Jack Maes

“The broken bottle sits lodged in the front of me even when she lets go. I pull it out, all of it, like a fish from water or a metaphor from a metaphor and I bleed like torn prey. Hours later, I pluck loose shards from my lower belly.”

my husband writes good 🥰

Jack Maes is a Latino teacher and writer from Southern California living in Northern Virginia. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from the College of William and Mary and an M.S. from MIT: He is one of the co-founders of Fast Flesh Literary Journal. We Feral Few There is no carpet in the living room when you arrive. Mom is smiling because you're a chubby baby with enormous eyes, and immediately you're the more honest one. You let it all get to your skin. We grow up together in that house, we navigate and find rhythm. We invent the joke and the cartwheel and the same movie run raw until we know all the lines and pauses. You are my closest friend, but knowing someone is an effort, not a prize. As a twenty-something I visit the house again in winter, pulling up the drive, wary of slick. The tires shuffle loose on the ice like they are absorbing every direction. When I press on the brakes, the chassis settles but does not stop, a gentle mistake. The headlights catch the outside air and betray it. Every moving particle and gust of wind is licked with light and trailed in motion. My blood is moving I think. The pond out front of the drive is only a few yards across and is frozen over, the water swelling just above the calm meter of the surrounding dirt. From the car window where I idle, the marbling from the freeze makes it look like a striped stone, gray and white, something I could pick up and thumb in my pocket for luck. I try to make my blood halt. I really try this time. (image ends but essay continues in the link)

Jack’s essay, “We Feral Few,” is out now in Passengers!

@jackmaes.bsky.social

www.passengersjournal.com/volume-5-issue-4-prose/#maes

We were so excited to send in our nominations this morning! 💙📚📝🧵

The first piece we nominated:

“In Which Michael Myers' Remains are Distributed Across the U.S. in Neatly Wrapped Parcels of Ground Meat” by Sarp Sozdinler

(come on, tell me that title doesn’t intrigue you)

www.fastflesh.net/myers

Would love to be added! Vintage bike-builder and sport bike enthusiast here

Would love to be added! CAD engineer and educator here

Same world same everything, except my teacher ID where my hair looks like Jimmy Neutron is treated like the American Express Black card. Respect the work.

Today my son has made it clear to me that the two greatest horrors of existence are falling asleep and waking up. Trapped farts are a close third

A reminder today to my fellow educators that we do imperative work for so many young people. Work that, some days, only we put full focus on, but that brings humanity closer to itself, to knowledge, and to critical thought. Thank you for being teachers. It is one of the top five punkest jobs

Guys it’s been a day on this platform and I already found a cool graph for my students, choked on my spit in a public restroom from laughing at a post, and don’t hate myself or others. Is this what hope for humanity feels like?

Sometimes I chuckle gently at something while my baby is asleep, and he wakes from sleep and does not go back to sleep and makes heinous faces and wretched moans like “WHY IN THE FRESH HELL HAVE YOU SUMMONED ME, FATHER?” and I tell him I’m sorry for ever having felt joy

I’d love to be added! AP Statistics teacher here

I already always hated twitter, so this is an easy switch. Power to the people, all the people, the lovely people

I’d love to be added if possible!

I’d love to be added if there’s room!