Category: Featured

Girls Like You

Judith Staff

Junior high is a jungle. Five hundred kids, ages twelve to fourteen, in a tough, urban school on the edge of the city center. There are fights every day, boys with nosebleeds, rumors about drugs, things thrown in class, teachers yelling. Chaos; I barely learn a thing the whole two Read more

Judith Staff

Judith Staff’s background is in teaching and early years education. She still teaches occasionally, though now her main focus is in child welfare and safeguarding children. Her work includes delivering training, presenting at conferences, and engaging in collaborative projects with schools around child abuse awareness and sexual violence prevention. She enjoys writing blogs and poetry on topics she feels passionate about. Judith loves running, gym classes and karate. She is married to an art lecturer and they live in Northamptonshire, England with their three free-spirited children, a 12- year-old son, and daughters aged 11 and 9.

Goddess of the Sun

J.B. Stone

After Crystal Williams’ “The Voice of God,” For Aretha Franklin her voice was the soundtrack to after-school pick-me-ups from the trauma of every reluctant schoolyard memento uplifting auras that filled the room accompanying my mother’s cooking as she shuffled from the kitchen to the dining room, switching up her vinyl Read more

J.B. Stone

J.B. Stone is a neurodivergent writer from Brooklyn, now residing in Buffalo. Stone is the author of A Place Between Expired Dreams and Renewed Nightmares (Ghost City Press 2018) and the forthcoming Fireflies & Hand Grenades (Stasia Press 2019). His work has appeared in BlazeVOX, Peach Mag, Glass, Empty Mirror, Maudlin House, Crack the Spine, and elsewhere. You can check out more of his work at jaredbenjaminstone.com or his tweets @JB_StoneTruth.

Message For My Daughter

Patricia Thrushart

I will not be there when you are the age I am now— this we must face. I waited to have you for reasons that are old rags of memory from clothes I wore before you. In today’s mirror I see you, orphaned, in your diaphanous future— thin skin, fragile Read more

Patricia Thrushart

Patricia Thrushart has published two books, Little Girl Against The Wall, and Yin and Yang. Her work appears regularly in The Watershed Journal, a regional literary magazine of Northwestern Pennsylvania, and on the websites Dark Horse Appalachia and North/South Appalachia. Her poems have been published in Tiny Seed, The Brookville Mirror, Clarion University’s Tobeco, The Avocet, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and The Pennsylvania Poetry Society’s Magazine PENNESSENCE. She is an active member of the local writers’ community, presenting workshop sessions and participating in live poetry readings.

Lessons

Melanie Jones

In the beginning, you will feel like you’ve landed in a world completely different to anything you have ever known or imagined, almost as though a tornado struck and whisked you off to another land. As you begin this journey you will feel like a modern-day princess. You will be Read more

Melanie Jones

Melanie Jones has embraced writing as a way to heals and as a way to help empower and inspire women of all ages. Hers is a journey that has been a blessing; full of heart ache and heart-warming experiences. She believes that all women need to listen their inner voice and to trust their instincts.

Recovery Looks a Lot Like Picking Up a Paintbrush

Samantha Rose

my skin isn’t paper but that doesn’t stop me from carving the weight of the world into my wrists crimson blood tiger stripes. or from ripping apart the pages of a story i never asked to be in don’t judge a book by its cover-up that is, pant legs and Read more

Samantha Rose

Samantha Rose resides in Portland, OR. She loves using poetry as a form of social commentary, and such writing is often inspired by her degree in sociology and philosophy. She enjoys art of all forms and her work has been featured or is forthcoming by Nightingale & Sparrow, Mohave He[art] Review, Down in the Dirt, Quail Bell, and more. You can often find her painting with coffee when she's not drinking it with her nose in a book.

My Body, My Choice

Jacqueline Cioffa

Dear God, I haven’t been talking to you much. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I lost my faith for a long while. I lost myself, too. I forgot I was your perfect creation. I forgot the privilege it is to be female. I forgot I was able to Read more

Jacqueline Cioffa

A retired, international model, and celebrity makeup artist. Co-Author of Model Citi Zen, the guide. Founder of http://modelcitizenmakeup.blogspot.com/. Author of numerous prose pieces in various literary magazines. Most recently published in Little Episodes Brainstorms the anthology, among esteemed artists Sadie Frost, Melvin Burgess and Todd Swift.

The Brothers

Cate Carlyle

Mr. Harley was one of those fun, quirky uncles who filled a room, except he wasn’t family. He was always at our house. I can clearly picture him perched up on dad’s ladder, a roll-your-own smoke dangling from his bottom lip, one long muscled arm holding a ream of wallpaper Read more

Cate Carlyle

Cate Carlyle is a librarian and the author of two young adult novels and a library reference book. Her short story “The Brothers” was shortlisted in the WFNS Nova Writes competition. Cate lives in Nova Scotia with her partner and supportive first-reader Bruce and their fur baby, Zoey.

MY MOTHER’S SCARVES

Anne Leigh Parrish

Blue paisley when she feels humble Green polka dots when the beauty parlor is closed Stars and stripes for the Fourth Red and green for Yuletide Magenta for seducing the department chair Navy blue for telling my father it never happened Pink and yellow for the parent-teacher conference Beige to Read more

Anne Leigh Parrish

Award-winning writer Anne Leigh Parrish’s next novel, an open door, will be published in October 2022 by Unsolicited Press. Recent titles from Unsolicited Press are the moon won’t be dared, a poetry collection, October 2021, and a winter night, a novel, released in March 2021. She is the author of seven other books. She has recently ventured into the art of photography and lives in the South Sound Region of Washington State. Find her online at her website, Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Instagram, Linked In, and Goodreads.