Every year, Aster(ix) readers and editors review our pieces from the year, and nominate some of our best work for the annual Pushcart Prize. We are excited to showcase our nominations here and invite you to enjoy them, too.
The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, holds Highest Honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections.
Puschart Press, http://www.pushcartprize.com/
Story
- “Today I Will Bake a Cake” by Layhannara Tep
But on New Year’s Day the following year, the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh and 1975 became a year the monks never blessed.
I’ve always wondered what happened to Ma’s two pots of taro pudding dessert that year.
Surely, that morning, Ma must’ve woken up before the sun rose, as she did every New Year’s Day. Boiling taro to its desired softness is a multi-hour process and Ma watched over her pots as she would newborns, one minute, she’s fanning the flames to bring the water to a boil, the next she’s piling in straw to bring the heat down. When you tend to taro the way Ma did, you draw out the sweetness hiding at its core.
When Ma woke up that morning, she didn’t know it would be the first year her dessert would go untouched.
- “Time Wave” by Racquel Goodinson
The eye kept me awake. It was the wait. Silence, like a threat, pressed up against my throat. The rain stopped. No wind. I looked through the boarded window onto the street. People were standing outside their house, looking, hands akimbo. Someone, a woman crying, sat on the sidewalk. Brown dogs from both next doors sniffed the trees that use to be in their backyards.
I waited. The eye moved over us, the quiet hub of the hurricane.
- “Snap This Photo of Two Good Men” by Catalina Bartlett
Damn. I wished Tío could see that I was worthy of respect. Who cares what people think, hijo? Ma always said. I don’t, I always told her. But Tío Domingo needed to remember that I worked for one of the most admired men in the Valley, that I had just been promoted, that my word was as good as the old man’s. All this made me someone who was admired too, and that was a righteous feeling, better than any two-bit con job.
Hybrid
- “Your Daughter Refashions the Flag into a Crop Top” by Rosa Alcalá
The frayed flag of a contested country that barely covered your sex: the thing woven onto you, the thing you had to accept. Yoko Ono put on stage how you knelt and kept quiet, as small, buffoonish men snipped and snipped. You even provided the dull scissors. Vicuña’s Amaranta holds a thousand invisible folds of what happened before and after. The original painting and your mother no longer exist, but they’ve put in a long-distance call to your daughter, who has begun to hear footfalls behind her as she walks around the block. Cecilia once told me she had to choose between poetry and painting, but she no longer believes this and is recovering what was stolen, rejected, lost. You bequeath to your daughter what was left of the flag, and rejecting its unflattering form, she refashions it into a crop top to show off her midriff. She’s on the verge of something, that beautiful precipice.
Poetry
- “Tell me all the things you’ve missed“ by Natalia Torres
A robin gingerly approaches the blueberry bush,
stops for a moment to inspect its branches,
hops inside and rustles around.
He pauses — drops — collects his spoils.
My father decides it’s time to rearrange the garden art.
He is grieving, but not grave.
His mother died this morning.
- “Everything is Temporary” by Nicole Callihan
If I were face-up in the MRI machine, I’d see the cherry blossoms affixed to the ceiling.
But I’m face-down.
My arms are extended above my head.
A crane, I read this morning, can stay aloft for up to ten hours.
It barely needs to flap its wings.
