The Furious Gazelle

Literary as hell.

Tag: creative writing (Page 4 of 5)

“Stuck in Detroit: A Memoir of Christmas Past” by Janet I. Buck

December 21, 2018 /

Spending the holidays in the Detroit airport is an overrated experience, no matter how many faces of happy customers they have pasted in the corridors. Mark and I hadn’t seen his parents and siblings for three long years and we were looking forward to some great big hugs and long-awaited homemade pecan pie, only to be found in the confines of Dayton, Ohio. To make a long story short, we never made it there. The rest of the saga made a Chevy Chase Christmas look like a free honeymoon in Hawaii.

Now, Dad did warn us that they were having a little snow back there — courtesy of some lovely photo attachments sporting him toying with his neat little snow blower on the driveway. Since we get about two snowflakes every three years here in Southern Oregon, I thought the whole thing looked like a precious Rockwell painting. “Just a little snow,” as it turned out, stretched from their doorstep right up to New York City. Unaware of the rapidly deteriorating weather, we put a few magazines and a book in a carry-on and headed to the Medford airport.   Continue reading

Poetry by David L. Paxton

April 13, 2018 /

Amalgamation 

 

Brain rocked dry spell,

this green fist

recovering, finger

joints swelled

 

plush flesh and hair

overly

mortared

 

with supposed despair

negative words

followed by shakes, caught

 

sitting through night

until red daybreak

catches itself up

and yellows to work.

 

Rain hangs

misting silent live oaks,

leaves dropping on trucks

Continue reading

“Error: User_Interface,” a short story by Rose Kinney

February 16, 2018 /

This isn’t the call Joan is waiting for. The call she’s waiting for, as she stares into the guts of the vintage purple GameCube she doesn’t have the skill to fix, is from Miku. Miku, who wears half of her hair in a ponytail and uses too much garlic when she cooks, who knows exactly which of Joan’s shit to call her out on and which shit can’t be helped, who understood Joan better after one year than Joan’s family had after twenty-eight. She can’t help but pick it over, the moment she noticed the blot of dissatisfaction in Miku three nights ago.

Joan had been slumped on the couch in her apartment, giggling as Miku finished her impromptu performance of “It’s Your Move” by Diana Ross. Miku took a bow, perched across Joan’s lap, and placed her hands on either side of Joan’s face. The ceiling fan clicked rhythmically. An upstairs neighbor slammed a door. Miku smiled lopsidedly, bringing her face closer to Joan’s. A flush burned Joan’s cheeks and she looked away. After a moment, Miku sighed. She detached herself from Joan and stared at the ceiling. “I guess you’d like for me to go, then,” she said, her eyebrows raised.

“No, no,” Joan had replied, too quickly, “You don’t have to.” Continue reading

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jason Reynolds share their best lessons from writing for Black Panther and Spiderman

October 7, 2017 /

Ta-Nehisi Coates (left) and Jason Reynolds (right)

Two outstanding authors discussed their process and craft at New York Comic Con on Thursday. We wanted to share some of their best insights.

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates is known for his work as a national correspondent for The Atlantic, a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood and novel, Between the World and Me. He currently writes Marvel’s Black Panther.

Continue reading

2017 February Contest Finalist: “Instead of a Valentine” by Pamela Sinicrope

February 13, 2017 /

If a couple gets married

and one commits suicide on February 11th,

is it anyone’s fault?

Feminists can blame all they want.

Husbands can lament and take lashes

while they rewrite poetry.

 

Like a blinking eye that opens then closes-

what is-is.  Unless it isn’t.

Depression was a black lung hung off

a rat’s tail on the tree by her window or-

asbestos pilled on plumbing pipes-unwrapped

and falling like snow-long before they said, ‘I DO.’

Long before, Sylvia swallowed 48 pills, slept

beneath her house, woke to try again.

 

Marriage is hard, poets complex,

Poetry is hard, marriage complex.

Like pulled threads in a sweater, they unraveled.

Depression created a triangle.  

Factor in children and the figure converted

to a love pentagon-where two people wanted winged

poems sailing space and three sides were left hanging.

Pentagon then add a lover? That’s a hexagon.

The shape shifted, lost all sides, became thread-a heart,

became a pneumatic noose around a head roast.

 

Sylvia gasped air and faltered, fell asleep.  

She wrote every day in the dark before a baby

banged pots on the floor, uttered, ‘ma-ma,’

while Ted left to write, wrangle crows.

Rejection lassoes perfection.

