• “Unititled Study”

    See more of her work

    Morenike Olusanya, popularly known as Renike, is an award-winning visual and book cover artist, and illustrator. When she’s not creating masterpieces or challenging herself to learn more, she is a mentor to artists that need guidance. She also enjoys working with authors, helping them to bring their vision and books to life by creating beautiful book covers and inner artworks for them. She has designed and illustrated book covers for Notable people including Aminata Touré, Germany’s first Black female minister, award-winning American author Coe Booth, and Jamaican-American author Nicola Yoon.

    Her personal work focuses on presenting black women in soft and subtle tones, which is in direct contrast with the way black women are often portrayed, rooted in the stereotype that they always have to be strong. The core message in her work is to represent black women growing and existing as young people who are experiencing life in the world. For Renike, art is an avenue to record her personal journey through life. It is her way of creating a relatable and safe environment where black women with shared experiences are their full selves, whoever that might be. She says that one of the greatest compliments she has ever received is hearing women say that her art creates a safe space for them.

    Renike has a Bachelors Degree in Visual Arts (Graphic Design) from The University of Lagos, Nigeria. She has been featured on platforms like Vogue, CNN Africa, Culture Custodian, Okay Africa, The Guardian, and others. Renike has worked with brands like Dark & Lovely, Hulu, Routledge, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, Wilson’s Juice Co and Olori Cosmetics, amongst others. She was recognised as one of the honourees on Leading Ladies Africa’s 100 Most Inspiring Women in Nigeria in 2021 and was nominated for The Future Awards Africa Prize for Art and Literature in 2022. She won the Lord's Achievers - Special Recognition Award: A Lady Making Impact Through Art in 2022.

Poetry

INDEX OF POETS + WORKS

Ann Fisher The Line Between

Daisy Bassen Naturally

Frank William Finney Up on the Roof in Smoke

James Seaton “Paradox”

Januario Marginalia

Jesse Raymundo “Devotion”

Kat L’Esperance-Stokes Backseat Driving

L. Ward Abel Anxious Sky

Sukhvir Kaur “giants”

Thomas Mixen Worldwide Renaissance

Valley C. Shaia divisible by two

echoes

  • Jessie Raymundo teaches high school literature and composition at PAREF Southridge School. He is a graduate student in the Department of Literature at De La Salle University-Manila. His poetry has appeared in various publications in print and online. He lives in a small city in the Philippines with his cats.

 

Charcoaled in the mouth of March—

even the flowers, their fingers bruising

 

over these prayers & twisters we have

no names for. Around us the rust remains

 

unrepentant as we trace the tremors of thirst,

the silence of supper. My tongue

 

twists this tale into the shape

of your sins. I’m thinking of rain,

 

whether the window we’ve whittled down

to devotion will drown or smolder.

 

I’m pressing an ear against your heart—

the misfired words I take upon my tongue.

 

 

Light, you’ve carved me with sorrow.

I’m afraid I don’t know what to make of this

fractured glare, this face full of sampaguitas. 

Some gardens frighten me. In their mouths,

I imagine, eyes wait. Although it’s not

in your nature to be baleful, you’d batter

bodies if it meant making this world

 

more visible. How to tell delirium from atrium,

recovery from wreckage? There's no way

to detach this morning from its dawn.

Take me to the evening that outlives all

 

other evenings, that unseals hectares of bruise

blue with blasted petals to touch on.

Take me to the dusk that drags

 

the moon across the sea,

my heart leavening & leaving its hunger.

Devotion



Atrium

by, Jessie Raymundo

The shovel still ridicules

the mud for the imprints

in its bosom

as though the tip of its

head did not plunge

into the wet foundation.

The tiger still throws

a ferocious tantrum at

the antelope,

who protests to retain

his flesh, who shouts to

his brother

when danger awakens

from its sleep searching

for breakfast.

The stone still complains

of the diamond’s raw

brilliance,

as if equality is owed

to him, as if he didn’t bear

the Earth for his shine.

  • James Seaton is a poet, spoken word artist, and author based in Brooklyn, NY. He has performed pieces about topics ranging from race to faith and identity at venues like the 2015 NAACP ACT-SO national poetry competition, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and BRIC Brooklyn. He published his debut poetry book, “Light Pollution: a collection of poems,” in February 2022.

