I sit burning

In capacity of myself,

Learning my lines,

For a part

In a play

That hasn’t been written,

Preparing myself

For the stage

That I must hence

Perform upon

To be noticed

By myself

Alone.

-Anthony Ward

We went out for dinner

Let’s eat at Hook n’ Reel

Seafood

Love it 

Ready to get my crawfish on 

The hostess is dismissing another party

She sees us

You at six feet tall

Me barely clearing five 

“You must be on a father/daughter date”

Rage 

Anger 

Emotions of volcanic proportions 

Filling my body 

Pumping at boiling speeds through my veins

I haven’t hit anyone in my life 

But never say never 

I respond that we’re engaged 

The hostess enjoys digging herself into holes

“You robbing the cradle?”

You explain we’re not so different in age 

I’m told I look like a baby 

There’s fist pumping 

We’re awkwardly sat at a table 

I never want to come here again

-Samantha Silverstein

Samantha is a legal assistant by day, writer of most formats by night. She lives with her emotional support human, Shawn, and barking cat, Vader, in the wilds of Suburban Philadelphia. Samantha loves horror movies, spicy food, and dancing in public

Perched high atop the branches of a eucalyptus tree,

a lone kookaburra surveyed the smoldering country,

witnessing miles of forest, charred and black,

as dry and desolate as the Australian Outback.

Dismayed by the scene, it averted its eyes,

until drawn by the sounds of a koala bear’s cries.

Peering straight down at the scenery below,

it beheld a creature bounding with fur aglow.

Bearing embers of a dying fire,

the koala crossed the Australian shire,

before bounding up with pads and claws,

in obvious distress, without a pause.

The bird stripped waxy leaves with its sharp beak,

Then flying toward the koala, it began to speak:

“Fur-laden friend, give me leave to attend your wound

from which fearful creatures would have swooned.

These leaves tamp embers and release oil,

soothing burns that will end your turmoil.”

“Thank you, thank you, yes you may,

Please hurry, hurry,” the koala did say.

Without hesitation, the kookaburra kept its word,

salving the wounds and asking, with curiosity spurred:

“Esteemed neighbor of this treasured land,

what caused this fire to be so fanned?”

“Good Samaritan, surely I will tell you,

it is painful to say, but it is true:

The summers are hotter and drier each year,

but not by mere happenstance, I do fear.”

“I agree our forests grow less lush and green,

but please do explain what exactly you mean.”

“Our atmosphere traps greenhouse gases each day,

with humans having a vital role to play.

For pollution warms the lands and the seas,

increasing temperature, drought and disease.”

“How could anyone deny such a truth,

as plain to me as your eucalypt tooth?”

“The path forward requires good will from every nation,

their cooperation, sacrifice and determination.

Each does currently profit more in the breach,

punting solutions until perhaps out of reach.”

“Then let the world over know of our plight,

spurring all to action, joining the fight,

of every creature and all humanity,

to salvage our shared future and destiny!”

-Douglas J. Lanzo 

An award-winning author and poet, Doug’s debut novel, The Year of the Bear, placed 2nd in the Firebird Award’s Coming of Age Category and has been nominated for the Newbery Award and endorsed by a NY Times bestselling author.  Doug resides in Chevy Chase, Maryland with his wife and twin son haiku poets, enjoying nature, tennis, fishing and chess.  Doug is also the author of 290 poems published in 64 journals and bestselling anthologies in the US, Canada, Caribbean, England, Wales, Austria, Mauritius, India, Japan and Australia. His Author website is located at www.douglaslanzo.com.

It’s a four-storey building

The fourth floor has got families;

“Families”.

Married couple with children

Fixed together like

A filthy moss has got lilies.

They pray to the same God

And pee in the same lavatory;

They worry that the milkman is a fraud

And make lengthy budgets for grocery.

The husband watches porn

While the wife prepares special corn

Silently wishing the kids were never born.

It’s a four-storey building.

I live on the third floor

A cat-lady lives next door

My mother is a grass widow

Another girl has a range of men

As diverse as the colors of rainbow

I throw a gush of cold shower

On my hairy pubis, and wonder why

I never attracted the right one in my axis.

It’s a four-storey building.

Second floor has a bitter vibe

If Dicken’s Miss Havisham had a tribe

Of women whose wedding gowns turned yellow

Their kitchens turned hollow

By the procession of fat rats that feed

On sour yoghurt and stale cakes.

