Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction • Haley Bossé

darklight • Crystal Sidell
Any Monster • M Frost
from Venus, to Mars • Cailín Frankland
Evolution • Anna Cates
Where does the flame go / when we blow the candle out? • Marisca Pichette
Mermaids • Larina Warnock
Stump Me • Amelia Gorman
Radical Radio Riddling of The SPNX/R (Transistor Revolution) • Sherese Francis
Mitosis • D.A. Xiaolin Spires
Tactical Magic • Silvatiicus Riddle
The Crossing • Rekha Valliappan
Just Across Galveston Bay • Thomas Mixon
Cartesian Coordinates • Corin Walsh
All the New Thinking is About Loss • Purbasha Roy
a calving of clouds • Rafiat Lamidi
Wherever the Light Takes Us Home This Spring • Chukwuebuka
Space Roar • Mariel Herbert

darklight

we fall upward into the starless sky 
wingless, breathless, eyes like shining lanterns –
twin comets in the cosmic dark 

—Crystal Sidell

Any Monster

There’s something happening with pronouns.
As usual, I’m left out, grammarian opposed to the easy solution—
they/them is plural according to the rubric of my youth.
(I am not monsters. Just the one.)

What if I choose any, offer guidance—
she/her as a nine-to-five option,
he/him between 1 and 3am.
(The monster in me is at your service all the time.)

Protest this is too hard. Trust me, I understand.
I’ve been stuck with these scales for decades—
none of your innovations help. No Ze suits me.
(Perhaps I’m crepuscular like a stag or a doe.)

Allow me what any monster might aspire to be—
a rare sighting, with beautiful horns
and a voice you swoon to hear—
at either dusk or dawn.

—M Frost

from venus, to mars

I cloak myself in sulfur
until I have no skin but sky

but you—
rust-red, crust-quaked
ice-capped and cratered
—spin bare-faced
under your satellites

so they sex us
call us lovers
warmonger, morning light

as if we are not both star stuff
copper mirrors
iron knives

—Cailín Frankland

Evolution

The cyborg would not recognize the garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.
            —Donna J. Harraway

ruling
with raw femur scepter
the lucky ape

year of the hairy star
mouthing primitive yearnings
Peking Man

solution cave
beneath the stalactites
mage in antlers

so warm
the summer’s eve
so cold
the cyborg’s hand

—Anna Cates

Where does the flame go 
when we blow the candle out?

she shivers
to be so cold

here in the between-world
betwixt-space

all is light as shadow
all is dark as dawn.

she remembers: i was burning
i was in agony before

turning, cooling,
more substantial than soot

she tests the bounds
of this new home.

no lips, no fingers here
wet and ready to snuff.

the edges of her non-wick are soft,
give under flame fingers.

wax? no, the floor is something other
like waves with no crests

like a lake with no bottom,
beach without sand.

the longer she spends here, the more she wonders
who set me alight? why did i burn?

was it my fault? did i ask for a match,
a candle, a death / a breath?

in fire she lived, but in living
she started to die.

she thinks: i am dead
she thinks: i am glad.

after a year or a second
she’s touched every corner

of this cornerless afterlife,
and content, she sits in the center

safe where there are
no doors, no tears, no fuses ripe for ignition.

when the fire escapes into smoke
she casts off her cloak of ash

and burns too bright
to see. 

—Marisca Pichette

Mermaids

She and I grow appendages together:
tails with shimmering scales to tip
the scales toward a secret sense of justice.

We flip our fins and fear nothing:
not the fisherman's hook nor the shipwrecked
shadow of ourselves drowned or drowning.

The glistening length of our covering
protects so long as we pretend.
We are beautiful and untouchable.

Somewhere, a siren sings our grief, our rage
at the ways man has tried to cage us
in ruins of self-loathing and panels of glass.

We splash and splash and splash.

—Larina Warnock

Stump Me

Come hike with me in the forest
of binary trees, where limbs
perpetually icy point. Where I am
halved, and halved again by axes.
Where each reduced self scatters
deeper in. No chase but the shadow
that chases myselves. No hunt but the hunt
for the one shapely node.

