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Being a better kind of ghost Due to the high levels of domestic accident these days, There’s a chance that I might be a newly formed Ghost, It doesn’t feel the way you think, though I am solid, breathable, clumsy like you I can still exhale, be indelicate, railing and flailing and moving things round was never really my scene I return each night though, Undress in the dark, set the alarm, lay on the bed, Try and steal the covers like always Once I whispered, asked you to come with me It’s too late you said, sleep, Ask me in the morning I listen properly now, without interrupting But it seems there’s nothing you want to say In the evenings, we just chill on the sofa with the wine we once shared, And never give away the end of the film, While you doze, I guzzle the popcorn crumbs I still put the bins out on Wednesday night Because you always forget Clink down the moonlit path Like a good husband Being dead is no excuse for not recycling I wonder how long we go on like this, In a spectral domestic bliss, I hope its forever, Or at least till you are ready, To come away with me The promise of rain Promise me the sun will not shine every morning, But, in the absence of light, you will instead Explain your half- remembered dream, This time I will listen, and try to understand We will each acknowledge our side of The corruption of bed linen, And, for the sake of argument Smooth out the frowning wrinkles With swallowed pride Promise me, if we must one day revisit These moments of misunderstanding, We can go together, bare foot Not wallowing but squelching in the mire Promise me the soft fingertips of rain, Gently resting in palms, Ready for forgiveness, A slow melting of last nights’ frost Those silent signs of a thaw Opening night The week of the show, You had started wearing the umbilical cord like a fashionable scarf, tighter And try with all your tiny might, There was no way to undo it Ready, in your pink birthday suit, This had become an engagement party, of sorts Head down, ready to depart into a fluid world A wrinkle, frowned in hospital towels, a new costume, Rushed down blurry corridors into a waiting theatre To play blindly, in the performance of your life It snowed that morning even though it was late Easter, in the darkness we observed the melt, numbed and dressed for the occasion in blue scrubs waiting, watching, an incubation period This was no dress rehearsal Opening on stage, ten weeks earlier than planned, You became a living puppet, tangled wires twisted, pumped up your lungs flat as pancakes, steroid breath, finding your voice, you were the star of this show, Somehow, you made it through the opening night, A brave performance, Centre stage in the hospital floodlights Gavin Turner is a writer of poetry and fiction. He has had work published in Punk Noir Magazine, Void Space, JAKE and icebreaker lit, not to mention Roi Faineant press. His debut chapbook The Round Journey was published in May 2022. You can find him on @gtpoems on Twitter or via his website www.gtpoems.com

Hibernation Comfort No one possesses this road this early. The juxtaposition of ebony tar and light, and the uneven patches where monsoon dug its heels in welcome me as I lodge my claims. In ten minutes I exhaust my energy to jog. My shadow hibernates beside a boulder. I have no power over this life I adore because of these elongated winters, caves of sleep, leaves of crackling, goodbyes unfinished. Fields Where We Belong Fields turn brief beneath our running feet, and the bridge, squares of formless green, trees sketched by me when I was six. If you ask me why we run we cannot tell. There is a feeling. A trace of an urge. Noon showers upon us, warm piss. A hiss says that our ankles will be dotted with fang-marks. We can comprehend the serpent. Time winters here. We should not race. An author, journalist, and father, Kushal Poddar, editor of 'Words Surfacing’, authored eight books, the latest being 'Postmarked Quarantine'. His works have been translated into eleven languages.

