Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction • Eva Papasoulioti

The Gardener • John Reinhart
Today’s Featured Plants • M Frost
Ghost Garden • Louise Worthington
willowbreath • Jennessa Hester
Clusters of crocus • H. V. Patterson
Axis Mundi • Marie Brennan
These Seeds I Carry • Beth Cato
Adaptable • Dawn Vogel
Transgarden • Alex K. Masse
Lost Cyberflora • Ian Li
chrysanthemoon  • D.A. Xiaolin Spires
Nor Yet an Olive Branch • Mary Soon Lee
A Cactus Learns to Lie • Mizuki Yamagen
flowers without meadow • Tiffany Morris
crimson botany • Kathryn Reilly
Family Project • Jenny Thompson
Elven Forest Meets Climate Apocalypse • Lynne Sargent
Artificial Memory Gardens • Eli Alemán
A Packet of Seeds • Ori Diskett
Behold the Dandelion • Kendall Evans

The Gardener

I plucked an unfamiliar planet
off the vine, held it close,
the warm aroma of its ripening
enticing me to bite, 
juices running into new galaxies,
looking forward to comet season,
already tilling a bed of supernovae,
seed that will volunteer in spring
between the marigolds
and the cosmos

—John Reinhart

Today’s Featured Plants

Pick a tap point to entertain your garden fantasies.

1. Nightlily ‘Sunspot’
You’d expect this nocturnal beauty to be yellow or orange,
but it’s surprisingly dark, its giant red blooms 
magnetic arcs—you’ll get pulled in every time.

2. Swarm Rose
A Beta Colony exclusive!
This intergalactic prize winner
a hybrid of roses and neon beetles.
Expect several flushes of electric blooms.
Ships as a mass of bare roots, beware the vestigial spines.

3. Martian Breath
These tiny treasures feast on methane,
require little or no water—
we aren’t even sure they’re plants,
the way they move across the grow dish like amoebae—
glorious under electron magnification*

*Extra charge for the magnifier

4. Nebula Tree (High Graft)
Stunning display cascading off a dwarf maple trunk—
petite flowers open once a rotation period,
releasing a cloud of incandescent pollen.
Buyers with allergies should use caution.

5. Quasar Fern
Elegant texture for the back of the bed.
Accretions of sporangia on the underside
eject luminous spores. Not to be missed! 

Today’s catalogue curated just for you—
yes, there in the barren bunk of your starship,
dreaming of gardens, of digging your fingers into dirt.

—M Frost

Ghost Garden

These petals, time-stained at the edges, hold memories
of purple bleeding through the veils between worlds. Our dying
is both ending and beginning—each curl and crisp echoing
through mirrors of might-have-been, where gravity
releases its hold on our stems.

Watch how we catch starlight differently now,
our flesh turned translucent as ancient maps,
our veins threading paths between was and will-be.
Even as we scatter into stardust, we're teaching
new languages of grace.

Don't press us between pages just yet—
there's magic in our preservation,
stories spiralling through our dried stems,
wisdom in the way we're learning to exist
in multiple moments, one ghost-petal at a time.

In the garden of perhaps, we are always
opening our throats to tomorrow's light.

—Louise Worthington

willowbreath

hear the
forest whisper
as it penetrates you—
i too was once a girl lost in
the woods

—Jennessa Hester

Clusters of crocus

When I died, 
My rage dripped with heart’s blood into soil

Crocus bulbs nestled in the dark
Like withered child hands
Drank in my spirit with my blood

In Spring, I resurrect with them, royal purple
We are urgent plurality 
              greedy for sun
              burbling pleasure of chlorophyll
              a singing network of anchoring roots
              drinking life from the murmuring bones of the earth

My killer returns, hand in hand with a new girl
              peace shatters, rage blooms
              crimson bruising blossoms
              memory of bowie knife 
              stolen life spilling out

Oblivious to danger,
The girl runs her hands through us
Smiling bashfully down at golden stigmata,
She doesn’t see the blade

He steps into our riot and
We resist
              shoots like winding hands
              petals become tongueslipsteeth
We are enflowered vengeance
We have no throat, so he must scream
Knife drops
He is lost in greenpurplegoldredredred

The girl crawls from our deadly bed,
Untouched
She flees,
Newborn fawn, bleating for mother

Soon, our blooms will wither
We’ll lullaby ourselves to slumber
Underground, self-propagating,
Multiplying bulbs readying for future springs

