Touching Poems

Zara Queen lives her life in bold colors. She dances for a living—literally—as one of the top performers at Club Mirage. Fierce, flirty, and unapologetically herself, she’s used to being wanted… but never truly seen. When her apartment floods, she ends up crashing with Liam Carter, a grumpy, emotionally closed-off single dad who thinks Zara is the human equivalent of chaos. He wants silence. She lives out loud. "You don’t belong in my world, Zara." “Then why do you keep looking at me like I’m the only thing keeping you alive?" Their roommate agreement had one rule: no touching. But rules were made to be broken, especially when sparks start flying and hearts start healing. "You strip for strangers, but the way you look at me... it’s like I’m the only one who’s ever seen you." As the lines blur between comfort and desire, Liam and Zara must ask themselves: can love grow in the space between damage and desire?

"On my knees, your highness…"Luciano groaned when he heard my words.I bite my lips seductively,I could see the lust and need in his eyes. "Damn it! Spoiled brat!"He cursed under his breath and grabbed my hair roughly but carefully,then slid it in my mouth… _____________ Hazel had everything a woman would ever wish for, a loving and caring husband, a happy home and all the power in the palm of her hands. However, her heavenly life becomes a nightmare when her husband finds his fated mate.Betrayed and broken,Hazel tries to get free from the chains of fate but Hazel finds it hard because of the ties that binds her to her husband. As though Hazel's husband finding his fated mate was not enough punishment from the goddess, her pack was attacked and she was taken by the heartless Lycan prince as his captive. Luciano, the Lycan prince who held onto his kingdom's rules tightly covets Hazel's beauty and he can't help the fire igniting within him. What happens when the secret from the past unfolds that threatens both Hazel's and the prince's lives? Will their love be strong enough to hold them together or will they be consumed by anger, betrayal and pain?

My sister, Anna Hawkins, and I are twins, but I'm slightly heavier than her when we were born. Anna has always been weak and sickly since young, whereas I'm always active and healthy. When Anna was four years old, she was diagnosed with leukemia. Mom blamed me for stealing Anna's nutrients when I got born, so I needed to return the nutrients to her. When I got my blood extracted for the first time, a thick syringe was used on me. I was so scared when I saw it. Mom told me not to be scared. She gave me a magical pen, stating that whatever wish I wrote down with the pen would come true. I wrote, "It won't hurt." When the syringe was plunged into my arm again, Mom bought me a sweet lollipop. The pain never struck me again afterward. When I was five years old, I drew a strawberry cake on the paper while getting 1000cc blood withdrawn from me. That week, Anna could sit up in bed and play on her own. When I turned seven years old, I wrote down my wish that I'd like to go on a vacation. The next day, I was sent into the operating theater for the doctors to collect my hematopoietic cells. For the first time ever, Anna's cheeks became rosy. When I was eight years old, I wrote that I wanted to become the top student of my grade. But a day before my exams, my bone marrow was drawn from me. Anna finally got discharged by the hospital. She got to wear new dresses that I never got to wear. In the year I turn nine years old, my body is heavily depleted. With a trembling hand, I can only write down a line in messy handwriting. "I hope… that I won't become Mom's daughter in my next life."

Tunnels deconstructs the individual’s Romantic fascination with ‘love’ or the grammaticality of beauty. Ideally, the ‘tunnels’ in the collection are subterranean love poems from the suburban imaginary. These seemingly syntactic tunnels travel through one’s literary imagination or heterotopic dreamscapes, and while αγάπη (Greek for ‘love’) inspires these rhizomic tunnels to navigate the abysmal ‘meta-spectacle’ of gesture, language or moment of poemness, the mind like the many-colored jeepneys of Manila, where driving past roast goose restaurants in Shek Kip Mei or spotting stilt houses in Kampong Kleang, attempt to explore the transgeneric textualities of the everyday, alongside the unstructurality of time and space, the littoral and the liminal.

Arya Harley enters into a millionaire agreement with Manhattan magnate Ayden Emory, in exchange for giving him a child and maintaining a fictional relationship, but with the unbreakable rule of not touching him or falling in love. Will she uncover the mystery surrounding the millionaire?

Two students are forced to share off-campus housing due to a housing crisis. Strict house rules are set- no late nights together, no touching, no crossing lines. But shared kitchens, midnight strolls and conversations, and stolen glances make the rules unbearable.

While cleaning Desmond Maynard's house, I accidentally knocked over his mother's keepsake. He once told me it was his most precious possession. But when I picked it up, hundreds of love letters spilled out. There were beautiful poems, passionate lyrics, and heartfelt confessions. He had written one letter a week without stopping. On the back of each one wrote a line: To My Love, Bunny. The nickname rang a bell. It was his junior in college. Things started to make sense. I slaved away for 13 years, running his household and caring for his family, but Desmond never even said he liked me. That was because he already had someone he liked. I sorted the letters by date, put them back, and grabbed my phone to make a call. "Mom, I'm in for the marriage proposal."

These are stories of true romance and touching emotion. I believe those two very important ingredients are constants in my highly sensual and very believable stories. My goal is to give you readers stories of high quality that may sometimes make you laugh, sometimes make you cry, but are always fresh and creative and contain many delightful surprises within their pages.

I'm just an unshifted Gamma's daughter. I'm turning 18 next month. I'm a late bloomer you see. But when I finally shift, I'll find my mate. But er.. there was this accident and I ended up touching the hottest guy's chest. Hehe, I touched my Alpha's chest!!

For the sake of my happiness with my boyfriend, I decided to go to the hospital to treat my congenital narrowness. But the attending physician turned out to be my boyfriend's friend—and the treatment plan itself made my face flush and my heart race. "During the course of treatment, there will be a great deal of intimate physical contact. That's unavoidable," he said. "For example, kissing, touching, and…"