By Sarah Ismail

Sarah Ismail, is a youth poet who uses writing as a space to vent, reflect, and make sense of her emotions. Poetry has become the place where she can express herself honestly, especially when spoken words feel too heavy or complicated. She may still be early in her journey, but she writes with intention, vulnerability, and a genuine desire to grow. Even when her writing is simple, it comes from a real place, and she hopes that sincerity resonates with readers.

Flicker….

Flicker… As light sounds

Go to sleep with the branches snap

The fire sizzles in fury of  the night

The wind howls as they clap

Flicker…For the joyous creak

A happiness none of you speak 

The greek fire shall be your future

Yet we ignore the flickers weak

Flicker….Like the napalm

The one we used for war 

The one who shall set the bomb

Be calm they say 

Then they're the first one at of the door

Flicker…As they wake up 

In fear, horror, a feeling we can't tell

We must help those in need

Those children in need

And yet we wish them farewell

Flicker…Call them the greek fire

Say they light the spark 

Those children, our future

Keep it all in the dark

Flicker…We shall speak for them 

We shall stand 

We shall do anything but die

And talk, and move

But we’ll float in their destiny 

All in their bright sky

Flicker….The fire burns out

The bomb goes out

The spark is gone 

And so is our doubt

By YuQiao Shao

YuQiao Shao is a three time Scholastic Gold Key winner, National Speech and Debate semifinalist, and has received a commendation for her essay from John Locke university. She got her "big break" when she got accepted into the Orange County School of Arts for Creative Writing as of just last year. She spends her days suffering from writer's block, craving sugar cookies, and taking long, leisurely walks with her dog while blasting Lana del Rey. She prefers books to humans.

On the exit of Highway 532, sat the homeless man.

Politely, he would be called “unhoused,” or “in a predicament” or “in need of aid.” His image had been shown with that word sprawled across it in glowing red letters in at least five pictures: three political campaigns for three different mayors, one for a charity dedicating themselves to helping those “unhoused” people, one for a school project. Out of all of those, the charity was the only one who had helped, and even then they were shut down just last year.

So, he was back to sitting on the exit.

Before, he had sold bouquets of flowers, different shades of soft neon and harsh pastel. He had walked past the rows of cars, showing off his wares, changing his signs: they were FLOWERS FOR SALE $5 A BOUQUET to CHEAP FLOWERS $5 A BOUQUET and then, finally, $5 A BOUQUET FLOWERS HOMELESS HELP ME BUY A MEAL. But the cars had whizzed by and the only customer he received was a blonde woman with an ugly bob cut, screaming about him violating HOA procedure. 

She didn’t buy anything, in the end.

So in the end, he was back to begging. This time he held out a little tin can and the same cardboard sign only this time it was HOMELESS ANYTHING HELPS THANK YOU. Strangely enough, people actually did help. A warm can of soda, unopened. A pack of cigarettes. Even an oily green twenty dollar bill.

He had ways to pass the time from his thoughts, at least, between the times when he would have to get up and walk amongst the cars that were stopped by the red light. He would count license plates: California, California, Colorado, Nevada. When he grew bored of the license plates, he recorded cars: red, white, yellow, green, red white, blue. And when all else failed, he thought of warm baths and pillows.

All this talk about pillows made him undeniably drowsy. He pulled out his puffer jacket from the shopping cart with three working wheels and laid down on the hard ground with it beneath him. What would be the use of him begging for anything, anyways? And what good would it be for him to move into the cities as well? 

He almost laughed. 

Cities meant more competition.

His throat had never felt more parched, but all the same he yanked himself up, much to the protest of his quaking and squeaking limbs.

The light turned red.

He moved amongst the people. He had no more strength to use his voice, so he only held up his sign: HOMELESS ANYTHING HELPS THANK YOU. He sucked in some snot that had dribbled out of his nose thanks to the cold January weather and moved in and out of the cars that crowded around the street. 

A blue car honked.

A man in a white one grimaced.

But the backseat window of a green car rolled down. He trotted there and held out his little pail… And the chubby hand of a small toddler dropped something—-red and white and green—-in his pail with a clink. 

“Candy cane,” chirped the little blue-eyed boy.

He was left on the sidewalk, a little stunned and wetness forming in his eye.

Then the light turned green, and they were gone. 

By Alisha Nasim

A 17 year old from India with an unhealthy obsession with finding new hobbies and cats. A firm believer of something-is-better-than-nothing and a creative enthusiast. She has been published in the Summur Magazine, The Grey Bear Culture Magazine and more.

I would light lanterns for myself when the world became too dark, when it became harder to see, a version of me that I always envisioned. I had thought of being anything but constant, anything but being stuck into a quiet loop of never-ending routines that no longer fits or into conversations that felt rehearsed.

During the frequent power cuts, I could feel the darkness filling my messy, cluttered and chaotic room, and my body slowly being engulfed in the darkness, falling into the void. Initially, I would find comfort in those power cuts because they gave me an excuse to forget about the chaos around and hid it gently under a blanket of deception. The comfort quickly turned into suffocation, which turned into self doubt. The familiarity that gave me peace, made me blind, and made me trip and fall over the mess of a person I'm becoming.

Since then I've started a (un) healthy hoarding collection of candles - especially the scented ones. I've also started hoarding hobbies - writing, photography, painting, reading - you name it.

Maybe I've taken the "don't let your figs rot" by Sylvia all too seriously but the dismay of being apathetic is more frightening than cleaning dried wax off of a wooden desk.

By Jude Al Hajjar

The author is an aspiring writer with an instinct for lyric intensity and emotional precision. She is drawn to stories where tenderness survives catastrophe, where love fractures the self and rearranges it into something braver. Her work lingers in the spaces between devotion and ruin, often using natural and cosmic imagery to explore intimacy, longing, and transformation. Still in the process of discovering her voice, she writes with a noticeable ache for beauty, contradiction, and sentences that bloom where they shouldn’t as proof that something lived, and ultimately mattered.

