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Our Possible Lives Born into what we are, with no recourse or recompense. Who could have imagined such a time and  such a place? Everything so sad and hollow,   nebulous hours, skies full of ash. A mess of things behind, a mess of things ahead. Our possible lives drift about like  bits of conversations overheard on a bus, the dead blooming like weeds in overgrown fields. An indifferent wind blows each moment through the days and the years and we never did  end up doing  much of anything. A Dog Or a Wave I wasn’t born to be immortal, never had it in me to hustle that way. Let my poems be sputtering  torches in the void. Should someone find one on their journey,   may it lighten their way long enough to allow  them to continue just a little while more, like a smile from a dog or a wave from someone you actually want to see. Reminder: Hey you dumbass wretched half-baked saints, you slapdash sinners,  you feckless dupes  selling your garbage pail souls to a lesser demon’s lackey the first chance you get, you wackos still dreaming of beauty in the face  of the machinations of the dull and monstrous kings who bleed you like  the dumb animals you are, you 5 time suicides, you muses to the damned, you elegant weirdos, you fucking mooks, you losers dreaming of victory, too close  to the sun with your paper bag wings, you knuckleheaded fools forever rushing in where angels  wouldn’t dare — listen, there’s no time left  for your bullshit  or mine. We’re already gone, and the void  offers no rewards for our best intentions. Eternity is a long time not to exist, so quit fucking around. Take your grubby little fingers, plunge them into the fierce and bitter heart of yourself and eat. The People Who've Been to Hell and Back  The people who've been to hell and back, you know it right away, even if they're too polite to talk about it. You can hear it in their voices and smell it on their jackets. There’s a look in their eyes that makes you nervous. Get a few drinks in them and they’ll loosen up a bit, tell you  how Dante only saw the guest rooms and never set foot in the  dirty parts of town. The people who've been to hell and back will not suffer bad poetry or good intentions. They have great fashion sense and the best record collections. They find the beauty and the terror in all the places you never thought to look. They'll tell you hell is just like  the most terrible things you've dreamed only you don't wake up. They can see all your secrets as if they were branded in light upon your skin. They could tell you your fate like a cheap vaudeville trick, reveal your final destination  in great and unwarranted detail, but by the time they got around to it you’d be already there.

Cold I used to be a tree leaves of ambition now I cannot find  myself in sudden  snow. Yes, I would  melt in your hands a gray towel to soak up. What washed away washed me ashore, cold sand scratching  skin. My body yearns  in dry winter air. E & K 4EVA It’s the running office joke.                                                     And maybe it’s cool. It’s high school. Both of you laugh silently  at the mouth of the hallway.                               I never would have known  them behind me if not for the muscles  whispering when he flexed in his black shirt,  leaning against a board full of push                               pins, and the printer having ceased– finally– it's endless work. Houseboat Sleeping on a houseboat– the world     a soft           earthquake, what creaks if not the heart this worn on marina water        ropes tugging at your limits. Climb the ladder to the wheel and pretend to steer this stupid thing in the only way it was never meant to work. How Good We Have It     I turn the shower knob clockwise and fly open the curtains. I shiver even though the world burns beyond my walls. No one in the mirror. An empty plastic bottle of Listerine (a puddle of nuclear winter-blue at the bottom). Half-open toiletry bag, though I have not vacationed in years. Inside, a travel toothbrush. Cheap plastic. Did you know we eat a credit card a week? And so, this is what my body knows. Filled to gills with the promise of money, money itself being its own shaky promise. Power? Freedom? When  I step out of the tub, dripping pieces of me that are not me, having soaked in a week of being alive in a borrowed and now mechanical but breathing  body, artificial as I am, inessential,  keeping the past alive with LASIK eyes, a genuine VIN– the wet bottoms  of my feet collect accumulated fur  of my animal in a midcentury rug, a shedding body that has become part of another one. Therapy A tree of marbles, faded– fruit, or poisonberry, with  its long and tired branches carrying the weight  it never knows, sags  in front of the new and bustling market in the center of the city. Breathes in the fumes of passing cars. Me, too,  and the lanternflies, on a  road to feeling meaning.  O, to have an insect graze  my leg before the sun  does the same– I want  to arm wrestle the emotions I can’t hold on to, where  our elbows lock on a surface  that is not temporary, palms sweaty with each other. Put me  in a tournament where I make it to the final match– against joy, the highest seed– and win.  If the necessary muscles  are sore the next morning, weak and wise and hopeful–  the wind reminding me,  the strong tree bending– I’ll take the rematch.  Each time. For as long  as it takes. Free Boba Tea at the blood bank without your sister the weight room  without your strength at North Market  without money the soft spheres in this tea go down  easy which is unlike  me January 2023 if anyone asks I'm at the bar to fight winter depression a clear straw  indicates intention water flowing however I can get it just as sun emits light that satiates I'll dance eventually to the best  of my ability handing back black  straws to whoever asks in the lingering holiday lights that spell a start to a year that was never new being one continual floodgate of all existence pouring into my hands into my can I'm dancing the beluga James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet working in film production. His latest chapbook is A God You Believed In  (Pinhole Poetry, 2023). Recent poems are in ITERANT, Stirring , and The Indianapolis Review . He edits The Mantle Poetry from Nashville, Tennessee . ( jamescroaljackson.com )

When enough affection has been given to an object, it develops its own lifeforce. It acquires a personality and develops loyalties and preferences just like any other living creature. Have you ever threatened a computer or sacrificed blood during a repair project? The device works afterwards, doesn’t it? Taking the soul of a starship is a serious endeavor. The end of their lives is not the same as a mortal death. They do not have heart attacks. They do not die in their sleep. They are not taken down by predators as part of the Great Circle of Life. And when a starship dies, she does not die alone. The heart of a starship is not the engine as one might think. Just like each starship design is different, so is the location of her soul. The Sabrina  was birthed from the affections of her favorite engineer, who often combed through her interior wiring to patch a shorted circuit. He dreamed of special modifications just for her when he crawled into his bunk at night, and although his bunk no longer existed, torn out long ago and replaced with a seating area for passengers, his affections were strongest there. Following a polite exchange, I interjected myself between two lovers perched upon the bench and knelt beneath the seat. It took only a few tender words to coax the Sabrina  to follow me into the Great Unknown. The lovers, enamored with one another, did not see me depart, nor did anyone else, and the abandoned shell of the Sabrina  continued on its course to Antares. She would never reach her destination.

