by Lisa Lahey

We don’t act like them, the xenophobes
and kinemortophobes,
each of us with a peculiar
look and a lamentable odour.
We’d love to run among the blue green grass
on frozen glass mountains,
with the cannibals
and their turquoise camels.
There is the one who sheds her skin 
every birthday so she can grow
while the skin melts into the ground.
There is another whose eyes
are moonlit lasers that x-ray every bone
and dream in a demon’s head.
You fear us all, that’s why we stay hidden.
It isn’t fair, shetani,
but what is?

* * *

Lisa Lahey's short stories and poetry have been published in 34th Parallel Magazine, Five on the Fifth, Bindweed Anthology, Spadina Literary Review, Vita Poetica, Ariel Chart Review, VerbalArt Journal, and Altered Reality.

by Sarah Das Gupta

Witches steal the milk from cattle,
shapeshift into brown hares.
In the hidden witches’ garden
grow pink foxglove fingers,
yellow clumps of spindly ragwort,
deadly to man or beast.
Witches ride in the Wild Hunt
high in inky darkness,
they form dark silhouettes
across the face of the harvest moon.
In elder trees they hide,
under the spiked blackthorn,
among monkshood and aconitum,
mixing strange concoctions,
bringing certain death and gloom.
Yellow and red flames
consumed them once.
Yet in the darkness of the pinewood,
in that other land under the hill,
they survive, to curse and cure us still.

* * *

Sarah Das Gupta is a slowly emerging poet from Cambridge, UK who started writing a year ago when her mobility became limited to 20 metres. Her work has been published in over 20 countries and she has been nominated this year for Best of the Net and a Dwarf Star award.

by Lucy Barker

I watch you enter. Sunlight penetrates the stained-glass, suffusing your pale cheek.
Once, from that  pulpit, the Reverend Swales preached forgiveness, his gimlet eyes resting upon me; the sinner of his flock.

I reach out. I have come too close. Startled, you flee towards the headstones encircling those weathered walls. My empty, unmarked grave lies beyond; above the wind-buffeted waves raging far below.

He waits for you by the lych gate.

With venomous whispers I bid you not to go.
​
Convinced it is merely the rustling of trees, you rush inexorably towards him; oblivious of my pursuing shadow.

* * *

Lucy is a retired tutor living on the beautiful South Coast of England, which inspires much of her work. For some strange reason she is fascinated by the eerie and macabre, but that’s another story!

by Cortni Merritt

I saw you with the box today,
pink and mirrored,
dark-skinned figure,
twirling to that tune I know but not by name.
It was in your hand but it held something you'd forgotten or maybe misplaced,
a dream or a wish or a past person you thought you would be.
I pretended not to see you
wipe your eyes when you asked, 
"Do you think she'll like it?" and you whispered,
"my little girl." 
It was perfect, even though empty. 

* * *

Cortni is a mother, writer, editor, and college instructor living in Central Florida. She enjoys cats, karate, and a well-cooked curry. Find her at www.srdeditingservices.com.

by Cheryl Snell

I was selling raffle tickets but he knew a long-shot when he saw one. Told me he was a cook and right off the bat invited me in for his homemade soup. “So you’re the literal girl next door,” he mused as he brought the steaming bowls to the table. “That’s what we should tell people.”

“Who would we tell?” I said. He was getting way ahead of himself, but the next Friday we went out to dinner. “I listen to the scuttlebutt from the kitchen,” he said, hand partly-covering his mouth. On a whim, I pulled his hand down and kissed it. He was so rattled he could barely demystify the ingredients in the dishes on our table.

The next time I saw him, he had recovered from my gesture and his shyness. We were in his kitchen making dumplings. As he shook the packet of rice-and-lentil powder into a bowl, stirring in yogurt, he said, “This shortcut will have no bearing on the taste.” We held hands and kissed a little as we waited for the mixture to ferment. When he dropped the batter into perforated cups, I watched it puff into snowballs. The sight made me think of the coconut Snowballs my ex liked to stuff in my mouth, practicing for our wedding.

I must have made a face because my host raised his eyebrows before he went back to chopping mint, onion, and cilantro for the dipping sauce. “Spices are the friend of physicians as well as the pride of cooks,” he said, as if he knew something about me I didn’t. And when I took one perfect white ball from his fingers, I remembered that deaf people imagine the sun makes noise as it rises. I bit into the round sphere, and listened.

* * *
​
Cheryl Snell's books include poetry and fiction of all sizes. Her work has or will appear in Blink-Ink, Roi Faineant, Switch, and Does it Have Pockets?      

by Louella Lester

The sun’s down and his outstretched hand seems mud-painted midair. He’s on the field side of the road’s marshy ditch. Crickets spitting out confetti streams of babel. Frogs gulping deep. Headlights sweep past, disappearing into their own dust. He only needs one set to slow. To turn. Bring the starlight.

* * *

Louella Lester is a writer/photographer in Winnipeg, Canada, author of Glass Bricks (At Bay Press 2021), contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review, and is included in Best Microfiction 2024. 

by Lynn White

​Just a raindrop
falling,
falling into wetness.
A silvery teardrop
which splatters
then disappears
into wetness,
to become invisible
as if by magic.

​* * *

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. Visit Lynn's Facebook Poetry Page here. 

by Michael Brockley

The red maple rises above the crowns of pears and serviceberries. Trees an arborist planted in my yard twenty years ago. Now the maple’s roots girdle the trunk, and the bark darkens with stoic resilience. In the evenings, I spread the palms of my hands across the knobs where limbs were trimmed back so a mower could cut the grass beneath the canopy. I ask what songs the neighborhood forest sings through its underground choir. What sustenance might be received from nearby silver maples. From spring’s transient redbuds. My calendar reads mid-October. The tree’s leaves still green. And summer strong. 

