by Jonathan Clark
Then, a full-throated longingRead More »
Emerges, in rich and fervid tones
Category: Words
a recent obituary
by Geoffrey Aitken
i imagined my
hideaway
in secluded
high mountain country
Winter Quietness
by Michael Shoemaker
Winter could have been conspicuous
showy or ostentatious
if not for its timorous silence.
No rustling of dry leaves
as a deer approaches.
Read More »Imitators
by Chey Dugan
I was admiring the aristocratic Grande Dame portrait on a Tuesday afternoon; a day when the Abruzzo Museum of Art History is hauntingly inactive and I’m free from the perturbed looks I get from the usual late-week crowd. I’m reluctant to admit, but somewhere along my embryonic development my Pavlovian wires got crossed and because of these ritual Tuesdays, I could just exist in my oddity. I would thank myself at the end of the week for getting this out of my system.
I was deep within myself and sure I was alone until you interrupted and said, I like what you’re doing with your face.
Read More »cassie
by Maddie Maschger
i think i talked myself into a self-fulfilling prophecy again
like some self-righteous modern day cassandra
Read More »Ten Years (and why I still talk about Nico di Angelo all the time)
by Daisy Solace
It’s 2013. I’m 11, living in Saudi Arabia, and anticipating House of Hades’s release with bated breath, counting down the days. It’s all I talk about, my best friend is getting sick of me. I’m insufferable, and I like it. I haven’t been into Percy Jackson for very long — just about a month by this point, but it’s found its space in my head and settled there.
As a kid who had always felt ALONEALONEALONEalonealonealone, it’s nice to read about a boy who’d changed schools so much that he has no friends, except for the one whose job it is to protect him. It’s nice to read about a boy who knows the truth: that the best people have the rottenest luck. It’s nice to read about a boy who, despite this, fights. After rows upon rows of pleasant protagonists, there’s a certain level of solace (pun intended) in Percy Jackson. He’s not easy. He’s not agreeable. He’s angry, rowdy, and, as Percy would come to say in the musical, impertinent. As a fellow impertinent child, I’m delighted.
Read More »3 poems
by Belana Beeck
There are many secrets here we must discoverRead More »
As everything seems to be undercover
Sand Angels
by Darcy Duncan
Into the dark we swim.
You tell me your name underwater.
It sounds different than it did on land.
More like mine: anonymous.
Read More »The Real Willy Wonka
by Blaire Baron
It is still dark and the early morning cacophony has yet to greet the day. The others have already left and Washington knows they aren’t waiting for him, not this time. With no Mum to wake him, he’s getting better at finding his clothes in the dark. Washington scoops up a sticky ball of yesterday’s ugali and pops it in his mouth before rushing out of the ramshackle maze. He zig-zags past sleeping mothers and babes. Everything here is laid bare, there are no doors and there’s nothing here to steal.
Some might call it a labor camp but to Washington, it’s home. Out of the maze now, he runs toward the line of humming shadows holding machetes. Washington grins up at one of his uncles.
Read More »A Flare
by William Doreski
A flare on a dark horizon
draws our attention inland.
Something metallic is happening,
something more primal than war.
You want to slap on a backpack
heavy with food and munitions
and hike to the edge of things,
Read More »
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