We start slow
Let the fire burn low
As the shadows grow
by Moon Mother’s glow
Wait
Lick the grease from our fingers
Breathe the smoke in that lingers
Wait
Test the ground with our feet
Wait for the beat
The thrum
Feel the life in the peat
The hum
We drum
We dance
fling the embers as we spin
a trance
there’s heat on our skin
a chance
to feel the fire burn within
and now we’re striped with sweat and dust
we’re dripping
with the scent of musk
heady incense
burning lust
and we are bound
to the sound
of the beat
that we found
at the hearth at the heart of the world
Claire Shaw is an emerging UK-born poet and author whose work has appeared in publications including Black Hare Press, The Dawntreader, Silkworm and Grimsy. She currently resides in The Netherlands with her husband and two cats and works in Digital Marketing. She loves to travel, practice her photography, and read like it’s going out of fashion.
Fizza Abbas is a Freelance Content Writer based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is fond of poetry and music. Her works have been published at many platforms including Indiana Voice Journal and Poetry Pacific.
Yorkshirewoman Louise Wilford is an English teacher and examiner. She has had around 60 poems and short stories published in magazines including Popshot, Pushing Out The Boat and Agenda, and has won or been shortlisted for several competitions. She is currently writing a children’s fantasy novel.
Rebecca Metcalfe is a 22-year-old student and writer from Essex. She did her undergraduate degree at the University of Chester and is now studying for an MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Liverpool. She has been published in Pandora’s Box, Flash: The International Short Story Magazine and in the Electric Reads Young Writers’ Anthology 2017.
Lisa Reily is a former literacy consultant, dance director and teacher from Australia. She
Candace Armstrong writes poetry in the beautiful woodlands of Southern Illinois. Her work has been published in The Lyric, Journal of Modern Poetry, Distilled Lives Vol 2 & 3, Midwest Journal, California Quarterly and others online. One of her sonnets was a winner in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest in the summer of 2017. Sometimes the poetry becomes prose and has been published in Muse, Diverse Voices, and WOW-Women On Writing online as a finalist in their spring 2017 contest. She is an avid gardener and enjoys hiking with her husband and their canine child, Murphy.
Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State, an editor at the online magazine Literary Orphans, and the author of I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE AND NEITHER ARE YOU, a story collection out from Unknown Press. You can also find him at 
Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthologies Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Retail Woes and Line Drives. It has also been nominated for both Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net. He is the author of two full-length collections, Lent 1999 (Leaf Garden Press) and Soren Kierkegaard Witnesses an Execution (Local Gems) as well as two chapbooks, Three Visitors (Negative Capability Press) and Artifacts and Relics, (Folded Word). His novel, Knight Prisoner, is available from Vagabondage Press and a new novel is forthcoming: The Magic War (Loose Leaves Publishing). He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and activist Joan Juster where he makes a living showing people pretty things in his city.
Foxglove Journal 