We will blanket this world
A ravenous riot of crocuses

—H. V. Patterson

Axis Mundi

holding the heavens above the forest canopy
ceiba, bodhi, fusang, or ash
emerald elder
of the world
the tree
grows
through
earth
and
into
cool shadows
of the underworld
cradling lost spirits in its lace
its roots the foundation upon which everything stands

—Marie Brennan

These Seeds I Carry

I made certain that I died
with seeds in my pockets so that
I would bring them with me to
the land of the dead, where
with fingers no longer curled
with arthritis I dug into earth
thick and rich through luscious
decomposition

and there I planted anise hyssop
and catmint, two dear favorites
of mine that would eventually grow
beautiful purple flowers to attract
bees and butterflies

you see
I always understood, from the time
I was a child that for me, heaven
wasn't about clouds and high gates
but ready soil and the promise
of what would come next

which is why I watered my new garden
and smiled as I patiently awaited
the first hesitant
green leaf against moist brown
for confirmation
of new roots in my forever home

—Beth Cato

Adaptable

They're the seeds,
hermetically sealed,
ready for the long voyage
to another world.
And I'm the bit
of dandelion fluff
hitching a ride
in a crevice of their crate.

I don't belong here.

Awakened from dormancy
in the warmth of a greenhouse
under a distant sun.
But the dirt, the petrichor
from the artificial rain,
is enough like home
for me to slip into a row
with the other seeds.

I don't belong here.

The gardeners spot me
when I've barely poked
my head above the surface.
I grew too fast
to blend in with the others.
They yank me from their soil
and toss me into the compost,
left to rot into new soil.

I don't belong here.

I pop my head back out,
crowned with the decay
of the other failures,
as their queen.
The gardeners underestimated
my resiliency; they always do.
But now they want to learn my secrets,
so they trap me in glass.

I don't belong here.

I've turned to gray,
gone to fluff again.
But the scientists here
now know my strength,
and they collect all
of my tenacious seeds.
An entire plot devoted
to my children.

We belong here.

—Dawn Vogel

Transgarden

long-abandoned by the hands 
of wondering others armed 
with misprinted manuals and seed packets 

i have allowed nature
to take me in and teach me 
the ways of reclaiming

for reclamation
has always been
my favourite trick of hers

deer hooves and dandelions
daring to shadow concrete 
cold, hard, and foreign

because really,
the unfamiliar
is but a border

to persevere 
is to know that, to love that 
and chip, chip, chip 

until there's space
for you
again

i follow nature’s act
and dig, dig, dig 
until i remember myself 

i stop hiding
what they said
fit the body two doors down

i let myself grow,
and grow and
grow 

my body becomes moss
herbs and flowers
in rebellious spots

i breathe summer sighs
and bleed chlorophyll;
whisper to my kin through new roots

things that were once
simply endured
i now sing as i do them

for i see myself
after years
of never thinking to look

Tended, 
Transformed, 
True 

—Alex K. Masse

Lost Cyberflora

Slip through the cracks between web pages 
and tumble onto a springy bed of cyberspace moss, 
where the lost missives of old Internet forums 
scroll across a sea of cell-like leaves 
in bioluminescent flashes. 

In damp darkness, these discarded fields 
of heartfelt messages and questionable advice 
coalesce into a velvety landscape, a quiet patchwork 
breathing beneath the sheen of social media. 

And on this fertile forest floor of bygone bulletin boards, 
feel the whispering electric winds disperse mossy spores, 
carrying these words onward, 
never flowering, yet 
never quite forgotten.

—Ian Li

chrysanthemoon 

On the gleaming 
white surface of the Moon—
ghastly, elegant Chang’e
marooned and still
experimental
places a kernel of regolith 
on her tongue—
why not?
she already drank 
the elixir of immortality,
why not sample a nugget 
of her new home?
it sits hard
and she swirls it
presses it against
her cheek
until it bursts—
a single tendril 
snaking upwards
and curling about
pierces
her taste buds—
the inception
of biomatter
where dust meets life—
inert meets eternal—
as a drop of her
phantasmal blood
touches the Moon’s surface
rolls down the crater—
root systems
come to life
rhizomic
buds and nodes—
interlacing
marring the
barren rock,
so that when
the terran eclipse comes,
chrysanthemums blossom—

the Moon—
the Earth-facing side—
turns suddenly
into soft petals of yellow
delicate like bird feathers
expansive like grain fields
glorious as the Sun
and somehow
waving about
in effectively
no atmosphere

—D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Nor Yet an Olive Branch

Leaf, stem, flower of an alien plant
or so we dub them for convenience

as we review video taken by probes
and chirped to us on radio waves.