It’s a four-storey building.

First floor accommodates virgins

Their vivacious versions

Thrusted into involuntary singlehood

Singing elegy of unrequited love.

I run down passing every storey

In a crimson cloth

To find refuge in the glory

Of a full moon

I embrace myself

And all my lives

Breathing in those four storeys;

I perform an ablution

To wash away all the personas

That were me and yet

Were not all of me.

While the moon shines

Showing the flaws of my world

In its silver light.

-MAHEK KHWAJA 

Mahek works in Higher Education publishing in Karachi, also working as an ethnographer independently. Her poetry and literary essays have been published on platforms like Cerebration: A Literary Journal, Hektoen International, Mehwar, The Rapport, Mixed Mag, Radical Zine, Pakistani Facts, and Zau Literary Magazine. She has contributed to two print anthologies namely Tales from Karachi and 1000 Stories by 1000 Authors. She teaches at a community school, writes poetry and eats gulab jamun copiously to combat melancholy in her life.

I don’t quite colour it in right,

this shell, this would-be-home,

almost-sanctuary. Last night

I ate not enough,

and there was a riot, a pit

in my belly, a pitless plum.

I think if my insides gnaw enough

I will turn the mirror

right way around tomorrow

and say you are acceptable

                                 acceptable

                                       acceptable

                                            acceptable

and I wonder if that will be enough.

-Rumaisa Maryam Samir 

Rumaisa Maryam Samir was born and raised close to the sea in the coastal city of Karachi, Pakistan. She first discovered poems were fun at the age of eight, when she wrote one on her mother for a school assignment. Now eighteen, she wishes she had more time to write in between juggling her A Levels and internships. Rumaisa has been published in The Weight Journal and The Incandescent Review, among others. Find more of her work @_.rmssmr._ on Instagram! 

There’s a bird inside me. Clawing up my ribs.

The bird dives, suspended on strings,

wings peeling away like tangerines.

For a moment

there’s nothing. Gray planks of wood

forming a bench, a handrail, the sea.

More nothing.

Hot tears scrub my feet. My ribs open.

I soar into the sea, caught by the sky.

A bird ruffles my hair. Clamps its claws.

Ribs close. Feet drown in heavy air. I slap the wind

with my claw. Stab the sky with my muzzled beak.

I’m nothing.

My gray wooden body is wet and empty.

I swallow the sky and all the birds inside it.

-Raquel Gordon 

A bulge in my upper back with her steely finger.

"When you feel tense, you scrunch your shoulders,

And you get one of these.

What does that feel like?"

I feel her poke and I think,

It feels like borrowed money,

Like a son who ran away,

Like carrying a briefcase to a business that isn’t working,

Like the death of my father,

Like an ego that I can’t understand but I keep obeying,

Like a hollow feeling of wanting to be different and more,

I answer her,

"It doesn’t hurt.

It feels like persistence."

If ever I am overwhelmed by fear, anxiety, panic, be my xanax, not that I would be sedated or sleepwalk through life, but that I would awaken to the distinction between true threats and irrational fears and find the courage to have a seat at the table You have prepared for me in the presence of my enemies.

If ever I fall into the darkness of depression and despair, be my pristiq, not that my emotions would be blunted or I would be rendered numb, but that I would find the hope, energy and will to climb out of the darkness into the light where joy has the last word.

If ever insomnia deprives me of dreaming my dreams, be my ambien, not that I would be anesthetized to sacred messages from deep within, but that I would be able to dream my dreams until I can overcome the worst of them and bring the best of them to life.

If ever I lose my sense of what is real and fall prey to delusion, be my seroquel, not that I would live as one lobotomized or dead inside, but that I would live in the reality of what is truly real, even in this postmodern age of conspiracy theories and viral misinformation that make the real feel surreal.

If ever my body takes me hostage and subjects me to torture, be my oxycodone, not that my pain would be vanquished, but that I would feel my pain as a signal, however unwelcome, as a sensation, however unpleasant, as the frenemy with whom I can collaborate instead of compete for relief.

If ever I make of my defenses an idol of escape that sends desire spiraling downward into need, and need into obsession, and obsession into addiction, be my suboxone, not that I would become addicted to another substance, but that I would turn to You each day for my daily bread.

