Misti Velvet Rainwater-Lites-

Trip

In the chill he sleeps loud
beside me in the rented bed
breathing through a mask.
He brought me an orange
and black coffee for breakfast.
His thick fingers dance deft
on my back until I fall
into dreams of terrible snow.
In San Antonio it's late May
and the sun is my mother
screaming birds from the sky.
We park on a hill and look
at the ugly skeletons,
tomorrow's unimaginative mansions.
It's agreed. We both want a garage
and a room for our books.
Sanctuary.
Our smiles are so much older
than photographs suggest.
 

No Romance

He was drunk and I was drunk and I had to convince him and he still wasn't convinced and I told him it was because I wasn't blonde and he told me that was cheap and finally we attempted a kiss but he didn't really want to kiss me he wanted to suck my tongue and it fucking hurt and I sucked his dick but it remained flaccid and I wanted to be fucked and I was fucked but only in my mind which is the worst place and the best place but in this instance it was definitely the worst place and I asked him to go down on me but I was on the rag and he wasn't down with that not in the case of me because I was not blonde and I was cheap and I was married and not to him but he spanked my ass until it was red and I screamed DADDY and later we watched a bunch of rabbits kill people and we laughed at Kris Kross and I bought him a steak and I heard him puke and he stayed with me while I tried to shit and we sat in a bar and he told me about how all the men congregated around the love of his life or one of the loves of his life (a blonde, natch) but there's more to it than hair color he likes his women well-read but sane yet really bubbly and shit and the biggest no no of all was when I got drunk and serenaded him with various crap ass songs the worst being “Hold Me Now” and asked him for a kiss and then got impatient and licked his face and years of friendship were null and void in the ugly whore face of such egregious error and I missed him I loved him for a long fucking time but now I don't and that's the end.

 

Libido Will Not Be Televised
 

Give her the nice Coca-Cola lotion cock and your stopwatch heart

for xmas for valentine's day for national clitoris day just because just because.
Chew him up concise and swallow with sparkling water to show you care.
Keep it clean and concealed inside a white pastry box.
Smile your bland share your beige at church and the Rotary Club meeting.
Safe inside the monkey house giddy screams and wild flings are allowed
but hide the cameras from curious fingers and careful with the belt
and piping hot white cream gravy can cause blisters to form
and San Francisco will never be the capital of America.
Meditation on Duluth.
A study in polite contrasts.
Shake the sweaty hand that feeds you raspberry balsamic chicken breasts
and olive oil drizzled asparagus spears.
The magic word is discretion.
A paper shredder is a wise investment.
If she leaves evidence behind
you can burn it
but you cannot
burn her.
Those kind of days
are over. 

 

 

Gillian Prew-

Essence of a Protracted Wound

Falling from the fade of a burst sun

my bride rides a drowned wind,

honeymoons on the viral grave

where the dumb mouths of the dead,

narrow with nostalgia and lavender lies,

snap in a fragrant rage.

Her liminal love with its dug arms

scoops the red roots of the tight trees

where her best wedding was throttled and laid,

and her lit loss burns in her brain

scorching the slow madhouse of her days.

              

               Poem in June

               Sunlight worn child stuck in her stain;

present and poor in the long dust

her heart beats like birds drowned

and drowned

in the womb’s breath blood.

On the shore of her mind

wind puffs a stiffening tide born

                             

and born

in the levelling loud.

Sweet with despair like a buckling bride

time blooms brief the spell of her skin,

the size of her grief a dwindling wreath

on the sore summer seed of her grave.

Gillian Prew can also be found here: http://gillianprew.com/

John Swain-

Cupbearer

The cover morn 

lifts in a light

the shape of prey

afeared to sleep

through the kill.

I am learning

to only serve you

with my life

like a cupbearer

sips for poison

with a loyalty

never questioned.

Birds strayed

beyond sky gates

like the pool

of a fountain

where I drew water

for your bathing.

Heaven to the Low

A recess suggested

behind the juniper

by a friend disguised

with occasional love

we could not fully share.

I dug at the stones

worn with age

like a man

to hide disappointment

and unfreedom

in the limited way

we must converse.

Sick and weakened

I cannot draw

the same pull

from the black thread

connecting like a beacon kite

every heaven to the low.


