Rekha Valliappan
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silicasun.bsky.social
Rekha Valliappan
@silicasun.bsky.social
5.2K followers 4.1K following 130 posts
Author - Poet
Award-winning Pushcart & Best of Net nom. Writer & Poet- Nature Nomad, Science Scarab, Art Aesthete -Stories, Poems, CNF, Flash Fiction, Haiku, Published in Over 100+ Literary & Genre Journals & Anthologies
https://www.silicasun.wordpress.com
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silicasun.bsky.social
#MondayMagic - For #MythologyMonday 🐎 celebrating #LunarNewYear 🏮 the tale of the Legendary Flying Fire Horse 🐎 time to pet one, ride one, or get one anytime this year while the auspicious season lasts 🎆 may good luck, prosperity, good fortune be yours 🎈 silicasun.wordpress.com 🐴 #silicasun 🧨📙❤️
February 16, 2026 at 6:51 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
danadelibovi.bsky.social
I have six new poems published thanks to @lothlorienpoetryj.bsky.social and editor @stridermarcusjones.bsky.social 💙—including a poem about the polymath René Descartes for all of us lapsed philosophers👇👇👇
Six Poems by Dana Delibovi
Lothlorien Poetry Journal Edited by Strider Marcus Jones Poet - Publishes poetry and fiction online and in print periodically. https://lothlorienp
lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com
February 9, 2026 at 5:52 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
Delighted to see my poem 'The Blessing Hour' in Jarnal 4 from @masonjarpress.bsky.social ❤️

My thanks again to EIC Steph Sundermann-Zinger and team. The issue is a stunner with many writers I admire from the US and around the world. Available now: masonjarpress.com/jarnal

#poetrycommunity #poetry
2 contributor copies of Jarnal 4, published by Mason Jar Press. The Blessing Hour In this city, we stop hunting for language, instead redeem the plainest spaces. Wade in water that makes absence personal. I don’t want to write my way through a flood. Don’t want us to split over distance, or small aberrations, unnoticed at sundown. What we miss, chimes as colours on oil slick roads, and hills that steepen by us simply climbing. It hurts to labour for love. A mother lifts her child above a ruined wall — shows him the future. Morning smooths out a street of debris. The child believes it is dusty Lego, waiting. The war hasn’t happened for 300 days, meaning our beauty has been humbly salvaged, the clarity of a single moment bargaining with broken bread on a bistro table. Grace slipping a note between the hands of a man and woman drinking coffee. They never go further than talking. Or walking, where nothing falls — except fractured light on an evening like this. A girl from a dim alley adjusts her blouse, straightens her crumpled skirt. Vanishes in fog. I tell myself she must have been loved, hard. That there was no crime. Things appear as a heart is held. As a land askew, its weapons and dresses laid to rest. This translucent city — edged with fire. I tell myself she must have been loved, hard. That there was no crime. Things appear as a heart is held. As a land askew, its weapons and dresses laid to rest. This translucent city — edged with fire.
February 10, 2026 at 6:58 AM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
icefloepress.bsky.social
PROCESS/ MARGINALIA /OTHERWOR(L)(D)(S) series continues with Australian-based writer/artist Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad @oormilaprahlad.bsky.social
a suite of 10 haunting poems/paintings annotations night highway journey to overcome fear #self #poems #paintings

icefloepress.net/2026/02/09/t...
The Ourimbah Meditations – Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
THE OURIMBAH MEDITATIONS 1 The dark is a stealthy weapon,a vault to hold the errant childwho will not be reformed.The gloaming, a scaffoldfor her unruly spirit—feral being, dashingbetween thorns an…
icefloepress.net
February 10, 2026 at 4:37 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
grantamag.bsky.social
‘I’d been doing my best not to talk about things too much, I was trying instead to be a stoical and practical-minded man of few words such as a normal woman might wish to marry’

New fiction by Benjamin Kunkel.

granta.com/whatever-cre...
Whatever Creek Meadows | Benjamin Kunkel | Granta
‘I had slept with her back in college and several times afterward, as presumptive grown-ups, only out of some masculine obligingness which I’ve never seen described in fiction’
granta.com
February 16, 2026 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
zsaffrynterra.bsky.social
Losing our words is a writer’s worst nightmare. Don’t forget to backup your work.
#WriteSky #WritingCommunity #5amWritersClub
February 15, 2026 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
georginadoodles.bsky.social
I love painting kingfishers, and this one was different for me, a ‘small in frame’ one. I love how in the reference image, it was moody but the kingfisher added glorious colour.

