News reports that I’m trafficked,
my heart denotes that it’s racketed.

Street owns me,
prostrates me,
bends me to knees,
for money that touches my hand, but never reaches my pocket.

Fettered and tethered in invisible chains,
puts me on display—but never seen.
That’s shame.

Mom hooked on crack and reefer,
allowed uncle to become my creeper.
In a haze she turned her gaze.

Wanted to be a teacher,
spent my nights daydreaming in books.
Now looking for a come up from the preacher,
reading street signs and cigarette pack promises.

Easy prey, that’s what I was.
Not enough love at home to lift me up above,
the grip of a pimp.
That’s shame.

Need to escape.
Shooting up liquid heaven, can’t make the evade.
Crisscrossed wrist so scarred in lines,
my signs of dying to live.

I’m a commodity—an item, a purchase.
Change it!
No demand--no supply needed!

But, the Johns drive by.
Buy my time and my pain is your crime.
That’s shame.


Author Bio:
Before embracing her affinity of writing, Shermie Rayne, had an indelible love of words. She likes to use written words to ponder while pushing back against, or relishing in the wondrous journey of life. Currently, Rayne is editing the first draft of her first completed manuscript, SKY, an upper middle-grade, epistolary-journal novel that follows a tender-hearted soul, a seventh-grade girl, Sky Jeffers, as she contemplates the challenging burden of living. http://shermierayne.wordpress.com/

Within a sleep 
of the universal dream
dreaming me
I lean out in the darkness
to hear a heartbeat of the world

Listening wide 
straining with sinew and soul
I hear flapping wings 

Ah, it is the bird of scripture
The Vikings buried him 
Remember, with your being, 
he under layers of Arctic ice 

Prophesy decreed 
that a shrill brass sun 
melt and free his wings 
to thrash the skies to raw skin winds
Winds to push across 
skies, deeply moving 
Winds to push clouds
to gallop through the heavens

Wings talk around winds

But what words tell of winds
gasping with the sounds of dead things washing on shore
Ashes - bones
arteries clogged with oil
Oil - the black blood of our destruction 

And in the air, a heavy scent of gone 

West winds blow vapors cold on leaves, quivering 
on trees with thin chests 
and branches reach out in search of embrace

Oh, tired earth of heavy-lidded eyes
dusty clouds - weeping waters
of voices deafened by silence

Our words spoken with fingers
forming the telling 
of living to die
existing to endure

We have filled 
to fall out of ourselves
and so must we swim to the moon
But what will light our way? 
Our shadows lengthening and widening 
darken the moon
Souls of stars lie bare
The black V of wings beat the sun to shreds 

Winds dip and roar
Yet stir up only pale raindrops

In this hollow rain 
stands a girl with broken umbrella
She’s trading her memories
for a withered apple in a faded pocket 

Her brother sells his poems 
a penny apiece
All begin with the line … 
life yearns to live
And end … 
life is longing for itself


Author Bio:
Susan Dale's poems and fiction are on Hurricane Press, Ken *Again, Penman Review, Inner Art Journal, Feathered Flounder, Garbanzo, and Linden Avenue. In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from Oneswan. 

Am I invisible or just not right?
Should I change my clothes, make them tight?
Hide my beauty behind makeup so you can see me better
Hide my frown under a smile so I don’t see under the weather

Maybe it’s my hair 
Should I wear it short or long?
Change my attitude to fit theirs even though it seems so wrong
Be down for the crew

Throw my brain in the gutter
I won’t need it we’ll think for each other
Change my music style around?
blast it up or slow it down

What makes you more valuable than me?
Nothing
Unless I give you the power and you receive
I’ve made up my mind

It is time for me to live my life until
I’m satisfied
I’m breaking out of stereotypes


Author Bio:
Writing has always been a great passion of mine. It has helped me get through some difficult times in my life. For a long time, life simply got in the way and writing no longer seemed that important. Recently, my health has gotten slightly worse. And all I keep hearing is that I’m too young to be sick, and 21-year-olds’ should be healthy. Through this whole process it has helped me realize what makes me happy. At this point I’m not sure if I’ll get better or will have the energy to do what I once did. My plan is just to continue to be positive and focus on what makes me happy. And writing makes me happy.

The brown rice were
not yet ready.
An old man turns in grave.

The thingness
was shapeless in dark
Like a sleeping Buddha.