"This piece was written as a sustained address, as one breath held across centuries. The process privileges emotional momentum over linear clarity, allowing images to recur and evolve rather than resolve. Metaphors are introduced gently, then stressed until they fracture and reform, mirroring the relationship at the center of the work. Syntax bends toward confession: long sentences accumulate pressure, then break into fragments at moments of emotional rupture. Repetition functions as both obsession and proof of life, while shifts in scale, from scraped knees to black holes, are used to measure the vastness of feeling against the fragility of the speaker. Roses bloom from wounds; devotion wears the mask of pursuit; tenderness prevails in landscapes engineered for cruelty. Time folds, violence softens into intimacy, and longing becomes an act of cosmology. What emerges is a meditation on love as mutually destructive and generative."

i write to you from the fault-line where the world cracked and something living, something unforgivably tender, pushed upward. a rose, just a rose, soft petals, mortal stem, no prophecy stitched into its veins. and yet it grew from a wound in the earth, and so it reminds me of us: the way ordinary things disobey extinction, the way something simple insists on surviving where nothing has a right to.

i wish you could see it. the pink is the pink of scraped knees and bitten lips; the green is the green of jealousy attempting at hope. the thorns are the thorns of every word i swallowed rather than confess i loved you long before i knew what loving was. this rose is not extraordinary, and yet it is a kind of miracle, because it bloomed when it should have died, because it dared softness in a landscape that teaches hardness. because it is, in truth, the shape of you.

oh love— do you laugh at me now? do you tilt your head the way you do, all quiet mockery and reluctant wonder, as though you can’t decide whether to scorch me or cradle me? i speak of roses and you speak of ruin; i send you petals and you send me fire; yet both of us are only trying to tell the same truth on different frequencies: that something in us lived, violently, stubbornly, against the orders of the world.

i would follow the beat of your footsteps upt

 and down again, if only to match my breath to yours. you move like a falling star, and i, poor creature, keep mistaking your descent for salvation. but your last letter, love, that impossible confession, cracked me open. i read it and felt the cliff-edge under my feet, the way the earth trembles before surrendering to a landslide.

i stand there still.

i love you. hell. hell.

i love you.

have i always? haven’t i? the feeling spills backward like ink dropped into water— staining the past, revising the origin. every encounter becomes a confession; every chase, a ritual of devotion; every attempt to kill you, an attempt to reach you. assassinations become assignations. i remember hunting you through samarkand and thinking, absurdly, that if i caught you, the world might finally make sense.

(you were a blur of heat then. you are a blur of heat now. i suspect you will be a blur of heat for as long as time tolerates us.)

you said you wanted to be a place i fit. and i, god help me, want the same ruin. i want to be the blade you sharpen, the stone you push against, the shadow you enshrine yourself within. i want the tea-drinking, the slow domesticity. i want the bouquet of impossible flowers you promised, even if i know you will cut your palms gathering them.

i want everything that hurts.

and i write this to you knowing it will sting, because the truth of me has always been a wound. i write to you in the aftertaste of longing, in the residue of fear. i write to you like the rose writes itself into sunlight even while the crack that birthed it continues to widen.

the world breaks, and something grows.

we break, and something grows.

and you, my beloved devastation, are the only miracle i have ever believed in.

elsewhere, beyond the jurisdictions of time, there is a sanctuary of matter where two stars collide in tandem. from that impossible mercy, a single flower is permitted. when gravity itself sings its last note and bends into this clashing, a bud opens, unfolding petal by petal under the weight of a thousand unspent years. i would go there for you. i would walk the long arithmetic of centuries, harvesting those consecrated remnants one at a time, letting time erode me into myth, until i returned carrying a bouquet dense enough to bruise spacetime, heavy with collapsed suns and vows that refused extinction. i would place it in your hands and ask you to breathe it in, to feel our entire history ignite inside your chest in a single, unrepeatable inhalation. everything we were, everything we destroyed, everything we loved.

i have spent my whole life rehearsing solitude, perfecting the art of standing on the ridge of myself with no witness but wind. you’ve seen that version of me, the one carved from distance, patient through abandonment, unaware of what could rearrange her. yet when i think of you, the old instinct dissolves. suddenly i want to be alone together, to be siege and shelter, to be the hand that steadies you as much as the force that makes you stumble beautifully into metamorphosis.

i love you, and i love you, and i want to place that verb under impossible conditions. to speak it the way one tests matter at the birth of stars. i want to learn what love becomes when uttered by two souls who consent to mutation, who submit themselves to the pressure of proximity until they are no longer what they were, until change is not a consequence but the entire, brilliant point.

yours

By Marie Bowden

Finding possibility

A love story.

Dedication

For Davie you have helped me to see that there are good men in the world.

Introduction

This is a story that is inspired by true events. 

I wanted to write a story about the reality of emotional abuse and how damaging it can be especially when mixed with mental illness and three children.

It can feel lonely and hopeless except for the one person who sees you and would do anything to get you out.

It is an unconventional love story where there is a possibility of a happy ending and a better life.

Chapter One

I know that I am awkward and a loner

I sit on the warm wooden bench by the entrance of my children’s school. 

I am always the first parent to arrive as I don’t want to miss out on a carpark or get lost in the crowd

It is hot but the cool breeze is blowing nicely on the first day of February 

I have time to adjust my straw hat to shade my pale skin before I watch other parents stroll by in their sunglasses and Birkenstocks chatting with an air of confidence.

I don’t fit in. I don’t think I ever have.

I usually just sit and observe the minutes go by. I watch as parents huddle in their groups chatting excitedly their words float by me.

I’m used to it, but it still hurts.

I am waiting for home time. I am waiting for the bell to ring.

I don’t see that there is someone next to me until I see his black boots and his face turns towards me. His hair is dark long and unruly. I am not good at talking to people especially strangers.

He talks first to break the ice. 

“Any plans for the weekend?” he asks. 

I am surprised that he is talking to me. I find my voice and say I don’t usually do much. 

He smiles and it lights up his warm brown eyes. 

He is beautiful, I think but blush hoping I didn’t say that aloud.

“ I am the same” he says. I mean I don’t do much.

