The GGPCollective
Ⓒ Glass Gates Publishing, 2024
“Darkness will always be a servant of light.”
Matshona Dhliwayo
Acknowledgments
Avery special thank you to all of our contributing writers. Without the courage to share your words and work with others, our little publication could not exist.
Please find our contributors and follow their pages on social media for more!
Follow @glassgatespublishing on Instagram for more announcements and future calls for submissions
● Gary Beck
● Paweł Markiewicz
● John Zedolik
● Justin Marlowe
● Chelsea Jordan
● RebeccaAgauas
● N.C.
● Adam Brooks
● Bailey
Table of Contents
● Most Painful Farewell
● The 11 Dazzling Verses
● Teleology ofYears
● Reprise
● AMuse Unrefined
● Evanescence
● Rack and Ruin
● Coffee for Faith
● Genie in a Bottle
● Paper Crowns
● TEN
● Return to Sender
Most Painful Farewell
I sit by the bedside of my beloved who is trapped in the room of departure. The plastic tubes keep her connected to continuation, flow with sustenance as machines hum, beep, screech, maintaining the ravaged body that once pleasured me with great satisfaction. Now she dances the last dance that I am powerless to save. I watch the withered remnants of a once vital life and ache for her agonies that soon will end leaving me alone with the imminence of loss.
Gary Beck
Bio: Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director and worked as an art dealer when he couldn't earn a living in the theater. He has also been a tennis pro, a ditch digger and a salvage diver. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction, essays and plays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. His traditionally published books include 45 poetry collections, 18 novels, 4 short story collections, 2 collections of essays and 8 books of plays and 16 poetry chapbooks. Gary lives in New York City.
The 11 Dazzling Verses
The dreameries need Blue Hours.
The Blue Hours would need a sun's afterglow.
The red sky in the evening longs for a delight.
The delight wants a homeland.
The native land wanted a literature.
The writings are willing to manifest a reality.
The epiphany was willing to become a sermon.
The homily-becoming can conjure a hereafter.
The spell of paradise could paint an entrancement.
The picture of the glee may perpetuate tenderly the dreameries.
The immortalization pertains to the dreams of the Blue Hourlets.
Paweł Markiewicz
Bio: Paweł Markiewicz was born 1983 in Siemiatycze in Poland. He is poet who lives in Bielsk Podlaski and writes tender poems, haiku and long poems.
Teleology ofYears
Spangles splash my lidded vision as his snowball smacks the sphere of my child eye after a weighty snow
but no known damage done by the thin bully four years older at this point in neighborhood history, who would die
somewhat young, not even fifty and five, imagined karma for the projectile offense (and the B-B shot to the fleeing buttocks
a few years later to same recipient of the winternight missile), the many years now passed beyond the aggressions allowing for conjectures of fair
recompense among the living, who wonder if continuing life is the reward for restraint regarding the younger whom one is for the moment above
John Zedolik
Reprise
Wafts across my body stretched upward toward the highest shelf
the warm air of the bookstore’s magnanimity while “God Only Knows” complements
the heat and strain for a short-story collection of modest cost and length
all this commensurate with Brian Wilson and the ’Boys’sweet timber as it keeps
at bay the outer cold that breaks, a wave, as the shop door opens and closes,
so if not engendering an endless summer at least a spell of late September far beyond
that month of red-gold, poised high up like the reader/seeker, at duct level, inches
from the pressed tin ceiling holding all of this breezy balm down and within customer reach
John Zedolik
AMuse Unrefined
‘Broken’would be an understatement.
‘Fixable’references a universal falsehood.
‘Limbo’between polar states of an aesthetically relevant hell would be more fitting.
Subjective sums which represent the appendages of us all.
Pieced together by the Frankenstein we refer to as our existence.
Positioned to exist within an abyss of uncertainty.
Our livelihood.
Acrossfire between Earth and the Cosmos.
Alien to some, yet grounded and relatable to one’s imaginative cohorts.
Navigating a non-cohesive blend of solitude and chaos.
Fire and Ice aren’t necessarily inherent paradoxes.
It’s unimaginable to break down what cannot be broken.
Justin Marlowe
Evanescence
So frequently, art embodies the here and now
Sometimes a daily gift, other times a fleeting piece of desire
Embrace the minutiae of it all
When it hits, it thrashes
When it pummels, it pounds
Receive with clarity
Rest in candor
Relish within its vision
Respond accordingly
The specific momentous vibration is irretrievable
If it departs, allow it to evaporate into a state of spiritual hopelessness
Leave it alone
If it circles back, keep it close to the heart
Acyclical recurrence of either exquisite charm or conceivable regret
Routine instances within the life of a creative
Justin Marlowe
Rack and Ruin
There's an old, boarded-up church on a country road in a small town by a Great Lake. It calls to me. Its simple, classic lines bring a quiet smile to my face.
I'm not a religious person, but there's something about this lost little church nestled among the weeds that resonates with me.
