The GGPCollective
Ⓒ Glass Gates Publishing, 2026
“Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.”
Paulo Coelho
Acknowledgments
Avery special thank you to all of our contributing writers. Without the courage to share your words and work with others, our little publication could not exist.
Please find our contributors and follow their pages on social media for more!
Follow @glassgatespublishing on Instagram for more announcements and future calls for submissions
● k. Christine
● Tinamarie Cox
● N.C
● doug thornhill
● Chelsey Jordan
● Adam Brooks
● MichaelT. Smith
Table of Contents
● Playing Solitaire
● Unsatisfied WithTime
● ANight in Prayer
● Highlighted
● large leaf 453
● Fruity
● StickToThe Plan/APOLOGY
● Synthetic Water; or Plan B (a satire…I hope)
Playing Solitaire
Now I go to the movies I want to see I order the take out I want to eat I go to the stores I want just to roam….
I go to the gym when I want Take a nap when I want And spend either 2 minutes or 2 hours on my phone…
And I love that no one has touched the blunt ends of my freshly cut hair No one has kicked up their feet in my Updated living room recliners No one has raked their fingernails through the new tattoo down my backbone….
And when I lay in bed at night and think about the odd satisfaction all of this gives It is also a stark reminder that I am all
Alone.
k. christine
Unsatisfied with Time
I can’t stop breaking my teeth on the unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bag, the encapsulated moments from the past I will never get to experience.
But when I change meal plans, stabbing my fork to catch the seeds that could grow my future, small bites of mouth-watering potential get stuck between the tines.
Starved and aged and greedy for more time, I reflect on the creature in the mirror, decide to devour all I see staring back at me, and choke down the hard angles.
This image of me becomes my last meal, and I remain hungry.
Tinamarie Cox
ANight in Prayer
It is said there is a night when the distance between heaven and earth grows thin— when every small prayer travels farther than it should.
But you do not need to know its name to feel its meaning.
Because on nights like this people remember that the heart was made for more than noise and hurry.
Someone decides to start again. Someone lets go of an old wound. Someone, for the first time in years, believes they might still be heard.
And somewhere in the quiet between breath and breath the world becomes lighter— not because the darkness disappears, but because hope has found a way to shine inside it.
@poems2_inspire_u
N.C.
highlighted walked accompanied only by long shadows in morning’s early golden sun witnessing dewdrops upon autumn’s tasseled corn highlighted in this gentle yellow wind
doug thornhill
large leaf 453
we live and stand on the great divide we never deviate from this single perspective; to one side all that has ever been to the other all that will become; we see neither clearly even though having lived in both; for a nanosecond or less we are in the present then it passes transforming into what will never be again; only to be replaced by another present another movie frame; seemly they flow as one passing at light speed still frames stitched together one after the other; our movie ends when the film breaks or burns the universe has no reel it is just what it is and the big bang was only the projector being flipped on
doug thornhill
Fruity
There's an elderly woman who likes to blow kisses my way on my daily wellness walks through my neighborhood.
She often wears a rose-red sweater, paired with a splash of red lipstick, her hair perfectly coiled in a French twist.
She's alone with no man or car, in a cottage-like house with flower boxes. Red geraniums dance within them.
She likes to chat with me about how she doesn't remember her age, nor care to. “It seems unimportant,” she says. I tell her my name is “Chelsey” each time she asks. She tells me it's a unique and interesting name for a girl as beautiful and spunky as me.
She confesses her love of fruit over cookies, and attests that's the reason she's still here. She once told me people called her “AppleAnnie” or “Annie Bananie” while growing up.
So every day, I blow a kiss back to a woman who looks happy as can be. She feels like an eighty-something-year-old version of me. Life is often kind of funny.
Asilly yet strong woman who likes to adorn her life in red, whom I smile at and say, “Hey,Annie Bananie,” as I go on those walks I no longer dread.
Chelsey Jordan
Stick To The Plan/APOLOGY
Exchanging clothes.
Too loose to remove the tags.
Stripped away to bare flesh.
I am not the same girl.
The corals in the oceans.
And the pinks beneath pale pinstripes.
They still tell me to stop dreaming.
Adam Brooks
Synthetic Water; or Plan B (a satire…I hope)
Should our fears become manifest –
and that manifestation be absence: namely, our water sipped from the earth as if from a straw of God’s, leaving nothing but the tragic sight of empty pools.
Aplan (which is to say plan B) for what we can do afterwards with the best of our abilities: namely, to make and bottle a corporate substitute: Synthetic Water.
“Less effort.”
“More waste.”
Those can be the taglines, which we could also profligate like a chant, as we bottle and market, bottle and market, bottle and market (like a train chugging along) the product -- spread it over the earth, probably not seventy percent of it excepting spreading the name. People will know our product not just through the taste, but through its marketing, which inferior water never had.
You’ll know it’s knockoff water from that corporate logo, which will be estimated at a value of something beyond human life.
Disclaimer: it will be less efficient than real water and probably will not hydrate the body, and even if it did hydrate the body, it might contain heavy metals that we will say are not proven to be dangerous --
But it will be certified and get tax breaks. It will not quench thirst, but it will be consumable.
In fact, it will be superior to water in that you will always crave more and therefore will lead to an endless stream of demand – pun intended. In fact, it will be ultra-consumable. The market can be cornered so much that the earth will be square again – downright Pythagorean in all its limits.
For should the planet die, our bank accounts won’t.
Michael T. Smith
Ⓒ Glass Gates Publishing, 2026