the sun is laughing
flowers kiss
my bruises
trees sing to me of truth
as winds whisper
things of both myths and half-truths
of old and new,
cleansing me of old wounds;
if only for a moment
with the fragrant songs of spring and summer—
the sun sculpts the sky
into carnelians, rubies, pink jasper,
gold, and amethysts;
the flowers
sing their songs
creeks wash away my pain and shame
peace is restored by one stroke
of nature’s paint brush
until the next human stumbles into me
with clumsy, erratic steps
expecting something without giving me anything
feeling entitled to time i do not want nor need to give them.

Image: Viscious-Speed via Pixabay

Here on a pretence of fixing something,
Talentless as I am,
Hers the only room with working lights.

Standing side by side in
the airy lull,
looking out to sea as we speak.

‘Is that the caverns?’
I nod to the street.
‘Yes, but I haven’t been. They’re too expensive.’

Her comment is absurd,
her accent Russian.
Her beauty is made of glass

in small, fragile features and
I know that
I am not good enough.

Out in the sunny coloured garden,
Her back to
the noise of the beach

I see,
Over her shoulder,
two chimneys fall off the horizon.

Too polite to interrupt,
I adopt the air of
a policeman in crisis.

I’ve heard about fata morgana but
I know
That I already know.

Silent destruction of
scattered world atop white froth.
I am calm, by the way.

I reach out for the
silk of her long dark hair,
doomed beauty,

the tide
up to my chest,
about the height of my heart.

BENJAMIN OLSEN is a writer of poetry, flash fiction and short stories. He lives with his wife and two small children in Bournemouth and is currently studying an MA in Creative Writing and Publishing. He is working on his first novel 17 Flaws. Sometimes he tweets nonsense at @BenOlsen1

Image: Comfreak via Pixabay

Over brandy and espresso we discuss
bad endings: twists, surprises;
careers, lives, manuscripts abandoned.
A Brit in his mild, learned way
suggests that it’s only failed art
that lets the horrid grandeur
of reality show through. (It’s the same paradox
a Frenchman has been elaborating for an hour
without quite stating.) Across the fields
the Quonset huts of our small city
shed, hopefully, the rain. So do the signs
and ineffective weapons of those
beyond the wire, who disapprove of us;
the ones who intend to stay.

We might have been among them.
But when the big groups muscled to the fore,
demanding passage – those unduly
devoted to religion or skin color,
burning girls or beating children, guns,
defeating the evils of vaccines, altruism,
literacy – we thought,
To hell with it. To hell with this fair world.
We too will have our own, and make it good.
There will be kindness on at least one planet.
We shall not wander weeds and ruins
with cowards, aesthetes, sentimentalists,
who again, despite us, will split and split
again and beat each other into mud.

The ships will come for us, we last and least,
next week. No one knows why or whose they are.
At least they look mechanical, not organic.
One has a sense they’ve done all this before.
They never talk. Their broadcasts
show the best of all possible worlds
for us as much as for the fools and bigots –
soil, seas, and solitude. Of course,
we wonder if we’ll end up slaves, cuisine,
or harmless dreaming molecules of amber;
or if, out there, our brave new culture
will rot, remembering we couldn’t help …
To hell with it. We’ll see what can be done
by a million intellectuals with robots.

FREDERICK POLLACK is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press), and two collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015) and LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Many other poems in print and online journals. Adjunct professor creative writing George Washington University, Washington, DC.

Image: By Tksteven [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

the new sacred is the way she laughs when i tell her a funny story
never in my life have i been prone to worship
until i met
her smile,

i had forgotten
what it feels like to be in awe
of the way someone loves you
i had forgotten

what it means to feel
unworthy and perfect at the same time
i had forgotten
how to feel like yours

in several small inklings i have realized
how she fits into parts of me that i had forgotten were missing –
places that never saw the light of day till
now

like sun
like spring flowers
like coming out of hibernation
i am

tip-toeing
hushing my heart
molding circumstances to
make us work

hold my hand
worship bodies
our toes touching
stay with me

goddess
lover
light
dear heart.

ABIGAIL PEARSON is a 22-year-old queer writer of novels and poetry. She has a black cat that she loves to cuddle with as she drinks tea and reads Dostoyevsky. Abigail has recently published a poetry collection titled A Mad Woman’s Voice and she has been published in Moonchild Magazine, The Slag Review and Cease, Cows.
She resides in Eugene, OR.

Image: via pexels

I felt like a one-man show in a gallery,
fearful for how much lack of interest I’d created.
I’d been sometime working on my looks
with the aid of a bathroom mirror,
half-analytical, half-hopeful
in the process of primping

I was very young,
hardly a master in these matters.
and no artisan
when it came to the particulars of romance.

I was like the promulgation
of various unproven theories
crossed with a living lecture on self-doubt.
I tried various methods of
decomposition of my own self
and reconstruction into something
I figured the other sex would appreciate.
I didn’t so much emerge
as step into the witness box.

