Another World by Joy Yin

 

Greetings, Readers!

 

I hope you had wonderful holidays and are enjoying a splendid winter season!

 

I just want to say that, never in the history of Scifaikuest has an ONLINE version of our magazine contained such totally excellent material! There is not one poem in this edition that is not simply SUPERB, and the artwork is totally WONDERFUL as well! I’m so totally pleased with this issue!

 

Please give it up for our AWESOME CONTRIBUTORS! Yaaaaaay! Kudos!

 

Thank you all so very much for sending us your poetry and art to share with the world!

 

Scifaikuest finally has its own ISBN!!! Please inform your local bookstores 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 t.santitoro’s newest book, The Telempath, the first book in the Crojan Chronicles series, from Hiraeth Publishing, at: https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/telempath-by-t-santitoro

 

and her other recent novel, The Red Foil, a SF mystery, at:

https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/red-foil-by-t-santitoro

 

and you can find her novella, Those Who Die, at:

THOSE WHO DIE by t. santitoro | Hiraeth Publishing (hiraethsffh.com)

 

You can also order t.santitoro's novella, Adopted Child, at:

https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/adopted-child-by-t-santitoro

 

And you can still get a copy of her vampire novelette, The Legend of Trey Valentine, at: https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/legend-of-trey-valentine-by-teri-santitoro

 

As always, I’d love to extend a huge Scifaikuest welcome to our newest contributors: Nikki Ratanapanichkich and Ramund Ro!

 

quiet twilight

gazing over the Martian landscape

you and I

 

-sakyu-

 

***

 

SCIFAIKU

 

untitled

M. Frost

 

cinders in the sky

combustion two ways

fire weather

 

*

 

just like coming home

Herb Kauderer

 

my found family

the new planet teeming with

indigenous cats

 

*

solo exploration

Herb Kauderer

 

external factors

one thousand pounds per square inch

living without you

 

*

 

the search for depth

Herb Kauderer

 

sub-space telegraph

expression in ones & zeros

ASCII art reborn

 

*

 

vampires in church

trapped by priest forever

bats in the belfry

 

Gary Davis

 

*

 

scarecrow does its best

to get a grip on itself

grasping at straws

 

John H. Dromey

 

*

 

aliens at play

ring around the scarecrow

crop circles

 

John H. Dromey

 

*

 

blip on the radar

last habitable planet

in rocket-fuel range

 

John H. Dromey

 

*

 

Creekin’

(for Metro Parks)

 

skipping rocks

across enchanted creek

water nymph breaks surface

 

Denise Rau

 

*

 

Martian harvest

the colonists celebrate

by painting the town red

 

Ramund Ro

 

*

 

UFO abduction

we enjoy a free guided tour

of an alien kitchen

 

Ramund Ro

 

*

new amusement park

the cool kids seek thrills

inside Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

 

Ramund Ro

 

*

 

used robot store

the bright plastic smiles

of the salesmen

 

Ramund Ro

 

*

 

water drips from the condenser—

explorers dream

of a green and verdant Mars

 

Lisa Timpf

 

*

 

gleam of distant light

across interstellar voids:

ships pass in the night

 

Banks Miller

 

*

 

sampling the troll

after nightfall granite chips

smell of blood

 

David C. Kopaska-Merkel

 

*

 

crisp dawn

nitrogen ice spalls

from the ship

 

David C. Kopaska-Merkel

 

*

 

headless horseman

haunting the DOT

no low bridge sign

 

Randall Andrews

 

*

 

hydraulic fluid

vampire’s unpleasant surprise

robotic woman

 

Randall Andrews

 

***

 

 

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Out of Town Fellow by Denise Noe

 

SENRYU

 

in that other world

everyone is happier

let's start packing

 

Nikki Ratanapanichkich

 

*

 

"Flopsy, Destroyer of Worlds"

Matthew Wilson

 

F in show and tell

bringing my pet

belching fire and brimstone

 

*

 

football sore loser

penalized for time travel

past interference

 

John H. Dromey

 

*

 

talk of climate change

as Nature turns up the heat

it’s mostly hot air

 

John H. Dromey

 

***

 

OTHER FORMS

(including: Sijo, Fibonacci, Cinquain, Minutes, Diminuendo, Ghazals,Threesomes, Brick, etc.)