John Swain lives in Louisville, Kentucky. His most recent chapbook, White Vases, was published by Crisis Chronicles Press.

David McLean-

like life starts

life starts when it wants to,
a kitten in a fat stomach and death is an old man
in some abyss, his cavern full of missing
and all the needful things, a gray cloak
thrown over his cold and bony shoulders,
a serpent and its insane gratifications,
cold cheeseburgers and zombie skateboards;

but what matters sometimes is kittens who cost nothing:
cancer like a soldier is standing sentry
in front of all the skeletons and memories
where school was, before all the several empty
sexual heavens, like daytime soaps
you can watch because you have to,
because the girls' gym teacher turned into
a panther too, and not everything you need
can be scribbled on a convenient card

because life starts whenever it wants to
like a party in a graveyard,
corpses and telephones and absences:
a kitten in her mother's fat stomach
is life and time to touch it;
and words are the dead
with all our nothingness

the leaves fall

the leaves fall like nothing does,
like tiny drops of distributive justice
wherever that lives

not in the loveless mulch where worms grow fat
corporate bodies, all the absences incorporated
like the impossible possibility of courtly love
actually getting to mean anything in particular

beyond the bizarre evils of medieval history,
beyond Kurt and Courtney dissected again
on television, moving pictures
on the still scream, screening again today,
timeless suicide and tiny bits of night
in every immature body not yet milked
for the utile blood;

some leaves fall too often, just like tears do,
injustice is nothing in particular,
nothing meaning much

blue and gray

and what is happening should be shown
blue and gray, sound just supple static
saying nothing

and tiny lights are firefly nighttime
centuries away in other countries
where nothing was once;

what is happening should be blue and gray
and aesthetic, happening once
like something to love

all that summer

all that summer things must have happened
though i do not remember them
like the flesh would remember every uncharted
cancer.

and the meat in the shambles all this is
might give birth to centuries of flies
like bees born inside dead lions
just to be a fatuous jar of treacle,

a dream to gross out all the maybe
angels. and a gay man in a velvet suit
did say we made a lovely couple
in 1987, though i do not know

if he pouted altruistically
like he did in your poem when he said that;
all that summer things might
have happened, maybe they did

carving smiles

they carve smiles in modern morons
with an apparent ax;

it has been said that the rain is given
like love is.

(most things mean nothing)

Michael Mc Aloran, (III)-

shadowing-
 
solace/ empty
                chamber
night of long earth(en)

spat once
silenced/ discarded

spat once
again
till hearse of light breaking from out of winds

dis-carriage of rib
cage of sun

long drag of the without
seething of abundance

I sky/ elapse/ erased/ multitude
and the break-spun
effigy

shadowing/ passing
across
a death mask’s final caress

emptying-
 
clear cut
from the without

break of spell
click-clack go the bones of I/ eye

sickness/
         caress

skinned appeal till dreaming yet
a blackened sky

nocturne of silent/ emptily

I
and the fleshed
relapse

breath of meat/ breath of stone
none the less

bankrupt of
emptying my fuck upon frozen orchids
 

amber-
 
in rip of eye
till escapade of none

(inhale)

I unclench the filth the walls
of teeth

a streak of piss
and a blind hand of

less than ever more than yet or less or more
(unknowable)

in guillotine of stark
I reek

of rotting roses
dusted with amber deaths

till claimed-
 
black earth
smear
toothless emptiness

(abated
                tongue)

death clasp of eye silenced
and the asked of

the sound
of none

vicissitude of
I cloaked in pelt of dreaming

dead/ alive
gash of
gouged throughout

I rain/ reign/ rain in the sunlight
till claimed
morass of breathless

 

here now or/…
 
excess of winds

(to mark the hard scar’s teeth
of asking)

stillness there
butchered the roving eye

I in-laughter

my heart laps the breaking currents
still/
         spoken

here now or/ there

Craig Podmore-

 Screen

It’s not a mirror.

Nor

Is it art,

Just celluloid,

Trivial, menial diets

Of cutting life into scenes,

Edited, primed and methodically

Structured like murder.

It’s a seismic process of conjuring compositions

Irrelevant to the mundane prescriptions of life.