These days she would accept all or any correspondence. His utterances are a dying dialect. The last thing he had told her was ‘I do not belong here’ and she did not know if he meant with her in their house or in this ordinary sleepover town or both and her heart had hurt. His music gnaws at her defences, catapulting its explicit lyrics through his keyhole to worry her as she tidies adjacent rooms. She occupies herself to feign control, a steadying of a quaking edifice. She knows he has been kissed by darkness; she has stepped inside his soul. She has leaned into the most expensive gradients of his moods, the ones which cost them everything. She blames herself. If only she had not been so scattered in her twenties, if only she had married a shy guy and not a bully with a wolfish stare. He has his father’s eyes. Polished sapphires of aquamarine she once believed she could see her reflection in. ‘How bizarre and beautiful,’ she had said when they had visited The Great Wall of China. He had informed her at 10 years old that it had been subject to man-made hurt for years, bricks stolen and portions vandalised and destroyed. She had felt that pillage too, the ramparts reduced. She had seen her future. On his 15th birthday, he had called her ‘Mom’ for the last time. It had been a comment about her road rage that had lifted his snarl into a smirk. At 16, she had found garments she did not recognise under his bed. Dialogue had failed, an impasse in situ. Four months later he received his first ride in a police car. She had fished fistfuls of cash she had given him from his pocket before washing his jeans. She knew he did not need to steal the sportswear but he did. Two months afterwards she made some calls and tried sending him off grid. She never read remorse in his expression, just awareness of her ill-fitting deceit. She had struggled to breathe. He had viewed her gasps from a distant shore before drowning his hands in his pockets and slamming the door. The ambulance operator had to trace the call, she was found in the hallway. The same hallway she had stood in when she practised for the conversation roulette. The calendar was affixed to the mirror waiting for the days to rearrange themselves until he would return. At 17 years and 264 days there was a girl. Her boots left blood lust streaks of mud on the floors. There was no interaction. It did not last. At 18 she tries to re-establish some semblance of normality but it soon becomes clear that she is a banana grove and he is a tamarin ravenous for a plate full of oranges. And then it is there like a floodlight shining on the cemetery of their years of dark nights. Its pincers are magnificent, so honest and committed. Its body is a mass of bronzed ripples and she is afraid the warmth of her gaze will startle it. He tells her that they use them to restrain and kill their prey. She does not care. Today does not need to bow to tomorrow’s tomorrowness. When he called her, he had held her arm and pulled her close as they had ascended the stairs together to where they are now, peering together into a toilet bowl. ‘Mom, can you help me save it?’, his words are blanched of any molten fragments, their edges softened. She wonders if it is a venomous scorpion. The thought is a struck match in the centre of her mind. She cannot lose him again. She knows its stinger is also known as a telson; she briefly marvels how circumstance has transformed its fiery dagger into their armament to repossess the greatest thing man has ever known. She feels dispossessed of further choices and with that comes the enclosure of relief. Her love for him feels newly secured in the moment and like a flag unfurls itself to iron out its creases in this strident breeze. ‘Of course, I will help you. I have always wanted to.’ Her hope is prone to being caducous, having been schooled by disappointment but his smile has knocked through those walls. Later, she will learn that her receptiveness, her thinly-veiled eagerness had handed him the mallet. ‘I am sorry, Mom. I am sorry you’ve waited so long.’ Together their laughter is a collage; it develops into the afternoon like a photograph alters in purest darkness from shiny and soulless to a crisp rectangle of light. Catherine O’Brien is an Irish writer of poems, flash fiction and short stories. She writes bi-lingually in English and Irish. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal, Reflex Press, Ink Sweat &Tears, Ellipsis Zine, Tiny Molecules, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, Books Ireland, Splonk, Flash Boulevard, Janus Literary & more. Her poem ‘Embezzled Emotion’ published in Janus Literary received a Best of the Net nomination 2023. You can find her on Twitter @abairrud2021.

The eleventh month After the all the casting and the punditry We return to our yards: manicured and plain, Ignore the stray wrappers along our curb Hope that the steady rain can sweep it up. But it’s difficult to return to the ways of before With this sad mist, this late rain without life. Our great hopes have become trash in the drain; No children parade in fanciful attire. Our relationships never so needed repair. The marital bed is dry and sleeps on one side. A fictional exercise has failed, a reiteration In the iteration of tricks and threats. Who can fill the vacant lots of our desire? That aspiration to devotion for fulfillment In the primal sense, without commentary. Blood, emotion like raw nerve, still craving A quavering in throaty tones inconsiderate Of the infinite consequence. The type that will Require the children parading in fanciful attire To dry beds, by green grass, asking to be fed. Reserve A strong woman started a fire in the rain. I ran through the remnants of a hurricane In a season of immeasurable drought. There were sand dunes in the Mississippi and exposed wreckage And since I couldn’t explore that river, once a hundred miles wide, I explored the thoughts in my own head. My trail crossed the dry ravines that had cut down Guarding hills and once created a preserving swamp. She was here and there, Running down a side creek, Smoking on her front porch Not enclosed like the others. She smiled and waved Not like a beauty in a parade But like she wanted me Like we could satiate us, At least till the rain passed And our spouses returned. I hadn’t known even that Passing gratification, Cheap by some standards Expensive by others, In years. Early frost had killed the mosquitoes, The bushes shed their protection, I stood in the center of the swamp Wondering How long. Dave Nash enjoys taking mass transit into the city on rainy Mondays. Dave reads fiction submissions at Five South Magazine and writes stories that can be found in places like Bivouac Magazine and Unstamatic.

