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She’s Always Dancing
Jamila undulates. She twirls and sways, her arms like two snakes, licking the air. Her performance touches every part of the dance floor, painted toes pointing as her hip rises and falls like a soft hammer. Jamila’s dancing because it’s what she was doing when it happened. If the music took on the physical form…
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Birds and Worms
I’ve always liked birds. I used to read about them in books, watched videos online. I’ve seen holos of them flitting about and soaring high on thermals. They just seemed so improbable. But there are the books, the holos. The bones in illuminated glass cases, centuries old. When I was young, I wished I’d been…
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Wicked Branches – Pt. 3
Sometimes rotten branches can be pruned. But sometimes the whole tree must come down.
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Wicked Branches – Pt. 2
Sometimes rotten branches must be prunes. But sometimes the whole tree must come down.
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Wicked Branches – Pt. 1
Sometimes rotten branches must be prunes. But sometimes the whole tree must come down.
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The Artist’s Way
I began The Artist’s Way with the new year. One day at the Goodwill Outlet at the end of 2021, I found an old copy of it in a book bin, 30 years old but somehow still unmarked. It seemed like a sign. I dutifully purchased a notebook from Target, selected a special pen, and…
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A Dark Sestina
I wrote this poem in 2019 during one of my teaching certification classes at UT. The intention was for pre-service teachers to experience different types of assignments as their future students would. Being me, I made a turn into darkness. The style of poem is called a sestina, “a complex French verse form, usually unrhymed,…
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Family Jewels
She wore the ring on her wedding finger, though it wasn’t the ring she and Grandpa had exchanged that day in 1961. The gold band was topped with a floral arrangement of diamonds and enclosed by a curved guard. It sat in a trough of finger flesh that it’d begun carving out many pounds ago.…
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The Call of the Void
I plunged to my death in a past life. As my knees trembled like a buckling bridge, I knew it must be true. It’s the only explanation. My head began to swoon as I stepped closer to the railing atop the stone barrier between the 86th floor and 1050 feet of sultry New York city…
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The Leader of the Free World — and the Insidious Scourge that Plagues it
While Ukraine is blasted by Russian munitions, supply chains are disrupted, gas prices surge, and — insert disaster of your choice — the United States faces a more insidious yet equally horrific problem — dated kitchens. Sheryl Carter, one of the millions of Americans suffering under this plague, says that when she and her husband,…
IFFY FICTION
Where Fiction is Truth, and Vice Versa
IFFY FICTION 