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Where Are The Monsters Now?
"Daddy?" the little girl whispered as her father got up from the edge of her child-sized bed. The room was done up in traditional Norse style, but with a certain American sensibility. The stone floors were covered in hand woven rugs with traditional motifs--Yggdrasil flanked by deer, ships studded with shields, warriors in armor--but in the light pinks and the browns more typical in a modern American girl's room. Next to heirloom tapestries on the wall were more recent ones with rough representations of cartoon characters. The toys scattered on the floor are both handcrafted and cheap plastic from a megastore.
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Infrastructure Swallows A City
It was an ancient city.
All the young people left as soon as they could The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Some Fortune
The glass panel was old, foggy with grime and dirt. Everyone on the other side looked distant and dirty--drawing closer, pressing against her glass case, only made them look worse. She felt like she was under threat. They made her want to get up and leave.
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A Quirky Look at a Cave Painting
By Steven Joseph McCrystal
QuailBellMagazine.com Should we avoid art when creating our own? Art is after all part of our life as we know it. It always has been. Even the bleakest cultures in history secretly record history through artistic expression. From childhood memories we grow to love, or loathe art. A quick glance at mum’s choices hanging on the wall of our home or our ominous father’s quirks placed in the corner by grace. Art is a journey we can’t avoid. Art is life. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Saugus, Embassy of the Second Muse
By Tom Sheehan
QuailBellMagazine.com
He has come out of a dread silence and given himself a name; Saugus, he says. He bleats like a tethered goat to come out of that coming, to be away, dense spiral to the core of self, to the mountain call, bird arc across such slopes of pale imaginings. Saugus, he says: I am that part of you cries not for the love but intimacy of words, light touch of skin we dread and seek, owning up of self as if in another. I am that part of you named endless searcher, thirsty one, guzzler, sufferer, warred on, the starved and the wasted, that part of you you can’t turn over by yourself. I have the secrets you do not know you know. I am lodged in a far corner of mind, some fallow place at reins’ end, waiting to be routed out, turned up, to green a page again. Has it taken you so long to find me, or do you ignore me and try it on your own? You cannot avoid documented lightning, shock of metaphor, God on one knee, Saugus. I am not a stranger. I breathe with you, find shelter and warmth when you do, know the single star haunting the edge of your horizon, know best of all the magic when the sound is right, Oh, Thomas! when the sound is the music of one word upon another, and it tears two parts of soul to four because nothing like it has been heard before, when the word dances on its consonants, slides on soft vowels, when the spine knows the word is known by every ganglia, thong and sinew of the body. The coring.
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Unintelligent Design
An hour a day,
sometimes more, I chipped away with mallet and chisel on a block of marble I found in Carrara and shipped to New York on the deck of a trawler. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Earth's Weight in Winter
By Mark Ramirez
QuailBellMagazine.com *Editor's Note: First appeared in The Unrorean Volume 14 Issue 2.
We soaped our bodies in currents of steam
after feeling the dull pulse of pick-up trucks The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Odysseus: Strength and Hope
By Steven Joseph McCrystal
QuailBellMagazine.com
Tie yourself to the mast as the Siren sings.
Overhear her whispers. Overhear her screams. A maddening intensity bereft of any sympathies. A sweet voice to entice the spirit with compelling charms. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Reality of Sound
I wonder if you heard me,
my soul, unleashed, in the sound of the reverberating high note and low G sharp. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Missing Puzzle Piece
I hate other people's children.
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