SCIFAIKUEST
NOVEMBER 2026
Midnight Murder by Denise Rau
Happy Halloween!
A real scare is the threat of losing a close friend. Please, let’s tell everyone today that we love them. Tomorrow might be too late. Go DO it!
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:
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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 at Hiraeth’s bookstore. These works include:
The Crojan Chronicles Book 1: The Telempath
The Crojan Chronicles Book 2: The Dark Side of Green
The Crojan Chronicles Book 3: GodSPawn
The Red Foil, a SF mystery
and The Saint and the Demon (with Ron Sparks)
Halloween splendor
the witch takes a taste from her
bubbling cauldron
(xeno-unit)
***
A Pumpkin Dreams of Fame by Lisa Timpf
SCIFAIKU
a billion years of dying
to discover tears
George Thomas
*
Alpha Centauri honeymoon
eyestalks of the alien’s spouse
twitch happily
Alper Ghuchlu
*
stubborn
staring contest
with a robot
Stephen C. Curro
*
EVA playground
kids hopscotch
on meteoroids
Stephen C. Curro
*
spaceship hum
teaching my alien co-pilot
how to whistle
Stephen C. Curro
*
tidal lock…
always the blue sun
overhead
Stephen C. Curro
*
alone at the bar
the station window
faces Saturn
Stephen C. Curro
*
sunset on Mars—
the rover’s shadow
longer than memory
James Weaver
*
broken AI—
it keeps asking
about rain
James Weaver
*
cryostasis
unable to pinch myself
to end this nightmare
Ngo Binh Anh Khoa
*
his metal hand
fixing the old swing set
gentle like before
Yuliia Vereta
*
her code rewritten now
no more orders or fear
only dreams of wings
Yuliia Vereta
*
zero sum exercise
Herb Kauderer
spacewalk step counter
not many calories burned
with no resistance
*
a quantum leap of faith
a random step
a coherent story elsewhere
Fariel Shafee
*
words we sew together
MAKING a world
of colors that are just waves
Fariel Shafee
*
old Mars colony
shuttered in silence—
only stories remain
Nancy C Griffith and Richard E Schell
*
Sunspots
solar-flare-induced
spotty communications
partial e-clips
John H. Dromey
*
The Nature of the Beast
stealth not its strong point
Bigfoot sneaks through the forest
quiet as a moose
John H. Dromey
*
Time Travelers’ Souvenir
clue to where they went
in the past for Thanksgiving
dinosaur wishbone
John H. Dromey
*
bioluminescence
Europa’s submerged ocean
ignites
Douglas J. Lanzo
***
SENRYU
alien turkeys
terrible Thanksgiving guests
they gobble my food
Guy Belleranti
***
HORRORKU
blood moon
she runs her tongue over
her protruding fangs
Ngo Binh Anh Khoa
*
a murder of crows
a fresh pile of corpses at
the scarecrow's feet
Ngo Binh Anh Khoa
*
android janitor
still mopping
crimson hallway floor
Nancy C Griffith and Richard E Schell
*
cracking airlock
at least
we don’t hear the screams
Richard E Schell
*
Halloween night
a child disappears
only the pumpkin smiles
Richard Schell
*
alien invasion
we welcome them
with open graves
Richard E Schell
*
dead tired
of her
ghosting me
old haunt, by Benjamin Whitney Norris
*
flashing images of that night
cut from her eye
on the autopsy table
post-production, by Benjamin Whitney Norris
*
totally burned out
after 36 years
fumigating the office now
SHC, by Benjamin Whitney Norris
*
can’t wash the stains
from these sheets
dregs of my humanity
dirty sheets, by Benjamin Whitney Norris
***
Discovered Mummy by Denise Noe
TANKA
staff planted
in fresh soil
elves gather
to face down
an army of chainsaws
Stephen C. Curro
*
doctor frankenstein
assembles me from dead parts
electrifies me
into a singular life
a monster of loneliness
Denise Noe
***
OTHER FORMS (including: Sijo, Fibonacci, Cinquain, Minutes, Diminuendo, Ghazals,Threesomes, Brick, etc.)
