I cannot help but stare, even though it’s too late.
The tears have fallen, and the breath has collapsed
in my lungs because your skin - hazelnut
cream swirl of sensational beauty
glistening – is all I can think about.
The next few steps I take are part of the effort
I refused to give you. For that reason alone, I am unbalanced,
begging forgiveness. I imagine a bum sleeping beside garbage
sweating addiction like me at a loss for your touch.
Your scent – caramel swizzle peppermint – leaves me
paralyzed. I know you are probably waiting for the L train now,
five minutes and inches of rain away from Chestnut.
Without fear, you wait, unaware and ignorant to me.
You must know the power you have in your perfectly curved
shoulders, your Mona Lisa dimples, your love,
and my audacity to ignore it all.
You’ve arrived at last and now you see me.
You can’t help but stare at my dead body:
sweet strawberries and milk beneath your feet.


Author Bio:
I am a Penn State University sophomore, majoring in Journalism and minoring in Comparative Literature. I have been writing since I was very little and love to write about personal experiences and realities of the world that people ignore or refuse to speak the truth about. I appreciate the views and voices of men and women who are strong, independent, and who create work that inspires others to indulge in their talents. I appreciate effective criticism 100% and hope that my work may be acknowledged.

A dark wintry feeling
Froze my
Lovely sense that awakened spirits when morning came.
There was no pain in my
Heart and no tears in my eyes
Going under the gust of happiness, no strain of mind
Endured. But afflictions of pain when comes to mankind
Who tells? Under the blue heaven
That was like an ocean
Skelton looking boy with closed eyes
Laid down on the hard chest of stony way.
No sense in him, only decay.

Dull gesture, deep brown skin, innocent face
Deserved for grace
Deserved for kindness.
But sense of mine
Under the warm sunshine
Froze at seeing how ignored he was!
No men saw, what the loss was
When an innocent life is seized on.
Many walking men there
Although looked at him but showed no pity.
Wounded face and bloody body were neglected
With hatred.
How kindless human and their humanity!

I froze and reached him on a slow walk
Around me mourning air and morning grim
Blogged my sense to return back to my destination
Telling me that he belongs to our nation.
I should show my love to him.
I should show my pity on him.
I should kill his pain.
Those thoughts awakened my sense
Keeping me in a clean conscience
That I should save that innocent life with the help of mine.
But heavy flow of blood and smashed bone
Made me feel alone,
Gave me fright
From where I saw no light.
My two eyes filled with hot tears.
My sense froze more than before.
I helplessly cried for help from my panic shore.
All giving one look, passed, but did not like to hear.
I cried for help
But I did myself.

I, in that selfish world
In that loveless world
I belong too.
Here no man sees you.


Author Bio:
Parnashree was born in West Bengal In Kharapur in 1988. She is an Indian writer and poet and completed her M.A. from Vidyasagar University in India.

The biting chill of mid-winter had marooned a heaviness on this gathering universe, and rhythmically turned it into an evening of restless ghosts. The air was frosty and carried that callous bite of rawness in it when the wind rose and picked up with it a stagnant cold. The crisp scent of moist snow-fused pines surged upward and drifted over from the neighboring grounds, made aglow by the brilliant gold of the moon; their shadows stood boldly behind in sharp, tapering silhouettes, gave way to the impression that a silent army hovered perpetually, and ever so in stealth silence, kept armed. 

After a steep climb from beneath a deep depression away at the inlet of the cavern, I lingered there, under the lined overgrowth, buried ankle-deep within what seemed like a mountain of virgin white. My left index finger cautiously stretched toward the edge of a jutting limb, poising just above the chalky tips, toying with the tiny droplets of the dew upon the bed of irregular shaped snowflakes. Then out of the thin air with speed at full tilt, a burst of red-tailed hawks and sooty ravens swooped downward from some aloft hanging branches, leaving a great flurry of pale silver in their wake. The discarded crystals scattered all around, buffeted by the wind, spun side to side as they tumbled then at once, sank to the drenched terrain throughout.

