Friday, January 16, 2026: Four paintings by Farida Samer Khan

Artist’s Note: This polyptych “Facets of the Feminine”; by Farida SamerKhan is an exploration of the multifaceted nature of femininity. Through the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements – a woman’s face, a panther, a jug, and a rose – I aim to reveal the complex, often contradictory aspects of the female experience.

The woman’s face represents the external self, while the panther embodies the untamed, instinctual forces that lie beneath the surface. The vase symbolizes containment and nurturing, whereas the rose represents beauty, vulnerability, and the cyclical nature of life.

Together, these panels form a nuanced portrait of womanhood, one that acknowledges the tensions between restraint and liberation, civility and wildness, and beauty and decay. By presenting these contradictions in a single, cohesive work, I invite the viewer to contemplate the rich, multifaceted nature of femininity.

Face

Panthere

Rose

Vase

Farida Samer Khan is a Canadian artist based in Toronto. The artist’s works are recognized by the strong representation of her artistic principles: colour theory and composition, and also by her ethnic and feminine identity. Her paintings were displayed in Arto Galleria, Gallea Art Gellery, Arts Etobicoke, Propeller Art Gallery and at many ethnic festivals and art exhibitions. Her artworks are in private collections in Toronto, Maple, Newmarket, Ottawa - Ontario; Montreal, Quebec; New York, NY, and Washington DC.

Friday, January 9, 2026: A Tribute to Renee Nicole Good: Poet, Mother, and Pacifist

 

Icy Graveyard Blues   

          for Renee Nicole Good

It’s cold in Minnesota

They target practice face

It’s cold in Minnesota

ICE digs another grave

It’s cold across America

Ask any glove or coat

It’s cold in Minnesota

As only George Floyd knows.

© Pam Ward

LA native, UCLA graduate, California Arts Council Literary Fellow and Pushcart Poetry nominee, Pam was nominated as a 2024 “Trailblazing Poet” from LA Cultural Affairs. Her poetry book, Between Good Men & No Man At All, was released on World Stage Press and she’s penned essays and two novels Want Some Get Some, and Bad Girls Burn Slow, Kensington and is currently working on Banter, her second poetry anthology as well as a third novel, I’ll Get You Pretty, featuring her family’s role in the Black Dahlia Murder.

******

Holding Strong

She wrote with wings

In pauses between courage,

Turning the ordinary pain

of living into what could 

be held strongly,

The world is a fragile voice 

When it tells the truth,

Now her poems walk above

Into the stars of the night

In the sunshine of day

On earth every word survives

In spirit and please listen 

To the earths calm tides

Where an angel still glides.

© JoyAnne O'Donnell 

JoyAnne O'Donnell is an author of five poetry books on Goodreads and Amazon.Writes for good causes. Her latest poems are in The Galway Review and others.

******

Fermata

Renée married men twice, then a woman.

Might have called herself lesbian, or pansexual,

but for now, I’m claiming her as a Bi Poet.

Not that it mattered when bullets mashed

that beautiful brain: an end to words.

Sustained notes of details: car-door pocket

overflowing with stuffed animals. Her wife

Rebecca sobbing on the snow with the dog,

screaming for the doctor that ICE wouldn’t let

near her. Their move to Canada when Trump

was first elected, Rebecca crying that she

made Renée come back, it was her fault.

The swagger of her killer striding to the SUV

to leave the scene. The Air Force service

of the orphaned six-year-old’s dead father.

Slanders by puppy-killer and President.

Eulogies from Renée’;s mother, then her father,

dictated to reporters on the phone.

Her two older children’s voices are absent

from middle school and high school.

Rebecca doesn’t answer her cell.

Renée’s guitars strings are untouched.

© Jan Steckel

Ghosts and Oceans is Steckel’s latest book. Her The Horizontal Poet won a Lambda Literary Award. Her books Like Flesh Covers Bone, Mixing Tracks, and The Underwater Hospital also won awards.

******

Ta Da

Dedicated to Nicole Good

let's see 

what else?

emigrate 

to the moon 

© Barbara Anna Gaiardoni

Barbara Anna Gaiardoni, Italian author and pedagogist, is widely published in Japanese-style poetry. A Basho winner and Touchstone nominee, she draws inspiration from nature. Motto: "I can, I must, I want."

******

A Very Quick Reaction

 

Families are being separated. We all pay more for less. Different but equal groups are being forced to hate each other and blame each other. People are being trashed and persecuted for being who they are. Medicine and science are being destroyed. Nations are being violated and exploited. People are being insulted. An innocent woman, a poet, is killed by agents of fascism. What atrocity will it take for the takedown to happen? I know it goes against karma but why can't the perpetrator of all this horror meet his deserved punishment? I refuse to say his name. He tyrannizes us by daily acts of cruel stupidity that we have to notice so that we are supposed to say his name. May he drown in a lake of his own offal.May rationality and kindness triumph over stupidity and cruelty.

 

© Lynne Bronstein

Lynne Bronstein is the author of Nasty Girls (Four Feathers Press) and four other books of poetry.

