, be it family, community, or intimate partner relationships. What do you believe we can do to bridge the gap and foster greater understanding?

You can’t foster understanding in your relationships without understanding yourself that we’re all so flawed and worthy of forgiveness. I wish I’d learned that much sooner. The next best thing is to read a lot and make friends easily.

Are there any pieces, books, or authors to whom you’d compare your work, or that inspire you? Which of the above have influenced you and this piece in particular?

I wrote this during a workshop with Amy Hempel, so I was writing under her instruction in a very studious atmosphere. I tried very hard to imitate her work early in my writing career, and I still use techniques I picked up in her workshop, and a workshop with A.J. Verdelle, in my revisions today. But these days, I don’t compare my style to hers anymore. I’m inspired by writers with clear artistic visions, which means I’m writing with much more artistic confidence myself and writing fewer imitations. Although imitation is excellent, effective instruction.

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A Poem by David Eileen

—Originally published in Cherry Tree (Issue 10, 2024)

Even if they have to be purified first, pushed through mushrooms & worms,
all my ancestors will sing about me. Borrowed organ, lungs open as a shoreline,
every bellow I muster will have their dirt in it. That very last filmy breath,
the one that tendons air between this life & its outwinking, it burns away hate
down to the marrow. Prejudice like flash paper. I’ve seen it. I felt myself die
once & my father’s name did not choke the light. My face made the same joy
as chlorophyll cells under a microscope, like if you could remember the first time
you had buttered toast hungry. & live there. & not yet need to clean the slick
from your mouth: I knew myself on the way to join a choir. So the same
for my haters before me, their narrow scoffs pried wide into anthems. Death
will plump that pursed lip into abundance like a sponge left in the rain. When she
reaches her scant heaven, my grandmother will bend backward to tie a bow
on the vein where they put me under for my abortion & call my blood a gift
I don’t have to split. She’ll say she loves her body filtering into open
petals & leave like lilac’s scent after spring.
She’ll ghost me again in her kindness.

I’m a highly emotional creature, so in touch with my nervous system that I used to wish it would stop touching me. I used to believe my own spine was an inescapable prison: sometimes I could swear it was fizzing around, sparking like a live wire after an electric pole goes down, leaving scorch marks wherever it wiggled. I see most things through the lens of emotional motivations and needs. In fact, I believe emotionality underlies most of what makes people in the world move, only matched in its driving power by class interest. This piece, like everything I write, is about the truth of human emotions, how they’re designed around wanting to be loved and recognized. Sometimes I write about my desire being met, sometimes I write about my loss that sharpens that desire. This poem contains both ends of that want: feeling fully met in some beyond-life place as well as contending with my family’s inability to meet me anywhere near there. I want them to show up like I showed up to that (ostensibly final) moment: disrobed, without ego, as indifferent and wholesome as bread to my breaking. But that’s where the title comes from: if I could only get there by approaching death, then I will wish the same for them, but without wishing that it happens in the same way. I’m writing for them what I always need to write for myself, putting down an escape from shame and a respite from guilt. This poem makes the case that death might be better without all these ideas of heaven, drawing on images of bodily pleasures like buttered toast and the scent of lilac. These sensory delights flesh out the poem’s exploration into the Unknown After that somehow—at least for a moment—seemed familiar, welcoming. Not at all like a judgment.

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Showcase:  We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it? How did you come to write your 2 favorite lines/sentences? What do you like most about this piece?

There was a moment when I was ill and delirious, alone in my apartment and so sick I felt confused and disoriented. After wandering in circles taking off and putting on the same few items of clothing, I genuinely thought I might die. I didn’t panic—thankfully, I wasn’t dying so my lack of panic wasn’t a problem. Instead, I thought about how much I wished I could stay behind, help clean up after myself. When I came out of this temporary haze, I felt so much gratitude that my estranged father and his parents were nowhere near what I thought were my very last chances to think at all. I wanted to capture that feeling of being connected only to love. That moment convinced me that maybe, on the edge of their own endings, my relatives would be freed from the disconnection and estrangement that prevents them from knowing me, from being in my life.

My two favorite lines from this piece exemplify what I like most about the whole poem: “So the same/ for my haters before me, their narrow scoffs pried wide into anthems. Death/ will plump that pursed lip into abundance like a sponge left in the rain.” I mixed language like “haters” and the ordinary, humble sponge with words like “anthems” and “abundance.” This poem is meant to be cheeky, to grin just like the green cells mentioned do if you see them up close enough. When I was suspended, in my mind about to die, all the common and disgusting things seemed to lose their sting, to mix with divinity. I needed this poem to have dirt, scoffing, and flash paper so it could hold the dirty & ephemeral alongside the divine, the eternal. I also needed it to speak with authority. My decisive language is a choice about who gets to keep, define, and dole out divine knowledge. In this poem, I’ve decided I’m worthy of that role.

What motivates you on a thematic level? At what point do you consider the nuts and bolts of technique, style, word choice, and other craft items?

I’m interested in themes I feel like I can climb into. When I hear an inspiring fact or think of a string of words I like, I’m also looking for the leverage and foothold I need to get myself personally inside “there,” to the flash of whatever caught my attention in the first place. In that way, all my themes are self-centered: I believe that poetry is a personal practice and I don’t like it when poets obscure the roots of their desire to work with any given subject matter. It’s more challenging for me to stay engaged in work that is presented without the personal fingerprints of its artisan. I work with religion in response to all the ways religion worked me over first! And same for the earth, for love, for queer life and gay sex, for food—even for the animals and astronauts I’ve written about, down to the smallest detail: I’m always aware that I’m choosing these things because I want to inhabit them, to walk around in a poem like it’s another body I get to try out, another vessel for me.

