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The moon is a vacancy sign, and I want to pull in for a rest. But the parking lot is full of stars, their headlights blinking through the dust my tires kick up. No room, no room. I must drive to escape the darkness, a mouth ready to swallow me whole from this lonely road. I fade into the crumpled map in my hand. No Google Maps police directing traffic on my phone, this is a moment of silence. Forced to proceed, guided by the eyelids of shadows. Slits of moon gaze. Night eats the gas, and I hope to make it before dawn. Some food left. Why don’t I plan? Nut bars, a half thermos of coffee, sliced apples. A short trip, they said. But the road stretches like a rubber band, ready to snap. The farther I drive, the farther away I feel. In the woods along the road, eyeshine follows me into a mist. And then a thick fog. A hazy amber halo shines through the fog. A gas station. I pull in for gas, coffee, and something to quell the queasiness in my gut. Maybe hunger, maybe anxiety. I’ll know which in a few minutes. The counter guy asks how much gas. His skin is sallow, his face gaunt under the fluorescent lights, his eyes shining emerald green. I think zombies, and my stomach does a backflip. Definitely anxiety. Driving at night is another one of my terrible ideas. Just as I’m hopeless at planning, I’m hopeless at not listening to the warning bells vibrating this saggy old body. I pay for a jumbo-size coffee, some candy bars, and gas. This road will either boomerang me back home or snap me to my destination. The fog finally lifts like a balloon rising. The road darkens into the shadows of trees lurching toward me like zombies, but do zombies’ eyes reflect headlights? I shake off the image of the man at the gas station. I wouldn’t be here were it not for my grandmother passing, and her memorial service is on Sunday. I’m not used to traveling alone, especially at night. Cataracts. Up ahead I see someone walking alongside the road. A young girl? Out here alone at night? “Are you OK? Do you need a ride?” I notice that she’s shivering in a red windbreaker. Her car has broken down. I don’t recall seeing one. Maybe the fog swallowed it. “I could use a ride to my grandmother’s.” “You too? Hop in.” I brush the candy wrappers off the passenger seat. In the washed-out glow of the overhead light, her thin, pale face looks barely held together, a vanilla cake with the top layer sliding off. Something about her is familiar. I don’t know what. My stomach somersaults. “Wait a sec,” she looks down, fishes in her pocket. I raise my hands in surrender. “Take whatever you want, just don’t hurt me.” She looks up, her feral eyes glowing green. And morphs into the gas station counter guy. “You forgot your change.” He puts a quarter and two dimes on the dashboard. The counter guy opens the car door, looks back at me. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to pick up strangers?” His grin is toothy, lupine. “Drop by on your way back. Coffee is on me.” The door slams shut. In my rearview mirror, I watch a wolf lope into the fog. Author Nolcha Fox’s Note: This collaborative flash fiction piece started out as Zuihitsu, a form Barbara and I wanted to explore. I don't know if we succeeded at the form, but we had lots of fun, and came up with a story that surprised us both. We alternated writing paragraphs (excluding dialogue immediately following the paragraph, which we considered an extension of that paragraph) I started and ended the piece. Nolcha’s poems have been curated in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Alien Buddha Zine, Medusa’s Kitchen, and others. Her poetry books are available on Amazon and Dancing Girl Press. Nominee for 2023 Best of The Net. Editor for Open Arts Forum. Accidental interviewer/reviewer. Faker of fake news. Barbara’s work appears in online and print literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, and her poetry has won awards and recognition. Her debut poetry collection, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir (EIF (Experiments in Fiction), which is about her relationship with her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, is a best seller on Amazon. Also, on Spillwords, Barbara was voted Author of the Month of October 2021, nominated Author of the Year for 2021, and recognized as a Spillwords Socialite of the Year in 2021. Barbara is now Editor for MasticadoresUSA. She enjoys bringing writers together and has been sponsoring open mics and readings on Zoom during the pandemic.

