Sara Sass is a biomedical engineer who has previously published her creative work in Gadfly Magazine and Harpur Palate magazine. She spent the past four months living in Detroit, which she loved and was inspired by. She currently lives in northern Virginia with a massive fireplace and 6 rosebushes.

Ashland Street

I asked you
To walk with
Me down paths of leaves
And hidden stones,

Across the frost.
Laid shallow by mornings
Rising blue and yellow.

I asked you
To walk with me.
You said “yes but
Wait for me to start.”

I waited
And waited.
The sun turned away from me,
Snow fell in sheets.

Ice crept in
From my feet.
Settled into my heart,
Which burned and fell still.

Lucas Price is a creative writing student at GCC. Initially inspired by a crisis between faith and conformity, this poem of seeks to confront and sort out those mixed-up thoughts and feelings.

Persons

Would I be less of a person if, say,
I made a mistake?
If I forgot something?
If I looked in the wrong places?
If I followed the wrong conclusions?
And then the costs drowned me
until I lost my lungs?

And how about my sentiments:
like if noise invades my space
or if my silence shoos people away?
If my beliefs clash
with a [growing] consensus?
If I spot holes in their logic,
yet mine is “preposterous”?
If my “greater good” is something
other than freedom?
If the blood of thousands, millions even,
seems worth one more saved soul?

Now what if I did a conscious evil:
such as if I stole and hoarded?
If I did not donate kindness [back]?
If I planted wounds and bruises,
be they physical or emotional?
If I scorned the benevolent?
If I defied my bodily design?
If I did anything without full faith?

These may seem destructive;
backwards; blasphemous.
You might see me as hopeless;
dangerous; disgusting.
But splinters inhabit all our eyes;
shouldn’t we help pull them out?

Katherine Westbrook is a literary artist, currently in her senior year at the Mississippi School of the Arts. She enjoys writings works of poetry, fiction, and prose. She will attend the University of Iowa in the fall, pursuing a degree in English & Creative Writing and History.

Puberty

Figure.
An apology I don’t know how to give yet.
A ladle in the lung cavity, and the
sitting and the silent. The birth of stomach hair, dandelions
plucked before the wishes are blown. Afraid of my own
teeth and pulling. Little dipper
scratching at the jaw.

Fracture.
Mothering the milk-knees,
honeysuckle thrift in the spring,
rain-mouth, hot-head, skin-vased,
lilac in sleeping thighs, fear in the tibias, in the
cavities, small wrists like peach pits, roses licked in
mud. Fertilize, retract, ripping
the horizon from the
cradle. Hercules keeps returning home to
snake-bitten babies.

Originally from Wyoming, Jason Joyce, M.B.A. is a writer, arranger, consultant and optimist who has made it his life mission to never grow boring. You can learn more about his companies, current projects and published work by visiting jasonrjoyce.com or @savageconfetti on Instagram.

War Paint 

Remember digging a grave in frozen solid ground at three in the morning for your mother’s dead parrot? He was such a little sailor as he quoted lines from Frasier and Days Of Our Lives while he lie wheezing on his side, molting a careless bed of feathers. Down across a bed in what could be and Ikea show room. wrapping refuse like lovers’ clothes on Christmas, mapping out foreign countries on the floor, where pillows and sage sheets wear makeup like war paint.

We still cover up.

Covered up, comfortable clothes, stutter step to strapless and pin downs, dressed up for failed first dates, miserably, mercilessly. More simply- strangers, talking about eating disorders and parents who died when they were young. First impressions far from impressions college roommates tried to make after these dates on 3 a.m. Wal-Mart runs for vanilla bean ice cream and cookies.

Now we’re watching stock tickers for significant signs in
Initials, Fighting
off going home alone with dairy and ground up Oreos.

Homework notes on your flesh, and the word you see in the partial permanence is “validity”.

Partial permanence like hospital roommates, bedded beside your mother, now carefully wrapped in wash worn covers, IV line ribbons, oxygen hose bows, and a laminate bracelet gift tag. Hospital smells don’t follow us home, but we’re sure the spirit of an elderly patient named Bea has.

”Excuse me ma’am, we were just visiting.”

I startle you awake in the middle of the night talking to the open door.

She’s the sour piss nicotine
of dive bar shows, clinging to clothes, smooth speaker crackle, warm wash clean waves wound round a mattress filled with air where we reek
of possibility buried in bed fibers and other ghosts that aren’t quite there.

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.

Bare Concrete Blue

Come on now son
Let’s beat away time
With the sole of this boot
And sing us a song
To shake off these dusty thoughts

For how many years
Can these months truly last?

For all of these memories
And all of their longing
To feel what they felt
Are no more than bare trees
To this cold winter blue

For now
The ancient has gone
And the new quickly fades
No matter how many buildings
We may like to
Construct from this world

So let us just walk then
My old shadow and me
Through these concrete dream streets
And these phantom filled crowds

For any true hope is not here
But beyond that clear frosted sky

In those dead palaces of silver
In that burning river of gold

Spring Bamboo Rain

Sundial
Otter
And blue dragonfly

None of them
Chide this grey monkey
For watching the first rain
Of Spring Festival fall

Far away from that kingdom
And its blackened heart
I stand and I smoke
Unable to move
Watching my thoughts drift on outwards
With the ripples on this pond

Their burning paper
And their pure white crane wings
Still craving
Still longing
For even the faintest echo
From that bamboo dream village
And her bell-like flute

Mark Kessinger was born in Huntington WV, attended college at Cleveland state, lived in Oklahoma City and now resides in Houston TX.

