The Alone Girl By Susan Isla Tepper

I'm the alone girl 

look for me 

in the mulch lined pit

no shirred satin

I've been down here

a long time

if you count

by the moon's cycles

I gave up

believing in stardust

the first year

watching my skin crack

a blood welt near my wrist

where a watch band would go.

A fading planet from inside out.

Susan Isla Tepper is a twenty year writer in all genres. Her stage play "Crooked Heart" will be featured in Origin Theatre Company 'May Play Festival', NYC.

Conversations By Daniel S. Irwin

I gave up tending bar,
Too many sad stories.
Lately, I’ve had these
Constant thoughts of
Death.  I’ve even had
Conversations with the
Dead, rather one sided.
It’s getting pretty weird.
Maybe this isn’t really
Working out, my new
Job as the night man
At the city morgue.

 

 

Daniel S. Irwin, native of Southern Illinois (such as it is).  Artist, writer, actor, soldier, scholar, priest among other things.

Work published in over one hundred magazines and journals worldwide.  Has appeared in over one hundred films. 

Speaks fluent gibberish when loaded.  Not much into blowing his own horn as you are only as good as your latest endeavor.

Once turned to religion but Jesus just walked away. 

Sipping Insecticide By John Patrick Robbins

Embracing the poison to avoid dealing with humanity, the clock is insignificant as my life these days.

Keep your head down and your true face masked. 

It's bleeding at the seams as we are broken internally from the start.

Empty vessels all pine, as you simply taste freely granted pleasures to escape feeling anything that is truly real.

A shared disease, an unwanted curse.

We were reckless as now we are bound to a countdown, a time bomb of internal hemorrhages implosion.

Blood tears shed in a durst bleak is the landscape of damnation's promise.

Does anyone have a cigarette?

Fuck the blindfold and you as well.

Open fire.

John Patrick Robbins is a Southern Gothic writer his work has been published in Impspired Magazine, Fixator Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, Fearless Poetry Zine, Distrub The Universe, Sava Press, Spill The Words Press, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and The Dope Fiend Daily .

His newest book is Midnight Masochism from Black Circle Publishing available through Amazon.

His work is often dark and always unfiltered.

Everything is normal but for normality By Dennis Moriarty

Look. Here is the core of all you choose

to ignore. The inner city

of this global sprawl where the roads flow

like needle tracks down the arms

of a junkie who has suffered

too many lows and not enough highs, where

the night spills it’s neon guts

over the pavements, in the gutters and over

the water of a river

that cuts this place in two with the serrated edge

of a tidal knife. Look closer.

See the lunatic trembling for the want of a bed

in the asylum, at the homeless

who occupy the streets, shop doorways opulent

apartments furnished with cardboard

and the discarded rags of another man’s demise.

Look below your feet and see

into the bowls of this city where the day people

scream for lack of sleep

and the night people move restless as the wind

that howls and blows

through the alleyways and up to the gates of hell.

Look. Here you are now

in leafy suburban England where everything

is normal but for normality,

where the lunatic, the junkie and the dispossessed

are the chorus of a song

you never play, a line in a poem you refuse to read.

Dennis Moriarty was born in London, England and now lives in Wales. Married with five grown up offspring Dennis likes walking the dog in the mountains, reading and writing.

In 2017 he won the Blackwater poetry competition and went to county Cork in Ireland to read his work at the international poetry festival. Dennis has had poems featured in many publications including Blue nib, Our poetry archive, Setu bilingual, The passage between and others.