He hasn’t lost the love or the language, he’s just brought them down to earth. He’s using them to make the ordinary beautiful–rags, bones, broken bottles. And things as extraordinarily ordinary as aging, as remembering.
Rag and Bone
Flash Fiction: How skinny the leash, how thin the arms that hold me.
“Maybe this meant something, maybe it didn’t.”
Linden Tea Madeleines
But this magical madeleine and tea, which he accepts while full of adult cares and woes, brings him such joy that he no longer feels mediocre, accidental, mortal, which is what being an adult feels like, on a bad day.
July Issue
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Letter From the Editor July: Words and Silence
It seems more important now than ever to tell our stories and share our stories, and listen to the stories of others. To amplify the voices of anybody struggling to be heard, and to celebrate when the words or images or silences speak to us or bewilder us or transform us. To harness our anger or sadness or joy in a wild productive fury, resonating with the strange perfect words we make our own or the deafening silences we inhabit.
Spirits and Demons
These phantasms are concocted from a little kernel of conscience, or guilt, or fear, or loneliness. Sometimes others see them, sometimes they don’t, they’re shifting and dreamlike, and they operate according to their own rules. They’re unreliable narrators. They’re wise or foolish, in turn; they speak in riddles, they speak a questionable truth, changing and suspect, like all truths.
May Issue
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Flash Fiction: Pond
Cars wait at the light. You are at the breakfast table in bare feet, wearing Jillian’s robe. A woman in a heavy coat labors onto the bus carrying all her things, a line of riders shuffle behind. Brakes release.
Character Study: The Pencil Collector
Someday he’d write the most perfectly beautiful story ever written, and he’d use one pencil for each word, and then he’d put each pencil back in its chipped plastic drawer until the next time. Some day.
Why I love gesture as a language, and a Recipe for a Bright Spring Hand Pie
I have long been fascinated with the motion of human hands. Gesture is one of my favorite languages. It’s oddly both universal and specific to one place at the same time.
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