Category: Poetry

36G

Christina Strigas

Living with them can be mostly a drag. I got them in Grade 10, a curse from Aphrodite. I got them gift-wrapped under cotton shirts, cotton bras,  wonder  bras thirty dollar bras, now 130 bare necessity bras, with black lace, purple flowers, a life of heaviness. I got cysts, I Read more

Christina Strigas

Christina Strigas is an author and poet, raised by Greek immigrants, who has written four poetry books. Her poetry book LOVE & VODKA was featured by CBC Books in, “Your Ultimate Canadian Poetry List: 68 Poetry Collections Recommended by you.” Her most recent poetry book, LOVE & METAXA, has garnered positive reviews, including Pank Magazine. Strigas’s poems have appeared in Montreal Writes, Feminine Collective, Neon Mariposa Magazine, Pink Plastic House Journal, BlazeVOX, Thimble Lit Magazine, Twist in Time Literary Magazine, The Temz Review, and Coffin Bell Journal, among others. Her poem, “Dead Wife” was nominated for best of the net 2020. In Spring 2022, she will be releasing her fifth poetry book by Free Lines Press, a French indie magazine that publishes experimental poetry. Twitter: @christinastriga Instagram : @c.strigas_sexyasspoet Facebook: Christina Strigas Author

FRIDA

Anne Whitehouse

“Love the earth and sun and the animals… And your very flesh shall be a great poem.” –Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass   The address the woman at the market gave her led to a stone house with a wooden door on a rubbish-strewn street in Mexico City. Read more

Anne Whitehouse

Anne Whitehouse is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Meteor Shower (Dos Madres Press, 2016). She has also written a novel, Fall Love, which is now available in Spanish translation as Amigos y amantes by Compton Press. Recent honors include: 2018 Prize Americana for Prose, 2017 Adelaide Literary Award in Fiction, 2016 Songs of Eretz Poetry Prize, 2016 Common Good Books’ Poems of Gratitude Contest, 2016 RhymeOn! Poetry Prize, 2016 F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum Poetry Prize. She lives in New York City. www.annewhitehouse.com

Other Lies

C. Streetlights

Emotion so vibrant its colors laugh. Passionate whispers carry through the wind only to shudder instead on leaves with anticipation. The night falls silent and stars hold their breath. Broken dreams gather on the dark side of the moon. Standing still, Time holds its breath waiting while I trace the Read more

C. Streetlights

As a child, C. Streetlights listened to birds pecking at her rooftop, but instead of fearing them, was convinced they would set her free and she’d someday see the stars. Southern California sunshine never gave C. Streetlights the blonde hair or blue eyes she needed to fit in with her high school’s beach girls, her inability to smell like teen spirit kept her from the grunge movement, and she wasn’t peppy enough to cheer. She ebbed and flowed with the tide, not a misfit but not exactly fitting in, either. Streetlights grew up, as people do, earned a few degrees and became a teacher. She spent her days discussing topics like essay writing, Romeo and Juliet, the difference between a paragraph and a sentence, and for God’s sake, please stop eating the glue sticks. She has met many fools, but admires Don Quixote most because he taught her that it didn’t matter that the dragon turned out to be a windmill. What mattered was that he chose to fight the dragon in the first place. Streetlights now lives in the mountains with a husband, two miracle children, and a dog who eats Kleenex. She retired from teaching so she can raise her children to pick up their underwear from the bathroom floor, to write, and to slay windmills and dragons. She is happy to report that she can finally see the stars.

Muse’s Message

Paula R. Hilton

I am distant memory rising. Earthworm aerating compost in your dreams. A tunnel, torchlit. The way out, or in. The hand you squeeze for comfort. The hand that slaps your face. Your relentless race, never-ending chase. A glass of ice water in Arizona in July. I am not a lie. Read more

Paula R. Hilton

Paula R. Hilton explores the immediacy of memory and how our most important relationships define us. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and has appeared in The Feminine Collective, The Sunlight Press, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Dear Damsels, The Tulane Review, and elsewhere. Her novel, Little Miss Chaos, was selected as a Best Indie Teen Read by Kirkus, and her first poetry collection, At Any Given Second, received a Kirkus star. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans.

The Bus Ride

Judith Staff

Evening afoot she waits at the stop. Mind elsewhere, on her day, or merely tired, distant. Boarding the empty bus, relieved for warmth, quiet. Town’s edge – but what is happening? Where are you going? She demands, nearly screaming now, You should have turned back there! The bus lurches down 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.

Barely Visible

Julie Anderson

trembling layers of authentic spirit refused fissures of disassociation spiders web stuck to the base of the soul sensitive thoughts pushed to the side in favor of our mother’s motto be good, clean and kind educated in the ways of humanity exploring delight gorging on fleshy highs what is right, Read more

Julie Anderson

Julie Anderson is the Creator and Publisher of Feminine Collective. Julie was inspired to create this safe place for women to share their secrets, desires, triumphs and pain as the antithesis of what mainstream media offers women today. In her column Pursuit of Perfection, she explores the importance of rectifying the balance of inner and outer beauty through essays, poems and articles on self-esteem, shame, family, and self- acceptance.

Surviving a suicide with my help

Elisabeth Horan

Forever is exhausting. Andrew is never gone… Just like we are never over Not that we are the same, and yet We are something like forever. Alive. Or dead. Does it even matter? What we do, even when in shadows. Is anyone really, ever, listening? I touch your chin as Read more

Elisabeth Horan

Elisabeth Horan is a poet mother student lover of kind people and animals, homesteading in Vermont with her tolerant partner and two young sons. She writes to survive and survives to write - We are all battling something. Let's support each other. Elisabeth enjoys riding horses and caring for her cats, chickens, goats and children (not necessarily in that order). She teaches at River Valley Community College in New Hampshire.

One Thousand and One Ways to Make Your Own Gender Trouble

Rebecca Lee

1. I am thirty-six I am marrying a man again I have frozen five embryos my popsicle babies saved for a rainy day when I’m old enough to be someone’s mother Someone on the internet says Anna Paquin can’t be bisexual if she’s married to Stephen Moyer. Someone else says Read more

Rebecca Lee

Rebecca Lee is a public interest lawyer by day and writer of poetry and prose by night. A queer writer of color, she is a graduate of Yale College and UC Berkeley School of Law, where she was Senior Articles Editor of the California Law Review and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice. Her poetry is forthcoming in Dispatches from Quarantine. She lives in San Francisco with her fiancé and their Goldendoodle, Justice.