How do you keep going despite the heaviness of the world?
This month, we warmly invite you to send us your thoughts, in the form of writing or visual art or basically anything, on the theme of hope.
As usual, our prompts are only here to help inspire you and don’t have an expiration date, so feel free to join anytime within the open windows of our call for submissions.
by K Weber
A month ago my hand was a fist
and then it slowly opened and wrote poems.
It slowly opened like a morning glory
morning; briefly invited everyone to look
by Alex Gibson
Red as an axe-wound gouge to the heart
Red as the bloodshed too soon to depart
Red as the smouldering left on pale flesh
Red as the raw ire choking veiled breath
Red as the razor lain still by the tub
Red as the rosary drowning in blood
Red as the knuckles of wallpaper white
Red as the bathroom’s shattered pull-light
Red as the flash of a chamber’s last blow
Red as the ink on emergency room notes.
One moment I stare at the screenRead More »
as blank & empty as a zen void,
then watch an impossible poem
emerge & crawl across the page.
by Eric Vanderwall
The Halloweens of those early years blend together and it seems as if it was one long night, and, as it seemed to my young boy’s mind, the whole world joined in, that world being our neighborhood. It was a long Halloween night, both wet and dry, both cold and mild, filled with expectation and disappointment, all condensed into pointillist moments that, out of the blackness of the forgotten, have, many years later, been brought forth to light. The days of October that preceded Halloween have all faded away, leaving only those few impressions of the month’s final night to encapsulate the entirety. Had I known in those early years how precious those times were and how irrevocably it would all be lost, I would have paid better attention. I would have tried to remember everything. Although nearly all those Septembers and Octobers have disintegrated, one memory of the second day after Halloween, All Souls’ Day, remains.
Read More »by Carlos Daniel Martinez
I want to go to a desert,
Where nothing can bother me,
Where I won’t bump into anything,
To close my eyes for minutes walking for miles,
To anywhere where I don’t have it planned out,
My eyes shall not guide me anywhere,
It shall be my mind.
by John Tessitore
for Emma
Today the sun was a friend,
a hand on the shoulder,
like a father.
by Sheeks Bhattacharjee
There’s a place I know,
not too far from home.
I first went there at sunset
and I had never felt
so
alone.
Read More »by Ann E. Michael
small blotch the shape of an imagined continent or aRead More »
wing’s purple imprint. Such amazement.
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