Poetry Contributor
Tylyn K. Johnson (he/they) is a part-time writer from Indianapolis, IN. He writes to reflect his heritage of storytelling and love through the framed lenses of Black Queer artistry. Their language appears in just femme and dandy, The Indianapolis Review, Etchings Literary Magazine, and the lickety~split, among other spaces. They are also the creator of Communal Creativity: A Game of Poetry on itch.io. Projects and social media: https://linktr.ee/tykywrites.
Poetry Contributor
Valerie Hunter teaches high school English, and has had poems in publications including Room, Other Voices, Deep Overstock, and Wizards in Space.
Poetry Contributor
Emily Kedar is a prize winning poet from Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in Living Hyphen, The Maynard and The Hart House Review. She is currently an MFA candidate at Pacific University.
Poetry Contributor
Ellen Malphrus is author of Untying the Moon (foreword by Pat Conroy). Publications include Chariton, Atlanta Review, Weber: Contemporary West, Poetry South, James Dickey Review, Blue Mountain Review. She is Writer-in-Residence at USC Beaufort and divides her time between the marshes of the South Carolina Lowcountry and the mountains of western Montana.
Poetry Contributor
Grant Burkhardt is a writer of poetry and short fiction, currently working on collections of both. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Poetry Contributor
Karen E Fraser is a Melbourne-based writer and poet, with degrees in Professional and Creative Writing, and Anthropology. She has been published by Humana Obscura, Bloodmoon Journal, Freeverse Revolution Lit, Querencia, Wee Sparrow Press, and Poetica Christi Press. Karen has held professional roles as a writer, and editor of Verandah Journal. Her poetry embraces the beauty of the natural world; activism, advocacy and social justice; and the absolute necessity of freedom, love, dignity and belonging.
Poetry Contributor
Alaskan Poet, Moon Gazer, Raven Watcher, Northern Trekker, Teacher. Kersten Christianson derives inspiration from wild, wanderings, and road trips. Kersten is the poetry editor of Alaska Women Speak. She has authored Curating the House of Nostalgia (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2020), What Caught Raven’s Eye (Petroglyph Press, 2018), and Something Yet to Be Named (Kelsay Books, 2017). Kersten lives with her daughter in Sitka, Alaska and enjoys road trips, bookstores, and smooth ink pens.
Vikki C.
This world is wounding itself. I walk through the conflict, avoiding the churches, the in-laws and all acts of confession. My lithe body, barely a nightdress, floating south and south again, until I reach my youth. Quiet feet wading through the boulevard of pink cherry blossoms from another heaven.
Dad leaves the petals unswept over the lawn, to hide the unkempt yellow grass from Mum, or to mask the scars in advance. The driveway is blanketed too, and the car is still covered with the darker pink petals from the hospice visit. We let them be.
Ordinary men say famous artists only paint almond blossoms as a distraction from the asylum. That if we fill our eyes with portraits of spring and promise, bright buds on blue, we would be cured for a little while, enough time to find the exit. That insanity would not encroach with its heavy black bough, latching the door from the inside out.
But now it’s 2023, and I’m at Kensington cemetery paying respects to the latest victims of tragedy. The cherry trees are weeping heavily over the wet lichened graves, mourning about me leaving too early that one winter Sunday, naively hurrying to a lover in my next life. Your pale face at the small window washed in evening light, as if watching from the other side – seeing the divorce and all the babies swept away to far-off territories. Unreachable.
Occasionally, they call home, pretending to keep me alive. They’re a hardy species known to weather the harsh winters in places cut off by cold wars. Bombs, crisis, severance. The signal is lost after a minute, but I know they remember the womb like a safe haven.
Still, there are brave men who carry injured women like me to safety, comforting us with white lies: dusting the shrapnel from our hair, brushing it off as just sakura. They tell us that the flowerless vase in the hallway is shattered – but maybe the house can be salvaged.
That there are girls with minds like mine. Daughters who are fragile blooms, caught in the middle of battlefields. And as much as they belong with us, we can never carry them home safely, without the petals coming apart in our hands.
Emily Kedar
I come back
to find my grandmother’s
pink geraniums dead. The only
living being
that knew us both
and had no tongue to lie.
I drag my finger
across the glass face
of the coffee table. My thumbprint
warped and elongated, presses
down into dust.
I rearrange the stones
I’d left on the window sill
back the way they were.
The coffee grinder’s bust, so
I head out
into the light snow
of morning, my feet landing
step after step
in someone else’s footprints.
Tylyn K. Johnson
let this momentary experience be
for us, to turn ourselves
into a messy painting
on your wall, made of
our skin and flesh and
sweat and laughter