A mauve mud allures. Poetic, smooth and asymmetrical.
Primordial canyon wall washed down.

Stones flash in folds of light--
Marbled earth collage.

A wonder of rainwater.
We desire to touch the untouched;

Weigh in on heaviness or lightness of matter;
Breathe in fresh musk of terrain –a bouquet of sunflower fields.

Should we poke in a finger? Plant a seed?
Draw a heart? Draw another?

Frame it?
Sculpt?

Relish it?
Shape a world?

An ebony feather flutters onto the muck,
forgiving the unforgivable flown back from whence it had come. 


Author Bio:
Wendy Gist's poetry, fiction and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in Amsterdam Quarterly, Empty Mirror Arts and Literary Magazine, Foliate Oak, Fourth River, Gravel, Grey Sparrow Journal, New Plains Review, Rio Grande Review, Soundings Review, Silver City Quarterly, St. Austin Review, The Lake (UK), and many other fine journals. She's the author of the chapbook Moods of the Dream Fog from Finishing Line Press @ finishinglinepress.com. Gist is a Pushcart Prize nominee and semifinalist for Best Small Fictions, 2017.

Small blocks of mosaic nugget,
Lining certain dungeon’s walls,
Reveal strange hints of getaway,
Glitter in uncommon afterglow.
Scary others, escalate unlikelier,
Exhort divides, goggle askance,
Loathe hate-challenged punters,
Disparage penurious occupiers.

Cohorts’ insouciance, usually
Brings gouts of visible blood,
Phials of soporific formulae,
Maybe, equally, gibbous bites.
Old castles, not Mc Mansions,
Attract caped birds, fangs, plus
Dark vision’s unsullied caskets,
And physical chemistry tracts.

Proud bats, classically acquired,
Likewise expand basic faculties,
Restore abilities, repair transport.
Bestow on fundamental charities 
Convex views of satellites, suns,
Whole planets, invisible lesser 
Asteroids, render lumpen ones’
Gawping into a sacred privilege.

Transmission devices’ molecular 
Magnetic microstructures consist
Mostly of nidifugous chips, ought 
To collude with avaricious execs.
After all, partial cement castings, 
Broken sports sticks, odd atlases, 
Gums of entertainment excellence; 
Indicate prolepses evolve publicly.


Author Bio:
KJ Hannah Greenberg’s whimsical writing buds in pastures where gelatinous wildebeests roam and beneath the soil where fey hedgehogs play. Hannah’s poetry collections are: A Grand Sociology Lesson (Lit Fest Press, 2016), Dancing with Hedgehogs, (Fowlpox Press, 2014), The Little Temple of My Sleeping Bag (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), Citrus-Inspired Ceramics (Aldrich Press, 2013), Intelligence’s Vast Bonfires (Lazarus Media, 2012), Supernal Factors (The Camel Saloon Books on Blog, 2012), Fluid & Crystallized (Fowlpox Press, 2012), and A Bank Robber’s Bad Luck with His Ex-Girlfriend (Unbound CONTENT, 2011).

A few weeks after my birthday
Ms. Marvelyn, my mother’s best friend
 
asks me to do her a solid…
the next time I’m in Georgia
 
‘’you and your children used to live there…’’
Anything for the woman
 
that babysat me each afternoon
snitched on me if I was a minute late
 
getting home.  My second momma. 
Sure.
 
Only when I was at the vital records
something happened.
 
I filled out the paperwork and receded
into the background of the room
 
wait for my number to be called.
smallish woman
 
took he information and whispered to many others--
she checked on computer, in file cabinets
 
in drawers, every place the state allowed
her to look.
 
Her face—grim, veins showing
each search, stop at a desk
 
rifling through files.  She knew before I did
the technological reality
 
there were thunderclouds breaking
in her face,
 
behind her eyes—a  Niagara Falls of hurting.
She fumbled with the papers I had given her
 
playing with her forefinger and thumb.
Those forms meant more than my body knew.
 
She looked as if she were dying.
‘’I’m sorry sir, but the state of Georgia did not
  keep records for African Americans before
 
1930.  Sorry, there is nothing for me to pull up
on the computer.  Did she have a family Bible…
 
…that would be the only source for you now.
You would have to locate the Bible and look
 
in the front or the back for the birth
and death dates of relatives.  I’m so sorry.’’
 
And she appeared to be.  Her mouth, nose
and droopy eyes became one.
 
But an individual cannot apologize away
atrocity.  One person cannot wash away the
 
sins of an epoch and although she was well-meaning
there was too much to say you’re sorry for.
 
There was too much to see and deny
that day on the second floor
 
state owned building.
had to tell her that there were no records
 
of her birth, but you did mean
loaning me one hundred dollars when
 
I lost my wallet with a one hundred dollar bill
when I came to visit my mother
 
two small children holding my hands.
 

Author Bio:
Dennis Reed is a native New Yorker and former member of the infamous poetry group BUD JONES. He was a member of the John Oliver Killens Writing workshop in the nineteen sixties and his early influences include the poet Mervyn Taylor and the artist and poet Fatisha. His work has appeared in Essence, Style, CLA, Black Scholar, Linden Ave. Lit Magazine and many other newspapers and journals. Mr. Reed has taught writing courses at VCU, William and Mary and Morehouse College.

Bone brother and sister
we carry these bonds
deep within, far down
below the flutter of family
photographs stuffed in
perpetual boxes, we wear
our marks of humanity
in places seen and unseen.

