For Kristen, Who Would Have Turned 47 Today, by Melissa Frederick
I found your obituary in an online archive,
where our newspapers return to earth
these days. Hard to explain
the electric world we now occupy:
issue 33
Your Sword, Your Trumpet, by Anjali Patel
This is not the first wake where she’s been called to tear her hair, clothes, and voice to shreds, but it is by far the strangest. Closed casket, empty funeral home. The anonymous letter she received instructed her to slip through the back door like a phantasma herself, and not exchange words with a single soul, nor peek into the dark wood coffin as she sang its dead through the threshold of her being.
Totality, by Brandi Sperry
I was serving pints of Leinie’s to a pair of flannel-clad retirees when the world changed, near as I can figure looking back. April 8, 2024. Total solar eclipse across a strip of North America. Theories abounded as to why that was the day when it all started, the day the first group of people went under, as we came to call it. The new reality arrived in a three-month wave, but I was way up on the shore where the land stayed dry.
Mourning Person, by Anuja Mitra
most ghost sightings are griefhallucinations. no one wants to admitto delusion, even when inducedby tragedy. scientists say we are shifting things, our mindsalways revising. what the brainnames reality is nothing…
Symphony of the World’s Roots, by Damián Neri
I arrived in a meteor shower, imprisoned within minuscule specks of ice and dust. The silicates that covered me burned as I fell, and my spores settled among the mountains in a strip stretching from Jalisco to Guerrero, on Mexico’s southern coast.
Your Body Conquers Death, by Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos
There you lie—with a thin tube attached to the side of your neck, an oxygen mask tightly clasped around your head, a shadow of the man you once were, but…
Auspicium, by Diana Dima
There has always been a sparrow inside me. At first it was just an egg, something I felt in my belly before I even had the words for it. I remember asking my mother about it, the way she hugged me and said, it’s nothing, trust me, try to ignore it and it’ll go away, and that was the first time I knew the world was not simple, not to be trusted, and it would never be simple again after that.
Earth as Eidolon, by Alexander Atreya
Content warning Suicide. Publisher’s Note: this poem is best read on a desktop or tablet, as mobile viewing does not preserve the deliberate formatting of the poem Iwith eight minutes…
The Glass Sarcophagus, by Tiffany Morris
As she crashed through the atmosphere of Earth, crackling through the stratosphere and into cloud cover, she marveled at the long stretch of blue: like cyanide, like corpse fingers, like glacier-fed water. The ship cut cleanly through the veil, through the dense thunderheads, through the cumulonimbus dream of atmosphere.
Inferno guts Manila, by Mark Cunanan
Reappears, out of the thick grey smog, our edificerazed to the ground again: columns cracked open by power lines, attic crumbling overhead, and decades-old record caked with soot. The…