CW: Abuse The chili was burning. She had set the burner too hot and hadn’t noticed. Her own mother would have called her a terrible cook. Took one to know one, but that was a weak counter. But the chili was burning, and one of her kids was screaming at the other kid. All the while, a third kid was stuck on her hip, and whenever she tried to set him down, he screamed. She had often wondered to herself if that was a sign of separation anxiety. But certainly, being only three, he hadn’t had time to develop a mental illness. The chili was burning and when she finally took it off the stove, she did it with one hand and the hot pot knocked against her forearm. A searing, shooting pain jumped through her arm, but she readjusted and walked the pot to the table before realizing that she had forgotten those silly little cork circles that would keep the lacquer from melting off her cheap wooden table. She set the pot back on the stove. The chili started to bubble again. The burn on her arm hurt, so she walked over to the faucet, flipped on the cold water and ran her singed arm underneath it. Relief was immediate, but it would smart for the next week or so. This wasn’t the first time she had burned herself. No, that was when her mother saw her standing too close to the stove, holding her palm above a heated coil for warmth. Her mother smacked her palm down into it, leaving insistent, painful welts that ran circular like a seashell for weeks. She was only eight. She shut off the water and the memory went too. The chili was burning so she picked it up off the stove and moved to the table before realizing she still didn’t have those damn cork circles. She put the chili back down when Luke came into the room. He was all snot and teary eyes. “Mom, Jenny pushed me,” the seven-year-old said. “And changed the channel to what she wanted to watch.” She yelled from the kitchen into the living room, “Jenny! I need you to come out here.” Jenny came running and looked at her mom with doe eyes, innocent and free from wrongdoing, an eleven-year-old who thought she knew how to work the system. “What’s up, Mom?” “Did you push your brother?” “No.” She shook her head slowly as if to add gravitas. The mother sighed and pushed her hair back with one hand. “Just go back in there and behave for a second so I can set the table.” The chili was burning again, and she almost picked up the chili before stopping and grabbing the table protectors and throwing one of them onto the table. She grabbed the chili, and carefully balancing it with one hand, set it down on the table. It was a little burnt around the sides, but that didn’t matter. It was a win to get it on the table. She’d take that. She looked for her wooden spoon that she had gotten at Goodwill. A dollar fifty for something that usually was close to six bucks. She loved a good bargain although sometimes she felt a little silly getting excited over four dollars and some change saved. She found the spoon where she’d left it, although she didn’t remember putting it in the dish cabinet. She gave the pot a stir, leaving the spoon sticking out because she couldn’t be bothered to find a new spot for the spoon. James fussed to be let down, and so she did. He toddled into the living room. It would only be a matter of time before he forgot that he wanted down in the first place and began to cry. There was a loud smack accompanied by a hysterical, keening wail. Luke came running out again. Now, two rivers ran from his eyes and fed into the two great and more viscous rivers that ran from his nose. When he tried to speak, he blubbered, “Jenny hit me.” He carried the “e” so perfectly long that she wondered if the child might pass out from lack of new air in his lungs. “Jenny!” she yelled from the kitchen. “Come in here.” They stood side by side, the boy furiously wiped his eyes and nose on a shirtsleeve that she would have to wash later. “I didn’t mean to!” Jenny’s voice rose into an exclamation, a child’s defense that some adults never unlearned. She crouched down to their level. “I told you both to behave. Now, what happened?” The floodgates poured out of both of their mouths and like God on the forty-first day of His flood, she stopped them both with a wave of her hand. “We should never resort to hitting unless it’s necessary. Jenny, did you need to hit him?” “He was trying to take the remote, and I wanted him to stop!” “You are not answering the question I asked you.” Jenny paused for a moment and in this moment, the three-year-old, James, stumbled back into the kitchen, saw the scene playing out in front of him and high-tailed it back into the other room as if he’d been spooked by a ghost. “I’m sorry,” Jenny said. Luke sniffled a little more, wiped his sleeve on his shirt again and gave his sister a hug. “Okay,” was all Luke said. The door opened and the screen door slammed shut behind it. “Look at this big strong man!” came her husband’s voice from the living room. The two children rushed into the living room. There was joyous noise and she listened to it as she bustled the rest of the kitchen plasticware onto the table. She remembered the bread in the oven and removed that. It was slightly black on top, but she fixed that by taking a knife and scraping the top part off. John came into the kitchen and smiled at her. “Smells good, honey.” “It’s been a shit day,” she said back. “Mine too. Wanna talk about it?” “No, not really. Let’s hurry up and eat, I’ve got class in an hour.” John spooned out the chili into a plastic bowl while she took the bread and placed it on the table. When she finished, she walked back into the living room and saw all three of them sitting on the couch together. The two siblings had probably helped the three-year-old up, Jenny and Luke’s fight already forgotten. “Come on, guys. Food’s ready.” John played the fool at the dinner table. He made silly jokes that Luke thought were incredible and made Jenny roll her eyes, but still, she smiled. The three-year-old was fussy and ate hardly anything so she tore the bread into small pieces and fed him from her hand. That, he seemed to like fine. When dinner was finished, she grabbed her notebook and World Literature anthology off the shared desk and kissed everyone goodbye, promising she would be home by midnight. After class, she was going to read and write in the campus library. John promised they would be bathed and in bed by nine, but she knew it would be closer to nine-thirty. That was okay. Before she left, John said, “I’m sorry you were having a rough day, Katelyn.” How long had it been since he had said her name? Since anyone had? She was mom or honey or you in the back. She almost broke down into tears then, but she just hugged him and soaked up his warmth before finally letting go and walking to her car. In class, they discussed Iphigenia at Aulis. While the rest of the class debated whether they felt it was right for Iphigenia to willingly go to her death, she contemplated what kind of woman allows another woman to be killed just to appease herself. And was that what it took for her name to be remembered? A tragedy? Her mother would have told her that she was being dramatic, seeing things that weren’t there. That the story wasn’t meant to be read with such a modern lens. When class finished and another Greek tragedy was assigned, another woman killed, she packed her things and walked to the library where she read the play and began to take notes, but she put her head down and slept until a librarian, a very old woman who smelled of smoke and cedar and whose face was wrinkly and kind, nudged her with a few fingers and ushered her on her way home. There, she found her husband sleeping on the couch, a book resting on his chest, laundry folded in a basket and some reality TV show playing. It was the kind of show where no one had to cook or clean or put children to bed. They did not have to balance work and play and personal relationships and dreams. They didn’t have to do anything but exist. She watched for a few minutes, chuckling a little at the antics on screen and then woke her husband and led him by hand to their bed where she dreamt of burnt chili, how sweet it tasted on her tongue, and her husband calling her by name again and again. Elijah Woodruff is a middle school ELA teacher who does it for his students but wouldn't mind being paid a little more.

