01/18/2022

Scoundrel Time
FeatureFiction

Burger Revolution

Since its grand opening in Nepal, everyone has been raving about McRonald’s. You see, we’re such a poor country even McDonald’s hasn’t sniffed us out. Thirty-eight thousand locations in over hundred countries...

Ranjan Adiga
FeaturePoetry

Revolutionary Letter to Diane di Prima

“not killing all the white men, but killing the white man in each of us. . . .” —D. d. P., “Revolutionary Letter #32”   Even now there is the desire, but what to do after Jan. 6— the militias and the...

Michael Begnal
FeatureFictionInterview

Dear Miss Metropolitan: An Interview with Carolyn Ferrell

In 1996, a teenage Black girl disappears from the streets of Queens. Then another. Then a third girl, of Puerto Rican descent, steps into the street and isn’t seen again. The disappearance of these three girls...

Ellie Paolini
FeatureFiction

Just Her Luck

If Holly put a penny in a gum ball machine, gum and a gold plastic ring would come out. At the Holy Names carnival, she’d lay a poker chip on a number, watch the wheel spin, and collect a stuffed animal.“I...

Laura Jamison

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News & Announcements

We are excited to announce the Scoundrel Time Pushcart Prize nominees for 2022:

Works nominated by Scoundrel Time’s editors:
 
Fiction:
“Bright” by Marilyn Abildskov
“Voyeurs” by Munawar Abbas
 
Poetry:
Jennifer Moxley: “One of Everything”
Essay:
“Bounded Functions” by Donald Quist

Works nominated by Pushcart Prize contributing editors:
 
“Algorithims” by Cindy Bosley
“Kill All the Bats” by Mohammed Sheeraz Dasti
“Just her Luck” by Laura Jamison

 

Congratulations!
Ken Massey’s essay, “Behind the Red Railing: My Childhood Isolation,” has been selected as a Notable essay in the new edition of Best American Essays, edited by Kathryn Schulz.

 
2021 Awards

We’re excited to announce our 4th annual Editors’ Choice Awards, just in time for our 4th anniversary. Each year, the editors of Scoundrel Time choose a favorite work that we published in the past year in each of three genres, poetry, fiction, and essay. This year, each winner receives $125.

This year’s winners are:

Michelle Acker’s “Aesopica (2019)” (poetry)
Ken Massey’s “Behind the Red Railing: My Childhood Isolation” (essay)
Chika Onyenezi’s “Twenty Thousand Cedis” (fiction)

 

Scoundrel Time journal congratulates the following winners of our special award for pandemic art, Art Against Isolation. These 7 powerful works appeared in our series, “Scenes from the Pandemic.” Each winning artist receives $100.

 

Virginia Beards, “April 7, 2020” (poem)

Lori Barrett, “The View From Inside” (essay)

Robbie Gamble, “Barriers” (essay)

Nene Humphrey, “Pandemic Sound Scrolls” (visual art)

Timothy Liu, “Four Poems” (poems)

Azarin Sadegh, “The Lizard” (fiction)

Eleanor Windman, “Coping on the Upper West Side” (fiction)

 

 

Contributors

“In the increasingly convincing darkness / The words become palpable…" —John Ashbery

“Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.” —Grace Paley

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Fiction

Dendrochronology

When the knock sounds, she knows she’s not to open the door. Her father has warned about these woods and their inhabitants. The expedience with which the knock travels through the little house reminds her that she is alone in a box made of wood. She...

Michelle Ross
11/07/2021
EssaysInterview

An Interview with Donald Quist

A resident assistant tries to break up a brawl between college athletes, but, as a young Black man, he doesn’t want to call the police for help. An eighth grader who is labelled “dangerous” sits in detention, trying to understand the mathematical...

Stephanie LaRose
10/28/2021
Essays

Bounded Functions

(an excerpt from To Those Bounded) I’m sitting at a desk, alone in a classroom smaller than any other classroom in my middle school. Every half an hour a teacher or the school resource officer enters to make sure I’m doing the math work I need to...