For a moment, everything was silent. I stood there heedlessly caved-in, conspicuously lost as to seem utterly posed, deeply unnerved by the otherworldly ambiance. With a large gulp of air dragged in and racked up in my lungs, I fell backward to the snow-veiled earth, where I sensed the ground sloping away beneath my back, uneven and powdery, and where I was found some time much later, staring upward in stock-still silence at the wild blue yonder above me. The distant moon was glowing a saffron-red, gave way to a mosaic slate-gray of the midnight sky a fluid pane of plexi-glass, sharply cutting in two, the jarring realm of the living from the muffled world of the dead.

 
Author Bio:
Lana Bella has a diverse work of poetry and flash fiction anthologized, published and forthcoming with more than eighty journals, including Aurorean Poetry, Chiron Review, Contrary Magazine, elsewhere, The Criterion Journal, The Voices Project, Poetry Quarterly, and Featured Artist with Quail Bell Magazine, among others. She resides in the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam with her novelist husband and two frolicsome imps. https://www.facebook.com/niaallanpoe

"I am incurable.  I am sent away to the ancient one, who teaches me to float on the ceiling of his cave." Russell Edson

But I am weight, I say, I am the essence of weight.
It has taken these eighteen years to transform my body.

I will teach you to float, he says.

The wings began before birth, I tell him.
They brushed the walls of my mother’s womb, made her ill,
made her curse my body.  When I was born,
they gathered at the glass, called me ugly, an eagle’s egret.
My mother was ashamed.

I will make you float, he says.

Form a sac, the doctors told them.  Make it of leather and silver.
Leather shrinks in every rain; silver has weight, has value.

When it rained, they locked me out.
I felt the leather grip me and my flesh shrink.
In the rain my skin began to shine, like silver.

It took a very long time for the shrinking, even longer for the silver.
But with each year, the skin shone stronger, like armor.

You are becoming beautiful, they said.  You can be
a sculpture adorning a parlor, a goddess on a marble statue in a fountain.
I say you can float! claims the ancient one.
Now they come to worship at my feet, I tell him.  They say I am perfect.
Then why have they sent you to me?

For the children.
Such beauty should reproduce itself, my father says.
And the wealth, says my mother.  Such creatures of marble and silver
will bring a fine price.

Doctors were called.
She is beautiful, they said, but the condition is incurable.
There will be no children.

But do you wish to be cured? demands the ancient one.

I wish…to please, I say.

Then envision the immensity of Father Sky, the way the lily glows
just before it dies.  Feel the flesh pulled by the tides, the salt upon the skin.
Lick it as a creature licks the birth film from its newborn.

I do as I am told.  I float.
The weight flows from me and I rise to the ceiling of the cave.

I have cured you! exults the ancient one.

But out of the entrance to the cave, the first blade of morning sun
is reaching, crossing the sharp edges of the ancient hole.
All the bones in my body stretch toward it.  I begin to move.

You cannot fly, you know! he calls.  The wings are gone,
you can only float!

But my body does not pause.  It drifts like a gull over the waves, a hawk
above the mountains.

STOP! cries the ancient one.

But it does not stop.
When I reach the shaft of sun, my flesh leans into its warmth.

You will fall! the ancient one shouts.

The arc of sun is now vibrant about me, like fingers on my skin.  I move
more swiftly, out through the mouth of the cave.  I see the layers of cloud
and sky shifting, each in the embrace of the other, I see that they are never
still.  I stretch my neck and the wind catches my breasts, lifts me –

I fly!


Author Bio:
Patricia Brooks has published two novels from Dell, and is seeking a publisher for her novel And Whose Little Girl Are You? Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary journals, including The Rockhurst Review, Raging Dove, Out of Line, and upcoming in the pdxx Collective.