About the author:
A native of South Detroit, Michigan, now residing in Hampstead, New Hampshire, Daniel Miltz is a seasoned freelance writer and poet whose life bridges the realms of technical precision and creative expression. With a distinguished 40-year career as a Mechanical Engineering Designer in high-level government aerospace programs, Daniel brings to his literary craft the same discipline and depth that defined his engineering pursuits.

His poetic journey spans decades and continents of thought, earning him over 1,600 accolades across various respected poetry forums, inclusion in more than 250 anthologies, and the publication of two books to date. Deeply influenced by the free-spirited, improvisational style of the Beat Generation, Daniel found his literary voice during his formative bohemian years in California—a time marked by introspection, rebellion, and a search for authenticity through words.

​Poetry, for Daniel Miltz, is not merely an artistic outlet, but a lifelong vocation—an enduring lens through which he continues to explore the intersections of memory, identity, and human experience.

‘We should lose faith in….’ says the morning to every death.
 
Long ago there was a sunny kindergarten.
 
And the Time is a galloping train.
 
The crisscross.
The brown sugar on the forehead of every battle.
The unnecessary explosions in the womb.
The wet gunpowder smiles at the ancient posterity.
 
‘Is there no wrong signal in the development?’
 
A voice remembers the words of Satan.
 
‘Let it rain in the tent….’
The ignorance in the funnel.
 
The postcard meets the cuckoo in the middle of early autumn.
 
Since evening there has been no evening post for the dead telegram.

I speak to you now, soft twin of silence and song--
not in dread,
but in dialogue.
Let this be a reckoning, not a reckoning by force--
but one by tenderness.
 
You have been
the site of wonder,
the seat of shame.
 
When I was young, I covered you,
wishing invisibility.
I mistook self-consciousness for humility--
before I understood vulnerability
as the birthplace of worth.
 
You emerged slowly, like truth,
late-blooming.
And when you came into your own--
not grandly, but fully--
I stood taller beside you.
 
You were never loud,
but you were mine.
And later, loved.
Held in warm hands.
Praised in the hush of midnight.
My fleeting confidence rose with you,
and even in its impermanence,
there was joy.
 
You fed life once.
You poured out milk
like a quiet miracle.
You were more than symbol.
You were service,
love in biology.
 
Now, they scan you.
They mark you with numbers and doubt.
A possible betrayal--
but even in decay, you do not lose dignity.
 
If there is disease,
it is not who you are.
You are a vessel, not a verdict.
 
Society still names you
fetish, scandal, battlefront.
But I call you connection--
to my child, to my lovers, to myself.
To the years I wore you with hesitation,
and the ones I wore you with pride.
 
Sometimes I rest my broken glasses on you--
a moment of absurd tenderness--
and I wonder:
do you still want to speak?
 
If so, speak now:
Tell me how you feel
about being feared,
about being watched,
about carrying a lifetime of meaning
without ever being asked how you feel.
 
Tell me if grief lives there.
Tell me if courage does too.
 
Tell me if, like me,
you have been waiting
not just to be examined--
but understood.
 
My breast,
if you must be taken,
let it be with ceremony.
If you must be saved,
let it be with reverence.
 
And if you are fading,
let it be as moonlight fades--
with quiet beauty,
with memory intact.
 
Because you were never just flesh.
You were always a feeling.

About the author:
Meg is an Australian self-published new Author who has one book *Story: Reflective Poetry* (2017), and a number of poems published to journals, in which some include: *Tipton Poetry Journal* (IN); *The Sunflower Collective* (LA); *SKYLIGHT 47* (UK); *Lifelines at Dartmouth* (MA); *Nature Writing* (UK); *Eureka* (Australia); *ditch* (Canada), and others.

Meg was lucky to have positive press coverage in newspapers across the state of Queensland, and a positive written review by The Red Room Company (Australia) regarding this book which shows a reflective style of writing. Meg’s writing demonstrates elements of whimsy, transparency of feelings, abstractions, and may present as illustrative through her use of sensory and colourful words and imagery.