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In the rearview he watches the couple arguing. He adjusts the mirror and leans back, a wide-screen performance just for him. The woman is throwing her arms around, gesticulating madly and flailing about inside the tiny car behind him. Her dude smokes an e-cig, blowing fumes out the window, oblivious to how stupid he looks sucking on the silver dildo. It’s too fascinating and difficult to turn away from: the woman is all emotion, flickering between intimate sadness and sheer outrage, while the dude displays complete indifference to it all. The couple behind him are in the midst of something final. He’s always felt a certain satisfaction in witnessing the endings of things, as long as they’re not his own endings, maybe. There’s an impossible itch on his finger, just beneath his wedding band. The highway is a clogged artery. Everyone else is angry, too. It’s hot—an overcast but still-sizzling sort of September afternoon—and vehicles are barely more than stranded monoliths on the blacktop, some of them idling in defiance, horns blaring for no real reason. The radio says a logging truck tipped over five miles up the highway. Logs all over the road. At first he laughed to himself, remembering some old joke about two logging trucks passing one another on the road; one going one way, the other coming from there. The punchline was something along the lines of, Why deliver logs if you already have logs? It’s not funny anymore though, not after sitting here for an hour. Now it’s personal. He hopes that someone died up ahead to make this backup worth it. It’s only a passing idea floating through him, but still, he questions his sanity a little for having had such a dark, unfair thought in the first place. He switches from the news back to satellite radio, catching the tail end of Gavin Rossdale growling on about Zen, or a lack thereof. Car horns continue to honk all around him. Looking back to the mirror, the couple behind him is still fighting. She clearly mouths an exasperated Fuck! and her face falls into her own waiting hands. He wishes he knew the details of what else was being discussed. If only he could read lips. The woman, she certainly has a lot to say, though he wonders how much of it is simply repeating the same points? Around and around. Arguments tend to work that way, he’s noticed. Especially as they get closer to the end. She’s trying to remain in control, but is visibly shaking, weeping. A breeze whistles by, blowing the grass on the side of the highway. How does the green grass continue to live and grow out here in this hopeless stretch of land? It seems impossible to him. Something furry darts through the grass, wild, and not affected at all by traffic jams. The entire song ends before anyone on the road has made another inch of progress. He hits the Previous Track button to listen to it again. When he looks back up into the mirror, the car behind him is making a reckless U-turn through some rocks and grass, and crosses over into the northbound lane. Some of the flying rocks ricochet off the side of his car. The dude’s car is already a mile away when he spots the woman standing alone on the highway. She holds herself, the hot day’s dust sticking to her wet cheeks. He’s opening the passenger door and waving her over before he even realizes he’s waving her over. She climbs in. There’s a moment—if bottled, it would surely be a moment worth examining for generations—where her stop-motion tears say nearly everything that needs to be said. No further evidence is necessary. She wears linen pants and a jean jacket, frayed all over. He almost asks if she was in a fight, if that’s why the jacket is all torn up, but then realizes that of course his jokey comment would only be misinterpreted, and she’d be getting out of her second car in as many minutes. Instead, he asks her if she’s all right. She says, I had a dream about this accident, you know? Like a precognitive vision. I knew this was going to happen but got into his fucking car anyway. I guess instead of finding opportunities to avoid the tough conversations and inevitable conclusions, I found a way for us to have no alternative. He doesn’t know a thing about precognizance, but she has lovely hands he notices, as she holds them tightly, restraining herself from flailing them around like she’d done while arguing with her boyfriend. Husband. Or whatever he was to her. He asks again, But you’re all right? There are crystalline cracks breaking through the stratocumulus clouds above. Thin, silver grins of unknown intent. She says, Something’s not right. My doctor hasn’t gotten back to me yet with the test results. They all think it’s brain cancer, I know they do. I know it isn’t. Who do you think would know better, really? I do have a mole on my leg that I’m worried about. I didn’t mention the mole to my doctor. It didn’t even occur to me to ask him about it, but that’s going to happen when someone says the words ‘brain cancer’ to your face a few times. You’re going to forget