The screen is xenophobic. Almost, totalitarian.

Jungian dualities in the vain of stimuli –

Victims sat bandaged before the canvas of a moving image,

Their interval requires an oxygen mask and a refill of their intravenous drip.

The projection eliminates fear, perhaps develops a psychosis of delusional cruelties that become a replication of the visual act. Sexualities are awakened,

Genitals ruptured to the impossible beauty of the sirens that win the hearts of

The Proletariat boys and girls. The depression of reality diluted by the Omnipotent stars of the show. The screen is not a screen but an altar to deter

The scars of personal heresies. The dark. The spotlight. Such an abyss! The Puddle of dreams within a frame, singing, dancing, crying and aching

Until,

The cameraman turns and seeks the man with a gun in a shopping mall,

The offender will shoot and kill innocent lives and it will be recorded.

The screen decays into a scapegoat, a devil even.

Everybody will blame the television,

The screen and not the fingers that pulled the trigger.

Reality TV is the hearse of our abundant crapulence.

It is anthropologically backward,

De-evolution,

Desensitisation:

“I wanna shoot that guy down just like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.”

It’s not a mirror.

Nor

Is it art.

 

Judas Boulevard

Concrete stars of

Cancer;

Cast of runaway regrets

And a stage for

Iwo Jima vets.

Eva Braun divas

On sets of

Aryan shores of

Cyanide;

Deluding the plastic

Divide.

Cruel thespians

Of hate:

Prosy and pernicious

Towards all

Christian pornographers.

The phallic lens

That ejaculates you

To fame;

Sinner celluloid

Perpetrate guillotine

Scenes of maimed

Damsels in godlessness.

Car-crash-Dean-obscene

Through wombs of blitz and glamour –

Queen Mary of Mansfield;

Medium wide shot of her

Own ‘death show’,

Live for the Tinseltown

Hyenas.

Sappho, Dido, Monroe,

Sit in the front row

For anti-septic rapes

Of political pillage.

“Happy Birthday Mr President”

Intercut with genocide,

The atomic bomb, Dachau,

Mao, Stalin, Pearl Harbour,

Dildos, Pro-life, Jim Jones,

The Somme, the Alamo,

The emperor Nero,

Proletariat zero, the man,

The ape, Manila massacre

And the ever-increasing

Tax rates.

(Jump cuts back to bourgeois ignorance)

The hidden clip found in Oswald’s rifle:

“Happy Birthday my beautiful liars.”

Behind the red curtains

Hung on abattoir meat hooks

There lies this Judas Boulevard;

A long road of despair and

Of insolent butchery –

A studio of narcissistic fucks.

Thus Spoke Tinseltown

Star names erased on the boulevard,

Replaced by the likes of Schopenhauer, Mao, Jung, Goebbels and Kierkegaard.

The Hollywood sign torn down,

Instead, A Christian temple as great as the White House stands before beautiful Tinseltown.

Guts in animal fur, seizures of the aesthetic profoundly

Foam at the mouths as dead liberals contort in a macabre dance;

A vomiting parade, a syphilis extravagance of a burning economy.

Nothing to exist but flesh that is striving to excess,

Although, that excess is in fact their blind desire to suffer,

Such suffering becomes knowledge, such death-defining truths

As the mob of fundamental destruction film each other

For the voyeurism of the masses.

Only to find that the films become that of a ‘snuff’ movie,

The hangings, the shootings, stabbings, rapes and mass murder –

Alas! Becomes the reel of ‘real’ under the veneer of fame;

Nothing to blame but the animal and the detrimental intellect.

Wagner concertos play to the empty streets of Hollywood

As its stomach rumbles and begins to eat itself like

The Aryan philosophy that it is.
 

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal-

The Face Eaters

 

I arrive at the secret destination.

The face eaters question me.

They are cold and direct with their

queries.   They make me cry
when they grit their gold teeth.
The face eaters are always hungry.
The eat the faces of men, women,
and children.   I don’t want my face

eaten.  I like it the way it is.  I don’t
think altering my face would be a
good thing.  The face eaters sharpen
their teeth.  I feel fatigue setting in.
I start having a hallucination.
My eyes look like fruit, like candy,

and the face eaters want to eat

out my eyes.  They want to eat

the soft tissue of my eyelids.  I try
to reason with the face eaters.
I can’t find happiness.  There is too
much temptation for them.  They
want both of my eyes and ears.
They would love to eat my brain.