Meg is self-taught and formerly worked in mental health as a therapist and support person. Meg’s education and qualifications are in Counselling. Meg is now retired due to an illness and has taken to writing as an outlet.

Meg really admires and feels inspired by renowned poets local and international, such as Sam Wagan Watson, Dylan Thomas, Lord Byron, Les Murray, Clive James, Judith Wright, Dorothea Mackellar, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Yeats, Ocean Vuong, Kevin Young, Sharon Olds, Henri Cole, T.S. Eliot, Mary Oliver, Wordsworth, Jacob Polley — and many of the Bloodaxe Book poets.

Again She defeated me in the battle 
and as usual I came back as winner 
with a broken heart full of petals given by 
the golden moonlit night for whom I always kept 
a thorny conversation for her and she always 
smiled to remove the pride of sultry days 
and she does always.... 
and I always do the same and get defeated... 
 
And it is still night in a silent tent 
and I have to bow down to kiss the feet of the nectar 
 
I have to be alive to be winner 
after being defeated and defeated and defeated .   

​About the author:
Partha Sarkar, a resident of Ichapur, a small town of a province West Bengal Of India, is a graduate who writes poems inspired by the late Sankar Sarkar and his friends (especially Deb kumar Khan) to protest against the social injustice and crimes against nature. His poems have been in different magazines both in Bangla and in English. Once, he would believe in revolution but now he is confused because of the obscurity of human beings, though he keeps fire in soul despite.

How cathartic, this roving mind,
This absent functionality!
All schedules and packed deadlines
Cast off, adrift in sunbeams.
Oh—that indigestion, tender head,
The aching in my wrist?
Whisked away by Vagrant’s touch,
Cured by idleness.
I dérive, as the French might say,
And take the landscape’s hand,
It leads me in a quick foxtrot,
Laughing with the band,
With the blue jays’ bouncing tune--
This lack of destination
Is my destination,
This drifting out of gloom.
And when I perch back on my chair,
And set my hands to strive,
I find the Vagrant’s straying
Has re-aligned my mind.

Inside the dead of winter
Curls a fiery soul
A little bear that sleeps defiant
Waiting out the cold.
 
She does not let it press her
Or file down her teeth,
The wind of sorrow whipping ‘round
Is flummoxed by the beat
The steady, measured beat
Of a soul crouched for the thaw -
A soul with wherewithal.
 
The snow intones a chant, a curse
And drifts down in layers deep,
It wants to choke
It wants to damn
The soul to darkened sleep.
 
It comprehends too late,
As it trusts grief’s gravity,
That the little bear has prepared
For this very thing.
 
She’d swallowed embers in the summer,
And fireflies in fall,
To keep her soul e’er burning
Inside Depression's squall.
 
And when springtime rears its roses,
And the wind softens for the bees,
The soul, she wakes her willpow’r,
And rises with the green.

She,
of whom I used to know.
Her arms flail in the mist,
mine self still I search for.
 
Drink she her cup of tea,
fall she into the darkest water.
 
A few berries of Jupiter
and an ampule in my pocket red.
 
She and her thatched hut,
both burning in my figment of reality.
Ashes of hers hover
within the red hues.
 
Selene’s weeping and the glowing flames,
monochrome in my memory lane.
I look, I see the waning of my twilight.
Moonlight in her youthful vibrance,
an illusion to her deprived disposition.
 
Look I into her shattering self,
found I mine emaciated past.
Either she is the truth,
or I am still blindfolded in the labyrinth.
 
I watch, I devour this line of thought.
Lose I mine coat of black.
Foraging for subtle changes, 
I have blinded the sculptor in me.
The road which the callous me saw,
lay glued to the colour I remember.
Lands formed from undescended waters,
plants seeds into the cold depths.
Into the devouring tunnel of adulthood,
lured I by the sanity I am knit into.
 