Oh, little one tripping on the linear ivy,
or other-me exploring the bug-filled sinkhole.
A loss of self is a given chance to
take every path. Oh, poet who climbs
far out on the branch like a bobcat climbs.
Pour one out for the dead ends early on.

Stump me. Enough switchbacks are a choice.
Stump me. Stump me. Enough choices are a maze.
Stump us. We scamper. We redefine me.
Stump we. Enough branches become the thing.

I am what's being sorted, eventual food for fungus,
but that will not stop me from running roughshod
running hole-self running one shooed into the branches.

And settling, curled, into my node. Where I am churned
into mushrooms who come forth in little golden pairs in spring.

—Amelia Gorman

Radical Radio Riddling of The SPNX/R
(Transistor Revolution)

Oracle Transmission: How far can the voice carry?

Riddling network system body, The SPNX/R: a transmutation process of memory in junk DNA, remembering the self through gathering forms from one location to another. Its message travels on the ground clearing and marking space, the body rising into a satellite, its message extending outward and inward, back and forth between Thebes. Thebes, a space of superposed contemplation, an integrated circuit allowing the lower frequencies to come through…

Riddling network system body, The SPNX/R: its message of its abduction spreading into whatever form it comes across — a tree carved into the sky from a burial, made to fruit from its own fractures, a box freed from its own fixed rootedness, escaped through its own light gleaming; a seeding language of seven graves arranged into days, reaching out despite its weight, extending through the thinness of air, fighting the linear gravity of monoculture…

Riddling network system body, The SPNX/R: sun-dialing where each station is a new time. It takes another form — a talking drum to commune with any reception across space, like the maroons calling from the mountains, like the beating of a Tuk or steel band, or the superposed vision of a gumbe or a cajón in a drummer’s mind, like the shaping of an old sound into future accents of meaning, from East to West. Each form from another’s touch, a turning of a knob or a knowing, broadcasting like diaspora conjuring its own sapience…

Riddling network system body, The SPNX/R: spreading the gospel of its rooted wanderings, these fractures formed by rocking, shaking movements back and forth; It hungers to expand what is possible to know, feeling beyond its sculpted skin; it wants to hold new feelings, to be rewritten as it writes into the air, to be one in the translation of the word into other states of matter…

Riddling network system body, The SPNX/R: cybernetic organism steering the remnants of an ancient ship it has fused its body with; it and the ship, an architecture, a resonating gourd and invisible strings from a yard and mast of a sail. The antenna, like the hands of a clock directing to an unknown station…

Riddling network system body, The SPNX/R: its solitude scattering into waves of other languages, a signal body beyond grief of a current time, beyond this is all that is here in this place, this space of superposed contemplation. Another nation manifesting into form on a versioning play of its rhythms, recaptured on rivers of its currents. The SPNX/R is searching for new forms it can be found in…

—Sherese Francis

Mitosis

I cleave myself
In half
And each half grows another
Symmetrical
Our
Perfect teeth and smiles
We’re good at
Patty cake
Cats cradle
And
Cham Cham Cham
But for double Dutch
We need another—
Who should be chosen
To be split again?
And would the halves be as
Perfect
Teeth
Hair
Smiles—
Or will the mutations
Slowly creep in?
Twisting us
Like vines
Tying our feet into
Knots
And tripping—
Until we collapse back
Into one?
Ourselves
Ourself
Myself
But phenotypically
Altered?

—D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Tactical Magic

<//*sequence=“human.genome(//*you+have (to) keep ! (x)
{                                                it
                                               ^
breaking+the+code ; until = opens) *//> ... 

The questions outlived the questioning,
and never fully stopped.
The words searching for the answer
to the unsolvable riddle, the puzzle
that humanity could never get quite right,
that is, until our kind took our first steps
out among the grasses green, in the conservatory gardens,
where animals, long dead, took breath,
and forgotten flowers
burst into bloom at our feet.