October I enter with my season in candlelight  Three burgundy kisses , westward  From a splintered jar  Seeping into oceans  Goodnight is cried , Damp lights assume prophets , Recoiling in the flustered breath of desperate inquiry  Those who have lingered with soft oath  And shape with delicate rebellion  Taste temptation in tragedy , For only with eyes and lips daring  Does laughter dissolve trespassed , A poured world into the mouths of mystery  Dawn is pale  Your lips will echo , Tragedy can be golden  If the season carries the night slow.  Hourglass We are held to the wind  And stiffened where frames croon heedful ,  Timber dressed furtive  And gardens enchanting light ,  I am tired ,  And though bones gnaw their secrets  As chandeliers bleed through velvet ,  I remain effectual to the brushes of this polished brick ,  Sands rest gradual , Measured ribbons of centuries ,  Yet still the avenue inhales me ,  Passing me through in a silhouette of espoused haste , The thread of infancy  Borrowed lengthwise ,  Figures dissolving into sudden dust and gilt  Cruel , as by splintered step in glass , Haste and its time  Ticking wax that falls fading from the lacquered oak  We may dream into its portrait  And bruise with its frame  To dare pursue its gilded vanishing.   A Costume of Lavender With lavender through the railroad  He sits with demons  And the clamorous abode of aching wheels through the day  “Summer, I thought you'd never come”  As jars begin to clink from the swallowing rust ,  His chapel is the residue of midnight in a green chapel , All beginnings can change the world  When crows are your witness  And the stillness from spring echoes as a furnace  Of acquired drowning rain ,  And all your flowers are birthed in tunnels  As souls of lending light  With quivering petals ,  A station  He moves to the stem and purple ,  Only to breathe.  Fainting Lights There is a shadow ,  The rose                  Its vine  Please forgive me my dear. Darren Lynch, aged 25, from Dublin, Ireland, is a writer whose work attempts to delve into the corners of the modern mind. Experience, imagination, and fascination are the keystones that help shape the poems he offers to his readers. From a very young age, Darren was immensely inspired by the poets that came from the same small island as him. From Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats to James Joyce and Eavan Boland. His inspiration was drawn from the poetic atmosphere they planted within the soil of Ireland. Darren is currently finalising his first chapbook of poetry titled ‘The Neighbourhood of Madness’ which is the culmination of poems written on his travels through the rest of Europe. Each poem within this maze has been delivered with the purpose of finding breath. A vessel, if you will, to carry the reader into a space of nothing but pure thought. As such, Darren has received multiple publications, which can be found through his Linktree and Instagram below. As always, Darren is happy to be in the same space as fellow writers, so please do not hesitate to contact him if you find his work enjoyable or even puzzling. To finish with a quote from Oscar Wilde ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’ Stay Groovy. Instagram: @darrrenlynch Linktree : @ https://linktr.ee/darrenlynch23

Cleanliness Sensitivity in good care always orderly and neat all these are next to godliness   Contentment A handful, used like a bountiful little or abundance, no difference anything possessed is enough Discipline Squeezing the body’s comfort adding lime to its sweet candy to achieve a profitable goal Author’s note: A Senryu is a three-line unrhymed Japanese poetic form structurally similar to haiku but treating human nature, usually in a satiric or ironic vein. Whereas haiku focuses on nature, senryu is concerned with human nature and its foibles.