“ I am Ash” he says holding out his hand. 

“Sarah” I say softly.

He smiles and says, “nice to meet you”. 

I notice that he has a tattoo of a skull on his neck 

I am just about to say something else when the bell rings and he heads towards the gate.

I wait for my two kids and Ash gets lost in the crowd of parents, kids, and teacher chaos.

My cheeks are aglow from having someone talk to me and know that I am visible.

Eden came flying out first. Her blonde hair flying as she ran over to me. She is noise, fun, energy, and very helpful. Once she reaches me, she begs me to spin her around and yells out to her friends.

I catch Ryan as he comes through the gate. He looks hungry and tired. 

I grab both their bags and hold their hands as we head across the crossing to our car.

there is the usual car seat fights. The windows are wound down and the music is up. I put my driving glasses on.

I smile for once as I reverse out because it is a Friday and for once someone talked to me.

It is my turn to have the kids as I had recently separated from my husband It still felt strange to go home to my two bedroom flat.

The kids preferred going to dad’s because of the Xbox and no homework.

It was all play and no work at his place.

“ What about going swimming this week-end?”

I asked brightly as I turned into the driveway. 

Ryan shook his head and Eden asked if Conrad could come.

“ Who is Conrad?” I asked as I stopped the car.

“ A boy in my class” she piped. “He is so cool he can do this trick on his scooter”.

I got them out. I thought that Eden is only six and shouldn’t be worrying about boys.

“Let’s invite him”. I said

Riley and Eden raced inside straight to the medium sized screen and putting on the baby Yoda series.

I plated up snacks. I asked who Conrad’s parents were to Eden.

“ He only has a dad” says Eden her eyes are fixed to the screen.

“ Oh I wasn’t sure if I would be able to invite Conrad”.

The house was a mess as I was having mixed bipolar episodes. The bins were overfull, dirty dishes lined the benches, and there was dirty washing scattered on the floor.

I handed out unhealthy snacks of twisties and strawberry milkshakes.

I attempted to clean up while the kids were occupied I didn’t really have any friends except my mum.

My parents usually came over for one day in the week-end. I had a close relationship with my parents but especially my mum who had supported me through my bipolar when it first happened in my early twenties. I had put them through hell with my lying, overdoses, and meaness.

I loved them coming over as they would take over such as helping with dishes, folding washing, and taking the kids on an outing.

the kids loved it too and called them Nana and Pop. And they always bought a take away. They would come tomorrow.

I think they had finally got used to Cameron and me not being together. It was Cameron who did the leaving he just said he couldn’t take living with my bipolar anymore.

I didn’t cry to start with. I was numb. I thought I would be suicidal afterwards, but I wasn’t. I had felt normal for once.

I went about finding a place and dividing up things.

it should have been me who left him as I only recently discovered that my supposedly good marriage was toxic. I had recently been exploring this with my therapist. 

I had turned the dishwasher on when the phone rang. A rare occurrence to happen in this house. 

Eden passed me the phone. It was Naomi my best friend who had moved away from me recently. I missed her. I told her that I was up and down she shared with me about her life down south and home schooling her boys. It sounded perfect.

She asked if I got the tea maker. I laughed and said “Definitely it is the one thing that keeps me going.

She said that she was proud of me. I tried not to cry as I said thanks. I ended our conversation early as we had guests coming. 

Eden asked again about Conrad coming swimming. 

“I don’t know his dad, but we could look on the school Facebook page”.

I found my laptop in my bedroom. It was my most prized possession my 35th birthday present. Eden hopped up on the bed next to me and snuggled beside me. She started chatting about the lolly she won at school for finding the magic treasure. “Awesome Eden” I said as I started scrolling through the school’s facebook page. On a whim I typed in “Ash” in the search and the image that came back was of the man I met today except that his hair was tied back which brought out his brown eyes.

“ That’s Conrad’s dad,” said Eden.

“ I can send him a message” I said. 

“Yay!” shouted Eden as she sang and danced around the room.

What do I say I thought. Probably best to keep it simple.

“ Hi Ash, it is me Sarah  my daughter Eden is in the same class as Conrad and would love for him to come swimming with her”.

By Klara Laurenzia Linden

Klara Laurenzia Linden is 21 years old and a master's student in Communication Design at Folkwang University of the Arts, Germany. She primarily works on visual narratives, illustrative representations, and literary texts, with a focus on conveying moods, emotions, and thoughts. 

Warmes Tuch

Die Liebe bohrt sich durch das Herz, reißt ein Stück hinaus, füttert es damit und flickt die Überreste mit einer kochend heißen Nadel. 

Der Duft, der auf Weiteres in den Sinnen hängen bleibt, der die stillen Worte singt und sich dein Gesicht in meines einprägt. Das Gefühl, das mitschwingt, bringt einem die Sehnsucht, die Sucht nach dem Rot. Meine Hände reichen mir die Funken, die entstehen, wenn der Blick in deine Augen fällt, wenn sie sehen, was deine Gestalt mit sich bringt und in sich trägt, erklingt die Melodie, sie singt die Lieder, die für dich geschrieben in alten Steinen gemeißelt stehen. Unvergessen, unberührt. 

Dann lerne auch ich zu sehen, mit einem hell leuchtenden, anziehenden Stern, der wie ein Magnet uns zusammenbringt.

Warm Cloth

Love drills through the heart, tears a piece out, feeds on it, and stitches the remains with a boiling-hot needle. 

The scent that lingers in the senses for the time being, that sings the silent words and imprints your face into mine. The feeling that resonates brings one longing, the craving for red. My hands offer me the sparks that arise when the gaze falls into your eyes, when they see what your form carries with it and holds within, the melody resounds. It sings the songs written for you, carved into ancient stone. Unforgotten, untouched. 

Then I too learn to see, with a brightly shining, alluring star that draws us together like a magnet.

