Poetry Contributor
Annika Gangopadhyay is an emerging writer. Her work appears in or is forthcoming in LIGEIA, The Incandescent Review, Blue Marble Review, and the borderline. In her spare time, she likes performing music and reading art criticism.
Poetry Contributor
Indu Parvathi is a teacher from Bengaluru, India. Her poetry appears in various literary magazines and platforms including The Punch Magazine, nether quarterly, Alipore Post, The Yearbook of Indian Poetry 2021, Narrow Road Journal, EKL Review and Usawa Literary Review’s December, 2022 issue. Her micropoem was published in Nightingale&Sparrow.
Poetry Contributor
Sabrynne has taken to using poetry as a means of investigating and learning about the world she inhabits, and her work has been published in print and online nationally and internationally, appearing in the Greyrock Review, Bloom Magazine, Studio OUCH! Gazette, and others.
Indu Parvathi
At the window, the crow waits for its usual,
half a banana or a biscuit, but the astrologer
reads forefathers’ ire in its calls,
warns of imports. Between cousins
and curtains, the spout
of my Sagittarian teapot tilts
towards his board spilling milky ways.
Impress him. Nebulae rise with the fumes
from the ghee lit lamp,
–Eau de space– it’s acrid. He decodes
cyphers from my palm leaf horoscope,
only a bride crossing the seas.
I touch my feng shui bracelet, remember
there are other doors. In the river crossing
game some stones are dummies. Rahu kalam,
yama ganda kalam, gulika kalam…
Sabrynne Buchholz
the gods eat gems at daybreak, as the sun devours the stars
and us at the bottom, groundlevel, the cogs, we drink the juice of oranges
a gift from the glow of those higher beings, but less than that saved for the heavens
sunbeam rolls over tide to froth on the sand, grains shaped like stars
or shards made in the image of space–
leftovers not meant for consumption, but we make do with a day at the beach
fortune is found in freedom, but perhaps can be manufactured
cogs and gears and wheels work hard to create what cannot be found, and
isn’t creation meant only for gods?
the sun and its fellows all roar and consume
yet left in that wake are all the things meant for us
the hierarchy feels muddled sometimes, but
each day starts the same as the last – the gods eat breakfast, the cogs start to turn
day turns to night, and collectively, we all take a breath
fruit can glimmer like crystal
RC deWinter
It was an ordinary August night in this sterile suburb by the sea,
cloaking the claustrophobic day with a dark flat curtain
that did nothing to dispel the woolly air that, thick
with the unshed tears of heaven, clotted even as I breathed –
but better to be outside than choked by the clutter
of witless air-conditioned conversation.
I dragged a chair across the lawn and settled into in the almost-silence,
punctuated only by the buzz and hum of hungry things with wings and
the snuffling of the neighbor’s ancient dog, freed for his nightly tour of
duty round his postagestamp enclosure.
I sat smoking and thinking, trying to figure out how a life once so fully,
freely lived had narrowed to the confines of a holding pen whose only
exit leads straight to the slaughterhouse.
These uffish thoughts spun round the cul-de-sac of my brain
until I wanted to shout and stamp and tear my hair out by the handfuls.
Then, unannounced, the ancient hero loosed his minions, a shining
army of footloose cosmic miscreants that blazed across the sky
in the most beautiful disorder imaginable.
Like crazed schoolboys held for detention and finally freed,
these glowing pieces of the stars that made us raced and frolicked,
spinning, tumbling, showing off their colors.
I jumped up and ran along the perimeter of the yard,
following, until, winded, I stopped, lit a cigarette –
then anotherandanotherandanother, making my own sparks,
wanting to be one of them, watching until the sky returned to the staid,
empty blue it had been before, all the while hoping when I hit
the slaughterhouse, my indestructibles will find their way to wherever
Perseus is camped so I can enlist.
Angela Acosta
Ernesto Giménez Cabellero is at it again,
his telescope always pointed towards Saturn
and his eager lunar brethren.
In 1927 he drew a whole universe of Spanish literature with
nascent nebulas spelling acrostics of esteemed men
as Perez de Ayala’s comet bursts through the sky.
Constellations chart the course of literary trajectories,
the magazines strung out like ticker tape parades
of influence, viewed through a telescope (15 céntimos per view).
There must be a place for you, femme and fair,
wedged between Ortega y Gasset and Menéndez Pidal
like the goddess Ceres in the asteroid belt providing artistic nourishment.
Ascend the observatory and take in more of the sky,
beyond the bright suns of Juan Ramón, Unamuno.
Dare we keep reciting their names?
Carmen Conde, ever the prolific writer,
settles into worm holes, jumping between lifetimes
into more welcoming futures for her, Amanda Junquera, and the cats.
All the young charges at the Residence of Señoritas
travel via spaceship, no longer bound by lightyears
of misogyny and yet to be realized dreams.
The prose and verse of “las Sinsombrero” shuttles between worlds,
precious sunbeams of resilience and tenacity
shining on the vanguard of aspiring artists.
The constellations of herstory move with the seasons,
the breezes of archival discoveries and news coverage,
a whole universe finally within her grasp.
Kristiana Reed
See the stars
watch the moon
u n f o l d
tuck
yourself in.
Bedtime wishes
shooting star promises
you are too little
to be bold
but the stars
glisten
as daggers do
and tiny hands find sharpness
they cut
s l i c e
the innocence away
asunder
tuck
yourself in.
Bedtime stories
of dragons, of maidens
you are too girl
to be bold
and so
you burn
watch the moon
and let your wings
u n f o l d
look at you
tattered as ribbons
as ashes
a corpse woman
of the girl they wanted
you to be
too bold now
too old now
too dragon now
sharp teeth and talons,
scaly skin and belly heart warmth
of the Earth’s core and kin,
go on
tuck
yourself in.Annika Gangopadhyay
The clouds whisper my name at dusk—
I am born after the sun dies, out of silence.
The softness covers my shoulders, wraps itself around my body
until I am a shadow. Below me
phantoms burn in the dark
and men cut my hair into constellations. I still see the silver
sickles in my sleep,
caving inward,
a field of blades cold against my skin. Lovers curl into crescents
ablaze with emptiness on the grass,
and the world is full of waning lullabies,
black skies,
clouds falling at my feet like dust.
See how I cradle this burgeoning wasteland,
this cold inferno.
Milk pours out of my skin where the stars should have been,
and I gently rock the earth back and forth,
back and forth,
before the blades nd my throat,
before a soft red cuts through the sky,
before the constellations are ablaze,
Before I die at dawn.
Poetry Contributor
Angela Acosta is a bilingual Latina poet and scholar. She was recently nominated for Best of the Net and her work has appeared in Panochazine, Pluma, Toyon Magazine, and Latinx Audio Lit Mag. Her chapbook “Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn” will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2023. She is completing her Ph.D. in Iberian Studies at The Ohio State University where she studies the lives and works of early twentieth century Spanish women writers.