She wanted to tell him
How her fingernails had become a symbol of her budding
Bisexuality;
Too long and too short all at once.
She’d say it as a joke
But he would know.

How her hair smelled of smoke -
A dirty lullaby on her pillow.
How she struggled to quit.
How she wondered if he still craved;
If the stale scent on her leather jacket spoke to him,
Bothered him, reminded him of tapping out packs
On his own palm.

If he knew his true heir
As she did.

She wished she could tell him
How men were and what they wanted
As if he didn’t know,
As if he wasn’t one.
How she had hurt or been hurt.
How their words were built against her
And all women.

But he was,
In his own way,
Only a man; impossibly entrenched,
Impossibly unable to understand. . .

She wished she could tell him
About late night road trips:
The speeding strips of pavement and
Blurred lines or blurred trees,
The empty truck stops with empty eyes,
The flannel, the burnt tired coffee,
Cigarettes and exhaust and coated bodies and gasoline. . .
And how she imagined his own rides
Long ago, through different mountains
With a different stereo
And if they were similar to this -
Excepting the clutch.

She wished for a moment in which
She was not his daughter
So she could speak with him as if she were.

Like how she remembered the nights of overwhelm,
Laying in the driveway watching stars fly.
How she wanted to ask if he felt that still - 
So small and so important -
Invested with transparent humanity.

She wanted to thank him for the gift.
Simple in its making, but
The only one that mattered.

How she had learned all her depth from him.

She wished she could tell him
The nights she screamed into her pillow
And silent, exhausted, fell crying to sleep.
Safe and full to sick or bursting,
That same love choking in her throat.
Remembering his beaming at her prodigal return
Which she would have named Failure.


Author Bio:
Shelby is a professional hobo writing poetry from the Maine woods.

"You – find me – in fragments."
Ezra Pound in a 1960 Paris Review interview 

This is my elbow, worn 
from the writing,
the back and forth,
proclaiming, ratifying
to be earned truth for you.

These are my fingers
that held the pens,
that swapped fluids
for the page, to dry
black and white,

again for you.

My mind, the genesis
of me, a hall of portraits
slashed or retouched
by how the world
receives them.

Here is my heart,
the pumping of everything
around everything,
the animal flow
that rivers on the altar-

-have you left your burnt offering?

See my eyes,
looking stage left
then right at you,
reflections upon reflections
on mirrors

too soft to break.


Author Bio:
Glen Wilson lives in Portadown, Co Armagh with his wife Rhonda and children Sian and Cain. 
He has been widely published having work in The Honest Ulsterman, Foliate Oak, Iota, Southword and The Incubator Journal amongst others. In 2014 he won the Poetry Space competition and was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. He is currently working on his first collection of poetry. Twitter @glenhswilson

Standing face to face, I watch her purpling skin rise
and fall with her stuttered breath.
The tears I’ve seen before don't fall.
They don’t exist. Not anymore.
The grip around her throat tightens.
It does exist. Always.
No words come—but thoughts scream.

I watch her will herself to breathe—to gain control.
Her breathing slows,
and I see the red welt across her face
where his words had landed…
slowly
disappear.
“It’s ok. You are not hurt. He cannot hurt you if you don't let him,” I whisper.
She doubts me.
I turn away.

“Don’t go,” she whispers, reaching out to touch the mirror.
The grip begins to loosen.
She knows what she has to do.


Author Bio:
A Mississippi native, Mary Roberson Wiygul has taught in the public school system for over twenty years. When not teaching, traveling, or spending time with her family, she loves to write personal essays and short humorous memoir pieces, but she also loves to showcase her serious side through poetry. She is currently a feature writer for Southern Sass Magazine, and her work has also been featured in Southern Roots Magazine, and on HumorWriters.org. 

except when defending people and property.
Terrorism, in contrast, is insanity; most of us
Want to get old and gray. Wrinkles are good.
 
Self-worth isn’t prized by nearly all leaders.
“Higher causes" “support,” scraped together,
Reveal traitors as just “friends thru conflict,”
Won't to fuse reagents of long, useless wars.
 
Remote ideas, expressed in prose or verse,
Though, surreptitiously source resolutions.


Author Bio:
Dr. KJ Hannah Greenberg has been playing with words for an awfully long time. Initially a rhetoric professor and a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar, she shed her academic laurels to romp around with a prickle of imaginary hedgehogs. To wit, she's been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize in Literature, has had more than a dozen of her books published. her poetry titles are: A Grand Sociology Lesson (Lit Fest Press, 2017, Forthcoming), Mothers Ought to Utter Only Niceties (Unbound CONTENT, 2016, Forthcoming), 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).

Your father doesn’t want me anymore,
she says before we hang up the phone.
 
The pasty white furniture, curtains, 
and walls of his one-bedroom apartment
a collective tabula rasa he embraced at forty-five,
shaping it with rough hands that once molded wet clay
at the living room table on nights the children slept,
with Eddie Vedder’s low rasp pouring over it all.
 
It’s louder than the air conditioning unit
as I push open French doors to let the dog outside.
The backyard is a bleached yellow-green,
with a man-made lake view of a murky shore
where Muscovy ducks wade along in pairs,
pausing to peck at wriggling tadpoles.
 
A scene framed by a crooked wooden fence
dilapidated from years of merciless hurricane winds,
its ground with dandelions and rotting avocados
that fall from our neighbor’s overhanging branches,
glistening with pebbles from the tank of a late pet turtle
and that year’s Christmas tree, a dry rust color in March sunlight.
 
