You need to know the truth you are about to hear:
There will be days you think you can’t go on,
days filled with tears, unable to endear
yourself to falsehood, the pain foregone.

There will be nights where all you do is live.
Warm blankets will be you cocoon in bed.
Your brain and heart will fight, being combative.
Your brain will scream, “You’re better off dead.”

But you must know your brain is very very wrong.
It is enough to do the least in fact.
You can and will remain stalwart and strong.
You must live long enough to see your impact

The truth is simply, one day you will not survive,
You, my friend, will one day do more and thrive. 


Author Bio:
Lea Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer and poet. She's been writing since she could read. Her work has been featured in A Certain Slant. She lives in a small New England town with her hilarious husband, two wild and sweet kids, an orange cat and a lazy beagle.

We always started social studies class with a short discussion of current events—sports
score updates, President Clinton’s impeachment woes, NATO finally striking back
against Milosevic… In my mind, it was stuff that happened to other people who lived in
other towns. I usually spent the period writing novels about perfect games and World
Series glory, and Wednesday was no exception.

the crack of a bat--
a classmate’s perched chair
tips too far

Wednesday was no exception. Again, something horrible happened in another town to
other people we didn’t know, and the boy in front of me tipped his chair precariously one
more time. But ten minutes of discussion quickly morphed into twenty and then into the
whole period. Before the bell, our teacher lets it slip that someone in our school might
do the same to us: my best friend.

ripples spreading 
across the flooded practice field--
his words echoing through time


Author Bio:
Colleen M. Farrelly is a freelance writer whose works have recently appeared in Haibun Today, Frogpond, Contemporary Haibun Online, Cattails, and #Femku, among others. She is a mathematician and data scientist by day, and she is working on a lay textbook covering geometry in data science and machine learning (release date in early 2020). This poem looks back on her teenage years and the moment that current events became relevant to her.

At the end of the week I come home early for rest from the crowding clamour and noisy
neediness of other people's children. The piano plays--classical music, always classical, in
teenage rebellion against twentieth-century tastes and twenty-first century expectations. I revel in
the long refreshing shower of gentler sound--high notes falling like drops of water into lower
currents of rhythm and harmony. For me this is peace...
warm drops of music
fast cascading faster
summer rain


Author Bio:
Fiona Jones is a part-time teacher, full-time parent, permanently tired. ​

These trees look like asparagus, tall and skinny, raising their branches straight into the sky, the whole trunk swaying in the wind as if losing their balance. The weaker trees knock into others, using each other to stay upright.

It must be hard to stay so straight all the time. There is no break, no rest, a linear life. Only up, rarely out. No wonder so many of them have fallen over. It is an incredible amount of pressure. If hunched over for too long, a sizable crack will appear up the trunk, and will lead the tree right to its downfall.

Does a tree make a noise when it falls in the forest when there is no one around to hear it? No, the tree falls silently, despairingly, it is the universe that that shouts when the tree can’t go on any longer. Angry. Disappointed. The fallen trees are left to rot and be an example for those still standing. This is what happens when one can’t conform, when one can’t handle the pressure. 

Some trees stand silently, others creak and cry in the wind. There is a mutual understanding among the trees. They know it is only a matter of time. Someone must fall next.

As the wind halts, so do they, holding on for tomorrow. I bid them good luck as I go.


Author Bio:
Haley Ericksen (she/her) is an English Major at Truman State University, who hopes to teach high school English in the future. In her free time, she enjoys writing poetry, prose and to-do lists. Haley finds that in writing, she can come to terms with events in the world around her, which has provided clarity in many areas of her life. Her writing is greatly influenced by personal events and challenges, as well as the Earth and humanity as a whole. Haley is an INFJ, a Hufflepuff, and an avid stationary enthusiast. She calls Kansas City, Missouri her home.

All before sundown 
Nothing to see after a blink
Within this mess of a town
Hearts so open, which begin to shrink

Nothing to see after a blink
Behind all things is nothing but shame
Hearts so open, which have begun to shrink
It’s all just fun and an out of order game

Behind all things is nothing but shame
I bit my tongue and closed my lips
It’s all just fun and an out of order game
No one cares about our friendships

I bit my tongue and closed my lips
You all tricked me once or twice
No one cares about our friendships
Maybe I shouldn’t be so nice

You all tricked me once or twice
No one sees it from my eyes
Maybe I shouldn’t be so nice
Time is the only things that lies

No one sees it from my eyes
I’m not the only one with a crown
Time is the only thing that lies
All before sundown


Author Bio:
Emily is a high school student who enjoys writing poetry about nature and the natural world around us. Some of her writing pieces like All Before Sundown illustrates the world as a personified thing and it glorifies the beauty behind the world using many body parts to portray the sensations humans experience with nature. 

Sprawled on top of the mattress,
With sheets that smell of pussy willow,
Pollinators are lured in by floral odors.
Roots are buried deep, tangling together underneath. 
Fluffy white blossoms feel like silk against the skin,
Cool and soft to the touch.
Pink tulip buds relax and unfold,
Their smooth, delicate petals glistening with morning dew.

