I felt a surge of pocket electricity 

You are bitter black coffee at dusk, A hunger for bread to satiate, A bed of broken glass to rest at night.

I was never a good painter. 

I watch jagged rocks reflecting light At odd angles, Reminding me of the muscles in your back and  That decision I regret. Like wearing sandals in the winter, Feet stinging with each step. Numb, yet all I can feel.  Mingling Razer snakes light up green on a screen And I am jerked back to your room, An internal pounding from the unapologetic bang Of my head on the wooden corner by your bed. Smooth and cool and unforgiving  Like the history between us. The pounding is compounde

Ashes are another form of tears, after crying, after losing a homeland.

The mark of the beast sometimes flickers across their gunmetal coats.

still, your hands wrap around my brain like a vise.

on the fine China dinner plate: sprig  lacquered with sweet Sherry ambition, polyurethane-blanketed queries, 

Abigail Ray is a writer from Portland, Oregon, and has been published in Same Faces Collective, Maudlin House, and Call Me Brackets, among others. She recently graduated with her Bachelor’s in English and writing from Portland State University. She primarily writes poetry, lyrical essays, and experimental fiction about loser-core women that are definitely not poorly disguised projections of herself, no matter what people are saying.

My parents’ eyes lock on me the minute I enter the reception hall. A few other head turns and  lingering looks shoot my way, undoubtedly due to the show-stopping quality of my dress. Mom  picked it out for me at the department store a few weeks ago. I remember struggling to conceal  my disgust when a pink, frilly monstrosity you’d think she’d stolen from the closet of a pompous  toddler came out of the shopping bag.

imbued by a sense of blue,  berry not in lactose-less latte

Hoya Dolling is an emerging indie-writer based in the Pacific Northwest, forging poetry and fiction with the weight of always choosing rock in a world of paper and scissors. Stiff, but not unchanging, the stone is weak to erosion with time as the artist, painting blisters and smoothing personal edges.

Can you feel me in the silence, can you smell me in the air?

in a subterranean street   of a literary novel   set in Mexico City like those lines   folded across faces in suburbia  clipping the grass