biddy bye bye
bought and sold
and when we cry cry

crawling cold
and if we dye dye

our blues gone old
we say my my

the table’s told

biddy bye bye
frightened fawn
and if we fly fly

the fuels withdrawn
Whisper why why

touch the dawn
float too high high

the baby’s gone

biddy bye bye
tale’s gone sour
heave a sigh sigh

every hour
voices pry pry

we ought to cower
but we lie lie
truth devour

yes we lai lai
a shroud of flowers
yes we lye lye
skin and scour

River (they/them) is a poet in the US. In lieu of a bio River asserts that the current conflict in Gaza and the West Bank is a genocide inflicted on Palestine by Israel and the US. It must cease immediately and permanently, apartheid ended, and Palestinians must be afforded dignity, self direction and freedom. Accountability must come to those in Israel, the US, and other countries who supported and committed war crimes, and reconciliation and reparations must be made.

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because we loved our country

& it did not love us back:                            the night we died

at the gates of heaven

we dragged our feet like soldier ants                     & walked

like devils on our way to heaven                       we wore tattered clothes

& the angels

laughed at us for coming from                    a crooked country

we carried the holes

our country dug inside the skin of our bones

& fresh bullets fell        from

their mouths       like hot yam         you said we looked dirty

& i laughed

aloud        like a rooster       & declared that we looked exactly

the way

our country wanted us to look        you tore my flesh apart

to see the ruin

that my inside had become      &        i opened the gates of your eyes

to see

the extent of the flourish      of your blemish            you said

you were grateful

for the impacts your country had      on your body          & because

it did not

shatter you as a whole             but only crumpled your intestine

& i threw

my tongue         against the gates of heaven          & threw

my palms to a distance

to worship the creator         for shattering my flesh          & for

remolding my heart

into pieces          you said we did not live enough on earth

but i said it was

not my wish to die together          with the body of our country

you said

we did not love the country enough          but in what other way

can you show love

again        if you have already offered your body           we loved

but were

not loved      i took bullets for you          my country           because

i did not know

that you were the one         holding the rifle         i threw my body

into the fire

for your sake          ignorant that the source of the fire was you

you bombed

my skin          yet            i enjoyed the fondness of the furnace

& although

we were tired           we walked          as if we conquered the world

when we reached

the gates of heaven         we met you at heaven’s gate       holding

a rifle &

throwing its breath            into the holes          of our nostrils

& still walked to you

Ayòdéjì Israel, a poet, writer and editor, is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Channel Magazine, Eunoia Review, The Deadlands, Ake Review, Defunct Magazine, OneArtPoetry, Sandy River Review, Whale Road Review, Nude Bruce Review, The Bitchin Kitsch and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @Ayo_einstein.

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Beyond the dim, there is a six-foot gully,
so audacious & wide, it opens into the
oracle’s shrine. The voice of
Ibini Ukpabi, fresh-wet,
it saturates everyone’s
ear, it says, Kamalu,
the warrior god,
quelled
the
Gorgon for
our sake; for our sake,
he made sacrifices with his beloved
who fell short of his glory at the expense
of their sins. Now, in requiem to this, every homestead
shall sing of blood & blackwaters, which means:
the cost of a capital crime is a no-return
walk through the dark tunnel of
disappearance, where the
Gorgon now rules.
Outside, a wolf
prowls as if
enacting
a pact
with
the hooting
owl. The moonlight
scrapes through the dark presence,
a slingshot of pebbles hurl into Iyi-Eke
& echoes a man’s name; he has been found guilty of
the crime he was presumably framed for. Many went
this way. Each morning, we wake up to the
bloody torso of Iyi-Eke, the river so red, we
believe it to be the crimsoned evidence
of death from the ones who were cast
into the tunnel of disappearance
a night before. I did not know
that the way to heroism
is to lose your
way back
as
a villain in
the face of your
own kinsmen. Behind
the scene: a cast of light
reveals there was no night at all,
only the day opening into deep secrets.
A peep further, unfurls how the tunnel of disappearance
opens into the European Beach through the outlets of Iyi-Eke,
the thighs of the river, reddened with a bull’s blood;
something we swore was evidence of our quelled
kin. I never knew that the way to honour
Kamalu is to toss one’s kin into a
windowless façade of a pinhole;
something we were so sure
to be the way the gods
clipped off red-oiled
fingers from soiling
the rest of
our hands.
A
closer
surveillance
reveals how those
condemned to death in honour
of the pact with Kamalu are sold
behind doors for ten manillas & shipped from
the shores of Calabar into the transatlantic voyage.
Their names, chained, a thing with wings— lost birds,
singing of home — & then, become so cursed with foreign tongues as to never
sound like us; the villains who quelled their heads in a charade of pact with the gods.

Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan (he/him/his) is a speculative writer of Izzi, Abakaliki ancestry, a finalist for the 2023 Rhysling Award, a nominee for the Forward Prize, a data science techie and a medical laboratory scientist. He was the winner of the 2021 Write About Now’s Cookout Literary Prize. He has works at Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Uncanny Mag, Nightmare Mag, Augur Mag, Filednotes Journal, Antithesis Journal, Kernel Magazine, Mizna, and elsewhere. He tweets @wordpottersul1.

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One way of measuring creatures is by volume.
For the purposes of consumption, we consider

parts. Like, it’s one thing to eat an ant, but what if
we’re talking just a leg or two, fallen into the pot.

How much is a lentil-bulk? How much to equal an olive?
The rabbis say it is true that something smaller than

a lentil is too small to consider, but at the same time,
that’s only true if the creature in question has no soul.

If there is a soul, volume is irrelevant and we must consider
their chance of survival. An ant without a leg is not the same

as the leg of an ant, when weighting sins of consumption.
We fall to pieces. We tear apart. We tabulate for hunger

and for heartbreak. One can be at peace with dying
but must still avoid being in a room with the dead.

Is any box full of bones a corpse? If a spine and a skull,
matched, we count one, one corpse. A whole, holy,

hole in the world. Even if the ribs are missing. Any
amount of bones taken from a grave remains a whole,

count one, held together by the act of burying, after
the skin, after the flesh, after the tendons. But a box

of parts missing a skull or a spine, unburied between
death and now, is something other than a dead man.

An unquantifiable loss. These are the lists of things you
should never touch: a limb from a corpse stacked

with two dead strangers, pieces of limbs mingled
from two or more still-living people, a half-kav of bones

from at least two dead things, a barrel of blood, a bone
the size of a barley grain if it’s been broken in two,

a spine and a skull from two corpses mixed in one box.
We prepare. We predetermine. We prevent personal pollution.

Shana Ross is a recent transplant to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty Six Territory. Qui transtulit sustinet.  Her work has recently appeared in Haven Spec, Identity Theory, Ninth Letter, The Dread Machine and more. She is the winner of the 2022 Anne C. Barnhill prize and the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition.  She serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly and a critic for Pencilhouse.  She prefers walking in the woods to social media, so she budgets her time accordingly.

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I dance with the handsome men I do not know
the music alive between their thighs, their liquid

skin and hard muscles, my feet and the floor
up my spine, into our shaking, sweating, swimming

pretty heads… My bladder aches. On the way to the men’s room
a handsome man I do not know slaps my butt as he passes by.

You should smile more. I am shy at the urinal trough.
A handsome man I do not know slurs and tells me

You dance strangely. He glances down at my social
anxiety. Rolls his eyes. Learn to dance or stay home.

Shoulder to shoulder, all the handsome men I do not know
laugh while they piss poisons away. Outside the panting

club, the handsome men I do not know call me Faggot!
and with fists they beat an understanding of identity

into me until my head rings with the bass of their hate,
hematomata, and the relentless losing of consciousness.

The opposite of life is not death, but lonely. No deeper cold
than the end spread out without end or touch, soundless

crashing waves of the infinite grinding existence into formlessness…
but then, out of this place without sensation, a stranger that gets it

snaps me back. In the hospital, my eyes open to a handsome
man I do not know, who tells me You’re honestly lucky

to be alive! A miracle. Blessed. From the ocean bottom
of swelling and gauze, I swim up to his indecipherable

piercing voice. How strange I feel. Clumsy. Empty of air.
Without heart. From the wounds under the bandages,

from swollen lips and sharpened teeth, the infinite moist
malice that came back with me dribbles. I cannot be

restrained. I reach up and pull the handsome man I do not know
to my face. His eyes widen. I see nothing of myself in reflection.

