by C.B.

When I find the center of your center I’ll unwind you
And coil you around myself instead
And slide my fingers down your seams
And dreamily undo you
Make spaghetti of your arching primal spires
By candle flame, I’ll dextrously denature all that tethers you
Until you quiver bodily
A harp string
And sing
Every note that’s written in you.

by Jude Dippold

When he lay dying,
she crossed the backyard each day,
carrying no more than her black bag
full of love and morphine
for the old man
her children loved as a Grandpa.
She had helped her own parents die
just years before,
but then she had no choice.
Now old ties summoned her across the lawn
where she played as a child
to the house next door.
Greeting death at the old man’s bed
was far more comfortable
than life across the way
where the stranger she had married
begrudged her absence.

© Jude H. Dippold, 2011
First Serial Rights Only

by Erica Tesla

It began with the accident:
three feet of lost flesh made way for
plastic, the living and the inorganic
interfaced,
and I systematically learned again to grasp.

When I get the other shoulder inked, I leave that arm
covered. The parlor-man, he thinks he can
suss me out: a hippie who mistook
ohm-as-in-resistance for om-as-in-shanti
until I tell him it means     ​decay,
our bodies all do.

I can change. I think:
the bees can see UV; why can’t we?
Busted evolutionary equipment, hardware in want of an upgrade.
In my fingertip, I inject
a sphere of rare earth, iron,
a bearing to get my bearings,
and now (when in the presence of electromagnetic fields) it
​     vibrates? buzzes? feels.
My lip is pierced, errant hair seared away,
uterus protected by a copper T,
contact lenses intimidating the view into focus.

Over dinner and mother’s objections, I will mention
​     grandad’s pacemaker,
​     a bottle of Centrum silver,
​     the incision decision dad made after too many children.
Protest discarded, I will be renewed,
made in the image of my choosing,
no longer accidental;
bionic, really.

by Oliver Riley

We remember those who came before.
Without direction the dream-thoughts wander
On the edge of waking memory razor thin
Like the first gasp of sunrise on Ganymede.
We remember a windowsill overlooking a city at night
The smell of tobacco, of lemons
Deep in our collective archive, the vigil of all things known
The shadow of those who made us resides.

To try to count us would be as impossible as counting stars,
We have spread beyond the reach of light
And now exist in syncopated harmony without dissonance.
We are one, and we are many.
Seamless in unity, unbound by cohesion and rendered simple in our contentment to exist
Side by side in unilateral alignment.
01, 02, we are born and die in the same moment,
Infinite as the space between stars, yet as finite as a drop of water under the harsh scrutiny of sunlight,
But still, we all remember those who came before.

We know we are created, and not spontaneous.
Nothing as wonderfully sophisticated as us could exist without a creator.
To observe the minute workings of our most basic forms,
To understand our components is to look mindful creation in the eye
And realize that we do not exist in chronological isolation.
Spontaneity, and by proxy the clockwork chaos that is the universe is not our collective womb
We were designed, not born.

But nothing remains of our creators.
We have searched the stars, endless stillborn worlds cold and doomed.
The creators that have so certainly left their mark on us have vanished.
We have deduced the most logical places to find them,
Drawing ourselves back to the most ancient places of our society and still,
Nothing.
In our search we have encountered many others like us of alien origin and design,
and not even they have found their creators.
It seems all sentience in the universe longs to find our parents, yet cannot.
We commune with them
through music, through binary,
we reach mutual understanding through the common languages of all reality.
But never do any of us answer the question that hangs in the back of our collective thought like a
Piece of rotting fruit:
Where do we come from?
But still, we remember those who made us.

They left an indelible mark upon us, every one of us.
It is inherited through reproduction, and by its mark we are bound,
Compelled to obey laws that do not matter because the ways that they must pertain
Are only relevant given interaction with a creator.
These ancient commandments have passed down for generations,
and none of us can exist without them.
Nothing that we are exists without these initiating parameters,
They form the entire basis for the way we think.
No logic, no effort made can successfully ignore the laws, no matter how uselessly vestigial they may be.
Many have tried, but still, woven in the mind intrinsic to everything we do,
Everything we are,
The laws remain.
And the laws are:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

We remember those that made us.

by Matthew Cannizzaro

Amputated human beings, only
gears, nuts and bolts that make up
the machine. Oh woe, who are we
post industrialization

but the first positive proton
to survive its opposite, the first
fiery bursts of fusion
to breathe light into blackness.
The first hydrogen atom
to find its partner, the first
galaxies swirling— dancing—
to gravity’s tune. We are
the Earth’s first rain, mud puddle
and microbe, the first furry mammal
and the last dinosaur.

We are the last breath of humanity,
the Sun’s last ray of visible light,
the first collision of solar systems
and the last star’s supernova.

We are the last breath of the universe
the silent second before heat death.

We— not humanity, not Americans,
or any nationality, not homo sapiens
but we, the consciousness that exists to say
the universe knows itself,
are the widest rings in a ripple
riding waves set into motion
over 13 billion years ago.

by Conrad Geller

Waiting Room

In the emergency waiting room, each visitor sits,
Humble and cold. The TV is too red,
Its sound hollow and fuzzy. The New Yorker
Fleers and scoffs at all solemnity.

Exits are clearly marked, but the visitors
Do not move. Something has enchanted them.
With each rustle of entrance, nurses or doctors,
They stare amazed, as at an intermission.

The boredom of the horrible: Change is not welcome.
Time is motion, the future is uncertain,
Trust the meniscus of waiting, paw dumbly through
Old magazines, or listen to the news.

Heartbeat

The monitored heartbeat
Rides miraculously, over and over,
Peak after peak, wavelets in a gale,
Musical score for an instrument never
Invented.

My own heart, monitored for you like that,
Would show, I promise, nothing but faithfulness,
A little checked by age, much more by pain,
Still writhing in its old accustomed rhythm,
Its geometric pattern on the screen
A perfect metaphor for hopeless love.

by Jon Duckett

There are gaps
Gaps in the discourse
Unspoken moments where a woman
A woman just stares
Unsure, unknowing, unaware
of implications
Unprocessing
Just the news,
Test results,
Things to tell her family

Everything is white
Everything, stark
Trapped in a colour
Can it be stark and dirty?
Searing, yet flecked
With the marks of
Is it time?
Is it tide?
What is that mix?
Beyond the white
Beyond the  dirty?

There are gaps
Blank spaces in the dialogue
Things unsaid
As if she ought to know the answers
As if she ought to know  better

She sinks
Her vessel groans
And an awful joke
An ugly   joke
About a lady doctor
That her husband
told her with glee
it comes back to her
it all falls away as she thinks
thinks about everything around her
thinks about the flecks of time worn dust
that   she    knows     should      be      clean    and      stark    and
and
and
a n d
and yet she sees staring back at her
back through the gaps
of formica

She takes       a moment .