You call commas half-moons. That makes a period a star. That makes an exclamation point a shooting star. That makes a colon a star and a moon on the planet Mars. That makes quotation marks a constellation. That makes an asterisk an asteroid. That makes a question mark a strangely shaped comet. That makes my strange affection for you a dash that—like all these little symbols upon my keyboard and all the massive solar objects above my head—has its time and knows its place.

Kayla Pongrac

Avid writer, reader, tea drinker, and record spinner. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Vinyl Poetry, Split Lip Magazine, Oblong, The Bohemyth, HOOT, Right Hand Pointing, and Nat. Brut, among others. When she’s not writing creatively, she’s writing professionally—for two newspapers and a few magazines in her hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Torchbearer Tales: www.kaylapongrac.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Birdhouse Accommodations, prose poem in The Teacup Trail (28 September 2014)

⚡ Castles for Tongues: FREE DOWNLOAD!, 140-word prose piece filed under “Correspondence” in TheNewerYork (12 November 2013)

⚡ Sinner’s Face, 1683-word short story in Wild: A Quarterly (6 October 2014)