By Evelyn Thakur

Evelyn Thakur is an emerging writer from the UK. Though she began her writing journey recently, literature has always been a friend and guiding hand. She is consumed by her ever - growing list of books (which must contain either Nabokov, Poe or Bronte!) and is drawn to the psychological intricacies of Gothic literature. Evelyn is Head of the Editorial Team for Antler Velvet Magazine — a literary magazine which curates art that focuses on wild and untamed souls – and is a staff writer for Syris the Zine, Orphic Literary and the Aletheia Gazette. She has been published in Venus, Darling Magazine, the Dark Poets Club and DYONYZINE Magazine. When not reading or working on the magazine, she is working on her upcoming novel and writing essays on literature, history, philosophy and more on her substack: https://substack.com/@evelynthakur

Lying in bed,

saltine eyes affixed to the canopy in wonder

as if it were an easel of twilight

dusted with a cluster of stars

born from spiders' silk and molten tiles,

I think about you.

Not in the way I used to —

I love you,

though your ghost is vacant from my thoughts

and the pockets of your laughter echo in the

barren chambers of my heart.

Like the freckles of starlight,

densely packed together,

floating into the vastness of the midnight unknown,

and bursting into champagne supernova,

the memorial of our love splits into atoms of

buried time.

Moments of tender caresses and

fraught misunderstanding

no longer anchor my heart like a sunken ship.

As remembrance dissipates and

collects on the frosted windowpane,

a blank slate is left in your place.

A charcoal frame with

no image,

no foundation,

expands into the filtered cosmos of my skyline.

Finally — I am free to paint again.

The blackened canopy screens into endless

wonder and hope,

I greet the cosmos with an open, gaping

throat

roaring with a laughter that belongs to me.

The time is right;

the clock affixed to the rhythm of another beating heart.

Whose is it?

I don't care but for the difference of

tabula rasa

and the strength of my unchanging, unending love.

I am ready to accept love as it comes,

my heart has healed from the projections of your

long-departed love.

By Jude S.

They are an aspiring writer with a deep sensitivity to the inner lives of others. Fascinated by memory, longing, and growth, they write stories that linger in the spaces between people. Their style leans toward lyrical and emotionally immersive, guided by the belief that even the smallest moment can hold an entire lifetime.

"This piece was written in fragments over several months, moving between grief, myth, and memory. I was interested in the cyclical nature of love and loss, how we freeze, and how we fracture. The narrative unfolds across different lives and eras, each one echoing the same emotional architecture: intimacy, rupture, and the slow return of feeling.

I worked primarily through image before plot. Salt, stone, frost, and light became structural materials. I layered natural imagery deliberately, allowing water, marble, soil, and seasons to function as emotional states rather than scenery. Repetition and variation were used as compositional techniques, mirroring the idea of reincarnation and inherited ache.

Ultimately, this work explores what survives devastation. The hairline fracture in the ice, the warmth returning to the hands, and the choice to shape again."

Elias Rowan & Liora 

Thaw I — Salt

Elias Rowan was a boy born with too much consideration for the world and too little for himself. He possessed the unfortunate habit of reflection, which, much like a mirror, returned to him not only what was present, but what was missing. His features were unremarkable in the common sense: dark hair always in gentle disarray, eyes of a brown so earnest they seemed almost apologetic. Yet there was about him a gravity that invited confession. Do not presume I mean the kind of confession a priest draws penitents nor as a photograph flatters the vain, but as a dimly lit room invites the unbuttoning of thought, where secrets, relieved of their moral urgency, slipped from the body like unravelled garments and rested at his feet, warm, human, and no longer ashamed. He noticed small tremors in voices. He felt the chill before others admitted the season had changed. It made him gentle. It also made him cold.

He did not know he was frozen. And yet, It was inevitable that he should meet Liora.

She appeared to him one afternoon by the sea, dressed improperly for the weather and laughing with all the freedom she artfully wore. Her hair, light as unspun silk, clung to her face in the damp wind. There was a faint scar near her mouth, small, crescent-shaped, which Elias would later commit to memory. Liora’s beauty was the sort that assumed itself mutely, like a tide that does not announce itself yet leaves the shoreline altered, so that those who encountered her were changed without knowing precisely when the change occurred.

They spoke of books left face-down on tables, their spines creased in similar places; of passages they pretended not to like and then quoted from memory; of letters never sent and errands delayed for no reason other than the pleasure of prolonging an afternoon. Elias learned the particular tilt of Liora’s head when she listened, the way her fingers worried the hem of her sleeve when she disagreed but chose kindness over correction. She teased him for his habit of rereading the same page when distracted; he noticed how she always waited for him to finish a thought, even when the rest of the world rushed on.

Their walks stretched longer than intended. She would stop to examine nothing at all, a shop window, a loose stone in the road, only so he might continue beside her. He learned to measure time by her presence: the minutes quickening when she laughed, and slowing when her shoulder brushed his. Once, when rain surprised them, she took his coat without asking and returned it warmed by her body, borrowing something essential and giving it back altered. Affection arrived without ceremony. It revealed itself in the unthinking reach for his hand when crossing the street, in the way she said his name as if it were a private thought, in the quiet confidence with which she leaned into his silences. Elias discovered that loving Liora meant living perpetually on the brink: of speech, of loss, of joy too large to be named. It was a state of half-agony and half-hope, exquisite in its restraint, devastating in its promise, and he would have endured it gladly, endlessly, had the world not insisted upon an ending.

She was taken by the sea. 

 Some speculated it was melancholia that

 had driven her to take her own life, others

 wrote it off as an accident, most never

 dared to speak about it. The

 mere truth of it settled over the town as a

 stiff, heavy blanket. He, of course, had

 blamed himself. He recalled

 the way she traced the sky with her

 fingers, mapping out where constellations

 should be. She'd laugh and go "Well my

 eyesight is pretty weak so I can only

 guess from the little blurry dots of white

 but this is where Leo should be.. I think."

 He recalled the way her eyes lit up when

 she'd noticed that instead of looking at the

 sky, he could only ever stare at her. He

 recalled the white dress she always wore,

 loose fitting but comfortable, always

 fluttering in the wind. He recalled the

 way she only ever used one pin to keep

 her bangs out of her face, the rest of her hair wild, always unstyled. "It

 can't be.." he'd mutter to himself. "It can't

 be.. it can't be." 