Delight shows in the gardeners’ flushed cheeks,
And with sweaty faces and sore limbs,
They admire the work that they have finished.
One looks out the window to see snow on the ground,
And they laugh together as they remember 
That it is still Winter outside.


Author Bio:
Caitlyn Drumm is a twenty-seven-year-old college student from Southwest Michigan and has been writing for fourteen years. She works in a field that requires to her to type for a living, so writing is her passion in her professional life and personal life.

​Caitlyn's primary focus in writing is to express positive sexuality and women’s body image as this is a subject near and dear to her heart. 

     “Only a dream,” Sonja thought.
She listened to the clock dripping the tick-tock-tick of reality. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of her bed.
    “I am thirteen,” she thought, holding her head in her hands. “I turn thirteen today.”
Is this what being a teen is about? Wasn’t her dream life supposed to be beautiful fantasies? There was nothing beautiful about the battle she’d witnessed: A star-liner battered to ruin by an attack ship, against the background of intergalactic endlessness.
    “It. Was. Only. A. Dream.” Sonja didn’t care if anyone else in the house heard. So vivid. She could feel the explosions, smell the burning instruments. There had been no background whisper telling her it was a nightmare, and that she’d soon awake. No, she had really lived it and only the terror of that last moment had shocked her back into her world.
    “This is real, isn’t it?” Sonja thought, wanting to get out of bed, out of the room, but frozen by the fear that if she tried she’d float away. Suddenly, she sobbed and the emotion caught her off--guard as if it belonged to someone else.
    “The answer’s in the dream,” she thought.
She remembered that she had tried to scream. That’s what woke her, for she realized that no one heard, no one would rescue her. She was on her own. Why couldn’t she cry out?
Then Sonja thought of last week’s science lesson: There is no sound in space.


Author Bio:
Frank Diamond's poem, “Labor Day,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize Award. His short stories have appeared in the RavensPerch, Innisfree, Kola: A Black Literary Magazine, Dialogual, the Madras Mag, Reverential Magazine, Empty Sink Publishing, the Zodiac Review, Into the Void, Mystery Tribune, and the Fredericksburg Literary & Art Review, among many other publications. He has had poetry published in Philadelphia Stories, Fox Chase Review, Deltona Howl, Artifact Nouveau, Black Bottom Review, and Feile-Festa. Frank resides in Langhorne, Pa.

She waited 
Then...
Walked along a winter psalm
Without whispered words


Author Bio:
Genevieve DiNatale is a broadcast journalist who works for WRNN-TV covering the Hudson Valley. She's also an aspiring poet with a chapbook in the works. Genevieve attended college at Brandeis University where she studied philosophy. She also has two master's degrees, one in journalism from Emerson College and another in survey research from the University of Connecticut. 

Into the sky’s upper resemblance: clouds;
Feeling them pass through that small moment--
    Floating through a high, small window …
 
Of things that come and go,
    Transiently, like birds that come and go …
 
And the sun’s light we feel as if feeling it for the first time.
We don’t question the sun’s light.
    What’s there to question … ?
 
____


Because our selves,
Which are children,
    Are children …
 
That’s why the hills are hills
And the grass is grass;
And seeing hills and grass
    For what it is--
 
Veiled there,
In the wind and hot sun--
With the children of our whole lives,
We become unaware … gradually, more gradually.
 

Author Bio:
SE2OND is a poet, lawyer and founder of a game design and development company called SE2OND, based out of New York. His first chapbook, which will be published later this year by AuthorHouse Publishing, is a collection of musings and reflections on a quest for an almost conscious unconsciousness—to see without having sight, to touch without grasping, and in the end, to think without thoughts, and to exist without self. To have or to be? This is the central question of his work. 

I’m in position on soil, it finds its way between my toes 
and into the wrinkles of my elbows

Stubbly toads orbit me.
A blooming is hanging over them
Shifting into names that I whisper in my sleep
They possess a magical sensitivity

Naked and yawning I lend my hands out

They say hello with the palm of their eye
Then turn their faces up to the sky with such probity 
“Do you remember when I called out to you?”

The shouts settle into the hollow bones of birds

Petrichor emanates from the grass, 
grass full like the open flesh on the back of my ankles
Open from tiny fish flirting with the current I stand against

We thought very hard of going up, and going away
I follow by their side to the surface of the water

Through the wind through the quiet they cry

The air surrounding me and the toads has its breath tightly held, 
We are the inmost of the trees and kissing deer

My clay colored motherless friend
disinhibits the stillness in an amiable way
I forgot he’s the cause of the light, the warmth,
He reminds us that what goes up must always come down 
The toads feel neutral about him

I know I shouldn’t say but I’d like to tell them that what they are feeling 
is everything they should feel

I wait in an ambit of wood, with soot in my own cocoon

We dream of somewhere where this hold fills our ear lungs as far as this body of water expands
where what’s ours is what we desire

I swaddled the toads in seaweed and said goodnight
I can hardly stay afloat from their weight in the small of my elbow

Their shouts can still be heard all the way to the coldest muscles on the bottom of the ground


Author Bio:
Sophia's boyfriend passed away on March 21st, 2019. Writing was very important to her during that time of grief.