We've a bumper-bundle (a reference only people who listened to Two-Way Family Favourites ​on BBC Radio in the UK in the 1950s will get) of scifaiku for you now. Nothing but haiku, except for the tanka that is. All poet bios appear at the end. And, again for non-denizens of the UK, there is a double pun in Susan Burch's "vending machine" poem as a Galaxy is also a brand of chocolate in the UK. Enjoy!


Metal Astronomer

Orion rising
robot's lens
pressed to the eye of a telescope    

by Kendall Evans    


snickers bar –
in the vending machine
that's out of order...
a galaxy
far far away
 
why won’t she
text me back?
the temperature
on Mars
drops again
 
alien proof –
I wake up with crop circles
on my va-jay-jay

by Susan Burch


Blissful silence –
her yipping terrier
out the airlock.
 
Left behind,
the last ship
leaving the horizon.

First breath of winter,
my bed becomes a portal,
out of the ice world.

by Samantha Renda 


The Ingenious Engine Stops
 
A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. ...William Carlos Williams
 
sophisticated technology
relying on short-lived batteries:
our brief span – eternal irony
 
De-Scribe
 
pencil and paper
artifacts of an early
digital age

by Pat Tompkins


alien flyby
wondering why
the fourth planet
is no longer blue
but rust-red

root cellar
the bodies age
nicely

sheets flapping
my childhood fear
of ghosts reignites

by Christina Sng


the music 
of a stellar nursery – 
radio emissions 

plopping through 
the planet's sandy rings – 
so many fractals 
     
by Francis W. Alexander

 
Our Haikuists:

Kendall Evans' poems have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov's SF, Mythic Delirium, Dreams & Nightmares, Weird Tales, and numerous other science fiction and fantasy publications. 

Susan Burch says she likes to write haiku, senryu, tanka, and sedoka. She has been published in magazines such as Ribbons, Frogpond, Moongarlic, and Bones and enjoys drinking Coca-Cola Slurpees.

Samantha Renda divides her time between writing poetry and researching towards her Masters degree in Zoology in the Kalahari. Much like her academic writing, she feels that most of the poetry she pens wants burning. Sometimes a good one slips through. 

Pat Tompkins is an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her short sci-fi poems have appeared in several issues of Dwarf Stars. She adds "I'm not quite a Luddite, but I don't do social media or have a blog or website."

Christina Sng is a Rhysling-nominated poet and writer. Her work has received Honourable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She is the author of several haiku chapbooks, including Catku (Allegra Press, 2016) and A Constellation of Songs (Allegra Press, 2016). Her first full-length collection, Astropoetry from Alban Lake Publishing is out New Year’s Day 2017. 

​Francis Wesley Alexander was born and lives in Sandusky, Ohio. He has had stories and poems published in The Martian Wave, Night to Dawn, Scifiakuest, Space and Time, The Drabbler Anthologies; A Robot, A Cyborg, & A Martian Walk Into A Space Bar, the Zombified II Anthology, and numerous other publications.

​What if the Age of Social Media and Texting has a permanent effect on humanity, asks Luke McKinney in our latest story Apostropocalypse? And you wouldn't believe the grief we had getting that through our auto-correct spellcheckers! Luke McKinney is an ex-physicist turned science comedy writer. His fiction has appeared in Mad Scientist Journal and Grievous Angel continues his cunning scheme of submitting to sites with the coolest names. You can read his columns in Cracked and at Zero Point Comedy – and you can follow him on Twitter at lukemckinney

Apostropocalypse
by Luke McKinney

We killed the apostrophe, but it was self-defense. Not much point in possessives when theres nothing left to possess. Ugh, still hurts to write “theres”. Still, better than unknowable tentacles spinning Escherian uncircles inside your skull!!!
Sorry. Multiple exclamation marks are a side effect of the process. Let me explain.

It started with PROJECT NETWORK. Idiots kept leaving cryptic notes in sealed journals inside locked chests in dusty attics before marching face-first into the maw of madness. What is the point in having idiots to trigger deathtraps if they don’t warn useful people? Thats their evolutionary function, Im sure of it. 

But no, the first half of all eldritch fatalities are an idiot deciding "Hmm, this venture worries me enough to write in my diary, but not enough to tell another human soul”. Then the second half is second idiots finding those diaries. People stupid enough to face insane death single-handed, or even stupider enough to find notes saying “Went to my insane death” and think “Hmm, sounds like a place I should go!”, and they all still thought their worries were too stupid to share.

