some ladies
need gold dollars
to create a mask

diamond illusions
of beauty

Beverly Hills haircuts
or the priciest
overpriced vines

and even though
my lover looks awesome
with all those things

she slides
out of bed
looking like money

it’s
the raw curves
and eyes that hypnotize
that drive me wild
always

but
maybe even better
she bought me
coffee
today.


Author Bio:
Bradley Mason Hamlin is an American writer, veteran of the United States Navy, and alumni of the University of California, where poet Gary Snyder dubbed Hamlin “The Road Warrior of Poetry!” Hamlin was born in Los Angeles and currently lives in Sacramento, California with his wife, Nicky Christine, and their children, and their wild cats. He is the editor of Zero Percent Magazine and his latest book of poems, California Blonde, is available from Black Shark Press.

That first time was a spiritual experience.
She said our first time
felt like HER FIRST TIME…
que se sentia como un amor virgen…
a virgin love…

When love begins… its beautiful
When love begins… its light
When love begins… it’s a fairytale
When love begins… past loves no longer exist

But virgin love…

Aaahhhh virgin love…

This love is…

Pure love

Innocent love
Unquestioning love
Trusting love
True love
Real love
Full of passion kind of love
Not caught up in the bullshit love
Lasting love
It’s you and me love…
Untainted love
Loving you freely LOVE
Without conditions love

I feel you inside of me… 

te siento por dentro de mi… 

in a way I have never felt anyone LOVE

You the mirror image of me LOVE~ 

ESE MOMENTO… 

when one gives themselves over 

QUE UNO SE ENTREGA~ 

and becomes ONE~ 

now that is LOVE~ 


Author Bio:
A proud New York born Dominicana who is passionate about writing works that empower and inspire women to find their voices. A self-identified Latina Lesbian Writer, Motivational Speaker, Performance Artist, Director, Producer, Playwright, and Activist, who after reading one too many stories about women she could not wholly relate to, decided to write her own tales that would honor women throughout Latin America and at the same time represent the American-born Latina experience which led her to launch the New York City Latina Writers Group.

She has appeared on NPR's Tell Me More and is guest writer for Latina Magazine. In 2011 Alicia published her memoir, Finding Your Force: A Journey to Love. Her one-woman show I WAS BORN was selected as part of the ONE Festival, held in NYC. She has worked for renowned magazines BusinessWeek, Glamour and Domino, but it was an article published in Urban Latino Magazine, "Two Cultures Marching to One Drum," that would change the direction of her life. In 2008, she joined Creador Pictures as Writer /Co-Producer of its first documentary, "Afro Latinos: La Historia Que Nunca Nos Contaron / AfroLatinos: The Untaught Story" WWW.AFROLATINOS.TV, a project that will change the way the world sees color and race relations in Latin America.

She lives in Harlem, with her daughter Courtniana. She is an activist against human rights violations, sexual/physical abuse towards women and children and is someone who firmly believes in facilitating safe spaces where self-empowerment and visibility is not only celebrated but encouraged.

I couldn’t fall back asleep. Cows that were sick or lame had been beaten, kicked, shot, and shocked to get them to walk to slaughter. After about a thousand years, it was dawn, napalm on wildflowers, the flames waving in a busy kind of way. I’d been brought up to believe there was no such thing as a stupid question. Was that just? When the phone rang, it was about something else, the great men of the past. I gave you a soft look, as if all things were curable with tenderness.


Author Bio:
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Middle of Nowhere (Olivia Eden Publishing). His latest chapbooks are Echo's Bones and Danger Falling Debris (Red Bird Chapbooks). He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.

*after Seamus Heaney

Slack of tongue I was
Nearly small as a sedge-warbler
When the young girl’s body
Was laid flat as a blade.

Her death still haunts this vestal daughter
Who recalls the river’s long curve,
The shrunken dusk of nightfall
When the farmer looking for lost calves

Discovered her out in the webbed marsh
Where toadstools and stumps
Repeated themselves that weary January
And she was my age, five

Exactly, and I didn’t know my destiny
Would be to save women, to speak
Up about the coldness of love
To clean out its rust.

I knew the hammered anvil’s ring,
The grunts, the slam and flick
Of a man who beat iron out,
My father, a brute with globe shoulders

Who could make my mother shudder.
I mapped his furrows exactly
Riding him piggyback,
Dipping, rising to the plough,

Closing one eye tight to follow the map,
The broad shadow round the farm,
The slug and thump for hours
Until our hung dry clothes were splattered.

The girl still rests in me like hot water,
A fifty year lid unfitted to a pot.
The memory blisters for I recall how they
Fished her from the mud and laid her in the pantry.

There was room for me at the schoolhouse then,
But my mother kept me in, coloring in the kitchen,
Afraid of the murderer, who he was;
A mystery opaque, where pitch knows this stigmata.


Author Bio:
Leonore Wilson is on the St. Mary's MFA advisory panel. She has taught English and Creative Writing at various colleges and universities in Northern California. Her new book is Western Solstice by Hiraeth Press. She has won fellowships to Villa Montalvo and University of Utah for her writing.

