Their lips --
pink and plump, 
they must feel soft against mine.
I wish to kiss.

Their thighs --
thick and squeezable, 
they must feel smooth and plush under my curious fingertips.
I wish to bite.

Their hands --
busy and never still
they must feel rough in mine
I wish to hold. 

Them --
mysterious and interesting, 
I wonder what goes on in your head, 
Do you wish to hold, 
bite, 
and kiss me? 

Do you ever feel
Desire.


Author Bio:
Cari has been writing poetry since middle school. Her passion for writing started when she realized how much she loved music and decided she wanted to make it. Meaning, she started off making lyrics to soundless songs. She's inspired by intense emotions like anger, sadness and lust. 

The dusk has fallen and I struggle to familiarize myself with the subsiding serenity,
It has been the first time that I've felt a disconnection between the human body and it's soul,
And have inferred an ending, I'd probably would never wish to conclude!

Enclosed within the four walls; I felt slightly nauseous today.
These walls have always been the best pals of my isolation
They have seen me broken, bent and have heard my cries without complaining
They have never judged me!
But today, I see a certain amount of negligence in their company!
So, I swiftly slide the curtains and opened the windows to breathe some fresh air,
and started sipping upon my coffee.

Whenever I look outside the casement, I see the World in a wider view!
I see the clouds traveling with time, people changing with the change in winds,
and two more old faces gazing exactly the way I do.
I wonder what stories did they live?

As I kept sipping upon my coffee, I could sense the bitterness of it was multiplying each time,
As if the coffee beans have revolted against the leftover sweetness in my life,
-The mere memories of my child holding my fingers tight and walking barefoot with his tiny steps!
Even in my 70's I couldn't forget, It was the day when Sushil uttered "Papa!" for the very first time
and how easily a happy man's tears I cried!
But, as I said, people change with the change in winds,
The hands once which held tight, now lay untouched like the dried autumn leaves,
And how easily a tear drop fell from my eyes
An unfortunate father, today cries.

I didn't want anyone to catch a glimpse of this countenance displaying sob and pain
So, I closed the windows somehow convincing myself to better remain trapped within these four walls.

I kept the coffee mug aside,
and set my body to rest for a while
But closing the eyes didn't help either!
Instead it brought the visions of miseries and dread.
For I saw the houses burning, lives drowning, mountains aching and at last my wife's grave!
And I opened my eyes wide in the spur of the moment
Found myself breathing heavily with a face covered with sweat.
I sat down, I calmed myself, caught my breath again, and drank a glass of water.
I wondered, "Why did this happen?" 
"What did her grave signify?"

"Maybe I didn't offer the prayer!"

My grandmother Dammu always said, "One should offer a prayer before one sleeps,
for it helps in escaping mind from horrid dreams and hallucinations!"
So, I gave her thought, a thought; and decided to value her belief.
I closed my eyes again and offered a prayer.
I kept on chanting holy names as a lullaby to myself and truly felt that my senses were shutting down!
Yet, I only had one question dangling somewhere in my subconscious mind
"Will I wake up to see another day or not?"

if I do, "What is left with me to offer to this new day and what is left in the day to offer something new to me?
and If I don't, "Who would bury me?"


Author Bio:
Sameer Ved takes a great zeal in whatever work he does. He started writing two years back and have been embracing this art since then. He believes writing is the strongest form of expression to connect to one's emotions and most of his poetries are influenced from the emotional trauma which he has seen in the people around him. 

The open doorways in the house lead nowhere
For you are not there
All the doors have been taken off
Better to hear the footprint echoes of you walking away
The doors are spiked into the pathway leading up to the house steps
Better to pass all those doors and enter mine
The doorknobs have all turned rusty with the rain
They would not open for you anyway
You can stand on my front steps and see right into my dark house
Curtains open and windows cleaned only an hour ago
It's a beautiful summer day outside
Darkness reigns inside
A black hole letting nothing bright escape
But please come in
Things have changed since you last visited
I removed all obstacles and cannot shut you out
There is freedom inside
Cavernous and deep-breath'd freedom
I implore you to revisit those old rooms
One in particular
Up the stairs to the left
First doorway on your left
The biggest room with the tiniest closet
I'm waiting for you there
I will hear if you call hello
Call hello to me
Call to me
Hello 
Again


Author Bio:
Jennifer Erin Marston is a single mother of a twelve year old son living in Memphis, Tennessee. She survived four years at The University of Memphis and lives for the galleries of Memphis openings. She attends spoken word poetry readings at Crosstown Arts with her son. She brings friends to gallery openings who have never gone before. She has filled her bedroom with paintings of an abstract nature and fills her drawers with poems about the human condition.