 

 

No Shoulders

I met a woman who had no shoulders.
Her shirt sleeves would hang limply.
She would stand awkwardly with her
head and neck bowing to the center
of her body.   Her voice was soft and
delicate.  She walked barefoot most
days.  The bottom of her feet were
dirty and rough.   She wanted to lift
her neck, but it would bow down

along with her head.  Saliva would
drip unswallowed.  She wanted to

sprout wings and fly to the sun.   She

could not find peace of mind.  She

wanted to sink to the bottom of

the sea to a non-existing lost city.
Her lips were moist with spit.  She
tried singing herself to sleep, but
she could not stand the sound of

her voice.  The words would come
out all crazy.  Her lips quivering
in search of the perfect song.

Neil Ellman-

Earth Breathe

Earth Breathe

Earth

breathe

a breath

of blue

forests

inspire

green poetry

of air

endure

in fire

your moment

in the sun.

 

Heresy

Somewhere in the stars

among the bleached-white

bones of prophecy

where planets go to die

like doddering old men

spittle on their mouths

and the gnarr

of desperate words

we seek patterns

in chaotic stones

the scattered debris

of light and dark

and finding none

discover heresy.

 

Some Other Sun

He who would be

some other sun than this

one who babbles

spring

an old man and his

mistress moon

undress

she anticipates

his words…some

things

not of anything

other than the spots

on a bubbling face

he knows

she knows

of age

blistering age

some other sun

that he would be.

Neil Ellman lives and writes in New Jersey (USA).  Fast approaching his 500th published poem, his work appears in print and online journals throughout the world, from Australia to Zimbabwe.  The latest of his eight chapbooks, Convergence and Conversion, is now available from The Knives Forks and Spoons Press.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman-

Pulling the Temple Down

 

Grapes fruit prolifically,

distended fleshy globes whose seeds

will never quicken.  Air above a desert,

tendrils curl before they fall still

aware of  bitter failure.

Listen: like fowl and fish,

no life can spring from this.

 

We rush away from each other

not waiting to ripen; the flush

of our first bloom frenetic. The inevitable end

falls so softly our minds deny the ugliness

of loss as it touches our lips

brushes by like heavy morning dew.

Cowards who choose a late stand

we tiptoe behind someone else’s mask,

solitary prisoners who follow the queen

in Cuzco’s altar carvings.

 

The god is nothing like before. Quick death

bothers him. Fall means slow extinction;

from the first he knows himself, plays to

that eternal gallery of ever-changing stars.

The wheel turns to our 15 minute fame

then Bau grows morose

and dances us to shadowed pools.

I’ve danced with someone like her.

Wrapped in shining steps, I floated

in slow water.

 

I won’t pretend acceptance;

to be dead, to be old, with everything

behind me. I sit at the feet of my past,

remember Samson, how he lost

everything in the end, and nothing.

Villainous heroes, mountains of arctic ice

monsters that calve in the mind;

love will always betray.

 

Was he really a villain, even to you?

Couldn’t it end there?

But listen –

he let go and gathered them all in,

submitted and died. If you built altars

it was before he imploded blind

on the print of your life, from the frantic cosmos

which judges submission and failure.

As you drove him through the temple

each head that turned tugged him

down and under until, defiant

he leapt to the head of the line.

Chris Guidon-

I Fell in Love When She Looked Down

I fell in love when she looked down.
Some memory snagging
and pulling her away.

You'll see me picking roses in the grave-
yards. Or
drunk, fighting in the gutters.

The soft scent
that blossoms at the bow
of the nape.

The warmth of a being
curled up in my arms.
The stars pulsing softly at the window.

Shadows hang
from the wonderment of woman
like prayer flags on the mountain-side.

My love is a sober lust,
my lust is a flickering candle
Molten wax on milky white skin.

Youth

I see you now. In the flickering bathroom mirror. You
fight for air, and cough blood like pigeon shit. Damn the flow.
The eyes losing light. Like a sun. Not exploding wholly, super-
nova,  shuddering off into nothingness. But slowly. Quietly.

