Tag: perspective (Page 1 of 2)

stones stacked with ocean in background — Photo by Leonardo Iheme on Unsplash

Behind the Microphone

1 November 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Courtney Fitzgerald

The plastic was blue, the small oval picture of Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens faded, but the microphone felt so real in my hands. Real enough that when I pressed the button and the song echoed back to me—tinny, slightly delayed, and crunchy through the small speakers—I could sing along and feel like a real pop star. I believed it too. I was a pop star living out my High School Musical dreams.

I’d stand in the middle of my bedroom, door closed, the world reduced to four walls and whichever character I decided I was going to be that day. Most days, that meant Sharpay Evans—the kind of girl who had everyone wrapped around her finger. My life was nothing like that beyond those four walls. If I spoke up, I was talked over. Always competing with my four older sisters, who were louder, funnier, better.

But in my room, I was Sharpay. The center of attention. I would put on sparkly clothes and the biggest sunglasses I had and sneak my sisters’ heels so I could be taller. They would hear me now. I would no longer be just their younger sister. I’d be their equal. Nothing would tear me down, and no one could get under my skin. I’d be heard.

Then the door would barge open. One of my sisters would come rushing in with something more important, or better to take over.

“Mikaela and Brian…” she’d say into her phone, not even notice me—walking in, walking out, like I wasn’t even there in the first place.

Reality would hit and the imaginary spotlight would disappear. The music would fade, I’d shed my costume, and I’d step into my rightful role as the supporting character. I’d only be heard if I was echoing what my sisters had already said, and I’d get by unnoticed.

I don’t remember the exact day I stopped using the microphone. Maybe it was when the batteries died from overuse. Or the day my sister caught me singing with it and told me I sounded like a dying pig. Or when my mom took my sisters’ side over mine for the thousandth time. Or the day I wasn’t invited to go with my sister to the park with friends. One day it became something that I stepped around instead of picking up.

The microphone ended up on the floor, then in a bin, in a basement, forgotten.

Sans microphone, I still like to pretend I’m Sharpay—loud, unapologetic, impossible to ignore. She shows up when I’m tired of hiding, when being overlooked has started to feel permanent. When the cloak of invisibility has become too much and all I want to do is be heard.

But being a supporting character does have its own kind of strength. It’s the role I’ve learned in a house where being louder didn’t always mean being heard. It may not come with shiny clothes or the loudest voice, but it has made me the person I am today. Fighting with my sisters for attention has given me a voice that sometimes goes unnoticed but is powerful when needed. It’s a confidence that comes from knowing I found my voice through theirs.

I doubt it’s still in that basement. I don’t have to press the button to know it wouldn’t work or see it to know that the picture of Zac and Vanessa is long gone. I just know that I no longer need it. My voice carries on its own, and when I need her, Sharpay is always there. But I need her less as I grow older and closer to my sisters.

Courtney Fitzgerald is a Senior at Bridgewater State University studying English with a concentration in writing and writing studies. She plans to graduate Spring 2027 and hasn’t quite figured out what she wants to do yet.

Puddle

1 May 2026 / Editor

Poetry by Haily Gagliardo

A puddle lies still
stale from a morning’s rain
Once crisp with crystal hues
now brown and dull
giving way to dirt

Only the day before
she was one with silent waves
taken suddenly
through the Sun’s blazing heat
To become one with gentle mist
fluffy and white

Until a darkness overcame her
Thundering light flashed
as drops of water fell
like stone to the earth

Now she lies in wait
for the day
to once again
become one with the heavens

Haily Gagliardo is freelance writer and singer, majoring in commercial music at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Growing up in a mixed family, with her mom Jamaican Indian and her dad Italian, she developed a deep appreciation for different views on a familiar subject, which she enjoys expressing through her art.

