Hybrid
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New! LIT Monthly Writing Prompt: April Edition
Happy poetry month everyone!
Here at LIT we are starting a new series of monthly writing prompts. This month’s prompt is from our nonfiction editor Vicky Oliver:
Write about a time when you were lost and how you found your way home.
The hero’s journey is sometimes a parable on the transformation of being: old habits and emotional reactions that are shed out of necessity as they become stumbling blocks to the journey. The old ways are replaced by new strengths or new ideas that have been germinating out of sight, waiting to come into play as fresh discoveries in a moment of crisis,
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Parade
by Tad Tuleja
I do not often see the faces of the dead. But sometimes, in a lucid dream, they tug at my memory, reminding me of what I have gained and what I have lost. In the hour of the wolf one October morning, the chill just whisking down from Alberta to Texas, I am half awake in the darkness and watching a parade.
I am five or six years old and sitting on the curb, just near the spot where Livingston Avenue runs into George Street. The parades come down Livingston from the high school,
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Benign Madness
by Joyce Lee
You know the insanity has always been there, hidden within the stories, secreted from the norm.
It’s there when, as a child, you sit by the lake with your younger cousins, weaving stories of sun fairies and shadow gnomes that dance on the wind-kissed water. They giggle and ask for more, and it’s just a story to them, but you see defined essences latent in the alternating sparkles and shadows, skimming the skin of your reality even as they skitter across the surface of the water, a refined actuality that soothes and satisfies,
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Curses for Crooked Teeth
by Laurie Blauner
photo by Tony Wallin-Sato
As a teenager I was exuberantly ashamed of my crooked teeth, although they weren’t my only problem. If I did smile, I covered my teeth with my palm. So my usual facial expression was comprised of rococo motifs that formed an impression of seriousness and concentration. This was fixed with braces and a horrible contraption called an “orthodontic headgear” that consisted of metal rods, one that circled the outside of my mouth and one inside that was connected to my braces, plus a strap around the back of my neck that forcibly moved my teeth with its cinching.
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Cabinet of Curiosities
by Meredith Jelbart
This cabinet, which I gift to you, my child, has ten rows of ten small drawers. Standing flat against the wall, it takes up little space. It is beautifully crafted; dark wood of the drawer front meets the lighter interior wood in dove-tailed joinery, a dark tail interlocked with a lighter one, a darker, then a lighter and so on.
It has come down in our family, from a great-uncle’s garage, to my study. To wherever you may choose to keep it.
You could say it’s an heirloom.
