Tara Campbell
Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. She teaches flash fiction and speculative fiction, and is the author of a novel, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose (one with Unlikely Books), and two short story collections. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) in September 2024. Find out more at www.taracampbell.com.
In the Kingdom of Dragons, only half the families drive hybrids. Despite our outreach efforts, it’s been hard to overcome dragons’ attachment to their coal-fired SUVs. For some reason, that’s the only mode of transportation they trust to bring the sheep and cattle home for dinner.
If I must be armed, I’ll fit pink flowers
in each barrel, shoot petals in moonlit
massacres, the only howl
my own feral salute. If I must be armed
I’ll stow them all away in glacial cold,
And now there’s a blur on the sidewalk in front of Robby, peripheral movement that he doesn’t even have time to think of as car door opening, though he knows exactly how much it will hurt if he runs into it. He veers away from the swinging door. His body tenses. The board tilts.
