The wife of a politician learns to offer a gloved hand,
tea cup ready sip sip,
chin-up in spite of slights — an enemy of the right. 
The rich and powerful are not your friends, being left. 
You husband-speak, always on guard. 
A constituent once chided hubbie for wearing jeans
to Save On Foods, “unseemly for a politician.” 
You promise crumbs for the poor and disenfranchised,
“Stay on the message, please.” 
 
A swing riding’s worse in a campaign for the vote could go right,
left or even green— an unlikely dream.
You sway from poll to poll, depending on the issue.
In your letters to the editor, there’s a note to i.d. you
as the woman wed to the politician.
It’s only in the vast unknown of your marriage bed that
your sails unfurl in a world of your own making. 
 
You go to balls wearing an outdated dress from Sally Ann. 
Once you wore your wedding gown to a black and white affair,
a fundraiser for The Hospital Foundation, where you
and that other leftie were seated at the farthest table
near the back, “So sorry we forgot to introduce you.”  
 
The movers and shakers, mostly realtors,
resent your bleeding heart, small ‘l-liberal’ sensibilities,
so-called radical stance on the ALR,
“Save it for chrisssakes.”
 
Never mind, they are not your crowd. 
Yours carry signs and petitions,
march for peace,
rally against corporate takeovers.
 
Even after your husband retires
you’re still wife
pressed into a box of sugar and simp,
loose tea and gloved hands
of two.
 
 
​Author Bio:
Annette LeBox is an award-winning Canadian poet, novelist and children’s writer with seven published books. Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals such as Event, Poetry Canada, Prairie Fire, Matrix and the Southern Review. Two of her children’s books have won the British Columbia Book Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. LeBox is an environmental activist, feminist, and wife of a former politician. 

I don’t remember the first poem I ever read,
but I do remember the pleasure I took at reading “Annabel Lee,”
“For the moon never beams, without bringing me 
dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”
It was playful yet sad, and I loved the rhyme, 
and that poem brought me to other Poe works.

I also remember “Sea Fever,” which I always remember by the first lines,
“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely see and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and star to steer her by;”
There was a majesty about it—with its reverence for the sea
—and yet it was playful too with its “merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover.”

Poetry was so expressive, so beautiful, so clever;
Its magic was that it could take on anything, love, the seas, even death,
with Dylan Thomas’ “Do no got gentle into that good night” but “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I am sure I was asked to write poetry in school, 
but I don’t think that I was ever taught to write poetry.
I doubt children today are taught to write poetry,
unless they are in a creative writing class in college. 
What might the world be like, if everyone wrote poetry?

As I grew older, I read all kinds of poems by all kinds of writers.
“We Real Cool” is deceptively simple until you get to “We die soon.”
“Against” by Jimmy Santiago Baca is a favorite
—they can lock him in prison and take away his freedom,
but they can’t take the moon away from him.

The magic of poetry is the way it connects with us,
on a profoundly personal level.
It humanizes and cleanses us;
it takes us to experiences and emotions that might not be ours,
and yet makes them ours because we have read about them in poetry. 

There have always been poets because 
the magic of poetry touches something primal in our souls
—something inspired by the divine--
May there always be because “what is found there”
takes us to a higher place.


Author Bio:
Kathleen Murphey teaches reading and writing at Community College of Philadelphia. She is the mother of three beautiful young women who never fail to inspire her.

There is a sleeping man
In his borrowed clothes
Holding on so tight
To a wilted rose

Face of old leather
Mapped with many roads
Dark and circled eyes
Scars of lost abodes

Life is a talking head
Every day the same
Society of survival
Panhandle is his game

There is a young lady
Occasionally with a smile
They have a little chat
Brevity is her style

She brings a single flower
He brightens like a star
Then dies as she departs
Perhaps a daughter's scar

I know this fallen person
I put money in his hand
I rarely say a word
There is a sleeping man


Author Bio:
I was raised in San Francisco and influenced during the cultural movement of the 1960s and 70s. My interest in psychology developed out of a curiosity to understand the colorful street people of that era. So, I became a psychotherapist at the masters level for over 30 years. My themes often spring from my work with people. The poem Hotel of Fragments is from my counseling work inside the prison. 

