The After

You make me high And soft I sink myself into you As I feel you slowly slipping away I hold onto this feeling, this place of happiness, of silly smiles and heat Even when you leave, you leave me brighter and I leave my mark on you too I never Read more

Emily Algar

Emily Frances Algar is a journalist and writer. She has experience in the music industry working as the A&R on the Grammy Nominated Album (Best Folk Album) Front Porch by artist Joy Williams. Emily has been published in a number of print and digital publications including Atwood Magazine, American Songwriter, and Record Collector magazine. She specializes in both long and short-form features as well as interviews and reviews. She has written pieces ranging from the commercialization of feminism and feminism in popular culture, critiques surrounding freedom of speech and the #MeToo movement as well as recently interviewing refugees from Iran. Emily has a Masters in International Security from Oxford Brookes University. Her thesis looked at the extent to which the media shaped public opinion during the Vietnam and Iraq (2003) wars.

Boy to Man

By rediscovering one another we’ve met love by crossing paths we’ve begun a new life together.

Christine Sempetrean Smith

Christine Sempetrean Smith is a writer living in southwest Missouri with her husband and three children. When she's not putting miles on her minivan driving her kids to activities, you can find her exploring the region, discovering people and places that make life interesting. She shares her travel experiences on JoplinMOLife, and muses her way through this amusing life on ChristineSempetrean (also on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram).

Shutting Down Because My Lover Shut Me Out

Sometimes I don’t want to deal with my life. It hurts too much. He doesn’t see me. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to speak, see, feel, love, hate, be, eat, see, feel, touch or taste the way my feelings are. I am shutting down from Read more

Sarah Fader

Sarah Fader is the CEO and Founder of Stigma Fighters, a non-profit organization that encourages individuals with mental illness to share their personal stories. She has been featured in The NY Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Quartz, Psychology Today, The Huffington Post, HuffPost Live, and Good Day New York. www.sarahfader.com Sarah is a native New Yorker who enjoys naps, talking to strangers, and caring for her two small humans and two average-sized cats. Like six million other Americans, Sarah lives with panic disorder. Through Stigma Fighters, Sarah hopes to change the world, one mental health stigma at a time.

For Lovers Spent

I wish I was the one you search for so you would stop getting colder as you walk away so you say But I am not the woman of your dreams I am someone very special just not the special one. You build songs for those you’ve loved and forever 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.

[v.5]

give me the gun, my love this is no dance, no punchline blue smoke coiling like hollow wire above the spruce crowns, glittered with the last cold of the cruelest month the tired ladder propped beside the gutter clotted scarlet the knifesong of the wind beyond the grasp of the Read more

Rachael Convery

Rachael Convery is a Classicist, Maker, and Scholar; follower of Sappho and Anne Carson; devotee of Beauty and the wildancient gods; seeker of the sacred and profane; lighter of candles upon the altars of the lost; daughter of savagedivine wolves; keeper of forgotten histories; lover of small, grand, and delicate things...

love. (lost?)

i remember you. when first we met i, barely more than a child you, already touched by war. two different worlds converging. you overcame my shyness with your admiration for my writing skills. we talked and exchanged numbers. though we lived in the same town, rarely met face-to-face hours would Read more

Wendy C Garfinkle

Wendy is a writer and editor who holds multiple degrees from several universities, including MA and MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. She's the author of SERPENT ON A CROSS, a Jewish Medieval Fantasy, and a poet. She has served as a copy editor and panel reader for Hippocampus Magazine, as a reader for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and as an editor and proofreader for Booktrope and its Gravity Imprint. Wendy's most recent venture is her freelance editing business, Grammar Goddess Editing. In her day job, Wendy is a crime analyst for a sheriff's office. Her hobbies include writing, reading,and traveling. She lives in South Florida with her teenage son.

For Medicinal Purposes Only

You are so crazy I can’t take it anymore I will not have this kind of drama in my life You are strange and unpredictable Am I CRAZY? What makes you think that? Is it because I grind my teeth every night, chasing demons in my dreams? Is it because 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.