 

SIJO

 

I've spent the entirety of my life building this time machine.

so screw the dinosaurs, so screw all of my past mistakes.

so take me to the future, because I'm never turning back.

 

Nikki Ratanapanichkich

 

*

 

CINQUAIN

 

we two

last of our kind

soon to be never more

our legacy’s last descendants

machines

 

Richard E Schell and Nancy C Griffith

 

*

 

anxious

for your return

seven years you have served

envoy to the alien world

of earth

 

Richard E Schell and Nancy C Griffith

 

*

 

SEDOKA

 

you’re sitting right there

yet it seems as though your mind

is a million miles away

 

I am dream-walking

with two small moons above me

as I scuff through Martian sand

 

Lisa Timpf

 

***
 

HAIBUN

 

Space Monsters

Guy Belleranti

 

A space storm forces us off course and damages our spacecraft. We have no choice but to land on a nearby planet, a planet reputed to harbor carnivorous space monsters.

 

We draw straws to determine which crew member will leave the spacecraft to access the damage.

 

I lose.

 

"Be careful ... Hurry back ..." the others say. I nod, and with a thumping heart, I step into the unknown.

 

Within seconds, scaly creatures surround me. . .

 

still alive

never seen so many teeth

flash friendly smiles

 

*

 

(haibun)

by Banks Miller

 

Two young women sat on a boulder amid the pale reddish expanse of the Martian plain.

 

"I wish I could really be here."

 

"What do you mean?"

 

"These suits are so ... distancing. I wish I could feel the rocks under my feet, the wind of Mars in my hair."

 

"It would kill you."

 

"Well, of course. For now."

 

"For now?"

 

"Someday, it will be possible. Maybe not in our lifetime, but we'll get there. One way or another. Whether we change the planet, or change ourselves, or make suits so good you can't feel that they're there at all..."

 

on red rock and dust

a face turned upwards

dreaming of wind

 

***

 

 

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HAIGA: Racing for Shelter by Christina Sng

 

 

ARTICLE

 

The Magic Eye, Optic Flow, and Ku

Or

The Mock-Latin Lens-grinder’s Monkey (a self-portrait)

by Robert E. Porter

 

Have you seen those “magic eye” posters?

 

A craze of the 1990s. Stereograms. Optical illusions. Randomness that “popped” and became a 3-D image, if you looked at it just right – or so they said. Were they just faking it? Imagining things? The trick was lost on me. Might as well have been staring into the “snow” on a TV screen. It makes me wonder, though…

 

Was this a case of the emperor’s clothes? Mass hysteria? Or did it have a real effect on those wired in a lemming-like, pop-cultural way? Was it the source and inspiration for that SF trope, the weaponized meme? Also called a basilisk – an apt name for anything that so totally captures our attention that we lose track of time and situational awareness.

 

Petrified. Staring into a poster while someone picks your pocket. Or staring into your phone as you step out in front of likewise-distracted drivers. Blood in the streets.

 

Optic flow is something else altogether. It’s not the way that a comic book artist grabs your attention and guides you from one panel to the next. No, it’s the apparent motion of objects relative to their distance. For ex., how the moon keeps up with the car no matter how fast you drive, while the trees lining the road quickly fall in behind us. Parallel lines converge in the distance, too. Trompe l’oeil. Visual cues of depth lend some perspective, if not true meaning and purpose. A house of cards built on the shifting sands. Self-driving cars rely on this mirage for navigation in space and time.

 

Are you really moving, or does it just look (and so feel) that way? For ex., in a flight simulator.

