John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in That, Dunes Review, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Thin Air, Dalhousie Review and failbetter.

Battleground

Once a poetic feeling takes hold
words get a good going over.

In prose,
they are merely inconvenienced.
With poetry,
words ache, they suffer, they bleed,
and they never forgive you.

The Bruise

Bruise didn’t heal,
just became one with the skin.

So there could be no forgetting.
Not with the past so visible.

Even forgiving didn’t have it easy.
Regrets poured out of him.
Even un-manly tears.

And love remained twice-removed –
a fist,
a harrowing pain,
stood in the way.

And yet
they kept on living together.

That bruise had
no place else to go.

The Redemption of Amy

She was no longer from Arizona,
nor California either.
She was no longer from anywhere.

And she wasn’t waitressing,
slapping guys who got too fresh,
cleaning up their mess.

Nor was she listening to people
warning her to stop taking that stuff,
flush it down the toilet.

And she didn’t need money
to pay the back-rent
or the payday lender on Broad Street.

She had no one to call
to explain or apologize
or make her excuses.

And the threats stopped,
the criticisms faded,
the despair put an end to itself.

She was just a body on a bed.
In her twenty something years,
the only one of its kind.

Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her work has been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, Arcturus, Constellations, the Same, The Mystic Blue Review, Jaffat El Aqlam, Brickplight, Willow, Fearsome Critters, Susan, The Broke Bohemian, The Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, Shoe Music Press, Havik: Las Positas College Anthology, Deep Overstock, Lavender Review, Voice of Eve, The Courtship of Winds, Mojave Heart Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rigorous, Rabid Oak, and Headway Quarterly. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, The Roadrunner Review, and Helen Literary Magazine.

When I Steal

When I steal, I steal big.
I steal the spring
And the birth of flowers.
I capture the giving,
A child’s crush—
Innocent and generous.
I secure the frames of nature
That travel through my flesh—
A hive for bees of steel.

Stealing is a sacrifice
For the nations apart, the pith
Uncrossed, lines untangled. Tangle,
Then untangle this sacred oracle.
Know your worth, the smell of your fear,
The gleam of my kiss on your neck.

I steal big and bravely
For your days
That do not know
Of the atonement
Of my many Mays,
The wait, the ebb
In the anatomy of buildings,
The delicate crossroads
On the fields of war. I bless
Most the loss of beauty—
My incipient babes
I hold dear in my bosom.

My times of yore are of physiques
Immature because of their anima.
The poles of ambience are even.

Ann Huang is an author, poet, and filmmaker based in Newport Beach, Southern California. She was born in Mainland, China and raised in Mexico and the U.S. World literature and theatrical performances became dominating forces during her linguistic training at various educational institutions. Huang possesses a unique global perspective of the past, present, and future of Latin America, the United States, and China. She is an MFA candidate from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has authored one chapbook and three poetry collections. Her surrealist poem “Night Lullaby,” was a Ruth Stone Poetry Prize finalist. “Crustacea” another of her surrealist poems, was nominated Best of the Net in Priestess & Hierophant. In addition, Huang’s book-length poetry collection, Saffron Splash, was a finalist in the CSU Poetry Center’s Open Book Poetry Competition. Her newest poetry collection, A Shaft of Light, is set to come out in 2019.

Imagined Life

To wrap your eyes up and close
Under a spot of our moon,
To straighten and to sing
Till the dark night has come
Now run at warm morning
Upon a small hill
While day goes by swiftly,
Bright like you—
That is your imagined life!

To wrap your eyes up and close
Under a spot of our moon,
Sing! Swirl!
Till the dark night has come.
Run at warm morning
A small, ample hill
Day going swiftly
Bright like you!

Stars

You see that you should know
Poems meaningful as stars.
Stars whose energy blink is reign
upon the galaxy’s swirling milky-way;
Stars that wander at humans all night long
And bow lingering eyes to watch over them;
Stars that exist only in wintry cities
A funnel of holiday lights in between their toes;
Against whose shadow their light has shone;
Who publicly dance in and about the snow.
Poems are not taken by folks like you,
And Goddesses rear stars as if their own.

J H Martin is from London, England but has no fixed abode. His writing has appeared in a number of places in Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Back Seat Driver

Seven – three – six
Time to get back on the bus
Time to get back on that wagon
Time to head back around these bends again

With their sun glittered birch
And their empty shelters
I watch them give way – as they always did
To diverted traffic
Which circles and backs up this litter bin mind
With microgram trash and fast fried flashbacks

All of them ghost years and badly smeared stains
Which bear no relation and have no connection to
This pressing window of Monday to Friday
And its Nine to Five

No – that primary school and those blue pallet stacks
And all of these people –
Wrapped up in their parkas and their scarves and their hats –
All of them have their own window to look through
And to see what they see

Here – but still there
Who am I to tell them any thing at all?

Is it January in Tongzi? Or is it Topoľčany in March?

Sat in front of my own self
This back seat driver couldn’t even claim to know that

For now – as it was – and as it has been for years
It’s still stuck on the same street – this faded store front
Which used to sell charm and its cheap knock-off dreams
To anyone fooled by its once filled out frame –

This now fraying seat this plastic fixture
This reflection I see in that iced window pane –

A grey hooded stranger in hand me down clothes
Who loves where he stays but cannot stand where I am –
Back on this bus and back on that wagon
A passenger craving far more than he needs

John Carnegie comes from Toronto, and since 1991 he’s lived in Paris, Greece, and Amsterdam with the painter Julie Wyn Summerfield.