― “It was a Dark and Stormy Night” from Edward Bulwer Lytton and Madness in Civilization by Andrew Skull

The author writes, 
“Bulwer Lytton on occasion
beat Rosina, and perhaps sodomized her.”
A better word is raped,
Mr. Skull, Lytton “perhaps” raped her.

Bulwer’s a writer, wrote 
“It was a dark and stormy night.”
His cliché, a taxidermized seagull,
Insisting its proof of life, 
even after death.

Rosina was carted off 
to an asylum.
She wasn’t mad.
She told the name-calling, 
fist-shaking truth 
at the voting box,
Bulwer’s Parliament re-election day.

Who would’ve blamed her
for the onset of insanity?
Besides the alleged rape,
Bulwer “set up a stable of mistresses.”
After her Dublin affair,
he took their kids
and their daughter died of typhoid.

I am in love with this Victorian.
Rosina called the Queen pigheaded
and threatened rotten eggs
against her Majesty 
in attendance of Bulwer’s play.


Author Bio:
Kathryn V. Jacopi is an English Department adjunct professor for Fairfield University, which is also where she received her MFA in creating writing. Her writings have appeared in Pudding Magazine, Statorec, Fjord, Manzano Mountain Review, and Drunk Monkeys. When she’s not reading, writing, and lesson planning, Kathryn’s often kayaking or enjoying her husband’s fantastic cooking. 

You know I wouldn’t hurt you.
That’s what I want to say
In the darkness of the bedroom,
In the space between the two
Beds that feels like an ocean
We have a choice to voyage
Alone. I want to ask her,
“Do you know (acknowledge,
Understand) that I wouldn’t
(couldn’t) hurt you intentionally?”
And listen to her deep breathing
Stutter across the narrow
Room, feel the air shift
With her as she moves
To lift her head and face me 
On my side. Perhaps she
Would laugh, the world
Too old for anything
(Everything) serious.
Or maybe there would 
Be enough tragedy 
To bring a solemn answer.
I get none of this.
She sleeps and I keep my mouth
Shut tight, under covers,
Never (always) wanting 
The truth to be told.


Author Bio:
Brittany Cooper is a twenty-year-old college student that’s been writing since she was nine years old and her father encouraged her to pick up a pen. Her first poem was about playing piano in the morning and ever since then, the power of words has been in her blood. When not writing, Brittany can either be found in class trying to earn a degree in English or at home watching Sherlock.

Lately I have not wanted to write a poem
or wake the dog up at one AM to urinate on the kitchen floor.

Yesterday I wanted to press my butterfly seashells 
onto blue canvas board, 
but I probably will not buy the canvas board,
so I stopped collecting the shells. 

I salute seashells because they are born of water -
the water I am leaving tomorrow. Vacation is over 
and the taste of September festers back inside my gums.

I wish I could fester here into the gums of the sea.

But I never knew how people could walk into that gray line 
of water that burns the esophagus.

Can you ever transmute sedimentary rock into butterfly wing? My life is somewhere, under water,
glued to a gray canvas board –



Author Bio:
Madeleine Gallo is currently a first year MA student at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in Susquehanna Review: Apprentice Writer, Fermata, Sun and Sandstone, Belle Reve Literary Journal, The Pylon, Sigma Tau Delta Review, Into the Void, Litro, and Rattle. After graduation, she plans to pursue a PhD in Contemporary American Poetry.

I feel like an artist. I’m not one,
but my head is full of paint.
No easel or studio or palette
or woman on a bed or fruit
for a still life because I only
wish that I could sit still long
enough to care about the still
lives of fruit, how their skins
touch, how I could add some
grapes for a little symbolic
splash of the blood of Christ or
maybe a few peaches in the mix
to hint at fertility or whatever I
see fit because it’s not real life.

No, I’m more abstract
not in a delicate, intentional kind of way
not dribbling paint
with a cigarette in the corner of my mouth letting
the ashes
fall on the canvas
and mix with the paint and channel all that chaos into arbitrary
powerful surges of energy and existence and what people call 
manliness. No, I don’t paint
with that confidence. I don’t even own a brush.

I prefer to gush colors
that I didn’t know existed
until they streamed down my face
until I squeezed their tubes straight
onto the canvas -- Alizarin Crimson,
Yellow Ochre, Phthalo Blue -- I start
scraping them desperately with my palette knife,
wounding the canvas,
exposing what’s underneath that blank
white. I think I’m finding its true colors
so when I realize that they’re mine
I keep scraping and
searching and
thinking
until it all turns brown then black.

I don’t plan to sell.
I’ll give it to you for free, please.
I’ll even pay you to take it
just so long as you can interpret it for me
and tell me what all this means.



