SKY TO EARTH
snowflakes lift us skyward
soften hearts, lighten feet
until we dance

FAT CHANCE
cat peers into sky
tracks the eagle circling wide
feline dreaming big

Liz Kornelsen is a prairie poet from Winnipeg MB, who draws inspiration to write and paint from nature. When not writing she can found hiking, skiing, gardening or losing track of time in an art gallery. Or hula hooping, a skill that delights, having eluded her in childhood.

The sudden arrival of mist behind your glasses told me you understood my
final act of love, the first in too long.
My hand on your forehead,
fingers through your gray whisps,
whispered assurance that you were loved,
a promise that we’d care for mom.

Your final words came later with energy from hospital juice,
a different kind of message, one more typical of our past.
A reminder of prized guns in storage,
a complaint that grandpa’s revolver remained hidden,
a cheeky jab at mom for the hiding,
an undirected sigh.

Two languages,
Two messages of love.

Joel Predd lives Pittsburgh with his wife, two kids, and their adopted pit bull Olive.

“Four… Three… Two… One… Ready or not. Here I come.”

It was another instance of hide-and-seek, a game children like to play the world over. But children are not the only ones. Rats, too, enjoy it. Even adult brown rats – sometimes known as common rats or Norway rats – such as Ed, Fred, Brutus, and Rattus. They were in an alleyway somewhere northeast of Philadelphia that Wednesday morning. Rattus was ‘It”. He took his paws away from his beady eyes and blinked in the filthy dimness by the dumpster.

Where were they? Certainly not in the street with all the busy, human, pedestrian traffic. After an hour of investigating each dark shadow, empty can, and discarded Styrofoam cup, Rattus was still alone.

“Ed? Fred?” His plaintive words seemed to echo in the dead-end alley.

Rats are social animals, so nothing is worse for them than to be alone.

Had the others gone underground? Were they with the dirty sewer rats?

“Ed? Fred?”

Where they in some cheap restaurant kitchen? Or a pawn shop basement, cowering by a damp wall?

Had the three finally abandoned him? Ed and Fred, perhaps.

“And you, too, Brutus?”

David Sydney is a physician. He writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

What you say goes.
Where it goes, no one knows.
Lighting gas, blowing smoke—
rarefied air never felt so remote.
Well, like associated costs,
living equals loss.

The trick is in the treatment,
stitched up.

Budding conniptions
tremble at the thought—
chickens little,
trampled at the trough.

Charles Brand is a certified educator of incarcerated and at-risk youth in Florida. He enjoys using any spare time and inspiration in the pursuit of impactful writing. Holding a master’s degree in western history, he is motivated to blend formal and informal skills in creative writing to attract readers who wish for more from the printed word.

Crude manner
met brute fact, et tu…

And on cue, the safety net snags
the choicest cuts
and lowest lots—
a pillar assault to the senses.

Surge breaches station;
gesture harbors germ.
Trappings set the hook, in vise,
caste out.

All’s swell that ends.

Charles Brand is a certified educator of incarcerated and at-risk youth in Florida. He enjoys using any spare time and inspiration in the pursuit of impactful writing. Holding a master’s degree in western history, he is motivated to blend formal and informal skills in creative writing to attract readers who wish for more from the printed word.

I will come to rest under the red oak,
In the shade at the end of the dirt road.
Between the corn and the factory folk,
They saved me a place according to code.
I have washed these stones with soap and water,
Stopping to trace the names with my finger.
I have been away yet still they offer
To let me lie with them here and linger.
Who will remember the name you carried?
Blood will run and dry but never transgress
Upon the ground where its past is buried.
Their offer is order, my answer yes—
When the harvest returns with the reaper,
Lay me down and let me be the keeper.

Eric Beidel has written hundreds of poems, stories, and essays he kept private until now. He has worked as a reporter, night janitor, editor-for-hire, speechwriter, and bureaucrat. He still uses pencils and the hand-me-down typewriter he got when he was 12. A native Midwesterner, Eric now lives in the shadow of the Santa Catalina Mountains in Tucson, Arizona, where he watches baseball and sunsets.