In your town I search,
without seeking visitations’,
of the divine.
Not for me the corpus of maudlin and hymen. or scores lost in meandering intent.
there's you somewhere,
in the oxygen that I breathe.

Somewhere in the hairclips that tie disparate strands in airy weaves and raised flags,
In long ago defeat.
somewhere in the roaming of the mind
around the bends in the head,
somewhere in the rusted edges of your contempt are shrugs which begin
from eyes that have already reshaped history;
Entwined it in cobwebs of stretched out half-shreds,
shrapnel bursts from long ago.
I’m in your town
and I seek a glimpse. I’ll never find. 


Author Bio:
Rony Nair’s been a worshipper at the altar of prose and poetry for almost as long as he could think. They have been the shadows of his life. 

Rony was a published columnist with the Indian Express. He is also a professional photographer about to hold his first major exhibition and has previously been featured by Chiron Review, Sonic Boom, Quail Bell Magazine, YGDRASIL journal, Mindless Muse, Yellow Chair Review, Two Words For, Alephi, New Asian Writing (NAW), Semaphore, The Economic Times, 1947, The Foliate Oak Magazine, Open Road Magazine, Tipton Review, Antarctica Journal, North East Review, Muse India, and YES magazine, among others. Rony has also featured in the Economic Times of India. He cites V.S Naipaul, A.J Cronin, Patrick Hamilton, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine and Nevil Shute in addition to FS Fitzgerald as influences on his life; and Philip Larkin, Dom Moraes and Ted Hughes as his personal poetry idols. Larkin’s’ collected poems would be the one book he would like to die with. When the poems perish. As do the thoughts!

I stumble, drunk 
as always, along 
the road. Where am 
I going? I dont 
know anymore.
I find a nice 
quiet spot 
a patch of concrete
amongst the
invasive grass

pass out 

pathetic

wake up 
She's stood over me
with tea in her hands
pity in those once so
loving eyes

'What the fuck's wrong with you?'
she says
'I told you not to come back here'
she says 

'But baby now that you're here my feet have finally touched ground'
I say 
'I've always loved you'
I beg

'Yeah'
she says
'I used to love you too'

were sacred, thought-police on your case,
silence enforced, stray giggles gross,
like church, sly farts a deadly sin.
Weird glass-eyed fiends with goblin ears,
like guides in sandals stalking through
a nettle patch, no warning signs,
their siren blasts remove cold tramps
or drunks on drowsy afternoons.
Kids in a gang are history,
the rest, at least those ones who’ve brought
their forms back signed by mum, your guilt
or innocence their call, one strike
you’re hooked, paws scrutinised before
you get to stay or handle books.


Author Bio:
Peter Branson, a native of N. Staffordshire, has lived in a village in Cheshire, UK, for the last twenty-six years. A former teacher and lecturer in English Literature and creative writing and poetry tutor, he is now a full time poet, songwriter and traditional-style singer whose poetry has been published by journals in Britain, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Australasia and South Africa, including Acumen, Ambit, Agenda, Envoi, The London Magazine, The North, Prole, The Warwick Review, Iota, The Butcher’s Dog, The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, SOUTH, Crannog, THE SHOp, Causeway, Main Street Rag, The Columbia Review and Other Poetry. He has won prizes and been placed in a number of poetry competitions over recent years, including a ‘highly commended’ in the ‘Petra Kenny International’, first prizes in the ‘Grace Dieu’ and the ‘Envoi International’ and a special commendation in the Wigtown. His selected poems, ‘Red Hill, came out in 2013. His latest collection, ‘Hawk Rising’, from ‘Lapwing’, Belfast, was published in early April 2016.

Pieces of the Songda typhoon
ripped apart the night,
but not this moon.
Far from the wind-shattered 
clouds piled against the sky’s edge –
a bite-dented circle, a flattened coin
perched in charcoal blue,
a stark-white communion wafer
the night swallows –

fills the purple-black
with the glitter of grace.