The leaf, or pseudo-leaf, explores,
restlessly detaching and reattaching

from the pseudo-stem which sprouts
a weave of shoots and dangling roots

as flocks of pseudo-flowers take flight
freighting pollen on petaled wings.

No foot falls; no beast stalks;
no bird sings out; no bug crawls

in this forest that is not a forest
on a world orbiting a foreign star.

The orange forest drinks sunlight
through carotene not chlorophyll

and the plants that are not plants
gossip in rustling whispers

and when we arrive, when we trample
heavy-footed in a pride of spacesuits

they will armor themselves with thorns
that are not thorns, that slice

through misconceptions and bare
our skins to air we cannot breathe.

—Mary Soon Lee

A Cactus Learns to Lie

We planted it first in silence,
hands careful as pilgrims placing stones,
roots pressing gently
into this red dust who knows
nothing of rain.

It watched us unpack,
unfold lives beneath a sun
too close to be kind, too distant to love—
a plant brought from another desert
to soften the edge of exile.

Soon, its needles whispered truths:
Dig here, there is water beneath.
And we dug, and found wells bubbling
sweet and clear beneath the sand.

It spoke through soft quivers,
quiet shifts of shadow,
spine and thorn its alphabet,
promised home, water, harvest—
telling us secrets we could not pry from 
these lands ourselves.

But hope, we soon learned,
is easily bruised by empty skies,
prayers unanswered,
dry wells promised wet.

The cactus, lonely perhaps,
afraid of disappointing,
began weaving gentler fictions:
that dawn was near,
that the sand could yield fruit,
that love was plentiful.

Tomorrow it will rain, it whispered,
but tomorrow was heat, and dryness,
and bodies curled tight with thirst.

We hesitated, fingertips reaching out
to trace its changing language,
no longer certain if the lies were born in the body
of our cactus prophet, or rooted deeper—
in our own restless hearts.

Now, we gather listless, 
watching for the tremor of a single thorn,
knowing it might lie, listening anyway—
hungering for the careful promise
we would someday find home
in this uncertain world
where truth was scarce,
and lies bloomed gently,
sweet as nectar, sharp as needles,
true enough to let us sleep
just another night.

—Mizuki Yamagen

flowers without meadow

in the galactic dark of blooming
the halo of old constellations
stains the hollow
shells of blossoms
spilling open
into gold-dosed light

seeds become stars
like the wasp devoured
in the beauty of the fig

—Tiffany Morris

crimson botany

on Alpha-X1 flowers sing to the skies for rain
anchored in the dead and dying
roots, like blind Protanilla flamma, rove downwards
seeking ghosts of soils rich and moist
as they scrape through collapsing veins

resigned, roots settle into saltier survival
xylem pulling blood from bodies withered or plump
ever-upwards, staining once-clear stems red
longing for Xytelam’s tears to fall from above
yet the droughts have killed even the gods

the crimson flowering mounds sway, 
watching withered survivors slashing scales
peeling them away from their beloveds
sowing gash after gash with younglings
whose leaves will unfurl towards two suns 

a fading species’ last attempt
to seed beauty upon their world

—Kathryn Reilly

Family Project

The dirt, the seeds, the fertilizer
even the collapsible planter
all had to be brought up in bits
during the migration to the colony.
Each member of the family sacrificed
all of their allotted personal baggage 
space, already meager to begin with
as the weight had to be spared
for more valuable freight: spare parts,
algae, construction materials—
those things humans need to exist
on barren, dusty alien ground.
Little room left for foolish hope,
and what humans need to feel alive,
but the family felt there was more to save
than people on a poisoned planet:
other life from Earth should endure,
so each new generation brought
as much as they could, until the day
the family could sit down together
around the plain dinner table to enjoy
a red slice of tomato with their rations.

