Author Archives: Tara Collins

Because his ears peak and the hackles still rise at the sound of a fight, his or not, and because no bitch passes however far downwind without pulling his nose into the breeze to gauge the days remaining between her and her heat, because lame as a beggar, he cannot run in the pack withContinue reading “The Werewolf Ages”

The Federal Center for Controlling Things wishes to know where I contracted poetry, so those infected, or at risk, can be advised. They have a list of everything that sings, and since my name appears on two or three of their cross-referenced indices, I am apprised that I have been identified as dangerous to theContinue reading “Indefensible Disclosures”

I like to sit and watch myself go by, I chose the safety of the passing crowd and though sometimes I try to catch my eye, a nod, a smile, but nothing said out loud, no word of warning, hint of coming joy that otherwise might slip beneath the crush, something beneath the notice ofContinue reading “The Old Time-Traveller’s Song”

First the vampires came with their pups waving their ticket punchers and their straws and flittering around the room bat guano crazy from the sugar rush diabetes put in my blood. Then the zombie kids with their melon ballers and ice cream scoops for carving out just the brain truffles where all the concussions poundedContinue reading “When My Medical Records Went Public on Halloween”

We called her 3-C like her dad, who said that she was “three cats wise”; everybody thought she had nine lives while all the rest of us had less than one. She liked rough men and I was never much for tough & tumble even back at school, so what I saw in her sheContinue reading “How I Became a Teacher of Exobiology”

1. Did a hair floating in the sink bring them up short, shaving? 2. Did horror well up from the clogged drain? 3. Did they fish out nests of the family’s hair, matted and drenched, without a hint of recognition? 4. Did they ever wake sobbing? 5. Did they strop razors to surgical sharpness withoutContinue reading “17 Questions the Judges at Nuremberg Forgot to Ask”

Like a miniature city made of glass, this crystal quartz extends transparent spires, rust colored at their base, shafts tinged with brass as if inside the matrix stone some fire raged out of sight and sent its telltale glow up the clear prisms of the shafts. This stone grew, layer by layer, flake by flake;Continue reading “The Atom’s Lattice Could Such Beauty Yield”

They said he was a wily man, with much of the snake in all he did, wherever he went for miles around whatever the people had, they hid. They hid their daughters and their wives, their gold and all their precious rings; they tried to hide their very lives, for he was good at findingContinue reading “The Secret Thief”