Part of me, is so disturbed by recent events, that part of me is moved to move words and form
my own opinions but it won’t change anything.

And that’s part of what fuels my rage and desire to grab them by the collar and say

what is wrong with you?
An entire country, giving undeserved empathy to some teen who thought that he could get away
with anything but got caught.
And I shudder, and the thought of hundreds of other girls that will never speak up.

They know what’s coming; this storm of shame and blame from a media that only aims to say
she was drunk, so she’s a liar, and it’s her fault the star athlete’s lives are over.
That clearly, she set herself up for rape when she lifted the plastic cup to her face and decided to
partake in part of being a teenager.
This part of me, is enraged. That I live in a place that think’s it’s ok to say raps isn’t a crime when
the victim made an “obvious mistake.”

That teaches it’s ok to take photos and forward to every half known name and publicly
humiliate, and then claim in court you weren’t a part of anything.
A witness. A bystander who didn’t stop to say hey this girls unconscious this isn’t ok.
And this part of me has to restrain from breaking down when I hear their names, anger boils
inside cracking up and down my spine as I’m brought back to a time, reminded of freshmen year. 
Waking to the sound of tears that one of my worst fears had become a friends reality.
And 4 months later I packed to leave campus,                                                                   
because he was walking past us like nothing fucking happened.
Sex without consent is a death sentence. Not in the law, but in your mind.

Trapped with thoughts inside, ageing over time like a pomegranate wine multiplying every time 
something reminds you.
And it’s a stress that both male and female victims hide because of how our society has promised 
to treat them.
Part of me, thinks more than anything, that everything needs to change.

We need to stop teaching don’t put yourself in bad positions, and start teaching, don’t rape.
It sounds like common sense but clearly isn’t from the news today.
And part of me, thinks this anger and frustration is a waste.

But part of me knows that’s to blame,

because if no one speaks up,

nothing is going to change.


Author Bio:
Nicole Jean is a young poet from New England, who believes that everything she writes is therapy in some way. She does not know when she began to write, but knows that no matter where her life takes her, through the many career paths that she’s followed, that they always lead her back to writing. Poetry for Nicole is not an escape from the world around her, but a magnifying glass pointed at the cracks on the road she walks. As the daughter to a woman who has overcome two brain surgeries and the complications that ensued, she has a strong belief in the power of women and their amazing capacity for strength and change in the world.

Nicole has a vocational certificate in computer programming, and is an editor for the Salamander literary journal of Le Moyne College. She writes for a personal online blog, and regularly appears in the Syracuse Underground Poetry Spot to read and preform slam poetry. When she’s not writing, Nicole engages her mind with photography, philosophy and art.

I lean on the sill, forehead against the winter pane.
I know it’s you because of the afterswells
of sobbing trembling across the phone line.

Driving to your house like following a cow path,
soft familiarity of muscle-memory injected into the cold angles of this city.
The day is still rising, cold and sharp,
a blue pottery shard unearthed.

I step through your door frame, as if hunching into a cave
of Jack Daniel's, cigarette smoke, sweat,
ghost odor of Mike, like choking seawater.
I try to breathe. You are curled upright on the couch,
your skinned knees painting bloodshot eyes swollen before your face.

Your eyeglasses on the floor in front of the unraveling couch,
a capsized hull, red plastic ship, lying on a shattered ocean sheen,
glass sinking into the carpet the way you sink into the couch like a sigh.
I don’t know if you remember how to breathe in.

Shaking fingers laced through mine,
your broken glasses limp in my other,
we step back through the threshold
as if set by waves on the cold sand of January.

Silent car ride. The sky swells above me like pastel balloons
at your wedding
when your thrilled champagne eyes caught mine,
when you knew how to breathe.

I could keep driving.
I could let the wind catch my swelling lungs like a sail, breathe, windows down,
not stop until we reach the coast, sea spray kissing your eyelashes
the way Mike’s rank lips never did,
as you breathe the thin full air.
We could never go back.

I turn into the parking lot, stop, keys lurching,
jangling, loud in the stillness.
Your eyes slowly blinking,
blind as my snow-stained windshield, slate-gray pavement.
The car thrums, engine beating like fists on bruised skin.
You, silent, blinking, unflinching,
forgetting how to breathe.


Author Bio:
Elizabeth is a senior in high school and thus does not have an extensive resume but has an extensive love of poetry. Her passion for writing was blown into greater flame after recently attending the Wellspring of Imagination Poetry Workshop where she discovered that poetry has a unique power to bring people together through honest shared experience and emotion. She has been published in the Best Teen Writing of 2013 and will be published in Clover, a Literary Rag this July.