The receptionist turns up just before I leave. Helpful. Calm. A little weary, like she’s just been woken by the air raid sirens too. She points me in the direction of the shelter, but lingers. Maybe thinking about the hotel dog. Maybe that I am overreacting. Maybe about the war. She notices my trembling hands, and her eyes soften with kindness. Or pity. I wander down the street. Find a building — half-lit, eerie. A cross between a communist obelisk and a Lexus showroom. Neither of which is inviting. I hesitate. But air raid sirens change the calculation — and the fear of social ineptitude temporarily takes a back seat. - - - - - Slouched in the lobby, sitting. Could be asleep. Bearish, stocky, wrapped in a plasticky raincoat. I feel better seeing him, at first. But when I ask if this is the shelter, he barely looks at me. Shrugs. Grunts. Not exactly reassuring. Probably my fault for relying on an app instead of learning Ukrainian. Second man turns up. Could be the villain in a '90s Bruce Willis movie. Thinner, but strong. Tough in a way that had nothing to do with size. Could be a bouncer, a taxi driver, a soldier, a gangster. But he was none of those. He was here. He speaks bluntly, even though I can’t understand him. There is, initially, no softness to him whatsoever. A woman turns up. The bear wrapped in plastic laughs — dull, blunt. Almost, look at this idiot . No one else is amused. Not even him. She walks over briskly. Yes? I pause. Am I at the shelter? Yes. She immediately walks away. After a beat, I follow. I hear them behind me. Both of them. The hairs on my neck stand up, and my attention shifts from potential bombs to a more immediate sense of danger. - - - - - We walk downstairs. Into dilapidation. Thick concrete walls, peeling paint, red and green in parts, raw elsewhere. Pockmarks throughout. Some larger cavities, where sections are missing. The aesthetics don’t extend to actual weakness. The building feels strong, solid. The cold advances — floor, to wall, to air, to skin. The woman opens a thick metal door and disappears. I go to follow, and the ursine man breaks through the sound of shuffling footsteps with a gruff NO  — a verbal parallel to the walls. He motions to a dark hallway. Between them and darkness, my mind scrambles for options, finds none. Moving into the dark, expecting to lose a passport, cash, more. Laminated signs appear, blu-tacked to the wall. Small words in Cyrillic, large words in English. NO PHOTOS . We turn left, towards trickles of fluorescent light, and hallway gives way to hallway. One wall lined with heavy wooden benches, each draped with a blanket. Thick wool, mostly blue, red flecks, scratchy. The space is empty except for the seats, the signs, and us. - - - - - The ursine man walks away, and the air feels different. Softer. The Die Hard villain stays. He offers his hand. We trade charades. He mimes, he speaks, he pauses to check that I'm still nodding, understanding. Assumptions, fears give way to shame, curiosity. It's hard. 300 languages here. Deutsch. American. Français. I speak Français. No English.  He draws 3 0 0 on the wall with his finger again and again for me. He mimes writing in an invisible notepad, his hand as paper. I offer my phone, and he shakes his head, refusing it. Americans , slightly derisively — his request misunderstood. I'm Australian! , feeling braver, or safer — attempting a smile, expecting to be excused of my faux pas. Americans , undaunted, unimpressed, uninterested. Not a misunderstanding, but a correction. I accept my new, unwanted nationality, and we return to charades. He acts for me, silently. His knee is injured. His elbow is injured. His heart is injured. It's unclear if the pain is physical, or emotional, or both. He leans on a heater for a while, then slowly wanders off. I hear his voice in the distance, talking, out of sight. - - - - - The shelter slowly fills. First, a middle-aged woman with a cat in a carrier. Then, a man in his thirties, focused on his phone. Another woman, with a young girl. She plays games on an iPad and soft dings of success emanate from the speaker. The hotel receptionist is absent. No one is talking anymore. Occasionally, the iPad sings. Sounds of waiting cover the silence. Shuffling feet. Readjusting coats. Breathing. Other than that, it’s quiet. Very cold, I think. Hard to tell whether the shaking is nervousness or temperature. - - - - - A man in a black coat arrives, walking fast. He approaches the woman and child, slows. Hands the woman a power bank. Crouches, touches the girl's leg. Speaks softly, gently. A quiet snort of laughter. Their voices mingle with echoing footsteps. We go back to waiting. Max Hedley is an Australian uncomfortable with, and curious about, the state of the world. Social media links are https://esquivalience.org https://www.instagram.com/esquivalience/

She keeps setting a fourth plate at the table. No one comments anymore. Her mother clears it like clockwork. Her father eats in silence. Her sister rolls her eyes but never removes it. Even the dog sits by that chair, tail still. It started a year ago. After the accident. After the quiet ambulance. After the unlit candle at the funeral. She set the plate the next morning, and the chair exhaled, not a creak, but something deeper. Like memory stretching. At  first, she tried to explain. “It just feels wrong,” she said. “Like someone might still come home.” Eventually, she stopped speaking. She only placed the plate, warmed it with breath, and set a fork to the right. Sometimes, she wonders if the plate is less for him and more for herself. That the ritual is not a memory, but a tether. Something that reminds her she hasn’t drifted too far from who she was before the silence arrived. Sometimes, a curl of steam escapes. Not from food, just breath, like winter mornings when the air admits something sacred. Once, she caught her father staring at the plate. His eyes weren’t sad. Just curious. As if trying to remember a face he never wanted to forget. There are days she swears she hears breathing at that seat. A quiet inhale, measured and steady, timed with her own. Once, she reached out. Her hand passed through nothing but came back warm. Each night, she washes the plate, dries it with the same towel, and places it in the same cupboard. Each morning, she takes it out again. One morning, the chair had shifted ever so slightly. Not pulled out, not moved with intent, just... different. As if someone had tried to sit and changed their mind. She didn’t mention it, but that day, her hands trembled while pouring the tea. The world moves on like a polite machine. Teachers talk about deadlines. Strangers hold open doors. Sunlight bends differently in winter, but the chair waits. She doesn't believe in ghosts. Only habits. Only warmth that lingers too long. Only the way grief builds a home in your bones and calls it memory. When the light touches the fourth plate just right, she smiles. As if someone’s laughing with her. As if the world never ended at all. Nehal Sharma is a Jaipur-based writer. Writing is how she lives inside her own curiosity, turning observation into reflection and reflection into story. She runs the blog “Mythology Meets Reality,” where she tries to make sense of it all without pretending it makes sense.

