​A bus form and sunscreen
Hairbrush and hair ties
Tissues and detangling spray
Snacks and a charge cord
Hoodie, windbreaker, uniform
Ankle socks and sweatpants
Running shoes in a grocery sack
Spikes in a yellow bag.
I have everything I need
But I’m still not ready to run.


Author Bio:
Sadie DuBois is a 9th grader who enjoys playing soccer, running track, and playing the guitar. She leads a busy life, but in her free time, Sadie writes poetry and prose. She has many friends and loves the outdoors. Her friends and family describe her as intelligent and humorous.

Manifold murmurs occur 
In the backyards of the facades
That we take to be real and to be everything
Grasping the surface but not its hinterlands
Its vast spaces tucked away like mountains in the fog
Not needing to hide because they are unseen anyway

Landscapes that long linger
In the wind and in mind and the imagination
In the land, the country at large, a constellation of places
Are not as common as we think
For they may be isolated from a place called ‘elsewhere’

Landscapes that do not escape but stay
So we do not get lost all the way but only a little bit
May only survive in disconnected, distorted form
With their leftovers buried in ruins and pieces 

Lost-scapes then, are the landscapes we cannot remember 
Or those we have to give up, escape from
Though the land itself, if it could speak
Might urge us to stay, at least from time to time
Especially from one time to another
So we can look elsewhere in the meantime
Not to be confined but to move within the landscape
As far as it can take us

Landflight, then, making lostscapes from landscapes
Drowned worlds endangering memories of migraton
We are all migrants, but we forgot all about it
Considering borders rather than memories
As measurements, dividing lines, imaginary walls
Failing to find forms that would
Accommodate a way of thinking
That does not stop at the horizon

Landscapes no longer
Held within consciousness, no
Longer heard of, listened to or understood
Explanations are needed now, as to how
We have grown apart, where
One-ness is at best beyond belief for all involved
In an inverted way, with regard to all of us
And in relation to each other
We are too used to being strangers now. © Ursula Troche, 4.17


Author Bio:
Ursula Troche is a poet and artist who has lived and worked most of her life in London, England, and before London there was Germany and after there is (now) the north-west of England: the seaside by Cumbria - facing Ireland, thereafter America. She has appeared in various magazines and some of her poetry is inspired by Illinois, where she stayed in 2012.

On the margins of hill country
where the stripped quarries stand
men uniform their boys

and push with a hardened hand
their souls to glory.
Where the stripped quarries stand,

each man lays his story,
last checks on the bar, lifting
their souls to glory.

To their boys they are gifting 
all that they know,
last checks on the bar, lifting

half glasses as school jerseys flow
in this trace of a town, where
all that they know

is that grown dreams are rare
on the margins of hill country
in this trace of a town where
men uniform their boys.

Previously published in Glassworks, Fall 2015.


Author Bio:
On her first grade report card, Tina Tocco’s teacher wrote, “Tina always has very individual and creative ideas when she writes.” The editors at some journals, including New Ohio Review, Roanoke Review, River Styx, Crab Creek Review, Harpur Palate, Passages North, Potomac Review, and Italian Americana, must have felt the same way because they decided to publish Tina’s work. When Tina gets bored writing for grown-ups, she writes for kids, and is looking forward to having her children’s poetry collection The Hungry Snowman and Other Poems (Kelsay Books) published in Fall 2019. When she isn’t typing away at her day job creating K-12 materials, Tina likes to paint ceramics, listen to peculiar podcasts, and daydream about living in rural New England. Tina earned her MFA in creative writing from Manhattanville College, where she was editor-in-chief of Inkwell. Some of her favorite things are cats, popcorn, and the Lois Lowry book The Giver.

My father was far short of 5-10,
but I thought he was tall enough
to take a slingshot to the sun if
it was too hot. That didn’t begin
to explain the blooming sweat spots
in the pits of his short-sleeved shirts
that moored paisley ties and pen clips.
 
