Karen J. Weyant

Learn early. At those fourth-grade slumber parties,
pretend to fall asleep when your friends start playing

Bloody Mary in the upstairs bathroom. Ignore
their chants of her name, their screams, their stories.

You don’t want to even imagine what they believed
they may have seen. Later, when you start driving,

check your backseat before you climb into the driver’s seat.
It also wouldn’t hurt to check under your car.

If you end up parking (which you shouldn’t do) 
with your boyfriend and you both hear scratching,

a raspy scrap across the roof or the side of the car,
don’t open the door, even if you feel a tug on the handle.

Drive to safety. Turn on the radio. The news 
about the escaped prisoner will be all you need to know. 

And never, ever pick up a hitchhiker, even if it’s raining
or it’s cold. Even if she looks innocent and sad,

and that dress she is wearing is way too thin.
Even if, she, in the headlights, looks a little like you.

KAREN J. WEYANT‘s speculative poems have appeared in Caesura, Cold Mountain Review, Devilfish Review, Eye to the Telescope, Gingerbred Lit, and Strange Horizons. She lives and writes in northern Pennsylvania.

Michael Dylan Welch

near the end
of the spooky story
her raised eyebrow

school trip—
the zoo gorilla
masturbating

poetry conference—
an opinion
from outer space

tractor beam malfunction—
a turquoise mountain lake
hovers above us

red pines—
our pup tent squashed
in the giant footprint

MICHAEL DYLAN WELCH has been writing poetry since he was a child, and never got over it. He lives with his wife and two children in Sammamish, Washington, where he’s president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword, curator of SoulFood Poetry Night, and served two terms as Redmond poet laureate. He’s founder and president of the Tanka Society of America, founder of National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com), and proprietor of www.graceguts.com, devoted mostly to poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in hundreds of publications in more than twenty languages. Michael also enjoys travel, photography, books, racquetball, and skiing.

Evan Vandermeer

I promised myself
that when this plane lands
I will have something
to show for it, and given
these first rumblings
of high-altitude turbulence—
the seatbelt light
having just lit up like a Christmas tree—
I better hurry
and get something presentable down
before it’s too late. At least 
I can lose myself (thank you,
little pink pill) in the movie
playing on the back of the headrest
directly in front of me. Without headphones, 
it’s a largely silent film, largely because 
I’ve seen it enough
to hear the music and dialogue
in the back of my mind. And now,
the flight attendant wheels up
and offers an array of non-perishable snacks:
pretzels, wafers, or cookies, and like a fool
I choose the pretzels (a sad
last meal), but my wife is kind enough
to offer me one of her cookies, which 
I eat so quickly in a single bite
she can’t help but comment
on my inability to savor anything
but coffee, the only thing
I’ll slow down to enjoy. Right then—
as if on cue—Will Ferrell’s character
takes his own first sip of that black nectar
and grimaces in pain, almost as if 
he had swallowed a thumbtack.

EVAN VANDERMEER is an emerging writer with published poems in Grand Little Things, Analecta, Kingfisher, Modern Haiku, bottle rockets press, and Wales Haiku Journal, and more has been accepted for publication in forthcoming issues of McQueen’s Quinterly, hedgerow, Presence, and contemporary haibun online. He will graduate in May 2022 from the MA English program at Indiana University South Bend, where he lives with his wife, Megan.