The Poet’s Way

18 February 2026 / Editor

Poetry by Arvilla Fee

Some might say,
I’m in love
with this summer day.
That’s not the poet’s way.
The poet says—

I lie on my back,
indenting the meadow grass
with contented, contoured bones
as my eyes follow
freshly spun cotton-candy clouds

trailing across a turquoise sky,
as though clutched by unseen hands.
The sun blinks as they pass her face,
serene in her brief respite,
magnanimous in shaded grace.

There’s a low hum in the clover,
golden-brown bees
sticky with pollen and hope,
legs thick with yellow promises
of wheat, corn, and Black-Eyed Susans.

From a distance I hear
the ripple of water,
a river’s ceaseless mission
to join the salty sea
while coddling catfish and reeds.

And that’s why I lie here, the poet—
spine to earth,
a mouthful of clouds,
and blood that runs thick
with honey.

Arvilla Fee lives in Ohio, edits poetry for October Hill Magazine, and runs her own online magazine, Soul Poetry, Prose & Arts Magazine. She is a widely published author and has three published poetry books available on Amazon. For more info: https://www.soulpoetry7.com

Shutters

12 February 2026 / Editor

Poetry by Michael David Roberts

All but children and birds care
to live their lives with an end game.

We adults prefer to walk narrow paths
usually leading to destinations.

But something always happens—
a major distraction in which

the locks are changed or the knobs
don’t turn, even just a little bit, all

unexpectedly, nothing predictable,
as it should be. And you don’t even know

if you are locked in or out. Sometimes
it is hard to truly be adult about this.

Often in the mornings, when
the dew has soaked the grass

and all the houses have their windows
shuttered, I can hear birds, all in synch,

like a room full of children who
have just discovered a small surprise.

Michael David Roberts is a retired community college professor who currently lives in Tumwater, Washington and spends much of his time walking through nearby forests. He has been published in The Comstock Review, Chelsea, Slipstream, Versedaily.com, and others. His book, The Particulars of Being, was published in 2004.

In My Octopus Village

1 August 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Brian C. Billings

When I first moved here, I thought my
neighbors were alarming. They jetted through the village
on furious missions for meals and mates. Changes
came fast, bewildering my twitchy eyes with color
that spiraled and streamed. I would hide whenever
waterways flashed. I wore shells and allowed tides
to stroke my mantle . . . but now each ripple
makes me flush when brilliant consortiums rush by.

Brian C. Billings is a professor of drama and English at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. His work has appeared in such journals as Ancient Paths, The Bluebird Word, Confrontation, Evening Street Review, Glacial Hills Review, and Poems and Plays. Publishers for his scripts include Eldridge Publishing and Heuer Publishing.

Not Mary Oliver’s Linden

4 April 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Diane M. Williams

Mary Oliver drove through Linden,
Alabama, and wrote about hulking birds
of prey in a field outside of town.
I wonder what led her to that southern
town that I forsook years ago.
Now, years after her death,
it’s much too late to ask.

Yes, I remember black vultures
descending on rotting carcasses,
shiny summer grasses of field and roadside.
But my Linden, Alabama, is not
the detached visual image of Mary Oliver.

Girl, age twelve, brother and two sisters,
Damn Yankees from up north,
Dad trying to make a go
as a dairy farmer in the Alabama Black Belt,
Mom a hospital nurse.
We didn’t know to say yes ma’am no ma’am.

Summer whipped the sultry farmhouse,
tarantula mother birthed her babies on my bedroom wall,
black widows nested in abandoned buckets,
our home a tired reminder of neglect—
peeling paint and broken shutters,
our lawn a field of weeds,
Lombardy poplars loftily ringing the crescent driveway.

We sang wild dewberries into our pails
uncaring of copperheads and scorpions,
danced across meadows bringing cows in
for evening milking,
trudged gleefully two miles in sticky knee-high grass
brushing off ticks, sweat bees, grasshoppers
to the town swimming pool,
splashed away our poverty
with kids who didn’t know.