Paradox

...he asks me

why it is my furrowed brows crease my forehead

 

and i say with a smile behind my lips

 

darling,

i have known women who drink storms for morning tea

and

sup on the whirlwind of cyclones

whose voices vibrate thunder

(the same that keeps you up at night)

whose hands are monsoons

that weave over barren land to paint full bloom

 

and

their spines are not like yours or mine

(grown too comfortable in life)

their spines--resurrected from ancient bleeding earth

now a composed terrain

overwhelming fortresses

 

and all the while

the sun sleeps at her feet

 

my land

 

many times before

i have been told that i am not pretty enough

 

perhaps my sun-kissed skin

is a shade of melanin too threatening

 

or maybe it is that mother nature’s grass

grows wild on my legs

 

...it might be that the temples erected upon my chest

are not great enough for your hands

 

but still

they try to dig their flags into the flat of my belly

as a show of strength:

that they were able to weaken my knees

and force me to collapse at the feet of conquest

 

...but no flags stand on my shores

because this land is not for sale

  • Sukhvir is a J.D. turned stay at home mum to a vivacious toddler by day and an aspiring writer, scribbling away under fluorescent lighting by night. She weaves elements of her Punjabi heritage, faith, childhood, and love stories into her poems. You can find some of her pieces published in the Santa Clara Review, Poets Choice, Treehouse Literary Review, Anti-Langorous Project, and Prevention at the Intersections.

giants

  • L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals (Rattle, Versal, The Reader, Worcester Review, Main Street Rag, others), including a recent nomination for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and he is the author of three full collections and ten chapbooks of poetry. His latest collection, Green Shoulders: New and Selected Poems 2003–2023 (Silver Bow) will be released this year. Abel resides in rural Georgia.

Roiled, the season of hurricanes

reclines into a soft chair of gulf

water and onto the great green wet

tops of pine that seek that ocean

all along the coastal plain.

It lulls. We are lulled to repose

within our homes, we mimic small

cliffside dragons, winged as if ready.

But we escape notice until the ground

gives way. Still we burn

all the way down.

Such are these eroded clay fingers—

clawing to make canyons of our

falling earth. Sky grows anxious.

The song begins. No one knows

the words except

birds.

 

I will finish this thought—

a reflection of the western gloam

wanes, resists,

flames-out over tides

as tables predict their highest

daily brim.

I grasp that all this will happen

even after I’ve died 

which challenges

the concept

of gone.

Anxious Sky



I want to finish this thought

by, L. Ward Abel

your protagonist sells her debut novel after going to auction

Envying a fictional character is real,

I’m certain of it, though I haven’t divined

How I will prove it to anyone. Perhaps

PET scan imaging dappled yolk-bright,

Vermeer’s weld, dyer’s mignonette the yellow

That all other yellows are judged against,

Just as bright, neurons ravenous

Coveting that which is most distant,

The imagination of the imagined,

An unruly sentience. Only in a novel

Could I write a grant captivating enough

To obtain adequate funding and my name

Would need to be Kit Marlowe.

Are you jealous? That scans madder.

Naturally

  • Daisy Bassen is a poet and community child psychiatrist who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Salamander, McSweeney’s, Smartish Pace, Crab Creek Review, Little Patuxent Review, New York Quarterly, and [PANK] among other journals. She was the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest, the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Erskine J Poetry Prize. She was nominated for the 2019, 2021, and 2022 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in New York, she lives in Rhode Island with her family. Her fiction is represented by Jennifer Lyons of Jennifer Lyons Agency.

    Website: daisybassen.com

    Twitter: @dgbassen (for now, anyway!)

    FB: @Dgbassenauthor

  • JL Maikaho is an emerging Nigerian poet, storyteller and essayist. Her works explore diverse themes from women's rights, ethno-religious conflict and climate change; to romance, mysticism and surrealism. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Brittle Paper, Nnoko Stories, Kalahari Review and elsewhere. A SprinNG fellow (2022 cohort), she's also a scholarship recipient of the SprinNG Advancement Fellowship, has been longlisted for the Bill Ward Prize for emerging authors and shortlisted for the MAFEELDA Essay contest. JL writes from Gombe, Nigeria and tweets @JLMaikaho.

Scaffolds of reason

but a poor spirit can break bones

and you land into dark clouds

into violent floods.

Who granted eagles immunity

soaring above gloom and dejection

It means they miss out on the healing rain.

See, the vultures too are sign

that death can replenish life

that nocturnals do not abhore the sun

but revere its light from a respectable distance.

It is a thing of majesty

how they spread their wings

in a way that says

a dark knight doesn't fear flight

no matter how dark the night.

Yet in these wings, a certain kind of

darkness dizzies the heart

like aloneness seeking salvation in a desert

like an oasis complaining about drought

because she heard about the lucky bamboo

whose roots were not annointed to search

excruciatingly for their sustenance.

In her defence

why must the date palm evolve to be content

with never being able to quench her thirst

always tethering on starving to death

her rigid bones often the only

succour for many a voyager

lost in the valleys of traumatic stress

taking her strength in exchange for their

yoke and this is no joke

now riddle me this:

what would be born if nothing had died?

