Contributor: Richard Schnap

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In art as in life
He learned that success
Is a capricious mistress

Poems rejected
By faceless editors
With assembly line hearts

Collages displayed
On the gloomy walls
Of a gallery’s bathroom

Songs that echoed
Through empty cabarets
Entertaining ghosts

But he’d heard somewhere
That if only one soul
Answered to his touch

He had changed the world
The sleeping stranger
That he had woken


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Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

Contributor: Judy Moskowitz

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Memories that live inside my courtroom
Of missing persons
Escaping an early self
Under the blanket
Where imagination thrives
Like the wingspan of an eagle
Taking in the wounds of war
That never really heal
Dirt making its trail over thirty years
Deep into the grout
Will I be able to write about
Marigolds and daisies
Trees and the nature of things
While listening to Debussy
Practicing


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I am a professional jazz musician originally from New York and now residing in Florida. I started writing poetry three years ago and have been published.

Contributor: Donal Mahoney

- -
When a young woman like that
sails into the conference room,
all masts billowing,
there's nothing the men
around the table can do
except take a breath

and wait for her
to settle in her chair,
open her laptop
and fuss for a moment
with some errant hair

before she fixes her stare
on the podium to wait
for the chairman to arrive
and take it from there

if he possibly can.
The chairman won't know
the young woman has said
everything his men
will remember tomorrow
without saying a word.


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Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, Donal Mahoney has had work published in print and electronic publications in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Contributor: Ananya S Guha

- -
The mists are here
Spring has given me
that, one more lust
of remembering.
Tired eyes are dreams
and I walk through spaces
time cannot tell. Only these
hills, where I live, where I dream
where I walk, their embryo changes.


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Ananya S Guha lives in Shillong, in North East India. He has been writing and publishing poetry for over thirty years. His poems have been published world wide.

Contributor: Scott Thomas Outlar

- -
The hardest place to exist
is in someone else’s fantasy
because you will never be enough
to fulfill what is not real

ditch such scenes
and start carving out memories
in your own life

with anyone cool
who’s trying to do the same
in their own


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Scott Thomas Outlar hosts the site 17Numa.wordpress.com where links to his published work can be found. His chapbook "Songs of a Dissident" is available on Amazon.

Contributor: James Robert Rudolph

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Bugling baby bunting
center of your swirl,
squawky talky jabberwocky
clever clacking chrysalis.

A teeming wonderland
special because it’s yours,
the kaleidoscope tumbles, then
another postcard from your
thrilled and fetal head.


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James Robert Rudolph is a retired psychologist and teacher having returned to old haunts in northern New Mexico after a busy career in Minneapolis. He believes in old-style magical realism, that inspired by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the high desert, and the deep, broad sky of the American mountain west. Recent poems have appeared in The Artistic Muse, Mad Swirl, and Bewildering Stories, among others.

Contributor: Paul Tristram

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She took a fall backwards inside,
clutched both shaking hands
to her palpitating breast
and tried impossibly
to compose herself.
The terrible Ache
which had barrened her heart
and wintered her soul
had finally come to an end.
She had just, a minute or so ago
peed an acceptance
into the sisterhood of motherhood.
And was absolutely useless
for a moment or two
for anything but
overwhelming, spiritual gratitude.
Sometimes God is not
looking the other way
and sometimes massively
important small dreams come true.


- - -
Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories, sketches and photography published in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight; this too may pass, yet.
Buy his book ‘Scribblings Of A Madman’ (Lit Fest Press) http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1943170096

Contributor: Jed Kim

- -
You come into my life in disguises
to mock and ridicule my emotions
I hate it when you’re with someone else,
jealousy and anger on my mind.
You hit me when I least expect it,
got me falling over looking like a fool
coming in different shapes and sizes.
My heart is fooled and runs for you
while my mind is a bit hesitant
for if I love you, will you love me too?

It’s strange how you are of this world-
almost tangible, but alas,
just a figure in myths, twisting naive hearts.
Our love can create havoc,
bigger than Helen and Paris.
When you choose me over others, I am infallible.
mightier than Hercules, the god’s champion.
Through all that however,
I am always afraid to approach you
for if I love you, will you do the same?


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Jed Kim enjoys spending time with his family and would like to go skydiving without a parachute once in his lifetime. You can find his works on Eskimo Pie.

Contributor: E.S. Wynn

- -
Can we but meet in dreams?
spend each eve
flying free
to catch and tangle up in each
to come together
like suns in silence
like stars burning away the blackness
as we circle
as we dance celestial
so close
so close

and meeting again each night
meeting again each night
until the day
until the day when suns stop their soaring
sear into solace
so close
so close

at last
so close
so close.


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E.S. Wynn is the author of over sixty books in print and is the chief editor of Thunderune Publishing. This poem is one of many featured in the book titled "What Will Be"

Contributor: Luna V

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Laughs in the forest,
a tribe living near a river
where trees turning bare

White blankets the scene.
Swift winter brings swifter sunfall.
Dead of night, sparks fly.

Chills run down the spine
blaze consuming the frost, and
the kids that played there.


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Elino Benjamin Villegas feels at home in the big city, though he is trapped in the suburbs of Southern California. When he’s not writing the worst short story ever, he’s hammering out a blues lick on his black Epiphone, experimenting with different recipes in the kitchen, or designing computer graphics and fan art.