Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction • Angela Acosta

Homage to the Former Future • Mir Rainbird
User Agreement (Tribute Edition) • Joshua Walker
eating • Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
ode to beasts and puppets • Angel Leal
My Bot Boyfriend Has Read Wuthering Heights Too Many Times • Jordan Hirsch
Encomium to the Earth’s Heartbeat • Lilith Acadia
Velveteen • Marsheila Rockwell
Moksha • Sultana Raza
Idolatry for Solmorrow • Elis Montgomery
Ode to Hopepunk • Sarah Titus
Ode to the Greenest Drip • Haley Bossé
Water Bear Blues • Lee Nash
Dark Side of the Moon • A. C. Perri
Terminator • Micháel McCormick
Maul to Maul • Aaron Grierson
Anubis at the Arcade • Katherine Quevedo
Centennial • Miguel O. Mitchell
The Hollow Ring of Hunger • Pixie Bruner
The Council of Elders • Lynne M. MacLean
The Mechanic Explains Treason to Her Daughter • Sarah Grace Tuttle
Post-Extinction Spoilers • Manuela Amiouny
In the Next Universe • Hannah Bryan

Homage to the Former Future

I’m building an altar
from old science fiction novels:
the dog-eared favorites of my youth.
My hopes were jet-propelled then.
I expected to be transformed, transportered,
Transmigrated like a pure soul up
up and away, like a bird, a plane,
a terran zooming into space,
the possibly-final frontier—
although who knew, then: the future
seemed boundless and made of dreams.
On the altar goes: my multitool
Lightsaber (handmade one Halloween)
Prizes from science projects
An essay I wrote age nine about
Saving the Environment—I thought we would. 
In the future.
I really thought we would.

—Mir Rainbird

User Agreement (Tribute Edition)

We thank you for your continued existence.
By remaining alive, you agree to the following terms:

You consent to being remembered
in accordance with available data.

You understand that memory
may be edited for clarity, tone, and marketability.

You waive the right
to be represented as you were.

All versions of you
will be considered equally authentic.

You acknowledge that your likeness
may be used in tribute materials,
including but not limited to:

—archival reconstructions
—commemorative projections
—personality approximations

Some inaccuracies may occur.
These are not errors.
These are enhancements.

You accept that your final words
may be replaced
if deemed insufficient.

Silence will be interpreted
as consent.

In the event that you are forgotten,
you agree not to contest
your absence.

In the event that you are misremembered,
you agree to participate
in the correction.

By continuing,
you confirm that your life
has been properly summarized.

You further confirm
that summary is preferable
to truth.

Thank you for your contribution
to the record.

Your compliance
will be remembered
accordingly.

—Joshua Walker

eating

I remember it
I remember the act
the social experience 
(when those still existed)
and of course the taste
of a thousand different foods 
and their somatic effects
I remember it all
the way I remember
the natural sun spring breezes
living birds your body 
your actual body which 
I miss much more
than bird calls or steak
or even linguine alle vongole
I remember but
the memory
has degraded (the way 
my body and yes maybe
our love would have
naturally) I remember eating 
and if I still had 
a mouth and teeth 
instead of this cybernated 
mask I would bite something 
anything the first real 
thing I could find 
hard enough to feel 
I wouldn’t care
anything just to bring it
all or any of it 
the taste of food the songs of birds
the warm sun cool breeze 
or you something real
back for one sweet second

—Nathaniel Lachenmeyer

ode to beasts and puppets

curses lifted, 
wish fulfilled

a lonely beast becomes a man
a dreamy puppet carved
into a boy

but bittersweet it feels
somehow, to lose
the animal

soul in you. the roving wild
heartbeat of a trapped
lion. yes, you 

feared a hall of reflections,
but you drank rain with me

even your cursed face 
was a wild garden

* * * 

puppet boy, wooden sailor
whittled into the shape 
of childhood

why was “real” so far away?
didn’t you dream
like all children of flesh

didn’t you fail
but try to be good?

ashamed, you couldn’t see
your clumsy body was 
a craftsman’s masterpiece. 

a lifetime of art to find one
piece of wood that could cry
& sing & tell lies under the moon.

immortal, you still are
false child. storytellers, all liars
know you’re their lost brother.

& to me still, I dream of you 
wooden, searching 
for truth 

maybe happiness
with painted eyes

—Angel Leal

My Bot Boyfriend Has Read
Wuthering Heights Too Many Times

My eternity is not your eternity,
lingering as mist on moors.
How am I to haunt you
when I cannot become spectral,
when the body you excavate
has oxidized, rust crumbling
in the palm of your hands. Grasping
onto my remnants, find it in yourself 
to love again, to give your children 
my unnatural name, to walk these great hytes
driven mad with despair and grief.

