a new horizon
every day
circling the globe
By Nicholas De Marino
rusted iron fence
buried deep
in wild brambles
marking the bottomless pit
where the earth was flat
By Christina Chin / Paul Callus (italics)
Autopilot Glitch
By John H. Dromey
we’ve reached our map’s edge
we either turn back now or
travel upside down
Visualize
By David Edwards
As you gaze at a map, with its congress of lines, points, numbers, and names, images crowd your brain – mountains, forests, deserts, cities, provinces, rivers, lakes, etc… But study the blankness beyond the cartographic edges…
landscapes merge, melt, then rejoin
fata morganas
chimera-populated
Lost Civilisations
By Christina Chin
and
Marjorie Pezzoli (italics)
barnacles
on carved ancient throne
spiral stairs down the dark surf
bioluminescent beings
pulled the moon low
mermaids sharing their songs
diving beneath the waves
finding names history forgot
to record
before fish stopped talking
when whales conversed with trees
time to remember them all
Babylon
By DJ Tyrer
Route to Babylon
Lit only by candlelight
An eternity
Vanishing in an instant
Can you make it there in time?
https://djtyrer.blogspot.co.uk
The Lake of Ghosts
By Simon MacCulloch
You ask about the soul. There was a tribe
Who lived, and died, in that dark smudge of jungle
Which occupied the inmost stretch of what
Was called on olden maps Von Graasper’s Land
And now is claimed by several warring states
But occupied by only apes and birds.
This tribe, extinct a century now, unknown
Before Von Graasper’s time to any other,
Were subject to a missionary venture
Whose log or journal forms our only source
Of information. In the Father’s words:
“These people have a strange, unsightly faith.
They dote, as Christians should, upon the Soul
As that which will survive the body’s death,
But add a most peculiar superstition,
Believing that the Soul proceeds from flesh,
Which must itself, when sensing death impending,
Produce the part whose substance is immortal.
And truly have I witnessed this myself:
Their old, to aid the process, eat odd tubers,
And smear the skin with bark-extracted ointments,
And from the flesh there springs a growth, a tumour
Whose form they take to be its owner’s ghost.
The person so afflicted shortly dies,
And ceremoniously the “ghost” is sliced
Away from cooling corpse, and placed with ritual
Within a straw container, set afloat
Upon the unnamed, muddy string of river
That gurgles through the margin of their village.
The body, only meat now, feeds the pigs.
I asked them where they thought their ghosts were going.
They tell me of the “lake of ghosts”, a place
That none of them has seen, but which their river
Refreshes with the spirits of their forebears,
Who swim there with the gods of earth and water
Beneath the god of fire’s approving eye.”
It seems the priest was also an explorer,
And vowed he would disprove the pagan tale,
So travelled down the river as it meandered
Through swamps that only crocodiles could live in
Until it simply petered out in puddles
To form a vast and pestilential marsh.
Before he could return to tell the village
He sickened with a fever, and went back
To die among his brethren at the mission.
His journal ends: “The lake of ghosts is fable.
A grey miasma, rife with biting insects
Awaits the ghosts who never shall arrive there.
For I have seen the crocodiles drift grinning
Upon that sluggish river’s sickly flow,
And in their eyes that glint of stolen wisdom
That tells me they have fed on things eternal.”
His fever spoke, no doubt. And yet, I wonder;
That tribe is dead, their pigs have perished with them,
And still the smiling crocodiles are swimming,
The slow and scaly gods of earth and water,
Beneath the god of fire’s approving eye.
stepping over
the threshold whispers
in a dead language
unwrapping infidelity’s
traumatic layers
By Christina Chin / Paul Callus (italics)
Round Trips
By John H. Dromey
travels in circles
guided by an old stained map
follows coffee rings
The Bermuda Triangle
By Christina Chin
a normal night
on a usual flight –
the pilot whispers goodnight.
in that instant,
the radar loses contact,
a blackout on the path.
the military base
watches the screen as it makes
a sudden U-turn
flying for hours
before a final blast plunges
the cabin into darkness.
https://christinachin99blog.wordpress.com/
Patalis; or, Antipodus Incognita
By Harris Coverley
The Ancients knew well the Antipodes
Aristotle and Ptolemy and the rest
That giant continent
With coasts like shards
Yet bare and smooth on its surface
Halfway between rock and ice
Not a human in sight
But a few million penguins
And a few thousand seals
To dance in the temperate air
In quietly joyous harmony
The perfect balance with the Known Northern Realms
That is until the Sons of Adam began to expand
And explore upon greater and greater ships
With gold and spices and converts in mind
The Antipodes
Such a frightfully shy landmass
In pained embarrassment began to shrink
Its vast shards crumbling into the evermore encroached upon ocean
Its penguins and seals drew in
Toughening up against the growing cold
Until – not a fifth of its true size – it was a frozen wasteland
Its avian and mammalian citizenry huddled hip to hip
Bellingshausen and Lazarev in that winter of early 1820
Did at last spot what remained –
“There is no Terra Australis!