What I should have said to him that night on the bridge is Don’t let go, but what I actually said is Do it and whether he would have done it anyway — full, as he was, of being seventeen and a crate of Special Red — went down into the black water with him. And for weeks the adults wept, and the teams of frogmen combed the silt as far the estuary where the river spools into the flat Atlantic, but no trace of Stu would ever reward their efforts. We hung around, the rest of us, though we avoided the bridge and the river and talking about him. We sat on the wall of the race track; we skulked in the churchyard and threw stones at the cans we balanced on gravestones. And for all our strut and disbelief, not one of us back then would have predicted Stu would show up again all of thirty years later, tangle-haired and bearded, having lost his memory in an Ashram in Rishikesh. And of course he didn’t. But now, on those occasions late at night when his sister – my wife – stares into her glass, and clinks the ice around, and asks me what I think really happened to him, I make up stories like that for her, and for me, and this is one of them. Tim Craig lives in London. A winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction, his small stories have appeared three times in the Best Microfiction anthology and in many literary journals in the US and UK. His debut collection, ‘Now You See Him,’ was published in 2022 by Ad Hoc Fiction.

Do you remember the time we were driving down Main Street in your dad's old blue Monte Carlo and "Fast Car" played on the radio? You said the song was ours. What a fucking cliché. You and I were just two punk kids from a small town covered in dust and hopelessness. We were lucky to graduate from high school after all the ditching and partying we did. But we dreamed big. Do you remember? You were waiting to hear from that record company your band sent a demo to and I was going to write a novel that would make Stephen King shit his pants. We would move to Los Angeles, buy a three story glass cube, and invite our famous neighbors over for sushi and séances. We would attend our class reunion in a blood red Mustang. That asshole quarterback who lied about me sucking his dick in the back of his Camaro would challenge us to a race and we'd smoke him. Everyone would comment on our matching black leather dresses and thigh high boots. You with your blue hair and me with my purple. Those two cheerleaders that always talked shit to you would beg for tickets to your next concert, and the principal who swore I'd never amount to much would ask me to sign his copy of my book. Keanu Reeves would be in your music videos, and would play the main character in the movie based on my book. Either way, he would be a vampire. Do you remember those days? The days before your father caught us kissing and heavy petting in your bedroom after we'd gotten into his tequila, and he told you he'd kick you out. The days before you told me you had nowhere else to go and you'd have to live by his rules. The days before your father called my parents and told them I was a "pinchi bruja," and they forced me to go to confession every week for a month. The days before I stopped dying my hair and started working the register at the supermarket around the corner. The days before you moved to the next town over with some guy I knew you didn't love and took a job at the daycare your Tia Rosa owned. Do you remember? Because I wish I could forget.