If ever I am at risk for relapse, for falling into that tragic sleep from which I cannot awaken, be my narcan, not that I would live recklessly with false hopes of rescue, but that I would awaken to the reality that relapse leads to death, and trust You to lead me not into temptation.

If ever pride clouds my memory, such that I forget that I cannot recover on my own, or that I need help from beyond myself, be my aricept, remind me that Luke traveled with a physician, that Paul encouraged Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach, that medication is not the enemy, that addiction is a social network disease and the support of a recovery community is a social network remedy.

If ever I tell myself the lie that pills alone can cure me, be my ECT, shock me into awareness that there is no message in a pill, that pills are inanimate objects that can only provide symptom relief and can never solve the underlying problems that give birth to symptoms, for You have called me to work out my salvation with fear and trembling, and I can trust in You, the Great Physician, to heal all of my diseases.

If ever I look upon myself with shame and self-loathing as damaged goods due to traumas I have sustained at the hands of others or myself, or if I so identify with my symptoms that I can no longer see that You have made me uniquely in Your image, be my saving grace, remind me that we are all so much more than our symptoms or diagnostic labels, that we are of infinite worth in

Your eyes, and that, however, broken we may be, we are held forever in Your heart. 

-Todd Matson

Todd Matson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in North Carolina, United States.  His poetry has been published in The Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling; Soul-Lit: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry; and Mindfull Magazine, and his short stories have been published in Ariel Chart International Literary Journal; Faith, Hope and Fiction; and Children, Churches and Daddies.  He has also written lyrics for songs recorded by various contemporary Christian music artists, including Brent Lamb, Connie Scott and The Gaither Vocal Band.  

There are times of loss

that become so vacant

and enter a void vacuum

where the elimination

of broken breath

presents as the only option.

Then the requirement becomes confrontation.

Time does NOT heal all wounds;

it diminished them.

The darkest hour

is only a scarred memory

with the passage of years.

What portends to be the bottom

will erase itself

if given the proper sun cycle.

Look beyond the chaotic discovery

and allow the depth of horizons

to begin the cosmic healing progression.

-Gerry Fabian 

R. Gerry Fabian is a published poet and novelist.

He has published four books of his published poems, Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts and Ball On The Mound.

In addition, he has published four novels. Getting Lucky (The Story), Memphis Masquerade, Seventh Sense and Ghost Girl. 

His web page is https://rgerryfabian.wordpress.com 

He lives in Doylestown, PA 

I

Last year there were only four in the family – I was unable to attend. The effort to get everyone ready was exhausting. No amount of parental encouragement – whether loud or soft – was effective. After an hour, mother called and cancelled the sitting.

The prior year was different. Each of the five members of our family was ready. At almost exactly two thirty, our parents smiled as Missy walked down the stairs wearing her white and yellow dress, then I ran down in my dark blue stripped sweater; and Molly posed resplendent in a white dress with red roses. We arrived at the studio twenty minutes early. 

Five people pressed together inside a small-town portrait studio. 

Father, mother, three children – 

Missy, Molly, and me, Mark  - in our Sunday best, smiling.

Beaming our joy of the good life.

Sweet as families go. Almost a cliché. 

But look more closely, each person somewhere else, not with the others. 

Mom and dad, for some reason, smiling in opposite directions. 

You’ll notice, only my eyes focused on the camera. 

II

There is no portrait this next year - lives conflicted, growth issues, 

one major change. 

III

From that point on, our mother worried about the younger child, Molly,  

who, like our mother, would become a nurse. 

The older child, Missy, would marry, and practice dentistry like our father. 

She named her firstborn son, Mark - in remembrance of me, 

And to remind my parents of their guilt.

-Thomas Elson

Thomas Elson’s stories have appeared in over three hundred English language journals and anthologies throughout the world, including, New Writing Scotland, Short Édition, Selkie, New Ulster, Lampeter, Mad Swirl, Blink-Ink, Scapegoat, Flash Frontier, Bending Genres, and Adelaide. He divides his time between Northern California and Western Kansas.

Although it’s early afternoon, we leave our hotel in our nightclothes. Jogging towards them, you tell me these falls represent death. Now that we’ve made it this far, we can’t turn back. We look ahead to the tourists. We could be arrayed in green and orange rain ponchos. They wear bright colors in case they get lost in the swirl of water pouring misting pounding from all directions. We want to get lost behind the falls. In our real lives, death stays on the northern border of our country, a shade beyond falling water.

