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Punk Rock Mother's Day
Thank you, Mom, for making me
the punk that I am today. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
6 Days [Not] To Love
By Valentina Morales
QuailBellMagazine.com I met Monday the first week I arrive into town. It was such a lovable creature; smiley, caring and funny. There was beauty everywhere you looked. I broke someone else’s heart. Monday broke mine. Tuesday was different. I met him while seeing Monday and it cured the scars I had from the day before and Sunday. How much laughter can a day contain? If it is Tuesday then it is endless. Wednesday was a mistake. The kind of mistake you carry and reencounter several times in your life and ends up not being one; the most lovable of all, the most incomprehensible of all, the one that reappears over and over and wants to take over the weeks. Thursday came and went as dawn and sunset show up. It never came back even though he was supposed to show up fifty-one more times that year. It only did it twice. Friday was a relaxation. What a perfect definition for a day as it had all you want; peace, laughter, joy, excitement and adventure but as its name says, lacked of the most important thing; love. Saturday is refreshing. It is unknown and unscheduled. It tries to leave a mark but then goes back to relaxation mode. I wonder if it is possible to develop feelings for a day that doesn’t have a proper definition and that apparently is not looking to be liked. Wednesday does not get it must never come before or after Saturday. It never will because days were set before our time. As I’m thinking about the scars and moments these beautiful days have given me, I realize today is Sunday and the day is gone. #Unreal #Prose #Love #Personification #Life #Relationships #Day #Night 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.
Sequel
By Tim Scott
QuailBellMagazine.com Tina was surprised when her husband, Tim, announced his intention to watch Tron: Legacy on FXM. He was not usually into so-called “hard science fiction,” though he occasionally had traffic with what publishers call “soft/sociological science fiction.” He also liked Star Trek, particularly Deep Space Nine, but that was a different ball of wax, entirely, a genre ghetto within a genre ghetto. Tina sat beside Tim on the sofa, watching the opening scenes of the movie. A young man rode a sleek motorcycle at illegal speeds in and out of freeway traffic at night. Somehow the filmmakers let Tim know that this was the character with whom to identify, not the motorcycle cop who set off in pursuit. Tina gave her husband a peck on the cheek, and rose from the sofa. “Enjoy,” she said, and padded barefooted out of the room. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Miner's Grandchild
Until I was fifteen, I was very close to my grandfather.
In the evenings, I would sit by his side as he rummaged through the uneven country that was his desk. My grandfather had been, for forty years of his life, a miner. He had also been a devout walker, a wonderful badminton player and a father to five children, all of whom had “plagued” him well into his sixties. To a man used to constant activity, the inactivity his increased bulk condemned him to was anathema. Sitting at his desk was my grandfather’s way of imposing on our evenings together a framing narrative, a narrative wherein he was using the polyglot on his desk as a marker of the accumulated experience with which he would dampen my overly optimistic view of the world. In this narrative, the rocks he’d picked up from hazardous mines all over India and Africa offered blunt life lessons. But by the time I was eight, I knew my grandfather was no gloomy Homer, no admonitory Nestor. My grandfather was a poet who’d arrived at adulthood beside Siegfried Sassoon, a humorist whose kinship with his Penguin paperbacks of P.G. Wodehouse was fierce and more enduring than his love for the stern-eyed beauty who’d beaten mathematics into my terrified father. Years later, when my grandfather’s spirit resided in that river after whom his wife was named and in whose coolly indifferent waters he’d bathed in his village youth; and my feet raced across the banks of a river continents away, one of his lessons stayed close to me. When I was thirteen, I had retired from a fight with my mother and was so angry I could barely breathe. I was angry often then, over little things, obsessing over my sense of injury until my head was fit to explode into flames. I went to my grandfather’s room and rummaged angrily through his desk. Busy with his cards, he ignored me till he finished his game of solitaire, one of the many occupations he’d grown into in the many impatient years of his retirement. “Sit next to me,” he said finally, patting the chair next to his bed. I sat down and dried my eyes while he told me, in his pleasant monotone, of Fire. In my grandfather’s eyes, Fire was a tree that stretched its slender arms out to the sky. The anger we saw in the frenzy of its fragile branches was really a desperate love, a love whose desperation didn’t come from a need to be loved, but from inchoate warmth at the center of its being. Contrary to what one might think, Fire had deep roots – it sprung from deep within the hearts of the men and women who saw in its fierce affirmation of its own life the fatally sweet music that drove them through life into the restful Valley of Death. It took me years – and many moments of pain and heartbreak, too – to realize that what my grandfather was really saying was that I was Fire, in all of the being my extraordinary self-absorption had led me to see as intensely problematic. You see, I’ve left the anger to which I was unhappily wedded for much of my young life. But I now know this anger itself was not just an abrasive tenderness, it was also an attempt to make myself understandable to all the people I loved, people who often saw in the disordered nature of my affection something inherently frightening. Fire still, my flames are pale. They soothe, they do not singe. For years, I burned low, too scared of myself, too scared of the world that seemed so hard and wintry. Recent years – and perhaps that true understanding of oneself that running affords – has taught me I’m sufficiently elastic to withstand anything. As a child, I felt rootless, disconnected from the ones I loved. I was convinced no one could love me. But fire only grows lovely when it learns to love itself. I’ve since learnt I’ve always had roots, that I am securely lodged in the hearts of those who loved me when I was still little more than a deeply cherished dream, still little less than an incomplete verse. I’ve acquired new roots since, roots as gentle and loving as the strength with which they tether me to the ground. And if I am Fire, who are you, my lovely, lovely child who obstinately refuses to close her eyes until she has drained every bit of Faery away from me? I think you are Dawn. And that those who love you will always wake to your smile.