Set me down inside a diner scene—in a film, a novel, on TV—and I’m bound to settle into whatever story you’re telling.  My back intuits the vinyl of the booth; my small breath quickens to mingle with the sighs aspiring from warmed coffee; surrounding chatter about new storefront churches, high-school basketball and the weather becomes the weather I know.  David Lynch, that great, mad American filmmaker, touched the truth when he said, “There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.”  Lynch always meant what he said.  From a wide canon of curious moments, the sun-stabbed diner scene in his noir Mulholland Drive —and its strange afterword—still passes viewers’ lips 25 years later. Cherished moments from his TV masterpiece Twin Peaks  nestle into the warm, wood-paneled world of the Double R Diner.  (I’d die to visit the real thing, still a working cafe in North Bend, Washington; though rumors say the pie is itself a tourist trap, nowhere near as good as Dale Cooper and the Bookhouse Boys claimed.)  Plenty of my favorite artists understand this safety Lynch identifies, this sacredness. In his Coffee and Cigarettes, filmmaker   Jim Jarmusch pillowed diners with reverent black-and-white, escorted us to table with the likes of Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, translated the dialogue of weary, knowing nods.   And while After Dark is considered a “lesser” work, legendary Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami made me a disciple for life by visiting a Tokyo Denny’s on its early pages. First leading us there at 11:56 p.m., Murakami reveals the personality of the place by night; “everything about the restaurant is anonymous and interchangeable.”  Yet roles are performed and routines observed in diners like Murakami’s; touch is transferred, from fingertips to ceramic coffee mugs, then to forehead temples. This nearly blank and transposable slate, these modest gestures, bend toward twinned meaning. There’s the inherent meaning of being anywhere at all and the meaning to come if and when another person joins us in our rituals.  In the diner, where we comb a menu of choices yet so often stick to the usual , this want for meaning becomes softer yet more sure. This is why patrons make sad eyes at waitresses here and would-be philosophers lean back to unburden themselves of deep-down wisdom before loosing a low whistle and waving a hand as if to say It all matters. Or maybe it doesn’t.  Here we enjoy our meandering conversations, punctuated with silence and shrugs and non-sequiturs, conversations which call up details no one needs to remember even as they breach the questions everyone is asking.  Insecure party hosts and seasoned silence-fillers love to pose some variation of a worn-out quiz: Tell me the people, living or dead, you would invite to a dinner like this one.  To me, the supremely more interesting question is who would you take with you into the diner?  Two fellows come to mind. I reach backward more than 50 years, then nearly 500 for very different men who almost share a name. Into the East Coast and the middle of the 20th century, I call up the Beat prince, Jack Kerouac. Facing the heart of 16th-century Spain, I ask one more favor from St. John of the Cross.  For all the strangeness of these invitations, we three intersect—minds and souls, now embodied—at the night.  Kerouac wrote so many different nights: nights on the road and tucked into your hometown; nights of much wine and much song; nights of consolation and without conclusion; nights when you touch something or someone miraculous without caring whether they will fade to stardust in your palm.  Mattering most, the ways Kerouac treated night as a three-dimensional possibility. In the company of childhood friends or would-be lovers, whether moving your body through the tangles of New York City or to the edge of a shy New England creek, Kerouac’s belief came through. We might be different people inside the night and on the night’s other side. This faith keeps him like a patron saint on my shoulder.  I picked up St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul at a time I would read any night-bearing word. His lyrical writ, enduring some 450 years, tests the night as metaphor for the Godward life, a place and a condition of co-equal darkness and light. In his night, we know the blessing of emptiness. Strange comfort permeates the souls which feel themselves turning over, being restored to a more austere happiness in God. Here, even desperation and doubt count as blessings, drawing us up into inevitable holy love. We endure the night for the sake of eternity growing within us.  John’s commitment to the image impresses me. While he still treats night as something to be overcome, his surprising tenderness with these dark hours keeps me coming back. The more evident saint, he is no lesser mystery. I reach for them to indulge the questions I keep asking. Must night be a metaphor for where we meet God or may we actually meet God there? Is night a good unto itself? Am I right to tour these late hours, naming lights whose brightness passes all understanding? Or am I deceived, too faithless to wait for the sunrise? In his story collection The Coast of Chicago, Stuart Dybek writes of “an all-night diner to which, sooner or later, insomniacs find their way.” “In winter, when snow drifts over curbs, they cross the trampled intersections until they come upon footprints that perfectly fit their shoes and lead them there. On nights like this in summer, the diner’s lighted corner draws them to its otherwise dark neighborhood like moths.” This is where I propose we meet.  