My Boy, When you read this letter, I will be dead. I’m sorry, but you need to let me go. If you don’t, I might start haunting people, and with my weird sense of humour and temper combined with superpowers and invisibility… Who knows what I’m capable of. Don’t be too sad. Think of me crying with laughter, sneezing uncontrollably, throwing pistachios at people for no other reason than to amuse myself, baking, singing along to loud music, calling out because there’s a flower/bird/cat blooming/flying/walking by. I enjoyed my life, and I loved it with a passion when you came along. I’m so proud of who you’ve become. I’m so proud to call you my son. Keep going, keep laughing, keep growing. Remember to breathe, and to choose your battles. Now, here’s a list of things for you to do. Call it my last wishes if you must. 1.) Organise a party to celebrate life. Play loud music: Rock, pop, reggae, boogie for all I care, but it must be happy music, and of course, play my favourite. Serve champagne, pizza, and chocolate. There’s no need for anything else (see note). Sing, laugh, and dance. Let the music free you. Note: Funky bite-size posh food is a waste of appetite and money (Yes, that includes sushi, we’ll have to agree to disagree on this ad aeternam—sorry, that was my last bad joke, I promise). Note: If any of our annoying neighbours complain, do the finger to them in my name, let them know it’s my last goodbye. 2.) Climb a hill before dawn, a warm cup of cappuccino (see note) in your hand. Feel your body strain, and your lungs’s effort as you reach the top. Sit on the grass or a rock, facing East. Breathe in and out through the nose. Relax. Close your eyes for a moment and listen to the birds as they wake and welcome the new day to come. Open your eyes, and enjoy the sunrise, the magical hour. Note: I hope you appreciate the fact that I won’t impose an espresso on you, although anything sweet and creamy is a dessert, not a coffee. 3.) Take a weekend off. Pack a light bag, but include clothes for any kind of weather and an umbrella (see note). Go to the train/coach station and buy a ticket for somewhere you haven’t been before (see note). Go alone. Focus on the discovery; try new food, walk around, sit at a café and admire life unfolding before your eyes, stroll through a park and open your ears to the whispers of the trees. Nature is wisdom. Note: Pick a nice place; there’s no need to rush into it and get the next train/coach out of town, quite the opposite. It’s about slowing down and enjoying the moment. Carpe Diem. Note: Since you’re unlikely to pack an umbrella, at least take a raincoat. Last, but not least. This one must remain unnumbered, for I despise even digits, and ‘three’ represents the triskelion of elements, the full circle of existence. Love life as I love you. Delphine Gauthier-Georgakopoulos is a Breton writer, teacher, mother, nature and music lover, foodie, dreamer. She likes to create stories in her head. She lives in Athens, Greece.

