I have given life to six great people
Causing my belly to stretch and protrude like a little pot
From fifty-four months of providing a nurturing haven in my womb
Stretch marks snake their way up and down my belly and buttocks
Like the stripes of a zebra
Gravity has taken its toll on my breasts
Even though they stand proudly held in place by firm support
The have nourished little ones
And my hips have spread like the wide plains of the Sahara
Rubbing together as I walk.

Gone are the days when my belly stretched out flat across my middle
And I could twist and bend like a worm in all directions
And the hands of my beloved could wrap itself around it in a single grip
Gone are the days when my breasts stood at attention
Boldly and proudly screaming of youthful exuberance
And gone are the days when my hips were nicely molded and firm
With a gap between them

As I embrace the new shape and design of my body
I feel no shame, only pride
It is a revelation of the fact
That I have given life
This gift I celebrate today


Author Bio:
"I am an old-fashioned woman who loves God, knowledge and documenting daily life, culture and women’s issues through words and pictures."  Ooluss Louisa Ibhaze started writing at a very early age with her friends and sisters as my proofreaders. She loves the ability to create characters and make them do what she wants. Coming from a family with many women, growing up was fun as there was always something to gossip and argue about. Her writing is greatly influenced by spirituality, passion for African culture and tradition, gender and life experiences. If given the opportunity to come back to the world as an animal, she would come back as an eagle. She holds an Msc in Medical Sociology, a second Msc in Globalization and Development and a BSc in Sociology and Anthropology. She has one published novel, a number of magazine and online publications, and a blog. She also has online journals on the World Pulse Project, Naija Stories and African Writer. She has recently completed her first poetry collection titled "Winds Of My Sahara." When she is not writing, she indulges in her other passions, which are taking pictures and traveling.

Be gentle when you
speak to her.
She has no words
to tell you the pain
she feels.
Her soul is as
brittle as glass--
untempered by time.
Somewhere along
the way to where
she is now,
she lost the map
to where she wanted
to go.
The dreams she dreamed
shattered into shards,
piercing her panache…
breaking her belief
in what she could be.
She fell through the world--
Alice into a twisted Wonderland
where the Rabbit had teeth.
Climbing back out
took all her strength.
She is a shell around
heartbreak.
A whisper could
crush her.
She’s fragile
like that.


Author Bio:
Rie Sheridan Rose is the author of five chapbooks of poetry. Her poems have been published in Mythic Circle, Dreams of Decadence, Abandoned Towers, and online in Electric Wine, Abyss & Apex, and Penumbra. She won the National Space Society of North Texas Poetry Contest in 2011, and made Honorable Mention in the 2012 contest. She has also been published in the Boundless and Di-Verse-City Anthologies.

I saw a large woman
sitting on a tipped over
Target cart waiting
for the bus yesterday,
the first warm day of spring. 

I don’t think she’d care about
the recent news story:
Target Apologizes
for Labeling Plus Size Dress
Manatee Gray. 

I think most women have more
to worry about. 
At least the women who
have to take the bus.
She fights the patriarchy

in steel toes & blue collars.
The cart was cock red & thick
plastic, buckling under her.


Author Bio:
Jennifer Jackson Berry lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Stone Highway Review, 5AM, Main Street Rag, Jet Fuel Review, Amethyst Arsenic, and Mead, among others. She is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications, forthcoming in 2013) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press, 2003).

 "Do you love me? I mean really love me. Because if you don't... I'll just have to kill you."
-Sofia in "Vanilla Sky"

Again, you ask if my heart beats for you

I could simply say ‘yes’- yet again
But it sounds condescending
evoked to placate an insecure
if not selfish soul
You are not Sofia-
you have no self
Your self is the self of a million souls-
Sored, poor, scorned, othered, forgotten
Silence, then, is more dignifying
Why should a spoken answer matter?