On the Bleached Tongues of Anvils

nothing gets as brutally plain as a desert.
It is what it is: nature. Undeniable. Life
and not life, without disguise.

Everywhere a billion rocks,
the kind that wait for gulls
to drop clams into broken shells.

Or raptors to open a turtle.

Or a simple stumble
to open a skull.

Innocent anvils, just there,
just waiting for whatever use.

The sun likes to count them:
all there, all there, it says
each hour.

I squeeze them into photos.
An inventory of places.
Next visit might be a park
or a parking lot.

For now, I like them exactly
for what they don’t say.
A casual existence
indifferent to discoverers.

So little
and so much. Too many
to stay visible.

I can feel their gibberish
seeping into my skin;
this is where so many other things
give up.

Currently living in New York, Edis Rune was born in Kosovo and is of Montenegrin descent. He is a poet, novelist, and short-story writer.

Stretch

I was stripped.
The receptionist took my name, my birth-date, my history, my living,
and the stretcher—my body—
and I laid down as a nobody, and was
allowed to only keep my eyes—and stared
at nothing but the florescent lighting.

Limb per limb—the attempt was there—that my organs
be stolen by these bare hands.

My hamstring on its thread—his hand pressed down on my head—
and ripples of cracks around my neck and felt like a snap.

He tied me down—with a belt as similar to a car seat—taking me
for a ride—pulled back the muscles and the cranium of my head—
as if he was looking for the most tender place to electrocute—

‘How does that feel?’
‘Where do you feel it?’

I lied and I liked.
It was all strenuous and teeth clenching, and not
once did my eyes blink—for it was all I had.

In a past century Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower, is now a retired math professor, and has published three chapbooks, one of which won the Gambling The Aisle prize, and one collection, Fractal Idyll (A..P Press). Another collection is in press.

Attribution

I attribute agency to you, you bad bad dog and,
the unnecessary and the insufficient rising like
an iris, past stochastic practices, unmodified,
are codified at your expense and/or to
your advantage. Should you mumble something
you may see a blur. Revoking ghost marimbas,
you have many academic references to write
before you reach the speed of light. What is
a bed of lettuce but the here and now?

Dispensing Empathy

As elbows bending backward might be knees,
beneath my dignity, so I’m the lazy arrow
stopping half way so the target brings
itself to me so, taken seriously or consecutively,
ignorance surrounds the public-private partnership
of post-apocalyptic birds and post-apocalyptic bees
so, Hello. Home, James, I say to the vacancy,
and turn the siren and the mirror neurons on,
and withhold judgment till the second judgment day.

The Explanandum

Your arms go out like chicken wings when
you put careful weight on that particular left foot.
That means that everyone but you has been
disqualified. That means you won.
Now you may harbor wires and pipes and
termite lives and call yourself a double window,
you may call yourself a gyro- or kaleido-scopic
pinwheel, you may call yourself an oscillating fan.
You may propel yourself. Your definition reeks
with meaning now beyond mere use and they
can do without you what they won’t.

Deryck N. Robertson is from Peterborough, Ontario, where he lives with his wife, Heather, and four children.

Two Spaces

I don’t always feel old
(Only when I get out of bed
And try walking
Across the bedroom floor)

I don’t drive with my
Turn signal on
Nor do I drive slowly
(Full disclosure, Officer,
I always adhere to the speed limit)

I’ve never yelled at kids
To get off my lawn
Or keep balls that have landed
In my yard

But c’mon!
I grew up in a typewriter world!
The snap and pop of metal keys
Striking the page through the
Inky red-black ribbon

You have lived your easy life
With word-processed efficiency
Backspacing and deleting
Adding your little circumflexes
And “typing” in Comic Sans (ugh)

I don’t begrudge you
And rather enjoy the simplicity
Myself
But please, for the love of all things

It’s TWO spaces after a period

15Hannah Pelletier studied English at the University of New Hampshire where she received the Richard M. Ford writing award two years in a row. Her work has been published in The Paragon Journal, Split Rock Review, Remembered Arts Journal, Thin Air Mag and more. Hannah is a 24 year old expat currently living in Paris.

Premonitions

I don’t think our end will
be particularly loud.

Even a cough is enough
to make the roof of this home

without hesitation,
collapse. So.

I fix you up,
as bad as I can.

But you don’t stay broken,
the only way I can

love you. Like a bird in the dirt,
with his belly up.

At the end, all the doors
are opened again.

And the both of us,

stepping backwards and
alone

through each one,
are not scared when they

close behind separate rooms—

First Love

You appear in the dream
like a knife—

descending slowly &
somehow holding

quietness at
your shoulders

(on the outside,
lightness is already
a blanket) but

I come to you
quietness & all

nine years later a
face—

nine years of
your silent hands,

of satellites, water
on rooftops,

rain dripping all over
the white floors
of it

& then:
morning  

The Reappearance

Woke me up
in the middle of

the dream
about looking

for
water in a dark garden.

You, whose name

cannot sit still
in a sentence,

already feels written
on the back of my hand.

Like needing to
to violently

slam the door
shut,

but stay
behind

in the room with you.

Vows

I didn’t speak a single word:

simply freed
a ribbon

tied from me
to the others,

sweetly, but forever—

I took back every gift I
had ever given

without anyone noticing.

And you, looking so
honorable

standing beside

all of the remains
I have dragged

inside our home,
take your turn.