CINQUAIN
a meal with neighbors
Herb Kauderer
at your
favorite place
to grab a hamburger
the new space aliens drop by
to eat
*
Core Issue
Herb Kauderer
Why are
hearts at the heart
of poems but for my
taste, too rarely on my dinner
table?
CHERITA
she shuffles
along the shore's edge
the bay's double moonset
a spaceship honks
and she wonders...
is it him?
Colleen M. Farrelly
NONET
The accident happened just as we
stepped out into the endless void.
Before the machine froze up,
biceps bleeding, I punched
the undo button.
To save my friend,
I must go
back in
time.
Dennis Owen Frohlich
***
HAIBUN and DRABBUN
DRABBUN
Identification
Moving through the corridors, ignoring the screams, the gunfire, and the sound of tearing flesh, she finally reached the entrance of her escape pod. All she had to do was scan her personnel ID card, and get the hell out of here.
As she scanned the card, a digitized voice from the computer echoed throughout the corridors of the spaceship. [ID CARD EXPIRED. PLEASE RENEW].
She froze in shock, she remembered now, and it was too late.
She looked behind her, and was greeted by a smile of sharp, hungry teeth.
forgotten renewal
escape pod unusable
smile of hungry monsters
Alper Ghuchlu
HAIBUN
Decorative Scarecrow
It’s been weeks since I removed that decorative scarecrow I bought for Halloween, yet I still see its silhouette in the night.
When I go outside to look for it, there’s nothing, when I point a light to it, it simply disappears.
Everyone I talk to keeps telling me I’m just seeing things, but every passing day the silhouette is getting closer, and I can hear its whispers.
Today the silhouette’s inside my home.
weeks after halloween
decorations
haunt me still
Alper Ghuchlu
***
Arachnids
I forgot to turn off the lights again.
When I went downstairs, I was greeted by a spider.
It’s not unusual for someone to get scared by spiders, even though they’re mostly tiny, harmless creatures, their appearance can irritate some people easily.
Except this one was almost the size of me, came after me as I ran to my room and locked myself inside there, and as it’s trying to break down the door, I look outside to see a horde of them swarming in the streets.
spider invasion
hordes of them
topple cars
Alper Ghuchlu
***
Breathless
A nebula looms on the horizon, an iridescent web against a dark canvas. A half-rusted probe skims the window on its way to collect corrupted data never sent back to the colony. She stares at yesterday’s log and wonders how she slept through a star’s birth.
pregnant pause
a stellar wind
clears the air
Colleen M. Farrelly
***
ARTICLES
Cheribun: An Introduction to Form Haibun, Cherita, and Hybrid Possibilities
by Colleen M. Farrelly
In the past two decades, haibun has spawned many nonce forms—such as tanka prose and even triolet-haiku blends—and evolved to include experimental prose/haiku components and braided structures, where each line of the haiku is separated and woven into the prose to attenuate each line and more subtly link-and-shift the meaning of the prose and title. Many journals accept some newer flavors of haibun and hybrids derived from replacing the haiku with other short-forms, including cho, Frogpond, Failed Haiku, #FemkuMag, Prune Juice, Whiptail, MacQueen’s Quinterly, drifting sands haibun, Pan Haiku, dadakuku, Chrysanthemum, the other bunny, and, yes, Scifaikuest. New hybrid forms emerge in journals each year, including hybrids with Cherita taking the place of haiku or tanka.
In 1997, ai li created three short-form poem types that tell a story in a breath: Cherita (a 6-line poem with stanzas of 1, 2, and 3 lines), Gembun, and Dua. While the haiku in haibun link-and-shifts the meaning of a haibun’s prose and title, Cherita tells a story that can parallel the prose’s story to not only link-and-shift meanings but can create related but dual or subplot narratives that either complete each other or are woven in parallel through a braided structure that attenuates each piece of the Cherita.
