A cruise to Stockholm.
The wake my past,
A trail radiating
To rock red buoys
Marking our Baltic lane
Through the atolls.
Gabriella’s engine
Pulses me alive,
Inspiring remembrances 
Of a childhood island.
First loves? Pleasant cargo,
Weight I sweat forward
Despite tolls and taxes.

A girl with dark eyes,
Jeans painted on thighs,
Stilletos her path 
On black boots
With gold zippers.
She flops on the wicker couch
Beside me, crossing legs
And smiling Cubist angles.
I imagine a first kiss
On salt-sprayed lips.
This girl is Gabriella,
Navigating boyhood lanes
Built by infatuations and sorrows.

My blood feels young.
Currents echo the shoals.


Author Bio:
Kirby Wright's second play, Asylum Uncle, opened at the Secret Theatre's LIC Festival in New York on November 4th, 2016. Wright was the 2016 Artist in Residence at the Eckerö Mail and Customs House in the Åland Islands, Finland. He is working on a poetry and flash manuscript set in Helsinki and Stockholm.

It was random, although the night was intentional. You touched my inner being like delicate fine art. The steadiness of your hands gathered my reluctance as if were a bouquet of white roses and directed it into a vase of free submission. It seemed as if you were fluent in the language of my pulsating heart. My flesh became immortal for a moment in time.  My better judgement went off like a siren but it was much too late, so precise, you were ahead of the game. So, we became in-sync like two beating drums, creating our own tunes and passionate, as we reunited two different cultures, two different tribes from our origin, near the edge of the sea, of the coast of, Mother Africa.
 
Poem on Michelle Obama’s Behalf:
Is there something in your eyes that keeps your mind obscured?
Is there something in your eyes that keeps your mind obscured? Has your hope spun into dust, is it my intentions you didn’t seem to trust?  What a ferocious appetite as you splurge on borrowed time just to vilify and mock me.  I’m a bit confused with the logic that you try use, it somewhat controversial as well a grave absurdity.  It seems your freedom of speech is now your new-found freedom of religion as you are constantly compelled to crucify me daily.  And now, we sit side by side, two grieving hearts forced in the company chaos; but, only one of us is found to be at fault.  It would be easy to recant your opposing views; but, it is with my deepest sincerity, that you would control your predominant attitude.  I can’t understand for the life of me how you can say insolence, that people immersed with melanin live with a deficiency and lack certain amount of resolve. Yet, when my beloved husband and I dispel that archaic stereotype, that old primitive fabrication, now you’ve become far too infuriated.  Your pathetic effort, your cold heartedness did not profit your gullible soul nor did it profit your selfish conspiracy to dethrone my humanity.  Why, why, why, I cannot make sense of your overwhelming preoccupation, is loathing what you do for a living or are you living only to despise me; and, if that be the case, I can perceive why my presence extremely vexes your apprehensions.  I did, attain the American Dream as well as engrave my mark in the universe as a lady of decorum and grace, the Constellation Orion is my witness. You on the other hand need to grasp that the world does not evolve around you, the earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof, so in essence, cast your grievances to the heavens or maybe send a letter of regrets to inform hades.  Yet, in all due respect, the next to time you decide to get something off your chest do not refer to me, your former First Lady as anything other than what I am.  Choose your words wisely or you should prepare to take cover and go into hiding, because the wrath of the world is waiting for you right behind me. Yet, I must admit, the most compelling evidence, something so profound that I merely over-looked, is that out of all of this, I completed my mission, to impede all Americans from overindulging, in chewing the fat with toxic and unhealthy selections.

Because the truth of the matter is, “we are, what we have to eat”. 
 

Author Bio:
Stephanie is an aspiring Indie Author, who loves to write.

Obsessions carry and squander potential,
Fickle, repulsive and beautiful and heartful.
As the desires of the heart conflict in white-hot majesty, 
Peace is found in chaos and chaos in art. 
If death be a performance then for my heart all the world's a stage,
So life means now but to be by the side of the star of the show.
If music be the food of love then slit my throat and drink the sonata of my veins,
For the symphony my heart felt for you could feed a thousand 
Though not provide the fanfare you deserve because even my own masterpiece
Could compare to that which you are each and every day.
Lidden eye to Eye of the Watcher,
A temptress to a just cause,
That which is accepted is that which signs the mockingbird 
Warrant of the other. 
Should both collied and the curtain fall, 
When chaos is taught remorse may my fortunes be ever fateful,
Should you be mine among the ashes 
When the curtain rises.
​

Author Bio:
A literary nobody with a soulful passion, sculpted by Barcelona and Paris -- horror author turned classical metaphysical, poet Carax writes with a hardened distaste for postmodernism and love of tradition. 

Rain falls false blessing
to mud all memory
while the dead lie
in distant eating earth.

Here I await low
clouds to second dawn
sun from gauzed gray
as sparrows huddle

where melts of bread
are almed them,
sacraments kneaded
out of my kitchen’s flour.

All rain here is sterile
for those dead who
cannot reseed from remembrance
to tendril far deserts

where black promises
bleed distant headlines
like stillbirths
buried in furtive night.

There skies burn arcs
of rockets across a boundary
the soil does not recognize.
Here rain fails to answer.

This world is as young
as it will ever be.
The dead lie useless
in the sterile earth.

And I am forever childless by
separation and loss
as everywhere the children 
vest themselves in easy death.


Author Bio:
Born in Pennsylvania, David Anthony Sam has written poetry for over 40 years. He now lives in Virginia with his wife and life partner, Linda, and serves as president of Germanna Community College. Sam has three collections and was the featured poet in the Spring 2016 issue of The Hurricane Review and the inaugural issue of Light: A Journal of Photography & Poetry. His poetry has appeared in over 60 journals and publications. His chapbook Finite to Fail: Poems after Dickinson was the 2016 Grand Prize winner of GFT Press Chapbook Contest and his collection All Night over Bones received an Honorable Mention for the 2016 Homebound Poetry Prize.

Climb to the fort
built in the rocks, by the creek,
where picnic days were passed
with eyes of imagination. 
Steps now moss-covered,
oak chipped from the floors,
nails scattered in rust,
heydays gone with passing youth. 
Adults we sprouted,
and into neglect our fort fell,
but in our ruins 
glimpses of the creators
we became hang in the ivy,
shines through the windows, 
sets in the arches. 
Our art, our home, 
when parents fought,
bullies tormented, and the world
stood bigger than us. 
Reminders, reminders,
of the spoils of childhood.
Forget not where we grew,
where we started, back in the woods
at our fort set in the rocks, by the creek,
and hold me in memory. 


Author Bio:
Katherine Givens is working towards an M.S. in Library Sciences from Drexel University. She has publications in numerous print and online magazines, including WestWard Quarterly, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Copperfield Review, Nazar Look, and From the Depths. She also published Passages of Love: A Collection of Poems with Nazar Look in November 2015. Learn more about Katherine and her writing at katherinegivenspoet.wordpress.com.