Sometimes I feel like the moon
that every wolf howls to
 
Up here in the gables of the clouds
waxing my crescent to make it full
 
They all, with their ears pointed skyward
whine the lonesome destiny of want
 
And I fear that if I howl back
it will be a barren squawk in the forest
 
Indeed no moon ever
had done such a thing.
 
It is a refuge though, to find a curtain,
a tree;
an evergreen to settle the shiver
 
If indeed, the howling should ever become
to much
​

Author Bio:
Atalie Rachael originates from Detroit Michigan. Her love for poetry started at seven years of age, and progressed into a passion later on. Her work generally revolves around life observations and experiences wrapped up in a language of metaphors and words. She has been published in Leaves Of Ink, and AllPoetry. Her favorite hobbies include reading, exercising, and taking photo's of nature. She posts her work to Instagram, and currently edits a book of poems to be made ready for publishing. 

You list female deities as you lie on the shower floor, birthing your own womb;
a holy battlefield slick with blood and cervical mucus.

For every nail whose polish you strip, you name another goddess, until you have a full
hand of flesh colored tips.

You thought of cast iron fish today, and you imagine biting into one like an apple,
to ensure that your nailbeds are pink and not blue underneath the cheap red nail polish.

You have your mother to thank, and you do, because to resent her would be to spite all
the women who constructed your lineage and who knew before what you know now.

In five days, this will be over
(give or take a couple pairs of dirty underwear)
(give or take thirty years)
but until then you will continue to wear black pants and buy color safe bleach.

You consider the cost of an iron fish, and resolve yourself to buy one for your
daughter and for your daughter’s daughter.


Author Bio:
Celeste is a new writer, working hard to sort out the fluff in her head by way of the California Community Colleges system. Her interests include daydreaming and procrastinating. She is having a difficult time convincing people to call her CJ, which she prefers.

Clinton and Shane are two Texans I just met
hanging out over dad’s backyard in Ft. Worth, TX.
It’s Saturday morning and there’s a train whistle 
moaning from two streets down. Clinton has a Rolling Rock;
Shane is touting his new diet plan. Clinton’s hands 
are wrinkled and as parched as mine, but the blackness 
of his skin is lustrous in the sun, unlike my pale pink. 
I can tell my dad is nervous, as he always is in the presence 
of a person of color. I’m envious of Clinton’s 
John Lennon bifocals and the ease of his stance--
the way he seems to sway with each swallow.

Clinton says he used to weigh 225, but he’s down to 160. 
Shane claims he’s about the same as he sips his 
green-glassed longneck. “It started as a bet,” he says, 
“and then I made the Excel chart and we even got fitbits.”

“Well, you got the fitbit,” Clinton interjects, 
“I just hit that track every mornin’.”

“My system is 1,200 calories plus 25% of what I burn 
exercising,” Shane chimes in, “I figure if I hit the treadmill, 
I can have a sandwich or this beer, or some ice cream, 
‘cause you know I ain’t gonna quit the ice cream. Plus, 
I ain’t about to run…I gotta have a smoke every now and then.” 
“Amen to that,” Clinton says as he extends the clink of his bottle.
Shane offers my dad a beer, but he declines, knowing that 
the paleo diet won’t suffer this foolishness. 

Dad begins to tell them about less carbs, the benefits 
of eating nuts, no gluten, no dairy, beef, vegetables, 
and of course, no alcohol. It all sounds pretty awful to me 
as I imagine a giant plate of hot chicken or enchiladas mole, 
but he clearly has won this varsity health match. I never 
had the desire to diet and don’t know why, but sometimes 
I just forget to eat; perhaps out of self-loathing--
fearing the same beer-barreled belly, glacially 
creeping around my waist.

How could dad be seventy-four? I was just fourteen and could 
eat a whole can of Pringles on the way home from basketball 
practice and still finish off a flank steak and baked potato 
and never break 150. Shane is right. It probably has more 
to do with the exercise, but I don’t get the exercise high.

My father stares vacantly behind his sunglasses off at the train,
cataracts making his eyes strain against the light as Shane’s 
diatribe about his ex-wife segues into a discussion of lawn equipment 
and high school football trophies. It’s been a half hour now and as usual, 
I haven’t said a word. 

I wonder what I will muster one day when dad has taken 
his last ride. What it will be like to have room to conversate 
without his oppressive ebullience? Will any of my ideas be worth
talking over fences? I’m already wishing I could hop the rails 
with him, ride the blinds, gaze forever into his eternal sunset 
beyond these chain-links and stockyards. We’ve traveled 
too far together, to know any different.


Author Bio:
Ryan O. Murphey is a Nashville based educator and songwriter who was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2010 for producing the best bluegrass album.

gender: shoving people in boxes
as long as anyone can remember.

but what is gender?
a misconception?
a label
a poor definition?

what do we do
when people are climbing
out of the boxes and
throwing them away?

burning the bridges 
between male
and female

we are all the same.

what worth does gender have any more?


Author Bio:
Alix Pierce is an eighteen-year-old student from Aden Bowman Collegiate in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. She often writes in her spare time and enjoys writing both stories and poetry. She especially loves poetry because it has no boundaries and it is a unique and personal way of expressing her feelings and emotions.