Per online searches, the first published cheribun appeared in January of 2022, in MacQueen’s Quinterly, which published Margaret Dornaus’s first piece. Each year since the introduction of the form, the journal holds a cheribun challenge to solicit pieces in this form. The number of published cheribun is unknown, but the number seems to be under 100 and mainly limited to MacQueen’s Quinterly. Published attempts at integrating Gembun or Dua with prose seem to be rare.
The cheribun form is well-suited to general fiction writing, as its parallel structure and story-telling possibilities enrich the world-building, imagery, plot structure, and layered meanings in the full speculative poem. My attempt is clumsy at best compared to the form’s possibilities within this genre.
Writing a Cheribun
Good fiction builds a believable world. A good cheribun builds this world through both the prose and the sensory details captured in the Cherita piece. The brevity and compactification of a story or a moment into sensory details to ground a reader in a particular emotion is the hallmark of good Cherita. The combination of Cherita with prose and title should link and shift the meaning of the prose parts, whether providing a sensory experience to the narrative piece, weaving in a parallel storyline or subplot, or providing clues to plot resolution. The best speculative pieces transcend the genre to speak to the human condition, which is messy and circular and sometimes fragmented like a braided cheribun.
In particular, the expanded line count and stanza breaks in Cherita transform cheribun into a versatile alternative to speculative tanka prose and haibun, which require multiple short form additions to achieve what Cherita can accomplish with fewer lines than multiple haiku or tanka in a piece. They also break the juxtapositions commonly found in tanka and haiku to provide more link-and-shift options to the writer. Cheribun forms seem a bit more suited to science fiction and general speculative writing, which builds worlds to immerse the reader.
Combinatorics: A Future Glimpse at Cheribun
Because cheribun offers so many possibilities to expand fictional worlds, it’s likely to find a home in speculative and narrative poetry and to further evolve over time. Perhaps parallel narratives will become a common structure. It’s possible to design a cheribun that pivots the middle stanza such that the story ends differently reading the horizonal vs. vertical Cherita at the end of the piece. Multi-ending hybrids such as that cheribun form or a haibun mixing multihaiku with prose seem well-suited to fictional poetry writing.
Triptych forms offer an additional link-and-shift mechanism for speculative poems that shift multiple viewpoints of an event into a multi-layered story. Triptych cheribun forms seem particularly adept at this type of storytelling in a series of speculative poetic vignettes.
Other short forms that are rarely hybridized offer more possibilities for science fiction or general speculative poetry, as well. Hybrids might include sijo, cinquain, limericks, sedoka, somonka, or even combinations of these short-forms interspersed throughout the prose as best-fitting link-and-shifts to the piece.
Zuihitsu, a Japanese hybrid cousin of the haibun that “follows the brush” on a train of thought by the narrator, is emerging in English-language hybrid writing, and both zuihitsu and its combination with Cherita seem particularly suited to science fiction hybrids. Perhaps exploring different prose options and different combinations of short forms and prose will open a new subgenre of speculative writing. Perhaps someone will write what has never been written.
Resources:
http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/Contests/MacQ29-Cheribun-Challenge.aspx
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147492/zuihitsu
***
Over the Moon
by Robert E. Porter
An editor once told me his American readers didn’t know history from alternate history without a payload of SF genre clichés. Killer robots from outer space. Victorian time machines built out of bailing wire and bicycle parts. Bug-eyed damsels and the monsters who love them.
Even the premise that Nazi Germany or the Confederacy won their wars and survived to the present day licks the jackboots of Romanticism. After all, they both acted out of weakness. Their aggressive tactics were effective early on and continue to be mistaken for strength. They both set out to butcher and enslave, not to win hearts and minds. They left the moral high ground to their enemies, and they alienated potential supporters in the process. It just took a while for the Union or the Allies to fully mobilize and engage in all-out war. Compare populations, natural resources, industrial capacities, etc., and you’ll see which side had the overwhelming strategic advantage. While things might have turned out differently, let’s not pretend that anything was possible – or that only the impossible can be interesting.
