Editor’s Note: It isn’t often we’re presented with a novella-length submission, but this one was too good to pass up. What makes it extra special is that it’s the author’s first published work. Victoria “Tori” Merkle’s “Elephant Tadpoles” will appear in three segments this week – today, Wednesday and Friday. We hope you’ll appreciate it as much as we baristas did, and will share your Comments with the author. ℘ Elephant Tadpoles by Tori Merkle Part I “Come on, girls, school in an hour!” our mother, Grace Hayward, ushered our two blonde heads down the hall. I was five steps faster, my messy pigtails bobbing up and down as I skipped into the kitchen. My bare feet slapped against the dark oak floor and my plaid skirt, its waistband folded twice over, could have slipped…

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    AS a leaf autumnally As a leaf autumnally pitching in wind, I am ravished by the airs of your mouth. Tumultuous I fly, bending, more corrupt with every spineless form of sin. I collapse continually, again.   With ancient hands you seasonally pour decay in my ripe buds, for, on Earth’s floor, I’d received too much tenderness of skin, more than you care to comply with. Veiny contempt spirals with pollen as a new variety to lovemaking, and hands stretch empty, brown. The petulant stem I am quakes, grainy limbs forming foliage of impiety. As your leaf, I toss like a mind in sundown.     anonymity how you do reconcile the dying breath of the flickering fluorescent young? their waning lights of ecstasy throughout weekly hazards are simulations of warmth. the impoverished…

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