#Unreal #Fiction #ShortStory #Miner'sGrandchild #Anger #Fire #Dawn
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Poor Student Apologies
Tapping keys create poems far faster
than papers. Forgive me, Dean, dear poet the phones at two jobs will not answer themselves. Do you know how often I must rest my pen to let grievances in my ear? People say I am the crazy one, picking yellow leaves in autumn, begonias in my hair for spring, a vulture dries her feathers in the sun wings spread wide. Song birds fly South in the winter but I must trudge North instead. I spill coffee on each day's shirt. Flannels with stripes overlapping. A road map with no direction. Books with empty pages and verses I cannot understand, but fifteen pages due about the hundreds I've read, Morrison would laugh at my troubles. Hemingway would say drink more gin. Have I told you my brother believes in Jesus? He thinks he will fly in the rapture, that I'll just burn with the rest. The click click click of fingernails on a desk. Frogs boil slowly in big metal pots, never knowing they're cooking. I suppose I’ll leave my light sweater at home, and I’ll wait to eat lunch because I hear frog legs taste like chicken.
#Unreal #Poem #Poetry #Student #PoorStudentProblems #College #Work #TheStruggle #AdviceFromPoets
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The Not-So-Silent Killers
For most of my life, one of my greatest fears was to be eaten alive by an animal.
In my nightmares, it's always a lion or a dog that gnashes its teeth at me. But then again, I’ve spent my life walking among the most dangerous animals every day, So what do I have to fear? The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
What I Mean When I Talk of Love
1. November is the season for la flâneuse
the yellow-dimpled air has this milky chubbiness, tonight, as i, count dust from your stars, my feet feel cold homeward northbound background radio turning caramel flicking an orange-burnt tongue leftrightrightleft my lips sting, from the distance they sense, from your smoky oesophagus my jaws slacken from awaiting the 5 o'clock shadow, i t s n o t d e n s e e v e n i n g j u s t y e t that splashed against yellow skin my carotid bleed from striving to listentowhispers about your dreams arranged carefully, in the twigs of bonsai snapped easily between my stubby fingers and my tin-eardrums split from dreamingnutsanddragons and pint-sized happiness that fluttered around my collarbones hearing your cycle click and stack against the blue wall, a airy-pile-of-lightness-resigned, bareblue wall, dareblue wall stripped-of-colour-where-your-woodhandle-rested my cornea has wept nights from longing to measure your finger-veins-like-leaves against my own stubbiness toolate toolate toolate it's too late for me to throw-off-the-weight-of-this-wanderlust-and-wannaknowitall-thirst, for me to grab green fingers and merge destinations iknowthisnowthat all the sand has seeped through fingers-of-glass each second is just a blue-green fluid, squirming in-my-lousy-thick-hand every dream of walking with you falls behind and the orange sun turns grey, my mind turns away intent-to-catch-the-meanderingnewodour-in-the-breeze, i-forget-what-it-is-i-was-so-intently-thinking-of-as-i-run-to-catch-the-shadow-of-a-silver-eyed-dragon-kite my salvation lies in drifting away not gripping-hard-redfat-knuckles-white. |