Books published by Capsule Stories

The poetry and prose in Capsule Stories Spring 2021 Edition: In Bloom explore the rebirth and renewal that comes with spring. Read about flowers growing and blooming, about you growing and blooming. Read about plants growing where they shouldn't. Read about blossoming new love, budding after a cold winter. Featuring writings by both established and emerging writers, Capsule Stories Spring 2021 Edition is the perfect book to pick up on a bright spring day.In BloomYou are walking down a sidewalk in a park you haven't visited in years. There are too many people, kids running up and down a small grassy hill playing tag with their siblings, adults standing on the pavement. From the top of the hill you look down at the playground, monkey bars with paint barely hanging on. There are too many fingerprints, too many places that were meant to be touched, too many kids sliding down a plastic staticky slide. You take a few steps, and before you realize where you are, you're on the swing set, swinging back and forth through the air, your hands gripped tightly around the metal chains. You throw your head back and let the wind take you. You jump and stick the landing on the rubber floor. Your partner waves at you from the top of the hill. He knows that you're smiling.As you run back to him, you hold out your hands. Sanitize them. You refuse to touch anything until you can wash your hands at home. But the swing reminds you of something you've been missing. Something you forgot existed, after such a cold winter, a seemingly endless expanse of time with your thoughts. The fog is lifting. The sun is peeking through the clouds. The flowers are starting to bloom.

Featuring poetry and prose by established and emerging writers, Capsule Stories Winter 2020 Edition explores the theme Bare Bones. Read wintry writings that tell of loss and heartbreak in the coldest season of your life. These stories and poems are open and vulnerable as writers lay bare their grief, sadness, and tiredness. Allow yourself to feel those feelings and be vulnerable as you read this 200-page literary magazine. But remember that it gets better, and spring will be here soon.Bare BonesIt begins with the chills in the morning as you pull up the comforter and wish for five more minutes. When you realize that the sky is just a little bit darker, that your windows are fogged up in your car. When you take a walk and look at the massive trees towering over you, branches pointing at the sky, and you wonder, do the trees ever get tired of standing? Perhaps the wind threatens to blow them down, but there they stand, stoic, strong, unmoving. Their colorful leaves have fallen, and their branches are dark, like wooden cracks that have shattered the sky. Slowly, day by day, the entire world changes.

Featuring summery poems and prose by emerging and established writers, Capsule Stories Summer 2020 Edition explores the theme Going Forward, from speeding along the highway to moving on from heartbreak and loss. In this 200-page literary magazine, you'll find the words you need to keep going forward, one day at a time.Going ForwardThe sun beats down, the light reflecting off the cars around you. The breeze whips through the car windows as you drive through the windy path around the coast, the ocean's waves licking the shore a few hundred feet below you. You have decided that you can no longer stay where you are. It's time to go. Anywhere but here. You're escaping from the people who have held you back for too long. You've been cut down and broken down, and you won't let anyone stop you this time. You travel, through dusty highways and past sandy coasts, through forest paths and thick downtown traffic. It all passes by in a blur, and before you know it, the sun turns the sky a deep purple, and the green trees you've learned to look up to start to look burnt as the leaves turn orange and dry.You keep going forward. There isn't any other choice.

Capsule Stories Winter 2019 Edition features stories, poems, and essays all centered around the theme Frozen in Time. With over 110 pages of beautiful writing, this literary magazine is the perfect book to curl up with on a cold winter night.