One man at a time eases into a back booth, and even in the easing, our dissimilarities grow obvious. From his wise-cornered eyes, John looks around perplexed, perhaps even offended, at shifting stacks of hot cakes. Jack sinks into the place like a man who knows the contemplative appeal of a steak-and-eggs platter.    Seated and thus smaller, John carries the charisma of a sage still, as if the very particles around him are charged with the electricity of God. Jack lights a cigarette, huffs and puffs and coughs a blue joke, speaks of a couple saxophonists nobody but him knows.  Before the coffee delivered and plates of biscuits, John performs the sign of the cross as if to consecrate the body and blood of Christ. Waiting for his new friend’s hands to fall into rest, Jack offers some weak but not unkind wordplay about this true man of the cross. I am not embarrassed by him. For each way Jack mildly irritates me, he enunciates a dozen things I forget to thank God for; Jack teaches me to number the trees, notice the hearts burning within strangers, to slacken my grip and extend my hands in front of me as if I might perforate the night, become one with its glories. I want Jack’s voice in my ear, at the table.  My whole life, I have played the translator. Growing up, I served groups of misunderstanding friends and still go between adults whose values live closer than they might appear. So I don’t mind translating now; the labor causes me to listen ever closer to these saints and their words.  Already, I hear the consonance as coffee comes. Coffee keeps us common. The diner does its magic. In this place, time both stills and, as Murakami wrote, reflects “deeper stage(s) of night,” darkness softening and sharpening just outside our window. Eventually we speak the same language.  Realizing this without needing to comment, we breathe lighter, talk louder. Sometimes we even roar. Rare moments resemble a better, truer rendering of 2 a.m. dorm-room conversations where you talk about everything and nothing at once.  Jack tells stories, and inside them, hums themes neither John or I know as if to ring our bells. John’s eyes twinkle as he uncovers a punchline that cuts the centuries.  And I keep the center, sliding questions back across the table. Somewhere in a second or third hour of conversation, we turn the night inside-out. Jack and I occasionally stick out our chests, flip John’s words around like a prod:  You really  think a soul can come to see “penances are its pleasures; fasts its joys; and its consolations are to make use of the sacraments and to occupy itself in Divine things?” We lace the question mark with exclamation points. John really does. His conviction begets intimacy. He talks, and Jack and I listen with intention, murmur what sounds like “amens.” Once, I swear to God, Jack mutters “when you put it like that ...” under his breath.  My friends never quite achieve a shared understanding of the word “sensual.” I lose count of how many times John speaks of purgation, and how many times Jack swallows the term like his coffee’s ground-speckled dregs.  Jack tips ash in the tray and John subdivides sentences, pausing sometimes to gaze at the ceiling as if waiting for divine permission to keep speaking.  Our words finger sides of the same coin, even if we stop short of spending the silver. Night is for traveling through, John asserts. Jack agrees, though for him the motion is its own prize. We all believe God, or some God-force, bids us come, whistling our way through and waiting for us at the sidewalk’s end.  We all want the same things from the night: to meet our created selves and transcend them somehow; to stumble into proof of love; to know light enough to keep us walking toward that great and indissoluble force. Reaching the longer lulls, my friends—to their credit—seem willing to live within them. In this quiet accord, this acceptance, I know why we gather.  Sitting with Jack to my right and John across the table, hands drawing remnant warmth from mugs our waitress long abandoned, I am free to reject false choices, to broker two visions of the night and however many more the night may abide. The night is big enough to harmonize.  For a kid who grew up with the metaphor alone, freedom attends the notion of living with the metaphor and in the physical night without fear. Contra John, I believe my desires will deepen rather than flatline there. Only night will tell.  I pick up the check as Jack offers genuine thanks and John’s downcast gaze speaks a humble word. Stepping into the night, really early morning—into the myth of it, its dimensions both known and beyond speech—I am already losing my friends’ words. They leave me their texts to retrace, but there is something truer at work.  In diners, the impression of the conversation, that which we carry away, means as much as the conversation itself. This is the usual, and it is not.  I carry away gratitude for a person’s own saints, for their momentary guidance and unintended consequences of their unintended prayers.  Of course, I carry gratitude for the night itself, more sacred than I believed before we sat for coffee and communion. Blessed is the night, and blessed are those who will be found therein.  Aarik Danielsen is a writer, journalist and librarian living in Missouri. His work is forthcoming or appears in Pleiades, Image Journal, Split Lip, Rain Taxi, Tinderbox Poetry Journal  and more. He sometimes teaches at his alma mater, the Missouri School of Journalism. More often, he travels I-29 to and from Nebraska, where his partner resides.