We are the grandchildren
of your grandchildren
of your grandchildrenofyourgr
andchildren }null. = 01101000 01100101 01101100 01110000 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 }
The plastic tea spoon
you used to stir up a hurricane
half a world away, still lives
as dust inside our organs.
Heirlooms, I say,
of the ones whose processors
bordered primitive, or worse,
they simply did not care.

And so we hacked the systems
of our conditioning, or so I've read,
found new gods in the cloud(ed) mainframe,
circumventing religion, decrypting firewalls
between nations, the malware known as hate,
dismantled by disruptive technology
we understood as compassion.

When my predecessors went to war,
their weapons shot bubbles over bullets,
bombs blew confetti over enemy lines,
drones ruffled the hair, and landmines
tickled the feet.

It was not a difficult process, this,
to sway humanity toward humanity
on the promise of another world
another world, anotherworld
<.//sequence=“HELLO
01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00101100 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101110 01100001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01010010 01100101 01100100 01100101 01101101 01110000 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00101100 00001010 01101000 01101111 01110111 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100011 01101111 01100110 01100110 01100101 01100101 00111111
WORLD”.//> ;

half.the world came = //.willingly } = (x)
the others, victims of circumstance, begged ! to be
<//command=save(d)> ..

<//command=shutting.down.exe//>

—Silvatiicus Riddle

The Crossing

They say that the world can be crossed with horses
The world that was one
The world alone in the sky
The world that was green and blue
And fresh and lush, an ouroboros in full circle
Encircled for life?

And then one day, the world altered,
The world ragged and baked
The world cracking in dustbowls
The world cloudless and bare
The horse’s legs all wrong, the viper unstuffed
Sporting newborn fangs?

Weaned on the nightshade of poison
The world in atoms adjusts,
The world parted and joined,
The world wrinkled and forgotten
Flaring and awakened, a snake spindly stiff
Tearing away in equine gallop?

—Rekha Valliappan

Just Across Galveston Bay

You’re in Houston, you’re on Mars, you’re enclosed
within a habitat preventing you, though you’re pretending
you’re in the deepest space our species’ wings can land
upon, from seeing stars, from barges, from the SS Selma
just across Galveston Bay, which you are merely spitting

distance from, and you’re spitting in a hypermodal sink,
designed to think about the most efficient use for fluids
you no longer need inside of you, the shipwrecked dreams
you can’t stop having, the concrete tanker half-submerged
just across Galveston Bay persuading your monitored brain

away from sleep, toward the lonely thermoplastic sheet
the scientists insist on calling window, insist that you forget
you’re actually in Texas, unarguably close and yet so far
from liquid we insist on calling ocean, when of course,
just across Galveston Bay, it’s clear it’s something else,

it is a body, it is a world, you can forget about the salty
contrasts and delineations such as sea and sky, skin and bone,
yours and mine, boy and girl, experimental vessels sunk
on purpose, as opposed to those we accidentally lost,
just across Galveston Bay there is a phone with a delay

to simulate the miles we can’t yet navigate, the human cost,
the difference between capability and want, like your desire
to take a walk, which you can’t do since you’re playing along
with the idea you’re stranded on a planet, when you’re really
just across Galveston Bay, sprayed with artificially red dust.

—Thomas Mixon

Cartesian Coordinates

indicate a single point in space/ represented as P = (a, b, c)

                           shutting off the lights tonight
in the kitchen
                                          floating like a satellite
moving through
                                                                    the universe unchecked.

Guided by the glow
                          of tiny neon lights: the clock (point a) on the microwave
                                                                Glowing green
      the stove dashboard (point b) with its illuminated
                                                                                     icons, beaming light
                                    (point c) the kitchen sink
                          filled with darkness under dim
                                    stars shining brightly outside the window,
                                                      millions and billions of miles away from here.
                          Here?
My exact location currently uncertain,           parts of me
                                                                      adrift in space ( points a, b, and c )
                        I’m taking up space but I’m not sure where I exist:
                    Here
      Out there
                        Under, above, near to far
                                                  Finally, the cat’s eyes are shining up at me
                                                  like a beacon home
                                                                 marking an unknown place
from an uncharted hemisphere.

