an independent creative arts journal
By Jose Romero
Posted on
This is about knowing yourself.
When I was a kid,
I remember writing
on a small piece of paper:
“I am gay”.
Then I tore it up
and flushed it down the toilet,
trying to forget the truth
I had just confessed.
Because that disease is not true:
that only happens in the movies,
and to that one distant cousin
of my mother,
to whom she doesn’t talk to anymore.
By Holly Day
Posted on
Imparting tiny grains of colored sand with intricate thoughts
One giant flower covering the ground. It was so beautiful
I wanted take it home with me.
After it was done, he smeared great swaths of color against itself until
It was nothing but white sand.
It should have changed my life. I should have taken it away with me
Let his day disappear in the pursuit of beauty, but just the beauty of the moment.
I fully intended to go home and erase everything I had ever written
With the artist’s apparent satisfaction at the act of creation
Should be enough for me, too.
By Yuliya Klochan
Posted on
On Friday, the crowd stopped by the most vulnerable place. A library. An orchard. A school.
The people in the crowd raided bakeries because they’d never baked bread. Shot at rotten houses because they’d never had to live in filth. Every experience they didn’t get, they annihilated for the humans to come.
Then the caravan trudged onward. The nurses on duty cursed as they removed broken glass from bleeding bodies.
They had marched for the same number of days as the age of their oldest walker. 83.
I traveled with the crowd for 9 Fridays. On the 10th, the crowd schemed to raid every treehouse in a suburb where white picket fences got hosed with an unlimited supply of potable water. Where roads extended into dead ends and every pothole was the cause for an evening’s complaint.…
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By L.J. Kelley
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He’d been sawing on her abdomen like a sadistic carpenter for what seemed like hours. As she lay on the table, motionless, afraid to move or make a sound, he dumped the acidic liquid over the bloody slash in her gut. It would’ve scorched her pale, tender skin if she hadn’t gone numb from the waist down several hours ago. What the hell was that? Vinegar?
She’d always been a conscientious person; treated people the way she’d want to be treated, got a college education, paid her taxes. She would never understand what she had done to deserve this outcome. As she’d busied herself with cleaning her apartment and finishing her dissertation on the failings of modern feminism in America earlier that afternoon, she had the feeling that someone was observing her. …
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By Vanessa Hawkins
Posted on
One Two Three
One Two Three
She kicks her leg up, showing the world her shapely thigh. Her skirt’s a rainbow of pastels that frame the swell of her plump buttocks and the sheaf of white panty that bisects her inner leg and whispers of the dark cleft underneath.
One Two Three
One Two Three
She turns in a whirl, her soft doll curls spinning like the dishes balanced precariously on smooth ivory poles. Her lips are red; the perfect cupids bow, and dark eyelashes flutter above ice blue eyes, so incredibly blue they’re ghost-like.
One Two Three
One Two Three
The curtains close. They open again. She’s seen undressed; her porcelain skin grasped at every angle by the calloused hands of men. The cupid’s bow is now split apart, a thick shaft poised between it, ready to shoot its quarry. …
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By Jose Romero
Posted on
Believe me,
nobody wants to be loved.
What good lies
in the isolated knowledge of one
who loves,
one who finds himself in love?
What good is it to me that you
love me?
The truth is irrelevant when it
comes to individuals.
What a useless thing—to be loved.
But to feel it, ah!
All souls, all spheres
of energy and matter
were created to seek it.
We bathe ourselves in the
hope to find it:
The feeling,
not the truth behind it.
For what is a color
other than the thing we see?
No reality can go beyond a belief,
becoming inconsequential.
Maybe they don’t know it,
maybe they can’t understand,
yet nobody really wants to be loved,
what they want is to feel as if they were.…
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By A.J. Huffman
Posted on
Waves leave me stranded
My body recalls the pull
of salty siren
I echo remorse
My shell an amplifier
of solitude
The sun rises
My body warms to resolve
accepts stasis
Hours tick like time bombs
Metronomic visions
of feet and feathers
Owning neither
I sink further into sand
pretend I am coffin
Waiting for death
I discover a new concept
Regeneration
The world moved forward
into perceived reversal
I am recycled
Arms of tomorrow
embrace me like yesterday
I breath as if I am home.