As of October 1, 2023, RFM is now publishing its stories and poems to its Facebook/Meta account at the same time the story/poem is published on the website. We are already publishing simultaneously to Mastodon and Tumblr. Follow us on any of these accounts to receive our moving and beautiful stores as soon as they appear on the main website.
Also, don’t forget that RFM is open to submissions of stories and poems about rural life in the US or around the world 24/7/365. Visit our submissions page for more information. There is no pay other than the publication credit and exposure, but we strive to reach a worldwide audience and to give our contributors as much exposure as possible.
Rural Fiction Magazine (RFM) would like to publish more writers from around the world, regardless of your country of origin.
I am seeking short fiction and poetry and non-fiction articles on topics of interest to a rural audience in any nation, but I am open to more than just fiction and poetry. I am also open to short plays, folklore, legends, tall tales, essays, etc. I am open to almost all genres such as fantasy, science-fiction, horror, mainstream, literary, romance, etc, so long as they are connected to rural life and/or have a rural setting.
Your work must be in English. It can a translation from your native language, but it must be in English, which is spoken around the globe and gives the work and author substantial worldwide exposure.
Please note that there is no pay for this other than a publication credit and exposure to the American and English markets. However, all rights remain with the author.
Currently, RFM is publishing material within a few weeks of acceptance, though this may vary depending on the number of submissions.
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On the fourth day after the heifer went missing, Billy and I, twelve, ran the length of the grazing field in the snow and at the far end before the woods, found the gate bent enough the yearling might struggle through.
We picked up a trail of hoofprints, of a low belly dragging through the deepest snow, determined swipes at a sluggish pace that showed the heifer desired freedom from head to hoof.
The clouds were monochrome but after ten broke and sunlight shone on southern facing slopes.
The day’s dusting melted as we approached fearing an animal raised to be beef would be prematurely turned to hide and woodland feast for coyote, crow, and all the crawling crowd of underground microscopic feeders.
We never found her. We traipsed fence lines and woods and not a sign. In spring we took a tractor and looked for femurs and vertebrae but nary a bone poked up in the fertile earth.
Years later I woke in the early morning to find new snow fallen on my deck and that heifer came to mind, that child’s delight we had that one heifer had defied the fatal stockyard zap in the head, had defied butcher, farmer, the walking dead. It gave us hope for surviving school.
Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, and has contributed to Williwaw Journal, Willows Wept Review, Rabid Oak, and others. He has a digital chapbook available at Red Wolf Editions and another forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks.
Fog shrouds the farm.
Horses in the far field
are like a mirage -
some snow,
grizzled gray trees,
the frozen snort
of a stallion -
it doesn't take much to blur.
Jane's on her way
to the chicken coop.
A flake
lands on her cheek,
a cold, damp, wake-up.
The world is in-between.
The wind is strangely warm.
The coop wire chills.
She's sixteen -
the child, the woman,
more mirages
for uncertain vision.
Hens scatter at her approach.
The rooster rears its comb and crows -
wattles flap, brown feathers flutter,
the day's first certainty.
A Farmer Dreams
Rain-splitter shares dreams with
cool fingered splendor,
one vagueness splattering the roof,
the other touching his hard skin tender.
One moment, he's young enough
for the thrums of memory,
the woman beside him,
shedding years like undergarments.
Then he's land, groggy from drought appeased,
trickles in cracks, floods in crannies,
dust sweetly laid, mud dripping from his thoughts.
He's half awake. His wife is snoring.
He can't wait to get out on the land again.
There's been a shift in pleasure
Life of the Amish Farmer
Humidity overheats
and bursts like a boil.
Heavy thunder, hail,
torrential rain and cooling.
The Milky Way drawn
by a single farm light
dangles out of the black.
By day, tobacco bends to the harvest.
The corn is holding green.
Esther and Daniel are blessed
with a new arrival, Lena.
The burial service for Lydia Yoder
is at 2.00 A.M.
We begin with the weather,
simple thrumming heartbeat.
Then, drawn to the sky,
witness our faith
awakened by its symbols.
The work, of course, is our Gelassenheit,
our sweaty submission,
a God tutoring to muscle,
to heavy footprints in the earth
and head bent low.
In practical epiphany,
the corn fields bind the air we breathe
like veins.
The child is born,
ripens everything.
An old woman dies
so crops won't have to.
Jenna on the Farm
Her face is still smooth
despite the long days in the sun.
The skin below her eyes
has cracked like land in drought
but the cheeks are fine as sand,
brown with just a trace of red
and the lips are unlined,
from years of more doing than talking.
Only the eyes
say the work was hard and wearying.
The back is ironing-board straight
and the neck high and proud,
but the eyes, once again,
a pale and bruised green,
speak the language
of bending and scouring and digging.
Maybe she looked in the mirror one time
and it was all too beautiful
for what her eyes were telling her.
Or maybe it was all like the eyes
and the rest had nowhere else to turn
but lovely.
He painted corn rows Mondrian-straight,
seated in the sun on his tractors,
stacked his lush meadow hays
with Van Gogh's studied nonchalance,
and wintered baled straw in a barn
laved red like Turner's sunsets.
And didn't he echo each spring the classicists'
good shepherd, lugging calves from the cold,
or scan his summery cattle pasture
with the sweeping eye of a Rubens?
Artists and their works were foreign to him—
though he framed family photos,
à la Wood, against the gabled farmhouse,
reveled like Rothko in fields of vivid color,
and weathered pigment doubts worthy of Picasso:
hogs black–later white, cattle brown–later black,
tractors red–later green, but dogs ever golden.
His final canvas he composed from bed,
gazing through a window to the farm—
Move the tractor. Bring the horse to the corral.
Mow the weeds at the fence row.
His body of work brilliant in sunlight,
how to tell the farmer from his farm?
Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry appears in Verse-Virtual, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Farmer-ish, Soul-Lit, and widely elsewhere (conservancies.wordpress.com). A father of five and grandfather of six, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife of more than 50 years.
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