Category: Featured

Once

Sandy Coomer

This game, and I should say a name is what I want a fact to hold against the things we do – nineteen minutes on the train between Montrose and Grand every one of them burning with your gaze, my shoulder blades melting, my hips my neck, my open mouth Read more

Sandy Coomer

Sandy Coomer is a poet, mixed media artist, and endurance athlete from Nashville, TN. Her poetry has most recently been published or is forthcoming in Red River Review, Clementine Poetry Journal, and Hypertrophic Literary Magazine, among others. She is the author of two poetry collections: Continuum, published by Finishing Line Press, and The Presence of Absence, which won the 2014 Janice Keck Literary Award for Poetry. Sandy's artwork has been on exhibit in middle Tennessee galleries, community centers, and libraries. An avid lover of endurance sports, Sandy trains and races year-round in the sport of triathlon, including Ironman and Half Ironman events.

“Hey Dude, Your Junk Looks Dangerous!”

Dave Pasquel

I hate using the public restroom at the airport. Whether it’s the urinal or the stall, no amount of hand-washing is enough to satisfy my germaphobia. However, after traveling nearly every week for the past ten years, I’ve been forced to give in to nature’s whims – but only in dire emergencies. After all, Read more

When Half a Brain is the Only Option

Shanna DeMott

My daughter has half a brain. No, really. She does. Allow me to explain. Sasha arrived on a Friday morning, in late-February. She was three weeks early and weighed 4.5 pounds. Aside from her low-birth weight, she was perfect. Words I used to describe her babyhood included happy, giggly, curious, Read more

Shanna DeMott

Shanna Sabet-DeMott is a freelance writer living in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her husband George DeMott, sings Italian arias in the shower, and Pop-Opera around the world. She has an 11-year old daughter who has survived 3 brain surgeries, and who has shown her Mama the meaning of bravery at every turn. She is a lover of telling stories about food and life on her blogs, eatingoutvegas.com and stumblingbeauty.com.

Phantom Heart

Julie Anderson

Lover your name is true. I see you beyond what has been ingrained honeyed words drip from your lips, drop into my dreams. Beat on for me, I can hear you in my heart. Sigh deeply suck me in. Spin a web of wishes around the sincere fantasy. Exhale the 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.

Smiling Away the Dark Prana

Jacqueline Cioffa

‘Dark Prana represents all of our habits and thoughts we have developed throughout our lifetime and it is always running in the background. They surface from time to time, often when we least expect them. We can be overcome by these thoughts and actions if we do not allow our 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.

Chaotic Inspiration

C. Streetlights

A photograph, miraculously taken of a star’s birth, taken just when that star ripped itself from absolute chaos (near the constellation of Sagittarius, my birth sign) an undeniable thrill, this sign – a star born at my sign Scientists become poets, (a rich and powerful dichotomy) describing a supernova explosion 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.

The Tear

Lynda Levy

“Does your weakness show as your strength?” Rivka leans towards me from behind a scratched wooden desk in her office at Neve Yerushalayim Girls’ Seminary. The thin metal folding chair I’m sitting on creaks as I cross and uncross my nylon covered legs under my long blue skirt. It’s October, Read more

Lynda Levy

Lynda Levy is a retired psychologist and life coach. After 30+ years living in Los Angeles, she recently moved to Phoenix to be close to family and is now (sort of) adjusting to the open spaces and thinner air of the desert. Lynda has worked her way through a series of absolutist-cultish groups, from Orthodox Judaism, to Primal Therapy, to Kleinian psychoanalysis, and finally (maybe) has stopped looking for "the" answer and is more interesting in expressing her own take on the world as she sees it. Lynda has been in writing classes and workshops with every writing guru in Los Angeles and will continue to try to learn from others while knowing that no one else can tell you what you have to say. When she's not writing Lynda is cooking, reading, studying Italian, watching films, or traveling.

Pillow Talk

Natalie Caro

He used to bring me into the bedroom to talk. He knew I liked to talk and that my mother and grandmother were terrible listeners and so he knew all I wanted was an ear. And so he’d let me talk and even better let me ask questions. What’s that Read more

Natalie Caro

Natalie wanted to be a mermaid, but she learned to write before she ever learned to swim. She likes to sit at bars in the Bronx writing poems about strangers while wishing for fins. In 2015 she was nominated for the Push.