—Carlyle Baker

   

star wound
outer layers begin
to burst

     —Eavonka Ettinger

   

UFO II

The cow returns, and we,
afraid to drink its milk, observe
it wander midst a crop circle.

     —Kushal Poddar

   

Gremlin

equilibrium:
a fantasy, this balance
of oppositions

     —Audrey Carroll

   

New Star in the Sky

“Daddy, is it supposed to do that?”
                                        event horizon . . .
                                        dots of ink
                                        in the craters

     —Mark Gilbert

   

Spring

My ocular gel
speckled with golden ice-fern
Springtime on Saturn

     —Mary Salome

   

VHS

a tape labeled “dream”
then static and your hands
all over me, a theme playing
softly, scrolling credits, and
characters we’ll never know

     —Chris Blexrud

—Bill Wolak

   

freezing eggs…
everytime I rewind
our wedding tapes

*****

cloning…
strawberry runners
trying to escape

     —Genevieve S. Aguinaldo

   

Edge Explorer

What is future about that? The mountain side erupted, eroded, on an angle. Trees grow tilted.
Plastic pack in orange, out of the whitening mist. Blown into the present, trod heavy footsteps.
As if on a map, organ meat: a series of red points extending invisibly into this imagined forest.
Clap of earth on face.           Pointed home.           Find the seeker’s mark.

     —Emma King

   

Feux Follet

Old mortar
joints broken within
school walls where the
finger ran so he cared.

At night the pudding
sets in cracks and initials.

*****

Gardens Used to Radiation

Police flashing
gold chamomile lights
against the homes.

     —Darin Ciccotelli

   

The Hive Relocating From Planet Earth

We cracked purple from space, we crowded
wildflowers as giant petal saucers, and we wept
willow tree harps. We learned to divide one
hundred ways to protect the vine. Somewhere in
the scrambled dark, we caught pine sap without pockets.

     —Crystal Sidell

   

year of
the freeze ray
life on Lake Erie

     —Jerome Berglund

   

Xenomorph

Feared invader
unbound in this foreign space.
Never asked for this.

     —Ellen Harold

   

I Think on the Heart

in which the imagination/of it was conceived/sliced and scalpel’d/loved and literatured/caressed
and capsized/kissed with the tips of frost/Sorry the creation of my throat/sorry/a plume of
blood/sorry/an aria of doomed resurrection/sorry/sorry/sorry/sorry a flock of neon birds/burning
into the arctic sun/It’s your hands that made me/unmade me/slain and betrayed me/show me a
lover/who is not a maker first/and that imagination/will haunt my thoughts no more.

     —West Ambrose

   

first contact
the bipeds are delightful
with chips

*****

Venetian love nest
no one here but us
tardigrades

     —Ingrid Jendrzejewski

   

Passionate Apocalypses

rain fire
the protagonists
are human feelings

The dark winter is behind and Spring blossoms with the sun promoting phytoplankton growth in the whole land. I was making a new friend. Who is he and where is she going I don’t know and probably will never know. His eyes are the reflection of my soul
.
shiny gloss
leaves lips subtle
reflections of light

Just as the petals of a flower curl and droop from a clumsy touch, so does my new friend close itself when a violent threat pierces his space. He’s also the unusual, designed to resemble a flowering lotus bud, apparently. We need to give him a name or we lose him!

I have been
searching myself
a long while

     —Barbara Anna Gaiardoni

   

paranoia (n.)

[source: p. 124 of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,
and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin]

—Shloka Shankar