“Ma, just let go. Save yourself,” said the girl, whose body was pierced
by wooden splinters from houses crushed by Supertyphoon Yolanda.
                                      —Philippine Daily Inquirer, Nov. 11, 2013

The world does not owe you an explanation.
Like the meekest child in the cold of night,
it shakes and shudders at the slightest tremble,
and opens its mouth to the drop of rain.
You must accept this is how the world behaves:
it rages against the living to turn people into ashes,
it breaks into quakes and destroys old churches.
Come to think of it, there is no way around it.
A girl of six must embrace the falling debris
coming for her death. A mother ties her children
around a wall post to keep them from being
swept away by the strong gust of wind.
But let me tell you, it is through small miracles
that we learn to come through the day’s horror.
Once, I saw an old man on TV, a victim of disaster,
holding a rosary in one hand, a stampita in the other.
Mother told me a stampita is one way of knowing
what to pray (and for whom). Like a didactic poem,
it tells you how many times over you must recite
the Lord’s prayer, or how many ways you could have
saved thousands of lives that perished in the storm.
There is no instruction manual better than this.
It tells you you will survive despite all these
and those  who did shall live to tell a bigger story:
a rainbow is coming out any moment now,
meaning, we must learn to love each other more.


Author Bio:
Brylle Bautista Tabora, 21, started writing in high school when he was part of the school’s campus paper. He started writing fiction in his first year in college, and a few years later, forayed into poetry. A biology graduate, he was a writing fellow for fiction to the 12th IYAS Creative Writing Workshop in Bacolod City-Philippines, and a fellow for poetry to the 52nd Silliman University National Writers Workshop. His poems have been published in the Philippines Graphic, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and Silliman Journal. He has been greatly influenced by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, whose passion for death and the written word has stirred up something inside him, but has since moved on to poets like Wislawa Szymborska, Philip Larkin, and Elizabeth Bishop. In his free time, he likes to browse websites like Buzzfeed or Huffington Post, or if he has the energy, goes out with friends. He has a dog named Tintin whom he loves very much, more than anyone he could think of in this world, although he oftentimes regrets forgetting to feed him, a task which his mother has taken upon herself. Right now, he could say, he enjoys writing poetry more than he does writing fiction.

Everyday is a good day to support women and gender equality. Although today is especially prominent, as it's International Women's Day. 

International Women's Day has been observed since in the early 1900's, a time of great expansion and turbulence in the industrialized world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radical ideologies. 

Read more about International Women's Day 2014 and the organizations that support gender equality.

http://www.internationalwomensday.com 

This is no time for timid hearts
For holding back your most precious gifts in the face of fear of retribution
For wedging yourself into a doorway while you wonder if you are worthy of entrance
For sitting interminably on a fence whose only purpose is to separate you
from your very self
This is no time

This is no time to utter whatever from a place of rarefied observation
To be carried along buoyed by neither aim nor intention
To let life live you blithely while you relinquish your birthright of free will
To sanction guilt and obligation as they hold sway over your most fervent desires,
This is no time

This is no time for equivocation, for hedging and backsliding
For whimpering and decrying all that you have created
For playing victim to predators of any stripe, be they real or illusory
For abdicating personal responsibility in the face of a preponderance of evidence,
If ever there was a time, it is not now

For forthright declaration of your deepest truths
This is the time
For standing your ground for causes that bear the mantle of justice
This is the time
For fostering unadulterated freedom that rings out
above the screech of politics and posturing,
For inaugurating new byways of sustainable evolution by lifting one hand after another
For redeeming without hesitation the wonderful that you believed was gone forever
This, right now, is the time

This is not the time to take the bait of vulturous fearmongers
To withhold the emanations of your frangible heart
To stockpile the succulent flowerings of your soul
To hurl at others the boomerang of judgment or culpability
(lest it return to its rightful owner)
This is not the time

If you have ever yearned to unleash your passions
Ached to be exponentially more than you have dared to be
Hungered for a greater humanity within and without
Longed for connection that defies the so-called bounds of time and space
And have known for eternity that you were born to be Love,

Today
Right here
Right now
It is time.


Author Bio:
Rachel Snyder has for decades relied on the written and spoken word to inspire individuals to embrace their hunger for spiritual evolution and empower themselves to live out full-spectrum lives. She was selected to read at the Bryant Park (NYC) Word for Word Poetry Series in June 2012 and her piece, “Migration,” garnered an Honorable Mention in the 2009 Writing Competition of Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature. Her 2010 title, Be Filled with Faith: Words of Well-Being to Strengthen Your Spirit, was published by Colorado-based Blue Mountain Press, who has also included her work in more than a dozen anthologies. She is the author of 365 Words of Well-Being for Women (Contemporary Books/McGraw-Hill, 1997) and its Barnes & Noble reprint, Words of Wisdom for Women (2003). A devotee of the meandering path, she has at turns been a journalist, a direct marketing copywriter, a stall mucker, an innsitter, a community activist, a housecleaner, and a public elected official. A poet outlier living in remote, rural southeastern Colorado, Snyder’s “intelligent inspiration for evolving humans” can be found at www.rachelsnyder.wordpress.com.