Employing a somewhat dim courage
and the habitual words and gestures of my friends,
I finally asked one modestly appealing girl for a dance.
Her answer was of undeviating typicality,
non-judgmental applicability,
and resembled something like “yes.”

JOHN GREY is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Examined Life Journal, Evening Street Review and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Leading Edge, Poetry East and Midwest Quarterly.

Image: Bernard-Verougstraete via Pixabay

I have poured the wine, skipped
The water,
Smoked the weed, and turned up the tunes in my headphones
Jackson Brown, Willie Nelson and – Miles Davis.

I have opened the window to my soul, my empty space and let the cold in.
With the draft, the monsters come. At first, just a breeze, a whisper and a damp breath on
My warm neck.

I stare at their invited but unwelcome faceless faces,
See their hole
And grab hold of their hand.

Tight.

Sometimes, it is me dragging them to the place of no return
Other times they grab hold of my warmth with their death grip, pulling me down the
Gravel-y path
Upright and unafraid
Towards the end where I trust they will push me,
Holding on to the last thread of my essence
Giving me a glimpse of the place that I cannot return from
So, I can face the abyss long enough to hear Its cry, Its
Reasons, and Its story.

I trust the monsters to show me the face of Hell and Heaven
To let me take notes and return to tell Their tale.
Their story is interesting, so I return more often than I should, the sirens call and I answer
Over and Over, and over again
Until the day I do not return
Again.

Image: Chris Martin via Pixabay

Remember? It was raining hard that night.
The slow pulse of passing cars, alive
in the wet light, drew liquid shapes
on blacked-out windows; our sentences swam
in an aquarium of air.

New York was jumping but the traffic crawled.
You stretched out, liquid in the shadows.
I kept my counsel as the hours flowed.
Behind the glass the sky oozed darkness,
bleeding like bruised fruit.

Afterwards, awkwardly, we touched. I froze,
But you melted me with a helpless shrug.
On the glistening sidewalk, you turned to ask
if you’d see me before I caught my plane.
Your smile was sad. I’m here, you said.

CLARE O’BRIEN lives on the north-west coast of Scotland. Her fiction and poetry has most recently appeared in Fearless Femme, The London Reader, Northwords Now, Biggar Science Festival’s The Powers Of Nature anthology and was longlisted for TSS Publishing’s Flash400 2018. Her day job is archivist and researcher, and she is also working on her first novel, a dystopian fiction called Light Switch. Follow her on Twitter at @clareobrien.

Image: Igor Schubin via Pixabay

Iambic OCD, first fingers forced,
her fealty, 400 year old king,
a caustic correspondence with a corpse.
Addict from an assignment, 17 —
don’t know what any of it means. Quatrains
restrain. A couplet is a cage. A box
to bind behemoth’s rhythms rage refrain
in 14 lines. Insanity kneesocked
in British architecture locked. A teen
boy-crazed, atop a brook, will not die down
or drown, be written in his book. Between
the stricture of his song, her soul’s the sound.
A dainty voice his pentameter shook.
This broken girl will live to write a book.

KRISTIN GARTH is a poet from Pensacola and a sonnet stalker. Her sonnets have stalked the pages of Occulum, Anti-Heroin Chic, Fourth & Sycamore, Drunk Monkeys, Digging Through the Fat, Neologism Poetry Journal, Society for Classical Poets and many other publications. Her poetry dollhouse chapbook Pink Plastic House is now available through Maverick Duck Press (maverickduckpress.com). Follow her on Twitter: @lolaandjolie.

Image:  [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

they don’t even hide anymore,
the snakes in the ferns, draping slack & slick
& blue-black across giant fingered fronds.

lizards skitter away but come right back
to catch dinner. quick dart toward
ants hauling a husk of grasshopper,

theft of a feast. even the big owls
don’t seem to mind you passing
where they perch on fence posts,

black eyes iron pot lids covering
silent windless voids, flat faces satellites
swiveling. they don’t so much as

blink when you stop & stare. they just lift
those lids & beckon you to slip quick
into frigid dizzying dark.

ANNIE FRAZIER grew up in North Carolina, lives in Florida, and earned her MFA from Spalding University. Her poetry has appeared in North Carolina Literary Review and NCLR Online. Her fiction is in CHEAP POP, Still: The Journal, Crack the Spine, apt magazine, and NCLR. She’s @anniefrazzr on Twitter.

Image: alexis parra via pixabay

Michelle with Mina in the bedroom,
colony girls, given new names,
their release papers pinned to the wall
from quarantine, a year
that had left them with a hatred of bright white,
but now alone magical and dancing
on Earth’s brandy and hash
moonlit through the paint-flaking wooden sash window
wrapped in sheets they’d dyed
the colour of damsons;
a bright green throw draped over the damp pliable sill;
rich thick blue-tinged smoke, low and heavy
undulates across the floorboards –
drifting towards candle-warmth,
synchronizing to muffled tunes from the bar piano
covered with glasses, three floors below.