Riddle Me This

  • Januário Esteves was born in Coruche and was raised near Costa da Caparica, Portugal. He graduated in electromechanical installations, uses the pseudonym Januanto and writes poetry since very young. In 1987 he published poems in the Jornal de Letras, and participated over the years in some collective publications.

Charles Baudelaire

Despite Paris experiencing the industrial revolution

in suffocating soot and exploitation of

children and workers to the delight of

bourgeois moral decay sailed like

a sailboat loaded with plague that brought to

the alleys a nauseating smell under a sky

metallic that corrupted fearful souls

and installs the tedium and dismay of an anguish

virus that can only be corrected through

artificial paradises in the city that is hell

seeks in the drunkenness of hashish the cloak

diaphanous reality that makes you see better the

things of redeemed errors and insults are not

avenged the just mighty and subtle opium

relax you maliciously in sweet voluptuousness

of the spleen and in the sickly flowers of evil.

Marginalia

Miguel Torga

It was in the earth that he felt good digging

telluric roots of the past, cold anchorite

and spartan persisting in the crags of memory

entangled in doubt, lying on the boulders

alvitrava greek odes close to the damp floor

among the oaks in ascetic rigor

from the hard earth that marks you for life

as the heather shines on the granites

emerges in singing the pain that moves him

look upon the afflicted as a pious physician

peacefully revolted by the hungry violence

of virtue of tenderness of beauty, always shouting

in the revealing light of the warmth of intimacy

between the terror and the crying that gags him

in the river of lamentations that makes him uproar

retaining faith in immediate and earthly things.

Marginalia


by, Januario

  • Ann Fisher lives and writes at the base of the Green Mountains in Vermont. She is Fiction Co-Editor of Mud Season Review. Her most recent work appears in Samjoko Magazine; you can find her poetry and prose in About Place Journal, Heartwood Literary Magazine, and The Sonder Review, among others.

underneath the porch roof

I’m cool and safe,

screens protecting me

from all manner of flying irritants

thick line of impenetrable shade

incremental, shrinking

soon, the long eaves will succumb

to the sun’s trajectory

expose the porch

to blazing heat of afternoon

I’ll close the blinds

cut off the view with hope

of keeping cool

isn’t that the problem though-

some of us have porches

and hope

bathed in easy shade

whispers of billowing leaves

only the slightest of interruptions

while others stand

bare-backed in the sun

leaving this long line drawn

in shadowed demarcation

we gather

food on our plates

laughter &

the taste of the sea

on our tongues

a tide of talk

passing with the róse

the rise of friendship

white sailed, snapping

once strangers waving

from distant boats

now shored together

in this island kitchen

awaiting a bubbling

blueberry buckle

The Line Between



Around the Pine-Planked Table

by, Ann Fisher

  • Kat L’Esperance-Stokes was born in Santa Monica during a lightning storm. After, she fell in love with folklore, horror, and the concept of home. Now you could find her in Vermont for school or on Instagram (@katlstokes) and twitter (@katsurless).

 

The baby boy in the back seat wouldn’t remember this when he’s older you think (mainly because you had a hard time gathering the pieces from back then)(nevermind counting the miles since the first road trip into the humid swamp of your paternal). You hadn’t met your father yet. It would be a month before you do (and a year before he’s all you and the baby boy in the backseat now know and now run from) (yet he’s who the baby boy in the backseat and you keep finding). (it’s always a gut punch). Still it's our father that we find in canned soup and (trimmed or unkept) beards. We both run (you run from him (not your father or the baby boy but a man who doesn’t resemble either) even though you promised you wouldn’t. Not this time, this time I'm staying you had sworn.). But this was before (under the streetlight absent night and taking a breath to swallow the stars that have been dying since) mom stopped in Louisiana to stretch her legs. (remember you’re getting ahead of yourself, back to the backseat). Back to the baby boy in the backseat that will make you a mother by needing a mother (you’re a bare-chested child but he needs a mother more than you need anything) but right now your mother is in the driving seat pulling off into a motel parking lot. Your baby boy brother wouldn't remember this but there was fireflies. He called them stars and our mother let him. She wasn't one for correcting. Still isn’t.

Backseat Driving

  • Thomas Mixon has fiction and poetry in MAYDAY, Pinhole Poetry, Paragraph Planet, and elsewhere.

They’re blowing leaves next door

onto staked-out tarps. In Germany

they’re burning lignite straight

through winter’s longer nights.

In southern Pakistan the bellowing

from a stray cat continues past

the forty day temptation mark,

as water takes it time to leave.