things. The mole is on my inner thigh. I’d show you but I don’t think that’s appropriate. It’s pretty high up. I can feel it right now. See? Right here, right under my pants. Something is going to kill me—kill us all—in the end though. It honestly doesn’t matter if we lose all the antidepressants and calcium and vitamin D supplements and antibiotics and L-thyroxine; we’re still going to get sick, aren’t we? None of that shit matters. Finally, she wipes her eyes, looks in the rearview herself, maybe checking to see if the dude is coming back. He’s an asshole. He told me it must be brain cancer, too. And what am I supposed to do with that? She turns to him now, maybe for the first time. He thinks her forehead is really pretty. What do I do with that? His hands still grip the wheel, at the 11:55 and the 12:05 positions. He covers up the ring on his finger with his other hand, and suggests some things were maybe not ever meant. Not meant? Meant to BE, I should have said. She says, We all started off happy, each and every one of us. Otherwise, why would we have gotten involved in these things in the first place? What would the point have been? He flicks the same song back to the start for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time now. He’s lost count. He confesses he was on his way to sign the divorce papers, though he’s never going to make it now because of the logs all over the highway somewhere up ahead there. She suggests, Maybe you had a vision of the accident, too? And here you are now, right in the middle of this mess, enabling your other mess to continue on. At some point, you need to step out of that car in the middle of the highway. Metaphorically. Horns continue to blare as she processes her own conclusions to her own observations. Shit. I forgot my bag in his car. Things never seem to end so easily, he says. There’s always a bit of a mess left behind. Thanks for listening, she says. Hey, do you think anyone died up there? He looks at her and they both laugh just a little. I sure hope so. R. Tim Morris writes short fiction, longer fiction, novels, flash fic, and poetry. He writes in different genres, mostly literary fiction, but I've been known to write Speculative, Magical Realism, Dark Fantasy, and even Adult Humor. He can be found on Twitter @RyMo89 or at his Website rtimmorris.com.

Phantom Pain The little things like sitting on Zelda's Title Screen. That sad piano title theme. Pop Art, Pop-tart, spring out the toaster one day and now you're an old fart. "Remember that movie? Or the Globetrotters with Scooby?" Yeah, I remember the gang, times have changed we no longer hang. Different branches different stances, we pass each other with sideways glances. But every night, down in the park I see our blue ghosts race and tiptoe back to the start. Scrooge McDuck (a poem of crossword clues) When I was a young bit of plankton I was attacked by a Dead Duck wielding a fanny-pack and donning a Scottish cap. He came barreling down the hill like a Feudal Baron or a Boeing 757. Holding his anger like an item in a holster. "I'll do it too!" he quacked and smacked me around like an R2D2. I joined a karate school, studied Draft.com and mastered ti-chi. Now, approaching middle age and cooked like an onion ring, I visit the old dodo. He breathes the sound of an unsound floor. Years and years and years, trees with seeds that whirl like helicopter blades continue to fall. There is pity and there is compassion. "I hope that you're satisfied now." Friendshipstein We fell apart like the cuts of a dismantled Frank and Stein glasses were shared the last time we met up. Un-stressed stitches, nothing abrupt. The limbs of our friendship nosedive to the floor. “So what now?” We shift awkwardly. You look at your phone and then cough at me. You remind me of a bad band’s cacophony, an unlit dance floor and the stationary punch bowl that no one drank from at that Ogre’s 13th Birthday party. “You remember that, don’t you?” Your jaw starts to slip out of place while we recollect and trace old timelines. “Friend-ship-stein, you aren't looking too great.” “I’ll make it,” you say. Loneliness is a pile of limbs on a bar stool. And solitude is a marble hidden in a can somewhere in Poznan or San Francisco that waits to be discovered by a child and held in the air like a prize. I tell you, I’m heading home for the night. You mush-mouth something trite, but you’re long dead and too drunk for it to make any sense. I say, “I’ll see you next time.” You say, “my neck’s fine.” Another miscommunication, I know you won’t survive another New Year’s celebration. So, I stack you up on the bar, call you a car, order you water with a straw and I try to be nice. I leave you there alone, head on the counter, chewing cubes of ice. Kyle Solomon is a writer and poet from Baltimore, MD. His previously published works can be found in SUPERJUMP, The Free State Review, and Grub Street. Devoted to the strange, phantom intersection between smart and stupid, Kyle writes poetry, fiction, speculative essays, and game reviews.