Snow Angels

Somewhere far upstream in my bloodline was a Viking who took a fancy to a Scotswoman
ancestral to my father. Took a fancy or simply took, I’ll never know, but one way or
another he dove into my genetic backwaters and pissed in my gene pool.

I like to think about winter, but this globally warmed version rarely delivers what I used
to be used to. So it lives at the back of my memory, a wall of black ice and slush
ploughed to the edge of the parking lot to keep the pavement clear for capitalism.

My mother, at seventeen the eldest, walking the bitter miles of road, snow-cleared by
a thousand-mile wind, to light the schoolhouse stove and explain “Führer” and “Europe”
so the kids would know where all the daddies and big brothers had gone.

And my Oma before her, muttering through the snow in Ekaterina Oblast to retrieve
the severed toes of Opa’s left foot. He hadn’t spoken since the scarlet fever took
his hearing, but he made much noise when his axe went astray on the downward arc,

this kind and silent man who touched my mother’s throat to hear her when she sang,
tapping his short boot in time. But they were safe from the Bolsheviks in Manitoba, and to
celebrate he would wake the children from their brick-warmed beds for one more song.

Somewhere back up my bloodline was a Viking, and I prefer to believe that he actually
fancied that bonnie lass. It may have been in a peat hut under sleety rime,
or under the Pole Star and an emerald sheet of aurora, but I am sure that

they let themselves fall back into the unscribed powder, sinking half-weight and
barely breathing in that great northern hush, saying “Are you ready?” and with their
upward eyes fixed on the pinhole night, they began slowly to fan their legs and arms.

John Daugherty is an emerging writer and poet from Houston, Texas, taking creative writing courses from the UCLA Extension (certificate program) and University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education.

Cut Martian

Ceramic feet
Dirty legs
Bulbous butt
Slender frame
Face in bloom
Cut down in
Your prime to
Show my love

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is a Sydney based artist, poet, and improv pianist. She has a Masters degree in English and has worked in both media and education. Oormila is a member of the North Shore Poetry Project and performs her work regularly at venues in Sydney.

Noughts and Crosses

Freshly forty. Reinventing.
The world of academia
now a cobwebbed memory
ten years dead,
I don my new avatar-
small time teacher,
sometime comedienne,
chatty storyteller,
at a suburban studio.

I teach six year olds to peel
the whorled hearts of flowers,
Channel the eye of a Georgia O’keeffe,
Plot cornfields and crows and lily ponds.
Skim the skies in Chagall flight.

They hang on the lilt of my every word,
adulation in their eyes,
the front of my apron a Pollock dribble-
smears and spatters of
hands and hugs.

It’s only at the end of class
when I turn cleaner,
Soaping and scrubbing
stains off wood,
That the dolour creeps in,
and my life appears to me
a mesh of noughts and crosses,
more chequered, more scribbled
than the plastic painting mats.

And when some of the parents
look through me,
As their children wave goodbye,
It gurgles rancid, to the surface.
thin and vaporous
as the cleaning fluid I spritz.
I resist the urge to proclaim
in my dark, contralto voice,
Something as idiotic,
and ironic,
as, “ I was the valedictorian
of my graduating class, you know!”
As though that would earn me :
Eye contact,
Worthiness,
Redemption.

Kellie Haulotte is a freelance writer who reads too many ghost stories and loves watching French Cinema. She also has been obsessed with reading Anne Rice’s books since she was in 5th grade.

Heat

Scorpion heat!
What do you want for dessert,
melting ice cream or sun kissed cake?
The car broke down again,
here comes the fiery brimstone.
Start walking to that oasis,
full of heavenly ice.
I’ll be behind you,
even if it’s all just fake.
Damn, this heat!

M.L. Fenton is an aspiring poet and a full time bus driver. She is a life long resident of the Monongahela river valley of Pennsylvania. The collapse of the steel industry, subsequent deterioration of the of the surrounding neighborhoods as well as the rivers themselves serve as inspiration for her poetry.

Shopping list

She had beautiful penmanship (something
I’ve always lacked)

I thought as I looked at her

Shopping list:
Pudding
Hot dog relish
Bananas (two, ripped from the bunch)
Reader’s digest
Jumbo
Etc.

Me, hurried and slightly annoyed
after work.

Discarding the shopping list in the
buggy, continuing with the minutiae
of my, oh so important life.

later when she’s gone

I’m always looking for those
shopping lists with her lovely handwriting

when my hands touch the cold handle of any shopping cart.

Olivia Rahal is an incoming freshman student at the University of Oklahoma, double majoring in Acting and English: Writing. She has studied Acting at the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute for two years, where she was surrounded by many artistic disciplines; creative writing especially sparked her interest.

After 18 Years of Observing Mama

In my 18 years, Mama began as
crinkling brown butcher paper:
the kind used to conceal a quaint christmas gift,
neat and admirable:
temporary qualities.
Soon, the paper takes on
edges, creases, and points.

Mama’s neatness acts temporary.
I watched it fade so quickly, I am
baffled to still find its abundance
preserved in time:
photos taken before my 18 years.
Perhaps that moved me to so highly esteem pictures.
Pictures steal the fleeting from the clock;
the momentary morphs into a higher form:
permanence.

Mama can not endure permanence,
yet her perfect, pressed, platinum hair on
school picture day
survives,
Now, Mama begins to crinkle.
Her pale skin swallows her tired eyes.
God never gave her tired eyes.
Perhaps the fatigue, too, will fade —
temporary.

I wonder what other temporaries My Mama holds.