Jungle
Today it’s so cold it’s hard to remember, the frigid air slipping in through collar, up pant legs, feasting on the exposed nose, searching out fragile fingers in and out of tight pockets, finding scalloped ears beneath a stocking cap, keeping lips a thin, hard line against the day that inside is a jungle, steamy and a steady ninety-eight-point-six, where every living creature, naked and glistening, luxuriates in a tropical heat and fecundity, a prelapsarian paradise of plenitude, where cold air and shivering bones are never...
Read MoreWild Violet Featured Works: Week of Jan. 6 (New Year)
As the new year charges off to a bitterly cold start (at least in much of the Northern Hemisphere), this week’s contributors wrap up the holidays and look forward to 2014. John L. Moore’s short story, “The Saga of Salk Atnas,” is a wry postlude to the Christmas holiday. In Margaret Karmazin’s short story, “Hallucinations,” an ob/gyn discovers a surprising connection between her life and the future of Earth. Ansel Oommen’s photograph, “Eclosion,” evokes hints of renewal amidst this pale...
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Photographer’s statement In this photo, a female black swallowtail has just emerged from its chrysalis and is busy drying its wings on a plaster sculpture. The juxtaposition of the butterfly and the life-like hand is at once a haphazard connection and yet, it almost seems to evince a metaphysical allegory.
Read MoreHallucinations
When the unearthly being made her acquaintance, Claudia Linstrom was beginning her first year of ob/gyn practice at Montbleu Women’s Center. She had just finished four years of residency at Montbleu General under the tutelage of Dr. Raymond Pileggi, who was now, unfortunately, showing signs of dementia. Since being a child, she remembered wanting to be a “doctor for girls,” and now she felt assured that the field she had chosen was perfect for her. Occasionally, she had even fantasized about having a special mission to perform. Soon after starting at the center, she rented a more...
Read MoreThe Saga of Salk Atnas
an After-Christmas Chronicle It was mid-afternoon on Christmas Eve in Jericho,Pennsylvania, when the brawny policeman forcibly escorted a sad-looking man in a tattered green coat into the lobby of the Konestoga County Mental Health Agency. The receptionist hardly looked up until the blue-suited lawman sternly and loudly demanded that a psychiatrist conduct an emergency evaluation of the shabby stranger, who was bald, tall and very, very thin. The outburst of the ruddy-faced policeman and the stranger’s odd appearance — there were multiple patches on his coat —...
Read MoreWild Violet Featured Works: Week of Dec. 9 (Coping)
The winter holidays can be hard for anyone who is dealing with difficult times. This week, our contributors look at ways of coping. In Debra Brenegan’s short story, “A Bath,” a battered woman makes a potentially life-changing decision. In Mark Chimsky’s poem, “Father in the Bread Aisle at the Newtown Safeway,” a grieving father attempts to return to his normal routine. In another poem by Mark Chimsky, “Silent Retreat,” a man on a retreat finds healing in human...
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