Burn Book

The colors bled into the paper as the flames curdled the corners. Names, dates, crimes, it all melted into ash before their eyes, disappearing into oblivion. They all vowed never to speak, even in a whisper, what was written within its binding. Their sins no longer existed.

Most religions have a bible or a creed that is a resolute anchor of all that is sacred. For those lucky souls who inscribed their names into the burn book, their holiness was birthed out of that which was not recorded. Their spirits flew forever free, their futures untied to fate or destiny.

“There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”

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?”

I’m in back on the hump, a hand on each front seat. Her hair, her piercings, her red glitter black lipstick shimmering in streetlights, so close. I want to whisper in her ear something so funny and sexy she just has to kiss me and we crash and I fly through the windshield but everyone who sees my body sees my black lipstick glitter mouth and knows.

“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/.

Wandering Star

I killed the crew of the Wandering Star, humanity’s last hope.

A desperate mission to find a new home. The ship crashed into this lonesome planet of obsidian.

Maybe I’ve lost my mind. But I heard a voice calling me here. A soft whisper in the dark. They called me insane, said I’d gone AWOL. Tried to lock me up.

I wandered the surface, guided by the whisper, until I stood in its shadow, a great five-pointed upside-down black star floating high above.

I wept when I realized why I’d been led here. The leviathan declaring the end of humanity.

From Guest Contributor Rick Ansell Pearson

Rick lives and works in central Mexico. His fiction can be found forthcoming in Year Five: Dark Moments and Patreons, published by Black Hare Press.

Haunted

More than spirits, ghosts are the chill of a finger tracing your spine, a whisper only loud enough for you to hear, a memory of something long gone. What happens when the ghosts I’m afraid of are the ones that are alive? Will they continue to feed on me until there is nothing left? Will I join the other ghosts then? Piece by piece, they keep picking away until I am nothing. Will they pity me? The girl they once knew was full of life; and now, she is no better than the rest of them. A bag of bones.

From Guest Contributor Kelsey Swancott

Kelsey is a senior majoring in English with a minor in Visual Arts and Spanish while also being involved in the campus literary magazine Angles. She plans on furthering her education by getting her masters degree in English as well.

Our Rooms Are Like Treehouses

Both with decks attached that lead into pockets of treetops. Our rooms are like treehouses, and if I had a string long enough, I would make a tin can telephone and give one half to you. If we had a tin can telephone tying our treehouse rooms together, then I would whisper into it at night to see if you were still awake. If you were still awake, then I would tell you all the things that freeze on my tongue when we are together—when everything gets flurried, and I forget that you can’t hear me through the silence. From Guest Contributor Grace Coughlin

Grace is from Buffalo, New York. She is currently a Senior at St. John Fisher College, majoring in Psychology with minors in English and Visual and Performing Arts. She has 100-word stories forthcoming in Eunoia Review and Otoliths Review.

To Have A Dress Made

He gently whispered in my ear: turn yourself around. Then he measured my waist with the corner of one eye. He said: “You are beautiful, my true!” You look like Venus coming of the foam with golden curls. I shall make you a dress that floats in the Sun. I shall make you an evening gown for your prince, The One. I shall dress you in purple and stick silver hairpins in your kirtle. I shall give you a mantle, and dress you in white. I shall draw stars upon you, your nails are painted, but you still walk naked.

From Guest Contributor Svetla Vasileva

Window Towards The Barn

She consoles the dust for being lonely. The rust for being needy. The rot for becoming unstitched by rain. It is easy to whisper these things on the day of rest. When even birds decline seeding and bees stay inside hives. There was little moving in the sparse outside, save a cat prowling between an empty peach bucket and a splintered fish pole leaned against fence rails, its frayed point vanishing in the tale’s middle.

She sits with tears on her cheek. Cheek on her hand. Pinkie finger tracing glass. Watching her three level acres all forlorn, infertile, sour, outworn.

From Guest Contributor Catherine Moore

Catherine is the author of three chapbooks including “Wetlands" (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her fiction appears in Tahoma Literary Review, Illinois Wesleyan University Press, Tishman Review, Mid-American Review, and The Best Small Fictions of 2015 anthology.

Public Poems Built On Public Property

Public poems built on public property are, as they say, asking for it. When you use such flimsy bread, eating away at holy Wonder until such thinly-sliced letters remain, every one meant to be swallowed, not whispered; when you hold them down with found rocks in a stream that is not a stream, just a concrete ditch void of the hand of God; when you slip out the window in the night like a Sufi thief or an idiot child, praying the wrong way, dancing naked, licking vowels in your own nonsense languagedon’t expect to get anythingexceptarrested.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

After graduating with a BA in English from Vassar College, Brook Bhagat landed her first paid writing job as a reporter for a small-town Colorado newspaper. She left it to travel to India, where she fell in love, got married and canceled her ticket home. She and her husband Gaurav write freelance articles for dozens of publications, including Outpost, Ecoworld, and Little India. In 2013, they launched www.BluePlanetJournal.com, which she edits and writes for. She also teaches writing at a community college, is earning her MFA in Writing at Lindenwood University, and is writing a novel.

Infinite Summer

God had bleached everything. The shattering sky. Erin’s face. Even our baby’s perfect hands were white.

Tiny, frozen fingers assail the windshield while Erin shivers in the passenger seat. I ease the gas pedal cautiously, hesitantly–-coaxing a reluctant lover.

Tires slip and I wonder if it would be so bad, sliding to our end in ice and pavement. Why not, with the cold body of our almost baby left at the hospital?

Erin clutches her abdomen, lingering reflex, and whispers the name I refuse to remember. The name we picked when the world was warmer and life infinite summer.

From Guest Contributor Sierra Donahue