HIT OR MISS
held together
by Operation Paperclip
Dr. Strangelove’s
latest wunderwerk
a rat-line to the moon
Does that work as a tanka?
High-level Nazis escaped via “rat-lines” to South America. Not all were hunted down and brought to justice like Adolf Eichmann. Josef Mengele, for ex., spent the rest of his life in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, dying at a Sao Paulo resort in 1979.
Operation Paperclip (another kind of “rat-line”) brought Nazi scientists and engineers to the US. The title character of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove is a parody of those Nazis, perhaps one in particular.
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun. (Lehrer)
Did he aim for the moon -- and hit London? There’s a difference, of course, between missing one’s mark and striking a deal with the devil.
“Von Braun's reputation carries the indelible and considerable stain that the V2 project relied upon slave labour, some of which was selected by the engineer himself from inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Much as Hitler may have hoped this was the weapon that would win him the war, more died in producing the V2s than did in London, and other cities on the receiving end.” (Randall)
Von Braun joined the Nazi party years before the war, and the notorious S.S. in 1940, during the blitzkrieg across Europe. It wasn’t until 1944, when the German machine was clearly breaking down, that he was accused of being a “defeatist,” or insufficiently loyal to Hitler. But he kept his job, continued flying bombs and launching rockets at Allied nations, only to switch to the winning side at war’s end. He came to the US, where he later posed with John F. Kennedy (whose father as US ambassador had once looked forward to a conquered Britain…) and contributed to the 1969-72 moon landings. Many have made excuses for him. But he did not serve Hitler or hit London out of ignorance, or work slaves to death by mistake.
Mistakes aren’t that bad.
When I see a typo in a book, or a book out of place, I point my finger and say, “Aha!” I’m not alone, after all; other people goof up, too. It is a recurring lesson, often forgotten, and worth re-learning every time.
Your sister and your brother and your dad and mother too
Big people, small people, matter of fact, all people
Everyone makes mistakes, so why can’t you? (Moss)
Big Bird sang that as he marched down Sesame Street, followed by his many friends and neighbors, who sang right along with him -- as if it were okay to make mistakes, to make room for learning and growing and doing better.
HAPPY PLACE
I shared that song with a friend…
“Weren’t the Muppets and Sesame Street awesome?” she said. “My favorite is, ‘I don’t want to live on the moon.’”
I had to look that one up. Had I heard it before? My memory palace has more trap doors and false stairs than the Winchester mansion. It was never meant to be lived in, only haunted. Along with Ernie’s moon:
Though I'd like to look down at the earth from above
I would miss all the places and people I love (Moss)
It makes you wonder what kind of people would actually leave earth “for good.” If they had no love for us, we might reach out to them and never hear back. Beyond this pale blue dot, there is little margin for error. We might never know when they made their last mistake, or if their descendants adapted well to a life of continual hardship, given the restrictions and limitations of a generation ship, or any confined space made habitable. Can they be happy? If so, how?
LOOKING BACK
What if I went back to that tanka about von Braun and his paperclip? What if I played with the structure and traditions of ku-related forms, like the renga? Or I cut loose, developing the alternate history more fully as a narrative long poem or prose fiction? Whichever path I chose, I’d be making a mistake, and probably more than one; but they can be serendipitous. So, it’s a chance worth taking. I could learn something, after all. I might even surprise myself by gigantic leaps and bounds. That’s part of the journey to self-acceptance and fulfillment, I think. Over the moon, and… Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.
WORKS CITED
Lehrer, Tom. “Wernher von Braun.” That Was The Year That Was. Warner Bros. Records, July 1965.
Moss, Jeffrey A. “Everyone Makes Mistakes.” Sesame Street. Scene 2, Episode 1, Season Two, 9 Nov 1970.
Moss, Jeffrey A. “I don’t want to live on the moon.” The People in Your Neighborhood. Sesame Street Records, 1980.
Randall, David. "Rocket Man Who Became Nasa's Favourite Nazi." The Independent on Sunday, 19 July, 2009, pp. 54.
