Beware, murderer. I know widows. I watched my mother become one, imagined how my face would bend and darken in the shadow of the word that means shroud, dusk, ash. What lies inside the bones of a woman who does not crumble before you—who wears this word to war, vowing not to yield? Something heavy: iron, redwoods. Oak, like him: an oak among reeds who knew he would be uprooted, just as she knows she will be. No, it is light, hydrogen fusion in the belly of a star, howling life, dawn, freedom. Beware of this widow on fire.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook Bhagat (she/her) is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction on paradox, rebellion, transformation, and enlightenment from Unsolicited Press. Her work has won or placed in the top two in contests at Loud Coffee Press, A Story in 100 Words, and most recently, the Pikes Peak Library District 2023 fiction contest. It has been published in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, The Alien Buddha Goes Pop, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal and a professor of creative writing Read her work and learn more about Only Flying at https://brook-bhagat.com/.

First, there’s a moment when you are just crossing the threshold from complete oblivion, wrapped in blankets and darkness, to reemerge into the light of the living. You are not a person yet. You have no recollections or anxieties. This is probably what it was like right before you were born.

You stare at yourself in the mirror and promise you’re never going to drink again.

I would pretend to be sleeping when he flipped on the light in my room. He would loom over me until my eyes opened. The walls would seem to lean in. Fear would distort my breathing. If I tried to scoot away, he would grab me by the arm and drag me back and crack me across the face with the flat of his hand. He was buried on a cold Sunday next to my mother. Some thirty people, mostly family, attended. It began to snow as stood at the graveside. He had finally found a solution to his loneliness.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

He received a large order to carpet an entire wall: that meant working late at the light tannery, in the other room. He looked at the skyscrapers at the far end of the room where he was now, but it could be done. He had to get to the other room, where the flowers grew: once the stem was cut, the stone inside reacted chemically with the local oxygen, then melted into spots of light whose original texture was much like a tongue’s. He sighed, thinking about his life. What he really enjoyed was preparing chlorophyll manually, on the piano.

From Guest Contributor Angelo Colella

Drunk Joe asked the man next to him at the bar “Do you believe in flying saucers? I think they are a crock.”

Joe goes home and quits drinking.

From Guest Contributor Doug Hawley

The birds flew by

They’re the same.

From Guest Contributor Daniel Duong

With the heavens above, eyes perceive blackness below. The silhouettes of lonesome silos dotting a barren landscape gives way to perceptions of ancient obsidian obelisks, sentinels erected by the offspring of some long-forgotten civilization, sating deities of seasons past.

I repose beneath a blanket of starlight, and the encircling melody of coywolves lulls me to sleep as I long for dreams of you.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

Blessed Morrissey. Everyone sings. Jennifer’s a junior and she has her own car. She starts the engine and on the summer night highway she says, “Wanna get kicked out of the Hilton?”

“Yeah.”

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction on paradox, rebellion, transformation, and enlightenment from Unsolicited Press. Her work has won contests at Loud Coffee Press and A Story in 100 Words, and it has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, The Alien Buddha Goes Pop, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and other journals and anthologies. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal and a professor of creative writing. Read her work and learn more about Only Flying at https://brook-bhagat.com/.

I sighed as my breathing slowed. The sun rose over my head, and I felt the power inside me waking, like the tree in the woods that had grown into giant oaks, covering the forest floor in the summer. I would sit in the shade of those trees until nightfall, waiting for the stars, reaching for the promise of sleep. The light in the sky became a distant memory, and I could almost feel the joy that the moon brought to those born in the middle of winter or during those spring showers that brought new life to the earth.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

Captain Sam of the starship Gillian’s Folly watches as the stars pass in long white arcs of Doppler light. As a boy, he always wanted to command a ship. The power. The excitement.

Captain Sam longs for the days of intergalactic war.