Dad woke me in the middle of the night, and I couldn’t find Donatello—he always slept with me. As he shook me awake that day into this inherited new madness of ours, I scanned the room, trying to find him, not caring that Dad screamed at me. “Let’s go!” He blurted the words all over me, extracting me from my sleeping bag and dashed out the door, leaving me alone inside yet another bedroom that once was filled with now-forgotten giggles. I grabbed my backpack as Dad shouted from the front yard, and I heard that all too familiar bang of a gas canister hitting against the side of the car as it was being fueled up. It took a while until I felt how my cheek was warm—he slapped me amidst the awakening. It had been explained to me: the necessity and urgency of mild violence during these “pressing times.” I might’ve reacted differently a year ago, but that was then, and now, I seldom noticed it. I headed out—this new “out” all voided from light. In the distance, farther than we’d ever reach as gasoline ran short, I saw The Beacon. Our lodestar, getting us up every morning—Mom, Dad and my sister, who were already in the car. “Buckle up.” He always ensured we’d fastened our seat belts—an odd trace of the old world. But we always did. The infinite night stretched beyond our own understanding, where nothing ruled but blackness and a few fires seen here and there through the car window. The car started—an asthmatic vehicle, holding on for dear life. I didn’t dare ask about Donatello. Every stop was limited to four hours, not a minute longer. We could spend time looking for food, matches or batteries, but never something as banal as Donatello. I don’t know how long Dad had harbored that wound, but sitting to the right, just behind him, it beckoned for my attention. Just below his ear—red, irritated and irritating. He scratched it with vigor, his hand resting for a few seconds, then back up again, seemingly digging deeper into the flesh. I could see The Beacon from afar—I used to focus on it if I got carsick and had to look out the window. Always visible above the treetops, I could zoom in on it, avoiding whatever was rotting—not seeing classmates being eaten straight from pavements by something on all four. If it got worse, I forced the tip of my fingers as far into my ears as I could, blocking the inhumane cries. But that day, all felt calmer. Still, the revolver was in Dad’s lap. Room for six bullets, but only holding our last two. “One for you and one for your sister,” Dad had explained as Mom wept behind him, and back then, I didn’t understand and asked my sister about it, who simply implied that I was “young and stupid.” From the beginning I had the other three too — Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo. Raphael got scorched as our last car caught fire. Something on the road. Dad swiveled, and I remember fear, panic, and more fear. We wormed ourselves out of the totaled car and watched it sizzle, with Raphael melting into a puddle of plastic. Then we ran. Away from the fire that was sure to tempt whatever was out there. Away from the car as it could explode, or at least we thought so, having seen it in movies. Away from whatever had caused us to swivel. If we were without a car, we often ran, even if we knew we, as a family, would never be fast enough to outrun anything. The opposite was stillness—surrendering and relinquishing our lives, becoming sustenance for this newly found ferality. I blessed that calm dark that day. Dad kept scratching his wound, and nobody else seemed to see it. After a couple of hours, I saw how his finger was red. We weren’t really allowed to stop. Or “advised” is maybe a better word. In the beginning, a lot was not “advisable.” Soon, the vast amount of un-advisables became something one could not adhere to anymore. There was no time or room for “proper procedures” and similar phrases that didn’t halt teeth from sinking into our neighbor’s left cheekbone so you could hear it crack—and he had meticulously read the pamphlets. Leonardo, I lost inside a school we bunkered down in. Too many rooms. We found some dented, unmarked cans in the kitchen that we ate cold—something we made a game of: guessing what we ate as we ate it. At night, sounds of impending pain echoed across the barren corridors. I’m a heavy sleeper—Mom’s not. She whispered when peril was close; I always experienced that as much louder than when she screamed. A scream proves something is already lost, and the solution is wildness and velocity. Whispers are about hope, a faint possibility—but it seldom stays that way. We stopped at a gas station—we knew the drill. I’m usually on food detail, trying to find something edible. Dad checks for gas. Mom holds the revolver. My sister is to find clothes or other supplies. The shelves are almost always empty. I knew this before entering every store, diner or gas station we visited. Maybe sometimes a bag of chips. I once found a Mars bar and ate it without sharing or telling anyone. “Yes!” Dad’s rare merriment. We weren’t supposed to make loud noises, but I figured he’d probably found some gasoline. With a child’s imprudence, I had to use the restroom and looking back, I could’ve just gone outside, in the wild, but the bathroom stall was so close. Mom was always trying to see me through the store windows, but she had those jittery eyes—darting, unfocused, so I snuck away. The sound of her commanding Dad to “hurry up” and Dad hissing a “yesssss”—everything fading as if someone had turned down the volume. I bumped into a shelf and stepped on some broken glass—stirring a ruckus I wasn’t supposed to stir. The toilet lacked water and stunk. The small, narrow window held pointy shards of glass with blood on them—a repetitive, un-original scene I