#watercolours #birdart 🪶
A watercolour painting of a kingfisher in the reeds A watercolour painting of a kingfisher in the reeds
February 16, 2026 at 11:47 AM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
sarahnour.bsky.social
The Hopi and Pueblo tribes have tales of Grandmother Spider, said to live on Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. She spun a giant web, waited for morning dew to accumulate on the web, and threw it into the night sky. The dewdrops became the stars. #MythologyMonday
February 16, 2026 at 4:40 PM
silicasun.bsky.social
#SaturdaySpotlight - Love, from the deepest corners of the heart ❤️ #HappyValentines 🍸🍫 #writers #poets #readers #litmags 📚 ‘I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.’ ~ Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. 📖
silicasun.wordpress.com 💐 #silicasun 🌹📘❤️
February 14, 2026 at 8:40 PM
silicasun.bsky.social
#TuesdayTips - Happy to share with you my new #microfiction release THE BIRTH published late last year in this lovely #book of #poetry and #fiction The Stray Branch Fall/Winter 2025 #36 Vol 33. Print copies are available on Amazon : www.amazon.com/Stray-Branch... 📚 #silicasun 🍈📖❤️
February 11, 2026 at 9:37 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
mariapopova.bsky.social
"Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real."

Iris Murdoch, easily my favorite philosopher, died on this day in 1999 and left us her abiding wisdom on art, goodness, and love: www.themarginalian.org/2022/01/08/i...
What Love Really Means: Iris Murdoch on Unselfing, the Symmetry Between Art and Morality, and How We Unblind Ourselves to Each Other’s Realities
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”
www.themarginalian.org
February 8, 2026 at 5:47 AM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
internationaltimes.bsky.social
A Walk of calm on the choppy waters of Love.
internationaltimes.it
www.internationaltimes.it/archive/inde...
January 31, 2026 at 7:38 AM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
bakerart.bsky.social
Fishing in Cambridge in front of the ice cream kiosk on Jesus Green, Cambridge. Small oil painting
#oilpainting #cambridge #fishing
A small oil painting showing people buying ice creams at the kiosk on Jesus Green, Cambridge while a man with a blue hat is fishing. A girl iin a pink dress is feeding the ducks.
February 11, 2026 at 12:41 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
folkhorrorrevival.bsky.social
"As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."

'Bleak House', Charles Dickens, 1852 #WyrdWednesday #BookChatWeekly
Art by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, 1850s. It shows two individuals of Megalosaurus in the original interpretation of them as quadrupedal animals with crocodile-like heads. One of them is standing up and the other asleep. In the background is a rocky outcrop with a flock of pterosaurs on.
February 4, 2026 at 2:08 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
rgeirsson.bsky.social
For anyone interested in dystopia, alternate reality, magic realism, the undead, or Crichton-esque scifi with a distinctly Nordic flair, these novels ought to scratch the itch. #wyrdwednesday reactormag.com/exploring-no...
Exploring Nordic Speculative Fiction in Five Novels - Reactor
These five memorable works encompass magical realism, futuristic dystopias, zombies, trolls, and sorcery, and quite a bit more.
reactormag.com
February 11, 2026 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
sarahnour.bsky.social
In the Old Norse epic Heimskringla, King Aun of Sweden sacrifices his sons to the god Odin to prolong his life. Aun becomes so old he can't walk. His teeth fall out, so he relies on a drinking-horn for sustenance. He finally dies when his people stop him from sacrificing his 10th son. #WyrdWednesday
February 11, 2026 at 4:12 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
silicasun.bsky.social
#FolkloreFriday Celebrating night of the first #FullMoon in Gregorian calendar of 2026 🌕 what joy the #WolfMoon magic propagated down the ages in myth art literature folklore 📚 Listening to wild packs howl at the moon tonight on ghostly moonlit trails matching winter's howling winds 🐺 #silicasun 🐾📕❤️
January 2, 2026 at 10:45 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
guhinp.bsky.social
My dad was a talented artist.
February 5, 2026 at 9:14 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
ruinsofdespair.bsky.social
Julie had been looking over Perdita's bookshelves with natural envy.

