Art: 18z by Lauren Campbell
In the Beginning
Where first men gurgled heard roots
saw skeletons inside flesh
Where warm grass women revolved
to panther music
Where summer welled up from trapdoors of earth
Where a world peeled carpeted sap-ridden
turned days
everywhere
~first appeared in Lexington Poetry Month (website), June of 2017
About the author:
t.m. thomson work has most recently appeared in io Literary Journal and The Athena Review and will be featured in upcoming issues of Darkhouse Books, Whispering Prairie Review, and Redheaded Stepchild. Three of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards: “Seahorse and Moon” in 2005, “I Walked Out in January” in 2016, and “Strum and Lull” in 2018. She has co-authored Frame and Mount the Sky, a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry (2017) and is author of Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019). She has a writer’s page at https://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter/.
In the artist’s words:
Lauren Campbell won the 2007 James B. Baker Award for short story for her science fiction tale, 416175. Her short story “OR” received an honorable mention in the 2021 Tales from the Moonlit Path “Abandoned Places” contest. Over sixty of her short stories have appeared in Chilling Crime Stories, Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers Vol. 6, Pressure Suite: Digital Science Fiction Anthology 3, Under the Full Moon’s Light, and other publications. Her two novels, “Blue Team One” and “Five Houses,” a collection of her first short stories (“No Lesser Angels, No Greater Devils”), and most of her recent works are available on Amazon. Laura is also an artist, having sold an illustration to her own short story “The Rainy Season.” In both her art and her writing, Laura seeks to explore contemporary challenges and abstract solutions.