He lived thereafter as though a pane of glass had been fitted between himself and the world. He could see everything, bread rising, smoke climbing, children quarrelling in the lane, but the warmth of it reached him, delayed, thinned, as if it had crossed a winter field to arrive. Grief did not strike him as a storm struck a ship; it entered like damp. It climbed the walls invisibly, settled into the beams, bowed the floorboards with its patience. He would wake and feel it already at work, industrious as ivy.

At first he believed sorrow would tear at him, demand spectacle. Instead, it behaved like a careful tailor, unpicking him thread by thread. A seam at the shoulder. A small surrender at the throat. He found himself undone in increments so slight no one remarked upon them. His laughter thinned. His appetite receded. Even his shadow seemed less certain of its allegiance.

He tried to remember the last thing she said, reaching into memory like a man plunging his hands into dark water, certain there is a body there, yet each time he drew them back he found them silvered only with cold. He knelt often, sifting the afterfield of her voice. Had it wavered? Had it steadied? He could not be certain. The mind, in its tenderness, edits. It smooths roughness, heightens radiance, burnishes the light, and erases the ordinary until what remains glows too purely to ever be marred again. He began to fear he was no longer loving her, but the bright, unbreakable relic his sorrow had made in her place. He recalled the crescent scar by her mouth and understood it differently now. It had always seemed like a small, private moon. Now it appeared a prophecy. A thin white boat upon her skin. He remembered the single pin holding back her bangs, how the rest of her hair refused governance. That rebellion struck him now. He would have gathered each loosened strand, held it to his mouth to breathe, hoping some trace of her warmth still clung to it, hoping it might forgive him for surviving in her stead. At night he lay wakeful, listening to the small creaks of timber cooling. The house seemed to breathe without her. He would turn his head toward the space she once occupied and feel the absence as one feels a missing tooth with the tongue, compulsively, tenderly, returning to the gap until it aches anew. He did not reach for her; he reached for the indentation her warmth had once made. The body remembers what the mind cannot endure.

He married in time. The years, dutiful as clerks, filed themselves away. His wife was patient, and he loved her in the careful manner of one who knows how swiftly joy may be repossessed. He did not speak often of Liora, but she lived in him the way a cathedral holds echo long after the choir has gone. There were corridors in him no footstep crossed. His wife sensed them and, mercifully, did not try the handle. Age silvered him. His hands, once steady, trembled as if remembering a cold no fire could dispel. He became known for gentleness. For listening as though each word offered were fragile glass. They praised his depth. They did not see that depth is merely what remains after something vast has been removed.

Now he no longer argued with what had occurred. He had learned that grief is not a beast to be slain but a country to inhabit. You build there. You harvest what you can. You learn the names of its seas, oceans and rivers.

In his final winter, when breath came thin and light gathered at the edges of his sight, he felt a loosening as though the seam of sorrow opened long ago was widening at last. Those beside him heard only the small mechanics of dying. But his mind moved toward the shore of that first afternoon: a girl improperly dressed for weather, laughter flung wide as nets, a white dress fluttering like surrender or invitation, he could never decide which. 

He would carry her absence all his life. But the ice had broken. And beneath it, something still flowed. If his lips shaped her name then, it was not as plea but as recognition. Not an attempt to retrieve, but to join. For he understood at last that love does not perish with the body it once illuminated. It alters its element. It becomes a tide. It becomes air. It waits at the margin where blue hour opens its soft, unanswerable mouth, and calls us, gently, home.

Persy Calder & Iris

Thaw — II

In the next life, she was Persy Calder, and in her hair glinted strands of silver that caught the light like frost on an autumn morning. She was not a Goddess in the way temples would have understood it. No thunder answered her moods. No storms bent to her will. But wherever she had trodden, the ground had recalled her.

When the sun touched her, her skin glowed back in a faint warmth. Her mouth was soft and full, stained always with the suggestion of pomegranate, as though she had just finished biting into fruit. And her eyes were the color of green, glimmering things seen through water, bright with life but carrying a depth that suggested roots reaching farther than the surface had ever revealed. 

Where she walked, petals loosened themselves from their stems and drifted after her. Seeds, even the stubborn ones, opened themselves like hungry small mouths. Pomegranates split in her palms without knives. All the splendor of spring leaned toward her, the way flowers lean toward light. Bees forgot their routes and circled her like prayers. The rivers slowed, wishing to linger in her reflection. The earth parted in a long, slow seam, and Persy stepped forward. The light thinned into something softer, mineral, and tender. The air grew still. Trees rose from the black soil with bark like polished obsidian, their leaves pale, shaped like the palms of the dead. The underworld began to lure in a curious girl made of loam and dawnlight. It spoke of a soul that had loved the same other soul so faithfully that even death itself had grown tired of interrupting them. Now she was the field after the fire. The season that arrived whether anyone asked for it or not. And the world, which had tested her with sorrow in multiple bodies, watched her carefully. It knew who would come.

The underworld was luminous with a slow, pulsating light, like the glow inside a pomegranate held against the sun. Rivers moved like drawling black ink. Trees grew with silver bark and leaves the color of old bruises. The air smelled faintly of iron and honey. 

And there, seated on a throne grown from black roots and cooled lava, was the ruler of it all. The Queen of the Underworld sat upon a throne carved from a single block of volcanic glass, its surface dark enough to swallow reflections whole. Shadows gathered around her like obedient animals, curling at her feet, clinging to the edges of her cloak.

Iris. 

Her crown was not gold but thorn, woven from the branches of trees that only grew in places where grief had sunk its teeth deep into the soil. Tiny white blossoms clung to the thorns—flowers that only bloomed in graveyards, petals pale as bone, their fragrance faint and sweet. Drops of something red, sap, or blood, or both, gathered at the tips of the thorns and fell in slow, patient rhythms to the floor below. Her hair fell like a spill of ink down her back, thick and heavy, threaded with faint streaks of silver like veins of ore. Her eyes held the stillness of deep water, and if you looked long enough, you could almost see them: shipwrecks of forgotten loves, broken swords, rings slipped from cold fingers, letters never delivered. Every lost thing in the world seemed to have found a home in those eyes, and none of it was rejected. She did not look cruel. She looked patient. 

