“Here I was in this shitty front yard. Ants crawling over my skin, ticks burrowing into my flesh, who cared, who cared?” Read new fiction by Jimmy Cajoleas on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/who-...

“I read Hegel and nothing else. I watch infomercials and nothing else. I eat saltine crackers and nothing else. I drink water and nothing else. My point is, I am a boring man.” Read two new stories by Matthew Washington on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/two-...

“She took him on a walk early every morning. Leg protested at first, but he was able to forget himself for long stretches of the trail. Knee made a fuss. He was stiff. He didn’t seem willing to hold the rest of Leg up.” Read new fiction by Sherril Jaffe: www.relegationbooks.com/article/leg-...

““I thought it might be a good day to make spaghetti sauce. I’d made spaghetti sauce before. But this time, I decided, it was going to be different.” Read new fiction by Ken Sparling on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/hi-i...

i had forgotten about R&R after i ditched twitter and for whatever reason, just remembered it again and went digging through some of the recent stuff. really enjoy these 3 shorties from gabe jimenez-ekman!

“It feels wrong to move away from this place Listening to this music, Sitting in the car, about to pull away The leaves in the distance, all around, Don’t want you to leave yet And so you stay and listen” Read four new poems by Vincent Katz on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/four...

“He drinks so slow I don’t know whether to feel put on or just alcoholic. He spits talking and my face is in the way so what’s the dignified response.” Read two new stories by Selen Ozturk: www.relegationbooks.com/article/two-...

“one day I was out in my shoes red shop peaks my interest sign said apply inside so I gone in but didn’t smell no apples that was sad” Read four new poems by Greg Brownderville: www.relegationbooks.com/article/four...

“I never felt anything. I had a hard time in high school, got bullied a lot. Dropped out of college after one semester. Then I started as a clerk at the grocery store.” Read three new stories by Gabe Jimenez-Ekman: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

“In heaven there are no automatic weapons To be found guilty of a crime there One need only to have arrived unexpectedly” Read two new poems by Norman Fischer on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/two-...

“Once you get them back to your place, you pet him and he curls up on your lap and then you see it: that sparkle in their eyes, the tenderness. Suddenly, they like you more just for petting a cat.” Read fiction by Marta Jiménez Serrano: www.relegationbooks.com/article/buddy/

“He memorized pi to nine decimal places—3.141592654—and then he squared that. Another trick he did was he typed in this number that, when he turned the calculator upside-down, it spelled BOOBIES.” Read six new stories by Paul Maliszewski on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/six-...

“I didn’t have anything, really, besides this harrowing anti-life and lightweight clerical job that I escaped to five days a week, smiling and befuddled, in order to escape my cramped, depressing apartment.” Read new fiction by David Nutt on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/slat...

“UNCLE jungle DAUGHTER doctor” Read ten new poems by Craig Dworkin on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/ten-...

“When I went into the fridge next, I took a cucumber. I drank a glass of water. I read five pages of a book. I held a plank for seventy-three seconds.” Read three new stories by Hannah Applebaum on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

“Just one thing more I promise. Do you have rain too? Drainpipes and waterfalls? (Did you tell me already?)” Read two new poems by Charles North on R&R, the poet that James Schuyler called “the most stimulating poet of his generation.” www.relegationbooks.com/article/two-...

“I’m always happy when people return their pizzas, that’s my dinner. I basically eat pizza every night. Albert Einstein ate the same thing every day, and never changed his clothes, and that’s why he was so smart.” Read new fiction by Dallas Campos on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/skit...

“Same poet, more in focus historically competent with pretty words rarely short-tempered, 5 foot 6 aggressively interested in football but that was always true.” Read four new poems by Isaac Jarnot: www.relegationbooks.com/article/four...

really grateful to @rnrmagazine.bsky.social for featuring three of my poems today! here’s one of them:

“eBay collectors spend thousands on dollar bills with printing errors” Read three new poems by Tom Snarsky (@tomsnarsky.bsky.social) on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

“Jenny’s misfortunes were more or less about how she came into the world. Mine were about wanting to get out of it.” Read new fiction by Grace Byron (@emotrophywife.bsky.social) on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/prin...

“I can’t decide what I want to be. Right now, I am becoming more careful with myself. I eat green foods. I’m dating around, but never stay out later than nine. Mom and Dad love me for being smart for so long.” Read new fiction by Jasey Roberts on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/vale...

“The sea monsters committed suicide in the mountains. There are no sea monsters in the world anymore. That’s why he grew up to work for Amazon.” Read three new poems by Yuyi Chen on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

“Because I've been wallowing too long. And now, in a stranger's apartment, happiness reveals itself to be an obese cat, and a woman from Alsace.” Read new fiction by Steve Anwyll on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/leo/

“my little mother, my little father in the morning when the sun is new my father’s village on my head feeding me, shaking with laughter i smell them like beer in the night time” Read new poetry by Leo Dunsker: www.relegationbooks.com/article/naiv...