Donald Quist
10/26/2021
Poetry

The Black Girl At Your Party

circa 1970s My plaits and ribbons brightened white spaces for a long time Fat immigrant ribbons in every Color held my Thick Jamaican hair American black girls didn’t wear fat ribbons They had beads that made music when they walked. I wanted dancing...

Antoinette Ellis-Williams
09/27/2021
Essays

Rubinstein’s Chopin

This inch-thick, square box was familiar from my childhood: the sturdy, waxy cardboard, its paper cover glued onto the top of the album set like a fifth-grader’s découpage. I used to open these boxes like gifts, lifting off the lid to reveal the...

Carole Burns
Cardiff, Wales
09/22/2021
Poetry

Deadline

At Camp Sumter, the infamous Confederate prison commonly known as Andersonville, there was a line of wood posts 19 feet inside the walls that the prisoners were not allowed to cross. It was called the deadline. I defrost the bright green soup made...

Louise Schneider
09/20/2021
Poetry

Fundraising for Planned Parenthood

I ski for them—the nurses and doctors who save women like me from back alley butchers and the ungainly pace of ignorance each slog uphill on skinny boards a penance for the grudge that grew along with the human in my belly,| who owes his life to a...

Karen Hildebrand
09/09/2021
Fiction

Bright

One has a dog named Willow. One lives in San Diego now. One has a cat. One likes hummus.   One has trouble concentrating. One doesn’t get along with her mother. One says, You really see why you’re so fucked up when you move back in...

Marilyn Abildskov
09/08/2021
Poetry

Three Poems by Jennifer Moxley

One of Everything If Po’ Lightnin’ still be Muse of mine, may he strum a few Orphic chords for my brother Robert, who is soon to be skipping town to avoid his creditors. The Sonoma sunlight, plumper of jammy grapes clutching dusty hillocks, sparer...

Jennifer Moxley
05/24/2021
FictionInterview

An Interview with Ethel Rohan

Ethel Rohan’s newest story collection, In the Event of Contact, is an examination of trauma and its aftermath, of loneliness and a failure to connect. Rohan is an Irish writer living in San Francisco. She is the author of four short story...

Alex Capdeville
05/18/2021
Poetry

from Ceive.

Ceive is a novel in verse that retells the Noah’s Ark story on a container ship. Set in an imagined near-future when extreme weather and gun violence have brought on a collapse of civilization, the book follows the thoughts of a woman named Val as...

BK Fischer
05/17/2021
FictionScenes From a Pandemic

Algorithms

1. The pizza delivery man calls me from the parking lot of my apartment, but I don’t know it because I’m watching the tracking app for the pizza preparation, and they haven’t gotten to the oven part yet.  I also don’t answer my phone for unknown...

Cindy Bosley
05/11/2021
Poetry

Villanelle neuroptera

A mantisfly sunk in Cretaceous amber displays strong forelegs jabbing for the air. They bristle, seeking to reduce its danger. Observing it we wonder which is stranger, that gone world or our own. Consider, here: a mantisfly sunk in Cretaceous amber...

Catherine Rockwood
05/10/2021
Essays

Bookstore

Peter runs a used bookstore. Runs is the wrong word. It’s an act of charity. Peter has a real job, but when the store’s previous owner gave up, he bought the stock, took over the lease, and kept it open Thursday and Friday nights as well as weekends...

Thomas Rayfiel
Brooklyn, NY
05/04/2021
Poetry

Allen v Farrow

We don’t know what we want or who we are we don’t even agree we are we In a civilized society, my friend says, preface to: we do not hurt children, we do not fuck children, we define childhood, of course we say we do, and we know we mean...

April Bernard
05/03/2021
Poetry

yrs,

how randall signs his emails means he’s mine & vice versa dear randall i miss you too bud & nights at the writers retreat we talked booze & drank big ideas & i’m grateful to read yr new awesome poem i love how summer dies like an old...

Anthony DiPietro
04/26/2021
Poetry

Three Poems by Joy Arbor

The Poet’s Wife Bil’in Village, West Bank Abu Rani recites a poem, an allegory of figs and leaves he composed on the spot when he couldn’t find the poem we came for. He’s the poet of the village, and we Americans sit on his family’s stone patio...

Joy Arbor
Flint, MI
04/19/2021