The candles in the hollows of the thick bedroom walls
are spreading a buttery Rembrandt gleam
while outside the soft hiss of drizzle
patters across a city roofscape, dribbles down gutters,
trickles out onto narrow streets. Acclimatized now
to real oxygen (if not yet wind and open skies)
the musty journey up the gloomy winding
threadbare carpeted stairs no longer
leaves them out of breath.
A bang on their door –
“He wants one of you down in the bar,
he doesn’t care which one.”
He never cared which one –
those Mars-born girls
all looked the same,
were all good workers.

TIM GOLDSTONE is published in print and online magazines and anthologies, including The New Welsh Review, Stand, Crannóg, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ellipsis, Altered States, The Speculative Book; and BBC and Waterstones websites. Prose sequence read at The Hay Festival. Travelled throughout Western and Eastern Europe and North Africa. Lives in Pembrokeshire. Twitter @muddygold

Image: vishnu vijayan via pixabay

The ways in which I love you can’t be counted,
enumerated, written in a list,
nor could I state the quantity amounted
of places where you’ve held me close and kissed
me on the lips that couldn’t speak the number
of loving acts and kindnesses you’ve shown,
or nights when you’ve been woken from deep slumber
by snores so loud they grated to the bone
and with a gentle hand you’ve turned me over
and pulled the duvet close beneath my chin,
then quietly explored the room for ear-plugs
and uncomplainingly you’ve put them in.

The ways of love don’t fit in fine equations,
aren’t solvable by methods known to man,
but that one thing you do on such occasions
means more than any numbers ever can.

SHERRI TURNER is a writer of short fiction and poetry and has won prizes in competitions including the Bridport Prize, the Bristol Prize, the Wells Literary Festival and the Stratford Literary Festival. Her stories have also appeared in a number of anthologies. She tweets at @STurner4077.

Image: Gerd Altmann via pixabay

So everywhere there’s life, It goes.
Cryptic properties obnubilated
Within the half-blind dovetails,
Translating just enough –
Not to impose upon imposing beasts
Opinions secondhand and ill-fitting. 
The reader reads into what is read,
The words ever ink and dirt and shrug.
For what is The Cabinet in truth?
Infinite space
Collected. An offer.

Image: comfreak via Pixabay

Fifty years                   from now
                         when                                            all the mini marts are gone and
          alien space chickens                run                         the plants
                                    humans the work beasties
         who will sit                    back                   and say
                                                                                                  I told you so!

TARA LYNN HAWK is the author of poetry chapbooks Rhetorical Wanderlust and The Dead. Her work has appeared in Occulum, Rasputin, Anti-Heroin Chic, Uut, The Cabinet of Heed, Spelk, Wanton Fuckery, Midnight Lane Gallery, Idle Ink, Spilling Cocoa, Poethead, Social Justice Poetry and more. “taralynnhawk.com”

Image: Tara Lynn Hawk

forecast: clear and windy

data: conclusively inconclusive
in reference to explorations

Lucinda stands tall by the river
waders wet, muddy drops
decorating the grass

inside the sunshine,
artificial of course and no longer
present since the requisite
year has passed,

they found traces of
pure gold
leading Lucinda, test tube in hand
to the now gray and murky shores

forecast: windy and not so clear

data: consumption decreases clouds
in the minds and fields

water samples passed to gloved hands
Lucinda stands dripping at their doors
face a portrait of a face
all utility
naked, save grace

under covers, behind tented walls
her sister and the sisters of others wait

forecast: cloudy, chance for rain

data: gold in the light, pyrite in the water

holding their bags, hoisting their children
over barbed barriers and sinkholes
of sticky mud, Lucinda brings the women

in half, they are divided
ten swallow this, ten swallow that
then back over the drenched and dying land

forecast: rain

data: default toward hope
symptoms shift to improved

tented roofs hold
out the water and in the noise
smiles when the screaming stops
and echoes of splatters recede

Lucinda sits marking the graphs
a delicate script she will transport
swimming through the field they walked

forecast: cloudy

data: people precious
threads binding the earth

Lucinda brushes her sister’s hair
makes a path through the others
promising a return she knows
she might not make

clothes at her skin
puddles off her brow, Lucinda slips
data through slots for the now sleeping
to review

shakes hope off like distraction
trudges, new supplies in hand
back into the seeping darkness

CHRISTIE WILSON lives in Illinois. She is currently writing a collection of short prose. Her work appears in Atticus Review, apt, CHEAP POP, and New World Writing among other places. Visit her at www.christiewilson.net or follow her @5cdwilson. 

Image: Martina Sarkadi Nagy via Pixabay