It was a matter of the wrong weather. The skies asphalt gray and pressing. A ticket machine that kept spitting negatives. She felt her day contract in a spasm of problems and she teased it away with the thought of a room as warm as a womb. Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time she has either reading or writing. Her works have appeared in numerous publications and her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web. Her debut novel, The Rose Master, was published in 2014. Continue reading Landing on an Off Day

by  Valentina Cano  He stands in a triangle of women. Silent, arms flat at their sides, Women of mortar veins, concrete blood. He hasn’t heard their husked voices in lifetimes, but they still wrest answer after answer from his drying, salty mouth. Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time she has either reading or writing. Her works have appeared in numerous publications and her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web. Her debut novel, The Rose Master, was published in 2014. Continue reading The Sphinxes

by Amber Edmondson This is your ribcage. You hammered it from rusted metal on an anvil of river stone. Tell me how you watched the flecks and flakes of you fall to wet sand, their color the color of dried blood or nutmeg. These are your ribs: I want your breath to move them. These are your hands. You have two. Systems of levers and hinges, mechanical if not for the way you wrapped them in skin and blood, nerve endings wired to brain, and your hands are the conduits of muscle memory. They are pathways, neutral. These are your … Continue reading Darling Girl

by Amber Edmondson They will ask you why you sheared your head down to bristles and stubble. Why you built a bonfire by the riverside and dropped the long strands into the coals by the handful, watched them shrivel and shrink. They will ask you. You don’t have to tell them. They will ask you where the beautiful boy has gone. The one who cast the net. Your beautiful boy is a fisherman. Everyone knows. They will not ask you about the scales because you hide them. They will not ask you about the way you gasp for breath the … Continue reading A Woman Wakes in the River, Drowning

by Amber Edmondson Show me the women with maps for faces. Show me their compass rose. Show me the roads they’ve walked, piles of stones, fields left for lambs quarters, stinging nettle, dirt scraped under nails. Show me the women with constellations for names. Show me black holes. Show me the stars that form their clavicles, that glow behind their skin, the lanterns of their bodies shaming fireflies, incandescent bulbs beneath sway-backed porches. Show me the women showing the mapmaker’s hand. Show me misnamed provinces. Show me her hips in two dimensions, the bones of her thighs aligned to guide … Continue reading Navigating the Sea, by Way of the Sky

by Molly Elizabeth Fells 1. There is a place in the break by the edge of the sea where the seashells and the shorelines come together like the face of some ancient goddess, predating any wandering poet, any history textbook, before anyone gave their own name to this place. I go there in my dreams sometimes, contemplative and salt-soaked. In the fever-dream, in the sunshine that creeps along the cracks between the rocks, she slipped through my fingers like the strands of her hair. 2. In the stormgrey, I catch you watching me for direction, for instruction but I’ve stopped … Continue reading Two Poems