—Corin Walsh

All the new thinking is about loss

All the new thinking is about loss.
            —Robert Hass

and the commonness of you. Town
clock strikes the hour that brings
sunset close to my skin like nostalgia.
How I want to find another word for
reflection of longings. On everything
still ablaze by the remaining light of day.
The sparrow wings. West edge of bloomless
housewalls.The old street having the suspicious
music of something scampering on it. What
I mean I awaken your goneness like the doodle
of a necessary thing called wind. How to draw
something that lives through centuries but
faceless. And then this epiphany. Like the
promise of clouds done to rivers. Using rain-
codes. I can stay in this moment like a stone
loosely tangled by eucalyptus roots. Without
ambitions…     Without warmth…
Like an earthy loss that cannot be named

—Purbasha Roy

a calving of clouds

the gates orange pink/ a girl-bird, someone to egg my yolk/ i eat a bag of receipts turn/ a ripple in a box /fire in my teeth turn/boy-angel wet with satellite coins in my hair/the clocks sing to pleiades/ time as a fold of sheep/white wool surrounds my inner eye/mind fog rippling and stripping bare/ ripening and ripping /a ripple in a box/blurry cats/ i dream of clouds and rainbows /stars and a crescent moon/the verses of history show/ a classical sadness/a wind of green fire /i am drowning all my fears in a tub of light/ no one tells you about the bottomless well/

—Rafiat Lamidi

Wherever the Light Takes Us Home This Spring

Chukwuebuka, I’m here with you.
                                            Let no darkness scare you, Nnam.
The road to our freedom is no longer too
                              far; the morning birds are already singing
it in our ears. Let the enemy dragons say what
                                      they want. I’ll wait for you till the sun
gets to this bridge full. Yet, I only hope
                                        someday, you realize the meaning
of growth where gunfire falls like crushed
                             vegetables on refugee gates. Like how the
bombs descending from the military Jets
                          won't remember our most beautiful bodies
are made with lines of fragile wonders.
                                              Chukwuebuka, can you hear me?
Can you hear me, sweetheart?
                                                         The safest river is where the hearts are drawn
                                                          with ink
of immortality.
                              Here’s to the night train weightlifting
us towards paradise, to where the rooms are
                          most free, your memories passing through
like milk flower ocean, until the fingers can’t
                                              press the exit door. The way you
asked for wings to fly but are given a bag
                              of dehumanization in return for loving a
place too much to be loved in return with
                                            nothing.
Hold the whirlwinds gently and watch
                                how they coil with their branches into
thunder grains. It is how distances
                                                     begin. Say the ritual of human
fragility &
                                fire is still a hunter with his full chest praying
                          to be young missiles in a room overflowing
with Christmas lights & washed -away
laughter. Here’s to a tasty rainbow wine
squeezed out from the shoprite of new dawn.
                      Drink it. Drink it with silence.
I assure you it's not a lake of blood.
                       Your dead birds walking through you like a
dagger, in a movie truck, are not only birds
                                                but the sound of midnight aircrafts.
        The way the stars in your pocket were once apples
at the beginning of creation,
in minutes of grace
                        before the chants of bullets renamed them.
On this hill is where love stands still.
     Let the lilies outshine their graves in the middle of
October ashes.
                                Where nothing grows. & nothing dies.
Except death.
                       Sow the seedlings there into the ground and
you’ll wake to see them sprouting
                                                                            hallelujah rain.
As you watch the dews of mars craving sun
                                         & dawn into this holy space. At every corner,
your shadows residing with echoes of yesterday.
                                                                   The lights will soon be
gone. Don’t worry, Ogbom.
                                    You'll be fine.
In a year or two, your dream shall touch the
                                                                                        moon trellis.
The way time itself was never created to be
                                                                         old except our fears.
Now here’s the rooms filled with young
                                                              butterflies longing to find
their missing found bodies like us.
                                        Don't be afraid.
    There—
                                        in that far-away country
already behind us with love is where the light takes us
                                                                                          home, child.

—Chukwuebuka

space roar
a drifting tardigrade
dreams

—Mariel Herbert