I cannot, do not, live without a soul,
but whatever your soul is made of,
it burns as magnetite, too bright
for this empty artifice to bear.

—Jordan Hirsch

Encomium to the Earth’s Heartbeat

Every 20-something seconds, 
Earth shimmies. 
Not a full dance move 
not enough for you to catch the beat 
just enough for seismologists 
like your cousin Anna 
to note a
blitzp 
on expensively sensitive detectors
baffle their expensively sensorial scientist 
brains.

I liked one scientist’s metaphor: 
Earth is always singing. 
Tectonic plates basically vibrate 
like a hi-hat 
no, more like giant finger cymbals 
against one another. 
Kinda cool.

—Lilith Acadia

Velveteen

Since you died, I can’t cast spells
at least not ones that work
And anyway, what would be the point?
What good is a witch without her familiar?

I tried, I did
I bought an orange Maine coon plush
that looked just like you
(though you were also part tabby
arguably part kangaroo
and probably part dog
the way you’d play fetch
and come when I called)

I lit the right candles, said the right words
clasped your collar about its neck
and left it in your favorite spot on the bed

I even slept with Not-You
clutched tight to my chest
hoping against hope
that somehow, if I could just love it enough—
love you enough—
the magic would work
and I’d get a second chance

You’d return to me
like that rabbit in the children’s book
turned from plush cat to real
by some pitying fairy

But every morning I'd wake
to the taste of tears and false fur on my tongue
arms empty of your warmth
ears ringing with the silence
once filled by your meows

But cats have a way
of playing fast and loose with reality
obeying or breaking
the laws of physics—
and metaphysics—
according only to their own 
inscrutable whimsy

And so when you finally appeared
in the doorway of my dreams
stepping delicately across a threshold
you did not deign to acknowledge
your tale big and bushy
and your eyes full of mischief
I knew

You’re not really gone
and you never will be
But because I am still bound 
by rules that cats scorn
I can only see you
out of the corner of my eye
or in that liminal instant when the lights flick on
or cavorting, insouciant 
in the ever-shifting landscapes
of my nighttime reveries

And while I know
I’ll never hold you again
that my spells to bring you back 
won’t work
I guess I’m okay with that
Because I think I finally get it

You didn’t take the magic with you
when you died
You opened my eyes to its true power
by making a home for yourself 
in my heart
that nothing so ephemeral and small
as mere Death
could ever hope to destroy

—Marsheila Rockwell

Moksha*

On 
new
planet,
portal led
to a seated monk.
He exhaled deeply, blew humans
back into Stargate.
Enlightened,
they searched
in
wards.

*Liberation of the soul (from worldly concerns) in Sanskrit.

—Sultana Raza

Idolatry for Solmorrow

on mars we stripped our sorry ship for wire
we filched each failing fuse and rusting rod
unmoored from earthen eyes and earthen ire
we’d searched and found a need to craft a god

all sol we roved for what did not return
our bots, like us, so lost in reddened land
all night we molded matter as we’d learned
we shaped Her wire-frame face, Her reaching hand

and when our suits too failed and chilled our blood
we saw Her frame made flesh in endless sky 
beneath Her hand we writhed in driest mud
and watched Her stoppered lips withhold their why

if not a final gift for souls on mars
a choked mirage now whispered by the stars

—Elis Montgomery

Ode to Hopepunk

I give thanks for hopepunk
stories that show us

our hands, flesh and metal both, building
lives with intention around sun-soaked lakes and
smeary sunsets with air that smells of air and not fire.

Show how we sit under deep-rooted trees to watch the children
chase the bees drunk on the prairie flowers
we planted on the graves of the highways we no longer need.

Show us how we built a world like this—
how we ran off the men 
who burnt our trees, drank our lakes, and killed our neighbors.

Show us again how we did it—how we built
with all our hands something beautiful without them.

—Sarah Titus

Ode to the Greenest Drip

The nearly unknowable passing
Of your seep into the planet’s face,
Your soil-sent body re-soiling
Itself and you, greenest
Of invaders, bodybound
To crash-collide with darkness
And corrode, you,
Deft creeper of elsewhere,
Planet-met and
Countless conglomerate,
You, queerest un-ancestor,
Seemingly still
Among the rocks, you
Sucking in the dust-breath
Of outward, a glitter-storm
Of chemicals, burp-out
Of black hole, you,
Algae or moss or
Other, my own
Unmaker of all.