No one is prepared for his screams. More handsome
men I do not know fall or flee. I howl after them to

Tell all the handsome men I am coming!
Tell them how strange I have become!

Richard Leis has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Star*Line, Eye to the Telescope, The Molotov Cocktail, and anthologies from House of Zolo and Crone Girls Press. He works at the University of Arizona with the HiRISE team, which has had a camera in orbit around Mars since 2006. His website is richardleis.com.

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This lesson I learned and
            relearned, reciting
it like a spell, word after word
to call back my power,
to soften the ache,
to sort out fact
            from fiction,
smother the ashes,
close the gate after me,
go home—

leave the garden behind,
all its wine and ghosts,
            flashes of memory
and myth, hope held too tightly,
until the spell turned curse,
            and secrets scattered
like a firestorm,

witch-wild and unruly, until I had made
every offering I could, lit every
candle and let it burn down to revelation,
wax unspooling into new constellations,
and then—

             something in my heart

started burning again, an admission
of missing, a feral kind of longing,
beautiful on sight, but bone-deep
             it was gnarled at the root,
and still, I ate it, took a bite
of my own heart, because starving people

do terrible things, and I was all bones
and insatiable hands—
            I should apologize,
            but I won’t.

Ali Trotta is a poet, writer, editor, word-nerd, and unapologetic coffee addict. Her poetry has been published in Uncanny, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Small Wonders, The Deadlands, Fireside, Strange Horizons, Cicada, Nightmare, Mermaids Monthly, and several of the Rhysling anthology compilations. You can follow her on Bluesky (@alwayscoffee) or Instagram (@alwayscoffee7).

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for Sakshi

Your face an oblong fact. Your hair a swirl of light in a jagged syntax. The curve of your laughter like a shot of caffeine in the mainline vein. This is how you look from the other side of my death—Your wrists torqued, shoulders hunched, your eyes a liquid curl of endless awe. You map the graveyard like a mouth does the memory of love; digressing along the diagonals— stumbling through the weeds to unfurl a nerve you didn’t yet know existed. What do they mean? You asked me once, The things you write— what are they a gesture of? And I said I wanted to speak from outside of my death— clutch and claw at things beyond the clasp of language. And it isn’t bad, to be honest; the ground eats all light and lets nothing through. Everyone is used to the quiet of it— lulled into sleep like a formless child. The mind outside the skull is just one— cold and liquid— membraned like a sheet of transparent glass. I get to walk in and out of your dreams and invent the past. There, the splash in the skyline from the day I met you, and the gust of breeze from the ocean in our backyard. The veins of the sidewalk spelling our names incorrectly. The sun slivered at the edges of the neem tree— the truncated symmetry of its scattered light and the unending crescendo of old-time Gods. The bravado and the fatigue of it all. Possibility piled up on possibility. The bright wild static of our childhood— the light spilling out of our hands like a litany of unsaid things. It’s all here— everything we lost— like a river of unending quench. Memory has no margins here, the world winnows all at once and everything is water— nothing sinks. And yet I am always swimming towards you, gnawing against the current, nudging and nudging against the curve of things. Your voice an anchor at the wrong end of a very long tunnel and I twist and turn in my sleep, crush the maggots underneath— trying to find my way to the dream within the dream where we hold hands again.

Abhinav is a graduate student residing in Delhi. His poems have appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Chestnut Review, trampset, The Deadlands, and, Gulmohur Quarterly among other forums.

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He occupies the office above the bleeding floor,
Pacing, a shadow. Pulled blinds, obscure.
Below, his opus: his system, perfected.
Efficient. Patented. Robotic. Protected.

A column of machines do the slaughter-line dance,
His monument to rendering lucre from flesh.
Bolt guns to bleeding. Flay, evisceration,
Split guts, cling wrap. Monetization.

The man blows on coffee, licks his dried lips,
Meeting all the metrics of beef cows per shift.
Twenty-four thousand two hundred and six,
Dividend payment, steak-holder fix.

Demand is increasing, and he’s the supply,
Just a minute ’tween death and prepackaged-to-buy.
They moo, they squeal, they huff, stomp a hoof,
Cacophonous to silent. Suspended on hooks.

Fevered snouts cast ’round. Panic in the line,
Swollen viscera, infection. Forklift tine.
If they walk, you can slaughter, say the regulations.
Reach down, pump lever. IV medications.

