You try different places at different hours,
dipping your pen in psychedelic summer skies
then switch to inky silence of monsoon clouds
when it doesn’t work
But vanilla days leer at you one after the other
until you realize that you are beyond salvation
So, while you continue to ransack your pockmarks,
for that elusive spark, you know in your heart that
you’ve forgotten how to write a love poem

You desire its cadence and metaphors as much
as the warm body of a lover in your bed on a winter morn
You finger the crumbling dry flowers rediscovered
between yellowing pages of “A Hundred Years of Solitude”
and long for its sinuous form to unravel in your hands
You smoke a week old stubs leafing through old loves
until your body aches under the weight of indolence
but, it refuses to be coaxed into existence

You convince nobody when you say it’s not your fault
that you’ve forgotten how to write a love poem
least of all, yourself,
a kleptomaniac in emporium of love
primping your garment of frailty
surrounded with smutty mannequins.

Craving for an escapade to run its finger on your lips
you are offended only by mundane
lest it becomes your destiny

Written by: Nalini Priyadarshni – Ludhiana, India
Feature Photo by: Caleb Jones

Thecla 

By D.M. Mooney

(Romance Novel)

“Wow! Just, wow! That’s exactly what I thought when I finished reading the new book, Thecla, written by debut author DM Mooney. This story line grabbed me from the very first words and kept me obsessively reading all the way through to the very end.”

~Chris Fischer – Readers’ Favorite

After losing her parents and surviving The Reckoning, a catastrophic earthquake that nearly destroyed all of North America, against all odds, young Thecla survived on her own in the remains of the destruction, known as The Wastelands. Seven years later, now a fiercely, self-trained warrior and hunter-gatherer, Thecla is suddenly introduced into a new order of civilization known as Carpathia, a pious community where the prominent Bishop Kato governs. As her morals are challenged and innocence slowly falls by the wayside, Thecla quickly discovers that her survival skills and instincts that kept her alive in the brutal, wild and untamed Wastelands is no match for her new life in Carpathia.

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: IWA Publishing Services / IWA Publications
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1518679994
• ISBN-13: 978-1518679995