From the Sycamore a brown leaf escapes
into Romero Creek -- I watch winter
with its skeleton trees, bark falls beside grey
water, grey as  my husband’s
face on Christmas morning as he remembers
twenty years before the morning he bulldozed
a Vietcong village into a green blackened hole.


Author Bio:
I have been writing since I was in the sixth grade. Yet, it was poetry that has given me the greatest enjoyment and love. I began by red-lining important images and metaphors in poems and now I try to create them myself. Poetry has given me a voice and has been also my guide.

I wanted to tell you 
when the blue moved 
through the maple boughs
that the first note you sent
went straight to my heart
that l loved you more deeply
with every glimpse of your soul 
your manuscripts revealed
that your presence in the world 
convinces me of God


Author Bio:
Cynthia Sharp has been published in Toasted Cheese, Haiku Journal, 50 Haikus & Three Line Poetry and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net Anthology. She lives on the west coast of Canada, where she enjoys photographing the exquisite beauty of nature.

I tried to turn my body inside out. Dispelled my flesh and hair into oceans while trying to
procure myself out of my mouth.
I bend over the water with my spine protruding and I become a half-human, half-beast
thing with runny eyeballs.
The shoreline was carved from porcelain.

My teeth ache. A funny thing it is to live inside a fragile shell. I carry it on my back and I
feel it get heavier between my cheekbones.
I am trying to purge the world between my jaws,
and when I look in the mirror I think how hair is actually a dead thing from the scalp
down and the only part of it that is living is under my skin.

Fold me into a skeleton. I do not need this carcass.
Let me get rid of all of this. Let me get high-
let me drink my body fluids from a carton.
It is euphoria that feels good on my tongue
the taste of my own insides-
technicolor.
delicious.
please. I want some more.

Understand that
I am hellbent on this.
I want to implode and
grind my body down to ashes and lick them from the ashtray-
I want to lap my nerve endings up from a bowl.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and I will teach you how to disappear completely
from the inside out
pull your organs outside of your body-
you have been vacuumed like you were afraid of when you were six.
what color are my lungs? let us find out.

I will rid this place of me-
I will do it with my own mouth.


Author Bio:
Leah Thomas is a 23-year-old Appalachian-American and a student at Morehead State University in Kentucky. She is a terrible dancer.

        A pantun is like a hawk with a chicken––it takes its time about striking. 
                                                                                Malay proverb

Headlights are strung into the darkening sky.
Just off the highway a fever rises––sprawling
intentions. The night is a damp cloth,
stretched tight over the town’s illumined limbs.

Just off the highway a fever rises––sprawling
lights displace your presumed directions––bundled,
stretched tight over the town’s illumined limbs.
A hawk takes its time. Chicken ruffles its feathers.

Lights displace your presumed directions––bundled,
your arms are wings against the belly of night.
A hawk takes its time. Chicken ruffles its feathers.
You drive in circles, cutting the corners. At every turn

your arms are wings against the belly of night.
The mirror splits your view, which way––
you drive in circles, cutting the corners. At every turn
a flickering eye is waiting, cranked up to be.

The mirror splits your view, which way––
attention. As you stand in line for more,
a flickering eye is waiting, cranked up to be. Hawk,
when it strikes, pounces feathers into darkness. 


Author Bio:
Leonore Hildebrandt has published poems in the Cafe Review, the Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, the Spoon River Poetry Review, and the Quercus Review, among other journals. Her translations of Rilke’s Elegies have appeared in Cerise Press. Her letterpress chapbook, The Work at Hand, is available from Flat Bay Press. Her first book of poetry THE NEXT UNKNOWN is now available at flatbaycollective.org. Winner of the 2013 Gemini Poetry Contest, she received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Maine Community Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission. She teaches writing at the University of Maine and serves as an editor for the Beloit Poetry Journal.

A snowflake fell onto the windshield
It softened--melted away
A subtle and gentle trace
Of who we were
And where we were going.

A couple grays near the temples
when I look in the mirror,
I see my paint has faded with time.
Your mileage may vary.

When I look in the mirror,
I note the lines kissing my eyes.
Your mileage may vary,
depending on where you drive.

The lines that kiss my eyes
are scratches like the scar across my deltoid.
Depending on where you drive,
your scratches may vary.

Like the scar across my deltoid,
my aching back is a bumper sticker.
Your stickers may vary
with the miles you’ve traveled.

My thinning crown is a bumper sticker,
and city mileage has faded my paint.
But when I see the miles I’ve traveled,
I smile back at the grays in the mirror.


Author Bio:
Colleen M. Farrelly, a graduate student in Biostatistics, is a freelance writer whose work has recently appeared in Lake City Lights, The Casserole, Vine Leaves, Four and Twenty, and The Recusant. She enjoys working out and volunteering her time.

