I am a bad seed,
For I come from bad apples,
And someday I will grow to be,
In turn, a bad apple tree.

And from that tree,
Bad apples will grow.
And one day that child of mine will ask,
“Mother, like you,
Am I a bad apple too?”

C.G. Nelson has been an avid reader of poetry since she was thirteen years old. Her first loves were Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. C.G. Nelson is a new poet. She went to the University of Washington, where she graduated with a degree in English and Philosophy.

<
One day I’ll upload to the cloud.
I’ll leave this body and fly.

I might even come back,
do it all again.

Programmed to have forgotten
I’ll feel sweat on my brow,

taste salt running from my face,
salt of the earth,

written in code.
>

Nick seeks to bring a sense of contemplation to his work as a product manager of financial indices when not reading and writing poetry. A woeful Knicks fan, Nick resides in Manhattan with his wife Julia and their miniature pinscher, Emma. Nick’s work was recently featured in Grey Sparrow Journal.

Mama always did the dishes
after I made them dirty.
I’d carry as many as I could in one big trip
to the kitchen sink.
Pretended I was a waitress
ballerina, plates on my palm
balanced with empty glasses on top.
Only a handful
of times did they fall and shatter.
Mama’d scream like I deeply hurt her
only child, or spilled hot tea on her foot.
I’d plié in fear and horror
in lieu of running away
to a small town where I could change
my name, be a big time
waitress when I grow up,
get all the Coke I want.

Mama always did the dishes
while I thirsted
for something to do
other than watch TV or watch her
sob and do the dishes.
I listened to her sing
songs from childhood
more loudly than usual
over rushing water and
my high-pitched babblings
I’d thought of myself
or heard on the news.

Mama always did the dishes.
I danced and brought my own blues.

Amber Weinstock holds a BA in Literature from Binghamton University. After teaching in South Korea and traveling for over a year, she’s returned to Brooklyn, NY to pursue art things and fight the urge to float away like a helium balloon again.

Watermelons grow into shapes
as children, becoming soft squares
made easier to keep in a fridge.
Maybe our children will grow
into rooms, the press of objects
leaving imprints on their rinds, each
a story they didn’t know they’d bear until
their skin becomes a clafoutis
splitting with raspberry bedsores.
Unless the vine is severed,
their bodies are bonsai.

Kristin Eade is a writer and editor from Seattle, Washington. She has an ardent love for words, especially those that need a good edit, and enjoys daydreaming, playing with cats, and being in nature. One of her greatest accomplishments is memorizing all the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody.

I remember a cool breeze
After a hot day
Of youth rushing
To get older
And I remember
The warmth
Of ancient stone
Radiating
The history of a moment

Katarzyna is a psychologist with an interest in psychoanalysis and writing. She lives, works and writes in London. Her poems are short and nearly always rhyme – this may be due to a fear of long prose ever since school.

Seen as an ornament of beauty, but suffocating everything in its path.
Revered for its durability, but no one notices the strangling roots underneath.
They are seen as strong, yet they have to invade to gain their power—
And no one knows what else had to suffer for the stunning flower to gain its numbers.
It stands tall no matter the depths of the water,
But no one realizes that it completely obstructs the shimmering pond from view.

Rebecca Malachowski has been writing poetry since she was 14 years old and has found it to be one of the main comforts and constants throughout her life.

Green tea sediment
at the bottom of my cup
swirling like a murmuration
of starlings
across a shallowing sky.
The closest I will get
to going outside today.

Kristin Eade is a writer and editor from Seattle, Washington. She has an ardent love for words, especially those that need a good edit, and enjoys daydreaming, playing with cats, and being in nature. One of her greatest accomplishments is memorizing all the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody.

I wrote an e-mail; it was how I reacted.
I was about to hit Send, but a text got me distracted.
The content came to me fast, as my anger slowly rose.
I just kept on typing, with the sharp words that I chose.

I detailed my complaint, didn’t leave anything out.
It got very detailed; put in everything I could think about.
I wanted it to be clear, I wanted it to be concise.
But one thing I didn’t try, that was to be nice.

I would have sent it, if it wasn’t for my phone.
But I like to get notifications, especially if I’m alone.
And so after the delay, my draft e-mail I re-read.
And then it struck me – I should just call him instead!

J.M. Allen is a 50 year-old living in Rochester, Minnesota who started writing a bunch of rhyming poems (the best kind?). He has three kids, who are approximate teenagers that give him much poetry inspiration!

Sometimes a step too early
becomes the right step out of
inevitability.

Read my pen so eager for the paper it plants
the first kiss before my command
and with every kiss destroys the delete key.

If it takes too much effort to find new paper then
our love can
only go on …

Let’s see what forest grows out of cut trees.
A forest of cacti is
still life
even if, in Feng Shui, they would say it is full
of 杀气—
the kind of breath that kills.

Celine Low is a nomad writer, painter, dancer and secret bathroom-singer currently housed in India.  She holds an MA in English Literature, and her writing is either published or forthcoming in the Muddy River Poetry Review, Beyond Words, and Quince Magazine, among others. Read more of her poetry on Instagram @_ckye. 

Purple wisteria,
a red rhododendron
color a lush green world
in a thin afternoon rain.

A brown horse steps
over the far field
with the slow fluency
of a mind at peace.

Rain patters the new leaves.
Rain falls through some archaic memory
not your own. Someone stood here
in another century.

And will again.

Mike Dillon lives with his wife of 40-plus years in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. He is a retired community newspaper publisher who comes from a newspaper family. He walks, reads, writes, and in summers swims in the cold waters of Puget Sound.