I am of three worlds,
accepting all equally,
and respectfully.
I claim To Be
nothing,
no one,
nobody.
Embracing my black
doesn't mean erasing my white.
Seeing no colors,
no lines in the sands,
of wrong and right.
I am of three worlds,
comprising one love.
Coming back to the middle-
with no below,
and no above.
My Libra scales tip
one side to the other,
but always in balance,
finding peace like no other.
Resting in a valley
of Tranquility,
I need not be loved
by anybody.
Looking around at mountains
of faces and races,
all making up one range
of displacement.
We have all been beaten
and battered by anger,
but cannot live in that hole
of malarkey and danger.
And so,
if I could say anything
outright, and without riddle,
it is this-
Don't obsess with either "side."
Just come back to the middle.


Author Bio:
I was born and raised in Maine and moved to Los Angeles last year. I have been influenced to become more open with writing and sharing poetry. Being of multiple races has great influenced my writing.

I drove straight home that day.
I just knew I would find my Happy there.
So, I searched under the bed.
Nothing.
I flung my closet doors open and shoved the clothes back.
Nothing.
I stared outside and blew the fluffiest clouds away.
Nothing.
I saw Cupid.
I begged him to place me on one of his love arrows to shoot me up into space.
Once I landed on one of Saturn’s rings, I asked Aphrodite for advice.
I ended up falling back down and landed in a black rose garden covered with a 1,000 thorns.
I realized that I had pushed her away.
I poured oil all over her feathers of love.
I locked her up in a Cage of Misery.
I never made it right.
So, she figured out how to fly…


Author Bio:
Miracle Austin works in the hospice world. She's an emerging author who enjoys writing diverse free-verse poetry with mini-stories and short stories.

She's been writing since first hearing, “Who’s Gonna Drive You Home,” by The Cars. She's working on her first novella and resides in Texas with her family.
www.miracleaustin.com

Words written on walls.
Misery.
A place where agony, shame
and obscure screams reside.
The guilty and not
brought here
to be stored away in stone
caves with no
dirt to dig.


Author Bio:
Arthur Abdiel Morales is a graduate student at the Arizona State University through the Interdisciplinary Studies M.A. program. His focuses include oral history, digital media and poetry. He is currently a photographer/ film editor for an oral history project titled Lost Boys Found. Arthur has a passion for bringing history to life through written and oral channels. Under the direction of Lecturer Julie Amparano, he continues to archive the amazing stories of the Sudanese people in ASU’s Digital Repository.

“No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it” –Matsuo Bashō

The plastic swimming pool has been buried
then filled with water and lily leaves for the goldfish
which swim in slow circles as the water warms.

The heavy sun makes her bring out wet sheets
and drape them on lawn chairs
--this woman with a man's name--
who carried her daughter across mountains.
"Please sit," she encourages me,
and the sheets steam into my legs,
their cooling vapors.

...............................................................

She has spilled her coffee on the professor's desk.
We were discussing Foucault
and the limitations of Plato.
Now the professor tells us of the fine lacquers,
the impossibility of repair.

The impossibility of repair.
The daughter's bones that never straightened,
even across the ocean in the land that doesn't pay.

................................................................

Darshan has real jasmine.
The fragrant flowers she presses to her face.
We drink the warm mint tea,
laughing about the shells of lives we leave behind.


Author Bio:
Skaidrite Stelzer spent the first four years of her life in a refuge camp in the foothills of the Alp mountains.  After immigrating with her family to Kalamazoo, Michigan, she spent her formative years as a displaced person, literally a woman without a country.  Poetry always seemed the most natural language to her, since it allows the freedom to cross many linguistic and cultural barriers.  Her work has appeared in many literary journals including, Eclipse, Baltimore Review, Glass, Fourth River, Georgetown Review, and The Third Coast.  She currently lives in Toledo, Ohio and teaches writing at The University of Toledo.

My black curves are stained
under white light,
and I wonder if that’s where
all the broken chords break.
 
The ivory spills over
thin strings and hammers
when his pulse
trembles with the triplets
of the treble clef,
when flats are tied by
a toccata of slurs.
He’ll reach to the right,
without noticing my side,
pull his face away from keys
once notes become whole.

I let his fingers run faster
towards the end of his song;
I let his eyes wander
when fermata is done.


Author Bio:
On a rock called Guam, Evelyn Quiel plays classical music on the piano. Aside from musical escapades, she is active in the Korean martial art of taekwondo. She is currently majoring in English with an emphasis in Linguistics at the University of Guam. 

Bruised my arms again
your stone skin
doctor says aint
no cure for this
kind of love
better get a
second opinion
he can't
get any harder
and I any
more blue
My friends are
starting to ask
questions
want me to
skip you down the lake
so I got new friends
long sleeves
shoulder pads
sweat underneath
enduring, quietly
cool colors,
summer heat


Author Bio:
Shayna Klee is a rookie at most things. She believes in creating art that is raw and honest. Her poetry is best described as a reflection of that.