Shamefully. I take a blade and cut the blue vein. Abort the child.
Her voice bleeds through the door and the blade is only a dove
again. And the years settle back, into the furrows
of my eyes. Translucent skin holding nothing in. Tears. Age. Regret.

Seagulls

We're nearly invisible to the seagulls.
As the gods once were, to the cave dwellers.

Violence is an initiation. A progression.
To touch that old world is what fascinates.

Children in their hats and gloves, one hand
in a parents' one hand making an offering,

not skywards to the distant angels, but down
to the cut-away spaces below.

Those glass eyes, searching for movement.
Waiting. Remembering.

Bas de Gids (II)-

Dom Gabrielli- (II)

night nostalgias

where in the night you roam, in the same attic where the professor impressed the scientific world with slideshows and wit, with theses and smiles, you hold the keys and you melt them on the funeral pyre where you placed yourself once, every particle of self burning, fumes of leaving

each word carried is an element of beginning but as we know you can begin anywhere. there are no rules even if good taste would be better. shades must be shades in these shadow lands where Ancient Greeks carved up the sacrificed limb of beauty, offering blood for water, muscle for hope, on the side of a sloping quarry

rules must be instinct driven. there is nothing to be applied. theory is dead. so you learn and you learn til the words become blood, become the blood which begins which begets which draws from the earth its iron redness

it was a long parchment, the same ones the professor used for his explanations, for his theorems and experiments. you tore one off. it was late. you were smoking furiously in the cellar. the wine bottles were dancing. you had a girlfriend, a poetess, you ravished her in the dank bat-infested alcoves

those were the days of the anxiety of influence, deconstruction ruled. the poetess quizzed your pen, she dismantled your bravura. you slapped wickedness on the walls. you wrote directly there, where she could not read the codes. you wore your body as a joke. you undressed her prudery, her skirts dried in the black sun

there was no punctuation, the lines were a meter long. the black pen and the black voice, the pyre, the pyre of night the pyre of your legs dancing in between the arrogant vagina's cerebral craving

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh, Paris and New York Universities. He has translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. Gabrielli has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which he recently translated into French (Les Corps Paralleles, 2012). Gabrielli travels extensively from his home in Salento, Italy, where he produces extra virgin olive oil.

Michael Mc Aloran- 'Untitled #12'

'Untitled #12'-Michael Mc Aloran

Dom Gabrielli-

morning nostalgias

unclutter this mind, pray undo it altogether. break down the walls of this person impudent enough to still hold a name which desires, which begets, which conquers , which imposters with all the signifying magnets, which invades all the particles of fire which burn, which burn my brother, which burn within, which burn without

where are your fingers, your cigarettes, your baby lips, your smiles, where are the storms which never quite carry, which never deliver, if only the dusts of deserts, the powders of my poems

only half of me is left and that half is dead, in permanent resusitation, aching hands and burning sands. what then is this middle, this inner-outer space, where the molten key, what then are you who slide between time spheres without pain

i know the way to blue. i have wandered the same breezes, the same smokes, late in the midnight diminishing, when the poems awake, the fellow pens, the distant brothers and sisters who tell us what they find

it is not so much an uncluttering. that is just the prelude. to let your voices speak. to see the memories of this windswept mind. to see you again. smiling in your wheelchair. holding my hand, shaking shaking in late spring hallway by the laurel bough and terracottas of fragrant basils

smooth is time perhaps. but only flattened, conquered, dispatched to another dimension. there is no ego without time. you can only become other in the releasing, in the becoming photograph of your person. let me be, let me go. come to me sweet memory of you, dead you, tomorrow

liberated i speak to you, a miniscule freedom, won, in battles with the demons of searchlights and goons unaware of the straighjackets they wear as uniform. i can fail tomorrow in the selfsame way. but is there a tomorrow anymore

where are you silver leaves and open boughs, where are you dead grasses and copulating lizards, black snakes and cistern geckoes, where are you turquoise tramontana blues and heavy sirocco grey-whites, where are you hands full of weeds, black nails and garlic fingers, where are you heart of goodness, song of nothing, wind of blue, wind of you, where did you go, where does this end, where are the coils of smoke which circle the sunflowers of reason, where are the open minds of rampant peapods, where is the scathing cactus irony of summer, where are you my nudity, my pain

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh, Paris and New York Universities. He has translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. Gabrielli has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which he recently translated into French (Les Corps Paralleles, 2012). Gabrielli travels extensively from his home in Salento, Italy, where he produces extra virgin olive oil.

