Gumball Blue

Gumball Blue

“War,” the little girl says, “is when papa is gone.” If you look out the window, you too might see the horizon line fizzing like a lighted fuse. It began years ago. More and more words were allowed to choose their own meaning, and now we find ourselves surrounded by random fragments of abstruse codes. Don’t you think it’s time for a gumball machine that dispenses eyeballs? Everything else has failed – duty, honor, country. We need to have a conversation, decide on a plan, something, before unfamiliar birds visit us in our sleep, stripping dream bushes of every last berry.

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Quetzalcoatl Comet

He looks out across his resplendent city in the glowing sunrise and sees the sacred sun silhouette the Temple of Tlaloc and Huītzilōpōchtli. Will the latter god save them from the annihilation in his recent dreams, or had the war god grown sick of the priests’ gifts of gory hearts and flayed corpses? Had he decided to do the unthinkable and abandon the Mexica to darkness, famine and extinction? The dawn sun basks the sky in a fiery orange. The water of Texcoco scintillates in the light, and the causeways reach out to the world beyond Tenochtitlan, from where the strangers with metal skin and moveable volcanoes for weapons will deceive him and raze his kingdom to the ground.

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Thrill of the Hunt: An Interview with the Founder of Tough Poets Press

George Salis: I consider you something of a superhero, championing the underdogs of literature who have been wrongly neglected. And so, what is the superhero origin story of Tough Poets Press, does it involve radioactive spiders, gamma rays, mutant genes?

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