They tell me I’m pretty and I can already see the end,
Cause for them, my body will be a sanctuary
They will leave in peace, and I will be left in pieces

Olivia Trachtenberg is only sometimes a poet. She likes to write poetry and prose whenever the inspiration strikes.

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 eats grouper in Panama City Beach, Florida, and soy curls in Portland, Oregon.

Frank might as well have been looking through a glass darkly. Staring out the kitchen window that Saturday morning, he could barely make out the birds in the tree above his car in the driveway. Were they singing to their hearts’ content? He needed batteries for his hearing aids. The flowers in his small backyard were crowded out by weeds. Could he distinguish colors? Did they have a pleasant scent? If he had instilled his eye drops, would it have helped? Never mind used his inhaler.

Finished splattering over his car, the birds flew off. Was it a pleasant sight? The flight, that is?

His flat screen was on. Now came advertisements for decongestants and hearing aids. Someone instilled eye drops. Could she – it was a woman younger than Frank on the flatscreen – see her car through her advertisement window? And was it, too, splattered with bird crap?

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

Shivering fingers
of a drowned valley: parting
of radiant ways.

Grinding grooves in country rock.
A truck hauls the letters COLD LOGISTICS
through monumental cuttings.

A baler founders
in a dinghy’s bilge, spinning
counter then clockwise.

Chris Andrews lives in Sydney, on Wangal land. He writes poems and translates books of prose fiction, most recently Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow in the Dark (New Directions, 2024).

You have no idea
Or maybe you do. You know.
God, please don’t. And do.

Brennan Thomas is a Professor of English at Saint Francis University, where she directs the campus’s writing center and teaches courses in creative nonfiction, fiction, novel writing, and Disney film studies.

A foot’s pressure spreads
a dull halo on slick sand.
Pop goes bladderwrack.

The line of a dragged stick bends
around a spiny puff and tentacles
bunched by frothing lips of swash.

Seethe-away backwash
plumes off shards unrushably
milled to blunt and matt.

Chris Andrews lives in Sydney, on Wangal land. He writes poems and translates books of prose fiction, most recently Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow in the Dark (New Directions, 2024).

“You’ll never take me alive,” shouted Rocco through the open window. Among glass shards and spent casings, he lay on the warehouse floor. His head below the sill, he pointed his gun in the direction of the police and fired a few rounds. “I told you, I’m not coming,” he sneered as the smoke began to clear.

“THROW DOWN YOUR ARMS, ROCCO.” That was the Chief, talking through his bullhorn while commanding the SWAT team. From behind an armored vehicle, he had a view to the warehouse riddled with bullet holes. The standoff with Rocco had done nothing to help its commercial value.

“COME  OUT.”

“No way.”

“YOU’RE SURROUNDED, ROCCO. MAKE IT EASY ON YOURSELF.”

“I’m not coming. I told you, no one’s taking me alive.”

The Chief reflexively ducked as Rocco fired a few more shots. He waited a minute before talking.

“ALIVE? WHO SAID ANYTHING ABOUT THAT?”

“What’d you mean?” shouted Rocco, keeping his head low.

“ABOUT ALIVE?”

“Huh?”

“WE’RE EASY. JUST COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP, AND I’LL PERSONALLY TAKE CARE OF THE ALIVE PROBLEM.”

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

Below the Umbrian hilltops, mugged by mourning fog,
the regiments of ripe tobacco fields unravel green
where all the delicate courtiers of this autumn draw
vermillion coverlets upon the naked bed of summer,
arrange the mortal liveries of their gold estate
as heralds to the kingdom of our winter.
Here, in these fallowing fields, lies all there is to know
of death and life – that every future comes to bathe
and bloom in the fertile blood of its tragic past, and yield
to the moment, this, the holy seed of Now. All this
appears as a face or figure frescoed on a wall,
and these survive and serve as a balm to the death of years.
Here are the stillness of columns and painted saints,
where the bells of heaven toll, as only they can hear.

Marc Wiegand has participated at a number of universities, among these the University of Texas at Austin, and the British Institute for International and Comparative Law. He has been an Affiliate Fellow in visual arts at The Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy. His poetry has appeared in Innisfree Poetry Journal, Blue Unicorn, The Penwood Review, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Westward Quarterly, and, soon, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets. He is an international lawyer and exhibiting visual artist who lives and works in the Texas Hill Country.

Red-dyed fingers dig into Jell-O.
Extract bits of marshmallow,
pineapple, cherry, walnut.
Leave gaping pockmarks
for other bits to gape at, cry over.
Pontificate their time.
Still pockmarks close over.
Jell-O demands that.
Missing bits are forgotten.
Where they were is forgotten.
Other mournful marshmallows,
cherry slices are plucked,
the spaces, spouses they leave
filled with shiny stickiness.

Brennan Thomas is a Professor of English at Saint Francis University, where she directs the campus’s writing center and teaches courses in creative nonfiction, fiction, novel writing, and Disney film studies.

I opened my mouth and spiders came out.
I opened my mouth and my tongue was a web
made from the letters of your name.
I couldn’t see around their legs
or your letters
so looking in the mirror became a horror show.
I could barely brush my teeth without choking on a vowel.
He promised he’d clear these spiders out of here,
why hasn’t he come yet?
I’ll snap the strands between these consonants.
I’ll dust the cobwebs down my throat myself
if he won’t help me.
These furry corpses stick to my teeth,
turn the words poised on my lips into a crime scene.
My stories stink of dead and rotting things.

Sydney Cloonan is a speech-language pathologist and writer living in Queens, New York. When she is not working at a special education elementary school, you can usually find her snuggled up on the couch with her partner, her dog Hannah and her cat Helo. Sydney lives her life based on two true things: there is no greater snack than peanut butter and it’s always a good night to watch a horror movie. Sydney’s first chapbook, maybe., is available through Bottlecap Press.