Confused yet determined,

I return to my idle portrait. 

​March 5, 2025 06:18

Nothing. No one. Or other pieces of emptiness that wander through my atrophied memory. The big white birds talk among themselves incessantly, even in the middle of the night. The sea was yesterday a blue wall, which I would not have dared to cross for anything in the world. So beautiful. The elders once came from the other side of the horizon to here, and for them it was the end of the world. Pines tortured by the wind surround me, today, it’s blowing from the East, from Central Asia like the people here. An abandoned cathedral, Greek Orthodox and all white, was empty. The path climbed steeply to the top. We passed a cemetery without a cross. A man imitated a bird there, looking perfectly ridiculous. In my dream there was a painting painted thirty-five years ago broken by a stranger. I discovered a piece of it by chance at a friend's place who was indifferent to it. This strange character can't speak English, the others are bandits. In the gallery everyone thought I was rich, it makes him think about Under the Sun of Satan when he looks at them. At night I hear the heavy footsteps of the seagulls above my head, moving and screaming even in the middle of the night. They are insomniacs, winter is coming to an end, it's the season when they talk too much. Something or someone stole two eggs, as white as both my eyes, from a nest placed on a window ledge thirty meters above the ground. So she never came back. Human beings and animals are the same, it's sad or not. It’s the beginning of the fasting for some, the awakening for others, at six o'clock sharp. Life is paradoxical, as the angel Gabriel told me once. I have nothing to say against that, I don't know, nor will I ever know. I could have or should have jumped, no one would have known anything about it. She’s totally aware that suicide is the only way out for him if things keep on going like this. Others have always been afraid of him, rightly so, and vice versa. After madness, nothing will be the same again.
And yet, the blue sea was certainly not a wall for him, but an abyss, in the end.

​Still, calm and noiseless
The charade bustling street is at rest
Emeritus drawing from the overflow
Well of Knowledge
Birthing life in white and black
 
Emptiness! A fight of vanity
Isolated in the other world
Waging war against inner demons
Ranging from human venoms
To cracking rumor
 
 Conspicuously muted
Her Mouth is sealed
Yet, she raced in heart
As she swims across oceans of thoughts
Mi Corazón esta perturbado
 
The bang is louder
Will she yield to its call?
Again, this tune fascinates me
Will she dance to the rhyme?
It all resonates with my soul!
 
This arrow pierces through her heart
It aches like a kiss of blade
Rivers ceaselessly flow through
Her balls, sad but true
Her guard is down
 
Imminent pains of gains
Applauds her tenacity
Her breast flapped in agony
Of want and needs
Reality is falsified
 
They all speak the familiar language of danger
Project of death in a lovely package
No more fight in paradise
Paranoid by paralysis of desire
Who wins, the demon or me?
 
This shadow deep in hollow
May one day hallow her hassle
Shackles of lack
Luck and will
Trends afar her
 
The cloud is ‘bout resting
Before dawn
I valiantly beat him
To rust and dust
Though choked but she moves!
 
Till next episode
Where the moon bows out to the sun
I shall retain my strength
To wind through the storm
And sail across the Nile

I was always the broken one,
a jagged shard of mirrored light.
The fairest of them all--
but they never told me
fairness was a curse.
When they laid me in the glass coffin,
the dwarves wept salt that carved
rivers in their faces.
They did not know
the coffin was not a tomb
but a lens.
Through it, I saw the prince’s approach,
his perfect features fractured
by the warped glass.
I saw the cracks in his smile,
the pity behind his eyes.
I saw myself as they saw me:
a body polished and preserved,
an object too fragile to touch
but too pretty to let go.
So I shattered the glass
with my unkissed lips,
cut my way out of their story,
and left the prince bleeding on the forest floor.
He called me wicked,
but wicked is just what they name us
when we break the molds
they cast us in.
I wandered until I found a mirror
that didn’t lie.
And in its broken face,
I saw my own reflection--
whole at last.