So we built a system to share the stupidest ideas in the entire world. It works! Now people tell everyone everything! They refuse to even eat a sandwich without Instagramming it. You can be damn sure anyone investigating a mysterious ghost in a crumbling manor on Death-Taboo mountain will upload a gallery of photographs and probably livetweet their own evisceration.

NETWORK succeeded beyond our wildest dreams (all of which must be reported to our Combat Oneirologists). People started skipping sounds and whole syllables online. So we add a bit of code, a 140 character limit, and boom: no more apostrophe!!! Far fewer syllables!!! Suddenly an entire generation can’t even write an Elder God invocation, let alone incant it, and instead focus their spare insanity into far too many exclamation marks!!!!1! 

2 hard 2 lrn t words, u no? Fun 2 watch them try to say Ryleh in textspeak tho. Really high yeah? O RLY, eh? Reel I hay? Ha, if that sunken city thought it was bad being lost under the South Pacific, now autocorrect has buried it forever.

Disaffected youths with thumbpads couldnt co-ordinate a counter-phonal reality-distortion chant if their lives depended on it. Which is the exact opposite of the case. Now all the angry failures trying to scream horror into the world do it in comment sections under news articles. Where they consider the apostrophe more alien than anything they could summon with it. 

​Besides, who has time to sit around practicing pronunciation when you can stream video? That is not dead which can eternal lie, because eternity is far too long for people desperately clicking “close” on a through thirty second advert. The only thrusting horrors of flesh they see are porn. But the true savior of the species was unexpected: the Elder Gods have seriously lost their appeal since people started summoning videos of cute kittens.

​What's not to love about this story: a cold, wet, winter's night in Greenwich Village, sitting in a coffee shop that could be the model for Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks when in walks the ghost of one of the heroes of Punk Rock? The author is Matt Handle and some of his work, including his debut novel Storm Orphans, is available on Amazon. Links to more of his short stories can be found on his blog riff. You can also follow him on Twitter @Matt_Handle


Me and the Ghost of Joey Ramone
by Matt Handle


My coffee tasted like they brewed it from dirty dishwater, but on a January night in the East Village, if it was warm, you drank it. I sipped the beverage noisily as I watched the winter drizzle descend outside the storefront window.  It was less than half an hour until closing time. The place was deserted. I could have sworn the seat next to me was empty when I sat down too. A minute later a grungy dude that was probably no more than 30, but a hard 30, if you know what I mean, sat there staring at the same snow-filled view. I had to do a double-take when I saw him. He was a dead ringer for Joey Ramone.

If possible, he was even thinner and paler than Joey ever was. Same rose-colored shades though. He had the same thick black mop of hair covering most of his face too. Even his ratty leather jacket and pants looked familiar. He smiled, showing off a mouthful of crooked teeth when he caught me looking at him.  

“How’s it hanging, man?”

For what felt like an eternity, but probably wasn’t more than 20 seconds, my brain froze. I couldn’t respond. I just sat there staring at him with my mouth hanging open. I know it sounds stupid, but I’m a longtime fan.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look just like…” I finally managed to blurt out, but before I could complete the question, the guy nodded toward the trendy clothing stores across the street.

“That used to be my bar,” he stated in an accent so authentically New York, no one could ever mistake him for a tourist. “Now look at it.”

The stores looked like every other cookie-cutter establishment along the block. Pedestrians trudged past them without so much as a glance. 

“There hasn’t been a bar there in years,” I offered up. 

The guy nodded, his shaggy hair flopping over the tops of his round sunglasses. “Yeah, it’s been awhile,” he agreed. “I just stopped by to see the old neighborhood.”

“You move away, I guess?” I asked as I turned to face him. I didn’t want to come off as creepy, but I needed a better look. Joey had been dead for well over a decade, but this dude was an absolute doppelganger. 

The leather-clad punk chuckled as he scratched at the back of his head. “You could say that. I got the band back together. Regular gig. Packed house every night.”

“Oh yeah?” I replied. “Where do you play?”

He gave me a mysterious smile. Like he knew a private joke that he was just dying to tell. Before I could convince him to share it, the store’s sound system kicked in. The opening notes of “I Wanna Be Sedated” blared across the shop. I jumped a little in my seat, goosebumps popping out on my arms. For no more than a second, I turned to look toward the direction the music was coming from. When I looked back, Joey was gone.

I glanced around the room to figure out where he went. When I didn’t see him, I actually stepped outside the front door, bitter cold and all. I looked up and down the street, but there wasn’t even a hint of the lanky echo of a man. There was only falling snow filling up shallow footprints, burying any trace of the past.