BY JORDAN NISHKIAN

“You can trust people with grief,”
she says, piecing together a bouquet
of bee balm and blueweed.
My fingers pick at heads of sea lavender
I carry through tides.

BY MICHELLE HERD

When I ask my mother
What her greatest pain
Disappointment, un-
Fulfilled, dream is she replies:

“Well it really is more of a
Fantasy, than a dream…”

Burn It All

Burn it all he tossed the words over his shoulder
while he walked out the door without looking back
leaving her in a mess of cold, dark, shattered ruins

BY LIZ MICHAUD

The first form I ever took was air.
I was not quite a thing,
I was the idea of a thing.
Nebulous in my obscurity.
Perfect in my imprecision.
Affable to every flit of the breeze.

BY C BRESNAN

Plunging deep, I'm drenched
with more humanness, grasping
hope and love to rise.

BY ANDY NARANJO

Like dried wine on stone
My eye is tinged with the reflection of droplets
Akin to the vine

BY EA BAKER

The Season of Flame

The wildflowers that once
gilded the hills and
valleys have become
tarnished,
fading into brown

BY JANICE PEREGRINA

Inside every sacred soul
Lies an enrapturing phoenix in repose
Her crumbling wings enfold upon themselves
Hiding from the world

BY HJ MORALES

Constantly spinning on space’s finger
At a million miles an hour
But the sand buries my toes
Like a silk sheet on a breezy night.

BY HOLLY KING

Here is what they don’t tell you.
That through idle hands we must kill.
My sister gave me this warning five
years ago while she pruned
her bougainvillea in the garden.

BY JORDAN NISHKIAN

You, my air,
you bury me—
hold me under,
carry me with you.

BY NATE BUSSEY

Sometimes I feel the incorrigible need
to get into hot water. I'll draw myself
a bath, raise the temperature by degree
the way you cook lobster,
plunge my ears beneath the surface
to listen to the water I'm making filthy

BY HOLLY KING

The greatest lie she ever told
herself was that her spine
felt burdened from violet
rosebuds pushing out
of each crack in the cement.
That thorns broke open troves
of forgotten dreams.

BY AUDREY KEMP

We have encountered her before,
The femme fatale from myth and lore --
The emblematic minx or tease,
Who conjures chaos in the breeze.

BY TAMARA LINDSEY

Lover hear my harmony.
Come find me.
Search the midnight fury.
I’m crying.

BY REBECCA CARLYLE

It rocks me slowly, occupying
my crevices,
everything is soft here, the touch, the sound, the feel.
I am a blemish in this
pulchritude.

BY HJ MORALES

Tides sway washing sand waltz
grandma's hands scrape soapy ribbed metal.
Foam brews, grunts splash in the air
salting lungs, cleaning carbon.

BY DEANNA NGUYEN

Winds of a moon-soaked night,
carry her voice
as gentle as the caresses
of a mother cradling
her newborn child.

BY JANICE PEREGRINA

peer in, look through the porthole
at the ocean, vast as sin
the silent siren rises
from the black within