Mini Pack: Dill, Parris, Evershed, Strang, Waring, & Iuchi-Fung

FUTURE SHOCK

by Linda Ann Strang Not Very Much After Alvin Toffler Confirm humanity? Tortoise Text, who will generate me?

CERN Headlines on Google International Day of Splitting the Atomic Scientist Hint of Crack in Standard Model: Planck or Animal?

New ALICE Springs into Action Takes Self-Driving Car to Mass Delusion God Particle Restored to Former Glory How Sci Fi Gold Became a Black Hole Cool Kickers for Turkey Earthquake The Beams Feel So Unstable Right Now Minimal Love I swear I’ve become a technology agnostic, but I have replaced you with a levitating moon lamp.

Deepfake You disco dancing, jade adorned, bareback on the hospital roof – northern lights above the ward where we’re laid out, exposed and dead.

Her Life as Four Text-to-Art Prompts for AI Beautiful girl in a tragedy Greek with electric eels and doves.

The mystic of the pathway is Mars’ darkling beetle.

Woman on the edge with I Ching stretchmarks, and him with his gelignite manhood.

Peridot me with forest bathing, pixelating the leaves in the style of Botticelli – with eyes, eyes, eyes – in the cemetery torchlight.

You Can Try This out in Dream by Wombo Or even Midjourney. Or what you will.

SUTUDCHA

by Magnolia Jane Dill No one can pronounce my first name.

I often said it as my middle name, and went by my real middle name, “Jane.”

But over the years the Social Security Office became more strict about name exactitude And my first name is now my first name on everything… except my passport, which reads Jane Weaver Dill.

I vaguely remember my dad, Papa, saying it out loud: Suuu Touch Ahhh!

And my close friends used to say it to tease me: Suh-touch-uh!

My aunt who raised me said, “Don’t touch Suh-touch-uh!”

I don’t like either pronunciation.

It has always been a part of me, But I never volunteered it to anyone.

They had to ask for it.

An inconvenience, A sense of pride?

A problem, A namesake of my Thai mother, Mama had the same name.

I don’t know what it means I never asked how to pronounce it.

I never asked what it means or its etymology.

I never asked anything about it.

I Googled it recently and found out nothing.

I want to change my name, by just eliminating that one.

Most people say Suh doocha.

I don’t correct them.

It would cost too much to change my name.

It costs a lot not to.

PRAYER, UPON LEARNING THAT NASA IS CONTEMPLATING A MISSION TO URANUS

by Colette Parris It’s time to go to Uranus, the committee members declare; straight-faced, no snickering, accent on the first syllable.

Only 12 years travel one way (the whiz kids surmise) if Jupiter does us a solid gravity-assist, 15 if it’s a hard pass.

We need quality time– the astrophysicists chant– with the ice giant pummeled sideways eons times eons ago, still winded and down for the count of its 27 moons.

On a related topic, we third rockers are crammed in a sluggish 21st century Titanic, inches from an end of times iceberg, all alarms muted; it’s way too late to left this ship.

So I beg two favors of the spacecraft still a twinkle in a project manager’s eye.

Please take me with you.

Please take the long way.

DENIAL IS THE HOUSE WE BUILT FOR OURSELVES

by Megan Waring October 30, 1983 Replacing the typical heaving bathing suit breasts of the Parade cover, is a globe. Iced over, Nuclear Winter, in bold font. Long term consequences, not its typical cover story. Carl Sagan, scientist celebrity, wanted a bigger platform, wanted readers to put down their diet sodas, their celebrity crushes and take a stance on nuclear war. He painted the picture of cold, ice, dust settling over the earth. Said, Fortunately, it is not yet too late. Protect the planet, the human family, Pleaded, There is no more important or more urgent issue. People were mad, told him scientists should stay in the lab, out of politics, out of tabloids, called him arrogant. He met with leaders, the Pope, wrote part of Carter’s farewell address, delicately describing our small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have.

Imagine: the home decaying around us, earth as abandoned house, traces where fingers touch banister disturb the ashes the snow boards splintered and nails rust stacks of magazines where Sagan’s words are fading pressed between neon advertisements of big hair-ed Virginia Slims and cassettes and excess and Tab flakes falling like cigarette tip memories like dirty snow like the loudest thing in this empty world

THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN WRITING A POEM (SO PEOPLE KNOW IT’S NOT GENERATED BY CHATGPT)

by Adele Evershed Misplace your words in the belly of the wail or in the sea far from sure…

Use words long out of fashion for the alliterative feel of them leaving your lips Never explain about an out of place, comma it’s merely a pause for a breath (and don’t we all need to breathe?)