Girl, age twelve, I dreamed
the “Wayward Wind” with Gogi Grant
got kissed by a snot-nosed boy in a haystack
rocked with Elvis in the jailhouse on late-night radio
wept finding my dog dead in a roadside ditch
practiced French words with my Jersey heifer.

Passing through Linden, Mary did not know
that in that field where vultures
hovered and gorged themselves
lay the remains of my childhood,
the tattered fantasies
and memories of Girl, age twelve.

The forlorn house and tumble-down barn
long ago torn from the landscape,
now the ghosts of the Lombardy poplars
sing to the restless wind.

Diane M. Williams taught college French for many years, then joined the creative team at UT Knoxville as an editorial manager. Her poetry has appeared in One Trick Pony, Bluestem Magazine, Monterey Poetry Review, Black Moon Magazine, and The Avocet. Her poetry collection, Night in the Garden, appeared in 2020.

Next Lives

23 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Lillian Anderson

We arrange to meet up at this kitschy hole-in-the-wall tiki bar off Victory Boulevard. I haven’t seen Ben in over a decade, but that doesn’t stop me from recognizing him instantly. The contours of his face have changed subtly, more angular perhaps. But then again, so have mine. He’s an apparition from my youth, back when I wore roll-on body glitter and scanned the radio for existential meaning. My middle-aged self is austere by comparison, free of artificial fragrance and parabens and God.

We find a corner booth and discuss what makes this a tiki bar, settling on Polynesian appropriation. I look down at the menu, studying the list of tropical rum-based drinks as if there’d be a pop quiz on it later.

“Why the protective body language?” he asks over the music blaring from a corner speaker. I realize that I’m hugging myself. I drop my shoulders and release the tension that I carry in my pelvic floor, where my physiotherapist tells me women store their stress. I think of being in utero where my mother stored hers, and her mother before her and so on, like a Russian nesting doll.

“This is strange, isn’t it? Life feels like a choose-your-own-adventure book sometimes,” I say, only you can’t go back a chapter when you fall knee deep into quicksand. We could’ve made it in another life.

“It’s weird to be human,” he says, and not for the first time, as we order drinks. Over Mai Tais, he tells me how he scattered his father’s ashes off the coast of Hawaii, making swirling patterns in the ocean with them, even putting some under his tongue.

“Isn’t that carcinogenic?” I ask, somewhat aghast.

“Not in small amounts,” he says evenly, as if consuming our loved ones was entirely natural. I nod in agreement, an ash-eating convert.

I confess that I’m agnostic, but my son believes in reincarnation. “He wants to be a butterfly in his next life,” I say, the way some mothers brag about their kid wanting to be a doctor. “Maybe we all come back as butterflies. Makes as much sense as anything else.” I imagine us resurrected as two delicate insects with paper-thin wings.

I swallow down the last of my drink to temper my nerves, ice clinking against the glass. Ben calls me a primordial attraction, and I balk at this disclosure, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. He remembers me at sixteen with thick wild hair in a green shift dress. It was purple though, wasn’t it? An iridescent mauve the color of twilight. That’s the thing with memories, they’re malleable like wet clay.

We leave the bar after running out of things to say, our eyes adjusting to the punishing late afternoon sun. Ben reaches for my hand and our fingers interlock as he walks me to my car.

“I always liked your hands,” I say, turning them over to admire them.

“They can’t look the same as they did 20 years ago,” he says.

But they do, I think. We’ve time traveled.

I close my eyes, and I’m a teenager again, sitting on a beach towel in Santa Monica with Ben stretched out beside me, lying prone in the sand wearing red swim trunks. The summer neon sun is reflecting on the waves like shards of shattered glass.

“Walk on my back,” he says.

I let out a nervous laugh. “What? NO!”

“You’re all of what, ninety pounds? Come on, you won’t break me.”

I adjust my bikini and step gingerly onto his lower back, my heart racing. I can feel the topography of his back beneath my bare sandy feet, his skin slipping over muscle and sinew and bone.

