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Fire GardenBeyond the walls of my homestead, Barren pines whispered silently, As ashen winds thrashed violently, To feed a brilliant flower bed. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Longing For What's Already Past The longing for what’s already past to return eats away at the soul and defies the spirit of man whenever he hears the sound of the wind song return to his heart. Jaded dreams fade into nothingness of remnants of who I used to be. Drums pound inside my head creating a droning in my ears that wouldn’t release me from its possession burning up my gut. As the river grows rough with every turn, solstice burns inside a timetable belonging to the feeling of remorse and feeds on the seeds of regret for the running waters to bring forth sheltered dreams that dove deep into isolated realms of my mind. I strive to reach their core with every lung I tear, bug all fungi bleeding out into the waters from which they came, and eventually get swallowed up by earthly plights. Sandstorm breeds havoc along jaded eyes of the tide's iced soul, but the fever which brings it to holistic beams of light boiling inside my blood. Trembling in the night is the lost child of the light that fell into platitudes that followed her around at every turn she made with very little stride. Her heart withered up in all unencumbered songs feeding on her rain diluting her with its trumpet. His sledgehammer drives lightening into her heart to bleed out the darkness that has brewed into it. However, with every song she bled out, the hours of the might conclude in their enticement when the bomb explodes, sending me back into earthly realms of remission for every tear shed along the way. Upon my return home from the dessert, I embraced my true calling to follow all holistic dregs into outer worlds. Withering roses that turn to ashes after life has been driven away from its core, now denunciate at will. I am their calling to grow into the highest of mountains. However, going where they may for all to see and hail evermore, brings about good tidings. I dance along the stream of life, and am delivered up to the lion’s den where a magistrate awaits me. He introduces me to a new song to sing, one that allows for the heart to sallow in delight of the wonder in the world, instead of having to fight out the darkness that dwelled inside the hearts of man. Whenever I fumble and fluster, I drive further into secluded beams of light waiting to gas up their wisdom to feed me with. No matter how I hollow out my bones, I always learn how to breathe all over again, as many times as it is necessary to bring me back to life, after returning from a channeled storm. For it’s the wisdom burning inside my mind, easing me up to the grace of all the is holy and sound. Even as I delve into the fires that glow in their evanescence of me, I can always tell how long I’ll have to dig into the earth whenever fortitude shows its face at my door. #Unreal #Poetry #Nature # Photography #StreamOfConsciousness #Hope #Faith #SelfAwareness #Past #Memory #Mindfulness Visit our shop and subscribe. Sponsor us. Submit and become a contributor. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Lights Across Gomorrah By Isaac Swift QuailBellMagazine.com I
"I never wanted any of this." Robbie thought to himself in his office. "I never really did." And it was true. He sat alone, the soul person in HR; he never would have ended up in the position he found himself in if things had been different. Some people were handed cards in life they didn't particularly want. Sometimes we're handed a steaming bucket full of piss and forced to create a beverage that resembles lemonade. "I'm tired," he thought. He looked at a clock that hung above the threshold of the door to his office. It was ten minutes to six. Soon he would have to take his lunch break. It was against company policy for associates (especially salaried) to go six hours without taking a break. This was one of many things that Robert Timothy Walker was aware of, though not particularly worried about. The director of HR along with the rest of the HR team were not present, only ghosts of their odorous coffee and fragrant yet cheap perfume remained, permeating the otherwise stale air. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Vixen The cold is seeping and fierce that year, and a fox comes with it.
Every girl in the village is suddenly a suspect. Behind closed doors, no one dares to glance at the shadows that cooking fires spit onto the walls. Livestock are picked off one by one. Panicked young men call off weddings and stop looking their sisters in the eye. It is easy, nowadays, to imagine the whisper of a red tail in the gloom, like a long-held deception. And the thinner a girl’s wrists, the paler her skin, or the darker her hair, the less she is spoken to, and the more she is spoken about. Mi-yeong, of course, has the thinnest wrists any of them has ever seen. In the winters, her face grows almost ghostly, even more so than fog. On her birthday, her cousin tells her in a trembling voice to confess, for all their sakes. She’s seen her, the other girl insists, shy away from hunting dogs and narrow her eyes to cunning, vulpine slits. Mi-yeong purses her lips, says quietly that they’ll know a kumiho when they see one. Her hands and heart are clenched, clammy. She is no stranger to being backed into a corner and pressed for a lie, any lie, to give the village’s fear a name. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Banyan Tree By Adreyo Sen QuailBellMagazine.com When I was a boy, my mother was the district magistrate of a tiny little corner of India.
