Bold, Boundary-blurring Fiction

Stay Updated and Informed

The Love Issue Cover Art

Fading Identities

Fabio Sassi

The Love Issue

Love is in the Smoke

This month, Neon & Smoke has love on its mind.

To celebrate it, prepare yourself for our first double edition — and far too many cheesy musical references. (That first one was Natalie Cole.)

Volume number one arrives today, and its stories and poems span pain and pleasure, heartwarming and heartbreak, love lost and sometimes never found.

The Supremes may have said it best when they sang, “You Can’t Hurry Love.” So, we encourage you to take your time with these stories. Feel them in your head, your heart, and your soul. Let them linger a while.

As always, Neon & Smoke is honored to showcase another emerging artist. This time it’s Oumayma Oueghlani and "The Smell of Loss" that lingers long after you finish her work.

While you’re reading, please check out the new Editor’s Light: What We Mean by Half Genre / Always Lit.

For our poets, submissions open March 15th. The theme: Dopamine Hits!

We want poems about desire and fixation, guilt and pleasure — the moments that made you laugh, cry, or scroll uncontrollably.

By now you know that we love hearing from our readers and artists. If someone’s work lingers with you, don’t hesitate to share it. And we are always open to feedback.

Many thanks for spending time in the smoke with us.

Love to love you, baby,

T & J

New Artist Spotlight

We are honored to feature emerging writer Oumayma Oueghlani in this issue of Neon & Smoke. Her piece, “The Smell of Loss,” is a story that lingers long after the final line.

Step into the Smoke

Where the Glow Meets the Haze

Flash Fiction

We publish bold, layered flash fiction—stories that move, that mean, and that linger. We welcome all genres, as long as there’s emotional resonance, narrative stakes, and a voice that leaves a mark. Surprise us.

Digital Art

Each issue, we feature a curated selection of digital art around a central theme. This time, it’s People Like Us—a call for visual storytelling that explores identity, intimacy, kinship, difference, and the quiet (or loud) ways we gather, resist, and belong. Think vibrant, strange, layered, raw. Interpretation is welcome—we want to feel something.

Poetry

We’re looking for poems that pulse with energy, voice, and emotional honesty. For this issue, we invite work that engages with the theme Ritual—daily or divine, inherited or invented, personal or shared. Whether lyrical or narrative, formal or experimental, send us poems that break and mend, that think and feel, that earn their place.

Editor’s Light

What We Mean By “Half Genre / Always Lit”

At Neon & Smoke , we publish work that is half genre, always lit . Writers ask us what that means. I suppose it’s a reflection of how we see the world: most people, in real life, are hybrids. We are soft and hard. Tender and sharp. Holy and unholy. Poetry one minute and curse words the next. Horny but ashamed. We want connection and we want distance. We want safety and we flirt with danger. We are brave and terrified, loving and cruel, often in the same breath. Human being

We Write, We Grow

Remember when you first knew you wanted to be a writer? I was eight at the time. All of my friends wanted to be firemen and policemen. I wanted to write Batman comics. (Sometimes I still do.) Back then, I thought it was about the action. Now I know it’s about the words. We often say words have meaning. But they have more than meaning. They’re a kinetic force—able to cut, convince, and comfort. They linger. They travel. They land in places we may never see. As I’ve gotten old

Writing Can Be Lonely

Writing can be lonely. Not metaphorically lonely — literally lonely. It’s hours spent inside a mind no one else can access. It’s choosing silence when the world wants noise. It’s disappearing into a story only you can hear, only you can hold. Most days, it’s just you at a desk, trying to say something the way it deserves to be said. And even when you finally finish a piece, the loneliness doesn’t end. You send it to a friend, a partner, a writing group, hoping they’ll feel wh

your editorial voice guiding readers through updates and insights.

Our Story Unfolded

Neon & Smoke is a home for bold, voice-driven fiction with emotional weight and narrative fire. We publish stories that don’t sit quietly—tales where the plot might thrill, chill, or make you laugh, but always reveals something deeper. We crave characters who leap off the page, language that crackles, and stories that blur the line between genre and literary not for the sake of novelty, but it’s the most honest way to tell the truth.

Learn More