From behind their protected positions, the chief and his men fired. Then Rocco blasted back from the warehouse. The police let loose again. As the dust settled, Rocco was still alive and fighting. The warehouse was a disaster, at least the ground floor, its windows shattered, its walls pockmarked by bullet holes.

“Throw down your weapons and come out.” That was the chief.

“You’ll never take me alive.” Rocco was defiant.

“I can’t hear you.”

“ALIVE. I SAID, YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME.”

Lying among the glass shards on the concrete floor, Rocco fired twice through the window.

“Come out with your hands up.”

“I TOLD YOU. YOU’RE NOT TAKING ME ALIVE.”

Although struck in the left shoulder and right ankle, he was defiant.

“Who said anything about alive?”

For a moment, it seemed like any other day at the warehouse on N. Fruman St., except for the dust, the debris, the discarded bullet casings, and police squatting behind cars, dumpsters, and other protection. Some days, there was actually more debris and dust. Why so many felons like Rocco chose to shoot it out on N. Fruman was something the chief could never figure.

“Enough. Come out.”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” Rocco was confused.

“You don’t have to  scream. I can hear you better now. Just keep your hands above your head as you go through the door.”

“I told you, you’re not taking me alive.”

“I heard you. And we’re not going to, Rocco. Just make it easier all around so we can plug you as you come out with your hands up.”

“Huh?”

“The men are sick of taking in guys like you.”

“You’re supposed to do that.”

“They’re tired of it, week after week, standoff after standoff. So they took a vote and decided to just shoot you as you come out. You said yourself you won’t be taken alive.”

Rocco was more confused. He had said that. He had almost no ammunition left. Also, a ham sandwich, the only food he had, was full of glass and bits of warehouse siding.

“Does Judge O’Neill, who sent me to prison for five years, know about this?”

“Judge O’Neill? It was his idea that we vote on it, Rocco.”

David Sydney is a physician who writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record)

I find her in back, mid-game
around the table, playing
two cards at once.

O-9, N-17, G-46…
Mini packets of Cracker Jack
are today’s prize. She has won

three already. Her sweet tooth, suppressed
for decades, now thrives on jelly beans
and ice cream. She doesn’t remember

it’s junk we don’t eat in this house.
As cards are called… B-29. I-43. N-17…
she full-on concentrates. Not long ago,

when invited to play, she had sneered,
For losers. It was awful
when, between reading the Times,

completing the Sunday crossword
and discussing politics, she could still track
her memory loss, could still reflect

on her own mind. Now, like the child
she never allowed herself to be, she thrills
over a complete row of plastic coins.

It should break my heart. But
it’s so much easier to love her
this way.

Lynn Cohen’s novel, A Terrible Case of Beauty, was published by Trebol Press in 2013. She received a Best of the Net nomination from Apricity Magazine in 2023. Lynn has attended various writing conferences, including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Columbia University Summer Writers’ Workshop. After a brief tenure in the Jerusalem Symphony Radio Orchestra, Lynn received a Bachelors in Music from the New England Conservatory of Music, concentrating in double bass performance.

Like the species she represented, she had always been a creature of two minds; dissatisfied unless her brain was wrapped around two dreams at once: one immediately controlling her eyes and fingers and all of the other things belonging to the real world, while her heart burned with some more essential, private dream. Now, as she lay on a custom-built couch, her essential mind was on a beach walk with Stephanos, nights ago.

They had climbed through a notch in the dune vegetation, and sat down as the surrounding sea oats framed the moon and hid everything else. She laid her head in his lap.

“Tell me stories of the night,” she said.

He stroked her sensibly-short hair and smiled at the way she always asked for his stories. He thought awhile, and then pointed up at the moon.

“The ancients,” he said, “called her Selene.”

“What, the moon?”

“Your moon.”

She turned her eyes into the pale white light.

“They said she was destined to someday give birth to Pandia, which means ‘all-brightness.’ Homer said Pandia was ‘exceeding lovely amongst the deathless gods.’”

She said, “And all I have to do, to give us that daughter, is to touch the moon.”

He smiled in the darkness, and said nothing. She stretched her arm one faint yard toward the moon.

“Seems so easy,” she said. “Seems so impossible.”

“And yet, you are the hope of people dedicated to doing the impossible.”

