Acolyte  

             from Love, Kelli Hoppmann, oil on panel, 2014

They told her the smoke would totally change her,
“mess with her head,” and then they all giggled.
She had been careful to wear the mandatory uniform:
torn jeans, low-cut blouse, the crown of invisible
brambles, the absence of a smile. When was a tree
not a tree? When it was in a forest. They gave her
a bloodstained robe, and she put it on, already adrift
in fumes festooning the air with furtive tongues.
For hours she floated in a sky the color of a blue-
green algal bloom. Soon they would ask her to invest
in the black pyramid, to drink pomegranate juice from
a lead-crystal goblet, to choose the shape in which
she wished to manifest. Her new skull will have prongs,
mispronounced ridges, and far more effective teeth.




Affluence

            from The Artist and the Arbiter, Kelli Hoppmann, oil on panel, 2014

You met him at the hunt ball. Neither of you wore
pink. He chatted easily of warmbloods, silver flasks,
stone walls. He smiled all the time, showing teeth
white as high powder. You had borrowed the tails
that didn’t fit, buttoning your vest to hide a stain
on your ruffled shirt. You longed for style, security,
and affection, for which sex was a nearly adequate
substitute. All of which would be withheld in due
course. He owned stakes winners, played polo,
belonged to exclusive clubs within clubs, as if
his life were a filigree ornament at the center
of nested Fabergé eggs, jeweled and golden. Even
the bathrooms of his summer residence were art
museums. He stayed up all night, scenting the air
for new diversions, and you did your best to keep
up. But you drew the line when he snorted them
until most of his nasal septum was eaten away.
And then he discovered what it took to put him
to sleep. He makes such an elegant ghost.




Delicacy

           from Pink, Kelli Hoppmann, oil on panel, 2014

You have scales instead of skin, a rosebud where
a heart should be, an insatiable hunger that won’t
let you observe without analysis, anatomization,
butchery. All you need is a stainless steel table
and a knife so sharp you could sever your own
hands, almost painlessly, with its invisible blade.
You don’t know what it is about the fine details
that fascinate you, but you have always believed
that an autopsy is more important than a remedy,
intensified your focus on relationships that are over.
Something about love makes you want to dissect
it until it has been reduced to sublime molecules
that you have no further use for. Something about
hope makes you take it apart, feather by feather.




Fetch

            after Sisters, Kelli Hoppmann, oil on panel, 2014

Everyone has a demon twin about whom they tell no one.
Your mother must have known, you are sure, but she flitted
from party to party, decade to decade; occasionally, gently
nudged by that fourth glass of Malbec, she mumbled about
how some things just didn’t work out and at least they had
you. By then you were going to parties yourself, sometimes
in nothing but pallor and tresses, glowing with the fumes
of liquid skies. You can’t tell whether trees are dead as long
as you only look down at the roots, careful not to consider
shadows cast by empty branches. Your mother said that you
would eventually find yourself, and for once she was right:
you did, in a black-light-filled room that could as easily
have been a mirror. Your other half wore a skull for a face,
and all the haggard sophistication you had longed for.
It smiles with its empty sockets. “My, what a lovely …
dress,” it says slyly, looking anywhere but at you.

​
​

F. J. Bergmann edits poetry for Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. She has competed at National Poetry Slam as a member of the Madison, WI, Urban Spoken Word team. Her work appears irregularly in Abyss & Apex, Analog, Asimov's SF, and elsewhere in the alphabet. A Catalogue of the Further Suns won the 2017 Gold Line Press poetry chapbook contest and the 2018 SFPA Elgin Chapbook Award.

Elegy for Brother Rudolph

The last time I saw him, at our nephew’s bbq,
he pulled his collar wide to show me his lesions,
his chemo port, the ridges of his breast bone
like a turkey carcass after days of picking,
but he partied on around the fire, singing the songs
he’d written, stamping his feet, joking, and sipping beers
until they and the pain meds overcame him,
and he settled for a lawn chair to watch the sparks
rise up to the stars, claiming they were all kin to one another,
the stars, the sparks, the ash at the end of his cigarette,
the cancer, the grown people who’d tried to break him
when he was just a boy, the guards and inmates
who towered over him, or later, when he was a wiry slip
of man, the tourists who tossed their change like trash
at his open guitar case on River Street,
the wife who left him, and his three children, who
he walked out on for the barrooms, the prisons, the crack,
those three hollows he couldn’t close.

​
​
Michele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her work appears in venues including The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Poet Lore, North American Review, Guernica, and O, The Oprah Magazine. She's currently at work on her second memoir.

