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Home Alone & MoreBy Brianne Manning QuailBellMagazine.com *Editor's Note: "The Gasoline Tree" was previously published at Yellow Chair Review Home Alone
Hydrangeas dance at the corner of the driveway, illuminated alone by glow of waning moon. The rain has stopped for now-- cicada canticles, the sizzle of solitary cigarette blaze. Another night at home without you. Not missing you gets easier. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Sixth Grade & The Teacher's RoomBy Mary Buchinger QuailBellMagazine.com Sixth Grade
We sit shoulder to shoulder at the cafeteria tables no ordinary school lunch—the cooks are all mothers some of them ours, everything from scratch by women who can cook—to say no thanks even to the soup is a problem. Today it’s rice, floating white and curved among green fans of parsley, bright carrot chunks, caught in a savory broth, when Mr. Hinz calls our attention to the similarity between the cooked kernels and the hookworms we’d been discussing just before lunch. We girls, edgy as beveled glass, screech. Some reach for ketchup as if to drown those worms, but even then how like an intestine —the squirted stream, beginning to bleed into the urine yellow, growing as formless as a future where nothing can be thrown away, all of it coming together in stamens with anthers and fertilized pistils, like sixth grade science where everything is like something else, no innocent berry or cucumber, all a simile for something we have yet to learn. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
90’s Car Radio ReplayHold me
Under dollarstore constellations—tin foil stars unraveling threads of lingering evanescence and tomorrow’s tired wishes The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Sleigh Bed & Before DarkBy Barbara Alfaro QuailBellMagazine.com Sleigh Bed
Visiting Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts. After days divided into increments of grocery lists, poetry, and baking bread, weary and delighted, you slip into your dark wood single bed and feel soft linens against your skin. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Murmuring and MoreThe Murmuring
The poison drips steadily into my skull. Lice are feeding. They are carnivorous. She is biting away at my life. I am merely a husk. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Rape Will ContinueBy Sabine Magnet QuailBellMagazine.com *Editor's Note: May be uncomfortable to those who have faced sexual trauma. I.
They will watch me lying naked on a sofa in some apartment in Berlin. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
BootsThe same sun scorched downtown Los Angeles that had seared the Iraq desert. Army Private First Class Samantha Cummings stood at attention holding a stack of boxes, her unwashed black hair slicked back in a ponytail and knotted military style. She stared out from Roberts Shoe Store onto Broadway, transfixed by a homeless man with hair and scraggly beard the color of ripe tomatoes. She’d only seen that hair color once before, on Staff Sergeant Daniel O’Conner.
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Olympus Knows I've FailedWords by Dan Szczesny Image by Bryan Crump Modeled by Lexia Talionis QuailBellMagazine.com *Editor's Note: Previously published in Lit Select Magazine. I await judgment, locked in my own mind. My source of energy and life, my imagination, has been stripped from me and now all I see is white fog, a sort of hazy blur. If I stay perfectly still, in my peripheral vision, I can see the dance of life, the movement of ballet, the crescendo of orchestra, a long, morning landscape where the sun dimpled dew broadcasts eternity. But if I try to conjure the images, they fall apart like dust and that damned blur returns. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
CacozeliaBy Willem Myra QuailBellMagazine.com Work-bound he goes to
cross the street, when the traffic light outside his place gleefully announces, "Enjoy your day, nigga!" The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
AuctionThe old man finally died
and now it's the time of the auctioneer, as much life's bookend as a coffin. In the basement of the church hall, surrounded by everything from fine antiques to kitsch to junk, he waves his microphone around like a rock star though, when he begins to bellow into it, he's more the preacher, assailing the crowd with the wonders of a local couple's splendid, decorous taste. But the jumble reminds more of an attic than rooms. |