Category: Featured

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.

Once Written

Victoria Addesso

There are times when I want to take facts and change them. I want to take the life around me, and in me, and turn it into a story. I want to rewind, and cut and splice. Leave some parts out altogether; reverse the chronology; take the raw material of Read more

Victoria Addesso

Vicki Addesso has worked in various fields over the years, full-time and part-time. In between family life and bill-paying endeavors, she works at writing. Co-author of the collaborative memoir Still Here Thinking of You~A Second Chance With Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, 2013), she has had work published in Gravel Magazine, Barren Magazine, The Writer, Sleet Magazine, Damselfly Press, Feminine Collective, and Tweetspeak Poetry. A personal essay is included in the anthology My Body My Words, edited by Loren Kleinman and Amye Archer. You can follow Vicki on Twitter @VickiAddesso.

Why Female Fireflies Fake Death

Laure Van Rensburg

She walks to the deli to get some lunch. She will get catcalled, but she’ll pretend she hasn’t heard it. Her pace and heartbeat will increase with every additional comment, the unwanted attention crawling up her legs like an invisible hand. She’ll want to say something, but she’ll remember the Read more

Laure Van Rensburg

Laure Van Rensburg is a French writer living in the UK. Her short stories can be found in online magazines including Across The Margin, Ellipsis Zine, The Fiction Pool, Barren Magazine, Storgy and Reflex Fiction. She has been longlisted for the Bath Short Story Award and twice shortlisted for TSS Publishing Quarterly Flash Competitions.

Blue-Aged Love

Christina Strigas

I search for you like a lost lover of jazz, I find you in the dim as you play a deceiver of love, where love is never free prices to pay at every bank vault. Waiting for musical clouds to form in all the shapes we always talked about. A 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

I Was Told to Ignore the Abuse

Victoria Telfer-Smith

They told me to ignore the words you said, “Don’t let him get to you. Try a different way of being. Be different; let him know you want him. He is just frightened of commitment. He will calm down soon.” I started to see your entitled feelings; I think they are Read more

Victoria Telfer-Smith

I am a counsellor who uses hypnosis in treatment. I use therapy to work with clients to achieve the life they want to. I also work with traumatised and abused people who are finding it difficult after a trauma they have endured. I use hypnosis for childbirth and fertility issues as well as post natal depression. I feel therapy is life affirming, when humans feel pain, both emotional and physical, they may need to receive support and guidance to deal with it, that is how I work.

It’s All My Fault

Judith Staff

They say “the body remembers.” Somewhere in my mind, the intrusive sound of the soles of men’s sensible shoes slapping onto the shiny floors throughout the corridors still haunts me now and then. Sitting on a shelf labeled “incongruity,” the sudden thunder of racing footsteps filling the hushed, echoey hallways 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.

Sounding

Kari A Flickinger

Words sometimes settle between thighs. Eye up—all night think how I don’t your shoulder brush, cough don’t, you away, leg. I don’t acknowledge your mouth when you’re talk -ing, how can you? Talking such silence between an affect. Sounding pangs liquid off every windshield tears the sky open. Tears, tears. Read more

Kari A Flickinger

Kari A. Flickinger's poetry has been published in or is forthcoming from Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Burning House Press, Door Is A Jar, Isacoustic, Ghost City Review, Eunoia Review, and Riddled with Arrows, among others. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley. When she is not writing, she can be found playing guitar and singing to her unreasonably large Highlander cat, as well as obsessively over-analyzing the details of neighboring trees.