My father could shoot down anything--
the stars, the sky, the whole Mason-Dixon
line with his Willy Loman Ball mason jar
in Grandmother’s backyard, seeking solace
in arguments about Gubner George Wallace
and upping the Blue Book value of school
busing for his audience under that pin oak.
 
He turned down a Miata deal, bought Renault,
and went broke. He bought Kaiser aluminum
cars made in Chile and Li’l Abner amusement
parks. But to the end of his salesman’s days
he remembered the hot haze of an Alabama
September night, not the inquisitions into
his business decisions. He remembers the gasped
derision of his peers that one time, that one time
with the pass blooming into a clear interception
that he batted down instead. He argued it out
for 40 years with himself, replaying his blown shot,
hearing the jeers at this lost chance, the whole field
his for a quick catch and a sauntering prance. This
looming regret in the air made him​
taller than he was.

​
​Author Bio:
Pamela Sumners is a constitutional and civil rights lawyer from Alabama. Her special interest in religion cases has given her an unwholesome familiarity with the hairlines of Judge Roy Moore, Bill Pryor, Jay Sekulow, and Alabama governors who dispute that the Bill of Rights applies to Alabama. She now lives in St. Louis with her wife, their son, and three rescue hounds who think eyeglasses are a food group.

I don't wipe my eyes when I cry
For fear of the mark it might leave
and I'm lying to you when I say, its over
I hope and I pray that you'll leave

Remember my face smiling at you 
remember the words that I said
and keep all the letters that I wrote to you 
all the memories in your head

I don't wipe my eyes when I cry
For fear of the mark it might leave
and I'm lying to you when I say, its over
I hope and I pray that you'll leave

You ask me if I'll stay with you
But its not quire right this time
I promise to hold these memories dear
but not everything happens to rhyme

I don't wipe my eyes when I cry
For fear of the mark it might leave
and I'm lying to you when I say, its over
I hope and I pray that you'll leave

​
Author Bio:
Caroline has been writing poetry and music for six years. She is a Sophomore in high school and hopes to presume nursing, graphic design and photography. In her free time Caroline likes to read, write, exercise and tend to her flock of 13 chickens. 

Slow trains crawl through town
so slow that migrants can hop on
in freezing winter to warmer places.
Slow trains rattle and whistle
at street crossings where cars idle.
 
I hear the slow trains rumbling at night
against the brickwork of abandoned
warehouses and industrial lots: the metal
thuds of slow trains marshaled
for thousands of board-feet of lumber
 
echo at dawn in the rail yard. Slow trains
linked to push east through the desert
to Winnemucca and Elko, stacked high
with doors and windows like eyes staring
up, open to the sky and frozen nights.
 
Slow trains sound through my sleep,
creeping past blank squatters shacks
without foundations that tremble
at the heavy steel of loaded carriages.
This town defined by tracks coming
 
and going, the rails cold with ice
the trains rattling, cars banging
whistles blaring six times a night.
Slow trains pass in the dark, cars
wait while the long trains crawl by.
 
​
Author Bio:
Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college. Over 450 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. She is a Best of the Net and twice a Pushcart nominee. The natural world of the American West is generally her framework; she also considers the narratives of people and places around her. She is a retired teacher living in Oregon.

I live my life at a historic disadvantage
Though the color of my skin is not something I can manage
I hate to play the race card, but the reality is
I have to work harder to live where a white person lives
But that's only one disadvantage, as a matter of fact
Being a woman in this world also holds me back
But I don't give up, for I am not a fool
I try to change this world, that can be so cruel


Author Bio:
Alex is an 18-year-old college student at The University of Washington Tacoma. She hasn't done very much poetry in a traditional sense. She became interested in making music at a very young age and started writing raps. She started using the poetry as a way to make her raps more complex. However, she eventually branched off into making poems and raps separate. This poem will be her first official submission of any poem she's ever written.

