Size / / /

By Rane Arroyo

1. The Diaspora Begins

The ships choose different paths.

Mine is littered with broken stars.

One by one, we're swallowed

by an invisible leviathan: distance.

After losing contact with the others,

we float away from the land of

our ghosts. No one is buried in

space, bodies thrown into the black

where cosmic cobwebs catch them.

We've been pushed into this lush

nothingness in the sky. Yes, I wore

a cloud as a crown while herded

onto my ship. Now, shadows spin

all around us, naked prayer wheels.

2. Wandering in the wilderness

means something new between

galaxies. Space doesn't expand or

contract: it just is—think of waves

without seas or shores. We cry out,

¡we are dangling! Mystery has been

smuggled aboard, that ancient virus.

3. Another new planet is found

It rains lead there without

pause. It's purgatory, minus

the purging. It doesn't sink

into our purified zodiac.

This planet is a piñata not yet

saddled, a Big Bang orchid,

old Hell long before religion.

It has seas not for our whales

or mermaids. Its melting skies

cling to flux and flickering.

There's always the question:

do we finally have a home?




Rane Arroyo has published many books of poems and one collection of short stories. Next year he will publish The Roswell Poems (WordFarm Press) and The Buried Sea: New & Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press). He is working on science fiction poems and his memoirs, Naked Like A Constellation. You can learn more about Rane from his website on myspace or New Sins Press, or read his published works: Home Movies of Narcissus, The Portable Famine, and How to Name a Hurricane. You can email Rane at ranearroyo@gmail.com.
Current Issue
27 Nov 2023

you no longer have image. in photos your cheek² sharpens, vectors.
That cis-tem is now only a speck.
Mushrooms didn’t exactly sweep sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, but much like their real-world inspiration they persisted, growing in the damp, dark crevices of the creative minds of every generation. They were a template for the anxieties of each age, seasoned with the fears of the era.
Stories of extensive evil, in which the threat is not a single villain, nor even a man-made pollution monster, but systemic structures of harm in which we are all complicit, offer tools to think through real-life problems, which are rarely fixed by defeating one villain.
Writing While Disabled 
Well, when people say writing every day, I think some people take it too literally. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about writing every day. People use the term dailyness to mean consistency. Write Consistently. Time-wise, write consistently. You build a practice. Because remember what I said earlier, a writer is someone who writes. It's about being in the present. Writing has to be a present practice for you. That's all it means.
My most hearty and luxurious greetings fam, hope all are doing well. Friends, I feel like I often start this column by saying I can’t remember what happened in the previous episode. Today, I honestly cannot remember a single thing that happened last time. Fam, so many things happened lately and my brain has been all over the place. I had to move! I am getting too old for this kind of lifestyle and now I’m not going to unpack anything because I will just have to repack and move again at some point. I don’t know if that is
Wednesday: Angel of Death: Dearly Departed by Ralynn Kimie 
Issue 20 Nov 2023
Issue 13 Nov 2023
Issue 6 Nov 2023
Issue 30 Oct 2023
Issue 16 Oct 2023
Issue 9 Oct 2023
Issue 2 Oct 2023
Issue 25 Sep 2023
Issue 18 Sep 2023
Issue 11 Sep 2023
Load More
%d bloggers like this: