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By Melissa Schack
Courtney LeBlanc is a poet based in Arlington, Virginia. She has released two chapbooks All in the Family and The Violence Within. The Pushcart Prize nominee’s latest Beautiful and Full of Monsters is a collection of poetry full of raw emotions and imagery. Her views on love and relationships are relatable and enlightening.
You can catch her writings on her blog, or read her poems right here in Quail Bell Magazine. Follow her on Twitter @WordPerv, Facebook, or Instagram @wordperv79.
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 The gentle lull of lazy summer days hasn’t hit yet and it won’t this year. It’s an anxious lull. In quarantine, I’ve resorted to taking baths like I’m a newborn again. I even use baby bath and pop a rubber ducky in the water. Bubble baths are part of my new normal. I indulge in other little ways as I can, mainly through eating decadently and watching movies without my former art school snobbery. But it’s not just my downtime that has taken a shift; it’s my work, too.
One specific shift I have noticed in my creative practice is my output of repetitive artwork. I don’t mean redundant artwork, where I harp on the same themes or visual imagery from piece to piece (though I’ve certainly been guilty of that.) I mean repetitive artwork as in visual art created by repeating the same motions or tasks over and over. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Editor's Note: This piece was first published in Pulp Magazine.  I recently read an article that listed the “types” of orgasm a woman can have. My partner and I stared wide-eyed when reading through this list, confused at how someone would publish an article stating that further research is needed to decipher what causes a “nipple orgasm.”
Apparently, it couldn’t possibly be because it simply feels good. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Luna Lark  We’ve all got the Quarantine Blues. But this is really the time to indulge in your sadness. Embrace your Sad Girl™ aesthetic. Cry but make it cute. Look pensively out the window, you know, in a cute way. Drink strawberry wine and other twee alcoholic beverages with an eye toward that downward spiral. Yeah, you’re going down hard, lady. Misery is your mojo. I for one am becoming the Sad Girl™ I’ve always wanted to be. Sylvia Plath and Frida Kahlo ain’t got nothin’ on me. I’m downright midnight blue. I’ve got the cloak to prove it. No, cloaks aren’t Emo; they’re Sad Girl™. Don’t get it twisted; this has a Free People tag on it. Not Hot Topic. Know your brands. Intimately. Sadly. Fashion is a large component of this. Drawing tears on your face and then decorating them with glitter is totally a thing. That’s another essay—one I promise to write after I finish weeping over this one.
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By The Editors
Marleen S. Barr is a sci-fi scholar, author, and unapologetic feminist. If you've read Her Plumage, then you may recognize her name among the contributors.
For today's Creation in Isolation, we talk about the "post-truth" world, predicting political disaster, and topics covered in her short story collection When Trump Changed: The Feminist Science Fiction Justice League Quashes the Orange Outrage Pussy Grabber (B Cubed Press). The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Margot Riddle
Before I really got invested into the makeup world, I just bought what looked pretty. I really only considered the power of my dollar recently, especially after listening to beauty commentary channels about the skeevy behavior of some of the most popular makeup gurus and their brands. Remember, money talks, and we have more power than we realize. Just recently, Kat Von D sold her problematic brand Kat Von D Cosmetics, which has since been rebranded as KVD Vegan Beauty, though its reputation still struggles.
So if you've been following the events of "Karmageddon 3", then you'll know about how many people are disturbed and disgusted by the bad behavior of the people who run their favorite brands. While many people have known which brands to avoid for a while, there are always going to be people who go into the beauty world without any idea of how wicked things can be behind the scenes. Since so many people were duped by problematic influencers, here are some dupes of products to replace their equally problematic brands. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
 This time of quarantine has been marked by such limited face-to-face human interaction. I recently realized that when I finally see most of my friends, family, and colleagues in person again, we probably won't match our memories of each other. Digital representations are never quite true-to-life. My days are filled with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and FaceTime calls—sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure. I take screenshots as I go along. I don't want to forget how I looked at the beginning of the pandemic and how my appearance changed. Three and a half months into it and I am already a different New Yorker than I was before COVID-19 hit. Death, illness, and isolation have changed me. Something that hasn’t changed? My love of makeup.
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 Yesterday was July 4th, but it was yet another birthday I didn't feel like celebrating. Not that I ever celebrated July 4th the way many Americans do. My Salvadoran mother, who became a U.S. citizen when I was 5 or 6 years old, observed Independence Day with gusto. The rest of the family followed suit. Mommy encouraged the whole clan to wear red, white, and blue. She cooked up a feast worthy of a TV commercial: hotdogs, macaroni and cheese, corn on the cob, baked beans, the requisite green vegetable (usually green beans or peas.) And don't forget the fireworks! She was all about them, and whatever parade or concert led up to the show. We weren't celebrating the United States and its "victories" so much as we were celebrating a new home and beginning for my mother. A fresh start. An escape from civil war in her country of birth. Gratitude for survival. At a young age, my siblings and I learned about the sins of our home country, the land of Reagan, and how those sins had impacted El Salvador and other countries around the world. Our father, a product of the American public school system, opened our eyes to the sins committed within our country, too. American exceptionalism was never our family value.
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Stars to Follow
By Alex Carrigan
There are way too many things we inherit from our ancestors that resonate with us. Some families pass down stories and religion. Others pass down specific hair and eye colors. Some pass down genetic illnesses and health conditions. Others inflict trauma or suffer from trauma that affects the successive generations. There are so many things to consider when looking at ones familial history and how it affects you in the past, present, and future, and reckoning with that can be the sort of thing that reveals more about oneself than previously thought.
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Black Queer Voices to Add to Your Life
By The Editors
Fact: Pride Month wouldn't exist without Black queer advocates. What many are learning is that Pride Month and LGBTQ+ rights wouldn't be where they are today without key events like the Stonewall Riots and activist Marsha P. Johnson. In honor of Pride Month and the Black lives crucial to the movement, we're taking a moment to recommend some revolutionary voices in the Black queer community. Remember this as you celebrate the last day of Pride: All Black Lives Matter.
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