Author Bio:
Hailing from Irvine, California, Rachel Higson just graduated with an English writing major and art history minor from DePauw University in Greencastle Indiana. She loves to skateboard, run, surf, paint, and snowboard. She has written over 14 articles for an online ethics magazine, the Prindle Post. Publishing three of her poems with A Midwestern Review, DePauw's literary magazine, before becoming its poetry editor and editor-in-chief, Rachel has pursued poetry throughout her college career. As a Fulbright recipient, she will spend the next year in Taiwan. Eventually, Rachel will go to graduate school for either writing or sociology, hoping to become a professor.

they will not come for us
as long as we stand here
with our faces turned
towards the bleeding blue
unblinking:

as long as we keep clutching
these dead tree trunks
breathing only 
towards tomorrow
they will not come for us

but once we pick up that bag
shrug them off and start walking
(me like someone 
with a purpose
you like someone who could not 
conceive of such a thing as a 
backwards glance)

they will come 
and they will be 
too late


Author Bio:
Laura Theis is an award-winning musician and writer and her short stories, songs, radio plays and poetry have been broadcast and published in the UK, Germany, and the U.S. Her new work is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, The London Reader, Enchanted Conversations and from Three Drops Press.
She has gained a Distinction in Creative Writing from Oxford University, is the recipient of the 2017 AM Heath Prize, and sings about mermaids, monsters, and strong women on badasssnowwhite.bandcamp.com

“I’m gonna puke,” I said.
Smart, not like sucking a stranger’s punch.
A lie, but it got him off me,
no less ethical than
undressing a barely-conscious teen.
He was looking for a trash can,
stumbling around in the dark.
Sure, I went to the costume party
looking like trash, a can for his refuse.
I wore a cheerleader outfit, 
from last year at high school. 
I was looking for trouble.
He was looking for 
someone to give it to.
I remember the green punch, 
then nothing ’til the sucker-punch--
waking bereft of friends
on the dirty floor
in a quiet dark room, 
not the party house.
I played unconscious when I came to,
Hoping that would make me safe.
It made me a more tempting target.
You’re not supposed to play dead
under depredation. 
He was standing in the hall, telling his buddy,
“I’ll go first; then, you can have her.”
His roommate was disinclined to participate,
but not motivated to intervene. 
Where could I go? How could I escape?
I didn’t even know where I was.
Underage drunk.
Every time he touched me, I said, 
“I’m going to throw up,”
and he got off. 
How long can it go on?
The doorbell rang, and it was my friends.
I heard him say, “No, she’s not here,”
And I yelled, 
“Help!”


Author Bio:
Sarena Mason is a part-time student, full-time writer, teeny-time author who has always preferred the voices in her own head to those around her. Her credits include: 2015-2016 Homer J. PIttard Creative Writing Award scholarship at Middle Tennessee State University and "Tennessee Easter" published in The Tennessee Magazine, April 2016 issue.

Achilles holds his breath
beneath the current bubbling over the tip
of his little boy, button nose. Mama holds him down,
her hand a boulder on his chest, but
with one leg he kicks out in
humanity’s Darwinian instinct.
Not just the heel, but the whole foot.
 
It isn’t logical any other way, in modern times.
 
In modern times, Hades is
a public park’s baseball diamond in 1996 suburban America,
and Styx is a river wrapped around its perimeter,
hidden by pricker bushes and dogwood trees in bloom.
Thetis isn’t Thetis,
whose wedding marked the first day of war fought for
pomegranates and beauty pageants,
but Theresa or Tara or
maybe some non-T name—Marcia. Victoria. Alice.
The possibilities are infinite.
 
Achilles is just shy of three and Mama imprisons him
below the pink petal coated river surface, promising,
Any second now, any moment longer, my good, brave, never dying boy,
until she drags him up up up
into the light of a sun kept stationary in space,
never once pulled by the chariot of a Titan or god spelled with a lowercase g.
He gapes,
little boy mouth flapping like a trout dying from fresh air,
his still developing lungs made into sheep-leather wineskins
half-full with water churning too much for mosquitoes to rest, so
she thumps at his back--
thwack, thwack--
leaving behind fingerprint bruises on skin.
The River Styx flows back through his throat,
burning as it goes.
 

Author Bio:
Sofia Lago is a New Yorker studying abroad in the UK, working towards a PhD in folklore and history. She loves mythology and fairy tales from around the world, and frequently incorporates both into her writing. Currently, she holds a bachelor's degree in history and a master's in Museum Studies. She's travelled to sixteen countries, and hopes to reach more. Her works, both prose and poetry, have previously appeared in Folio, Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal, Birds Piled Loosely, A Lonely Riot, and Junto Magazine.