Your boyfriend traces your vertebrae,
climbing on, counting each step,
like it is a staircase of bones.
You slip like sand through his fingers.
Your brother, whose chubby cheeks which once you lovingly pulled
resemble deflated balloons,
the bags under his eyes - sacks of pain,
his face haunted with the same illness as you, the same venom,
the venom that seeps down from TVs and movies , from posters and magazines;
venom consisting of perfectly slim people.
They will bury you next to your brother, 
with the plaques screaming in pain, 
the tombstones shall tell how you both were
Loving children,
Beloved friends,
Perfect victims
To this capitalist world.


Author Bio:
Milkshake, haiku lover.

I looked once
Saw the people
Tried to climb back inside
Thought that I had mistook what my eyes had seen
 
The sights that my mind saw
sounds it heard were not glorious as I had always thought they would be!
Why did I look once?
I can't unsee or unhear now.
 
My dream is forever gone
the realness has taken over
So I now must remember forever what I saw
and what I heard
And never have the peace that goes with ignorance.


Author Bio:
I am Linda Wood and I have been thinking and writing poetry for fifty years. I feel more comfortable writing poetry, but reading prose. After a long career as a social worker, I recently began attending the Bluegrass Writers Studio. My first class was in fiction writing. My genre of choice is comedy. I would like to think of myself and my style as a younger version of Erma Bombeck. This is only my second writing presented for publication, the first being a work of prose.

I look out my window
And behold the jewels in the sky
Reflecting on the water below
The moon's push and pull seems to me a silent moan or wretched cry

The laughter of a child echoes through the air
A foreign sound, like a fluttering of the wings of a sparrow 
The laughter opens my heart and renders my soul bare
Then, like an icy prick, it pierces my heart like an arrow
Shot from the bow of a happiness long gone,
A forsaken love
Like a treasure buried or a dog's missing bone
Like a love long lost
Or a soul missing home

This pain of mine is self inflicted
Like a treacherous barb that I myself set in place
Like a torturous taunt that I myself picked
As one would a rose set with thorns
I know this seems as though I am mourning
And surely it haunts me like a passion unborn
But it is more truly a revelation or warning

I owe you many things 
Least of which is my sorrow
Although that is hardly the ransom of kings
It is enough to ask that you return what had been borrowed
I want my heart back
Or the wanting to fade
Because my love has been stretched and hurt like a man on a rack
Or blotted out like a light placed in the shade

I can hear the wind sing
I watch it wisp through the branches as if to kiss their fingers briefly
I can hear my heart howl and my blood sting
Because the thing I desire most fervishly
Evades me indefinitely
Like the child who runs from a father who beats him
Or as a dog runs from a human who does not love it humanely
Or as water drips off a hat's rim
So in this way does happiness evade me
So in this way do you hold me in contempt
So in the way does love flee
So in this way do you elude my attempt
To love you with my heart and with my mind
In this very way, and in no other way can I describe
Do you leave me behind
And here in my heart you have left a mark that shall forever remain inscribed

​
Author Bio:
Joseph Sweeney is an American student attending high school in upstate New York and an aspiring poet and author. After reading "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot, he became inspired to write poetry. He was further influenced by ButtonPoetry, a YouTube channel dedicated to spoken word.

​I was just learning
To speak again
My third grade teacher
Rolled some words
Across my desk
Like marbles
I put in my mouth
An ancient orator
Wanting things
To be clear
Perfectly clear
​

Author Bio:
Gerry Grubbs is an attorney practicing law in Cincinnati Ohio. His most recent book, The Palace of Flowers, is just out from Dos Madres Press. His previous collection, The Hive is a Book, We read for its Honey, was a finalist for the 2014 Ohio book of the year for poetry.

You take the cereal boxes away from their fate
and you fill them with purpose;
they come alive as trains, elevators, sometimes an emotional mother
 
​and as a city is built in your youth and virtue
you seize its possibilities; taking all the risks
to inspire an old moon to harvest great beginnings
 
I carried you once, four pounds of growing belly
my heart burned and I was alone
but not really
 
You stroked my maternal odds and made me something
each time I tried to convinced myself
I was better off dead
 
Now, I buy the family size boxes of cereal, the ones with extra room
for seats and passengers who bear sons of their own;
sons who are faithful to the occupation of unconditional love
 
and because I am so clumsy and sensitive
I often crush the corner of the rectangular packages
before I get them home
 
You say: “Momma, I will use it anyway”
and I cry in private
as you go in your room and build us both a dream.


Author Bio:
Kay Bell was born in Barbados and migrated to Harlem, New York before she could barely walk. Her work appears on the online quarterly journal: "The American Aesthetic”, in the book: "Brown Molasses Sunday: An Anthology of Black Woman Writers" as well as in other venues. Currently, she is earning a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York and lives in the South Bronx.