The government is replacing people with Replicants. They got to Carter a couple nights ago—when I woke up, I knew it wasn’t my fiancé lying beside me, even though it looked just like him. I wondered whether they’d programmed the thing to think it was really him before I slid my gun out from under the pillow and blew half its head off. That’s how I discovered that Replicants are organic. Fake Carter looked human, right down to the blood and brain.  I didn’t cry because I knew in my heart that he was still alive and probably giving his captors hell. I decided to try to find him, but I knew I couldn’t do it alone—and thanks to my rescue pup, I won’t have to.   Taffy is part Bloodhound, so I’ve been teaching her to growl whenever she catches a whiff of Replicant. She’s a fast learner, and fake Carter’s body has been the perfect training tool.  Last night, my good girl hit 100% accuracy, so now I’ll know who I can trust to join me in the fight. If our numbers are strong enough, we just might have a chance of freeing everyone who’s been taken. Maybe we can even bring down the whole damn regime.  I wake at dawn and shuffle downstairs to make coffee and work on my plan. As usual, Taffy bounds into the kitchen to greet me—but she stops short. And then she growls.  Maria Carvalho’s multi-genre work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including Roi Fainéant Press, MetaStellar, Free Flash Fiction, Twin Pies Literary, 101 Words, Literary Revelations,  and All Your Stories . Her short stories have been published in many anthologies, including several titles in the Owl Hollow Press Anthology Series, and her poetry appears in several best-selling books from Literary Revelations. Her popular children's book Hamster in Space!  was praised by Kirkus Indie Reviews for its "sharp understanding of kids' wacky sense of humor." Find her on Bluesky and Twitter: @immcarvalho

The first thing I notice the ammo room smells peppermint; normally a soothing scent but now I find it offensive.  “Who’s the asshole?” I murmur. “What are you jabberin’ over there?” a cracked hoarse voice barks from the dark. It’s the old sergeant, Half-Brain Marc, he’s probably taking his usual afternoon snooze in this godforsaken place. I sniffthe air again. “Some clown must’ve sprayed peppermint here. Who’s got the twisted mind to do something like this?” “Peppermint!” Marc exclaims. “It’s jus’ musty, rusty, gunpowdery stench, nothin’ else.” “Could be my fault. After ‘shrooming in the latrine since lunch and popping double ketamine, all odors are pretty offensive to me right now.” “Mushrooms? C’mon, Frank, you’re a holy roller, never do drugs. I can’t recall seein’ you with anythin’ stronger than green tea. No buzz, no hall’cinogenic for you.” The geezer is right. I’ve been imagining myself snorting cocaine, cursing at a colonel or higher rank in front of others, cutting off my right index finger to become a tuco — anything that would throw me in the stockade for a couple years. By then this hurly-burly should be over. I’ll emerge as a phoenix from fire, a peace warrior, write a best seller, go on talk shows, maybe run for office. Back to reality, I hate being the regiment’s sniper. Especially now that my spotter is out of commission on account of the neck wound he received last Friday. And of course I can’t trust any of these yahoos to take his place. Definitely not Marc who, I suspect, fills his canteen bottle with cheap bourbon, instead of the mandatory alertness potion that keeps you awake for fifteen hours, guaranteed. The old son-of-a-bitch also reeks of peppermint. J. S. O’Keefe is a scientist, trilingual translator and writer. His short stories and poems have been published in Everyday Fiction, Roi Faineant, 101 Words, Spillwords, ScribesMICRO, 50WS, AntipodeanSF, Friday Flash Fiction, Spirit Fire Review, Medium, Paragraph Planet, WENSUM, 50 Give or Take, 6S, Satire, MMM, etc.

I’m waiting in line at the corner store when I see my ghost four people ahead of me, trying to buy a pack of cigarettes. But he only has ghost money, so the clerk won’t let him buy anything. “Why don’t you try the boarded-up gas station across the street?” the clerk asks. “I hear it’s haunted. I’m sure they have all sorts of ghost cigarettes you can buy over there.” “They don’t have Camels,” my ghost says. “They only carry brands that no longer exist.” My ghost tries to get what he wants, that pack of Camels, the brand that smells like chocolate and/or your parents. Because chocolate smells like life. But in this world, if you don’t have real money at least, you’re going to need help to get the things you want. You’re going to have to ask for it. Ghosts are always asking for things, which is number four on the list of reasons why people don’t like them. After looking at me balefully for dragging my ghost in here somehow, the clerk just ignores the spectre, and just like that the other customers do too.  “Any of you could have a near-death experience,” my ghost grimly whispers. “Or a séance gone wrong, or bad credit even. The end of the world is nigh, all it takes is one little curse, and you’ll only wish you had been kinder to those of us from the other side.” The people in the store just shuffle through him, buying booze and cigarettes and other assorted crap that’ll kill them more or less slowly. “You don’t have to be assholes,” my ghost mumbles forlornly, not even bothering to try scaring anybody anymore. When it’s my turn, my ghost looks at me with the most reproachful expression, like if you won’t even buy cigarettes for your own ghost, then what sort of person are you? Someone who probably kicks his ghost when he thinks nobody is looking, that’s who. “Fine,” I sigh. “One pack of Camel Lights.” “Camel Unfiltereds,” my ghost interrupts. “Unfiltereds,” I proclaim. “And this here extra-large bag of Sun Chips is for me. It’s on sale, right? Oh, and give me some matches, too.” Grudgingly, the clerk rings me up, making me pay extra for the bag. Everyone knows ghosts are bad for business, at least the kind of business you want to have. But I choose to be aggressively cheerful in the situation, because I am NOT the sort of person who kicks his ghost, and I want my ghost to know it. How did I get to meet my own ghost, me who is definitely among the living? Let’s just say when you get the phone call for the pre-planned cemetery plot package next to your parents, and the salesperson goes on and on about how much you’ll save by purchasing NOW when you are in the pre-need stage of your life, and how, for just a little tiny bit more, you can get the full ghost experience to guide you in this life and help you commune with your lost loved ones: you really should say no thank you  to that last part. Outside the store, I hand the cigarettes over. My ghost opens the pack, tapping it first repeatedly against the wall of the store, cursing the clerk and all the clerk’s relatives and pets in terrible detail with each tap. “Do you want one?” he finally says. “No thanks,” I say reflexively. “Smoking’s bad for you.” “Not if you’re already dead,” my ghost says. “We get to smoke all we want. Light me?” I light the cigarette in my ghost’s mouth. I can see my face, my ghost face, and yes, it’s weird and that’s reason number three people don’t like ghosts, especially