Arriving every Wednesday morning, The Commuter is Electric Literature’s home for strange, diverting, bite-sized literary works you can read in just a few minutes. You never know what sort of emotional experience you’re going to be in for when you open a Commuter issue. You might find yourself feeling enormous embarrassment as the entire universe looks up your dress, tender forgiveness as your doppelgänger cuts off your favorite toe, or reluctance to lead your old church sect to the Holy Land after you return from centuries in the grave. You might be cloning yourself just to get through the week or flattered that the Wordle Bot is propositioning you, dating an affordable sublet or talking your children through the legal consequences of burying you under your preferred backyard lemon tree.
We published 50 issues in 2025—The Commuter’s eighth year of publication—including our milestone 400th. In keeping with Commuter tradition, 98% of these were selected through open submissions. We publish poetry, short prose, and graphic narrative from a range of debuting to established authors, and our full archives are always free to read.
Judging by the posts that were most popular with our readers, 2025 was a year for the literary and irreverent, as well as the horny and deeply reverent. It was a year for poignant explorations of grief and loss and love. And above all, it was a year for calling out one of the most malicious and all-powerful forces hell-bent on destroying our society: The New York Times Connections puzzle.
– Preety Sidhu
Associate Editor, The Commuter
The NY Times Connections Destroyed Society and We’re Fine With It by Pardis Parker
In this flash fiction by Pardis Parker, an unhinged New York Times word-game creator designs puzzles so diabolical that players spiral from irritation into full-blown madness, triggering the end of relationships, outbreaks of violence, and—eventually—wars that lead to the end of the world as we know it. A taste of his devious word play: “I group together the words CIRCLE, HORSESHOE, PITCHFORK, and TRIANGLE. People try to find the common link. Instruments? Games? The American west? I inform everyone that the words are all shapes of capital Greek letters.”
Oral Sex Is the Only Honest Prayer by Andrea Jurjević
Andrea Jurjević offers two phenomenally sharp, delightful poems. The first, “Pussy Smoke,” exemplifies a “poetry of profanity,” even as she notes that “some of my readers find my cussing to be a motherfucking pain in the dick.” The second poem, “Summer of ’69,” is cleverly constructed and captures a beautifully disorienting longing.
A Home Health Aide With Feathers by J. Condra Smith
Part remembrance, part elegy, part quiet testament to the memories that people leave behind, this story by J. Condra Smith was chosen by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of the 2025 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. In it, a grandchild tends to two inheritances left by their recently passed Abuela—a community orchard and a rescued kestrel—each becoming a vessel of shared memory and lingering presence. “Maybe it’s just the way imagination gets stirred into memory,” the narrator reflects, “but I swear there was a time you could watch each tree tilting on its axis. Warming to the glow of her.”
How to Love a Widower by Melanie Faranello
In this piece of flash creative nonfiction by Melanie Faranello, a thirteen-year-old finds an old wedding ring, and a mother must once again face her insecurities about her husband’s first wife, who died suddenly from a heart attack. She’s forced to question her idea of love as being “singular, finite, that in each of our romantic luscious hearts, there is a space reserved for that mysterious one and only.”
Unfortunately, This Is What the Soft Animal of Your Body Loves by Miriam Jayaratna, Amanda Lehr, and Jenny Kroik
This graphic narrative by Miriam Jayaratna, Amanda Lehr, and Jenny Kroik is an irreverent riff on Mary Oliver’s iconic poem “Wild Geese.” It explores the small, sometimes peculiar comforts the body yearns for, like “putting Bugles on the ends of your fingers to make cunning little claws” because, as the story notes, “you do not have to be good.”
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