#

Back in her first mind, she heard a bodyless voice ask a question. She studied a screen and replied. “42.5. Nominal.”

#

Stephanos, at the beach, pointed back at the moon.

“The Lakota indigenous people have their own story: a legend that the Sun and the Moon were once lovers, living together in each other’s arms. One day, their followers got into a war over which of their gods was greater. After, it was decreed that the Sun and the Moon would live together forever in the same sky, but forever separate, seeing each other only rarely. The legend has it that, on those rare occasions when the Sun and the Moon are allowed to come together, the Moon is so hungry for her lover, that she gobbles up all of his light, and doesn’t spare any for the Earth. And thus, we have eclipses.”

Giggles. “I think I’m glad they don’t allow you to teach science.”

He gave a noncommittal wave she barely saw in the night.

“All wisdom is poetry, dear Ann. That was science, told with a flair. Modern scientific cosmology says that the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth were once the same heavenly object. They split, and gave birth to life, and mankind. And you. Although I do think you’re mostly moon.”

She raised an imaginary glass.

“To reunions.”

#

In her first mind, she heard the voice say, “One minute,” and she answered, “Roger that.”

#

At the beach, with Stephanos, she said, “Those are other people’s stories. What’s your story, oh my wise teacher?”

He stared out at the unceasing waves and thought.

“A story of a lonely man, in love with a world that didn’t love him. One day a beautiful goddess held him and welcomed him a to the humanity he thought had rejected him years ago.”

She smiled and sat up.

“Ah, but what about the moon? These are supposed to be stories about the moon.”

“Like all mankind, he is literally built of pieces of the moon, held together with moonbeams. Every moment since the dawn of creation, tiny particles of moondust have fallen to the earth, driven by the sun’s powerful radiation. And they become part of every one of us. To be a man is to be shot through by the moon.”

“Yes, but what of the moon in this story?”

 “She, too, is waiting for that girl.”

She kissed his arm.

“You are such a dreamer.”

He paused.

“We are all dreamers. And you are the apex of those dreams.”

She squeezed his arm.

“And you are the protector of those dreams.”

She stood up, did a slow 360 and scanned the beach cottages and industrial buildings that now appeared beyond the grass.

“Well, I am going to go be the protector of sleep. We have a lot of work in the days ahead.”

He stood up and surveyed the cottages to find the path home.

“That we do.”

#

In her mind of the here and now, and for mankind’s future, Artemis Mission Commander Ann Bradley lay strapped to her couch in the cramped metal capsule balanced atop the 98-meter-tall SLS launch vehicle. She glanced at her companions as the voice counted down.

“Three, two, one. Liftoff. Liftoff, of Mankind’s Return to the Moon.”

Ann said, “Roger, Control.”

Flames finally poured out of her rocket, the way her species’ dreams had poured out for centuries. She felt her new home shake with the fire until it broke free of her old earth home and rejoined the sky where her species belonged. She glanced out the window at the Launch Control Center and her second mind imagined she saw the man she loved inside it.

In the Launch Control Center, Range Safety Officer Stephanos Palmas kept his hand hovering over the switch with ABORT written on it in big red letters. His eyes were focused with an all-consuming vision on the screens in front of him, searching for any sign of trouble that would mean he would need to hit that switch and save the crew—his crew—from a mission gone bad, at a cost of giving up mankind’s dream of the moon. Only when he heard the voice say, “MECO” did he take his hand away, and allow it to begin a very human shaking as he watched his dream, and the dream of mankind, sailing to their destiny.

Michael Guillebeau is a seventy-two-year-old former NASA worker and novelist. He lives in Madison, Alabama, Panama City Beach, Florida, and Portland, Oregon. And on the road between them all.

You think you see it
And it is there.
But life plays tricks.

The vision you seek
Does not appear
Here or anywhere.

Tell yourself
“There is nothing.”
Nothing is there.
 

Eric Beidel has written hundreds of poems, stories, and essays he kept private until now. He has worked as a reporter, night janitor, editor-for-hire, speechwriter, and bureaucrat. He still uses pencils and the hand-me-down typewriter he got when he was 12. A native Midwesterner, Eric now lives in the shadow of the Santa Catalina Mountains in Tucson, Arizona, where he watches baseball and sunsets.