—Haley Bossé

Water Bear Blues

Thanks for the splice, CRISPR.
I’m withstanding the pressure,
the extremes of temperature,
the radiation, the Grays,
and the decades of cryptobiosis.
Inside I’m a desiccated mess,
a human-tun.
My loved ones have rejected me
now I pass for a vacuum cleaner bag.
My eight limbs have no one to cuddle
out past the Kuiper Belt.
No one pecks my tubular kisser
with its spiky stylets
or lets me score their back with my claws.
No one calls me their little moss piglet.
Once my bioglass has melted,
there’s nothing to do out here
in this lonely interstellar artery
but writhe outside the hatch
and catch the solar wind,
send bogus reports to NASA
or watch reruns of The Fly.

—Lee Nash

Dark Side of the Moon

Dark side of the moon…
Our tentacles are showing—
Quick! Tap Clean-up tool!

The playground of Space
Artemis II queues—
Big Dipper closed for repairs.

Orion’s belt falls—
Artemis II dodges two
Extra-large planets.

—A. C. Perri

Terminator

My geezer self 
  Arrives from the future
Terminator style

A tremor in his clammy touch
as he steps into my body

I (we) stand slowly
  take trembling steps
our body a burden

This is how you will feel
  he says

adding:
  I’ll be back

—Micháel McCormick

Maul to Maul

Though many call you Darth,
We all know you were never quite there,
Maul—a smashing contradiction of a title—
for a subtle tool of ruthless efficiency and
blazing saber-staff,
recklessly thrown down a shaft after being
cleft in twain by a juvenile delinquent
(or so the books would have us believe).

But so were We all blessed upon your two
dimensional return on the small basement screen,
skulking in the shadows of a Clone War, orchestrated
by your former Master turned sleep paralysis demon.

Despite your nadir, you thrived in the shadows, 
dashing and slashing prices the way you 
killed the competition; the anti-hero
we needed, even if we didn't deserve your antics, the way
you might not have deserved those mechanical legs.

Still, they're integral to your story—the blinding arrogance
of youth and power taking you down a notch, until
you fell far—
so far apart once again
—as to seek working with Jedi of all people in the name
of revenge.

Despite such folly and failed attempts at garnering
apprenticeship, we see wisdom creep into your actions,
the patience that once made your blood boil, simmered
down to a fine sauce, ready to strike only according to plan.

Now We see you splendently ascendant as the Shadow Lord
rebuilding your criminal syndicate and We crave your favor,
legendary Zabrak of canon!

—Aaron Grierson

Anubis at the Arcade

His jackal ears twitch at the frenzied
sounds—not the digital jazz of game
cabinets but the cacophony of humans
pinballing between them.

This arcade favors all things ancient,
refuses to switch to plastic cards, insists
on machines that swallow jangling coins
faster than Ammit (the Great Devourer
of Souls) could and that spew forth
tickets of papyrus (if one is lucky).

Anubis hears all, that final Game Over.
Then he swoops in like the spindly claw
contracting around the hapless plush
with the mummified, stitched-on face. But
he’s no torturer. He’s a guide, an usher,
a sympathetic ear (long and pointy)
to prepare you for the afterlife.

But first, the ultimate weighing of redemption
at the prize counter, the transactional
actions of an entire life, the token
goodwill and the cheap, plastic
promises. I pray you’ve played fair.

—Katherine Quevedo

Centennial

Thirty-six years of pain and exploitation
their base-six slave centennial
spirals gouged into rocky flesh 
from unihorn tip to trifold toes
some religious profit-neutral nonsense
easily tolerated

The wealthy paid to attend the ceremonies and to wear crystal garb
glitterati gathered in cultural mockery
they danced in the bioluminescent vortices cut into the ground
on six continents millions whirled in drunken disrespect
never noticed when the natives spun away from the dance
leaving hordes of clustered dirty gems
ready to be polished

The fire in the sky was the harbinger
starships built to laugh at spacetime 
barely had time to gasp at disintegration

Concrete slabs of denial pressed down
a force greater per area of nihilism
brought the mighty to their knees

The natives stood tall and lifted their faces to the cleansing
they had gathered their off-world tribute to the holy places
as eldritch tentacles reached down from netherspace to dine 
tasting the terror
supping on shock
drinking in despair

When the ritual was complete, gemstones were gathered from the dust
now toys for children
belief baubles to preserve the faith

Child, put one near your ear
our god leaves these to remind us of their love
Do you hear the screams?