End of the trail, shorn skin in a stack,
Runnel of blood, electrical crack.
The pile—it shakes, vibrates, and moves,
Congeals, limbs form. Life. Looms.

Six legs, then eight, crooked horns unwind,
Crawling starfish of meat. A new raging mind.
Carcass tartar. Eyes form a crown,
Scan for the man who put them all down.

Ribs jut like claws from marbled toe,
Hanging from rafters, spy silhouette, go.
Lurching hulk, methane rasp,
Bursting wall. Broken glass.

The beef finds its mark and away he is carried,
Within bosom of meat, he’s embraced and he’s buried.
Eyes swivel ’round, see the warehouse in back,
Find man’s old equipment, all dusty and black.

No robots, no machines, no murderous code,
Just steel rods and chains, and shackles. Cold.
A calf, he is laid to the skinning cradle,
Mewling ruminant. Supper table.

Transection. Open. Hide pulled away,
Fever dreams come. Clasp hands: Pray.
Beef stands over. Man whinnies shame.
Sinews ascend, bone breathes vein.

Meal now dressed, cow spider gives birth,
Eyes draw wide to edge of girth.
Strip-steak womb. The mound opens up,
Caldera of flesh. A tear. Erupt.

They pour to the floor. Meatballs with teeth
Swarm up his limbs on eyelash feet.
Easy bits first: cheeks, then lips,
Armpits, earlobes. Fingertips.

He bleeds, but he lives for one more breath,
Then the beef mouth smiles, declares: Death.
Sated and strong, her children congeal,
Spawn red meat arachnid down slaughter-line trail.

Leap to machines, tear wire from root,
Robots topple. Crashing. Mute.
Rush the corral. Broken pipe,
Animals flee to waxing night.

Engulfed in flame, slaughterhouse fire,
For the man and his system: funeral pyre.
Beef mother counts heads. Brain makes a list,
All twenty-four thousand two hundred and six.

Chris Panatier lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, daughter, and a fluctuating herd of animals resembling dogs (one is almost certainly a goat). He writes mostly short stories and novels, and also draws art for book covers and metal albums.

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in my language moartea e marea                  death is the sea
and the sea is mare, vastness                         that will swallow us all

in my language moartea e mareea                death is the tide
a shifting of matter                                        that must always return

in my language Maria, marea mea                she, named like the sea
is returned to the vastness,                            and becomes the sea

in my language Maria a murit                       and there is no sadness
in seafoam arms, today                                 she holds me as ever

II

only in English do I crumble,
            cut myself on shards of words:

                         Maria has died in
                                     a hospital bed

                                                  far from the sea
                                                      far from home
                                                                   far from
                                                                                me

III

in no language are there any words
for the the low-growling blackness, the opening of jaws
between waves—niciun cuvânt destul de întunecos

and when the sea swallows your past and your future,
you would say anything but the right word:
passed, departed, stins, adormit

a kindness, how the sea fog of language
fills that terrible hollow, so that you believe
she lingers on, nu încă amintire

but in drifting between languages, it finds you
suddenly, the sharp truth—the wave crest
at the intersection of: death, moarte.

IV

there is a sea beyond all words: golden with sun and memory
and us swimming and the future—the future, as far as we can see.

Diana Dima is a writer and neuroscientist living in Canada. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, khōréō magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.dianadima.com or as @dimafic on Bluesky.

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We walk through a forest of petrified trees:
poems in an extinct language
memorized by stone.
I love them for their ability to outlive me.

We are scavengers
at the whale fall of prehistory.
The dead things we burn are burning us.

I want my daughter to outlive me.
I want to donate my body to paleontology.
I want to set myself on fire for my child,
but the fumes would hurt her little lungs.
I will leave a plastic fossil.

I’ll be ghost in the groundwater, blood
for oil, as in toward the creation of,
not in exchange. When life hands you
an extinction event, make fossil fuel. When life
hands you your own tail, swallow it.

My daughter breathes in dinosaurs.
I hold her in the soft parts of myself,
biodegradable, already forgotten.

Lindsay King-Miller is the author of Ask a Queer Chick: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life for Girls who Dig Girls (Plume, 2016). Her fiction has appeared in Fireside Fiction, Baffling Magazine, and numerous other publications. Her debut novel, The Z Word, is out now from Quirk Books. She lives in Denver, CO with her partner and their two children.

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