—Jenny Thompson

Elven Forest Meets Climate Apocalypse

Yes, villains have always been 
setting dreams afire

endless, eternal beauty has always been
compatible with inevitable disaster

perhaps the only reason I cannot imagine
Lothlorien in wildfire season, 
Du Weldenvarden drowned,
Ardeep like bleached coral

is because first they were printed,
tree become book, become dream
even as seedlings suffocated under ash,
never to germinate.

forests, and the tomes they bore
going up in smoke is a twofold nightmare
that seems to burn away any possibility
of recovery’s dream.

—Lynne Sargent

Artificial Memory Gardens

I visit the gardens weekly,
Entrusting precious moments to bloom.
If my neurons fail to preserve them,
I smile, knowing they’ll still be remembered.

Biotechnology’s sentimental soul
Transforms memories into bio-organic seeds.
Abstract thoughts become gorgeous flowers,
Cherished privately and communally.

Seeds pulse with color and emotion,
Capturing significance and sensory details.
I dream of becoming a gardener,
Infusing memory soil with love and care—
A heartwarming duty to nurture and preserve,
Ensuring healthy growth with tender hands.

Gardeners know memories need regular
Mental and emotional nourishment,
Lest they sprout corrupted.
Meditation and reflection clear the mind,
Watering plants with focused thought and intent.

Pruning is essential, as with any garden.
Positive reinforcement keeps it manicured;
Painful parts are cut like unwanted thorns—
with consent—
Promoting healing and new growth.

I tend joyful blooms of sparkling flowers:
Happy childhood memories, milestones,
Friendships, and love.
I recall my grandmother’s smile
as she tended her roses, her hands
delicate yet strong, each petal
infused with her care.
Her memory blooms beside mine,
A reminder of roots that run deep.

Melancholic vines climb through the garden,
Embodiments of bittersweet memories—
Sadness, pain, missed opportunities.
Their shimmer proves that unpleasant
Doesn’t mean unsightly.
Beauty is layered, nuanced, complex.
I could not have overcome adversity
Without their gripping support.

They lead to wisdom trees,
One of the least populated sections.
Few reach full adulthood.
In their shade, I reflect,
Learning from the past,
Biting into fruits of mental clarity.

The dream flowers, I save for last:
Ethereal orchids with holographic gradients,
Capturing surreal dreams that shift
In form and color,
A perfect conclusion to my visits.

The neural interface for memory extraction is painless,
Yet not without controversy.
Privacy matters—
Once planted, are they truly ours?
Do they belong to the public?
Can we control whom we share them with,
pluck, or alter them?

Memory cultivation transcends nostalgia.
Alteration profoundly affects emotional well-being—
For better or worse.
Our memory flowers cross-pollinate.
Cathartic and enriching when done properly,
Cultural memory gardens are a prime example.
The fragrances of cultural heritage
Comfort the homesick;
Hybrid flowers extend velvet blue-green leaves,
Tenderly caressing our cheeks,
Fostering empathy, a sweet embrace.

Some blend narratives,
Kick-starting better understanding
Of others’ perspectives.
Most cross-pollination happens naturally,
By proximity.
Hybrid memories retain qualities of both origins,
Breeding shared experiences and unity.

Yet not all pollination is welcome.
My neighbor’s new wisdom trees
and dream flowers grow alongside mine,
But one negative memory can dominate,
Injecting distress into seedlings.
Mature, they exhibit discoloration,
Dehydration, sharp, modified leaves
Dripping poison.

Smaller and stunted,
They wish to go unnoticed.
Their aroma pungent,
Yet no less beautiful than the rest.

—Eli Alemán

A Packet of Seeds

When you read your poem
it is my monthly microdose
of psychedelia. 

Every one in the room
has caught a glimpse
— each a different glimpse —
of the connections between
it all. 

The lightning on the shore;
the way she sees her body; 
their perspective of a sexy plant;
the fern that dreams of fossilisation;
the glittering riverbed of stars. 

A room of poets; a packet of seeds. 
We grow into various shrubs or trees;
beds of flowers and encroaching weeds;
invasive species. 
Invade each others' minds
just for one night
to plant our own ideas there. 

Tensely aware that
it's colonial faire;
some have been planting these seeds 
for thousands of years, but
most of us just got here. 

A poem is a psychedelic seed,
a hallucination to untwist and unwind.
I'm here for the existential pleasure
of having you change my mind.

—Ori Diskett

Behold the Dandelion

Behold the sentient dandelion
ROARing in the crevices
Between concrete and fences   

—Kendall Evans