Beauty in Adversity
​Photography by Clarissa Cervantes

“The lotus flower whose roots are often buried in the mud, represents the powerful psychological resistance to transform adversity into beauty as well as to bloom full potential, despite the circumstances around it.”
Clarissa Cervantes is a poet, photographer, physical therapist and researcher. She strives to create meaningful images and articles to inspire and uplift readers. 
www.fineartamerica.com/profiles/clarissa-cervantes

No One Is Coming to Save Me 
Fiction by Rachel Laverdiere
CW: Abuse, Sex, Death (of a child)

Pummeled by rain and panic, wind screaming above the ticking engine, above the searing throb of mangled limbs pinned between the quad and the bog—I am trapped
beneath the granary, shirt snagged on a nail 
in a subway headed to god-knows-where in a country where I do not know how to speak
by the crush of a man whose beery breath suffocates until I succumb
searching and searching for my car in a parking lot that triples and triples in size until I am a speck—an ant wavering between grains of sand—and just before I disappear, my baby girl cries and reaches for me, but I cannot hold on to her, so she falls and falls and vanishes into the darkness…

​I wake. Spit rain and mud from my mouth. 

This was a dream. 
She never cried when she was born. 
I remember her skin, soft as crushed petunias, 
how they placed her on my breast so I could say goodbye. 
She never suffered, but I will never stop.
This pain will never end.

​Rain becomes drizzle, and wind congregates with treetops. 

Everywhere, the murmur of things forgotten:
the damp of dew between bare toes, 
the ozone smell of thunderstorms in June, 
an old lover’s hot breath quickening against my ear, 
the tang of a margarita, the crunch of its salted rim,
fresh beignets for breakfast 
my grandmother’s wheeze after her laughing spells
the wisp of my daughter’s hair against my chin, 
how I placed a snippet in the locket around my neck so we’d never have to part.
Rachel Laverdiere writes, pots and teaches in her little house on the Canadian prairies.
www.rachellaverdiere.com 
Twitter: @r_laverdiere