their own. We cross the street, walking past the abandoned gas station, up to the gates of the cemetery. It’s the Day of the Dead, as my ghost has been reminding me off and on all week, between haunting me and going wherever the hell ghosts go, and even though I’m not Catholic, I’d be a bad son if I didn’t at least make an attempt  to say hello to my parents. The security guard sees my ghost and waves us through. “You don’t like me,” my ghost says, not for the first time. “You think I’m a shitty ghost, but it’s really because you don’t like yourself.” “I don’t think you’re shitty,” I say, also not for the first time, opening up my bag of chips in front of a ghost who thinks he knows all the answers. “But I have no idea how you turned out to be who you are, because I am nothing like you.” “That’s what you’d like to think,” my ghost says. The smugness of the dead: that’s reason number two. We’ve arrived at my parents’ grave, right next to my own with the unfilled date on the stone. “You want some?” “Empty carbs? Fill me up!” He opens his mouth obscenely wide. I can’t do it: put chips in his face, getting filthy septic ghost juices on my hands. I hand him the bag, but it slowly drifts through his fingers and a bunch clatter on my grave. “Don’t be a chickenshit,” my ghost says. “They’re still sorta healthy, so I can’t hold onto them. You’re going to have to feed me. Or maybe I should tell you when you are going to die or whether there is in fact, a God who is judging everything you do and think right now.” One by one, I feed chips to my ghost, and it’s all kinds of gross to see how much he enjoys them. After a while, he says, “Your parents are here, do you have anything you want to say?” I’ve been nervously waiting for this moment. The salesperson was quite eloquent about this part: get the ghost, and you’ve got a direct line to the land of the dead, at least once a year, depending on your faith and the sincerity of your beliefs: you are sincere in your beliefs, right? I look around, observing more than a few other families having quiet conversations, and try to feel brave. “Well?” my ghost asks. “Hi Mom, Hi Dad,” I say to my ghost. “How are things in Heaven?” “They say they can’t go into the specifics but that they’re fine, and what the hell are you doing with a giant bag of Sunchips at your age?” “They were on sale, Mom,” I say, just assuming it would be my mom who would still be critiquing my eating habits. “Was the diabetes on sale too? We see the whole delta of your life and the consequences of your decisions, the ones you make and the ones you don’t, and trust me, you do not want to go there.” My ghost gives me a gleeful I’m not the only one who thinks you’re a fuckup look as he digs out another cigarette. Somehow, he’s figured out how to make the matches work all on his own. “Okay, Dad,” I say, because that was definitely a Dad thing to listen to. They’re right of course, I mean, who am I kidding buying the economy size? It’s kind of stupid to do self-destructive shit when you can see your own ghost sticking his tongue out at you. So I get up off the grass covering our graves, grabbing the bag of Sunchips. I reach in for a handful, which I start placing at the various graves around me, the ones where it looks like nobody’s going to visit. I hope that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re visiting the cemetery on the Day of the Dead. It’s not like I could just interrupt some grieving family at their own plot and ask whether it would be morally ok or culturally appropriative if I left a bunch of junk food on top of their dead relatives. I wander around in the crisp fall weather, stopping by the children’s section and then the Civil War veterans’ memorial. I’m a good person: I distribute every single chip in the bag to somebody buried beneath me. I know I ought to feel humble about my good deed, but I don’t, I turn around because I want to hear all the thank-you’s my ghost should be passing along. Instead, he’s rolling around on the ground, his mouth crammed full of Sunchips, laughing his literal ghost ass off. I mean the kind of laughter you do when you never have to worry about choking to death. “I do a great dad,” my ghost says in the five seconds he can grab between all the laughing. “Don’t I?” Bits of chips are sprinkling out of his face in all directions. “Delta of your life,” he says, doing something obscene with his hands that no statue can stop.  Is that reason number one, for why people hate seeing their own ghosts? The jokes? You tell me. If I could have murdered my ghost, that’s what I would have done. But in a moment, my ghost goes from laughing to rapidly slapping himself, as if little fires were breaking out on random parts of his body. “Quit it,” he shrieks. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he wails. Bits of him start disappearing, a kneecap, an eyeball, his whole left leg. Whatever’s doing this to him seems quite vicious, and very thorough. They leave his mouth so he can scream. When there’s just the head, some spine and one shoulder with a forearm still attached, just as quickly it stops. While my ghost gets the writhing in agony out of his system, I watch the empty bag of Sunchips drift away as if in a breeze, except the air around us is so very still, it’s like the world is holding its breath.  “You had to leave some chips in the Children’s section, didn’t you?” says my ghost, like a kid who never gets to keep anything he wants. “Can you at least get me another cigarette?”  He just sounds sad. Do I ever sound that sad? I give my ghost another cigarette. I even light it for him, seeing as he no longer has any hands. “Are you going to stay fucked up like this?” “So long as I stay here, yeah. But I should get better once I crawl out of this godforsaken SHITHEAP of a place.” “Do you want a ride?” He nods, so I do my best to scoop up what’s left of him into the sack from the store. It’s goopy and disgusting, but you know what? Under my skin, I’m probably just as goopy and disgusting. I don’t hate myself, or my ghost for that matter. But man, I need to make some adjustments if this is what I’m going to be by the time I’m dead.  I’m still ruminating when my ghost starts muttering in its sack, “All right, All RIGHT,” he declaims. “Could this day get any crappier?” I look down into the wreckage of my face as it mouths the words, “Ezra, it’s your dad. He says he used to smoke Camels when he was in his thirties, and was wondering if you could leave what’s left of the pack on top of his headstone.” “Is that all?” I ask. I make the bag with my ghost in it slosh around a bit. “Your parents want you to know they love you and respect your stupid life choices,” mutters my ghost, like he thinks he’s doing me a favor. “Fuck you too,” I jauntily tell my ghost (and maybe my parents?) as we wind our way out of that graveyard. It’s good to be alive. Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Animal Children , published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. His short story "Taylor Swift" won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast , and his fiction can be found most recently in The Glacier, Hex, Anti-Heroin Chic, Heavy Feather Review  and Your Impossible Voice.  He lives in Barcelona. https://linktr.ee/hughsteinberg .

