New Jersey Couple Out on the Town

Photography, 6" x 9"

Lawrence Bridges' photographs have been exhibited at the Las Laguna Art Gallery, the London Photo Festival, the ENSO Gallery in Malibu, and were featured in the Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery in November 2025. He lives in Los Angeles.

Swallow Me Whole

Shailaja Vats Das

You are aChangeling,Mamma
How do you do it?
You were shoutingsoloud at me
Became so big like a monster
And all that monster wanted to do
Was turn me into an insect
Scampering across the ground
Trying to flee your big, heavy feet
And now — look at you
You are beautiful                                 
So full of grace
Everyone adores you
I want to adore you,
I want to adore you so much —
But every night in my dreams
The monster reaches me first
As I scamper away
Into the dark caves,
searching for my mamma full of grace —
When I know she is on my heels
Breathing,
Grunting heavily.
Just inches away from swallowing me whole.

Author's Bio

Shailaja is an emerging poet and an engineer living in Los Altos, California. She was born and raised in Ranchi, a small town in India, and now shares a slightly chaotic home with her husband, two teenage children, a dog, and more useless objects than she would ever agree to labeling thus. When she is not navigating her professional life or tending to her family, she is an occasional writer. Her work has appeared in two anthologies,Turning the Corner (Eber & Wein), I Don’t Feel Anything (Wingless Dreamers),and inSuperlative, A Literary Journal.It is forthcoming in 1922 Review, Half and One,andBeyond Words.She is the editor of a coffee-table book,Boys II Men.