And as my dog’s tail is swallowed by overgrown grass,
his puddle of urine seeps into cracks in the tiled back porch,
trickles toward a plastic vase holding the dried remains
of Felicity, an orchid I drowned last summer.
A single bud is perched on an ink-colored branch,
waiting to burst open into the humid air.
 

Author Bio:  
Stephanie Porven is a Creative Writing and Classical Civilization major at Florida State University who is grateful for every fairy tale her parents read to her before bedtime throughout her childhood. She believes butterflies bring good luck and coffee is the elixir of life. Lately, her interests have included struggling to revive the wilted daffodil on her patio and attempting to successfully French braid. Her work has appeared in Hypertrophic Literary and The Birds We Piled Loosely.

Darren, all denim and acne, puts black clouds in his basket. They’re two-for-one
today. In a later aisle, he’ll load up rain. The fierce kind right before hail.
That’s just Darren the teenager. Dog leash chains dangling through black pockets.
Jenny will hold my hand and agree with me – a cart full of sun, the tangerine
summer kind. A bundle of clouds so thick it looks like you could dance
across them and never fall through. And Claude, in Aisle 10, examines the edges
of lightning bolts. Checks for sharpness, color. Looks for hot pink and spark yellow.
Claude, who used to buy wholesale snow so we could trap ourselves inside for a day.
Make macaroons and love.
 
At the weary end, Jenny detaches herself. Considers sleet by Darren’s side. He allows
her to hang on his belt loop. Claude takes my hand and we pick out bushels of fog, a batch of mist. Because that’s how he first saw me. Bursting late from that dormitory door, rushing in fog. You floated to me, he said. And tiny spots of mist touched down on us in separate ways.


Author Bio:
Martha Clarkson manages corporate workplace design in Seattle. Her poetry, photography, and fiction can be found in monkeybicycle, Clackamas Literary Review, Seattle Review, Alimentum, Hawaii Pacific Reivew. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Nomination, and is listed under “Notable Stories,” Best American Non-Required Reading for 2007 and 2009. She is recipient of best short story, 2012, Anderbo/Open City prize, for “Her Voices, Her Room.”

I found this bottle by the sea.
A message sent to me?
One cold dark December night.
I wish it may,
I wish it might;
Be from my lover.
Intended pour moi,
Not any other.

It read to whom it was for:
"This is what I wish from life.
To hold your hand on the shore.
Kiss your tears when there's strife.
And nothing more.

Leaving two sets of footprints in the sand,
the ocean will wash and greatly roar.
Shells crunch at our feets demand.
I hear your voice and nothing more!"

I reply,
Scribbling in hurriedness and scared.
As seagulls o'er soar.
My heart is bared.
For you my love and nothing more.

"Find me by the sea.
It is where I belong.
There's no place I shall be,
Than waiting for my angel's song.
That has become the lover's lore.
My dark haired beauty,
And nothing more.

Your eyes are in the oceans night as I gaze and stand.
To feel your touch instead of sand,
- I do implore:
To hold your hand,
And nothing more.

I smell the salty ocean breeze.
It reminds of your scent.
It is only a tease.
Reminiscent.
Of our days of yore.
I am nothing without you.
And nothing more."

In sheets of cold rain I throw the bottle in.
I swim and begin.
To look for you.
In the ocean's blue.
And my body finds this a chore.
I start to sink.
To become nothing more.

I drown and I cry
Beneath life's sea I lie.
Laying on life's ocean floor.
It's you I want,
And nothing more.

"There's no other place,
That I'd rather be.
Than to kiss your face."
I cry as I reach and I race;
To open up heaven's door.
Then I feel your tug.
Then nothing more.

I awake in your warm arm.
Away from death.
Away from harm.
You made either nor.
As we lay on the sun rising shore,
We hold each other.
And nothing more.

You're my heart.
My heroine in this place.
You're my love.
My saving Grace.
Along with you life I do adore.
I want you forever.
And nothing more.


Author Bio:
Ian Alford is a poet, an author, artist, and a single daddy, who enjoys spending time with his kids. "Nothing More" is a poem about the loneliness of being a single father. Ian also enjoys the arts, such as painting, drawing, writing fiction, poetry, and photography. As a writer he has had his work appear in Charleston's The Post & Courier, and in Columbia's The Gamecock Newspaper.

we stood on our
tiptoes out in the rain
reaching for each other

I grew up on a small
plot of land where my dignity
is still buried

we reached for heaven
not even knowing about earth
starting droplets from the sky

but that was then
when I was young
and life was promise and golden
shaded hope.


Author Bio:
Cattail Jester is a sometimes poet, and likes the way poetry can do so much in a small space.

I expel my complaints in clouds of black ink
determine to blind with my helpless anger. The ink
floats around me in a cloud, obscures the view 
of the sink full of dishes, the bills stacked on the table
toys that refuse to move from where dropped

messy handprints on everything. I long
to escape through the drain, through the tiny cracks in the floor tile, 
slither behind the stove where the mice make noise
find freedom in the dark parts of the yard
beneath the floorboards of the basement. 


Author Bio:
Holly Day has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, since 2000. Her published books include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Piano All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, Insider’s Guide to the Twin Cities, Nordeast Minneapolis: A History, and The Book Of, while her poetry has recently appeared in New Ohio Review, SLAB, and Gargoyle. Her newest poetry book, Ugly Girl, just came out from Shoe Music Press.