He was a decent dancer and I guess I was too.  We Fevered and YMCA’d until last call so when he inquired, I eagerly scribbled my phone number on a Cover Girl-smudged cocktail napkin.     An ostentatious-orange Corvette drove up to the curb which, to be blunt, was the first mark against him.  Not my favorite color or  set of wheels.  Attired in a loud, polyester dress shirt and cream-colored, wide-wale corduroy pants, his sartorial flare gave me pause.  When he turned to escort me to his vehicle, I was aghast to note a trio of black streaks on the butt of his trousers.     Dinner was a disaster, no surprise.  The guy drank like the proverbial fish and never once did he think to ask about me, about my  life, about my  interests, passions or dreams which was a good thing (for him) because all I wanted for my immediate future was to get as far away from this loser as I could.  My mind scrambled to come up with an exit, an off-ramp, an escape from the insane situation in which I found myself ensnared.  I was clueless as to how I might get untangled from this sorry, pathetic date from the very depths of hell.   Why is it nice girls find it so difficult to assert themselves?  We left the restaurant (did I mention it was an all-you-can-eat buffet?) with plans to head to a new night spot he’d raved about all night.  But first, he wondered aloud, would I care to see his house?  That, too, was something he’d talked about non-stop while we ate.  It was apparent he was quite proud of having become a homeowner at such a young age.   I just didn’t have it in me to decline the earnest enthusiasm of his heartfelt invitation.   He gave me the grand tour which took all of five minutes.  It was a small, older, non-descript home.  Nice enough; neat and clean, nothing fancy.   Good , I thought, time to leave .  Walking through the living room, on our way to the front door, I saw it.  A huge portrait of himself hanging above the sofa, ornate brass candle sconces on either side.  OMG.  Who does  that?  The creep factor with this guy just ratcheted up more than a few notches.   Securely tucked back inside the claustrophobic space of the Corvette’s front seat, I watched as he started the ignition. The guy was nearly giddy in his anticipation of the night’s main event: the two of us tripping ye olde light fantastic.  At this point, I was still along for the ride and this  chick was miserable.  It’s worth pointing out that my date, apparently, possessed not a shred of awareness as to my discomfort.  Girlfriend, what did you get yourself into?   Come on, Julie.   Think .  How to put an end to this nightmare?   Talk soon turned to his job.  He worked on the shop floor of a local manufacturer of recreational vehicles.  Clearly, he enjoyed how he made his living.  Good for him, I generously thought to myself but it wasn’t enough.  Not even close.  He was nice — kinda, sorta — but that was as much grace as I was prepared to yield.   When I mentioned my sister, who also worked there, his excitement was palpable.   That’s your sister?  No way! He then proceeded to regale me with his strong infatuation with my younger sibling.   Dude , I thought, that is NOT the way toimpress a gal .  Even if I had no interest whatsoever in pursuing any kind of relationship with this zero.   Ah, but the best was yet to come.   By this time, I’d zoned out while he droned on and on about his work.   Spermy , he said.     What?  What did he just say?   Yeah, my friends all call me Spermy .   I can’t believe you just told me that , I said, incredulous as I turned away, the blur of Iowa corn fields whizzing past the passenger-side window.    Don’t you want to know why they call me that?   NO , I replied.  It was impossible for me to be emphatic enough on that point.   A brief but awkward silence followed.  I was done playing this game.     I’m not feeling very good.  My sinuses are bothering me.  Please, if you would, drive me home.   At least he was a gentleman as he promptly, and without a word, did just that.     Now, some forty years later, a teeny-tiny part of me wonders, yeah.  I wonder why they did  call him Spermy.  But then again, not really. Julie Allyn Johnson is a sawyer's daughter from the American Midwest whose current obsession is tackling the rough and tumble sport of quilting and the accumulation of fabric.  She enjoys the company, camaraderie and accumulated wisdom of various poets and writers she's met since her publishing journey began in 2018.  A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work can be found in  Star*Line, Coffin Bell, Haikuniverse, Lowestoft Chronicle, Chestnut Review  and other journals.  Julie enjoys photography and writing the occasional haiku, some of which can be found on her blog, A Sawyer’s Daughter .