had witnessed to the edge of normalcy. There was at least some toilet paper left, a few sheets, and I, just as with the Mars bar, felt guilty for fleeing, if so, for just a few minutes. Being ten compared to two years earlier was vastly different—my dreams of going to Mars had been distilled into a dream of a Mars bar. Now, as then, the clicking came in waves, and I slowly finished, but I didn’t run. That wasn’t “advisable” in those situations—only upon “eye contact,” but it was often too late. Instead, I moved soberly through the store, treading with caution, avoiding those pieces of glass and where I’d bumped in. There’s a perverted comfort in those faint clicks—making their presence identifiable, knowing where they are. So, when I couldn’t hear them anymore, I just stood there—the air deprived of my family’s existence—a lack of belonging. Without them, it was just me. But then, Mom popped her head in—chucking a brittle “let’s go!” at me. Back in the car, it took a while before I realized my sister wasn’t next to me—and even longer to ask where she was. But I didn’t get a reply, only stern, withered faces. Her walkman was on her seat; on the floor was her backpack, unzipped; inside was Donatello. But I’d rather have her. Dad was scratching again, with Mom hunched over weirdly and a new kind of moaning. Usually, they’d asked if I had found anything, but this time, they kept quiet as the endlessness passed by beneath the car tires. That wound seemed to grow, and I tried to recollect if any news outlets ever mentioned wounds, abrasions, or anything like it, but nothing came to mind. I woke up. A rumble inside the car, and we seemed to have gone from asphalt to gravel. Dad’s collar: tainted. Blood oozing, traveling from the wound down, along his neck, caught by the fabric of his already stained shirt. He wasn’t picking or scratching it anymore, and for a long time, I just sat there, waiting for his finger to start digging, picturing how his whole hand would submerge within himself. He drove with one hand on the gun and one on the steering wheel as he usually did, but soon, I discovered that Mom wasn’t there. Looking back at it now, going over those three days in my head, as I must’ve done hundreds of times, I still can’t grasp why it took that long to learn that Mom wasn’t in her seat—that she was gone too. “Where’s Mom?” “What’s that?” “Where’s Mom?” “You hungry?” I didn’t reply, and he handed me a can of something. I know I ate it. I can’t recall what it was, but it calmed my stomach, and at that point, numbness halted me from pushing onward with questions. Instead, I reconciled with the allness that forced us to succumb to whatever was happening. As Dad looked out the window, I peeked backward, checking the trunk, thinking she might be there. Maybe sleeping, a nap. But it was empty, save for a baseball bat and some plastic bags with logos of brands that once mattered. After an hour, I tried again: “Dad, where’s Mom and Ellen?” “Who?” I didn’t ask again. He glared me mute via the SAAB’s rearview mirror, and I picked up the walkman, hoping to be taken elsewhere. The music was being hauled through mud as the batteries were on the verge of death. Cheerful and poppy, the music had transformed into a representation of Earth’s gloomy sorrow—the vein of our sins bared and up for slits and cuts and gashes. As it died, I turned it off, and Dad turned to me, asking what was wrong, and so I hit “play” again, claiming: “nothing,” just sitting there with silence in the headphones. Michelangelo was lost bartering. Dad added it to a deal without my involvement. Another father had asked for it, a treat for his daughter. It wasn’t much more than that. For dinner, we were able to have bacon, and I got an extra slice. I think that was the last time we traded with others. Shortly after that, that, too, became “un-advisable.” Eventually, we stopped, assuming it was nighttime. An old barn near an offshoot type of town where I shut my eyes hard as we went through it. Dad actually patted me on my knee as he drove, so I can only assume that whatever was out there was worthy of him letting go of the gun. We ate something flavorless and slept in our sleeping bags, in shifts. Dad stayed awake so that I could slumber. Usually, he woke me after a couple of hours, as I had to “learn the ropes,” as he put it, but spared me, just having me be on watch for two hours. Then I was supposed to wake him up, but he never seemed to be sleeping—instead, he was in a state of drowsy awakeness, a limbo-like phase where it had become necessary never to sleep but always rest for what might come. As we drove off that following day, it dawned on me after an hour or two: we weren’t going towards The Beacon anymore. The only thing solidifying our existence was behind us, our star, promising an imaginative yet uncertain future. “Aren’t we going to The Beacon?” “What beacon?” And even though fear was familiar, this was new. Dad, Mom and my sister Ellen had been concrete, tangible and trusting. We weren’t without purpose or goal. A hardship-packed journey, aiming for that bright light that winked at us, a smile of sorts, an embrace of rays—The Beacon—but what if that ended? Survival would then be a mere charade without vows of life anew—no pledge about a once again domesticated uniformity amongst those left. We had something, at least. “The Beacon? Aren’t we going there?” But he didn’t answer. “Is Mom coming back?” “Are you tired?” I nodded, as I got the feeling that’s what he expected, even though we’d just woken up. “I’ll wake you in a bit.” So I got as comfortable as I could, my head where Ellen used to sit, Donatello in the backpack with his ninja stance ready to go. I sought comfort there, in those plastic eyes made in China, as