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by Patricia Ndombe
You cannot save me when I am in bed overthinking alone . The seven deadly sins have found an eighth. AUTHOR Patricia Ndombe is currently an undergraduate poet at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC pursuing a major in English and Creative Writing. She is shaped by a family precisely half African and half African-American. She enjoys writing poetry as a creative outlet that enables her to reflect the world around her, escape the troubles of life, or look at it through another lens. Many of her poems were inspired while struggling with periods of identity uncertainty during her first two years of college, and this turbulent time period has given way to many others.
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by Hannah Price
this is because i want to fit together with you like swans, because when neither of us speak you can hear the grass growing without putting your ear to the ground: your throat has my nose pressed to it; beneath the line where our skin meets is a yawning expanse, and if i close my eyes i can see the shifting immaterial of the earth, brown and black, breathing because you are breathing. your breathing is not like grass growing but i know they are happening from the same place, at the same time and if i listen long enough i can hear a heartbeat echoing in your collarbone, like something speaking underground. if i breathe as the grass grows i can see everything from here; unending ground that seeks the space below your head. and when i pause it's dark enough to see the words collect, small and distant in my chest like chicken bones at the bottom of a well AUTHOR Hannah Price is a writer and student living in Chicago. She is pursuing nothing! by Lori Cramer
I used to dress in fluorescent colors, desperate to be seen, known, and understood. Look at me, my bright pink sweatshirt shrieked. Talk to me, my neon green leggings screeched. Spend time with me, my vibrant orange baseball hat shouted. These days, I clothe myself in charcoal gray, an elusive hue that doesn’t beg for anyone’s attention, but instead warns: Stop staring at me; I’m not a spectacle for your entertainment. Don’t start a conversation with me; I’ve no interest in sharing my thoughts with you. Go away and leave me alone; you’ll never understand me. AUTHOR Lori Cramer’s short prose has appeared in The Cabinet of Heed, Elephants Never, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and Splonk, among others. Her story “Scars” (Fictive Dream, February 2018) was nominated for Best Microfiction 2019. Links to her writing can be found at https://loricramerfiction.wordpress.com. Twitter: @LCramer29. by John Grey
Leave over, the soldier kisses, shakes hands, takes one good look at a dozen faces before joining the end of the security line. At gate 12, he’s on his own, in an uncomfortable plastic seat, his roll behind his knee, glancing around at the usual mix of vacationers, businessmen, family off to see more family. No roadside bombs where they’re going. No brainwashed local recruit about to turn his rifle on Florida beaches, Chicago conference rooms or homes in small towns in Wisconsin. Just rude kids. Surly parents. Curt woman at the airline counter. It’s a time out from those worth dying for. AUTHOR 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. by C.B. Auder
They found another aerial bomb in the Elbe last summer, just there beside three churches, spitting distance from a Kindergarten playground, not ninety meters beyond a monument dedicated to Friendship Between Nations. Thank a heat wave (Hitzewelle) and a drought (Dürre) so severe that even World War II found a new way to gasp and rear the aging steel canister of its fragmentable head. Mutti used to send her voice arcing through the August neighborhood towards Richard Nixon Elementary park. Tones that pinpointed our location on that searing metal slide, on those pinch-fingered swings. A new misery announced every afternoon--Fritzi Teufel, the dependable klaxon of the neighborhood--words flying through our chain links, flaying us from ear to ear, piercing even the notion of a cicada's drone of summer love. No longer that shy Mädchen, fourth forgotten child of six, Mutti was an American now, echt, allowed to speak her gottverdammtes piece in Rancho Cucamonga. And how her worries then grew. Round and thick and lead-filled as a Kommandant's head, as she pushed her walls of Wasser, as she flung her arms out to shoot down all of life's surprises--good or bad for her equally traumatic--anything unexpected that might sabotage the perfect balance she'd attained with the sharp-edged trenches of our minds. I still see her up on the ridge of my childhood, her words devoted to flying spit, twinkling silver on holidays like Bouncing Bettie toys (Bist du verrückt? Are you CRAZY?). My summer long gone, they land in autumn birdsong now. Soon, they will cocoon my sanctuary of winter solitude, until even the memory of that precisely-scheduled bedtime kiss has risen and cooled and flown. AUTHOR C.B. Auder's writing has most recently appeared in Milk Candy Review, Bending Genres, Atlas + Alice, and Pidgeonholes. They edit the online journal Claw & Blossom at www.clawandblossom.com by Liwa Sun
I slice myself into a thousand wafers, each one scorned by a land. In my second life I inhabit a panopticon. Sample different sets of humiliations, trying to decide if democracy is worth this fight. A lump of sadness explodes, a drenched spectacle. My forbearance shrugged at, my skin burnt. Garish sun besieges me, impaling lids. Oriental lids. I grin and my teeth melt so as to avoid the real questions. If I will have to go back, what good does it do me to revel now? I am a baby thrown out of the bath water. AUTHOR Liwa Sun is a Chinese writer, poet, and a game-theorist-wannabe. Her works are forthcoming in The Bare Life Review and elsewhere. She lets poetry contaminate her memory, in which she rejoices. She lives in Philadelphia with a small couch and mountains of books. |
