marythaler

What are we to make of a poem that begins “None of this happened:” except to see where the author takes us, what other tricks she has in store, what detours we must take?

An FBI raid on a grave-robbing missionary; stolen sacred objects; ancient artifacts; hundreds of human remains; fears of an atomic weapon in a remote farmhouse. And even, perhaps, the wrath of spirits.

Despite scenes of peril on the ocean, the book moves slow, full of details about everyday survival in this harsh environment. By the end, the reader has witnessed great changes reflected the microcosm of the characters’ lives.

We’re inviting submissions of short works—fiction or non-fiction, poetry, prose, or other experimental forms—that explore all the many contradictory faces of paradox.

“And what do you know about paradox?” Grolier asked his younger sister, Mailka. “The harmony of opposites? But I still don’t know what that m… means.”

A virgin will rebuild from ash the burning library at Alexandria. She will not take any prisoners. Her large eyes will be tests that you must pass. For a third time will the Argo sail, outperforming Voyager One. You will learn of how this ship is not different from your body. It will move beyond the speed of light.

Language has served as a way to bridge a perceived gap between consciousnesses who believe themselves to be separate. By another reckoning, language has served as a crutch to help us hobble through the woundedness of feeling separate.

Coming from Montréal’s bustling scene of graphic-novel creators, Cab’s main character is a painter struggling with creative block while living semi-legally with his friends in a building on the verge of being condemned.

A thrilling yet understated crime drama focused on the relationship between a police detective and a woman whose husband has died in a suspicious climbing accident, distinguished by the complexity of its characters.

The danger of cynicism is getting what you believe in:  Nothing.

Strange, the power of the past—how our spiritual ancestors become our future masters.

Never mind poetry or prose, good literature is the art of friction.

In the age of information overload, our guides are curators.

Anything freed from the marble is an angel.  Never cease chiseling…

Jordan Kurella’s novella is a modern fable that bounces back and forth between a modern day university, a music department, and the nether world of Hades, the Greek version of Hell.

A working definition of Love: we started talking and never stopped…

Birds don’t use their wings only to fly but, also, for balance―just like us.

Art for art’s sake is a dead end; art for heart’s sake is the way out.

A quietly provocative story about a cellist who leaves the musical profession and finds a job preparing dead bodies for burial.

Properly speaking, shadows are not those places where the light is blocked. In the earliest reconstructed languages, those places have no names, though the proto-word for shadow does exist. Shadows were the beings that lived in those places of blocked light. Through the corruption of time, they have lent their name to their native homes, been subsumed by them, been forgotten.

From my very childhood, I’ve always been curious, interested, in a quest to find out what actually life is. What, in fact, is death? Where do we humans come from, and where do we go after death? Or, why we humans are on earth at all, and then die?

“The Second” was written for a speculative fiction writing workshop and very last-minute in its original form. I did the plotting and world-building on the fly, and basically the original idea was “what if the protagonist were trying to save their friend from a duel?”

Metapsychosis editor Mary Thaler interviewed Deniz Ozan-George, an artist based in Boston, Massachussetts. Though she’s recently completed one portrait, Deniz considers herself first and foremost an abstract painter, lyrical, and expressionist.

Susan Evans’s poem “Lucy” appeared on Metapsychosis website in Autumn 2020. During the following winter, we exchanged emails in which Susan told me about her creative process, her sources of inspiration, and what her hopes for the coming year.

An artist is actually creating a world rather than just a stationary object. The artist is sailing through universal winds and transmitting truth. It really depends on the artist as to how this truth manifests and is revealed.

It starts like this, the intercom buzzes. Nick, the reluctant pet cat, is faking obliviousness, turning around, padding over to the kitchen for a snack. His tail, way up in the air, offers me a clear view of his hypoallergenic pink behind—shorthand for open scorn. “Guess I’m getting it then,” I say, pushing back with my own attitude.

Seconds — those appointed to negotiate and if necessary fill in for the principal fighters in duels conducted by pilots of the Polarin Aerial Fleet — were allowed only one kind of interference: to try and talk combatants out of their folly, or to watch as time ran out and they went to their deaths. This was thought to be a way of reducing the number of frivolous challenges. It had had virtually no effect.

Medb is a novel that draws the reader incrementally toward the mysteries of the human psyche, on its way touching on gender roles, the power of the occult, and the pathologization of difference. It’s a winding, inward journey that begins, fittingly, at …

Forms point upward or sideways from a centrifugal base, hunting and seeking. Tides of observation and transmission approach and recede, leaving visual patterns in their wake. Ancient symbols make their way across pathways of energy, co-existing with forms of nature; earth, sky and all types of elemental forms are born of essential vibration.

“Lucy the nun with the green socks / saw me hugging the oak tree / that summer I / hibernated in Spartanburg.”