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Punctuation Marks as Characters

by Roger B. Rueda The Comma is a tired aunt who keeps the conversation going when everyone else wants to sleep. She slips between names at dinner, pauses just long enough for breath— but never dares to end anything. She believes in gentle interruption. In lingering. In second chances. The Period is firm, deliberate, a schoolmaster in a pressed shirt, always bringing things to a close. No nonsense, no flair. This is it, he says. Enough. He walks out of rooms and never looks back. The Semicolon is complicated— a philosopher with wine-stained lips and a pocket full of half-finished ideas. Too smart for his own good, too hesitant for exclamation, he links contradictions with quiet precision. You never quite know what he’s feeling, only that he sees everything as two truths at once. The Dash bursts in— uninvited, electric— a renegade, a drama queen, a breath held too long and then released like thunder. She doesn’t believe in rules; she believes in ...
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CORAL GRIEF

by Tommy M. Artajo It started with color. Neon riots under the sea. Not chaos—choreography. A rave of reefs—pinks, purples, oranges so bold they made rainbows look shy. I saw it once— on a grainy NatGeo VHS in my cousin’s house. She said, “That’s what Heaven probably looks like underwater.” We were ten. We believed in things like magic and reefs that would never disappear. Fast forward: the ocean got hotter. But we didn’t. We cooled. Bored of miracles we didn’t make, we microwaved the sea with our emissions, gave the reefs a slow fever. And when corals are stressed— they don’t scream. They don’t fight back. They bleach . White. Like a ghost trying to remember it had a body. And that body— that coral body— held worlds. Little fish cities. Octopus dreams. Sea turtles that knew their way by scent and starlight. All of them—evicted. Color—evacuated. Just white skeletons now, waiting for a pulse that isn’t coming. You wanna talk about grief? Talk...
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THE LANGUAGE OF TREES

  by Tommy M. Artajo You ever heard a tree speak? Didn’t think so. They don’t got Twitter fingers or soundbites. No microphones buried in bark. No Wi-Fi. But baby, they are talking. Oh, they’ve been talking this whole damn time. Roots stretch like prayers in the dark. They touch. They tangle. They warn . One tree gets sick and the others send sugar through the soil like care packages from cousins. One sapling struggles, and a mother-tree miles away says, not on my watch . They feel each other. Through mycelium webs— fungal threads so fine, they make your fiber-optic internet look like string and soup cans. You think the forest is quiet just because it doesn’t clap back? Just because it doesn’t burn your ears with sirens and scrolling drama? Nah. The forest has its own hotline. Its own group chat. Only difference is— they’re not just talking. They’re listening. They’re learning . And here we are— concrete-born, Wi-Fi-fatigued, chopping dow...
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About the Creative Work Journal

Milvus is not merely a journal. It is a wager on the stubborn endurance of the creative instinct. We have named it after the milvus —Latin for kite, that sharp-eyed bird that rides invisible thermals, not by force but by attunement. There is something in that image that speaks to how true writing works: not always with noise, but with quiet precision, balance, and the nerve to stay aloft. We live in a time that distrusts the imagination, or worse, treats it as trivial. But imagination, properly wielded, is neither whimsy nor escape. It is resistance. It is reconstruction. It is what remains when systems collapse and ideologies rot. Milvus holds space for writing and art that refuse to be caged—fiction that tests its own skin, poetry that knows history, essays that speak when speech is dangerous, and forms that break themselves open to make something new. This is not a journal for trends. It is not a platform for the self-congratulatory or the easily satisfied. We are drawn to the f...
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