Once I told a lie.
The snow started melting
releasing methane. 


Author Bio:
Satish Verma is ferociously original. You feel resentment, outrage and violence, cannot pin it down but wonderfully spin your brain. Satish has the greatest sensibility which sweetly exploits the delicacies of human conflicts. You are taken aback. This is magic, profoundly soulful. In a lone, long journey Satish Verma is still discovering himself. Beaten, betrayed, felled, he comes back with fierce velocity. His childhood was traumatized by Indiaʼs partition. Terror, violence and death were witnessed which built the morals of poet. Becoming defiantly recluse Satish Verma pursued his value based life on the path of truth. Teaching Botany for 35 years he was writing poetry, privately and solemnly and published twelve collections. Worked silently with social causes. His scions, doctors and engineers are living in USA. He chose to live back in his beloved country and resides in Ajmer (INDIA) with his spouse Kanta running the Charitable Holistic Institute of SEWA MANDIR FOUNDATION. kantasatish@gmail.com.

Orphaned and drifting along
On a derelict street, eaves drooping
Gutters filled with birdshit
It’s stark cry long since muted
By the screaming of the blighted
The torn down and abandoned
Once children sat on the stoops
Bookended homes leaning against
One another, all support now gone
Tossed away. Urban decay, is that really
All they can think of to describe this horror?
This is a monument, a wailing wall
Of rotted and shattered plaster
Overgrown lawns and a foundling
Foundering along unkempt--
A dowager in a mildewed dress
A lone and boarded over elder
Who’s outlived its time in a
City that no longer loves its own history
And yet cannot move past it
Coal is still king! They cry even as
This home that is no longer part of any row
Sags to the broken sidewalk,
To the beer bottle littered grass
And dies.


Author Bio:
Angel Propps is a freelance writer, author and LGBTQ activist who spent her teenage and many adult years in a town shattered by mill closings and urban decay. A condition that seems to have become utterly contagious.

She instructed my uncle to grab the jar full of loose
Texas dirt and acorns from her nightstand.
“Our baby will be born over Texas soil, one way or another,”
she told him as he drove seven miles over the speed limit.
After sneaking the jar past the bustling nurses,
my aunt told my uncle to place the jar under
the gurney. When the doctor came to deliver
my first cousin, he didn’t comment on the mixture
of earth and acorns. My cousin cried and into fruition. 

Years later, when only my youngest cousin cannot
legally drink and we’re all sitting around the ‘adult’
table, she asks my aunt about the jar that has sat on
their fireplace for over twenty years. My uncle calls
her a hippie over his bourbon, and my aunt laughs
her light and airy laugh before she says:
“Everything is bigger in Texas, right?”

Our eyes meet as everyone chuckles, and I press
my hand over the crook of my elbow. The skin is molted
and pinched from various butterfly needles. I haven’t yet
wrangled a man into marriage, and she knows how much
that terrifies me. I wonder how dirt and acorns saved
her children.

When I’m climbing into my Volkswagen the next day,
she meets me in the driveway. “Take it,” she whispers.
“We could all use a little luck.” I take the jar tucked lovingly
beneath her shawl, my fingertips pressing what little
hope I have left into the dusty, dirty glass.

 

Author Bio:
Melissa Hedges is a recent graduate of Stephen F. Austin State University, where she majored in creative writing and minored in literature. Her work has been featured in Circa Review and The Blue Route. Though her first love is fiction, she's currently having a love affair with poetry. Right now, she's taking life by the horns by moving to Hawaii (even though she's terrified of everything in the ocean). She also has a soft spot in her heart for antique maps and typewriters.

Clouds of chicken feathers float
Like summer snow on bitumen,
Meters before our windshields,
Teasing possibilities, including
Teleporting to regions, where
No terrorist or temperature
Inhibits any anodyne commute
Among school, work, home.

Desultory motoring, plus perfidious
Others, yet bring cultural collisions,
The likes of which, thereafter, seldom
Create cause for comfortable sharing.
Even persons, blessed to take early
Sabbath, fail at apotheoses involving
Children worn as shields, concrete
Tossed on lanes, random mad men.

Social lenticels need to offer better
Breathing, opportunities for walking
Away from ruins, improved survival 
Rates. Some numbers need no proof;
Shoah’s martyrs, fathers, mothers, 
Babies, remain as in vitro warnings.
We light candles, thank The Almighty,
Dream, awake, empower Am Yisrael.