But pay attention to each slash and exclamation mark like scythes gliding through a field of daisies leaving a bloody path!

They love you / not / Read in the hope you will be read in a bed or in a bower (see above) in the night—quiet and full of its own self importance or in the classroom simmering with bleached away blood Know you can’t use all the strings but keep hold of them in case at some later date you pull on one and in the gush of bloody words you find the truth or at least a better lie Find metaphors for all the speechless things to make them more palatable a starving child as a featherless bird perhaps?

Find similes for happiness to try to make it outlast the verse and your imposter syndrome And call yourself a poet If they laugh (and they probably will) tell them we will all be dirt grass soon enough but your words will wave on

then satirize them in poem just because you can And when you realize you don’t care if you are understood or that you overuse blood in your work (because you believe words like life should not be clotted) then you ARE a poet Isn’t life just an experiment with full stops and run on sentences like curses and wishes pressed between the blanks like cress in an egg sandwich and always a lot of waiting time to fill the next stanza?

And even knowing all this you still won’t be able to make sense of this World or believe in the next one But at least you felt something when you tried… and that longing has to count for something Right?

Write!

ON GENDER EUPHORIA

by Kiyoko Iuchi-Fung Euphoria is the continuity of the physical, emotional, or cognitive with one’s gender. But it is more than the antiseptic of this definition, more than simply existing: it is being. It is crude joy extracted like oil from the depths of self. It is the unshakable happiness in becoming who you were meant to be. It is everything they want to take away because it’s always been our bodies their temples cause they made a box for being they said there’s one god two genders none of this false idolatry just another cut throat police force they don’t open doors for me no they’re killing us ‘ you see our transgressions were never a choice —— So we hold fast to euphoria as an affirmation of our humanity in the face of ever present dehumanizing hatred. Hold fast to euphoria as a testament to our power, a show of our resistant resilience, a conduit for our joy.

To find euphoria in the hidden places they cannot reach, in the liminal spaces between their hate and our depression, between the waking and the sleeping, where a boy of 14 wore a skirt for the first time.

That boy was me, spinning in my room with the door locked and the shades drawn tight enough to black out the California sun, with ‘ adrenaline running high enough to take a bullet and not feel it, but with joy, radical joy, I became more myself that day So we hold fast to euphoria, to the revolutionary joy they cannot take from us for it is both our refuge and our fists raised in Power.

CONTRIBUTORS Kiyoko Iuchi-Fung (they/them) is an 18 year old electronic musician and occasional poet studying Music Technology at NYU Steinhardt. When they aren't cramming or composing, they enjoy crocheting, raving, and baking. They currently live in New York where they are working on a hyperflip/mashcore mixtape album. You can find their music on IG: @kiki.is.x_x or on SoundCloud: kiki is dead.

Adele Evershed was born in Wales and has lived in Hong Kong and Singapore before settling in Connecticut. Her prose and poetry have been published in over a hundred journals and anthologies, such as Every Day Fiction, Reflex Fiction, Grey Sparrow Journal and Anti Heroin Chic. Adele has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net for poetry. Finishing Line Press will publish Adele’s first poetry chapbook, Turbulence in Small Places, later this year.

Bottlecap Press published her second poetry collection, The Brink of Silence, in June. Her novella in flash, Wannabe, was also published this year by Alien Buddha Press. Find her at thelithag.com and @AdLibby1 on Twitter.

Colette Parris is a Caribbean-American attorney who returned to her literary roots during the pandemic. Her fiction can be found in Scoundrel Time, Cleaver Magazine, Streetlight Magazine, and other journals, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Healing Muse, BigCityLit, Thin Air Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @colettepjd.

Megan Waring is a poet, playwright and fiber artist. She holds an MFA in poetry from University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches. An honored recipient of the 2020 St. Botolph’s Emerging Artist Award, her my work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Salamander, Nailed, and Pulp Literature, among others. Her fifth co-written play, Fables and Mummers, is scheduled to be produced by Greene Room Productions in October 2023. More information at https://meganmwaring.wixsite.com/my-site.

Magnolia Jane Dill (she/her) lives in West Point, Mississippi where she grew up. She lives with her husband, and her dog, Chico. She has a BA in Fine Arts from MUW, an MA in French Literature from MSU, and is an MFA Creative Writing candidate at MUW. She travels often to Paris, France.

Linda Ann Strang’s published poetry collections are Star Reverse and Wedding Underwear for Mermaids. Her poems and stories have appeared in many journals, including Portland

Review, The Malahat Review, Hunger Mountain, Reflex Press, Stand, Hollins Critic, and Gone Lawn. Linda is editor-in-chief of Hotazel Review, an international journal of literature and art.

She lives in South Africa.