 

How romantic-two poets in the same house-

unparalleled love letters, mirrored muses:

in truth, for them, it was murder-

no, it was a contest-

no, it was academia-

publish, perish, publish, Pulitzer-no

 

noose was wide enough to capture

the universe of words that broke them-

no-broke her.

Instead of a valentine,

the noose became a knot.

“My Husband’s Parkinson’s Disease” By Linda Miller

February 2, 2017 /

Two things.

   One, my husband’s Parkinson’s disease. It’s a tough break for such a splendid man and in spite of all the stiffness and fatigue and slow-motion, he’s Mr. Positive. But then you’ve got to be with this stuff, or you’d never get out of bed in the morning. You’d surrender to your cement-filled joints and then allow yourself to sit around recovering from a hellish morning of rising but not shining. Television would soon rule your life and there’d be hell to pay for anyone who nudges you to do more. You’d sit there, stone-faced and barely moving. You’d be the rusty tin man without oil-can relief.

  When Steve was first diagnosed back in 2003, both of us were cool, calm and accepting. We were sad but not yet mad, and I remember my sunny husband saying, “If I had to get something neurological, I think this is a good one to get.” Really?

    I had just lost two parents to cancer, and as I sat across from him in the diner I almost thought he made a good point. Parkinson’s wasn’t going to steal him too soon, just make his everyday movements torturous and sometimes dangerous. Like hopping in and out of a car, eating a salad, pulling on underwear or threading a belt through the loops of his pants. It made me mad to witness the downshift in his life’s power and pace, but I had to put a sock in it. Tamp it down. Squash it. Steve wasn’t to blame. No one was to blame. His brain wasn’t making enough dopamine. Should I be upset with his nerve cells? OK. Works for me. It’s their fault.

Continue reading

Riding The Red-White Caterpillar by Penelope Hawtrey

January 26, 2017 /

Park and Ride and I. January 26th. Ottawa. This is how we meet.

I park my car and then grab my overstuffed knapsack that rests on the seat beside me that holds various snacks and workout clothes. I turn and reach behind me, and blindly grapple to locate my brown leather purse that I flung on the floor of the backseat. My second bag weighs more than any Army Cadet has ever had to carry during a march.

“Ah! There you are!” I say to no one in particular. Locating both bags, I push my car door open as white snow whips against my face feeling like hundreds of pin pricks against my cheeks. The snow enters my Honda civic and dances around inside. With that, I stick my foot out. And that’s where we meet.

Snowbank and I; SNOWBANK 1, ME 0.

Snow worms wiggle between my hiking boot and ankle and then, smoothly shimmy their way down to my heel. When my feet hit the pavement, the cold ice crunches against my sock and bottom of my boot until it is pulverized into a puddle. And now, I have a puddle at the bottom of my boot. Continue reading

Things That Make Us Furious: “Prop Clothing,” by Eliana Sara

December 21, 2016 /

screen-shot-2016-12-21-at-2-20-08-pm

Dear Fashion Industry,

It’s time we opened discourse on a rather seedy subject in your world: prop clothing. Like the prop food adorning model furniture, prop clothing creates an illusion of actual clothing. The prop jacket may look as though it is completing your ensemble, but, unlike real outerwear, it offers no warmth.

Prop clothing comes in many forms- the super cute studded pleather “jacket” that’s “perfect for fall” but cannot keep one warm within the acceptable temperature range of fall in your region is a failure as clothing. It is a collection of cloth merely pretending to be a jacket and it may look like a jacket to all appraising eyes hence pulling off a “look”- but that is all and thus it is a prop.

Continue reading

The Old Capitol, a short story by Karl Harshbarger

November 11, 2016 /

 

    The secretaries who worked in his father’s outer office didn’t even say hello to Casey.  That was because two of them weren’t really a secretaries at all but just students at the university.  They kept typing on their typewriters and listening to their Dictaphones.  And Mrs. Tish, the real secretary for the outer office, didn’t say “hello” either because she was talking on the telephone back at her desk.

    Well, it didn’t matter.  Casey walked right past the secretaries’ desks into the second office.

    “Hello, young man.” said Mrs. Paskow, who was his father’s personal secretary.  She had a drawer of one of the file cabinets open.

    “Is he here?” said Casey.

    But he had already gone over to the door and looked in.  What he saw was his father’s big desk and his father’s big chair pushed back from the desk and the painting of rounded hills of corn fields and rounded trees up on the wall behind his father’s chair.
Continue reading

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