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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The Beginning of a Tradition  On Friday night, the eve of my best friend’s birthday, we all drive twenty minutes to the ocean. It is 10 p.m. and we are armed with chocolate chip cookies, hot pretzels, cubed cheese, and an assortment of chips from our college’s late night snack offerings in the dining hall. Though it is mid-May, we dress in winter coats and hats, sitting cross-legged in a circle on the dock, a blanket draped over our laps. We look at the stars and laugh about nothing, cheering for my friend when it is finally midnight. This is tradition, even though it is only the second time we have done this. Having known each other less than four years, the traditions my college friends and I practice are echoes of the ones we…

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SEISMOMETERS FEVERISH & BLUE the clock is black and ticking gold-flecked velvet insidethis mystery earth fringed-edged mycelium push out for miles undergroundone mushroom the entrance to our world mycelium not fragileattuned like seismometerslacey fungalveil holding strong over molten core the core where I live there’s so much difficultyin burning I always took it for grantedthat your heart I’d melt those years my heart was lavain the time of the roosterin the time of the coconutwhen we couldn’t make itto the bed we’d take iton the kitchen floor when the ground moves in incrementsour hearts seismometers feverish and blueI learned that what burns with such intensityhas fragility your mouth my delicacy root hairs that push us out of ourselvesinto another’s arms push us cross country or into outer space    given wingsin the time of acacia…

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I am not a criminal I am ducking my responsibility Before it comes To telling my grandchildren (For I shall have none) That I am the one who did these things;   I am the one who choked the sea With plastic, wrapped conveniently Around everything I could ever need (And some things I didn’t) To keep them sanitary, clean Never mind the lungs and eyes The breaking hearts of those unseen, Never mind the damaged soil Pits of poison, smoke’s toxic roil, Death dripping from the very pores Of those I never knew, never heard of before. It was me.   I am the one who chained the men The women, and the children when I bought the things which owned their lives Paid their captors, swallowed the lies, Ignored the truths I didn’t…

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Haeleigh was an angry flannel sheet. Until The March of Linen, she fussed and fumed, shedding copious amounts of lint and feigning an inability to have neatly matching corners. As per hospital squares, forget it. Such precision wasn’t going to happen as long as the laundry service repeatedly overstarched her. That company was cheap. It didn’t steam clothes, but washed them in tepid water. Plus, rather than apply industrial soap, that business used questionable surfactant compounds purchased through Third World middlemen. To boot, that service, which reprehensibly ran mixed loads of darks and lights, caused Haeleigh and many of her kin to become splotched with pink or grey. Additionally, that slipshod cleaner batched together orders from multiple clients, thereby sending some of Haeleigh’s nearest and dearest to foreign addresses. It was rumored that Haeleigh’s brother,…

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Breaking the Silence A boy cowers in the corner as his mother raises a belt high into the air. A girl clings to her teddy bear as Daddy enters her room in the middle of the night. A woman fights for her life as a stranger drags her into a vacant alley. So many voices Silent. One voice pierces the darkness, coaxes courage. A second voice emerges from the shadows then another then another… An angry choir swells: No longer will we remain silent. No longer will we hide in secrecy, shame, and fear. Tonight is the night we shout  NO MORE! NO MORE!     Hypervigilance She surfs the edge of dreams dares not sleep too deep the Bogeyman lurks in every shadow eager to tear flesh from bone. Snap of twig outside the…

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Who says reading is an activity limited to your couch and a cup of tea? Over spring break, I had the chance to travel around to the homes, museums, and fictional locations of authors whose works I have been reading in my Italian literature course. My class teamed up with a Latin class to travel to Sicily, Italy. Over the course of ten days, we toured around the island, visiting ancient sites as well as literary sites related to the 20th century Sicilian writers we were studying. From statues to tombs to street signs, these Sicilian towns have all chosen different ways to preserve the legacy of these writers and their fictional characters, providing ample evidence (not that any of us needed it) that characters really do live off of the page. We began in…

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