You said there was a cave on the other side of the falls. We could shimmy on narrow footholds and slippery handholds with our bodies fastened on the slick rock. One wrong move, a weight shift, a hand moved too fast slips and we’ll fall from the escarpment dashed. At the bottom, the falls churn water back to sky in a cloud of smoke mist. We slip underneath the falls into the cave.

In the cave, I tell you that I imagined death was a man. A man who drives black jacked-up pickup. A man who compensates. A man unable to love, to connect, to express himself originally. A man capable of violence vengeance rhetoric. A man who traffics in second hand sentiments that manifest dark resentments. A man who wears black. Black work pants run down over his black boots. His black shades look through tinted windows. His black pickup careens around blacktop bends littered with roadkill.  A man who smashes my skull like a squirrel on the blacktop, roadkill, man kills.

Inside the cave we explore until we come to the abyss. We retreat and you hold me under the falls. I can never love you more. Between the abyss and the death, the cave presses us present. My lips press, you open your mouth to me. 

There’s no other time. 

I know you took us here because he never took you. You always wanted. You have me, I fill his role. I’ve studied the classics. You fill the role of Venus on the half shell. Her crimson locks flowing across milk white freckled breasts. It’s a ritual dance we do. 

Snowflakes linger into April. Mist rises. Water falls from the parapet. It smashes against fallen rocks. It billows above the falls and infiltrates the clouds. It floats on updrafts like an eagle, a bird of prey. A bird that knows nothing else. A bird in the air that searches the ground for life through death. But we are hidden for now behind the curtain of the falls. Death’s scepter will return again and again like water over the falls. But for now it passes. Above the slate river against the sedimentary sky until the two meet on the horizon like my body against yours, yours above mine. 

-Dave Nash

Dave Nash (he/him) listens to jazz sampled by hip-hop hits while he types. Dave is the Non-Fiction Editor at Five South Magazine. His work appears in places like Jake, Atlantic Northeast, South Florida Poetry Journal, Hooghly Review, miniMag, Roi Faineant Press, Thriving Writers Magazine, and Boats Against the Current. You can follow him @davenashlit1. 

irises dilated on Interstate 81

internal clocks blaring of times and danger

11:00 PM

cross myself ✝️ and hope to survive 

yet I leap with the headlights still on

strewn across the graveled pavement

laying lifeless, preparing to decay

on the doubled yellow lines

the shame of letting the hunter win

stolen womanhood 

long-headed

facial distortions as if I never left

doe-like eyes peering into the endless now

the body lies broken, protruding bones

skin draping like filthy lace

torn stockings on each of the four legs

ripped apart 

just like what happened on another road

veins pulsating intensely as if I hear you again

kicking for one last fight

car horns deafening warning signals

bright lights fill the scene

like an improper erection 

one last punt to force you away

into the distant past where you let me die

alas, I made it to the otherside

-Su-Ling Dickinson

Su-Ling Dickinson is a 36-year-old writer and artist based out of Portland, Oregon.  Su-Ling enjoys being a total cinephile, photography, and “a damn fine cup of coffee”. Her writing is inspired by raw emotion, cultural collision, and latent content. 

last night I quietly whispered new secrets

about the scratching noises within the doors

diminutive vocals that sing of skeletons

and of ancient mysteries held in my mother’s chest

vigorously writing new sermons of lust

for faithless audiences and the (wo)men who will never love (me) 

take our places on the shelf, organized and meek 

keeping our disorders clandestine amongst the dust 

like the myriad of tchotchkes in grandma’s closet

stories untold, because good girls keep it on the inside

these cabinet doors shut tightly like our legs

locked and bound by an oath to old gods and new 

over the years, the cabinet grew 

stretch marks forming along the ridges of its belly

like a prized pig awaiting its last meal, sweet release

bursting open at the seams in feminine rage 

but there wasn’t a world left to listen to stories of

generational trauma, survivalism, and infinite despair 

everyone foams at the mouth for some canned optimism

-Su-Ling Dickinson

Su-Ling Dickinson is a 36-year-old writer and artist based out of Portland, Oregon.  Su-Ling enjoys being a total cinephile, photography, and “a damn fine cup of coffee”. Her writing is inspired by raw emotion, cultural collision, and latent content. 