She’s unhappy
Very lonely 
She cuddles with her kitten, cappy 
She looks to be cozy 

Very lonely 
Wants comfort 
She looks to be cozy 
The affection she lacks and also suffers 

Wants comfort 
She feels abandoned 
The affection she lacks and also suffers 
In need of a companion 

She feels abandoned 
Doesn’t feel the love 
In need of a companion 
Wants to find true love 

Doesn’t feel the love 
Walks around 
Wants to find true love 
She hears a sound 

Walks around 
Might see her soulmate 
She hears a sound 
Its her soulmate 


Author Bio:
Yasmine Picardo is a senior at Alameda High, studying creative writing. 

We are children of a lower gear
Greased on chicken wings and beer
With shiny pants and rusted flies
Broken teeth and lacquered eyes

We are children of a lower gear
Where the child is free to steer
No more family no more grind
Flush the tears and nurse the wine

We are children of a lower gear
No longer engaged in fear
Of losing self or gaining hell
We jam the pump and drink the well

We are children of a lower gear
Deaf to what the clean lambs hear
But God’s Peterbilt pulls up near
Because we’re His children of a lower gear

​
Author Bio:
William Peck is a retired teacher and counselor of inner city children. He is also a lover of Dylan Thomas and E.E. Cummings. 

When the rain stuck
to the house, made
the black night slick,

she did as dogs do
and found a fat round
pillow, traced circles, 

then settled in to pay
attention: ears soft
triangles, eyes hushed

water-blue, still as creek
stones—as if there were
nothing of more urgency 

than dark drops making
maps on the pane—as if
the greatest insistence

was the symphony
just before her—rumbling,
electric, wild—as if metaphors 

never mattered, and there 
could be no string of words
more pressing than a storm 

singing over wet lilacs, no other 
answer beyond the full quiet 
of your own soft being.


Author Bio:
Emily Patterson is a writer and editor in Columbus, Ohio. She studied English and Music at Ohio Wesleyan University, where she was awarded the F.L. Hunt Prize for most promising creative writer and the Marie Drennan Prize for Poetry. Emily's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spry Literary Journal, catheXis Northwest Press, Pinkley Press, Eunoia Review, and Harness Magazine Issue III: Poetry and Motherhood. Emily is currently pursuing an MA in Children's Literature at The Ohio State University.

In silence I’ll wait, 
I’ll watch you in my memories. 
So happy, so free. 
In person I don’t know you 
So distant, so untouchable 
Slipping through my fingers, I try to grasp 
But the more I grab the more it disappears in my hands. 
The funny thing is that I believed it all.
I listen, and I got lost 
In everything, 
in magic, 
in make belief, 
But I closed the book. 
Because I knew it wasn’t real 
But I’ll hold on to the memories 
Because they were real, 
To me. 

“She is older than the rocks among
which she sits; like the vampire, she
has been dead many times, and learned
 
the secrets of the grave . . .” Walter Pater
wrote in the 19th Century. “Are you warm,
are you real, Mona Lisa, or just a cold
 
and lonely lovely work of art?” Nat King
Cole sang in 1950, the arrangement by
Nelson Riddle. The recording, the B Side
 
to “The Greatest Inventor of Them All,”
made Number 1 on the Billboard chart.
In 1911 the poet Guillaume Apollinaire
 
was arrested for the painting’s theft
from the Louvre and implicated Picasso
though both were exonerated. Americans
 
bought six Mona Lisas but the original
was identified by Da Vinci’s fingerprints
in the oil. Her husband was Florentine
 
businessman Francesco del Giocondo,
likely involved in the trading of female
slaves. At the painter’s death in 1519
 
at the palace of the King of France
the portrait remained unfinished after
over 10 years of work. La Gioconda
 
died in a convent where she was found
innocent of sexual scandal. Da Vinci paid
a musician to play flute to set the right
 
mood though she is not the central subject
of the masterpiece. Her smile is the door
to the strange mountains in the distance.


Author Bio:
Nels Hanson grew up on a small raisin and tree fruit farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California, earned degrees from U.C. Santa Cruz and the U of Montana, and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations. 

winter is already a memory
& I don’t understand time very well
I remember right now tomorrow, today,
and it scares me that I’m writing a memory.

transient:
peripheral craving
fogged and artificial
when a bite of cereal isn’t enough
when it’s cloudy and I’m still squinting
fingers digging toward marrow
because just laying together isn’t enough.

enduring:
deep hunger
longing for longing’s sake
(palm out, wide open)
aching — I know how it feels to be truly hungry.

cereal is already a memory
& the stomach ache of a full stomach
is far worse than the stomach ache
of an empty stomach
and it scares me that I’m eating a memory.


Author Bio:
Alisa Otte has been writing and journaling for as long as she can remember. She aims to write about what she doesn't understand, about those moments when she gets a pit in her stomach but can't figure out why. Writing is as essential to her as eating and breathing. She follows the modernist movement of poetry almost religiously, and draws on poets such as Rilke, Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay for inspiration. Alisa is about to begin her final year of university at Colorado State University and is currently studying creative writing in New Zealand at Massey University. She has been previously published in The Tau, Momaya Press, and Cicada Creative Magazine.