– Richard Le Gallienne, An Old Country House, 1902

#BookologyThursday
Illustration titled 'Julie had been looking over Perdita's bookshelves with natural envy' by Elizabeth Shippen Green. A woman leafing through a giant ornate tome.
January 15, 2026 at 1:53 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
ninaantonia13.bsky.social
#BookologyThursday This is the old cover of 'The Greenwood Faun' which will shortly be reissued by Snuggly, with new artwork but the story remains the same - a magical manuscript transported from Arthur Machen's 'The Hill of Dreams' unleashes Pan in Victorian London.
January 29, 2026 at 2:19 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
asls.org.uk
“I never read such an impious book,” said the reader, throwing it on the floor.

“You need not hurt me,” said the book; “you will only get less for me second hand, and I did not write myself.”

—Robert Louis Stevenson, FABLES: “The Reader”
#BookologyThursday #C19 💙📚
XI—THE READER “I never read such an impious book,” said the reader, throwing it on the floor. “You need not hurt me,” said the book; “you will only get less for me second hand, and I did not write myself.” “That is true,” said the reader. “My quarrel is with your author.” “Ah, well,” said the book, “you need not buy his rant.” “That is true,” said the reader. “But I thought him such a cheerful writer.” “I find him so,” said the book. “You must be differently made from me,” said the reader. “Let me tell you a fable,” said the book. “There were two men wrecked upon a desert island; one of them made believe he was at home, the other admitted—” “O, I know your kind of fable,” said the reader. “They both died.” “And so they did,” said the book. “no doubt of that. And everybody else.” “That is true,” said the reader. “Push it a little further for this once. And when they were all dead?” “They were in God’s hands, the same as before,” said the book. “Not much to boast of, by your account,” cried the reader. “Who is impious now?” said the book. And the reader put him on the fire. The coward crouches from the rod, And loathes the iron face of God. Illustration to “The Reader”, by E.R. Herman, from the 1914 Longman’s edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Fables. A highly detailed illustration in pen and black ink, brush and wash. A man stands on a short ladder in front of a bookcase. He is wearing a cap and a long dressing-gown, finely striped in black and white, and black-and-white checked slippers. He is looking down in disgust at the floor, where a book lies open on the patterned rug. The book has a human face on one open page. Beneath the illustration is a decorative border of six identical figures. Vaguely demonic, they have pointed ears and possibly horns. They are skeletally thin and are kneeling with their heads bowed.
January 15, 2026 at 2:57 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
chriswoodyard.bsky.social
#BookologyThursday Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book, M.R. James.
"'Good God! a hand like the hand in that picture!...'
"The shape, whose left hand rested on the table, was rising to a standing posture behind his seat, its right hand crooked above his scalp."
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ghost_S...
A man with glasses and smoking a pipe holds a necklace with a cross over a large book on the table. The light from the lamp lights up the smoke from his pipe and the face of a demon behind him.
January 15, 2026 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
silicasun.bsky.social
#TuesdayTreasure How do we thank the beautiful #litmags which housed my #poems #flashfiction #shortstories in 2025? 📚 #ThankYou 🙏 #literarymagazines #writers #editors #readers who published my work 📚 online, in anthos, Best Of 📖 For list : silicasun.wordpress.com 🦓 #silicasun 🐘📗💛
December 30, 2025 at 9:29 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
silicasun.bsky.social
Great resolution for the #newyear, Hope! Stay inspired everyone! #HappyNewWeek #HappyMonday #silicasun 🛵📘❤️
a cartoon of a man riding a motorcycle with the caption happy monday new week ahead have a great day
ALT: a cartoon of a man riding a motorcycle with the caption happy monday new week ahead have a great day
media.tenor.com
January 12, 2026 at 7:59 PM
Reposted by Rekha Valliappan
bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Well-striped and well-read 🦓

Found in our archives: an illustration of a zebra in a C16 Greek Bible.

Shelfmark: MS. Laud Gr. 86, 389

#ZebraDay
A medieval illustration features three animals walking across a natural landscape with a sun rising in the background. One animal resembles a deer with antlers, another is similar to a large dog, and the third resembles a zebra with distinctive stripes. The scene includes handwritten text along the borders.
January 31, 2026 at 9:43 AM