SCIFAIKUEST
AUGUST 2026
The Landing UFO and the Girl by Sonali Roy
Welcome, Readers,
And Happy Anniversary. Another milestone for Scifaikuest!
Speaking of anniversaries, but not to be maudlin, sometimes we need a little reminder of past tragedies.
This year is the 25 Year Anniversary of 911. I know that out in the western states the horrible events of that day didn’t have the same impact it had here on the East Coast, where so many people knew the actual victims of the Twin Towers’ destruction. Working in my local school district at the time, we saw families torn apart by the senseless actions of that day. The immense anger which grew from that destructive violence was understandable but just another exercise in the same kind of thinking.
Following the horrific circumstances of twenty-five years ago, road rage continues to proliferate. Racism continues to provoke unspeakable actions.
Why can’t human beings learn that violence is not the solution to our problems?
Just something I wish everyone think about.
Scifaikuest finally has its own ISBN!!! Please inform your local book stores and library that they are now able to ORDER SCIFAIKUEST!!!
You can always find us here, at Hiraeth Books at: https://www.hiraethsffh.com
If you don’t have a subscription to our PRINT edition, they are available at:
https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/scifaikuest
And, if you would like to join the select group of contributors by submitting your poetry, artwork or article, you can find our guidelines at: https://www.hiraethsffh.com/scifaikuest
Pssst! Looking for something good to read?
You can get all or any of t.santitoro’s latest books by searching Hiraeth’s book store here: https://www.hiraethsffh.com/search?q=t.+santitoro
These works include:
The Crojan series book 2, The Dark Side of Green at:
https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/dark-side-of-green-by-t-santitoro-2
The Crojan series book 1: The Telempath at:
https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/telempath-by-t-santitoro
The Red Foil, a SF mystery, at:
https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/red-foil-by-t-santitoro
Those Who Die, at:
THOSE WHO DIE by t. santitoro | Hiraeth Publishing (hiraethsffh.com)
Adopted Child, at:
https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/adopted-child-by-t-santitoro
The Legend of Trey Valentine, at: https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/legend-of-trey-valentine-by-teri-santitoro
and The Saint and the Demon at:
https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/saint-and-the-demon-by-t-santitoro-and-ron-sparks
SCIFAIKU
alien contact
message arrives
demanding our surrender
Richard E Schell
***
be careful
when wishing upon a star
they're coming
Mark Hendrickson
*
alien ship
instead of being welcomed
quickly deported
Mark Hendrickson
*
procrastination
blame it on
the gravity well
Mark Hendrickson
***
immortal heir
rebels still fight
a tyranny without end
Alper Ghuchlu
*
simulation glitch
my glorious kingdom
becomes a city of ruin
Alper Ghuchlu
***
cryogenic legs
stretch through headwaters
of the Milky Way
Randy Brooks
*
mining an asteroid
the honeybots load up
limbs of gold
Randy Brooks
***
"Space Pirates"
Matthew Wilson
Blackbeard's last treasure
x marks spot
30 light years off Alpha Centauri
***
winter solstice
the night illuminated
by dragon fire
Stephen C. Curro
*
ringed planet
in the sky
he pops the question
Stephen C. Curro
***
Your Planet or Mine
symbiosis
obligate way to
alien friendship
John H. Dromey
*
Dunes of Doom
in a sea of sand
a mirage-based siren sings
irresistible
John H. Dromey
***
who controls the weather?
