- At the Outset by Jay MacLeod
- Stardust by Chrissa Sandlin
- A Cappella by Melissa Studdard
- Taking Flight by Mangesh Naik
- Bride Price by Sari Krosinsky
- Let Down by WC Roberts
A Cappella
by Melissa Studdard
She perchs you 
at the edge of a cliff,
leaves you there,
afraid for your life,
afraid for her life,
in fear of the general
and overwhelming
delicacy of life,
takes you back
to that primordial soup—
the thing
that first crawled
out of the ocean,
leaves you clinging
beneath the lip of a wave,
the underside
of a volcano,
the quivering,
quavering
cloud from which
lightening is about
to strike, leaves you
hanging there, hanging —
about to fall —
it's over,
you know it,
and then,
in a beat,
she transports you
back to power,
raw and absolute —
the battle cry,
the victory chant,
the will to break
an unbroken horse.
So throaty and brave,
contralto a cappella,
she empowers you
not through words
but by scats,
tells your story
in the lilt
of a wounded note,
your human story,
the tale of undying
millennium,
perpetuation
of the race,
survival
of the fittest —
you—
human only
in form,
but really
the unconscious
fluttering
of a god's
dreaming eye.
She sings this
into existence — 
atom, cell
and DNA strand all -
this magical life.
She sings!
And sunflowers turn
their heads to listen,
and the moon drops
low and early
in the night,
and the voice
settles down
like a boat in the ocean —
faint rain
can still be heard
trailing off,
tapering away,
and you're in that boat,
anchored by a rope,
at the mercy
of the weather,
but calming,
calmer now,
so still.
BIO:
Melissa Studdard's middle grade novel, Six Weeks to Yehidah, will be released by All Things That Matter Press in late 2011. Her poetry, short stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in journals such as Boulevard, Gradiva, The American Book Review, Literal Latte, Poets and Writers, Connecticut Review, Dash, The Smoking Poet, and elsewhere. She's a Book-Reviewer-At-Large for The National Poetry Review, a contributing editor for both The Criterion and Tiferet, and host of Tiferet Talk.