It’s darker than it should be

in Dakar, the sudden wind and sand

puncturing cars. Inside our hearts

the valves conceive the rhythm

to this worldwide renaissance.

It’s a dirty beat. In London

climate activists throw nosh

at the Virgin of the Rocks.

There’s a metaphorical beast

in the cave, whose growling

can’t be heard above the rush

of coarser amplitudes, of blood.

Worldwide Renaissance

  • Valley C. Shaia is a graduate of JMU, VCU, and Lesley U with an MFA in Creative Writing for Young People. Additionally, she is a member of Tin House YA '22 and a scholarship recipient of the Highlights Foundation. When she's not writing her Lebanese-American fantasy novel, she chugs coffee at indie RI bookstores.

i am divisible by two,

he says,

Sexuality & Psyche.

& he does not feel the need to

pursue either of my realities

any longer.

in the pages of his story,

i am a chapter.

perhaps not even that, perhaps

hardly worth a mention.

he included me for the sole purpose of

driving his plot forward,

as he does with everyone else.

i thought i was a bookmark.

i think i am wrong.

i like to imagine he craves a single detail that,

in the end,

i do not afford him.

he has seen all parts of me besides

Anger & Grief.

tomorrow, he will see one.

in his mind, he will see the other.

him, aloud: i don’t think i should sleep here tonight.

me, within: i will not cry in arizona.

over & over, my mantra,

i repeat it as

aftershocks of his declaration

seize my brain, as the

hours stretch past like

putty,

clinging to the corners of that

terra-cotta bedroom.

he details in uncertain ambiguities how

he has decided

i am binary

& he is no longer willing to make the

proper calculations this

relationship requires.

meanwhile, i am making my own calculations:

the travel i endured,

the invisible expenses of the past

five months which will

never receive their

cash-in value.

him, aloud: i am an artist. i do not have the time.

me, within: am i not? do i not?

so much has changed,

he claims,

inside the six weeks where we

labeled our progressing love story.

it seems he doesn’t remember how

he slipped into

my messages &

made me think i was

falling for the Nice Guy.

months of casual inquiry turned

personal investment,

where the question of whether or not we

were on the same page

went from theorem to

proof,

where he said,

he was doomed the moment he saw me.

where he said,

he wanted me in arizona.

him, 10/19: i’ll be honest.

him, 01/19: i don’t lie.

me, now: you won’t. you do.

perhaps, i am retroactively collecting what

i am now owed through the

myriad of gifts that appeared in the mail.

the shirt on my birthday.

the sunday package of my favorite cookies.

on christmas when

i earned

an imported bottle of scotch with a love letter & an

engraving which sent me to my knees for him

for the first time.

he thinks, he is the one who is owed.

he thinks, he is sacrificing his story.

so

he summons me across the country to

claim his consolation prize, to

divide me by

two

in his king-sized bed.

& as he splays me across the sheets &

doesn’t

tell me he missed me,

i intrinsically know he is

laying me bare in

more ways than one.

he has reached a choice in his manuscript.

he is an artist & this is what

his scene detailing me calls for.

this is the Perfect Break.

echoes creep,

decomposing fruit hidden

under floorboards.

ply up wood &

find the collection of

sundries still burdened,

weighing down the

cottage of me.

filth of ages.

twentyeight ages.

twentyeight years,

tucked away within

pine boxes.

here!

come see ribbons

buried,

circus whips

my mother

ringmaster

used to

tame.

here!

feel cotton

money,

picked by

me &

spun for my

sisters.

here!

heirlooms of

partners past.

rotting rose petals &

shards of hearts.

still draw blood.

watch:

more shed off.

glass needle

doghair.

echoes, echoes

through this house.

no witching hour.

free to come &

play.

some trifle more than others,

bursting out of

hidey-holes &

dancing

round the room.

be stronger,

i whisper.

be braver.

but there are days with no

exorcism, &

they hiss,

you are not enough.

rendered to my

knees

from all the

noise.

newly broken

among rabble.

time dawns when

floorboards will not

cage.

divisible by two



echoes

by, Valley C. Shaia

  • Frank William Finney is a retired university lecturer from Massachusetts who taught literature at Thammasat University in Thailand for 25 years. His work has appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies including The Bluebird Word, Drawn to the Light Press, Pocket Fiction, and Portrait of New England. His chapbook The Folding of the Wings was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022.

Kat used to crawl out the window

to the nearest roof

to catch rays

in her swimsuit and shades.

Her plank was the bridge

that saved our lives

when the three-storey fryer

where we lived caught fire.

Back on the ground

the talk went round:

A crone on the first floor

smoked in bed.

Her last cigar,

the coroner said.

Up on the Roof in Smoke

Next
Next

NON-FICTION