Herb Kauderer
rainy day scheduled
temperature always warm
dreams of snowball fights
*
non-executive decision
Herb Kauderer
sneeze inside spacesuit
as she realigns thrusters
uncharted space ahead
***
wife at the wheel
house stuffed in the backseat
clone grins shotgun
Nicholas De Marino
*
virus blazes
through digi-forest
sans firewalls
Nicholas De Marino
***
plying his trade
assassination bug
brought from earth
Wilda Morris
*
a hard day’s work
we cool off
in the Ort Cloud
Wilda Morris
***
bipolar
werewolves howling
at Phobos . . . and Deimos
Rick Jackofsky
***
SENRYU
halloween as a werewolf
I always win
the costume competition
Alper Ghuchlu
***
invitation
vampire enters
ending sucks
DJ Tyrer
*
DNA rewrite
two heads are better than one
arguments ensue
DJ Tyrer
***
what we give
for someone else’s dream
cYbeRpSyChOsiS
Kelly Sauvage Moyer
***
seekers and gearheads
talk ancient tech
in NASCAR lines
Nicholas De Marino
***
popular spot today
our spin ship’s zero-g center
impromptu flip contest
Lauren McBride
*
my first space mission
left with
bittersweet goodbyes
Lauren McBride
***
HORRORKU
and when they got back
each bowl of porridge
had been thoroughly dosed
femme fatale, by Benjamin Whitney Norris
*
millions in cash
blown across the freeway
not worth stopping for
evacuation, by Benjamin Whitney Norris
*
in a Ball jar
drowned in alcohol
her latest beau
lush lust lost, by Benjamin Whitney Norris
***
out of the flotsam
bobs an arm
they're always useful
David C. Kopaska-Merkel
*
return
from the shadows
your moon shines again
David C. Kopaska-Merkel
*
the blue head nods
polite for a species
that eats its young
David C. Kopaska-Merkel
***
JOINED SCIFAIKU
Dreams of Immortality
Lisa Timpf
brush with the Reaper—
I cough up dough
to get a clone
clones are like chips—
hard to stop
at just one
clone softball team—
I play
every position
crowded house—
seeing myself
at every turn
too much of a good thing—
clones yearn
for independence
empty nest—
they are not me
and never were
***
JOINED SF TANKA
Growing Amok
Lisa Timpf
anger in the orchard—
branches sway
hurling fruit for miles
some apples can
fall far from the tree
climate change
brings water shortage—
vines entangle
unwary humans
grapes of wrath
weedkiller-resistant
dandelions flourish—
usurping the grass,
they turn lawns yellow
flower power
***
HAIBUN and DRABBUN
DRABBUN
Midnight Snack
I woke up at 4:00 a.m. to the sound of ripping meat and bones. When I went to check, I was greeted with a furred beast, his yellow eyes staring at me.
“You want some?” he asked me.
“Gee, Charles, I know it’s not easy being a werewolf, but could you at least quiet down with the chomping? And you know I can’t eat raw meat!”
His ears flopped back. “Sorry…”
“It’s okay, bud, just turn down the TV volume as well, okay? I need to get up early tomorrow.”
werewolf roommate
at least he’s got an excuse
for all-nighters
Alper Ghuchlu
***
HAIBUN
Unexpected Rain
Looking out the window Max sees it’s raining. Nickel size white balls are pouring down heavily. Max thinks its hail, but can’t hear it landing.
Half mile away
The pilot ejects safely before the plane crashes into the massive factory. It’s Sunday so no employees are at the plant.
crashes with such force
debris cloud towers for miles
popcorn storm warnings
Denny E. Marshall
***
DRONES BY RICHARD E. SCHELL
***
ARTICLE
Debrided Frankenstein
Robert E. Porter
Naomi Wakan picked up haiku late in life, while teaching ESL in Japan. Now in her eighties, she continues writing the little poems.
“By identifying with a slice of time, a spot in the world,” she says, “you are opening yourself to the interconnectedness of all things.” (Wakan)
There’s my opening, too. A good haiku says “pay attention!” not so much to those three lines, or their poet, but something else, something outside – to be captured, arrested, acknowledged, and released.
It has often been said that books are burned in vain. Anything worth reading points up and out of itself, at things we’d see for ourselves… If only we stopped to look.
Still, I wonder…
Did haiku start as a fragment of a larger collaborative poem, as I’ve often read, or was the larger poem grown from a haiku in the first place, as seems more natural to me?
Haiku grown like seed potatoes.
I wonder, too, if those “seed potatoes” are faithful clones or do they mutate, evolving over time from ancestral forms, as yeast does; as haiku seems to.
For ex., this talk of lines and syllables.
The spoken language families that became English and Japanese diverged about the time of the last ice age. Our writing system goes back to ancient Mesopotamia, where it was invented and literally brought the “cradle of civilization” out of pre-history. Writing in Japan developed from a different system brought over from China, where it was invented independently from ours. How can rules for one be applied to the other?
