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This day limps and whimpersin a sudden mob of jeers and taunts.Remorse muscles in, blockingthe tease of possible lightwith a fuggy pulse of wayward,gravel-blind, monstrous self-absorption. This is the end of the worldand only imps and devils are afoot,the wrecks beset by iron-hearted lootersstealing movement from the air, invitinga tepidContinue Reading

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There’s a story in this, girls,and it doesn’t have any wolves in it for now, though you never knowwhat might come down the lane, in Neverland, especially nearthat mermaid bog of old. Which is the gateway toThemyscira, truth be told, though no one ever seemsto want to know where theContinue Reading

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II. One way of looking at itSever the notion of quest from bloodand you get girls, leastways if the bloodis othered and the quest is sticky withswords and snares, beset with spitefulnymphs and pitiless trials, fool’s goldguarded by dragon-fire, the road toilluminant decency – or what passes as –marked byContinue Reading

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I crept up to him while he slept and studied the twitches his dreams made beneath his frail eyelids. He should have sensed my stare. Soon I knew if he was being chased by wings and needles, or if he was lost in a flailing bark inside the snapping prongsContinue Reading

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as the crow-flowers tickle and the nettles prick her remembrances. she is a river of dream purpling the shadows of overhanging branches as, mermaid-like a while, she buoys herself up with flow and flight, no more the awkward baggage of a boy with clanking ghostly chains for brains. Kate Falvey’sContinue Reading

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So where are all the fools and fairies? Quince, you string the lights and rig the gauzy scrim. Titania, shimmer all your sylvan innuendo in and vary like an otherworldly whim or a thought before the sin. Rustics, do some heavy lifting within that copse of wizened, watching oak. ImproviseContinue Reading

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I skulk around the gemmy corners of the emerald mausoleum and sift the twinkling dirt through the veil of my unnatural hand, as if memories of sentience were enough for me to hold the insubstantial grandeur of our lofty and unseemly dreaming. Never was I bold enough to challenge hisContinue Reading

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Millie and Adela waggle their tow-sacks through the stile, grazing the beech hedge as if they were moony golden sheep instead of moony dun girls meant to be sharp-eyed, not dozy and slack, watching for bits of fluff, flimsy in the scraggly brush. They trod on silver thistle, quaking grass,Continue Reading

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The ideal woman isvery brightly colored.She is shiny; her breastspoint in sharpconical assertion oftheir amazing defiance ofphysical laws; her waistturns where she leans orbacks away and, ifshe is clothed herstatic swiveling rumplesher neat skirt, shifting andhitching it over herneat hips. Her lapseems emphasized. Her legsalways exert themselves.If she is clothed,Continue Reading

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You could, if you were so minded,dab another descriptor onto the page,something sunny like dazzle or a blotch of razory silver, glinting in a naughty knot of cursive, a wink or arched curve of pencil under a dramatic swath of glistening fringe.The eye would be brimful and green, the hairContinue Reading