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Vagabond Seed by Craig Rodgers
The minotaur told the mermaid he loved her, but their liaison lasted only so long, and when some years later the gods took note of the fruits of that tryst they did not fume or row but only wept for the wretched pink creature who would know no home on…
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Luminosity by Anita Goveas
a possibly true story At 6 o’clock, Henrietta watches Mr Pickering, Cecilia Payne, Williamina Fleming and the other computers go home. She promised to lock up, she usually does what she is told. The sun is dropping below the horizon, tinting the sky and the red-brick building next to the observatory.…
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On the Proper Use of Mosquitoes by Roppotucha Greenberg
They won’t let me sleep. My father, a halo of insects around his head, is singing of Robbie Burns’ heart that’s apparently ‘in the highlands a-following a deer’, in Russian first, then in English. Drink always made him jolly, and it earned him our neighbours’ respect (before they met him…
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Sylke by K.B. Carle
Tyn wakes to fireflies playing in the soft areas between the bones making up his spine. To his wife, Abigail, tracing swollen pathways of whippings that echo an anger he keeps holed up in the dark parts of his mind. The part can’t nobody reach but him. Instead, Tyn sets…
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Better Days by William Gilmer
I only drink one beer with dinner while encouraging her to have a second. I’m ready to make the sudden U-Turn onto McKalester towards St. Catherine’s hospital before Grace’s phone even rings. When Grace becomes lost in the maze of sanitized hallways, I play along even though I could navigate…
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Souls to sell, bots for hire by Russell Hemmell
Hidden behind the curtains, they’re waiting for me.Expectantly and fearful at the same time.For a reason. Bots have been exploited for sex for warfor anything they could think ofsince the beginning of the cyborg era. We have passed under different phases, before our Keepers could decide if we had a soul or we were just…
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Creative Study: Elisabeth Horan
Artist Statement: I find myself so thankful for the feminist writers who have taught me to write poetry… When I first read Emily Dickinson, I thought this is the real thing… the power of scarcity, the complete control of the tone and voice. She is the master of doing so…
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Father Time by Christine A. Brooks
tick tock The grandfather clock, keeps time, twelve gongs. She has made it to another day. Silence, outside the dining room window where she lay dying. Darkness shrouds the small house that holds her body, while her soul prepares for flight. Tick tock. The grand clock just won’t stop TICKING…
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Loki in Utero by Blake Johnson
The grass here is greener than you’d think, despite crunching underfoot, despite being dry as bleached bones. But I don’t mind. This place, this terminus between void and light, is double-sided, constantly shifting between lies that might be fulfilled and truths never realized. I feel right at home. I hear…
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His Face When It Will Flicker by Kristin Garth
is cracked glass Picasso striated grove —skin branches, singed romances, flame buried in bone chip snow, glycerine. Globe revealing glistening cemetery. His youth, a sunken mausoleum mystery; angles become mangled. Face is wasting, cubed. Happens in a wink.You think you are confused — staircase mistake of candlelight? Dim castle direas host, Adonis, promise, flickering to ghost. Last crackle,…