At present, comparable to Final Days,
Quiet denizens, alerted by alternate
Realities, stridently grasp antiquities;
Fiends’ villages hold scant practical 
Wisdom, little truth, humanity, peace.
Thus, potatoes, rocks, hens jumping 
Off of pickups, justify overlooking 
No depredations. We locals extirpate.



Author Bio:
KJ Hannah Greenberg gets high on adverbs, mixes more metaphors than a platypus has pockets, plus giggles so much as to not actually be indomitable. What’s more, she flies the galaxy in search of assistant bank managers, runs with a hibernaculum of sometimes rabid (imaginary) hedgehogs, and attempts to matchmake words like “balderdash” and “xylophone.” Among Hannah’s forthcoming books are: Word Citizen (Tailwinds Press, 2015), Jerusalem Sunrise (Imago Press, 2014), The Little Temple of My Sleeping Bag (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), and Simple Gratitudes (Propertius Press, 2014). Her newest releases are The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles (Bards and Sages Publishing, 2013), and Citrus-Inspired Ceramics (Aldrich Press, 2013). 

A rose is common,
picked frequently for an array of reasons.
If not careful,
its thorns will pierce through the skin of the holder -- 
only a strong individual can withstand its sting.

One can appreciate its beauty,
with its many sizes and colors,
diverse in many ways. 
It prospers and prevails to bloom;
only if taken care of.
But, if neglected, 
it ceases to thrive and falters,
crumbling beneath the most fragile hands.

Given to various people such as mothers, friends, and lovers,
the rose is always present,
always shared, always admired.

a rose is a delicate thing.


Author Bio:
Courtney Mansell is a high school senior in Redmond, Oregon. She had studied in the international baccalaureate program, along with participating in several extra-curricular activities including theatre and music. She especially enjoys writing and creating music and art. Although very active in the arts, she is going to be attending the Oregon Institute of technology to pursue a career in the health field. 

Because our mouths were glued shut with Band-Aid brand tenderness
When we were jealous of the girls whose hair was pulled
by a freckle faced boy on the blade grassed playground--
Because we knew what it meant when a boy picked on you.

Because when I woke up to him spit shining me
With a calloused hand that was rough against my sandpaper core
Even though I had been asleep in his oil stained sheets when he started
I told myself that it was my fault he was so confused by the word rape.

Because when a heavy lidded boy drives over bodies and shoots women
All because he wants to climb his way to a location he feels entitled to reach
The say it is agenda pushing when we finally say
Enough.


Author Bio:
Brittany McIntyre, a recent graduate from Marshall University's MA program, lives and writes in West Virginia. Her work has been published in The Dying Goose.

Isabel was fourteen, Jose sixteen, when Angel was born.
    The judge ordered them to get married;
          otherwise Jose faced rape charges.
His mother, a drug dealer, got custody of the baby
     and Isabel went back into foster care.

The morning I drove Isabel to see Angel,
     the grandmother was sitting in a beat-up armchair,
holding an empty coffee can on her lap
     while she wrapped a rubber band around
a thick roll of bills. She didn’t know where
     Jose had taken the baby or when they’d be back.

Isabel was furious that Angel wasn’t there;
     it wasn’t the first time either.
I’m raising your kid so you better be nice to me,
     the old woman warned her,
          otherwise I give him to the State.
 Screw you, Isabel said, you just do it for the money.

Isabel got to hold Angel for two hours on Saturdays.
     When she didn’t have a ride, she took the bus,
more than an hour each way.
     She always brought him a toy or a cute outfit,
          shoplifted if she had no money.
I can’t help it, she said. I cry when I leave him.

I don’t know what happened to Isabel.
     Occasionally I drive past the apartment;
it’s boarded up. Angel must be a teenager by now.


(forthcoming in Running Down Broken Cement (Main Street Rag, 2014)


Author Bio:
Nancy Scott is managing editor of U.S.1 Worksheets, the journal of the U.S. 1 Poets' Cooperative in New Jersey. "Isabel and Angel" will appear in Running Down Broken Cement to be published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014. The book is a collection of narrative poems inspired by decades of work in New Jersey on behalf of homeless families and foster and adopted children.Nancy was a foster parent to Isabel (not her real name) when Angel was a baby.