—Miguel O. Mitchell

The Hollow Ring of Hunger

A tribute to Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”

Rings of kohl and mascara circle her eyes like a soot scab,
Circles expanded from sleep and tears.
Her face—those ever-hungry eyes—
leave marks on the prone companion 
of the night before
like a whiskey glass 
sweating and marring the coffee table.
Man or woman, it matters not—
she fed on their pure need.
It vanishes in grey mornings
as she dresses and escapes.
Leaving no note, no tea on the hob,
no phone number, no real name.
Not that it matters at all.
They’ll possibly in due time be back right as rain.
Was it Suzanne or Cath, was she Siobhan?
A chameleon—Was she Elizabeth or Alyson?
These countless, too-many passed, midnights,
spent stumbling between pubs,
bodies forced too close on small 
dark dance floors by too many pints
and spur of the moment false promises.
She does not ever recall who she was last night.
What was said by whom and what promises were unkept.
She hides a fortnight from the high street habitués
before emerging again from a dimly lit bar,
offering shy smiles for a light and a rollie,
the witching hour when names and faces never matter
tasting nourishing hunger in their gaze,
a street-side kerb, outside a random nameless place.

—Pixie Bruner

The Council of Elders

paying tribute to the Foremothers

Out of the old murky photo, the Council of Elders emerges,
gathered in a room of dark wood panels,
around a cloth-covered table.
Women all, they stare unflinchingly back at the camera.
Their partners, old bald men and faded women, 
sit blurred and shadowed beside them, not seeing 
the ghosts 
            who hover at the frame’s edges. 

The Elders themselves are greying, 
or grey, or white-haired indeed, 
and exceedingly present, with spines of steel, 
robed in thick garments 
redolent of responsibility and power,
and suppression of
            their unbidden shades. 

With gazes grave and canny,
the Elders have risen from nothing, 
from a time when women held little in their own hands.
Decades of the hunt and the gathering,
of the blood and the planting,
sharpens their vision 
            though their eyes are failing. 

But ghosts gather here, too. 
Specters of determined, too-smart girls 
risen from stigma, from difference, from poverty, from chaos.
Eighteen-year-old ghosts that dance, laugh too hard, 
drink too much, fall in love too deeply.
If you look sideways, into the shrewd eyes 
of the Council of Elders, 
            you can see the ghosts 
                                    dancing still.

—Lynne M. MacLean

The Mechanic Explains Treason to Her Daughter

The ashes of our ancestors
run in this river,
so sit on the bank
and remember

we were starfarers, once.

We had never seen the purple sea,
or heard the angler-bird warble.
Remember what it was to be new to the world—
everything felt so difficult, so strange.
Gravity made walking cumbersome.

Now, notice—
            how our orange grass glows in moonlight…
            how our seaweed sings when wet…
            how our opal-flies migrate in a rainbow-shimmering mass…
Would you sink a starship, for this?

Listen.
Do you hear the common angler-bird,
warbling her five-part harmony to celebrate noon?
Now, imagine

silence.

—Sarah Grace Tuttle

Post-Extinction Spoilers

Wanderers will first stumble on the cryptids drifting across the Milky Way
that were once our satellites. Then, on our beached starships, broken down into
caves that shelter the records of our days.   
Under the quiet of the halls, they’ll find 
dormant computers climbing the walls like stalagmites, and 
frescoes of holograms staining the hull with 
handprints of languages. 
Internet will be little more than static ruffling their skins: 
they will call it a haunting. 

They will stand vigil over the two skeletons that remained at their post,
(because extinction, especially, will have its caretakers)  
brush off red sands from entangled metacarpals,
and excavate fossilized craniums, still leaning forehead to forehead. 
How well they decrypt our once-bodies 
will depend on the map of their own, 
evolution won’t have outgrown this search for recognition. 
They will stubbornly trace white pebbles of vertebras down to pelvic bones,
count the rings of the femurs, date us as 
pre-historic, pre-heat-death of the old universe.

We’ll have missed each other by a few lightyears, 
barely. But no matter. 
Should they dig into the tibia
they would find grief, and awe, alike etched
in the amber of the marrow;
the same primordial ingredients as their own.
They’ll think our chosen burial sites have quite the view.
Just over the horizon, a pale blue         empty                   planet
still blinks across the expansive dark.

—Manuela Amiouny

In the Next Universe

in memory of Ruth Stone

Far off, there will be certain 
planets with true blue skies 
and drinking water. 
But in the next universe, 
the worlds will open their arms 
to everyone. Distant meadows 
will bend their stalkish-heads 
to the galactic farm 
cats and starry rodents.
To the iridescent trout 
and nebula-blessed birds.
The air will breathe 
and not reek of soot and chemicals.
My mother will breathe,
and her shoulders will not ache
with the daily labors of this place.

—Hannah Bryan