Sam Albala is a poet nestled in the mountains of Colorado. She has a horizon habit and can often be found gobbling up the sky line while babbling about road trips, tea, and anatomical hearts, all with her mouth full of light. To see not-real-life horizons find @keepmindscreative on Instagram. To read more composed words, visit samanthaalbala.contently.com.
victoria
I inhale the pungent ambrosia
the brackenwater of
you deathly loins.
The pulse quickens against
bolts of funeral lace
and you will reach the ecstasy
of the trite.
artemis
I massage algae into stone,
Create histories on your chilly face
melt my muscles to shape your flanks
One moment fluid, the next:
sturdy as a ponderosa pine
I change, but you?
Half a million years ago
you yawned.
insinuated
Your words are dust
Swirling into desert storms.
Your words are sand
Itching underfoot.
Your words are weeds
Choking up my roots.
Yet I know that you need me.
Like a fire that ravages,
Clears the forest land.
I destroy all virgin soil
To let you seep in again.
Moira Murphy is a vocalist, pianist, and songwriter who fronts Oryad, a band that marries metal and opera in a trance-inducing ritual.
How do I write that I love you? How do I say that I love you in a way that doesn’t want to possess you? When you laugh and your eyes squint it fills me up. When you look into me, you make me feel seen and alive. Like I want to feel everything. Your touch, your gaze, your compassion to all my energy, makes me feel like warming up the world instead of burning it down. The way you process the world astounds me. You make me more loving to myself. You challenge me to be better than my bad habits. You challenge my negativity. I have never felt more love than when I am around you. I feel free and trusted. You nurture me in a way I have needed. When you let me in and let me see you, I am recharged. And I have asked you for deeper. And I am also scared of deeper because like you I am clumsy until one of us has to be the gentle one with the steadier touch. You make me secure even when I fear myself. You’ve helped me see my magic as the reality it is. And I don’t think that you see that you are magic. You give me so much life. I need security. I desire security that we can’t always guarantee. You teach me patience with me.
She’s fascinated
by birds
I’m captivated
by bones
always optimistic,
she calls me pessimist
but I’m a realist, I say
is it just coincidence?
that she’s drawn
to living things
while I’m humming along
to songs of death
attractive opposites
and all that
but we really are
a perfect pair
I cheer her up
when her eyes turn dark clouds
or I give her space
if that’s what she needs
she makes me laugh
when I refuse to smile
she anchors me
reels me in
when I drift away
Magpies from her youth
Sparrows in the yard
Northern Flicker peck-peck-pecking
Blue Jays hit her heart
but she sees Crows the most
and what do I see?
but dead squirrels
in the street
a bird with broken wing
I used to have a spirit animal
a Coyote
or a Wolf
I saw him under bridges
hidden in tall grass
but I haven’t seen him
in a dozen years
did this beast take flight?
or flower into bones
I see
the plain underbelly
she sees
the decorated wings
if I had to choose one now
I know it’d be an Owl
I’ve heard him at my window
I’ve seen him up on high
Steve Shultz is a poet, mailman, and former journalist from Aurora, CO. His third poetry collection, Pancreatic Care Package, was published in September by West Vine Press. He blogs sporadically at https://fmghost.wordpress.com.
standing on the edge of love, i looked in but was always forced out; a false god stood in the temple of my family keeping me away from all those who loved me—i could not break his lies nor could he swallow my truths, and so we stood he and i; two different shades of fire unable to communicate—he misunderstood me, claimed i misunderstood him; people have always whispered that he is good but they didn’t have to kill his ghosts—they didn’t know how my feet trembled in fear of breaking egg shells or how hard it was for me to reclaim all that was lost, didn’t know what it was to be versed in silence so they could know the hymns of peace when they really wanted to war against monsters; they do not know the definition of good—but maybe that’s the point, no one really knows what they are saying, no one really knows; everyone thinks but no one knows until they see the monster how monsterous a monster can be—but i know, and i’ve seen, his fangs; he cannot feign innocence to me—sometimes monsters take the shape of people we love, and sometimes that means we have to kill nightmares so we can remember how to dream.
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). TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | FACEBOOK
Photo: Steve Shultz
The days – salamanders, were passing, white,
against the background of an elapsed summer.
The synthesis was a baby.
Everything is headlong –
to be touched, skin to skin,
and to become one.
Time was speaking.
It was saying that the future was past,
and the past was never.
I love you!, I was saying to the underwater bells of light
where I was seeing him above the sea floor.