Sunday morning spent taking tender little sips of stark black 

coffee — split — by soft lipped nips of puffed pecan 

divinity 

on humbled roads. slow seesawing Virginia to NC 

inhaling prime honey 

suckled spring. plenty 

holy.

-Oakley Ayden

Oakley Ayden is an autistic, queer writer from North Carolina. Her words have appeared in South Dakota Review, Bi Women Quarterly, Reservoir Road Literary Review, and elsewhere. Find her online at oakleyayden.com.  

I can show you the glass panes laid out in the yard,

mirrors mired with the green of growth,

reflections,

invitations for light,

a place for the sky to check the part of her clouds.

I can take you to the stacks of lumber

where I trace dew droplet constellations,

watch spiders drink wet sky from silken hammocks.

I have the pipes too, 

arranged,

a tunnel from shed to fountain.

A way for the mice to travel,

to hide,

to just for a moment be something other than prey. 

Even with all of the pieces,

I can’t figure out how to be a house,

was born unbuilt,

but still,

my mama named me Home,

taught me to shelter what I can.

-Konrad Ehresman

Konrad Ehresman is a writer and creative living on the central coast of California. His work can be found in Bluffington University: The Bridge, You Might Need to Hear This, Ariel Chart, and he has work forthcoming in BarBar and Bluebird Word, among others. Konrad is also an editor at Rising Action Review. When he isn't writing or reading anything he can get his hands on, you can find him baking far too much bread and being a general nuisance.

Never love a poet,

I’ll steal up all your sighs.

Pen them into paper,

turned into something wise.

Never love a poet,

I’ll write you in the rain.

Smudge ink in the water,

let it trickle down and stain.

Never love a poet,

I’ll dissect all your smiles.

Find the melancholy,

that whispers in your wiles.

Never love a poet,

I’ll make simple words our cavalry.

Turn pain into prose,

from our tragedy, make poetry.

-Oliver von Maltitz

Record:

I’m wistful when it’s time to wash my hair

 after leaving your bed

or my hands after leaving the table.

I feel secure in our vocabulary,

our embraces,

our accidental hand-holding.

The story of your life whispered into my right ear

a fleet of pelicans’ wings rising from the water

the ocean, exhausted, dozing off in sleepy laps along the shore.

What else can I do 

while abandoned by sleep in the night

but think of all the kisses we’ll never share, 

but consider

wild rushes of wind through high grasses,

the silver in your face, waves and coils,

fence posts evenly distributed along Route 66

a series of marriages and divorces

maps of where we’ve been and where we’ll never go

-Dusti RW Levy 

Dusti RW Levy is a queer disabled poet, podcaster, and writer living in a drafty old house in Montgomery, Alabama. In addition to being on management staff at Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia, they're a creative writing and theatre student, occasional performer, and aspiring playwright. You can read more of their work in FUCKUS as well as the online litmags boats against the current, Lavender Lime Literary, and, most recently, the tide rises, the tide falls.  

I am standing on the edge of a 12-foot garden. 

the first: worms, no more 

parasite than beauty, no less 

winsome than repulsive. five 

not-hearts beat; syncopated, 

diffident, deadened, numb. 

next: the compost stinks of sewage; the rot consequential; the filter broken, 

and here too much water is 

a bad thing, as if too much 

is ever good, as if water 

is ever bad; and what kills, 

the gun or the hand holding it? 

the sun starts shining 

a few inches down, but if 

your back was turned, you wouldn’t know. 

there are too many pine needles 

in my backyard; there are not enough anywhere else. I do not enjoy 

cleaning them up; 

I do not think we have to. 

halfway: the first plant sprouts. 

there are ghosts in the garden; 

they wave from the clovers 

and duck behind the daisies. 

they died somewhere else, 

but they lived here. 

they whisper that the hand was the gun. there are no birds 

in this part of the garden. 

someone painted a rock and left it, 

golden idol of the sentient ground, 

worshiped in earnest 

by far-away worms; parasites.

tenth: there are rocks 

but the tulips grow fine. 

it is not nice to look at. 

it is messy. it holds no 

uniformity and begs no penance. its dirt sticks under your nails until it merges into your skin; repulsive, parasitical, sympathetic. it hurts; dehydration is no solution to drowning; listening to ghosts does not save their lives. 

I cannot save anyone 

with a worm’s body, a 

turned back, an explosive rosary; reprehensible. 

last: I fix the filter, 

wash my hands, 

and hope for rain.

-Rachel Uon