my eyes closed. I’m not sure if I heard voices outside, what language it was or if it was all in my mind. As I opened my eyes again, I had no clue how long it’d been. Dad wasn’t in the car, and above me, I saw a crown of trees. I sat up—it was probably advisable to suppress as much of any pointless feeling one could muster. I opened the door. “Dad?” But he wasn’t there. I stepped outside on something once labeled as “road,” but now, grass and dandelions had taken over, seizing what was once theirs. “Dad!” I turned around, not seeing him anywhere. I yanked Dad’s door open to be met by an empty car seat, not knowing what I had expected. The backrest and seat had blood on them—a river flowing down, a pool of wound ooze—not coagulated. His scent lingered, not yet diluted by oxygen. I stepped out on the road—spruces and pines as an audience, watching my performance as I took on the role of the “abandoned son.” “DAD?” But he wasn’t there. I know that now as well, as I knew it then. But retelling is a way to keep them breathing, if just so inside my own mind. After that, I walked, not knowing how to start the car or drive it. So I began my journey with no plan— except moving towards The Beacon. I’m still walking. My feet hurt, and I got a can of something in my backpack. I haven’t seen civil behavior for years, and now, The Beacon went black just two weeks ago. I also have a Mars bar that I’ve been saving. You just have to eat around the mold—enjoying whatever goodness is left. Born in Sweden, Julius works as a narrative designer in video games. He writes anything from flash fiction and books to games and screenplays and makes his own sausages in his spare time. He's been longlisted in The Bath Short Story Award, The Bath Flash Fiction Award and The Aurora Prize for Writing and is published in JAKE Magazine.

You say you want a revolution? What if that revolution meant turning yourself inside out instead of turning you around. What if it meant accepting the Hieronymous Bosch painting of your soul and letting the world leer at it through gritted teeth? Courtenay Schembri Gray’s “The Maggot on Maple Street” is a deep dive into the psyche of a woman in modern society where the inside must be turned over like earth, and the growth must take place in the public view. The pitfalls, insecurities, judgment and the violence that can be a woman’s life upon examination, is explored in beautifully gruesome language. This exploration takes you to the dark and hidden places and there is nowhere to hide. In the poem “Saturn (De)vours” Schembri Gray contemplates the what-ifs of societal judgment vs. the sometimes much harsher personal judgment. It’s a cage match and there are no clear winners. For example: “What if I want to turn myself into a stain on the white shirts of men? Would that be unwomanly of me?” I imagine the lipstick stain of the passing fancy, I imagine the passing fancy as a real person. One who wants to be there, but wonders. “Bare Fruits’ starts at the transition from the perfect protected feminine pre-menses, including the rose scented sanitary pad, to the transformation into reviled, controlled woman. Turning this poem over in my mind, it felt like it was written far in the past, and that there was an ancient truth that we have long ago stopped talking about. It made me angry. The line that provides the best example of this is “To the peanut gallery, my labia is no Longer something fragile, rather a vessel To be butchered by a baby’s head” The peanut gallery as social media or the public at large, reducing the narrator to a holding cell. Timely for the current attack on reproductive rights. This is something that has always been the case in our world. Everyone’s always had a front row seat between your legs. This poem points it out bluntly and without apology. Poetry should move you, but Schembri Gray’s gives you a shove. “June Bug” has an Emily Dickinson style sentiment, and I love a good rhyme, but it must be a GOOD rhyme for it to not feel stilted or stodgy. Schembri Gray uses the rhyme to make her indelible mark in the reader’s mind. The imagery of bloody coat hangers and lanterns, an ominous glimpse into the future, surfs the edge of woman’s folly and its potential dangers. “Charge of the Revolutionary Gun” uses a creative rhyme scheme working its way through every line. The rhythm isn’t predictable and surprised me a few times. These poems sing. Throughout the collection, we are witness to transformation. “No Baby, No Cry” is one of those pieces that make you cringe, and brings up feelings you may not be ready for, but are part of the plan. We shift from child to woman and back again in the same poem. Maybe on the precipice of forced ‘womanhood’, she explores the fine line, always in question. The following line, reminiscent of Plath, ushers the concept in. “If they knew the fermentation of his blood they would call me a doe-eyed baby riding the storm, unaware and muddy.” “The Maggot of Maple Street” is wearing its guts on the outside. This is a brave collection. It is an angry collection. Schembri Gray isn’t looking for sympathy. Maybe not even for understanding. She is just trying to show you something, and that can be hard to accept. She collapses the notion that bringing the dark into the light cures. These concepts don’t look prettier in the illumination. What she is doing is inviting the reader to recognition. This collection is a mirror held up, and one can be changed by reading it, whether or not you are ready for it. Kellie, well, she’s tired and cranky and the only way she gets through the day is by reading other people’s incredible work and interviewing authors she finds interesting. She is the AEIC of the beyond description, and always perky, Roi Faineant Press.