I was loving him with bliss,
and I was knowing him.
Ουροβόρος (Ouroboros)
He is caressing my breasts,
I am caressing his hands,
which are caressing my breasts.
All life created itself so that
I would feel in your arms
the way I do.
Serafimova was shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2017 and Summer Literary Seminars 2018 Poetry Contest, and long-listed for the Erbacce Press Poetry Prize 2018 and the Red Wheelbarrow 2018 Prize, as well as nominated for the Best of the Net by the BeZine. Margarita has three collections in Bulgarian (the most recent being The Insolubility of Splendour (2018)). Her work appears in Agenda Poetry, London Grip New Poetry, Trafika Europe, European Literature Network, The Journal, A-Minor, Waxwing, Orbis, Nixes Mate Review, StepAway, Ink, Sweat and Tears, HeadStuff, Minor Literatures, The Writing Disorder, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Orbis, Chronogram, Noble/ Gas Quarterly, Origins Journal, miller’s pond, Obra/ Artifact, Califragile, TAYO, Shot Glass Journal, Opiate, Poetic Diversity, Novelty Magazine, Pure Slush, Harbinger Asylum, Punch, Tuck, Ginosko, etc. Facebook
I have these recurring dreams of protecting myself
In one, I was hitch-hiking.
I had a purse full of knives in case of danger
I still remember glancing inside my purse trying to determine
Which one would make me the safest?
Which one could I grab the quickest?
I once heard a story of woman hitchhiking
She got picked up by a truck driver who put his hand on her knee
He tried to grab her by the neck and push her face into his crotch
She stabbed him in the leg
and threw the truck into Park
and hopped the fuck out
In my dream, I didn’t need the knives for protection
In my dream, I took the truck
I had a dream
That my brother’s friend took me in when I needed a roof
I told him that I would not hug him
I told him that I would pay him because I didn’t trust a handout
He eyed me like cake
he waited until I was asleep to touch me
He said he only wanted to tickle me
In my dream, I said I didn’t want to be touched or tickled.
In my dream, I put pepper spray can to his face
and said he didn’t get to touch
He said I was cute when I was angry
In my dream, I peppered sprayed the fuck out of his eyes
I had a boyfriend who once gave me a knife to protect myself
He said he never wanted a bad thing to ever happen to me again
He yelled at me the day I forgot to carry it in my bra
He yelled at me that same day for trying to say “no” to him
He was proud when I remembered the knife
He was surprised when I held up the knife to protect myself after he broke down the door
He was stronger when he wrestled the knife out of my hand
and showed me in the mirror how you hold a knife
to someone’s throat
MY THROAT
my blood on the floor
He instructed me to clean myself up
I broke a mirror and fled
that wasn’t a dream
it was a living nightmare
I have this dream that I don’t carry all this anxiety
That I don’t have to think of the best ways to protect myself
That I can walk around
and not be so goddamn scared
Maybe I’m in a Murakami novel. Maybe I never got off that train in Japan. Maybe this is enough, I think, as I sit on a subway, contemplating my disappearing cat, my disappearing lover, eating a sandwich, my bags all shuffled like a chaotic orchestra. Maybe there’s death to be had. Maybe there’s morning that has yet to be sipped. Maybe there is a transcendentalism to bingewatching television. I am bingewatching people in the park. I am closing all of the garage doors to my emotional relevancy. Maybe I never left the city. Maybe the city is in me, a creature of habit, half asleep on a train that goes in circles beneath the novel of my moment.
Sometimes a building will not let you
move around itself the way you want:
you feel an architectural punch.
You step over the leaves, & there is a branch
you did not see. You feel it in the back
of your leg, & again feel it for days.
You see a voicemail. You must have missed a call.
There are no missed calls. You cannot fetch
the voicemail. You turn your phone off
& back on again. You will do this again.
it was over and dead
and the ground produced no flowers.
it was over and dead
the cable cords were cut.
the television looked like a race war.
the fridge was unhumming.
i was dead and buried in the cushions
of the couch.
i was dead and all my poems were dead too.
and it all came in through the windows.
new breath new flowers
new life new love
new angels of electric health.
new standards of electric wealth.
And I screamed back into the wind in a
way that no day could ever forget and it
screamed back and my eyes were the size of life and
my pupils swallowed the sky and I fell down happy on the
couch
and I died,
I died,
I died.
there is an idea of a ghost #13, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory.
south broadway press 