Oozing like clean corn syrup into a hot pan, she bubbled. 
He fed her sentiments thick as glucose.
He stirred a deep flavour within her.
Then he shook anger into that sweetness.
His temper, like food colouring, dropped. She reddened.
He stirred again and tipped her into twenty-one moulds. 
She slowly crystalised, like a prisoner. Then she cooled.
He peeled back the moulds. Peeled these from her.
She was shining, twisted and addictive.
She was like twenty-one hard ideas, children sucked small.


Author Bio:
Sid Orange was a drug addict, thugs, bouncer and conman. He is from London, UK, but now lives in the Cotswolds, UK. He is an autodidact and a feminist - despite his gender.

She sits alone at a table
Solitude is her choice
The others joke around
They laugh and talk
Their work undone

Hold your head up
Keep striving and learning
Your future lies straight ahead

The kids call her weird
She walks and eats alone
When she talks to me
I see a bright and shining star

Hold your head up
Keep striving and learning
Your future lies straight ahead

These days will fly
The years will go by
Soak in all you can
The person you become
Starts with the person you are

Hold your head up
Keep striving and learning
Your future lies straight ahead


Author bio:
Jessie Swierski lives in Phoenix, Arizona where she works as a teacher. She enjoys rooting on the Arizona Diamondbacks, gardening, and spending time with her family. 

How I crave the destruction of free
radicals interfering with my every day, 

with the single and cohort experiences
that make up my average life, nitrous 

oxide exploding my brain cells,
ammonia dictating from the liver, 

kryptopyrroles building up, stealing all
my zinc, devouring my B6 and Omegas.  

Inexplicably, I eat potato chips and
squelch opportunity by interrupting you

or hearing something you cannot. I see
oxidants swarming, cutting the heads off

my antiquities, foes with no believable
leader to expose the better parts of their
 
natures, my flesh with its temporary
spirit clearly not their reason for 

being but excuse enough to camp out,
pretend to be independent from some
 
electron that is everywhere at once while
I, of course, am little but a host.  I can
 
take the modern dilemma except for the
elements that wear you thin and down, 

that only take and nothing give, getting
into everything, even your protected 

best, the lowest of them mute
scavengers, most likely the strongest of
 
all.  They fill the squares, shouting
democracy, divided into ancient 

factions, their different and opposing
slogans not explaining that some parts 

within a system are primary, some
secondary, others inconsequential like 

comparing a beating heart to the texture
of hair, though they are related.  They 

have studied Aristotle and focus not on
the hand nor the body but on the chance

he got even to speak while they were
there.  They have escaped their zeolite
 
walls, stolen all the oranges and grapes,
filled the jars of olive oil with bile.


Author Bio:
I write every morning at 5 a.m.

One

To be awake is to be awoken.
The sun is a small disc
that does not heat much
in the cold winter; and the dark
before it recedes has curled
the fox’s tail around him
so that he makes a rounded disc
in the old leaf litter, the woodpile
where he stays hidden in the snow.

Two

To be full of food is to be lazy
for awhile. The mouse’s track
doesn’t call so strongly,
the scent of rabbit doesn’t urge
so deeply in the muscles
that can bound and leap through
snow and run barely leaving
pawprints, small, doglike, following
in a straight line to find its prey,
claws showing, sharp enough--
but now, having eaten, the fox has
the white snow as a blanket to lie on.

Three

To live in the forest, the field
is to see the winter sun
as high as it can be almost
disappear in the great storm,
the white coating trees and dead grasses
and rocks and the rusty red fur
of the fox who walks silently,
more quietly than the fast-falling snow,
to his mate who is already growing
inside her the kits who will be born in spring.

Four

Does it matter if we just drift
into dreaming when there is
so much to explore? The two foxes,
together, run across the field,
and are just about alongside each other
white-tipped tails flashing when they
become one for a moment,
like we all do, for a moment, in a dream.

Five

To be perched on the telephone wires
near dusk like the row of pigeons
is to watch the lowering sun go pink,
flush, set a deep rose glow
on the stretch of sky that is tree-height
at the horizon. And the fox follows
a broken trail in the snow;
she stirs no twig or broken branch; 
she is full of the color of the sunset,
from the tip of her ears to the tip
of her busy tail, and she is black
when the sun goes down.

Six

At night when the unborn kits
move inside the mother fox,
stir against her, they wake her
from the kind of sleep that deepens
in the winter when no one roams
the coldest hour, and there is
no need to guard against him.
When the mother fox sleeps again,
the kits sleep with her. There is
a silent roar in the air, the last cry
and bark of the day, but look,
the fox is still, quiet, doesn’t move at all.


Author Bio:
Gigi Marks lives in Ithaca, New York. Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including American Poets Against the War, The Atlanta Review, Best American Poetry, Green Mountains Review, Lilith, North American Poetry Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and others. Her first chapbook, What We Need, was published by Shortline Editions. A second chapbook of her poems, Shelter, was published by Autumn House Press in 2011. Most recently, her collection of poems Close By was published by Silverfish Review Press in Spring 2012. Close By was nominated for the National Books Critic Circle Award in Poetry in 2012. Recent poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry for 2013.