Just because you don't believe
it doesn't mean it's not true.

Just because you can't imagine
incredible lies sculpted to fool you

In love need you hate me
I survived your path, see your fate
rose, survived, broke free?

Just because it feels like love
it doesn't mean it's true
Faked love, confuses, controlling
to make best use of you.

Sociopath, abuser the studied all agree,
of this heartless narcissist lurking
I may never be free.

Empowered, risen, successful, glowing
his motives clear I respond strong, all knowing.

Just because his demon is hidden by new love calm
He is who he is
take heed
you are in certain harm

Survived, empowered, I dare to share
you are not loved, he does not love
he will abandon all without care.

Just don't underestimate what I know
because you can't believe it's true.

Guard your heart, protect your child, hide your gold,
it's to be stolen, you destroyed
before he has done with you.


Author Bio:
Previously and restored fabulous women, who foolishly, at the end of 2006, on a huge wave of trust, fell in love 'on line'. In a love con, believing in my daughter and my security, the idea of becoming part of all that made sense as a couple and family. I sold everything, property and possessions, to selling to relocate to Telluride, Colorado from Nottinghamshire, England mid 2007. Singly the most ridiculous and reckless move of my life. Alone, fearful, pregnant, jobless, I learned to vividly write of my days, the challenges, joys and fears. Isolated I became the victim and jubilant survivor of domestic violence. Abandoned with two children, I survived all efforts to crush me. Started my Esthetics business, made sense of each day, and bought a house. Not published, or notable as a writer I am encouraged to practice, and I love to. I've already had a fantastic life. I know, when I depart earth my children will speak "wasn't our mum amazing'. I've always turned adversity into opportunity, always been a survivor, a thriver. I'm just ready for still, and writing allows me to feel that place of peace.

Last evening, mid-November
late afternoon, sky reduced itself
to pink-shading-toward-lavender,
crystal, cold. Overhead, almost
as high as a jet,
lone crow wrote "goodnight"
upon this blush, going home.

Going home.
Frozen on my booted feet,
I leaned my ear into the white noise, commuter
traffic, compressors of the grocery store
across the drainage ditch. I reached for the blank space 
between plane and contrail. 
I teased solitary low note's thread of passage 
from all that noise. Moon watched me, listened. Aloft
in a strange neighborhood, that 3/4 flat 
face shone a cliche of new coin, thick/translucent.
A paradox. Should I survive coming night's adventures 
I will notice

sun shines silver, too, these mornings.
How did it move to that odd corner ? 
I've never seen it there. A phoebe will
beckon, summer-song. Perhaps he hatched
July past. I blink. Trees remain nude.
In spite of his spell, I cannot unknow:
winter creeps stealthy-footed toward
me. My sheets on the line capture this promise's
perfume. Soon, blind blunder-moths, all rainbows
and white, will dither in the wind like crystal
dervishes. Should I survive daylight's adventures

I will marvel when they touch my windowpane,
antics visible in darkness, when they flutter
through streetlamp's pall. Grab my macro lens too late.
A drip sliding down. As are we. As are we.


Author Bio:
Rachael Z. Ikins grew up wandering the woods and fields and lakeshores of the Fingerlakes region. While searching for mushrooms and the faeries that dwell beneath them, Rachael discovered the poet within. She is releasing her fourth chapbook of prize winning poetry this month. She lives in a balcony apartment with rafts of house plants or lights blooming from its railing depending on the time of year. She travels more often than she used to, this time to read from her collected works in a castle in Ireland. For one who writes of dragons this seems fitting indeed. Rachael is also an accomplished visual artist. Her works are currently displayed throughout CNY galleries. For more about her, find her on Facebook and Twitter and at www.rachaelikins.com

So you’ve got to accept it.
Some women have it all.
They have 9 pairs of $874 dollars worth of Lululemon yoga stretchies.

But you, you’ve got a biz.
A love that will outlast 26 poses
and a trip to Vail. 

While your biz may not feel like having
it all at the moment.
Trust.
When
I
Say
This. 

It goes beyond the proscribed definition
of all. That “all” is a social construct
and your bigger than those walls. 

They don’t fit you.
Your too much
Maybe it’s all in your shoulders.
They’re gonna get blistering sexy
anyways.

Your arms may tilt left
towards the third eye of the moon
while understanding that your
tenacity will never encounter
the promise of failure. 

Some women have no future,
no compunction, no reality.
They just do what they want to do,
while embodying what they are told to do.

If that sounds like having it all,
while you work to your knuckle meat. 

Then, you Love,
will forever be running after it
all.
All, to find nothing.


Author Bio:
CJ Johnson is an author and emerging screenwriter. Her first book is titled, Woman Steps In Poetry and Prose, where All Or Nothing first appeared. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Screenwriting at Wilkes University. Her work is always rooted in a poetic voice.