The first time we saw it, we were rowing under Barnes Bridge, cool shadows flooding our lungs with their mossy scent. Like the black swish of an eel, only larger. Eight blades dropped in the water at our cox’s command, “Hold it up!” Our voices splintered. “OMG is that a-“ “Porpoise?” “Dolphin?” “Here?” The waves softened as our breath rasped. Training for Henley Women’s in the midst of A-level exams was slaying us. A few feet away a black curve rose and breached. Water sluiced over its sides, the pale underside of its belly. Its wide tail smacked the river. “Whale,” we breathed as one, gripping the sides of our boat. Coach’s voice crackled on the cox box. She was on the launch, back with the second eight. “Girls, why have you stopped?” She said she’d call the government hotline and ordered us to finish our piece. Sunlight pierced the clouds, whitening the surface of the river. All morning we’d been struggling with the turns and dips of the blade, each slide and recovery. All week Coach had moved us around like chess pieces, looking for the combo that delivered the ultimate speed and power. Now we pulled in time, adrenalin firing our muscles. We found our rhythm and skimmed across the water, hearts buoyed by the sight of our whale. After, we rowed back to the club, stored the shell and hauled weary legs up the steps to the Boathouse mums. As we gulped down bowls of porridge, they said there’d been another sighting near Chiswick: a baby minke, stranded from its mother. We bristled at their downcast voices and shaking heads. We’d seen it; it was magnificent. It could survive on its own. It could swim to freedom. We survived Covid, survived months in our rooms, in our pyjamas, biding our time through family meals, family movies, family everything. Released back to the wild, we’d bolted back to school, to rowing, to parties, to life. The whale would make it too. They’d see. ## At Kew Bridge, we jogged along the river and scouted through gaps in the brush until we spotted a long dark shape sloshing its way westward. Cupping our hands, we shouted, “Turn around!” The baby minke flicked its tail but kept swimming with the tide toward Richmond Lock. Away from the ocean. Flipping flood tide. We knew all about its syrupy drag. We knew all about aching muscles and ripping fatigue. We also knew all about endurance, how Coach’s voice made us dig deep, how we’d learned to carry on past our limits. We shouted some more. For a moment the whale responded to our encouragement, swimming so close to the bank we saw its blowhole gape open and shut. “Yes!” we screamed. It submerged. We texted our mothers to say we wouldn’t be home, shrugging off their concerns about dinner, schedules, A-level revision. ## On the concrete ledge by Richmond Locks, people jostled, snapped photos, speculated in bright voices. Night fell. Rescue workers in full-body waterproofs and divers laid out strips of sunshine yellow tarp. We wrapped arms around each other in the chilly haze of streetlamps as they tried hour after hour to coax the baby minke onto the inflatable. The whale thrashed arcs of phosphorescent water, lit by searchlights and strobing blue lights. People began to leave as the baby minke’s protest diminished to a mere flick of its tail. They called it at two thirty. The last time we saw our whale, we stood with fingers entwined as they switched off the emergency vehicle lights, the searchlights, the diver’s headtorches. The river was one with the night, inky black and still. Cole Beauchamp (she/her) is a copywriter by day and fiction writer by night. She was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and has stories in trampset, Janus Literary, Ellipsis Zine, Sundial, Free Flash Fiction and Lost Balloon. She lives in London with her girlfriend, has two children and an exuberant Maltipoo. You can find her on Twitter at @nomad_sw18 and on Mastodon at @nomad_sw18@zirk.us

In Philadelphia, My Love We turned the streets of Philadelphia into fighting arenas when we’d drag our issues from jazz bars and take them outside, intoxicated. Some part of that we can blame on tequila sunrises but we both know most of that was a manifestation of things we mutually decided were better left unsaid, until we said them. Out loud, unnecessarily visceral, all the more uncomfortable what with the July heat. Passion, we blamed it on an unparalleled connection. You’ve never met anyone like me, I’ve always wanted to meet someone like you so when it was good, it was good but when it was bad … In some outlying part of my mind I still find this to be true. In that part, I still wish it was you. An Ode to Sin I wish I knew sooner that vindication could never present itself to people who’ve never sinned. I wish I knew sooner that whenever our tongues performed near perfect choreographies to an endless tango in our mouths; a memory their muscles never forgot and would shortly enact in a refined fashion, that it was bliss they were emanating. There was never anything wrong with falling asleep in your arms and having your face be the first thing I see the following day, I always thought we were sacred in an unholy way.

when we lived on the moon we danced to techno wearing spacesuits caught space rocks in tiny glass jars we laughed loudly in a dark sky there were no stars we learned to moon walk on the surface scattered small seeds in the moon dust we prayed for moon life in the moonshine the small seeds saved us A word from the author: I am based in Brighton, UK, and am studying part-time on a creative writing course. I have a passion for reading and enjoy writing short fiction and poetry. My absolute favourite novel is the mind-blowing Bunny by Mona Awad.