Persy recognized her at once. Of course she did. She always did.

Love, after enough lifetimes, becomes a kind of scent. A frequency. A tremor in the bones when the right person enters the room.

“You came,” Iris said, "and you have come a long way." And the truth of it struck the underworld like a bell, because this time, no one had been stolen. No one had been tricked. No one had eaten fruit out of hunger or ignorance. Persy had walked down willingly, her hands empty, her heart full of centuries. 

Iris watched her with an expression that was not surprise, not triumph, but something quieter. Something almost reverent. “Do you know what it costs,” she asked, “to sit beside me?”

Persy did.

“I have already paid it,” she said. “Three times over. I’ve loved you before,” she said quietly, though she did not know why she knew it. “I don’t remember how. Only that I have.” 

For the first time, Iris’s composure faltered. Just slightly. Like the smallest crack in ice. “You shouldn’t say things like that down here,” she murmured.

“Why?”

“Because the dead listen. And they are greedy for stories." 

As if summoned by her words, shapes began to gather in the shadows, pale figures, half-formed, watching from the edges of the hall. The air thickened with their silent attention.

Persy stepped closer to Iris. “I don’t want to leave,” she said.

Iris’s expression hardened. “Everyone says that. For a moment.”

“But I remember,” Persy whispered

“I remember things that don’t belong to me,” Persy said, almost to herself. She did not look at Iris when she spoke. Her eyes were fixed on the dark floor, where veins of dull marble threaded through the stone like frozen lightning. 

“Sometimes it’s water,” she continued. “Cold enough to sting the teeth. The taste of salt when I shouldn’t be near a sea. She looked up, at last, at Iris, ashen eyes glinting in the candlelight. "Sometimes it’s the smell of dust, white dust, soft as flour, settling into the lines of my hands." She flexed her fingers as though expecting to see it there. “And sometimes it’s a small room with a window. There’s a couch. Old. Its springs creak when someone sits down. A cat.” Her voice grew quieter, afraid of being overheard by her own memory. “And there’s a weight beside me. A warmth. A person I trust without remembering why. I never see her face clearly. Only the shape of her shoulder. The way her hand finds mine." 

Iris did not move. But the shadows around her tightened, as though they felt the shift in her breath.

“You don’t understand what you’re saying,” Iris murmured.

“Then tell me,” Persy replied.

At last, Iris said, very quietly, “If those memories are real, then every one of them ends with you losing me.”

Persy considered this, her brow knitting slightly, as though she were turning the thought over like a stone in her palm.

“Yes,” she said. “But they also begin with me finding you.”

Iris did not answer immediately. For a long time, she only stood there. The underworld held its quiet around them. At last, she exhaled. 

“You always say things like that,” Iris murmured.

“In every life. You speak as if beginnings are stronger than endings.”

Persy tilted her head. “Aren’t they?”

Iris’s mouth curved faintly, but there was no humor in it.

“No. Endings are heavier. They last longer. They leave stains.” Her gaze drifted past Persy, into the dim distance where the shades gathered. “I remember them all. Every version of you.”

Persy listened, very still.

“I was there,” Iris continued. “Not beside you. Never close enough to touch. But I was there at the edges. I felt each ending like a bell struck somewhere far below the earth. I knew your name before you were even born again.”

Her voice softened. “And every time, I told myself the same thing: this will be the last. This will be the life where she forgets me.” 

Persy stepped closer. Close enough that their shadows merged on the stone.

“But I didn’t,” she said.

“No,” Iris replied. “You didn’t.”

They stood in silence, the weight of centuries pressing gently around them like deep water.

Perseya reached for her hand again, slower, asking permission not just from Iris, but from the whole long history that lived between them.

“What happens now?” she asked. Iris’s fingers curled around hers before she could stop herself. The touch was cool, steady, familiar in a way that made something ache beneath her ribs.

“Now comes the part none of your lives have reached before.”

Iris looked down at their joined hands, then back into Persy’s eyes.

“You always found me,” she said. “And you always lost me. That was the pattern. That was the balance. Life, death. Spring, winter. Beginning, ending.”

“But you’ve come here willingly. You walked into the dark with open eyes.” She paused. “That breaks the story."

Her thumb brushed once across Persy's knuckles. 

Persy’s lips parted. “Is that bad?”

Iris thought of the countless endings she had watched. The countless souls drifting into her realm with unfinished sentences in their mouths. She thought of Perseya’s voice just moments ago, listing those small, ordinary memories: the couch, the cat, the hand in hers.

“I think it’s the first honest thing that’s ever happened to us.” Iris said quietly.

“What does honesty change?” Persy asked.

Iris lifted their joined hands, studying them as though they were some rare, delicate artifact.

“It means,” she said, “that this time, you don’t have to stay.”

Persy frowned. “But I came here for you.”

“And I know,” Iris replied. “That’s why I can’t keep you.”

“In every other life,” Iris continued, “love meant losing you. That was the law of it. The price. But if I hold you here now, if I keep you in the underworld just because you love me, then I become the ending. I become the thing that consumes you whole.”

She shook her head. “I have done enough in my time.”

Persy’s grip tightened. “Then what are we supposed to do? Just meet again and again until the earth runs out of lives?”

Iris’s expression softened, and for the first time, there was something almost gentle in it. “No,” she said. “We change the rhythm.”

“You will go back,” Iris said. “You will live. Not as a goddess nor as a myth. You will live as a woman with dirt under her nails and sunlight in her hair. You will have seasons that are yours alone.” 

“And you?” Persy asked.

“I will stay,” Iris replied. “I belong to the endings. Someone must keep watch over them.”

She stepped closer, close enough that Persy could see the faint, pale blossoms tangled in the thorns of her crown. “In every life before, love was something that happened to us. And loss was the punishment for it.” Her voice grew softer. “But now, love is something we are doing on purpose. Even letting go.”