“The common denominator was the impression that something had happened to each person, maybe at once, maybe over the course of decades. An event or simply an idea. An emotion. Something painful or unforgettable or both.” Read new fiction by Angela Ma: www.relegationbooks.com/article/as-i...

“She was still thinking about the King James Bible, thinking there had been an error in the translation of the Latin, no, Hebrew. The English loved their Greyhounds so much they wrote them into the past.” Read new fiction by Mitchell Galloway: www.relegationbooks.com/article/grey...

“Why bother writing so much that your own writing doesn’t recognise you? If you mean to get everyone to publish you, you know how many people you’ll keep busy working for how many decades?” Read three new poems by Ouyang Yu: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

“I want you to be happy like a man wants to live with his wife in neo-liberal derangement How she might feel about it is another poem” Read three new poems by David Larsen: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

“And then the waterfalls are nice. They’re nice the way these things tend to be nice: they’re pretty and two minutes later you don’t know what to do with them.” Read a short story by Samuel Solleiro, translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers: www.relegationbooks.com/article/grea...

“I thought the duration of human lives stacked up in a row and you could go back a century quite quickly if you only remembered a few lives would send you back to Rome” Read four poems by Hannah Piette on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/four...

To celebrate his birthday today, June 6th, we are happy to share a never-before-published short story by Stephen Dixon. Read “The Day is Done” on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/the-...

“Lawson feels that he is in a kind of place he’s never been, a place with dark spaces above, below, to the left and right, front and back, kind of closing in.” Read new fiction by Clyde Edgerton on R&R: www.relegationbooks.com/article/deat...

“The Washington Metro is not sexy People read books like The Secret History of Neo-Liberalism They take calls from their realtor The floor is a Pollock-inspired linoleum It used to be industrial carpet” Read three new poems by Simon Schuchat: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

“Lilly wants that baby, and Samuel likes to give her what she wants. He’s given her a proposal, a marriage, a house with his car motor in the living room.” Read three new stories by Megan Koch: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

Relegation Books’ house magazine, @rnrmagazine.bsky.social, edited by @josephgrantham.bsky.social, opens again to submissions tomorrow; capped at 100: relegationbooks.submittable.com

“Nobody's perfect but people aren't stupid. Human knowledge may have gone boom but going boom is a thing that happens” Read four new poems by Bob Perelman: www.relegationbooks.com/article/four...

“Thinking too much, fell off. Found out. Fell in love. In that order. No breeze today, in the breeze.” Read four new poems by Rod Smith: www.relegationbooks.com/article/four...

“She had had a psychotic break when she was in college and started cursing everyone. She was treated for this, and eventually it passed, and she started wearing only white or beige, which looked lovely with her gold blond hair. New fiction by Sherril Jaffe: www.relegationbooks.com/article/vari...

Editor @rnrmagazine.bsky.social, @josephgrantham.bsky.social , interviewed by Lucy K. Shaw for new literary news outlet, Zona Motel: zonamotel.substack.com/p/profile-jo...

“I don't think I would be able to do this if I lived in Los Angeles or New York or San Francisco.“ Joseph Grantham discusses @rnrmagazine.bsky.social, the year-old art and literary magazine published by Relegation Books in Baltimore, with Lucy K. Shaw: zonamotel.substack.com/p/profile-jo...

“The hard part of getting a mouse to sign a contract is that you have to hold him down using the cover sheet, but when you hold him down he can’t hold the pen.” Read three new poems by Renny Pritikin: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

“I thought about you 3 times tonight from 7:30 to 8:30 from 8:30 to 9 & from 9 till I got home when I started to think about you again” Read four new poems by Elinor Nauen: www.relegationbooks.com/article/four...

“Things call and fall into place. Call like a curlew or a loon. Call hair ‘yellower than porchlight,’ children in from play... Call like a hoopoe or a crane.” Read new poems by Merrill Gilfillan: www.relegationbooks.com/article/stev...

“The day Elvis died, my father said we had to go out and buy his records, because one day they would be valuable. There might not be any left, he said, but we had to try. So we went out.” Read five new short stories by Paul Maliszewski: www.relegationbooks.com/article/five...

“The predator has been made legal by voting. First there was vetting and then there was voting. The voting was carried out by the people. Who will carry out the people.” Read three new poems by Eugene Ostashevsky: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

“The predator has been made legal by voting. First there was vetting and then there was voting. The voting was carried out by the people. Who will carry out the people.” Read three new poems by Eugene Ostashevsky: www.relegationbooks.com/article/thre...

“When I told my Foundations of Western Thought teacher that I wanted to examine Marx’s alienation of labor in terms of the strip club he’d blushed so hard I could see the pink showing through his combover.” Read new fiction by Mesha Maren: www.relegationbooks.com/article/gold...

“I could, but I don't. I could drink tea, but I drink coffee. I could take a sip right now, but I let it sit and keep writing.” Read new writing by Steve Benson: www.relegationbooks.com/article/on-f...

On March 22 in Baltimore, join us for the closing reception of @rnrmagazine.bsky.social’s First Art Show, with musical performances! Thank you to @bmoreart.bsky.social for listing: bmoreart.com/event/rr-the...