Is it not enough that
I am right here beside you
when everyone else has left?
Does it not suffice that
I converse in your tongue
and perorate around your dogma?
You can put a tail on me
and I will have no complaint
Your faintest whisper drowns
the most raucous sound

You can cage me in a box
too small for interlopers to get in-
I could not be more free!
I spot you without effort
even in a throng of thousands
Let me give chase to your umbra
Smile and disarm me-
I will turn my back on a world
that abnegates you,
that debases your dream

for the petrichor of plenitude
to take over the fetor of want
for barricades of prejudice
to crash down beyond repair
for bloodshed to stop
for freedom to grow wings
for justice in its purest self
to be like the rain in summer
inseminating the dead earth
that life may spring from favelas

Raunchy movies expended
the lexicon of love
the same way the greed of a few
depleted chance for the many
Rhetoric is depreciated
Mine for you is beyond triviality
It rises above hyperboles
that might plague my speech
Your poverty is my reality
Everything else is theory,

or fallacy, or fraudulence
I shall confront the lies
that distort your truth
I shall not tire telling the poor
they are not blessed
I will abandon fair weather
to struggle with you
when hard rain falls
and violent wind glides across your face
with threats of perdition

Did I –somehow- answer your question?


Author Bio:
Cheryl L. Daytec is a lawyer and educator from the Philippines. For more than half of her life, she has been an activist advocating for peace and human rights. She actively works on issues affecting indigenous peoples and minorities, women, children, the LGBT community, political dissenters, and other marginalized groups. A member of one of the indigenous peoples in the Philippines, she teaches at Saint Louis University in Baguio City, her birthplace.

Her poems- most of which deal with injustice- have been published in magazines in the Philippines and elsewhere. She believes that poetry should articulate the aspirations of the oppressed. She listens voraciously to the music of the 60s and 70s which, according to her, connects to the soul of humanity and expresses its aspirations for peace and equity. She loves gardening and making beads, as well as exploring natural wonders.

Aside from the Philippines, she lived in Europe and the United States. She considers herself a citizen of the world.

I let the medication
Enter into my body
Polluting
Invading
Destroying
All within its reach
All that is healthy
I watched it destroy me
I watched it destroy my life
It made me angry
It made me sick
It made me hate
Until the next time
Knowing it was making me live


Author Bio:
I am a mother with 2 children undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. This point reflects my immediate thoughts.

*after Rainer Maria Rilke

                                                            "It is better to heed a wise man’s rebuke
                                                            than to listen to the song of fools."
                                                                                       — Ecclesiastes 7:5

I don’t bother with me. They are more.
I say, “Do not know me.”
That’s me.
Not knowing is me. It all goes and saps
strength like dry bones,
always waiting for the wind (you know)—
that’s me.

Yes, this is so, they think: I am;
there is no other way.
Of course I have a mind.
The mind is reason. Mind is logic.
Sometimes I think I’ve gone societal.
(That’s me.)

Oh, it is a dance!
plié and bow as humbling and giving.
Good thing I never have to see me.
I will always come when they call.

This has never been strange behavior,
traveling between people, around the needs,
caring, out-of-touch.
That’s me.


Author Bio:
First and foremost, I’m a woman. I was a wife, and will be again in time (hoping by the end of this year—marrying my best friend). I have three living children out of five—Dunstan was lost three months before birth, Vincent recently passed after 2 ½ years battling the rare cancer PNET. He was 24. I have a BGS and an MA. The credentials did not make me a writer. I’ve been writing since I could take pen or pencil to a paper, even if the lines weren’t letters at the time. Gran’ma Ginny (an oral storyteller, keeping up with her Indian heritage) and I shared stories all the time. She was my inspiration. Today, I try to put her stories onto the paper. It is a difficult task.

I’ve had work appear online in Diagram and EWR, and in printed form in Confluence. A piece of my work has been performed by the Dance Collective of Fort Wayne, Indiana. I have done several readings on the campus of Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne and at the Three Rivers Coop of Fort Wayne in a series called First Fridays.}[=

I nod half-smiles
In waiting rooms,

Breathing the stink
Of latex gloves

And rubbing alcohol,
Waiting for nurses to call.

I was the changer of tides,
The boy throwing stones

Into the sea
To send surf raging

Toward distant shores.
Now I clean pools

In Trump Tower shadows,
Imagining a lost daughter

Spreading blankets
Over my grave.


Author Bio:
Kirby Wright was a Visiting Fellow at the 2009 International Writers Conference in Hong Kong, where he represented the Pacific Rim region of Hawaii and lectured in China with Pulitzer winner Gary Snyder. He was also a Visiting Writer at the 2010 Martha’s Vineyard Residency in Edgartown, Mass., and the 2011 Artist in Residence at Milkwood International, Czech Republic. He is the author of the companion novels PUNAHOU BLUES and MOLOKA’I NUI AHINA, both set in the islands. His futuristic novel will be released in 2013 in Dublin, Ireland.