They can’t. So, we do what human beings have always done. We borrow what we can fit into our own linguistic wheelbarrow, and we make those cultural tools our own. I’m writing now in a hodgepodge of Germanic and French languages, with loan words from around the world, in what’s called the Roman alphabet.
This word “Haiku” – am I pronouncing it right? “Hi-koo”? Should that be “hah-eye koo”? Does it matter? So long as you know what I mean? And I mean what I say?
When in Rome…
a dead language
reanimated
gladiator bleeds again
#
“For many years people have been aware that earthshine from the Moon contains information about Earth’s climate system.” (Guo, et al, 547)
I wasn’t one of those people. I wasn’t aware. I had no idea. How could this be? Clearly, I have more to learn.
“As on Earth, the Martian sky does not become black at sunset, but scattering in the atmosphere causes the sky to have appreciable brightness with the Sun several degrees below the horizon.” (Lorenz et al)
That’s more like it. Closer to what I know. Just a little further…
Whether doing science or haiku, it’s our job to point things out, or shed light on dark places. We’re to unravel complexity, or reveal the complexity of things simply overlooked. If we’re bored, we’re boring. Life doesn’t have to be fantastical, or have the melodrama and high-volume pyrotechnics of a summer blockbuster to be interesting. Why is there something instead of nothing? How can it be consistent, predictable? We rely on a set of basic assumptions, to get through our day. Programmed by experience. Pretermined to a large degree. For ex., what’s it like to fall? It’s burned into muscle memory. When it happens, we don’t have to think about it. We react, moving automatically – through a new experience that tends to reinforce those old assumptions. If we survive the fall, we pass the experience on down. Our future selves remember, so they might just save us the trouble of falling for that again.
What happens, though, when we come across something new? It doesn’t fit our previous experiences. We can try to make it fit. Make-believe. Throw a fit. Make excuses. Live in denial. But if it’s observable, measurable, consistent… The double-slit experiment, for ex. How can this be? It throws everything we thought we knew into momentary disorder. It’s counter-intuitive. Relativity does the same, if we only understand what it means regarding mass, gravity, and acceleration, or a cosmic speed limit and the fairyland aspects of time dilation. Practically speaking, it makes no difference; in the course of our lives, some basic understanding of Newtonian physics will probably do. An object in motion, etc. Put your seatbelt on. Slow down. Watch where you’re going. Give us a brake.
There may be nothing new under the sun, but none of us have seen everything yet. And, of course, appearances can be deceiving. The mesmerizing flashes of a television screen, for ex. Anti-anxiety meds pitched between anxiety-inducing approaches to what has been commercially selected for this evening’s news. Or what I so often see on the bus or in the waiting room: self-absorbed doomscrolling earbuds in perpetual, self-imposed quarantine. What happens when Forster’s machine stops? Are we ghosts to be eaten by Pac-Man, or alive to pain and the real pleasure of being fully alive -- for this moment, at least?
Basho jumps right in
today’s fast-paced world
playing Frogger
#
I want to sharpen my focus. To look beyond my prejudices and preconceptions. To see things as they are. It won’t be easy, but I know the way. It’s the same way to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. There are no short cuts, only Band-Aids. I want to learn from my mistakes and fail forward, in haiku and other things. I want it all right now. But it’s a process… Borne slowly out of hardship, softened by repeated hammer blows, nailed down at last.
necrotic tissue
debrided
honeymoon
Works Cited
Guo, Huadong, Guang Liu, and Yixing Ding. "Moon-Based Earth Observation: Scientific Concept and Potential Applications." International Journal of Digital Earth, vol. 11, no. 6, 2018, pp. 546-557.
Lorenz, Ralph D., et al. "Scientific Observations with the InSight Solar Arrays: Dust, Clouds, and Eclipses on Mars." Earth and Space Science (Hoboken, N.J.), vol. 7, no. 5, 2020.
Wakan, Naomi B. "Haiku-Writing: Learning from the Pine." Green Teacher (Toronto), no. 72, 2003, pp. 13.
***
FAVORITE POEM by editor, t.santitoro
millions in cash
blown across the freeway
not worth stopping for
evacuation by Benjamin Whitney Norris
This is a scene straight out of an apocalypse movie! Perfect! --editor, t.santitoro