Persy felt tears gather in her eyes, though she was not entirely sure why. The grief did not feel sharp. It felt wide, like a vast, unending horizon.

“Will I remember you?” she asked.

“Not like this,” Iris said. “Not with names and faces. But you’ll remember the feeling. The way some people feel like home.”

She reached up and brushed a loose strand of hair from Persy's face. “And somewhere, in some life, we’ll meet again. Maybe this time as two people who happen to like the same blue light in the afternoon.”

Persy let out a shaky breath. “That sounds…  ordinary.”

Iris smiled faintly. “Ordinary. Yes.”

The ground beneath Persy's feet began to glow softly, the path back to the surface opening, warm and golden. 

She hesitated.

“Go,” Iris whispered.

Persy nodded, though her heart ached. It just tore a page out of a book she had just begun to love. She stepped onto the glowing path. With each step, the air grew warmer, lighter, sweeter. The scent of soil and blossoms returned.

At the threshold, she turned back.

Iris stood in the dim light of the underworld, crown of thorns and pale flowers, eyes deep as ever. But there was something new in her posture, something almost like peace. Persy smiled, and then stepped into the light.

And so the legend was told: That once, the Queen of Spring walked willingly into the underworld for love, and the Queen of the Dead loved her enough to let her leave.

Since then, the seasons have been nothing but a dance. Spring rises because somewhere in the dark, a queen had chosen love over possession. Winter falls as the memory of her descent, and the quiet faith that she would always find her way back. And somewhere, in some ordinary afternoon, two strangers keep meeting again, never remembering why their hearts feel so certain. Because once, across many names, many bodies, many fragile, unfinished lives, love kept walking into the dark.

Again and again, love reached the same ending.

Again and again, the dark closed over it like water over a stone.

The universe thought it understood the pattern. It believed love was only a beautiful prelude to loss. It believed every story bent, eventually, toward silence. But it had not accounted for memory. It had not accounted for devotion stubborn enough to outlive names, bodies, even sorrow itself. Because in the final life, love did something new.

It walked there willingly, with open eyes, and said: I know you. I have always known you.

Some devotions are too faithful to be treated as accidents, and too beautiful to be ended the same way forever. And the world felt the difference. Because once, across lifetimes and losses and small, ordinary rooms, love refused to become only a tragedy. And ever since, the world has turned a little more gently, as though it carries, deep in its spinning core, the memory of one soul finding the same other soul, again and again, until the ending broke open, and let itself go.

By Mahsa Babaeian

Mahsa Babaeian is an Iranian Muslim woman and a devoted mother. She is 32 years old and currently studying medicine in Iran. She holds a firm belief that one must strive to achieve the highest and most complete form of everything—be it excelling as a student, a mother, or a servant of God.

"Amidst the numerous concerns, preoccupations, and responsibilities of a perfection-seeking female student, Mahsa Babaeian wishes to address a particular issue that perhaps has never before been articulated—an emotion that many girls sense quietly within their hearts every day. It is a feeling that countless others may only become aware of for the first time, prompting them to pause and reflect deeply.

“Before the Mirror” depicts a young woman's internal struggle with exhaustion, daily responsibilities, and spiritual commitments. Throughout the narrative, she is overwhelmed by fatigue after class, which influences her decisions—initially planning to rest, then contemplating whether to join a congregational prayer. Her physical tiredness affects her appearance and her ability to perform religious duties properly. Ultimately, she chooses to rest and sleep, missing the prayer time, but the next day, she begins anew with renewed spirit and a renewed intention to fulfill her religious obligations. The story highlights themes of self-care, the importance of spiritual discipline, and the human tendency to sometimes prioritize comfort over duty, only to recommit with fresh resolve."

She left the classroom with half-open eyes and furrowed eyebrows. Her backpack was thrown casually over her shoulder; the physiology class was over. She was talking to herself—hungry now, as lunch in the cafeteria had already passed. Weakness washed over her. As she strolled through the university courtyard, exhaustion pressed heavily on her.

"First, I’ll eat something," she thought, "then I’ll go home. After that, I’ll finally get the sleep I promised myself this morning."

A long, restful midday nap to wash away all this fatigue.

She gathered her belongings and headed toward the medical faculty. As she exited the hall, the call to prayer echoed through the air, tickling her ears. Carpets were being laid out in the School of Medicine Hall for the congregational prayer. She turned and saw Haj Agha Qods standing there with his usual energy.

She stopped.

Her feet felt rooted to the ground. She quickly calculated her options in her mind.

With this exhaustion, if I go home to rest… but if I stay and pray in congregation, my noon and afternoon prayers won’t be missed. They’re brief anyway. And autumn days pass as swiftly as life itself.

Her steps changed direction, and she moved to perform ablution.

Darkness from fatigue had deepened beneath her eyes; her makeup had smudged and spread from exhaustion. She looked at herself in the washroom mirror. Because of her tiredness, she couldn’t perform ablution properly. She left the faculty, abandoned the idea of joining the congregational prayer, and went home.

She washed her face with cold water, which eased her headache. All she craved was a deep sleep.

So she slept.

Before she knew it, the prayer time had passed. She woke at sunset.

The next morning, she awoke feeling refreshed and in a good mood. Standing before the mirror, she combed her hair as she always did and prepared to go to the university. She couldn’t go looking unkempt—never.

That day, unlike before, she performed ablution (wudu) before applying her makeup. She paused for a moment, gazing at the cream on the table. She picked it up, hesitated, then decided.

Because this time, she wanted to be able to pray at the university.

By Shïzã

She is a girl with deep feelings and sensitive heart to feel everything so hard

Title: Thaw

We remained close for years,

wrapped in love, warmth, and cherished memories.

The day we were physically separated,

did you really think we were apart?

And then, after so long,

when I saw you again…

love thawed within me.

It reminded me of us.

That sensation refilled my heart

and made me question—

were we ever truly separated?