Candi V. Auchterlonie-

Ghost Hands

I faltered at the ledge 

searching for the words
  

a map of how 

to follow or lead
  

the pages spilled over 

felt as though it was never endingly
  

white over white, the shades of it grew impossibly light, 

sheet by sheet
  

pinioned wings, angels 

in gulls
  

relativity,
  

the spilled honey milk of feathers 

of that pouring, letting down,
  

foreign, 

made even more foreign.
  

the squid ink furls like smoke 

the ought to have said words 

stinging the hived breast.
  

luggage lost, silk and pearls, 

gold bars,
  

wealth sinking under the salt  

weight of this pacific blue,
  

more,

 meaning to be 

herring bone 

sharp
  

the man under the sea 

so thoughtfully
  

writing the world above at a desk 

some wreckage, stone dead, no,
  

he wasn't,  

only dormant.
  

Some lodestone, polarity 

collecting
  

to the eyes of him 

the metal of her.
  

nightmares, ghost hands 

hers,
  

are-  

mannequin dislocation
 require re-assembly, the digits do.

 type written love poems about april  

and death's blossoms fill the velvet green air
  

above the suspension 

of air over ocean,
  

impressing pregnancies, along the hills, some turn to stillborn 

grief, amber light over ashes, and yet from this, still comes some life 

some joy..
  

They wonder what it is like 

to touch that red, watch it leave 

where it left, sticky bittersweet, the love, the longing-
  

as the invisible ink does go, from the pages 

unwrought
  

flittering freely over that ledge 

this surely is all the pulped tree ever hoped for
  

in all those rings of unrippled stillness,  

a sea to carry it out a while...

 

...Startle the idle sway
 

some verve to kick again.
  

What waking awaits this? 

Was it just a dream all along...
  

Before the ledge.
  

Not under, not over, not in nor out 

still there, we're still there, impossibly 

delicately, still.
 

Leila A. Fortier

~Psychosomatic~

I

Sensed the gray

Clouds and then tasted the rain~

The cumulus effect of your vacuous being~

Through the rapid succession of psychosomatic

Pleas~ I became deliriously asymmetrical~ Steeped

  Into a soul labyrinth of ritual~ I traversed your meridian

For some follicle of truth~ You were a master ventriloquist

Torn from a mystery~ Grazing upon your angular paradox

I fed from the pantheon of smoking indie eyes~ Estranged

By the slippage of your layered disguise~ The result

Of this synthesis only absolute nothingness

…And the point of no return…

 

~The Haunting~

I

Knew not the

Weight nor consequence

Of this haunting~ No fathoming the

Euphoric agony of this evisceration~ This

Severing of self- Inhaled into the vapor of your

Apparition~ Inducted into your holy rite of confusion~

I am but the perfected nothing of your conjurings~ The

Summoned uninvited~ The kneeling unseen of all your

Abandon imaginings~ Cast into your world of quiet

Delirium as the neglected byproduct of some

Unfathomable grace~ This sacred

Void that has become my

Prison of liberation~

Where I am but

A silent

Echo

Of

~

…Your every exhale…

~Profound Unexplained~

You

Come like a

Magnetic whisper~

The vanishing ink of an

Invisible tattoo~ A space unmarked

With punctuation~ Missives in Morse code

Stirring me into inexpressible delirium~ No

Sleeping to be had within this waking dream

Your Kafkaesque vicissitudes tinged with

Mystery~ The limpid luster of the

Profound unexplained

 

 Leila A. Fortier is a poet, artist, and photographer currently residing on the remote island of Okinawa Japan. Her unique visual poetry is the specially crafted formation of abstract designs, often accompanied by her own multi-medium forms of art, photography, and spoken performance. Much of her work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, German, Hindi and Japanese in a rapidly growing project to raise global unity and understanding through the cultural diversity of poetry and literature. A complete listing of her published works can be found at: www.leilafortier.com