Author Bio:
Pattie Palmer-Baker is a Portland, OR artist and poet. Although she often combines these two forms of expression in collages of paste paper and calligraphy, the inspiration for and the meaning of the artwork lies within the poem. Over the years of exhibiting her artwork, the discovery that many people responded most strongly to the poetry motivated her to strengthen her focus on writing. The goal of all her creative output is to translate the inner world into a media that moves readers away from their habitual perception of the world. 

You want to know the real me? You need to learn about my past.
Almost 5 years ago I let someone in, someone in my life that had me wheeled in.
He told me he loved me and made sure I'll always be okay.
My family was in love with him, I felt I had to stay.
It started with one pill that made me think,"
you got this Paula, happiness is on its way."

Years have passed and instead of the smiles
I would get high in bathrooms to make people think
she has everything she wanted.
I put on an act and decided that I had to leave my house,
which is what they would of wanted.

I went to the boy who promised me the world.
He told me just try it you'll fall in love.
The rush that I felt I will never forget.
I thought I wanted him but the drugs pulled me in.

At first it was great and I will never forget
saying I won't be addicted. Days past then years
then I ended up alone, waiting for him for the county call.

I'm sober I'm fine I'm great I would say,
while having a needle in my arms crying my life away.
Stayed away from my family so they wouldn't know,
but things became different when I wouldn't show.
One day my dad said go ahead tell me the truth
and I'll understand. I told him the truth, he told me he will help,
but leave the boy who got me into this mess.

Feeling the symptoms of withdrawal pushed me toward that boy even more.
I wanted to be clean, I wanted to feel but at that time it was just a dream.
My parents became strangers soon enough expecting a knock telling them,
"She won't wake up."
Dead or alive they already knew they had lost their daughter
and there's nothing they could do.
As money kept coming into my life slowly,
my boyfriend and I had to think how to get more.
Selling my body was never an option, so I would do people wrong,
which always did me right.

Kept saying to myself, it's almost over, soon you'll lose this fight.
Day-by-day you keep saying I'm done,
looking in the mirror at this creature you've become.
Hoping tomorrow you just won't wake up,
because it's better then fighting another reckless day.

8 bags In the needle and the first time I prayed,
asking, begging please God take me away.
Waking up in the morning had to be the worst,
the shivers, the puking, actually having to feel.

I became a monster that I created.
First time getting thoughts, I need to get out of this fucked up world.
As I saw my sister’s face when she saw this person dying
she begged and pleaded for me to stop lying.

She believed I could get out and did everything
she could but when your high you don't have any emotions.
I walked away. It wasn't hard at all.
Looking back today there are things I can't fix
but sobriety is always going to stick.
This disease or addiction whatever you wanna call it
I'm one of those lucky ones that was able to get off it.


Author Bio:
23-year-old female dealing with addiction to heroin for 5 years

succumbed to the monsters. 
No one realized their patience,
how strong they grew on the steak
he ate on Thursdays. A kitchen
with unclean windows, 
a La-Z-Boy, a girl to bring the tray.
He wiped his mouth with a towel
and slept, dreamed Jap Zeros
in Akron’s abominable heat.
And still they waited, watching
Vanna spin vowels as he dozed,
then Trebek with his myriad
answers. When night fell 
over Firestone Tire & Rubber,
they feasted on pork rinds
and his memory’s flesh--
the boys smoking Camels 
on the shore at Kwajalein, 
the girls of Okinawa, rhinestone-
soaked and ready to sin. Those days,
those endless days of betrayal
and pursuit—when Akron gleamed
with Hower High School girls
in skirts and he was young.
There were no monsters,
the whiskey bottles danced
at his bedside, and the women
on West Market found men
in the rain.
 
                        The night
I watched him die I knew
the monsters had won, tiny,
tenacious, sucking at his organs
the way children suck Tootsie Rolls,
obscene and with a sense of luck.
What did he say? Fuck this 
and fuck you…his bloated frame
a spectacle in blue pajamas
cursing because I was young
and would leave. A Laura
was near, a Rebecca in the rain
with a red and white umbrella,
and no war.
​

Author Bio:
Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Burnt Pine, Two Peach, Lunch Ticket, and Poetry Quarterly. He is also a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee.