WWPH WRITES ISSUE 91
WWPH Writes 91… comes to you with rapt joy in the poem SUNRISE SAILBOAT from Chris Biles and a sharp-witted satire about the briefest and sweetest of romances in the flash fiction I MARRIED A DAY-OLD SHEET CAKE by Tara Van De Mark.
We are also reading through all the submissions for AMERICA’S FUTURE, our upcoming anthology, and we hope to start corresponding with writers about their work very soon (we have so much good, thoughtful, exciting, and thrilling-at-times work that the selection process has been a challenge!)
Most of all, in these turbulent times, we are grateful for our diverse, inclusive WWPH community of writers, artists, readers, and friends. Our mission remains steadfast. Find it here.
Read on!
Caroline Bock & Jona Colson
co-presidents/editors
Washington Writers’ Publishing House
WWPH WRITES Poetry
Chris Biles (she/her) currently lives and works in Washington, D.C., where she enjoys playing with the light and the dark and losing herself in music, anything outside, and some words here and there. She is published in several literary magazines, journals, and anthologies in print and online. You can find her at marks-in-the-sand.com / Instagram: @marks.in.the.sand / out walking the city streets.
©Chris Biles 2025
WWPH WRITES Fiction
I Married a Day-Old Sheet Cake
We met by chance, his icing blue eyes locked with mine as his mother, the plastic-gloved baker, removed him from the display case and checked his expiration date. She leaned towards the black trash bin on wheels as I dashed past the cupcake display to her counter.
“No, wait! I’ll take him!” I said.
“You sure? It’s stale,” she said. Later, he told me she always said things like that, she was the kind of mother that whipped and beat her kids to perfection.
Yes, I nodded, and she handed him to me. Under the fluorescent lights his smooth white frosting hair glistened. Knowing that he tasted like the celebration of a thousand birthday parties felt like love. We perused the aisles together, filling the cart with strawberries, orange juice, and eggs for the brunch I was hosting.
“I like parties,” he said.
“Me too!” I said.
I saw our future filled with balloons and streamers, candles and little baby cakes who had their Dad’s red piping cheeks. When I asked what food he liked he gave a delicious shrug and nodded towards a case of Milwaukee’s Best.
Our wedding was a simple ceremony, the cashier rang us up and put him into a paper bag with instructions to carry him flat. She paused before running my card and gave me a look that marked the seriousness of this occasion. She didn’t want to see me at this altar again.
“You don’t need candles?” She asked.
“No, just the cake,” I said.
Our honeymoon was brief, the stroll home being just three blocks. He had never been outside the grocery store but said it looked nice. It felt so different from other relationships, like the Key Lime Pie that incessantly sang doo-wop or the Fruit Tart that droned on about the origin of each of his toppings. Outside my building, I thought he winked at me, but it was just a nervous twitch.
We settled into life together, he on my kitchen counter, and me getting things ready for brunch. It all went by so fast, there were quiches to heat, flowers to arrange, I had to shower, get dressed, and tidy up the empty beer cans he tossed onto the floor. He was a good listener and gave me my space. Just knowing he was there, that we were in this together, was satiating.
Then it was time for my friends to arrive. Except they didn’t, perpetually late. My husband with his rainbow sprinkle sideburns poured me a mimosa and opened himself another beer. We didn’t talk much, comfortable in each other’s presence. Although in retrospect, I wonder how much my own imagination filled my love’s moist vanilla silences and made him out to be more than he ever was, more than he ever could be. I still desired him, particularly since I hadn’t eaten all day; so, after my third mimosa, I took a taste.
The doorbell ringing stopped my binge, crumbs of him spread from my chin to the floor, my fingers sticky from his buttery icing. He was too much of a mess to meet my friends, so he napped in the cabinet while I swept up and changed dresses.
Brunch was lovely but I couldn’t eat, my stomach achingly heavy from the refined sugar and guilt at having lost myself in this relationship. My neighbor Julia suspected something was off, but she said nothing until it was time to clean up, and she found my snoring husband next to the plastic delivery containers. Seeing him through her eyes he looked just as his mother had said, like a stale, now half-eaten cake. I thought of trying to explain our love but couldn’t.
After the last hug goodbye, I knew we needed to end it. He nodded and went back into the paper bag from our wedding. My resolution wavered on the walk to the trash chute. It felt so cruel to throw him out, just as his mother had wanted to, so I placed him on the table in the hall. The next morning, he was gone. I assumed that the superintendent took care of him, but later I spotted Julia in the elevator with white frosting on her lips.
©Tara Van De Mark 2025
Tara Van De Mark is a recovering attorney now writer based in Washington, DC. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, The Best Small Fiction, The Best of the Net and has recently appeared in BULL, Lincoln Review, GoneLawn, Citron Review, and Tiny Molecules. She can be found at www.taravandemark.com and lurks around X/twitter and bluesky @TaraVanDeMark
WWPH NEWS
Our Award-Winning Books Are Receiving RAVE Reviews…
Read the entire DC Trending review here...and read FOR THE BLESSINGS OF JUPITER AND VENUS, by Varun Gauri, winner of our 2024 Carol Trawick Fiction Award. Available everywhere, books and ebooks are sold, including at our bookshop.org affiliate page here.
Read the entire Strange Horizons review here… and read The Machine Autocorrects Code to I by Chanlee Luu, winner of our 2024 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. Available everywhere, books , including at our bookshop.org affiliate page here.
Our award-winning books have also been selected as BOOKS WE LOVE by National Public Radio, and they are both available as trade paperbacks and ebooks! Support your WWPH and purchase them here bookshop.org. Here’s the link.
INSIDER NEWS… if you are considering submitting to WWPH, check out our guidelines and FAQs (new for 2025!) here.
A BIG SHOUT OUT to long-time press-mate and WWPH executive board member Holly Karapetkova on her just published award-winning collection Dear Empire.
”Karapetkova writes with a contagious honesty. Her poems describe an American mirror we should not turn away from.” —E. Ethelbert Miller, writer and literary activist, 2024 Grammy Nominee for Spoken Word and Poetry.
WWPH WRITES is open for submissions! We now pay $25.00 for poetry (up to 3 poems) and prose (up to 1,000 words of fiction or creative nonfiction). Free to submit! More details at our Submittable page here.
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