Torsade Literary Space Marjorie Bowen: The Sword Decides! (part fifty-five)
Marjorie Bowen The Sword Decides! (part fifty-five) Her day had left Simona restless. While, this role she played required less… Less (a sigh) of standing by in readiness. Fiorina in her simple dress, sweating when the sun was hot, no perfumed waters, no cloth teased from […]
The Resident (part six)
Chapter One Dark Paneling (continued) “Go in and get you something to drink,” Stu called out. “Lunch any time now, Dad.” Deb’s over-the-shoulder glance caught her fiancé’s frozen sneer. She turned in full, with a warning deliberation, and shot Bridge the dagger of a look. One visitor was dressed in […]
Catastrophe (part twenty-five)
Jean Hess La Catastrophe de la Martinique (twenty-five) When M. Jalabert received the dispatch, in which M. Landes spoke of the fall of the Morne-Lacroix, and of the possible consequences, he had thought it best before posting this, to communicate it to the governor. […]
The Cat Sprang Up (poem)
The Cat Sprang Up Since largely we are not little match girls And because the habit of sneaking asks of us That any wisp of fellow-feeling Be snuffed and whisked aside in the cup and ball game The atom shot from the huddled mass to huddle in a doorway would gather […]
A Little Joy (poem)
A Little Joy The young gather near old Timeworn The age of him lies like a bundle Poor yellow tom The stink of an open toilet and the menace of a grinning man He knows they’re like that A little joy in the killing The back steps concrete crumbling This fault […]
The Immortal Lake (part two)
The Immortal Lake (part two) Gleam of omen on the flat tar lake at sunset An ice-white sunset without a cloud That throws the shore’s reflections black And cold, the sparking furnace of earth’s end Rippled by the same thin wind Juxtaposed and never joined, the craft Emerges from the brown […]
Fair Enough (poem)
Fair Enough Having a penetrating sort of vision That pierces fuselage Pares the sea-floor to viscerate the hull Of the queen of Atlantis’s barge And pixelates figures of varying density And having no soundtrack flings of panic Or pain vaporing implosive motions Perturbate the heated air around Their persons like tiny […]
The Hillside (poem)
The Hillside Reprieve conserves tomorrow’s backwards step Names you neither queen, nor good nor evil Reprieve as a dogging mirror cold on counsel Reminding you there’ll be no answer No pattern but the sky Giggles your new-poured coffee Or the rain, just as the drops cease falling And the tipster turns […]
Demimonde (poem)
Demimonde Starting fresh a heart for bold endeavor The probing intellect makes like an inspector For as the renovators have the door ajar The walls pulled down floes of plaster Pushed by traversing traffic to shore Up against sawbucks chunks of gear Where cords lie plugged together The tiles hexagonal shorn […]
Time and Place (poem)
Time and Place Cheating to elude the advertising Where grains of revenue pour in theory As the ant lion makes an hourglass of its victim’s Struggle, so ant resisting capture gravitates Pitwards the half-dome lengthening time As the Romans measured summer hours Sunny ones, as the public gardens Godwotting avowal in […]