THE CURSE OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

You forgot to put your shadow away.
Gray morning swallowed and dragged it due west
past hidden islands and abandoned wrecks.
Now only cracked mirrors unveil your face--
A torn card from a very wicked deck.
It’s hard to shave, to walk into dull day
meaning it. This naked sidewalk is paved
with broken glass. No shadows. Your cool mess
is looking for something past the fog line.
Another life, you sailed. Clung to the rigging.
Sang chanties. Then you drowned—you know that much.
You’re still cold now—shadows of clouds singing
above you. Lost as Peter Pan, you touch
each crack. All your charts are printed on dark times.

​

Mark J. Mitchell’s latest novel, The Magic War just appeared from Loose Leaves Publishing .A Full length collection of poems will released next year by Encircle Publications.  He studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver and George Hitchcock. His work has appeared in the several anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. Three of his chapbooks— Three Visitors, Lent, 1999, and Artifacts and Relics—and the novel, Knight Prisoner are available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  He lives with his wife the activist and documentarian, Joan Juster and makes a living pointing out pretty things in San Francisco. A meager online presence can be found at https://www.facebook.com/MarkJMitchellwriter/

River
 
Wind shakes this river like clothes on a line,
Wrinkles the sheet of sunlight,
Cuts the cloth with a ragged edge
Playing seamstress to the weaver
Elusive tranquility.
There’s a world of doing away from here,
Where life fades the days, weeks and years.
Peace like a river is sunlit fabric,
Woven from water,
Darned up with dragonflies.
 
 
 
Spider
 
This is the time of the spider,
When the dew falls heavy,
And the mist spins webs between the trees,
Thick as dreams.
The moist promise of frost breathes in the wind,
Rattles the cage,
And the occupant,
Stoic and unmoving
Waits for eternal night,
With the patience
Of the bridegroom
Under earth,
Headstone empty beside him.

​
​

Together

The world fogged its lights
and draped gray in our eyes
like shuddering clouds
above a darksome land.

The day
heard the city awaken
and broken
as the land fractured apart from front to back,
the reflection in your eyes
gray catbirds deep in a shadowed forest.

I forgot
you walked these grounds before,
the clouds in your wake,
the shaky yesterdays
hungry for your smile,

a darkness for two,
the growing fog
and you,
before I happened along.

Before that,
candles fizzled
into a sulphur wisp.

After all this time
we're stumbling here,
where a milk-and-water past
tolls.

I remember
you glowed like a phantom:
your fog to my smoke,
your eclipse to my night,
a fulcrum for a world of tomorrows.




The price of love

is the wave embracing the beach,
some left behind, more removed each time.
Time and again, whispers
of crest and sand.

At dawn, looking out at the waves,
I see a skyline that fuses foam to horizon
as a singular scar--murky, but implicit.
At dusk, the waves come clean
in low tide in its come-as-you-are bond.

I am unbottled by this whisper, this thunder,
this buildup-and-release. This edginess.
This steadiness. This incurable pounding thirst.

​
​
David Bankson lives in Texas. He was finalist in the 2017 Concīs Pith of Prose and Poem contest, and his poetry and microfiction can be found in concis, (b)oink, {isacoustic*}, Artifact Nouveau, Riggwelter Press, Five 2 One Magazine, and others.

Crescendo

Warm life-blood pumps
through her veins.
Muscles dance to the
electrical impulses
flitting through her body.

The sleek oil glides liquid-smooth
through the engine.
The car swerves around the mountain pass
selling its metallic soul
in the moonlight.

Waves of molten metal
unleash a crescendo:
Red and white jagged sculptures
desecrate the cliff.

​
​
Monica Kagan lives by the sea in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa with her wonderful cat. She is a reader at FICTION on the WEB. She is also a contributing writer at Rhythm & Bones Literary Magazine on their blog #Necropolis. Her work appears in Fourth & Sycamore, Bonnie's Crew, and Rhythm & Bones, among others. Work is forthcoming in Crack the Spine, formercactus, Bonnie's Crew and Twist in Time. Twitter: @MonicaOFAH

the womb
 
i hunger to be reborn
in the womb
there is warmth, comfort,
food, ease
i want that warm darkness;
to slide away all that devours me
i want to be carried by another
for that protection to envelope me--
death doesn't hurt
life does
i want to know a place between
them again
black sky with the promise of hope
give me those inky black feathers,
the womb is a gift i want to receive
again;
to lay a place that is not want
where voices are a comfort not the chains
of pain that cut
in webs of agony found in the spiderwebs
well acquainted with longevity
of living in a world born of nightmares
instead of dreams.


