I'll pick myself up,
tear the insecurities away.
Take out the thorns,
finding courage to stay.
I'll keep on walking,
whisper a prayer.
Maybe tomorrow I'll find,
what I didn't find today.
Sometimes it's not always skulls and bones.
Sometimes it feels just right,
Like right now.
These are the times I savor the most but go unnoticed.
(How foolish of me!)
It happens when I'm sitting near the windowsill,
And hear the rain pitter-patter.
The sky clears out,
And I feel the breeze of a thousand freed sighs.
I thank almighty God,
For this moment.
Cos' no matter how old you get,
You'll always need some air.
The rivers have dried,
The ocean calmed down,
My lungs opened up,
Allowing me to finally breathe.
The recesses of my mind,
Turned into light,
Letting a flood of wanted thoughts,
Swim back into this reflective pool.
I can spend
As Pauline walks barefoot
on the black cracked sidewalk,
her soles pull up ashen
from the sun-warmed asphalt.
Her dark curls river-running
with flecks of shining mica
parallel to her striped top,
blown by the late summer breeze.
The breeze that swings the red light
hangin’ over my head.
Twenty behind me equally stopped
by the gatekeeper red.
In the afternoon, I take my time,
open my sunroof, roll down my windows,
And watch Pauline walk down the sidewalk,
ankles interweaving like a duet,
until she turns to cross
the two-plank bridge that lies across
the shallow roadside creek,
the wood as dark as her skirts
which catch on the
Dear Lovely,
It's been a really, really long time since… well, since the 'Adventures of Lovely and Chance.'
I've been wanting to write to you for a very long time. And I don't know what took me this long to finally write, but I do know that I was too late, because one day I came back... and you were gone.
I realised then that we never really had a proper chance to say goodbye, so I wanted to write this in hopes that you'll still come across it somehow.
How does one crab of a bucket start a letter? A letter that should be short and sweet, and yet there are a million and one things I want to say to you right now. But as I can't fit a 'm
Are we ghosts?
Do we ever touch
Come into contact
Or do we dance around each other
Terrified to feel?
The shades of our hearts
Do we ever think
That we shouldn't trust
Don't let them know
What goes through our heads
Keep all our secrets?
The spectres of our hopes
Do we say too much?
Do we offer everything
Up to anyone who asks?
Do we say too much too soon?
The wraiths of our fear
Do we ever stop
And say you know too much?
Do we withhold our trust
Because someone knows
More than we do about us?
The phantoms of our dreams
Do we confess to weakness?
Do we let the mask slip
For long enough that someone sees
What we hide
Getting Published the Hard Way by msklystron, literature
Literature
Getting Published the Hard Way
GETTING PUBLISHED: THE TRADITIONAL WAY
A tutorial by M. Alice Chown
If, like me, you have stories lying around gathering virtual dust on your hard drive, why not send them out to a publisher? You have nothing to lose. A couple of years ago, I attended the launch of an annual Canadian short story anthology, called Tesseracts 10. I knew one of the authors whose speculative fiction piece had been included in the book. Matthew Johnson and I had taken the same creative writing course. Our former prof, author, Robert Sawyer, was there at the launch too, as well as the editors of the anthology. Those who had contributed a story to Tesseracts 10 to
I hover, standing
in the threshold.
I smoke and salt your silhouette,
tracing your shapes,
your shadowed features,
and your outline.
I wrap your monochromatic palette
in layer over layer
of photographs from
flashbulb memories.
I compromise the tactile,
liken your sideways smile
to a bracket, a backslash,
or a tilde.
I resign myself
“I want a daughter I can be proud of.”
That’s what you said
You didn’t know how much that hurt
Because what you really said was
“You’re not good enough.”