Category: Featured

Gold

Julie Anderson

Heavy words, insinuations if you will are left like baggage, there they are, on the back porch of my mind. All of them lined up in order, not of appearance but importance. Baffling renditions of memories held within their confines, these ghostly memories cannot find their place in the now, 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.

City Lights

Amye Archer

For Tony We have moved from the city to the country. The sky is dark, black, blank on cloudy nights and bursting with the white-hot heat of a thousand other galaxies full of lovers and poets, philosophers trying to figure out what it all means, what we mean, while we Read more

Amye Archer

Amye Archer holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her memoir, Fat Girl, Skinny, was named runner-up for the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award, and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has two poetry collections: BANGS and A Shotgun Life, both published by Big Table Publishing. Amye’s work has appeared in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Hippocampus, Mothers Always Write, Nailed Magazine, PMS: Poem Memoir Story, PANK, and Provincetown Arts. She is the creator of The Fat Girl Blog.

Senator John McCain: For the Greater Good

Dori Owen

Arizona has had its share of elected officials who brought shame to the State in a national spotlight for years: Convicted felon and openly racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Mean-spirited Governor Jan Brewer who infamously shook her finger in President Obama’s face when he visited Arizona. Impeached Governor Evan Mecham, who Read more

Dori Owen

Dori Owen is a storyteller, writing from small town Arizona, after living a few decades in California as an LA Wild Child, with a brief stop in Reno. She settled into grownup life as a project manager, collecting an MBA and a few husbands along the way. She is a shown artist and her favorite pastime is upcycling old furniture and decor she finds from thrift stores. She lives with the cat who came to visit but stayed. The love of her life is her grown son who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her essays and poems have been published in RAW&UNFILTERED VOL I, StigmaFighters Vol 2, and Love Notes From Humanity. Her blogs have been featured on The Lithium Chronicles, Open Thought Vortex, Sudden Denouement, and The Mighty.

Miss Congeniality

Dori Owen

Sundays I travel it’s visiting day time to see my fair little friend who lives in a place of maximum security no chance of parole. Before she arrives I make stories up in my head of inmates here on why and what brought them to a concrete barbed wire home. Read more

Dori Owen

Dori Owen is a storyteller, writing from small town Arizona, after living a few decades in California as an LA Wild Child, with a brief stop in Reno. She settled into grownup life as a project manager, collecting an MBA and a few husbands along the way. She is a shown artist and her favorite pastime is upcycling old furniture and decor she finds from thrift stores. She lives with the cat who came to visit but stayed. The love of her life is her grown son who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her essays and poems have been published in RAW&UNFILTERED VOL I, StigmaFighters Vol 2, and Love Notes From Humanity. Her blogs have been featured on The Lithium Chronicles, Open Thought Vortex, Sudden Denouement, and The Mighty.

Ten Things to Know

Krystal Beatriz Galvis

Ten There are ten beer bottles sitting on their – her kitchen counter. All of them were empty, lined up and she leaned her hip against the granite countertop as she spun a bottle. Her fingers danced around the spinning bottle on the dark grey countertop… the one they picked Read more

Krystal Beatriz Galvis

Krystal Beatriz Galvis, born and raised in San Diego, California, is a writer fascinated with magic, fantasy, and darkness. She is a MFA graduate student at San Diego State University studying creative writing. Outside from writing short stories, she researches any Latinx fables or myths and writes small poems on her Instagram page under the hashtag #krystalg.

Distillation

Jen Rouse

20 drops per minute. Until the liquid turned vapor leaves a residue so intoxicatingly flammable, everything smells like risk. She said, let’s create a vessel. Let’s create an apparatus. Let’s slow the process, no need for this hemorrhage of light. We will dissolve, return, split, and form again, with greater Read more

Jen Rouse

Jen Rouse’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Poet Lore, Midwestern Gothic, Wicked Alice, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, Yes Poetry, Crab Fat Magazine, Up the Staircase, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist for the Mississippi Review 2018 Prize Issue and was the winner of the 2017 Gulf Stream Summer Contest Issue. Rouse’s chapbook, Acid and Tender, was published in 2016 by Headmistress Press. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.

To the Ones Who Think Friendship is Easy

Catarina Chung

The concept of “friendship” is hard to define. But I’ll tell you one thing. It’s anything but easy. Some do it right and cross that long bridge to meet a friend at the center so they can jump down into the ocean waiting below. Together. Others do it wrong and Read more

Catarina Chung

I am a writer who attends a magnet high school focused on STEM. I am in the Medical academy at Bergen County Academies, but I write in my free time. Some of my work has won a gold medal from the Scholastic Art and Writing competition, and some have been published in Bergen Community College's magazine, "The Pegasus."

When I Climbed Trees

Jesse Albatrosov

When I was a girl, the worst thing I could imagine was being alone yet, here I am, sweeping through each day without benevolent counsel and making it— waking up to find these people are my people, unaided and I haven’t an ear to bend when I am unsure or Read more

Jesse Albatrosov

Jesse is an emerging poet living and writing in the Central Florida area, with her husband and five children. She moonlights as a seamstress for her Etsy shop and is currently working toward her Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and English with a concentration on Poetry. Her work is published or forthcoming in THAT Literary Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Mothers Always Write, Press 53's Prime Number Magazine, Streetlight Magazine and others. You can find her online at www.jessealbatrosov.com or on social media.