* * *

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Prose Poem, Superpresent, and Dreams of Rust and Glass, Volume 2. Poems are forthcoming in Last Stanza Poetry Journal and confetti. ​

by Petra F. Bagnardi

Under the moonlight you showed me the line of your story;
it appeared not like the silvery path of a boy,
and it did not look like the tale of a purple girl.
It involved a complicated soul and the broken being of a human.
It took all your courage to tell me about your journey;
and for your brave honesty, I loved you.

* * *

Petra F. Bagnardi is a screenwriter, a theater playwright and actress, and a poet. She was short-listed in the Enfield Poets' Twentieth Anniversary Poetry Competition, and her poems are featured in numerous literary journals.

by Ani Banerjee

The fan overhead makes a creaky sound; somewhere, a dog howls, and from downstairs, Baba coughs. The couple toss and turn in bed and he says, "Let's go to the roof."
 
Under the stars, their bodies meet, sweat dripping salty over her, both breathless, air thick as mango pulp.
 
“Like dipping in the Ganges,” she jokes.
 
“Next year, we should get some air conditioning,” he says. 
 
“Or we could just hop on a cloud and go to the mountains,” she replies, and he laughs.
 
Below, on the street, four flights down, the night watchman stomps his cane and asks, “Everything ok?”
 
On cue, from downstairs, his ninety-year-old Baba calls out to her, the disposable daughter-in-law, “Munni, water, water.”
 
She says, “Coming, Baba,” but she can’t get up; her saree is crumpled and wet and tangled. As her feet keep slipping beneath her, she clings to the railing, but like old houses do, it groans and the railing gives way.

​* * *

Ani Banerjee is a retiring lawyer and an emerging writer from Houston, Texas. Her flash fiction has been published in Lost Balloon, Janus Literary, Dribble Drabble Magazine and others. 

by John Grey

Trilling air
in morning fog
flutters the treetops.
 
Then mist lifts,
warblers emerge,
lake mirrors sky
from here
to the mountain foothills
 
And huge vistas
now encompass the small,
from a beetle on a leaf
to the roses in a garden.
 
The opaque has its charms
but clarity gives voice
to depth and distance
 
With light in abundance,
all colors are accounted for.
 
And ghosts are now people
with long lives ahead of them.

* * *

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Tenth Muse. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and  “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.

by Lorette C. Luzajic

The seagrass, like woodcut lines zigzagging across the dark water. Rippling cords all tangled in the shallows like some kind of labyrinth. The soft moon illuminates a hushed halo over her brow. Sometimes she wails for her drowned child and the eerie sound fills up the whole world. Sometimes there is mere silence. No wind, no waves. I crawled off of the same shore, the epigenetic trauma of hate and war. Want spun through and through my story. Like a ghost, I wandered after her, needy and damaged and desperate, tugging at her silk nightgown, begging her to see me. 

* * *
​
Lorette C. Luzajic reads, writes, edits, publishes, and teaches flash fiction and prose poetry. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw.

by Gabbi Grey

​She leads me down a dark alley. The smell of urine overwhelms, but I’m focused on her. She squeezes my hand, undoubtedly sensing my apprehension. I’ve never been to this side of town.

Rumors abound about it. Stories are shared. Whispered.

The door says Employees Only, but she pounds. The sound reverberates off the walls.

I cringe. I trust her with my life. But will this venture cost me that life? The promise, though. The lure of salvation. Of redemption. Too powerful to resist.

As the door swings open, a little man is revealed, his white pasty skin a direct contrast to my dark.

I hesitate, but she pushes me inside to follow the creature of the night. I straddle the chair he points to. My breasts squish against the cold padding.

She sits next to me, pressing a kiss to my temple.

I bare my back and the man fires up the ink gun. The pain is excruciating, but less than the fire that caused the burns. She whispers in my ear. How she loves me. How brave I am. How she doesn’t care about the scars.

I’d bear a thousand more to hear those words from her. I’d enter a thousand more burning buildings to save a wretched and ungrateful feline if she would hold me.

Magic ink.

A promise I didn’t believe.

The pain is transforming. The ink is taking hold. Tightened skin loosens. I feel my scars disappearing. Fading into nothing, replaced by beautiful ink. Healing ink.

For her I will do anything. To bask in her love, I will endure anything. And this particular anything is working. Is curative. Is transmuting.

The gun is silenced, and he wipes off drops of my blood.

She tilts my head and kisses me deeply.

Passionately.
​
Promising an eternity.

***

Gabbi Grey, a USA Today Bestselling author from British Columbia, dedicates herself to her fur babies and manages a government job while writing LGBTQ-focused contemporary romances. She also writes m/f romances as Gabbi Black and Gabbi Powell.

by Joshua St. Claire

summer revival
a cicada
thrums down the sky

cosmic strings
a daddy-long-legs casts shadows
onto asbestos shingles

a common swallowtail floats
through the hydrangea sky
deepening blue

sunset
the horizon bent under
the weight of peaches

dog days
the islands of the Susquehanna
lost in their haze

Shakespeare in the park
a red-winged blackbird becomes
the king of infinite space 

the sky
growing violet at the edges
crowcaw

golden hour
an evening primrose blossoms
into deep time

the press of blue on blue hydrangea moon

* * *
​
Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from Pennsylvania. His haiku have been published broadly including in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Mayfly. His favorite thing to write about is the sky.