A Magazine of Many Arts

by David C. Kopaska-Merkel

Where the colony had been,
the jungle had since returned,
complex organic molecules in the soil
indicated the former presence of plastic,
nothing else remained.


Nothing else,
save a few feral cats,
hungry and elusive,
hunting small creatures
whose biochemistry
provided little nourishment.


It was days before we saw
their sulfurous eyes,
watching us move like humans do,
their prominent ribs,
we enticed them
with terrestrial food,
shot one with an anesthetic dart,
never saw the others again.


What destroyed the colony?
the purple mold,
exposed metal furred with it,
the Lieutenant’s cough,
all treatment ineffective,
whatever took the two exobiologists,
their empty sample bags
fluttering down very near the ship,
large high flyers
almost invisible in the mist.


Today the lock wouldn’t close;
behind the access panel,
mold-raddled circuit boards,
I’ve caught the Lieutenant’s cough,
only static on the radio,
we entered codes for the last resort,
waited for the end,
but there was no clean atom blast.


In the bomb room,
purple growths reach for us,
blossoms greedily open.

by Robert Borski

Among the far stacks, whispers stir the air,
but this time, it’s not the books conducting
their regularly-scheduled audio checks,
but a rant that seems to come up out of nowhere
(or possibly not: earlier, an infected book has 
been purged of interpolated blue material,
so the kibitz may be viral in nature) —
a babel of voices complaining about bitcoin
fines, compression ratios, the inherent danger
of bathtub reads, and as always seems
to be the case whenever a talkfest breaks out, 
the ever controversial taxonomic racism 
of Dewey (“Please, sir or madam, I do
not belong in the Science Fiction section, 
I am Literature.“) — until at last, trundling 
up the aisle, the emboldened robot librarian, 
putting a silver-gray finger to lips, reminds 
them of where they are, and then, overriding 
their programming, enjoins them all to “Shush.”

Marcie Lynn Tentchoff

I used to make the trip for free,
gave guidance to the young,
the weak, the frightened travelers
who had really no precise idea
where they should go,
or what came next.

It was my calling, my attempt
to lend a touch of reassurance
to the transformative journey
that might mark the end of pain,
and open entry to
a land of otherness.

They loved me then. Their poets spoke
my name so kindly, painted me as handsome,
even godly in my looks, till somewhere
someone thought to send
a thank you gift —
one copper coin.

Then came more coins, my pay some said,
while others spoke of sustenance,
provisions for the newly dead.
What need had I for metal bits?
What need had they
for food or goods?

But their perception of me changed,
a skeleton, a money-grubbing,
clawing fiend, who’d eat their souls
should those who loved them
not afford, or just forget
to leave my fee.

And now I steer my darkened craft,
my oars smeared with the blood and gore
that they imagine I now crave
while falling copper obols fill
the bleached bone sockets of my eyes
like tears.

John W. Sexton

She remembered the first time
her mother had told her that the soul
could leave its fossil in the air.
 
She had been a child of seven
when her mother had taken her
to the door in the lake.
 
The door was set three miles
beyond the island of reeds,
just above the deepest part.
 
There her mother had made flat shoes
of woven reeds for both of them;
and they had trod out
 
across the lapping surface
of the blackening water. On arrival
her mother had tapped seven times,
 
seven slapping taps
against the lapping wavelets
with a laurel stick;
 
and the door had opened, a slash
of opening. As they stood at its threshold,
careful at her mother’s caution
 
not to step beyond it,
a dark column of shadow
rose out of the door.
 
This is the murky light
of the downworld, said her mother.
Look through it and you’ll glimpse
 
the fossils of souls.
But now her mother was long dead
And she had come out to this spot again.
 
She had tapped seven times
Against the lapping water
And the door had opened.
 
When the column of dim light
rose out of the lake
she had stepped through the threshold
 
of the door.
And that is how your grandmother left,
in search of her own dead mother.
 
Because she had crossed the door alive,
and because we have never seen her soul
fossilized in the air, we expect her to return.
 
They say there is a spiral of stairs
that leaves the ground at the touch
of moonlight. We have never seen
 
these stairs, but we wait for them
to unscrew through the yielding earth,
and for your grandmother and her mother
 
to step amongst us again.
On that day you’ll see your great-grandmother
in her filaments of light
 
and will realise for yourself
how the dead can summon the living
through the door in the lake.

by Deborah Davitt

She found him on the shore, ship-wrecked, sea-wracked—
his eyes had lost their light, travail-blinded.
Fever shook him like a wind-tossed aspen,
her cool, dry fingers, his only respite.
Yet he never knew her face or her name—
refused to tell him whom he owed her due.
 
Every love’s a journey into darkness,
 
and his was all uncertainty—he begged
to touch her hand, her face, to know her truth.
She relented, letting his fingers trace
the forms of her lips, her cheeks, and her eyes,
But his hands jerked back when he found her hair
coiling cool, lithesome, and alive around
his hand. She recoiled as if struck, but he leaned
forward, offering himself to his fears.
 
Every love’s a journey into darkness,
 
and she felt as much fear as he, as they
lay together in her cave, as she’d not
dared with any other, staring into
his blind eyes as her serpentine locks twined
around him, supple, sleek, and scaled. And she
who’d known only death, celebrated life.
 
Every love’s a journey into darkness,
but some kindle their own light on the way.