​
​Linda M. Crate's poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has five published chapbooks A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press - June 2013), Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon - January 2014), If Tomorrow Never Comes (Scars Publications, August 2016), My Wings Were Made to Fly (Flutter Press, September 2017), and splintered with terror (Scars Publications, January 2018), and one micro-chapbook Heaven Instead (Origami Poems Project, May 2018). She is also the author of the novel Phoenix Tears (Czykmate Books, June 2018).

continuing to name things that are yellow after my five-year-old niece stops playing the game

Sunlit leaves in autumn
and a lemon peel perched
on the rim of a glass brimming
with a pleasant but nondescript wheat beer
una sartén de paella compartida con amigos
exist in the same color family as choler.
Yellow bile. Yellow belly.
They flew yellow flags
when ships needed to be quarantined.
oh! The knitted wool of imaginary prevention!
Vast expanses: sunflowers and canola.
Before I was afraid all the time,
morning light dissolved into kernels
dancing across the cornfields
where I ran telephone pole drills.

​

Dendroctonus rufipennis

At a party, a friend of a friend asks
do you have children?
And you respond
There are thirty times
more dead spruce
than five years ago.
They turned red
and then a discomfiting dun
after climate change
birthed a destiny of beetles,
manifest. Smaller trees can
flourish in a forest
of ghosts, but that
doesn’t always mean
that they do.

​
​
Ray Ball, Ph.D., is a history professor in Alaska. She is the author of two history books and her creative work has recently appeared in Cirque, L'Éphémère Review, Okay Donkey, and The Cabinet of Heed. She tweets @ProfessorBall

​Session 1


why are you here?  
— i am many things.                                                              
save for an explanation.
do you believe in hell?  
— i quit believing in myself.
i am hell packaged in a teenage life.  
i burn brighter than the dreams i abandoned.  
you smoke?  
— la... la... la...  i burn a smoke to update my body
on how many wreckages it must become.  
i liberate my body so it                                                      
ascends to peace.  
do you ever stop to think about God?  
— inside a church, i find no place to stand.
my mind turned its back on worrying about rapture
& who starts the consuming fire.
what do you represent?  
a boy withdrawn from society.
a frozen lake where water once ran through.   
soulful song no one claps for.
what is your name?  
i have a body. scars. memories. soul.
i killed my name to be something.
why are you a room of darkness?  
because light is slavery.                                                      
ask sinners.
i do no wrong by hugging the cavern on light's body.
i am neighbor to light.                                                          
arms apart, colours different.  


​
Lagos based Michael Akuchie writes poetry with an exiled mind. His recent works are on Praxis Mag Online, African Writer Online, Ngiga Review and elsewhere.  He studies English at the University of Benin, Nigeria.

Mon Amor
From a 1959 photograph of Emmanuelle Riva

You deserve someone
nakedly loyal like
a submissive lover
who listens
to your softest seductions
and immediately craves
the hunger of your fiery
tongue. Someone who
trembles with just

the idea of losing
the match that yearns
the most hypnotic flame
inside you. Even thinking
of you reawakening arms
reaching out first thing with
morning giggles, wanting
you bed hair, no make-up

always uncovering blushes
reigniting your smokiest
fire between your thighs
without even asking,
someone who submits
like an eager poem, and
someone who loves to present
you the time to spotlight and
bloom—as you enchantingly

rhyme, vibrations alone.




Symbiosis
From the 2012 photograph by Rick Garrett


Is this how love feels
like? he asks leaning
in lips ready to kiss me
again. I try not to look
up, my head on his chest
not wanting to confess,
instead I teasingly stir,
pondering the fate of two
bodies becoming physically
connected no longer alien
after first contact, linked
together by the spark
of longing to retaste desire.
To reignite that fire again
and again, not thinking
in dates of expiration,
as his lips touch mine,
sometimes as our tongues
unite again, savoring each
other, I don’t know where
he ends, and I begin— instantly
our most intimate greeting
becoming one giant mass,
a bonfire flesh flame that
might incinerate us, why
are we so combustible
from within? But we love
reigniting to feel the naked
rekindling touch taking us
over, rippling climactic torches
simmering grins from the match
that reappears engulfing
us again as our heat blazes
closer and closer inside,
outside, somehow between
our smoldering intensity
I came to love how softly
he mouths my name.  ​



​
​Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is the author of the full-length poetry collection Flashes & Verses… Becoming Attractions from Unsolicited Press and the poetry chapbook So Many Flowers, So Little Time from Red Mare Press.
His poetry has been featured in The Yellow Chair Review, Burning House Press, Frontier Poetry, poeticdiversity, The Wild Word, Rigorous, Tin Lunchbox Review, Rogue Agent Journal, Chanterelle’s Notebook, The Fem, Rigorous, Palette Poetry, San Diego Reader and Lunch Ticket’s Special Issue: Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch University Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing.
One of his poems was named the winner of Subterranean Blue Poetry’s 2016 "The Children of Orpheus" Anthology Contest and two of his poems “Buzz Me” and “Estranged Fruit” were nominated for Best of the Net in 2015 and 2016.
Adrian is an LA Poet who has a BA from the University of Texas at San Antonio and he is also a graduate of the MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles where he lives with his wife and their cat Woody Gold. You can connect with Adrian on his website: http://www.adrianernestocepeda.com/