rudy clarinet
da da da DA DA Da
soft guitar
sound-Zephyr
honey notes oozing
tenderly dance
flashing
rippled moon-shadows
off a breaking wave


Author Bio:
Gregg Dotoli studied English at Seton Hall University and enjoys living in the NYC area. He is a white hat hacker, but his first love is the Arts.

We know
Something
At the
Macroscopic level has
Fixed trajectories here
And
Fixed trajectories there
But something
At the
Subatomic level has
Quantum this
And 
Quantum that
 
All race
All castes
All creed
Have no boundaries
As we are
All made of
The same stuff
As we have the same
Basic organic chemistry
Because
We are,
All connected
Through
Space and time domain
By little quanta
Our creator.


Author Bio:
Dr. Sukarma Rani Thareja is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Christ Church College, CSJM Kanpur University, Kanpur, UP, India. She has several years of teaching and research experience. Her academic works have been published in national and international journals. To help students enjoy attending classes, academic or co curricular, she composes short poems, or educational collages, to introduce/recapitulate her lessons.  This allows students an opportunity to combine chemistry information with their personal creative reactions.

Spinning on your way to the scarred cliff,
you have to smell the stink of machismo.
You see many wheelchaired women too,
heads hanging like a broken flower;
they have each a knife to end themselves.
 
Once there, you quickly rub your hands
in the dust before slitting and dumping
your heart dexterously into the wild wind
for that man’s play, pleasure and peace.
 
You don’t cry; you sacrifice many a
body part and like the nearby grey smoke
wreathing up slowly, you relish
the crippling experience of staying dead.
 
Till, renewed, your pink whirligig whirls,
giggling and jiggling the other way round
to say that life isn’t being a dutiful statue
or a scared feather; you learn that life is
about digging a grave for every gravedigger.


Author Bio:
Amit Parmessur is a writer who resides in Mauritius.

I am shattered.

Fragments of me are scattered – under Michigan elm trees, mixed into Georgia
red clay, and rushing down storm drains with the California rain. 

People shake their heads and whisper their doubts into the blackness, saying I
am too broken, unable to be repaired. 

I know I cannot ever be whole again, but I try to forge together what can be
salvaged. 

I make a new masterpiece, still breakable but stronger.

People blanch at the foreign sight, unable to accept my new reality.

I leave them behind to see if I can be happy under a new sun.


Author Bio:
Yong Takahashi won the Chattahoochee Valley Writers National Short Story Contest and the Writer's Digest's Write It Your Way Contest. She also was runner up in the Gemini Magazine Short Story Contest and Georgia Writers Association Flash Fiction Contest. Some of her works appear in Cactus Heart, Crab Fat Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Gemini Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, Meat For Tea, River & South Review, Rusty Nail Magazine, Spilt Infinitive, and Twisted Vines. 

​The man sitting opposite me
lists what he calls the "honeys"
in the room with great and disgusting
description.

When I tell him about daughters
and wives, virtue and vice, he spends
a few filthy words on me.

They pass by, those objects, as he
catalogs them, prunes them in his
mind, and I say Check Please sooner
than I expected.


Author Bio:
J. "Ash" Gamble is a late in life writer from Ft. Myers, Florida.

​I lay immobile and weak on the bed
feeling like melted chocolate
that looks firm on the outside
but if pressed, it squishes


Author Bio:
Rachel Timmins is an Online Journalist and a chief writer for Weekend Notes Library of International Attractions. She is a member of the Toowoomba Wordsmiths, Australasian Christian Writers, and Christian Writers Downunder for which she has written blogs. She has also had devotionals and poems published in Studio: a Journal of Christians Writing, Penned from the Heart, Poetica Christi, Footprints, The Mozzie, The Voices Project, and a travel article for the Sunday Mail. 

Many of her poems are cathartic or helpful to others relating to a background of abuse. As a Christian, she believes God has healed her of trauma and she hopes that her writing to encourages others to believe that healing is possible and that life is worth living.