Magisterially disapproving of my tendency to disappear in my books and diaries, she’d take me with her on her week-long visits to the village she was surveying, a place called Anjaan. I was a sickly child, an epileptic, and severely asthmatic. My mother was often impatient with me. Anjaan was the sort of village that must have looked the same for eternity. It had cement houses now, but it was still guarded fiercely by its weeping banyan trees. And every evening, fierce sandstorms tore up the little squares like dervishes, calming only when the gypsies arrived with their colourful shawls and wooden owls and ravens. I loved to watch the gypsies hawk their goods in their raucous voices, their sarees a storm of yellows and reds. And I often stole into the houses to watch the girls play with their dolls. I was fascinated by their intricate games. Each of the dolls had a complex history, a glorious past as soldier or buccaneer. But the girls never had much time for me. And my mother would discover me and push me towards the boys playing under the banyan trees, an old scarf tucked under my arm as a comfort blanket. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Prim Derive He wore a pea coat inside the house. Not because it was cold, or because he would be departing anytime soon, for if this were the case, he would have keys in hand and shoes on feet. He labored away at a makeshift desk, a bedside stand with a worn lacquer top covered in stains from hot plates and cold, sweating cups. It sat in the corner of the room. Sounds crept in and bounced off the cream tinged walls, but these were only momentary dealings in which the world presented itself. After that, it receded to the hallway, to the parlor, to the front door, to the façade and into the lofty plume of blue. All four corners of the room held cobwebs some eight feet above the floor. The ceiling fan spun itself off at some point, he did not recall when; the cobwebs and the fan were suspended in a freeze frame, unalterable. Gray fixations and holed plastic sculptures, because anything that is nonworking but which resembles something is merely a statue, an inert homage, a way to see the process frozen. He worked under a hot lamp, assembling and disassembling it all and re-piecing it together.
The man in the pea coat never works past the hour of twelve. His days and nights were inseparable, indistinguishable. Along the cream tinged walls were a series of clocks––all analog and non-ticking. They had no hands. The faces were marked by the numerals I-XII. Their round, wooden cases revealed sprawled out decorative patterns of vine and liana, which were carved into them by force, with little wood shavings jutted out of the gorged crevices. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
House of Azaleas It was a place for dogs and I am cat people. My room was never mine And I hated the mirror and windows for the longest time. I was the gatekeeper and watch-guard there, on the corner by the road, hedged in by headlights and demons with my things all crammed in Wal-Mart shelves unable to breathe or look fine. But it wasn't the house's fault. I liked it better before they tore the redwood paneling out and painted over the red bricks in the kitchen. It was what it was then, dark and woodsy, not a whitewashed tomb. I didn't want them to fix it, but that wasn't the house's fault. #Unreal #Poetry #AltLit #House #Stairs #Photography #Woman #Trauma #Secrets #Demons #Haunted #Family Visit our shop and subscribe. Sponsor us. Submit and become a contributor. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Like Always August will begin once again i will not take cover when theelephant shots get fired hotter than julys bookend. We will find our own way without asking city state and zip codes tightrope candy inevitable defeat mighty metronome sorries Ears and rumors of something to think about. Maybe my ass we want to be nothing less than unaccounted for. Signs in the earth steady euphemisms jellyfish faux #Unreal #Poetry #AltLit #ComingOfAge #Lost Visit our shop and subscribe. Sponsor us. Submit and become a contributor. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Window Fiddleheads of frost fingered by the morning sun melting my heart strings. #Unreal #Poetry #Photography #Music #Beauty #Solitude Visit our shop and subscribe. Sponsor us. Submit and become a contributor. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Delicate Joy The hardest part is learning to be alone. That’s what Erin had told her before slipping off to the bathroom to covertly call her husband. Joy waited at the table studying the checked pattern of its cloth. Her lungs weren’t working and her brain was filling with blood. What if her heart suddenly stopped beating? She felt like that might happen. Loneliness felt like dying, and he had only just left. If this was the numb shock of recent disaster how much worse would it feel when it really started to sink in?
Erin had been telling her about God’s plan, and how this would all work-out for the best, meaning Joy and Adam would work-out, that they would get back together. But how do you get back together with someone who doesn’t love you anymore, who perhaps hasn’t loved you in a very long time? How long had it been? Joy wondered, moving up from the table cloth to study her wine glass. Erin had sucked her teeth when Joy had ordered that wine at two in the afternoon on the day that her husband had left her. As she studied the curvature of the glass her mind continued to fester in its rotten contemplations. She had been married to Adam for seven years, and which of those anniversaries was the first he knew that the woman he married was no longer the woman he loved. She knew so many more things than Adam, she was so much better than him at trivia and had always won every such competition with a gloating pride that Erin would say was obviously not the right sort of attitude for a woman to have towards her husband, definitely not Proverbs 31. |