The “magic eye” and optic flow both involve the brain’s interpretation of visual stimuli. Optic flow (of soup cans on shelves at your local grocery store, for ex.) can induce vertigo, when the calcium carbonate crystals in the inner ear have been dislodged. Those crystals serve as mercury in the proverbial switch, which, if not zeroed in just right, can transmit the wrong signal and -- boom! Down you go, with the room “spinning.” Centrifugal gravity? Artificial gravity? No, your brain gone haywire.

 

And flashing lights can trigger seizures in epileptics.

 

Maybe there is something to that meme… But in typical SF fashion it’s blown all out of proportion, so that everyone could be affected and the effects are catastrophic. Ice Nine. “Nothing but gingerbread left…”

 

A genre of Grosz caricature and hyperbole. Stood on the shoulders of Micromegas, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Gulliver’s travels, on tour with Jefferson Airplane. The suspension of disbelief? Picking ourselves up by the seat of our pants – for kicks… into an abyss of self-indulgent anxieties, futures with zero probability. Motes in the eye of the beholder. Or the Beyonder, as the case may be.

 

I fell into SF via D&D and Marvel comic books, c. 1983, while wrestling with the angels of evangelical Christianity and the specter of nuclear war. The legend of the dungeon master, James Dallas Egbert III. Able Archer. The Satanic Panic. Wasn’t I raised to take things literally? And yet to question everything, to find things out for myself, to wash my hands after using the toilet and trust in the efficacy of vaccines. While the hidebound supercomputer on Star Trek, the original series, could be shut down with a silly paradox (“I am lying.”) I’ve kept truckin’ with a full load of contradictions and scatological balderdash, fueled by conflicting ideologies, opinions, and viewpoints. Huzzah! Excelsior!

 

That’s life: SNAFU. It’s not easy. That makes it interesting. Let’s see this through, though, whatever it is. Do what we can, and face the consequences with the resilience of a cockroach in a microwave.

 

In our best ku, we capture a moment. One freeze-frame out of the continuous optical flow. A slice (as for microscopic slides) of life – or sensory experience, on the off-chance that some of us are not technically alive. Dickian androids. Zombie Reaganites dug up 40 years after their hero’s reelection by landslide and reanimated by technological wizardry. Lines of code in a simulated universe. Regardless, the ku is “only” a fragment, which conveys the larger whole…

 

Hole, or pupil. Another kind of magic eye has taken this snapshot.

 

The sense of change or continuation in a still image is as illusory and thoroughly wonderful as our tenuous connections to the world around us. After all, we are made up of empty space in a latticework of atoms and molecules. So is everything we touch, or find so touching. We only see the stars as they appeared long ago, in the light come down to us (at the cosmic speed limit) through the bouillabaisse of earth’s atmosphere, corrected (or uncorrected) eyesight… light registered imperfectly in a mass of fatty tissue and nervous wiring the size of your two fists put together.

 

Even our very best ku can hardly be expected to feed the starving, or bring drowned refugees to life in the Canary Islands; to undo a tsunami, or prevent the next global pandemic; to stomp out needless striving, hatred, greed, or stupidity. But into these captured moments we can escape, sometimes. To restore a sense of wonder, or joie de vivre; be willing again to resurface and face our fears, learn to work together, to do what we can – before it’s too late. Don’t let them fool you! We’ve got nothing to lose. No one here gets out alive.

 

Illegitimati non carborundum.

 

***
 

FAVORITE POEM by editor t.santitoro

My favorite poem this time is by Banks Miller. His haibun is just so lovely and wistful! So here it is again:

 

(haibun)

Banks Miller

 

Two young women sat on a boulder amid the pale reddish expanse of the Martian plain.

 

"I wish I could really be here."

 

"What do you mean?"

 

"These suits are so ... distancing. I wish I could feel the rocks under my feet, the wind of Mars in my hair."

 

"It would kill you."

 

"Well, of course. For now."

 

"For now?"

 

"Someday, it will be possible. Maybe not in our lifetime, but we'll get there. One way or another. Whether we change the planet, or change ourselves, or make suits so good you can't feel that they're there at all..."

 

on red rock and dust

a face turned upwards

dreaming of wind

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