In the yellow streetlight seeping
from the slice of window in the wall
you smirk and raise
one hulking caterpillar eyebrow, tweaked 
and plucked too neat
you used my tweezers, I know, I found
two hairs, crossed and thick
firm as mountains and peaked.
you raise your eyebrow, your lip
and say those used-up-as-yellow-sock words:

“Come to bed.”
meaning
let me screw your thoughts, your head.

your voice grates like cricket song outside
and your skin
pulled thin across your jaw and your
eyebrow and your
lip
and your
black, black as well water black
pupil in your eye
reminds me of all I can’t love about you anymore.

Your chin
as I follow you upstairs
dodging toys and split crayons on the floor
pouts and sprouts whiskers
adding to the list of everything
I want to pluck
stick, bend, beat, break.

When you’re finished whisper-stabbing
my name in my ear
I will crawl
past the mirror, a rectangle scar in the wall
I will creep to where the children
Breathe 
stove-gas quiet,
their mouths open in their sleep.


Author Bio:
Erica McKeen is a Canadian writer of fiction, poetry, and experimental works based in London, Ontario. She has recently ditched the university life to focus on her writing and the betterment of her mental health. She has a particular interest, in both her reading and writing, in the topics of feminism, insanity, and horror. Her fiction and poetry have been published in The Quilliad, This Dark Matter, Nom de Plume, and issues four and five of Occasus. Visit her blog on mental illness and living the creative life at www.ambertypewriter.wordpress.com

as rocks in the water.
We are stoic--
and stagnant—overseers at the bottom
of the pond. We are guardians
of the leaves and exploding star flowers that one day rise to the top
as buoys.
Storms never unearth us. The animals
swim and eat among us.
We stare as a pad breaks the water
—it shatters the reflective ceiling.
Becoming the buoy. The lily pad explodes; petals aim at the sky and leaves.
The stem remains hooked below. Between us rocks
in the water where we sit among the lily pads.


Author Bio:
Emily Walling’s work can be found in journals such as The Gateway Review, Apeiron Review, The Caribbean Writer, Cactus Heart, and upcoming in The MacGuffin and Riding Light Review. Her creative work is about the physical, emotional, and psychological connections people have with nature. She graduated from Bowling Green State University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and continues to work in higher education.

The sweet sweet sun’s coming down hard
What do we do with unmet desire?
Let it lick the iris in the eye
& glaze at the yellow mile
stretched ahead the tip of your nose
as if something could rest for once.
A foreign lie that takes time to come home.
 
Damascus is upon my gentle spirit &
makes me weak with visions.
The bending arms & legs
Have born the weight only shortly
before, too, succumbing to
the pleasure of letting go.
A well-spoken truth that turns its back.
 
Do I dare peer into the masked face?
Or send my soul on its own while I wait--
Not for the return, but the final broken
Moment of disgusted surrender
when all the purity I didn’t have
is gone once & for all.
A crisp ethic that has many names.
 
 
Author Bio:
Chelsea Grinstead is not concerned with where she ends up. God is her bread and butter. She graduated from University of Florida with a bachelor’s in journalism. She loves sunshine, reading, writing, yoga, and politics. She wants to go back to UF or maybe travel. She would love to be a missionary working in the developing world—but she wouldn’t mind being on bestseller lists either. To her, each day is a gift and an opportunity to be spiritual, being in oneness with God and truly connecting with people on that level. Poetry is how her mind works and is a natural way she expresses herself. When she reads others’ poetry, the pain or sorrow inside her is translated to endless beauty. Poetry is her land. 

We are not as heavy 
as the man whose skull is filled with dollars,
our voices do not rumble,
even though we cringe at the dark clouds
bulging down toward the horizon,
fearing the explosion of the holocaust
sparked by hate and dust.

Nobody has explained to him that breast milk is baby food,
even if he clings to his religion,
even if his blond hair makes him feel superior
on his raised bed,
treading on the cemetery of rights,
the promise of some sort of vague greatness
where his ego shines.

Spare us the meanness of your fabricated stepmother;
you may offer us, instead, the lightness and the light,
the crushed wishes of women 
who have been vilified for centuries
the crushed wishes of women
who have been vilified in their struggle to fulfill their goals.

Let me walk away from the shadows of your prejudice.
The fortitude of broken dreams
continues to behold the monsters of the past.

Yet we dream of being the protagonists of a new chapter,
even when we know that hope is not enough.


Note: In America gender and ethnicity continue to determine the value of one's work. An African American woman makes 63 % of what a white man makes, whereas hispanic women make 54%, even with the same training and experience. This poem is dedicated to those who struggle with the evils of sexism, bigotry and xenophobia on a regular basis. 


Author Bio:
Julia Hones had her poems and stories published in various journals and anthologies, both in print and online. She writes about being oneself in today's societies, relationships, gender and ethnic bias, modern slavery, the interaction between humans and nature, the impact of technology, and other subjects. Her poetry was a semifinalist for the Mary Ballard Poetry Prize 2015 and was recently shortlisted for the erbacce Prize 2016. She published her first poetry collection in 2016: "She Opened the Cage." To learn more about her list of published works you can check this link: http://juliahoneswritinglife.blogspot.com

She
She: is not
Without he
Add an ‘s’ like the
Shushing of a child
She enfolds he
Additive, entwined
Of course they are in this
Together
Yet he can stand
Alone.
 
Caught
Snared in a small trap,
Perhaps a possum
The steel teeth
Clench her foot
Blood, pain enough to
Cry out but not be heard
Or tangled
The quiet act of netting a butterfly
Easing her into a jar
Her wings flap wildly, then slow
A final flutter.
Yes, that’s it.
 
Loveless
Love reduced
Diminished
Less than promised
Desired, required
Less
Love.
 
Marriage

 
Author Bio:
An accomplished poet in her youth, Heidi Seaborn took a very long break. After three decades, three kids, four marriages, 27 moves and a business career, she started writing again with the advantage of all that experience. Living in Seattle, she currently benefits from David Wagoner’s mentorship. Her poetry has or will appear in Gold Man Review,Into the Void Review, Flying South 2016 Anthology, 3Elements Review, Windfall, Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, Ekphrastic Review, the Voices Project, the Ice Dream Anthology and elsewhere.

Into the pain deeper
they commanded--
the tiny white moths
that fluttered
in my bones shaking
me, fear insufficient
a term--
black fury, loathing
but a gauze curtain
falls, the scene afloat
behind it--
a dance in silence
the mouth frozen
in a grimace
between a smile
and moaning--
twist deeper
into the couplings
meant to wash out
the remembrances
so that finally
he could say
in truth,
no one else will ever
do that to you again,
indeed a truth
as the trapped moths
flew from the husks
of dreams and I
would never catch them
again, never retrace
that trajectory
the view finally opaque
with time, the bones
still and cold
hardly a ripple
but dig deep
into the ash
a knuckle bone still hard
may be sifted out
laid gently on the urn
too thick to burn wholly
just minerals now--
of archaeological
interest only.


Author Bio:
Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college Over 300 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. The natural world is generally her framework; she also considers the stories of people and places around her. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.