I open my eyes to find two grown strangers standing in their place. I steady myself for another goodbye, but no one says it properly anymore. Instead, it’s a truncated bye or see you later or take care, as if people were made of porcelain (aren’t we?). I think of my dead brother and father, whom I never said goodbye to, wondering if I’d eat their ashes too to keep a part of them. Letting go of the living feels riskier, like walking away from a boiling kettle as it sings. Some endings are like that.

Lillian Anderson is an emerging creative nonfiction writer from Los Angeles. Publications include Scary Mommy and Beyond Words Literary Magazine.

green potted plant beside window — Photo by Gilberto Olimpio on Pexels.com

House Plants Lament

1 September 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Peter A. Witt

Potted I sit on the windowsill,
like a canvas painted with sunlight,
weaving patterns on my outstretched leaves,
it’s a good life, but I envy the vibrant
garden that grows outside, where
plants hear the twilling of house finches,
the buzzing of honey bees, and feel the cool
of early spring breezes, as arrowheads
of Sandhill Cranes migrate north
from their Texas winter homes.

Once my keeper carried my potted home
out to the patio on a rain-clouded day
where a gentle caress from nature’s hand
bathed the soil around my roots.

I drew the pure water into my stems,
it was refreshing after my usual diet
of salt-filled, chlorinated water drawn
from the kitchen tap. Alas, my roots
were never bathed this way again.

My owner thinks I’m happy; she sees
no bugs, no rot of my roots or mold,
no diseases, but she does not know
I feel like a prisoner in a gilded cage;
she thinks of me as nothing more
than a potted house plant with no
ambition to be something more.

Peter A. Witt is a poet, family history writer, active birder and photographer. Peter retired in 2015 from a 43-year university teaching and research career. He lives with his wife in Texas.

New Shorts

30 August 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leanne Rose Sowul

I was so proud of them: cream-colored denim with turquoise flowers, bright green leaves, and cuffed bottoms. The perfect length to show off my new, longer, sixth-grade legs.

At recess, we sat on the low ledge of the concrete court while the boys played basketball. We watched them, waiting for them to look our way. We fidgeted, hands pulling the weeds that grew up between the cracks, fingers brushing the pollen off buttercups.

Then, one of the girls said, “Hey, is that leg hair?” I felt the brush of her hand, running up my shin from ankle to knee. She was right—my leg was covered in soft down. I hadn’t noticed.

“Hasn’t your mom taught you to shave yet?” she asked. The others turned, looked, laughed. My face flushed. I looked at the other girls’ legs. Smooth, white, perfect.

The boys were yelling, laughing, piling onto each other. They’d swarm back into school with dirty knees, sweaty hairlines, and smelly pits. Still, girls would line the hallways, trying to catch their eyes.

I wish I could say that I stood up then. Told that girl off for touching my leg without permission. Made an impassioned speech about a woman’s natural body. Strode into that throng of boys and grabbed the basketball. Walked into the school dirty and sweating, happy and uncaring.

Instead, I pulled down the hem of my new shorts as far as they could go and tucked my legs underneath me. Instead, when I got home that afternoon, I asked my mother for a razor.

Leanne Rose Sowul is an award-winning writer with publications in JuxtaProse, Under the Gum Tree, Five Minutes, and more; she has performed her essays for “Writers Read” at Lincoln Center and in collaboration with Carnegie Hall. Join her “Good Character” newsletter on Substack for more.

rippling seawater reflecting pink evening sky — Photo by Ben Mack on Pexels.com

Beyond Vision

3 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Suzannah Watchorn

Suzannah Watchorn is an English-Irish writer who grew up outside of London, UK. She now lives in the US, where she works as a writing coach and freelance editor. Her poetry and essays are featured or forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Nebulous, Sunspot Literary, Wild Roof Journal and Red Noise Collective.