The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. ~ C. G. Jung

I am a dark daughter of the moon
who never shall be a son of the sun. 
Lady anima of the black soul, 
she cast herself wholly into the Black Sea
to sink what cannot be drowned. 
Feet of a bird 
Heart of a lion
Arms of caduceus 
Brains of porridge. 
I am the black virgin leaching night of its blindness 
like some leprous and defunct lost gypsy
master of the black matter known long before
the age of reason saved us all.
Yet, she cannot nor will not conjure it up to save herself now. 
This misunderstood raven, racked lesser when weighed against the dove,
ravenous and never fed enough, but must fend alone.
Light, might you come soon and bite back in the dark 
as I lie scared witless of those sheered fangs chomping
at some disembodied life that has not yet departed.
Come now or go now, full light. 
I hung on all these days, months, coming on the full year,
the friction of every moon and hair 
blackens me deeper, shackled as if by some Puritan rule, 
requisite public scorn to purge my blackness.
Difficult she is, they whisper,
as if my disguised queen of the night cares to listen.
Queen with the goosefoot who wove flax into linen, 
a skill so ancient it gave meaning to an ephah of grain.
There is nothing they say that is not assumed worse by me. 
So, I lay down my whip—for now. 
Enough. 


Author Bio:
Robin Throne was a 2016 writer-in-residence at Wolff Cottage and recipient of the fourth David R. Collins literary achievement award from the Midwest Writing Center, the third fiction chapbook prize from Gambling the Aisle, and a literary fiction award from the Writer's Well for her debut novel, Her Kind. Her work has appeared in The New Poet Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Gypsy Cab, Mankato Poetry Review, North Coast Review, Split Lip Magazine and Crab Fat Literary Magazine among others.

The intense distraction of my febrile heart
trapped me into love.

Now two years after the addiction started
and you wouldn’t satisfy my need
you appear in my tinder feed
like another face in a stream of shallow filters
and poses and selfie smiles

but the narrowing of my veins
and the quickening of my pulse
is a sign that the vulgar convulsions
of emotion reserved for your coldness
had never departed.

I’m so lucky to feel unrequited,
lest we fuck and I realize I never liked you.

do not ask me what I felt as I watched the people 
hurled like broken branches
crushed into crimson rain
by vengeance masquerading as honor

do not ask me what I thought as I heard 
the screams of children 
and the moaning of dying parents 
no longer able to comfort

do not ask me why I wept
as on a muted screen I watched
the devastation and horror
fanatics view as karma
only magnified my sorrow

do not ask such ignorant questions

ask me how I sobbed when my daughter, mother, wife…
my infant sons exploded into misty scarlet droplets
as they crawled to reach my arms 
in Aleppo three months ago

then ask me if I’ll ever pray again


Author Bio:
Michael Coolen is a pianist, composer, actor, and writer living in Oregon. His writings have drawn extensively from his career as an ethnomusicologist studying music and cultures around the world, particularly in Africa. He is a published composer, with compositions have been performed around the world, including at Carnegie Hall, New England Conservatory of Music, Museum of Modern Art, and the Christie Gallery. He approaches his writing as if they were musical compositions, balancing words and prosody as if they were melodies and accompaniment in a larger form. He has had a lifelong fascination with the connections between music and mathematics, and he has often used structures like the Golden Mean, the Fibonacci series, and other mathematical equations in his writing.

Over the years, he has been honored with three Fulbright Fellowships and four National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. His poems and essays have won awards from the Oregon Poetry Association and the Oregon Writers Colony. He’s been published in Oregon Humanities, The Gold Man Review, Best Travel Stories, Clementine Poetry Journal, Creative Writing Institute, Rats Ass Review, Broken Plate Poetry Magazine, The Poetry Quarterly, et al.

Castles and regal estates
Thriving in suburban marrow
Heartland of high stakes

Hunger drowns in the pond
Catering dawn till dusk 
Duty of resolving all vagabonds

Staffed with eagle’s eyes
To read the slightest faux pas
Quick to realign any flaws

Lightness of day is pall
Room and board is shared and small 
Acquiescence is the golden rule for all

Hotel of fragmented dreams
Losing yourself demands valor
Of alter ego extremes 

Acquired sojourn that bleeds
Caught in a cage of prey
Scream loudly for prior misdeeds

Peering through grey bars of strife
Breathing with breathless life
Thought is the only remnant still bright


Author Bio:
Lee Johnson was raised in San Francisco and influenced during the cultural movement of the 1960s and 70s. His interest in psychology developed out of a curiosity to understand the colorful street people of that era. So, he became a psychotherapist at the masters level for over 30 years. His themes often spring from his work with people. The poem Hotel of Fragments is from his counseling work inside the prison. 

I'd be lying if I said this old heart didn't 
ache, that my nights aren't restless, that a dream
didn't fade. I'm not wailing, more like sighing. Isn't 
that a softer grief, appropriate in scale? It seems
preposterous to say, I wish your loving me
would've lasted longer, had been more than passing 
fancy, that our romance hadn't ended with me
getting dumped for that beauty from central casting: 
Younger, taller, smarter, with a full set of teeth. 
As for me, I’m losing hair and height and brain cells.
I've had a tooth pulled, deadening nerves underneath.
I'll pretend, age is a number. Oh sheesh. Oh well.
I guess in a weird way I gave what I thought was my best,
only to discover what I thought was best was less.


Author Bio:
Drew Pisarra's poetry really kicked into gear with his discovery of the work of filmmaker R.W. Fassbinder. Since then, he's been writing poems for every movie that the German director ever made. His book of short stories, "Publick Spanking," was published by Future Tense a number of years ago.