Everyone says it looks haunted, but we pass haunted-looking people every day, working their nine-to-fives, slowly slipping away.
Beautiful things aren't always bright, shiny, or new. Sometimes they're rough around the edges, boarded up, and in need of a fresh coat of paint.
Just like us.
Bio: Chelsey Jordan is a Michigan-based poet and artist whose work combines a distinctive voice with playful watercolor doodles. She explores self-expression, introspection, and the emotional textures of everyday life. Her work appears on Instagram at @cjwordsandotherfeelings.
Chelsey Jordan
Coffee For Faith
I order a coffee using your name, just so others, and myself, can hear your name being spoken once again.
I show strangers your pictures. Look, wasn’t she the most beautiful woman in the world? I thought so.
I write your memory with my left hand, in cursive, a story of who you were and who loved you. No one loved you more than I did. Gone, never forgotten.
Loved, deeply within my bones and the crevasses of my soul.
Rebecca Agauas
Genie InABottle
My therapist asks me how I’m doing, I tell her I cry going up and down the condiment isle.At least I’m getting my steps in. I eat my veggies, I hydrate. Coffee is after all bean water. I go for walks, get my Vitamin D. Getting lost on the trail is better than getting lost in my mind. On Sunday mornings I sip coffee and watch the news. Man, I thought my life was bad. She asks about my nightmares. Skip, avoid, next question. My bank account states $0.00. I left my heart and soul in an unfamiliar room with unfamiliar faces. My therapist is concerned for me. Shoot, I’m concerned for me. Unless she’s secretly a genie who can grant me three wishes, I don’t see these visits helping. On the rare, magical chance she comes out of a gold lamp, my first wish is to bring you home, to me.
Rebecca Agauas
Bio: Rebecca Agauas is a woman who lives in Michigan. She is a person living with chronic illnesses and is an advocate for the chronic illness community. Rebecca has a love and passion for writing considers writing a form of self expression and self reflection. She has self published 2 books and has been published and received recognition from various literary magazines. You can find Rebecca on Instagram @rebeccaagauas.
Paper Crowns
You taught me the geometry of story how to fold a beginning into a neat paper crown, how to whisper wishes like coins into wells, how a promise could be polished until it looked like a star.
You gave me a map with only happy endings, stitched the edges of my nights with lullabies and lit the attic with lanterns that never went out. I learned to read the world by your illustrations: knights in the margins, glass slippers tucked beneath ordinary shoes, a single rose kept like a secret between my ribs. Then the ink ran.
Doors that clicked open became doors that closed and kept closing; The prince learned how to walk away. the lantern that burned steady sputtered and fell, and the attic filled with rain. I pressed my palm to the page and it warmed with red.
You watched the fable fold under my fingers, watched the crown slip, watched me stand with the clean shape of belief torn at the seams. I bled from small, honest places - from hope, from the soft quick words I used for loving and you catalogued my unravelling like weather.
Still, there is a stubbornness that does not die: I keep the folded crown in the drawer, not for the wearing, but to remember how bright the paper was before it cut me. And even now, when I see a well, I measure how deep it is before I toss my coin.
N.C.
Bio: More work can be found on Instagram @poems2_inspire_u.
TEN
There was a beautiful woman on the trail
So I followed her because she ran at my pace
Of course she got scared and tried to run away
We all fell on our knives and bled out
And that loss was also my fault
Now I too hold on to dead things
Dead things that are not mine
Dead past things that do not serve me
Inanimate objects with memories and scents
I am not the only one with work to do
Life could have taught us that much
Now I keep running while waiting to exit
The Dominant and the submissive
Squeezing out the last few drops of her body wash
Adam Brooks
Return to Sender
I folded every last memory of us into paper airplanes...
Decorated invitations adorned with party hats, An RSVPfor a backyard cookout from last September, Lunch box love notes hastily scribbled out on the kitchen counter, Afriendly reminder unstuck from the fridge about the parade on Saturday, And to please not park on the street to hinder the fun.
I carried the overflowing box of ink and paper into the backyard, Stood precariously on a lawn chair and with the flick of a match, Lit each one ablaze and repeatedly set them into motion. Bad decisions are best made swiftly.
I watched the creased pieces of paper, Once cradled in my hand, now combust into kindling. Every word written crash landed in brilliant, spiraling nose dives, and spattered in the shadows of the oak trees.
Threatening storm clouds bullied the sunshine from the sky, And opened up in torrents to quiet the raging fires. I collapsed into my seat among the mess of charred remains, Little landmines of love reduced to smoldering ashes.
Every feeling I carried for you went up in smoke, As I looked out over a graveyard of us.
Bailey
Bio: Bailey is a writer based in the Midwest, where she enjoys slow mornings at home while keeping track of her small human and two dogs. She tries to fill her day with reading, writing, and spending time with family. She is best known for her writing on Instagram under “coffeestainedloveletters.” You can also connect with her on Threads.
Ⓒ Glass Gates Publishing, 2024