I am the ghost though they say you are dead. A brain composed of stardust won’t rot. Those bones stacked underground I pled for you to take survived only to be forgot. My body was buried before yours would breathe though I clawed through six feet, compacted dirt toward a whisper of death already grieved. The provocation for haunting is hurt. My spirit’s entangled with yours on some star while my bones mimic youth in a grave. You once made a map of my private scars. No one was found, discovered or saved. The curious natures of alien girls is ephemeral in these primitive worlds. A word from the author: I wrote sonnet about feeling destroyed by another’s death you physically survived.

A Fine Zenith A stone in my chest radiates the blue color of new fallen snow under the full moon. It rises from my gut through my diaphragm and lungs, heart and throat, through my eyes and the top of my skull to a fine zenith around which the universe rotates, around which I rotate radiating light from the cracks in my battered heart. The Other Side I stand at the precipice the view cliff and chasm river winding far below the other side lush and inviting gravity pulls me forward I’m not afraid of falling I know if I fall I will burst into flight My Muse Calls at 3 AM I rise in the dark, dream myself into being. Whose face peers back from the morning mirror? What spice runs through my veins? My hair awaits the comb of dawn. My pen scratches paper, bleeds incarnadine ink. From those wounds, flow poetry. The perfume of night blooming flowers meets the aroma of dawn. In the flow of scents, a new day is born. I sense the curves of my ever-changing body, feel the delicious breast pain that informs me I'm a growing girl. Light from Your Eyes I like the idea of surrounding you as you enter my cave I imagine your adagio inviting me to grip you tighter pull you deeper into the darkness of desire the animal of my heart purrs and howls as you become a horse galloping in place until you surrender I want light to shine from your eyes fill sweet space as we glow in the embrace of the moment while radiance surrounds and suffuses our convergence I Am an Ocean I am deep and dark. I am bathed in light and shade. I am home to minute and immense. I give birth, I nurture. In my deepest, darkest places, there is light. When I feel darkness, when I feel I am not enough, when I feel self-doubt or self-loathing, when I feel I don’t fit or belong, I will try to remember in my deepest, darkest places, there is light. Emily Moon (she/her) is a queer transgender poet from Portland, Ore. She is Editor at First Matter Press. She is author of "It’s Just You & Me, Miss Moon." Her work includes appearances in or forthcoming from Pile Press, Boats Against the Current, Banyan Review, The Dawn Review, Culinary Origami, [inherspacejournal] and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @emilymoonpoet and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Emily.Moon.57/.

The red tide poured from every side. I call my shrink and ask - 'when are you free?' A tormented body rolled in blood and brine. There seems to be a problem with the line. So tense, engaged, and pulling taut. The red tide poured from every side. Now, on the couch, I lie as prone as death. Its trauma, heart and pulse quite out of sorts the monster horribly wallowed in his blood. And whalemen oftentimes misunderstood their ties with nature and the deep. A red tide poured from every side. ‘The trouble is, I cannot sleep'. * Stubb is the Second Mate on whale ship ‘The Pequod’ in Moby Dick, the novel by Herman Melville. (Lines in red are verbatim Melville, or close to. Lines in blue by Ivor Daniel).