Online Issue Contents

• Editor's Choice Poems
  • Conspiracy 1999 by George Manuell
  • Necropolis Exit by Malcolm Deeley

• Full Table of Contents

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Editor's Choice Poems

"Conspiracy 1999," by George Manuell

When I saw the first corn circle
It was as though a Jovian thunderbolt
Had burned equally complex
Pathways through my brain.
Everything clicked: All those problems that bugged me:
The alien abductions, Roswell,
The second Kennedy assassination,
Why my father had beaten
The living shit out of my mother.

This was all the key I needed
To communicate with the others.
That Friday the 13th, my friend the Shaman
And I set up camp in the middle
Ready to wait out the Millennium.

Knuckle-bones helped us determine
The location of the wormhole,
And an agaric-aggravated trance
Gave us effective incantations
While we stared into the sun.

On the third day of our fast,
He came, lo!, on clouds descending;
Black, hairless and rather camp.
Taking my right hand in his wounded hands,
'Feel' he said, 'the hole in my side.'

George Manuell is a retired Modern Languages teacher living in Tamworth, near Birmingham, UK. He has had poems published in Orbis magazine, Poetry Nottingham, etc. Five years teaching in Mwanza, Tanzania, in the '60s resulted in an unpublished novel. His main hobby is Early Music (viols, recorders, lute). Family: wife, three sons, four grandchildren.

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"Necropolis Exit," by Malcolm Deeley

There is only so much loss
that a place can bear,
Land used up in sadness
must change,
with life slipping in
from the edges.

We built the Great Necropolis
to honor,
to remember those gone,
and we put it, willow-lined
beside the city's busiest highway.
Speed and stopping,
boundary to boundary.
No message intended.
Utilitarianism.

The trees were attractive
from the road.

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Full Table of Contents

Departments

• Quarks & Strings • Marge Simon
• President's Message • Deborah P Kolodji
• Stealth SF • Denise Dumars
• May/June Poetry News
• A Dark Poetry Renaissance • Kendall Evans
• Reviews from the Small Press • Edward Cox

Poetry

• Spring Song • John Tumlin
• Raven on the Road • Duane Ackerson
• The Muse Themselves • John Tumlin
• Rid Now of Betrayer • Steve Sneyd
• A Fable • Ray Greenblatt
• Houston, We Have a New Problem • Steve Sneyd
• untitled • G. Sutton Breiding
• Jinniyah in Cape Canaveral After the Bomb • Virginia Aronson
• Hereditary Guilt • Gary William Crawford
• Interplanetary Navigation • Kathabela Wilson
• Harvest of Hope • Kurt MacPhearson
• The Fifth Age • David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Conspiracy 1999 • George Manuell
• Across Our Universe • Ann K. Schwader
• Jaguar Drum • Gary Every
• Necropolis Exit • Malcolm Deeley
• two untitled tanka • Deborah P Kolodji
• Space Junk • Shirley Valencia
• Changeling • Wade German
• Elegy for Tropes • G. Sutton Breiding
• Off the Grid • Chris Ambrose