Scarlet

“Cobalt Tears”, “Silent Parties”, “I Think a Painter Drives That Car”, “Red Lines”, “The Parlor”, and “Of Violets”

Cobalt Tears Before his body can form the needed musclesTo uphold the soaking load of precious cobalt,He is sentenced to mine,Collect,And carry this mineral.Fragments of cobalt tucked beneath his nails from digging,Its dust in his lungs,His tears polluted with it asPhotographers bear witness to the iniquity of greed,Greed of his country, that owes a debt […]

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Scrimshaw

By the time Beth learned Jonathan was lost, he had already been dead two months. News of the incident traveled slowly, drifting from port to port, St. Jago to Panama to Port of Spain, across the Atlantic on a clipper bound for Amsterdam, before washing up here in London. It was a whale, the Reverend

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No Fury Like…

Medusa. There’s a reason they call you that. It’s not so much the mythology course you teach, or the fact that your last name is Gordon, or the curly snakes of hair that tumble down your back—it’s your eyes. That famous penetrating gaze that should by all rights have the power to turn one to

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“Neelakurinji”, “In the Ghazal (a Ghazal)”, “Drunk Friday Musings”, “Of Inquilab”, “A Villanelle”, and “Majnoon’s Grief (A Pantoum)”

Neelakurinji The blue mountains are purple again as though estranged lovers have washed up ashore  and poured paint stolen from the  Gods over the Nilgiri. Did you hear  the news rumored  in mists? The Neelakurunji, Strobilanthes kunthiana, fireflies  of blue hue, bloomed at last. Twelve years have gone by  since the purple blue comets last

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Keeper of the Vortex

Agatha tended the Vortex. It was her punishment for not obeying the Prefect of the Labyrinth, from where all life was sustained. There were rules to follow, laws older than time, although there was no time as we know it, and she had disobeyed the rules by being herself. The Prefect had shorn her locks,

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When We Were Cowboys

When the nurse came into the room, I had just awakened from a dream. She was a young woman with swift and accurate movements; her white and blue clothes blurred as she opened the curtains to an overcast day. “You haven’t moved since the last time I checked on you,” she said. “Still tucked in,

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