Because I am sick, I imagine myself capable of astonishing feats. I fit my bare feet into the crevices of mountains. I leap off cliffs armed with spears to take on sharks. I fly. Where to? But I am not sure it matters, as my wings have yet to grow.
Colleen Addison did a PhD in health information and promptly got sick herself. She now lives, heals, and writes on a small island off the coast of Vancouver, Canada.
The father cut the umbilical cord even as the lights flickered. The newborn looked determined to survive. There was some perfunctory crying, but she calmed down as soon as she latched on to her mother’s breast.
“I will keep you safe,” her mother whispered.
Outside, the bombs had devoured everything.
Jahnavi Gogoi’s poetry has been published in Indian Review, Coffee and Conversations, RIC journal, Café Haiku, Presence, Five Fleas, Haiku Girl Summer, tsuri-doro, Enchanted Garden Haiku journal, Zen Peacemakers, Fresh Out: An Arts and Poetry Collective, The Daily Verse by The Wise Owl, Haiku Corner by The Japan Society, Shadow Pond Journal, The Leaf Journal, haikuNetra among others. She lives in a quaint town in Ontario, Canada with her family and occasionally tries her hand at fiction and essays.
The fog swirled in thick clouds. She heard a familiar voice. It was fading into the mists. She had to act quickly before it was gone forever. “What’s the afterlife like?” she called. A pause. “Confusing,” came her father’s voice. Letting go, at a loss yet somehow comforted, she awoke.
Sarah Tyk is an aspiring writer from Iowa and host of The Interested Reader podcast. An astronomy major in college and grad school, her true love has always been writing. She writes what she can, when she can; usually during her toddler’s naptime.
You don’t see them. Not through your binoculars, not even when everybody else in the boat is yelling with surprise and delight. You don’t see them after searching and searching along the blue choppy water of the horizon. Still, your heart dances. It is enough to know they are there.
Hetty lives in Scotland and works in publishing. When not reading or writing, she likes exploring new places.
I found him in the gloom of the depths.
I never saw his back, nor could I see his face.
Standing on two legs not unlike mine, he reached out a hand to the wall.
He started to climb, I in turn followed.
Mile after mile, it’s been getting brighter.
Daniel lives and works in Dublin.
Color vanished from the world with his wife’s last breath. Murmured words of sympathy hovered at the edge of sound. Endless gray corridors led to the NICU. Masked and gowned, he stood beside the incubator, dark spines of hair visible among the tubes and wires. In that moment, color returned.
Suzi lives somewhere between truth and interpretation and writes whenever the words must come out and speak to others.
I heard leaves and branches singing to the sun
I watched the trees singing as one
Grace for the day
Prayer for tomorrow
A daily prayer for one hundred years
A daily prayer answered
Until today
Whirring of encroaching engines portends the end
Of one last sunset
And no dawn
David is a St. Louis-based writer who enjoys all forms of writing from microfiction to novels.
When mom passed, we joked over boxes deemed for the dumpster about her catchwords of somedays and one-days and soons. We never had much growing up, but we had each other. We finally moved her old bed, only to discover a thick mat of lottery somedays and one-days and soons.
Deb DiTomaso lives in Connecticut with her husband, a dog, and a bunch of chickens. She’s a career nurse with a lifelong passion for crafting stories. Her work has placed as a finalist in CT Tassy Walden Awards for New Voices in Children’s Literature.
Excitedly, young Aisha skipped from the packed boat to the beach. Her parents’ faces lifted slightly upon seeing her joy. The sun painted the summer holiday she’d always dreamed of right onto the sand. Her parents exchanged a look laden with relief at seeing the beach empty of border police.
Tom lives with his young family in New Zealand and works as a primary school teacher. He has had a passion for stories ever since learning to walk and is currently working on a series of fantasy novels.
The hospital vending machine drones an accompaniment to the febrile bouncing of my foot: rubber kissing laminate.
You could be anywhere by now.
When I tip my head back, I see stars: souls trading places, a life for a life. We should be out there, where the air tastes sweet.
A translator by trade, Lesley Warren lives for language. Born to Welsh and Filipino parents and now resident in Germany, her work encompasses themes of identity, displacement and “otherness”. Her poetry and prose have been published in a number of digital and print journals as well as appearing in a podcast.