You buy bedsheetsduvet covers in bright colors (always, the cheap satin, notsilk.) A pillowcase to salvage your Mars in Leo hair.You think sleeping on bright colors in abstractions of leaves & flowers will makeyou brighter; brighten your mood.But does it? (or, with that black satin promise, do you only salvage an ancient & ongoing sadness?)& […]

Wide Open Cages – River Lucero

Submissions are open for our twelfth issue ‘Ancestors’ for the next six weeks. The deadline to submit your work is May 1st. We are accepting poetry, prose, creative nonfiction, visual art, photography and artwork around the theme of ancestry. We are looking for work which explores this theme as well as heritage, legacy, the land […]

Issue XII: Ancestors [SUBS OPEN]

it is deeply aquatic herein the purple-screamed eyeof our hurricanewe the peopleclamor for the unclipping of our wingsmatted as they arewith the detritus of ourhistory-onicsour senses melt as Dali’s clocksand we ponder how we arrived herein this nowwe the femaledon our proscribed attiredhandmaids to the hereaftersteeling our stilettoscloaked in the foldsof our quiescenceand bide our […]

We the Unhinged – Marcia J. Weber

The sun was down. The moon, up.His wrath raged through wallslike earthquakes promising to find me,expose me, squeeze me until no breath, no movement could emanate from my small self.The sun was up. The moon, down.I wore a mask that fooled the world.Giddy on Life, I had it good, easy, running about, conjuring people and […]

Awake and pretty much sober: Sobriety Comes with Breath- Danielle Wong

someone said YOU SHOULD START A CULTand grow it bigger than the cultof the rapist catholic churcha cult of womenwho are awakewho are sick oftaking abusewomen who are willing to stand upand be countedwomen who scare menbecause they don’t smile on cuedon’t put men firstdon’t pamper themor let them take women’s ideasand put their own […]

You Should Start a Cult – Georgiann Carlson

I curled up in the bones of a corpse.Dead in the woods at twelve. Lost Boy Scoutcamping. It was cold. I was on the hunt forDeath. Little slices of Mr. Grim that I couldeat like scuppernongs from the vine.In the South, we rarely get snow. Thicklike eider down. Frost creeps in, into bonesyour ex the […]

The Best of You, Honey, Belongs to Me – Allister Nelson

We the unhinged,we with the screws loose,we the weird and wild walkerswending our ways without mending them,walking carefully, choosing our paths, rough and smooth,but mostly rough, so we watch out for hazards,we the watchers, the uncomfortably numbwatchers in a mad worldwe want only to change. Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced […]

We The Unhinged – Lynn White

The Heretics, Lovers, and Madmen Literary Collective loves a good writing/creativity prompt challenge. Our goal is to provide prompts on a regular basis. We hope that our ‘Shadow in the Frame’ prompt stirs your muse and that you consider submitting your prompt response to Heretics, Lovers, and Madmen for publication. We welcome poetry, prose, flash fiction, creative […]

Writing/Creativity Prompt Challenge: You Could Start a Cult

They’ve come before. Remember history. Remember the millions, the thousands, the hundreds– totaling seventeen million. And yet, always, they come. Different times, different places. Always leaving behind traces of their strange bitter fruit. They are poised, preparing, ready to come. Some of us remember, state the parallels, recite the historical, are laughed at as the […]

They are coming – Annette Kalandros