For the Girl in Row 5

It’s easy money. Walk slowly, hands behind your back, checking no one is cheating. Up and down the rows of desks, quietly handing out tissues, pens. For a teacher of 5 year olds, exam invigilation with 16 year olds is a breeze. Some children look anxious, one girl is biting 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.

Trapped Tears

It’s back, that distantly familiar swell under my ribs, a bitter sensation, like crying which is desperate to escape. Is it my trapped tears, all alone inside my chest? Or the hollow itself that they inhabit, which hurts? The aching makes me inhale, throbbing intensifies. Perhaps because my sorrow is 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.

Every single night

My brain is a place of deep concern to me. My brain is a place of butterflies and octopi. You haven’t seen a place such as this and I am so happy for you. You tell me to smile and chock it all up to my negative attitude – that 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.

Judging Rights

Nestling together, blame and judgement let’s talk about that. Were you there? Were you wearing her clothes? You know, the ones she asked him not to pull off? Did you feel her heart accelerating? While her soul wept in fear of what was to come? Were you witness to all 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.

Weathered Beliefs

There is help on the way for those who step on weathered beliefs in instigating shades of abusive rhetoric for the vulnerable and gracious minded souls who seek comfort and answers instead of a whirlpool of subtle gaslit phrases to keep all guessing their worth in their pool of doubt Read more

Margret Avery

Margret Avery expresses her talents through being a singer / songwriter / actor / writer and poet. She has also worked as a freelance makeup artist with her work gracing the pages of many editorial and commercial publications. The passion to express through song led to her writing and continues to grow with equal tenacity. Margret has contributed as a writer to Suite101, Women’s Voices for Change and now proudly for Feminine Collective. Margret’s writing is included in Feminine Collective: Raw and Unfiltered Vol 1 and that makes her smile on a daily basis. Her music can be heard on Spotify, Pandora, CDbaby, Soundcloud, Reverbnation and NumberoneMusic.

First Four Seasons

First Summer We have been in Canada about a month, and the constant feeling of shock somewhere deep in my tummy, is not abatting. I am just eight years old. I am lonely, bored, and my parents have a lot to do, so my mother takes me out to the 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.

A Blur of Selfishness and Orgasms

This cannot be it. Don’t get her wrong, she likes some of it. The sound is awesome. Sounds, she thinks, deliriously lost in the world she crafts in her head as she hopes to get just a little wet. His breathing is short; he’s gasping into her ear, her neck, Read more

Lorel Rea

*Lorel Rea* is a fourth-year English student at Northern Kentucky University studying creative writing. She is obsessed with reading; anything that contains dragons, women with swords, or LGTBQIA+ characters is already on her TBR shelf. Though currently drowning in a sea of fantasy worlds, Lorel tries to keep the daydreaming to a minimum. She lives in Northern Kentucky, though her permeant address should be changed to the public library where you can most often find her with tea and an open laptop.

Moon’s Song

If you desire to measure how far you have trekked, across meadows and deserts of emotion, and oceans of storm-filled nights, look back toward the horizon. For there remains, soaked in your tears, the crumbling bones of all your relationships. The harmful sort, which once upon a time took hungry 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.