Of course he has a reason,
the blinking sky is full of its 
own incalculable logic,
and of course the bending
of trees is to be expected.
All the events of this place
have simple explanations,
and of course what seems
a detriment is a gift, what
seems a detachment may
be the deepest known
connection, and bruise
purple is color of many
admirable species of 
soft, fragrant flora.


Author Bio:
JD DeHart is a writer and teacher. His work has appeared in Eunoia Review and The Commonline Journal, among other publications.

That moment: the second between when you speak
and I write, reading the movement of your lips,
a symphony on paper, not yet formed in words.
You tell of the day of your birth, the fairgrounds

where the sheep and goats line up, speaking
the language of sheep and goats, as they step
onto the scale to determine their worth
and wait for father to buy the roasted peanuts

he promised you for behaving, helping him
load the cattle onto the trailer without a license
plate. You worried cops would pull you over
after a chase, you in black eye-mask and stripes

like Saturday morning crooks. Your mind wanders
to carnivals from stories, sideshows and ladies,
bearded and fat. And shame
on anyone who pays for entertainment

that degrades another human being. Yawn, recline
in your office chair to appreciate the pond
where your grandfather fell through
ice to save your father from drowning

when he came home drunk from Nam.
And you always return there, as if you
were the one to tromp through chemical jungle,
and come out alive but scarred--

the face of a dead, but lucky man. You lose your place
in your recitation, this message I’m supposed to relay
for you—the cancer that has spread throughout
your family. Tumors of breath, of hands

that cause you to be quick to anger and not so
quick to forget. I want you to find solace, absolution
in constellations—the messages from God, written in light
without humor or irony. Like when my father vowed

to shit a gold brick if we got together, you said he’d
only use it to buy more silver. So you hold me
because he never did. Safe—away from the fire. I ask
if you’ve lost your place again and you say, No.

The pond ripples with the absence of the dragonfly
and as we practice scales in a well-lit room
faux-wood paneled, surrounded by sleeping children
and cats—too many to mention without causing

an eyebrow to raise in curiosity, judgmental.
You laugh at what flashed behind cloud-blue eyes
and we know after this composition is complete
we’ll edit hours and words away, then make

love on the futon where our first son was created,
consummating our commitment beyond
death. Because we know about rogue planets,
string theories, and reverse engineering

from documentaries narrated by paid actors
that have never visited this land where Mormons
traced lines across the soil on their retreat
from persecution. This land where salvation comes

metered out in small doses—the sweat that beads
on our brows, works into our eyes as we pull
weeds from the garden where only spinach
and cilantro seem to thrive. Come Friday, I’ll make

the trip—the five hour drive—to pick up my kids,
then we’ll be a family again. Until Sunday.
Though my ex looms in the corner, like the pile of hair
in The Grudge, ever-present, encouraging 

us to make mistakes, to lose focus
of what matters and what we possess:
these small moments, the seconds
between when you speak and I write. 


Author Bio:
Jennifer J. Pruiett-Selby is a teacher and mother of four, with a Master’s in English from Iowa State University. Jennifer lives in very rural Iowa where her column {just a word} appears in the local newspaper, and has been published in Red River Review, Matter Monthly and Four and Twenty.

It was a crowded day
the smell of flowers, candy
wafting in the summer air

Girls with bows in their hair
boys in collared shirts
hands held in reassurance

I saw a child selling balloons
barefoot, tattered clothes
a face wrinkled beyond his years

He was my age
but there was no hand
to hold his in this crowd

I silently watched
as he sold coloured dreams
for a penny a piece

I saw the longing for ice cream
in his young eyes,
as he eyed ice cream cones
held by hundreds of smiling faces

My parents said it's time to go home,
and I followed them,
looking back
every other minute,
as the balloon seller
grew smaller and smaller,
and was finally out of sight

I still wish I had bought him an ice cream.


Author Bio:
No matter she does as her day job, Shubhangi is a passionate poet, guitarist and singer-songwriter. An economics graduate with an MBA in Marketing, she has nurtured her poetry throughout her adolescence up to now. Her poems deal with various themes, ranging from nature, love to the experience of being a woman in Indian society.

Turquoise in the vowed silence matrimony
Turquoise like the way a culture hangs on
How my heart pounds—smooth cracked
            stone of blues—turquoise
Turquois is the answer to separation
                        melded in white gold, framing
This textured poem gone turquoise,
            is a fissure
                        Left in me



Author Bio:
Jenn Gutiérrez considers herself a child of the woods—her forts still hold. She has spent the last six years pursing her doctoral degree in Curriculum Studies & Teaching from the University of Denver, but she also holds a MFA in creative writing from Southampton College, LIU. She has two collections of poetry: Weightless (2005, out of print) and Silence Imbibed (2011, Anaphora Literary Press) and has had work published in various journals including The Texas Review, The Acentos Review, Bacopa Literary Review, and others. Her latest passion is the combining of her scholarly interests as a qualitative researcher and her experience as a poet, aspiring to join the ranks of arts-based researchers such as Eliot Eisner, Tom Barone, and P. Bruce Uhrmacher.