I try not to be too cognitively aware of my work in terms of craft until I’m further in the drafting process, maybe even toward the end. That being said, there’s a certain “wrongness” I can feel in words that don’t seem to me to fit into what I’m writing, so while I don’t let my Editor Self into the drafting process, I do write away from the wrongness. Once the draft feels right enough, or when the flow of inspiration stalls, I start combing through for particular snags: a word or line break that could be refined, a metaphor that gets away from itself. Punctuation is always a wrestling match: I’m squeamish using a word when a symbol will do, so the ampersand determines my syntax as I look for visual or sonic “wrongs.” The more I think about how I write a poem, the more I wonder if I’m not just feeling through it, passing the words under my fingers or over my tongue to get them more comfortable. These days, I’m starting to wonder if this attention to the nuts & bolts should come even later in the drafting process: can I invent an intermediary stage where I’m seeing the poem not as a series of grammatical details OR as a body’s whole, inspired piece; but rather as a collection of units with their own discrete purpose? Can I step into the editing process just enough to see the poem as a skin for ideas without yet beginning to diagram the sentences those ideas fit in?

Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical or social level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?

I know I’m a product of my influences, but my relationship to history is retrospective. My work fits at the end of all the history I know, sitting on top of what I’ve consumed to get here like the tiny triangle for sugar and fat sits at the top of the food pyramid. I use that image specifically for the seeming frivolity of sweets & oils: they’re nowhere near the bottom of the food pyramid… but somehow, I still feel I’ll die without my treats. In the same way, my work feels crucial to me. Poetry is a matter of survival but at different doses, providing different nutrients, than other survival concerns. I wouldn’t guess that history regards my poetry with the same fervor and respect with which I regard both: I’m an ardent student of history and lineage. I don’t expect history, broadly, to make room for me or remember me. But when the keepers of my personal history and lineage reject me, that devotion is at odds with my wellbeing. My grandparents are farmers and we both claim to love the earth, but I’m the only one who is concerned with climate change and the rights of indigenous people to manage their ancestral lands. This poem contends with that exact dissonance.

Socially, I see this work very much as a product of finding my community. Coming out as gay later in life—many years, actually, after I came out as non-binary—meant that I had not practiced living through my own desires very much. This is where my love of lineage is redirected: away from family or religious tradition, toward the hand-to-hand preservation that queer/trans people give each other. We keep each other’s histories, give each other medical advice, perform secret marriages, and create new rituals. It feels like inventing how to be human all over again. It also feels like being the very first member in a new religion, leading me right back to my love of clandestine history and the places that history is kept, catacombs and bar bathrooms and church basements and behind photobooth curtains.

As we explore themes of personal agency and empowerment, sometimes difficult conversations arise between those closest to us, be it family, community, or intimate partner relationships. What do you believe we can do to bridge the gap and foster greater understanding?

I can only share what has worked for me. Put simply, I believe in the loving kindness meditations developed for Dialectical Behavioral Therapy by Marsha Linehan, a psychologist who synthesized important scientific research with Buddhist tenets and her own personal experiences. This meditation is an accessible practice that anyone can do and benefit from. But in all honesty, I’m estranged from most of my father’s side of the family, so I’m not sure how effective my own methods of bridging gaps have been. I’m not sure that I know how to repair a relationship with someone who is determined not to recognize your personhood, or your right to define it. Now, the people I’m close with go out of their way to make sure I feel understood, which is the only thing that allows me to extend that kind of grace to others: something of an inversion of St. Francis’ prayer (“let me not seek to be understood as much as to understand”), but resonates with me all the same. I had a difficult relationship with my mother for many years, especially before she divorced my father. It was only her allowing me to feel exactly how I felt without critique that gave me enough space to repair our bond. The space we took made us stronger, I think, and more aware of each other as separate individuals. The relationship we built back has real foundations based on choice and agency. I have alienated people in my life through choosing recovery, choosing my own health, and choosing to embrace my authentic desires and identities. But I’ve also been embraced by (more) people for these exact same choices. I’ve learned that choosing myself does not mean choosing to be alone, even if it means accepting the possibility of being alone.

Are there any pieces, books, or authors to whom you’d compare your work, or that inspire you? Which of the above have influenced you and this piece in particular?

For this piece in particular, I’m inspired by the sensibility of hymns and the clipped language of Anne Carson as well as the mix of divine with the mundane à la Ann Sexton (continually remembering her poem “Evil Eye,” where Jesus cracks an egg into your toilet). I wanted to retain some of the religious language that shaped (and had a hand in destroying) the relationships I’m describing. Ideas of purity, of organs bellowing, and of redemption are deliberately equated to worms, mushrooms, and abortion; things that seem distasteful or even heinous to a family in the throes of Catholicism. This is my chance to revel anyway.

I am forever inspired by: Sharon Olds, Emily Skaja, sterling-elizabeth arcadia, Becka Mara McKay, Tara Hardy, Terri Ford, Ross Gay, Chen Chen, J. Jennifer Espinoza, Todd Dillard, Richard Siken, Li Young Lee, Campbell McGrath, Annie Dillard, Arah Ko, Victoria Chang, Paisley Rekdal, Dante Fuoco; and far too many more to name but live on the tip of my tongue all the time. I wanted this piece to insist that death is better than hate, that love is “the means, what we ask with” (Olds). I drew on the traditions of all these poets, as I do every time I write. I’m inspired and bolstered by the bravery of these artists who repurpose odious, difficult, visceral moments into art—especially the ways that their art retains the odious and visceral, not obscuring it in order to make art with it. That’s what I want to do.

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