When my bare feet
Step on the marble floor
Of any given temple
In any given country
To the south from China,
My husband says
‘You don’t know
All the people who were 
Here before you.
I will wait outside.’
I am holding the sandals
Swaying in my hand.
People pray there.
Sometimes they whisper.
Sometimes - sing.
But most often
They don’t even open lips.
I have never been
Of the church-type,
But temples do make me totally speechless, 
Then turn me into the storyteller, 
And finally - make me come back
To see the dawn breaking and getting scattered
On the white tiles lined with black.
‘Wanna get some breakfast?’ - he asks
Smiling, while I am fastening the sandal clasp.


Author Bio:
Yuliia Vereta is a young writer from Ukraine, who is creating essays, fiction, and poetry that comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comforted. Currently lives and works in China. Holds the Master of Arts in Translation. The majority of her works reveal sharp social issues, moral crimes, and emotional struggle.
Her other works were published in 2019 in Salmon Creek Literary Journal, Penultimate Peanut Magazine and Litro Magazine. She received the 2018 City of Rockingham Short Story Award for short fiction and became the finalist in 2019 Poetry Matters Project as well as 2019 Hessler Poetry Contest.

Just around back of the little yellow house,
The sun glistens on dew of green.
With bark standing straight
Taller and wiser than the dark, broken shingles to its right.
Branches drooping under the apple’s weight
Hang heavy like the arms of a willow.
We run faster than our feet can carry us
Where our past selves, round faced with short legs
Find the round and small rotting apples on the dirt.
Unlike our fresh cheeks, their skin feels of leather from age.
The leaves blow in the wind.
They fly as time travelers, making ripples that flood through time and space to now.
Loneliness nuzzled in recollection.
In memory I find myself,
Placing rotted apples in laundry baskets as I taste the fall gale.
In the backyard of the small plot,
The tree bows in recognition of the old lost and new gained. 
For she has watched me grow
And held my hand as I took my first steps
She is always bronze, strength exuding from her.
With broken branches, she smells of life.
Her grasp reaches far and wide to the heavens,
And her golden leaves fall slowly to the earth,
Letting us know she has given us her children
Until I remember
That the tree stands no longer.
What is past must stay there.
The apples have fallen their final fall.


Author Bio:
Sam Smiley is a writer from Racine, Wisconsin. They currently live in Chicago and study physics at DePaul University. Sam writes poetry and short fiction inspired by their experiences in the midwest and their year abroad in Thailand. They are non binary, use they/them pronouns, and can be found on Instagram @wordsflowlikewater. 

Home Finch, red head, fuzzy.
It’s back brown and white feathers spread to
A surprise of red. I gasp.
The plain bird accompanies in strips and plaid but
is too far away for sight or delight and definitely
not exotic purple or with turquoise plumage,
and this is not the Gulf of Mexico, Antiqua, The Borneo Islands,
or San Miguel, Mexico
But I still thrill seeing Home Finch
With the red head.

The waving trees 
reminds me of Mother 
taking me out in the world for
An adventure.
I climb into her red Chevy convertible
wearing a shocking pink, scaparelli topper.
Her smile next to mine makes it all possible.
Later, Eating the salty pretzel outside of the department store 
is the best part,
for in those days I did not need a boost,
of sighted iridescent feathers to give me strength,
as the joyous shopping trip culminated 
in our flight down the road.


Author Bio:
Thea Schiller, a New York Poet facilitates a poetry workshop at the Somers Library in Somers, N.Y. and holds a B.A. in creative writing from The City University of New York. Her poem, "Sarah" was the Orchard Poetry Prize winner in Furrow, University of Wisconsin. Recently, her poems have appeared in The San Diego Annual Poetry Review 2017-2018, Edify Fiction, The Ravens Perch, 4th & Sycamore, Lucent Dreaming, Hevria and many literary magazines in the past. When given the chance she follows her muse from Norway to Greece.