I fell asleep with my left hand resting on my phone, and when I woke up the phone had become part of me. My hand had grown around it, had integrated the beveled sides, and where I had once had a human left hand, now I had a rectangular patch of technology with small, stubby fingers protruding from the edges. This didn’t disturb me as much as you might think. Like anybody, I spend most of my time with a phone in my hand, absorbed. The absorption was literal and fleshly now, was all, rather than attention-based. I could feel notifications instead of hearing or seeing them. Spotify would play music immediately if a line from the song so much as ran through my head. All the world’s knowledge sat at the end of my arm; a neuron flickered and I could recite the history of the English crown, or the molecular formula for dopamine. Envy flashed on the faces of strangers around me; they had to fumble in their pockets or purses, while my hand lit up or went dark whenever I blinked. All things proceeded as they would have otherwise. One day, as I walked in my neighborhood, scrolling, I chanced to look up at the sky. The unfolding cataclysm became visible to me then, through my own eyes, not through the window in my flesh, and I had just a few moments to wonder at the work of our hands before my breath stopped. Katharine Coldiron is the author of Ceremonials and Junk Film. Find her at kcoldiron.com or on Twitter @ferrifrigida.

Bathe your body with excellent fatty foods so that you burn more quickly. Go soft in the joints and hard places. Your cremation technician can only burn so many bodies in a day so be sure to light up like a candle inside the oven. Be blue flame curling up towards the heavens. Refrain from excreting too many gases on your way out. Be flammable, but not too explosive. A steady flame for your cremation technician to lose themselves in, staring at the dancing heat until it dwindles. Be smoldering coals with chunks of the person you used to be. Do not fight against the dying of the flame. Your cremation technician has other bodies to burn. Ly Faulk has loved reading and writing for as long as they could read or write. They still believe in the power of the written word to change lives.

Silverfish twist through crevices in the Escomb church walls. Alive in the shadows. Centuries of insects slick with Saxon blood. They shimmer across our laps where Dad and I sit on wooden pew benches, alone in the dark, gazing up at the narrow chancel arch. A millennium of war and religion dusts my lips, my tongue. Chokes my throat. My father rises. Pierces the pious air with his fist, meaning, let’s go for a stroll. I take his arm. He straightens. Whistles for his childhood dog, Rosie, who leaps from a steamer trunk full of Dad’s memories. Good pup, I say, bending my head through the low doorway. Outside, the sky moves like a rat snake shedding its skin. My dead sister sits on a 12th-century tombstone etched with a skull and crossbones. She kicks her bare heels against the skull’s sooted eyes. I’m waiting, she says. On the far side of the cemetery, Dad spies a young rhino stuck in the Limpopo mud. The river slugs by, watching us with one greasy eye. Hurry, Dad says in Zulu, tossing me a jeep and seven strong men. It takes us hours and rope after rope, but we free the beast. Dad beams about the rhino for his remaining three months of breath. Though godless, you were always the smart one, he says, calling me by my sister’s name. Lisa Alletson was raised in South Africa and the UK, and now lives in Canada. Her stories and poems are published in New Ohio Review, Crab Creek Review, Pithead Chapel, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Typehouse Magazine, Emerge Journal. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Best MicroFiction. Her debut chapbook, Good Mother Lizard, won the 2022 Headlight Review poetry contest. You can find her published work at www.lisaalletson.com.

Reclamation Of A Land Once Stolen Her dress flows. Silk of mulberry heavied by tears. Yampee-eyed, cracked lips in the yolk of day. She appears hollowed. She tells me its time to gather the pieces that ran astray, to wash this temple sullied by hands that grasp and bruise and take; to whip this body with redemption and sage. Her dress falls. Silk of mulberry gathered at her ankles. Hesitant eyes look upon strange land in the egg of day. She appears hopeful. I tell her its time to puzzle the pieces, caught and tamed to sanctify this body, still sacred still worthy, unchanged. I await her repossession. Only A Name Weary walls whisper a name in the haunting eye of night as cold winds rattle the remains of days, long gone, still etched across my cerebrum. I mourned my dead like a nation at war – indeed we must press on to any end, at any cost. I mourned my dead none at all for what good is it to wail and long. Still, as the night crawls, I have gained nothing at all but echoes of torment and our memories’ gall. Akleyiaha R is a twenty-one year old Trinidadian poet. She is an entrepreneur and student, and has been writing since the age of twelve. She marvels at self-expression through the art forms. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Dipity Literary Magazine and The Bibliopunk. Her debut book, 'The Skins I've Shed' is coming soon.