But in the final analysis,
whether you listen for trumpets
or shift away into the void,
whatever belief system you hold,
there is only Kindness, our
heartbeat joining in kindness.

The choice to be to others
what the world should be
to all brothers and sisters,
a common structure.


Author Bio:
JD DeHart is a writer and teacher. His chapbook, The Truth About Snails, is available on Amazon.

​Draped over a dowel
in a tiny antique store,
a white linen tablecloth
worn soft with washing,
embroidered white-on-white,
buttonhole stitches precise,
an intricate design 
of roses and twining vines.

I cradled it to my face
     Castile soap, line-dried
and knew her in this piece.

  I saw her busy day
     hanging laundry, pulling weeds
     enfolding tiny hands to lead
     a child to bed, brush a tear,
     kiss a cheek, say a prayer.
I saw her at twilight
     In her rocking chair,
     linen on her lap, sewing
     her heart within a hoop
     with thimble, needle, thread.

Slipped from its destiny
this cloth was her legacy
made to be passed 
from daughter to daughter,
used until it tattered

sewn at last into
Teddy bears and collars,
an heirloom to carry
her bittersweet memory
ingrained in its last frayed fiber.


Author Bio:
Nancy Gustafson has published poetry, memoirs and short stories. She writes to express her gratitude for her life, family and faith. She writes to work out her thoughts and is often surprised by what appears on the paper. Nancy is retired from Sam Houston State University, where she worked as a program coordinator in the Correctional Management Institute of Texas at the George J. Beto Criminal Justice Center. She and her husband, Jan, live on a farm in Huntsville, Texas, where you may find her in the kitchen, the garden, or at her desk. She loves to write, read, visit with her children, and snuggle babies.

“What is it like to be unbothered?” She asked.
“What?” I respond to ignore the question without seeming rude. 

But then she asks me if I understood the question. Of course I understood the question, but why was she asking?

My love has an obsession to empathize, and understand, what she just cannot understand. She’s accustomed to imagining life in another person’s shoes. She lives her life standing up for others, more than she does for herself. 

Yet, her empathy is her greatest weakness. She constantly compares herself to a girl, I barely know now. The idea that I can punch a wall over someone who means nothing to me, but that I can put her on hold when she’s crying over the fact that she wants to leave me, she cannot understand. 

She just doesn’t understand. 

I tell her that I love her, but she only hears the tone of my voice. She feels that I do not mean it, and I am not a person to write it all over the city, but instead in my mind. I think about it and I know it, but because I am not the man she reads about in her favorite books, she does not believe the emotions I try to share. 

“I do get bothered. I’ve just learned to deal with it in silence.”

To myself I ask her, why must you always fill the silence? It is not your responsibility. 


Author Bio:
Emely Rodriguez is a recent graduate from Towson University with a degree in English and Mass Communications. She is the Poetry Editor for Grub Street, Towson’s literary journal. She works first-hand with writers both on and off campus, learning from each person the reasons they write. Emely is a proud Latina who advocates in her writing for her people and for herself. Throughout her life she has experienced micro-aggressions and heartbreak, but she has learned to use her writing to cope. She began writing in fourth grade, after a guest poet visited her classroom to help her class create a poetry book. Ever since that moment, she has explored language in both English and Spanish literature. She is currently working on her first novel, but would like to be published in multiple journals before her publication. Emely explores unrequited love as a means to share her heartbreak with others; so that people can feel that they are not alone in this experience. Her writing has been her safe-haven growing up and believes this passion can be shared with others to help people deal with a multitude of challenges. Her next step is to apply to graduate schools for creative writing.

You the ones walking under the light of sun,
Who live as if never die someday!
Do you think that you are God, immortal?
The creatures consisting of flesh and blood,
You do not know the spirit in you.

We are the ones whose faces are forgotten,
Whose voices are lost in silence of dark.
The cold land covers our skin,
Sweat fills our lungs in deep graves,
While the sun makes your skin darker,
And you lie on the land which swallows us.

Once upon a time, we were more alive than you.
You think that the death is eternal dream, eternal sleep.
But we witness that it is not.
It is nothingness what you examine all the times.
There is no word and dream here.
Everything is quite simple, quite basic.

The religions you created and the heaven or hell you imagine,
We don’t know what they are, where they are.
The sins which you like to list,
The myths and imaginations of heaven you dreadfully wish,
We were lost when we had been looking for them.
Symbol of the divine, the LIGHT,
We don’t know what it is anymore, we can’t see it anymore.

Mothers and fathers and the rapers and murderers,
You are all the same, no difference between you.
You gave us the life, you took life from us.
The responsible of our death and sufferings
Are just you, not any other person.
We never had a choice to select.

The birth of human is the death of the human.
Pleasure you take from sex and the sin,
For your happiness, we suffer.
And your God is not here to judge us.
Neither is the devil here.

We did not die when they stabbed us,
Or shot us from the heart.
The diseases could not kill us,
As you did by forgetting us.
By burying us to the chest of cold land.
We would have preferred to be ash,
To be able to be in the heart of nature.
Maybe we would have wandered around you,
As silent and invisible ghosts.
We would be kissing you from the cheek,
Touching your face, caring your hairs.
But these things are what you buried into the darkness.

You had no pity on us while burying us with shovel.
The gravestone became your chest where we had cried,
The roots and worms are our new friends,
And to us, they are closer than you were.
Our corpses were not only flesh but also emotions and regrets.
They were our stories, our memories.


Author Bio:
Ramazan Yilmaz lives in Izmir, Turkey and is a student of American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylul University.