******

let the phoenix of hope rise again

we live in a country where

you can be shot in the face for

trying to protect your neighbors,

unarmed and driving away;

they can shoot you in the face

in front of your spouse

leaving your child without his mother—

nicole good, you deserved

so much better;

to write more poems and discover

more beauty in this tragic nightmare

of a world we live in because

there is still magic and there are still miracles—

but right now it is hard to hear the

voice of dreams,

so we must hold onto the ashes

of hope and watch until she becomes

a phoenix blazing through every nightmare again.

© linda m. crate

Linda M. Crate (she/her) is a Pennsylvanian writer. She has seventeen published chapbooks the latest being: only the future knows (Alien Buddha Press, November 2025).

******

Elegy to a Poet

Your voice. Silenced by a bullet

from the gun of a masked murderer.

You heart. Stopped by a bullet

from the gun of a masked murder.

Your love. Whisked away by a bullet

from the gun of a masked murderer.

The murderer praised by those supposed

to keep you safe.

In this upside-down world

you, poet, are smeared by lies.

You, mothers, are to be cut down.

You, lovers, to be reduced

to dry corn husks.

Wielding love and words

as dangerous weapons

will get you executed,

light snuffed out by the illiterate

in these times of cruelty and death.

© Rose Mary Boehm 

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her work has been widely published mostly by US poetry journals. A new full-length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

Monday, December 1, 2025: Al-Khemia Poetica Pushcart Prize Nominees

 

This year’s Al-Khemia Poetica Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Press Nominees are:

Lorraine Caputo "An Andean Dawn" (poem)

Ann Huang’s"Aftermath" (poem)

Sarah Maclay’s "What the Trees Said" (poem)

Genie Nakano’s  "Once and a While" (poem) 

Jan Steckel’s  "Kol Nidre"(poem) 

Terry Wolverton’s "The moon showed up at my house this afternoon" (poem)

Good luck to you all, and congratulations!:)

Friday, October 31, 2025: Sarah Maclay's "What the Trees Said"

 What the Trees Said

(Melisande, Before He Sees Her, Weeping, by the Stream)

Sometimes speaking is not the right answer.

Too many deaths, big ones. And everyone rushing to claim

some scrap, to pull the dead over themselves to wear like a jacket

or sweater or robe—to claim them. How can they talk so fast?

Like people expect it.

How can they talk so soon?

Why not just feel it? For a long time. How can they talk?

No, sometimes speaking is not the right answer.

Still, there’s music. Crawling, curling, out of its iron crisscross cage

in the cocktail evening, crossing the open veranda and spilling

into the verdance of the late-light lawn and the swollen land-locked lakes

and the rush of trees at the base of the hill.

And that sound you hear is not a piano, no, but a sequence of diamonds—

hitting water, returning

from solid to original form

so quickly the notes

in runnels and spray

dissolve into longing and wavering

traces of shadow and reflected boughs—all reverberation

and swaying fingers and torsos

solemnly waltzing, immense

in needle-fetished, loosely armored

and gigantic limbs, this band of gathered

spruce grown rainward into spiraling,

many-handed tower-

beings changing the hand of time and the shape

of the air they move in, above the viridian pool

and the fountain spraying its jewels and the lily

surface of the statuary, weirdly still and dwarfed

below the choir of swaying trees

nodding and bowing and reaching as if this necessary wind

were only the long-expected accomplice—

the long-awaited accompanist—

heaven principle arriving to reveal form

as verb, which is their message:

Listen to the bruised heart

of your mother, whimpering in the distance.

Listen to your own.

Put down the crown. If there ever was a crown.

Place it in the water. Let the tiara turn back into tear

and let the glass re-liquefy, the rhinestones river themselves

into wavery mirror; the held and fastened facets of cut glass

spew into the air like the laughter of a chandelier

turned upside down, in circling arcs of wet light.

Let it all disappear.

Learn this word: Relinquish.

Your hair will feel like water. You’ll feel water

on your cheek.

Your waterhair a waterfall, anything you try to crystallize

will liquefy and fall just as these notes

coming through the windows of the music room, in the distance,

not that far from here, winding through the air beyond the Tudor harlequin patterns

of the panes that might have caged them, growing cool as day gives in to night

and as the ice windows melt into twilight

melting in twilight

and trees with blue leaves—

and as the tourmaline of evening deepens into a liquid obsidian

reflecting night, the nearly still surface will finally ripple

and the reflected arms and faces of the stone and stationary naiads

waking to the dark

will undulate

and move—

and as a cool allure of lunar pallor shivers over the pale pools

reflecting night:

If water can ripple,

gravity can ripple;

time can ripple

and rush.

She wanted to love.

She wanted to die.

She wanted to not remember.

She wanted to dip her hand in the holy fever.

© Sarah Maclay

Sarah Maclay’s newest releases are a chapbook, The H.D. Sequence—A Concordance ( Walton Well Press, 2024) and Nightfall Marginalia (What Books Press), a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Poetry, her fifth full-length collection. Her writing, supported by a Yaddo residency and a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship, awarded the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Special Mention, has appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Best American Erotic Poems, Poetry International, where she was Book Review Editor for a decade, and elsewhere. She’s the producer/host of Poetry.LA’s “The Poetry of Night.” Website: https://www.sarahmaclay.com/