Do you really think so, my love? 💕

Title: Thaw

We remained close for years,

wrapped in love, warmth, and cherished memories.

The day we were physically separated,

did you really think we were apart?

And then, after so long,

when I saw you again…

love thawed within me.

It reminded me of us.

That sensation refilled my heart

and made me question—

were we ever truly separated?

Do you really think so, my love? 💕

Title: Thaw

We remained close for years,

wrapped in love, warmth, and cherished memories.

The day we were physically separated,

did you really think we were apart?

And then, after so long,

when I saw you again…

love thawed within me.

It reminded me of us.

That sensation refilled my heart

and made me question—

were we ever truly separated?

Do you really think so, my love? 💕

By Faheema C.

Faheema C writes for the love of words, drawn to the quiet spaces where emotional vulnerability and tender human truths unfold. She has long been writing short stories and poetry that explore intimacy, power, longing, and the fragile resilience of the human spirit. Working in both Malayalam and English, her voice moves between cultural rootedness and contemporary reflection. Though not yet independently published, she has been a contributor to the poetry collection Mirage.

"This poem was originally written in my mother tongue, Malayalam, a regional language of India. It was first shared on social media in Malayalam and warmly received by readers on social media stories. I recently translated it into English, with slight linguistic refinements to preserve and deepen its emotional texture."

In the hush of a long, rain-soaked season,

when the earth was already swollen with longing,

she conceived a love.

First month,

she caressed the womb

and whispered stories into it. 

Second month,

the stories thinned to silence. 

Words dried at the edges.

 Silence began to gather.

Third month,

the womb grew heavy,

with the dreams she shared.

Fourth month,

it cooed —

whispering: you are mine.

Fifth month,

it complained

that her love was thinning.

Sixth month,

the womb grew roots

of forbidden things,

pushed through her ribs —

guilt, fear, shrinking space.

Seventh month,

with sudden cruelty,

it stamped upon the paper palace

of her private dreams,

collapsing what she had built

before it ever existed.

Eighth month,

the roots thickened —

a forest rising within her.

Ninth month,

she could not breathe.

In the tenth month,

in a frenzy of survival,

she tightened her fingers

around the womb’s throat

And pressed.

Love died.

She became

 a murderer.

At least, air returned to her lungs.

By Kim Piercy

Piercy is an educator and writer from California who likes to share many little observations on nature and human relationships with modern poetry. The mission is to spread joy and trust in natural creativity!

Wild Mushroom Soup

I saw you hunched with shaking

hands that begged for a task

and said "Let's make soup!"

just to see you smile.

Stir the seasoned pot

with wild rice and cream.

A scent so hot it lures

the cottage fairies

through the windows

of this dank house.

Sneaking sips as it simmers

low to bring happiness high.

Dinner is served with a side

of silly talk.

If you start to frown again

I can fill your bowl with seconds,

and the time poured will keep us full.

We made soup to heat

for hard days to come,

and heaps more for storms

over the nights that stick

like ice to lungs.

A wild love that's home grown

will warm the trembling air

until the chill is chased out

by the flavor of shiitake

and chicken broth.

By Abbie Cochrane

Abbie Cochrane is a Utah based actor of stage, screen, and voiceover. Having graduated from Southern Utah University in April of 2025 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theater and a minor in Creative Writing, Abbie can constantly be found with either a script or her laptop in hand, but she's always telling stories. Her writing has been featured in the Kolob Canyon Review, Moss Puppy Magazine, Yavanu Literary Magazine, and Aetherium Literary Magazine. When she's not at rehearsal or typing away at her latest story, she can be found playing Dungeons and Dragons, working on her next cosplay, or spoiling her labradoodle named Lola. Follow along with her adventures on Instagram (abbie__cadabi). 

My body and spirit come back to each other when the day gets longer. I don’t know what about the sun’s return is enough to keep me from splitting in half for months, or how the extended nights later in the year continue to pit me against myself. Perhaps the longer I spend in darkness and cold, the easier my mind is able to convince my body of every bad thing about me being true. Nothing can hide in the blaze of the sun’s light, so maybe that’s why it’s easier to come to terms with existing as I am every day in the summer. 

I’m very particular when it comes to the seasons. Every month has a season and every season has a month. I’m used to feeling bitter and lonely in the months with holidays dedicated to loved ones and family. My soul is broken, my body is always tired, and neither can look at each other long enough to become at least the silhouette of a person happy to be with her family. Yet this year, during the rare seventy degree Christmas, I was still unhappy because I knew that’s what I was supposed to be. That December was as gray as a corpse, representative of how I’d felt all through the year. I found myself forcing a “humbug” and purposefully keeping my soul and body from attempting to reconnect before I was ready. 

When the sun’s return came early this year, it threw me off balance as though I had slipped on ice. I’m not used to liking myself in February, so it’s a strange feeling. I’m opening the windows in the morning and being met with sunlight instead of a blue-bruised sky barely scraped by the sunrise, I only have to wear one coat when I walk my dog, and I’m finding myself smiling in the mirror instead of keeping my head down while the steam clears after I shower. 

As the days keep getting longer and warmer, I find comfort in the expectation of happiness returning when the sun does, when the two parts of myself most often at war can make peace, if only for a few short months. Thawing is uncomfortable. It’s remembering to move things that were once frozen, oiling your joints as if you were the Tin Man in Oz, knowing full well it will never be permanent. 

But thawing also means warmth, even for just a little while.

By Areeba Shoukat

Areeba Shoukat is 17 year old college-going girl from Pakistan. She writes about her feelings that mirror those of most of today’s youth.

How lost, how still,

A frozen lake

Once would flow and dream,

Was stopped and hemmed.

O silent lake,

Your echoes sealed beneath.

Covered by cold silence,

Yet quiet warmth underneath.

Soon enough-

Frost begins to loosen,

Warmth lingering through the rime Slowly, slowly and slowly.

What once forgot it's way to go,

Will now go for sure.

What once forgot to flow,

Will now flow for sure.

O water! Your waves-

Restless though.

Murmur burried secrets.

All slowly and slowly.