Only this worthless and jagged shelf of ice!”
To this day its plains seem rough and dead
And yet…
They await the time to smoothen out and warm again
Originally published in Altered Reality Magazine (March 2022).
The Basilisk Of The Fenwicks
By Mark Howard Jones
Amid the tidelands of morning, still awash with the darkness of dreams, he consults the crumpled scrap of paper. The map was inexpertly scrawled by his own withered hand, as near a copy as he could manage of the one held in the cathedral’s sealed archives.
The long-abandoned parish of Saltmire held a church, deconsecrated and crumbling, yet still home to a field of graves. He is certain the secret resting place that he seeks is sheltered in that near-clandestine cemetery, lost to sight but not memory.
The very tip of an island is visible at the uttermost edge of the map. The adjacent sheet was missing from the archive but something inside him assures him this is the place where the poet was buried.
As he peers out across the waters, he begins to lose hope. Then, through the mist a low, dark shape appears, hugging the horizon as if it fears the arriving daylight. Broken angles in the sky part the air, revealing the secret that can no longer be denied.
Hurrying, he unmoors the boat from the rotting jetty and sets about the task of reaching the island before it is swallowed once more by the mists. Over his shoulder is a bag containing a torch and a rare bottle of absinthe, one of the poet’s favoured weaknesses, to be offered in honour of his genius. The poet’s laudanum-stained verses will endure until the last handful of human dust has blown away, he is certain.
He had found the man’s work in a tattered volume hidden away in a college library. On the back cover, a man with a weak chin and dreaming eyes stared out at him from a degraded Daguerrotype, as if desperately trying to impart a message outside of time or any other human limitation.
Splashing ashore, he soon stands in the remains of the churchyard. He sees hills rising high through the parting mist. And still more hills beyond them. He realises this is not an island at all but merely the tip of a vast, lost, impossible land that stretches away into the immeasurable distance. Something the map has not told him of.
The tumbled remains of a tower has smashed down upon many of the graves, revealing their hideous contents to the unforgiving sky. In a distant corner of the graveyard, forgotten under ivy, almost lost in the labyrinth of gravestones, he spies the half-word ‘Fen-’ carved above a leaning doorway.
This water-logged sepulchre must be the place. Curled up asleep above the door is a carving of a mighty basilisk in slumber, guarding the family and its unknowable mysteries. An untiring heraldic guardian that will protect them for all time.
Pushing on the tilted stone door with all his might until it moves, he staggers down the few steps into a family tomb with dark-coloured slabs lining the narrow space. Water sloshes about his feet in a desultory tide.
On the stone nearest the door is the name Jacob Beresford Fenwick. There are no dates but in their place is an inscription reading ‘Forever blessed by the kiss of the basilisk’. He recognises it as a quote from the author’s own On Idiocy and wonders if it was Fenwick’s own ego that decreed it should be there.
He recognises the names of the poet’s mother and father on two of the tombs but the others are a mystery to him. He presumes they belong to ancestors who have long since turned to dust. He pulls the bottle of green liquid from his bag, ready to honour the memory of this lost prodigy.
Absorbed in the relief of finding his hero’s lost grave, he fails to hear the sound behind him as something follows him into the dank space. Behind him, a huge serpent moves swiftly across the ceiling and lowers itself before him. As the breath stops in his throat he recognises the beast from above the doorway. The stone is no longer stone and the carving is now an animal to be abhorred and feared.
Frozen by the creature’s awful gaze, he now knows Fenwick’s verses claiming the companionship of revered serpents are no mere poet’s fancy. The basilisk lets loose an appalling cry, as if calling to something far distant and long lost. In answer comes the sound of feeble stirrings within the tombs.
His immobile hands lose their grip on both the scrawled map and the bottle of absinthe. The latter strikes the wall and shatters, turning the water around it filmy white before being subsumed by the filthy fluid.
For a moment, the map floats on the surface like a becalmed vessel. Then, as the graves begin to open, the ink runs and fades, surrendering to memory and hopelessness.
Ends
Fading Coastline
By Christina Chin
and
Uchechukwu Onyedikam (italics)
ocean fog
swallows the lighthouse
sea monsters
shapeshifting
mami wata
navigation drawn
on ancient parchment
stars look completely unfamiliar
the boat and fisherman
magic relics
realizing
the Sunken Ruins
in forgotten deep
in sight
earthen walls
Recognising the Gravity of the Situation
By John H. Dromey
not printer’s smudges
dark spots on the star chart’s edge
pinpoint huge black holes
old road signs
strangled by moss
and creeping roots
irretrievable memories
swallowed by time
By Christina Chin / Paul Callus (italics)
compass rose wilts
oh, there it is –
Atlantis
By Nicholas De Marino
