Issue 25 – Cosmic Joke

You Jest
By DS Davidson

Sir, surely you jest
Or, is this a test?
Such things cannot be –
They are beyond rationality!

 

Vultures from Outer Space
By Mark Hudson

The crew of the ship got off on the moon,
they didn’t know that they would die soon,
they hoped to do some science research,
but some alien vultures began to perch.
Outer space vultures, tending to frighten,
some maybe thought they came from Titan.
More notorious than vultures from earth,
and none of them were cute like a Smurf.
Bald headed birds, with red beady eyes,
they took all the astronauts by surprise.
They tried to race back to their ship,
but these alien vultures were really quick.
Sucking through space suits; biting through bones,
the astronauts wished that they could go home.
The vultures looked like monstrous goblins,
They radioed back, “Houston, we got a problem.”
Without weapons to fight crazy condors,
the astronauts found themselves getting devoured.
NASA watched this, with increasing fear,
Look out! The space vultures just might be near!

The Purple Jester
By DJ Tyrer

I am the Purple Jester
I prance and dance and sing
I clamber up inside the roof
And make the rafters ring.

I am the Purple Jester
I caper, prance and act the fool
I cast down the mighty
And break every single rule.

I am the Purple Jester
I perform for all I’m worth
I reveal strange secrets to all
For I am not of this Earth.

False-Meat Vegan Spaghetti
By Miguel Fliguer

Camilla: You, sir, should eat those ribs.
Stranger: Indeed?
Camilla: Indeed it’s time.
Cassilda: We all have partaken in the barbecue but you.
Stranger: I eat no meat.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No meat? No meat!

– The Vegan King, Act I, Scene 2

Deep in the forest portobellos grow
At the lichened foot of eerie trees
Collect them when the suns set
And twin shadows lengthen
In Carcosa

Large onions fall under the knife
Olive oil sizzles in the pan
Sautee until clear with a pinch of garlic
The way they do it in
Lost Carcosa

Cleaned quartered portobellos
Join the onions in the frying dance
Over a bed of dying embers
Watch them and think of
Old Carcosa

From the King’s secret vines
Grapes birth their crimson harvest
Simmer a cup in the fungal sauce
The fragrance will take you
To Carcosa

Ancient rivers boil in the pot
With salt, oil, and spaghetti
Serve them when al dente
Topped with sauce and vegan cheese
From Carcosa

The twin suns had drowned in the lake
Strange moons wander in the dusk
Song of my soul, I am so hungry
Suppertime is nigh
In Carcosa

 

False-Meat Vegan Spaghetti is a tongue-in-cheek prose-poem / delicious recipe, obviously inspired by Chambers’ Cassilda Song from The King In Yellow. It is a slightly edited reprint from Cooking With Lovecraft (2017), which is available in paperback and on the Kindle from Amazon.

Miguel Fliguer ( TW: @cookingwithHPL ) lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His first book, Cooking With Lovecraft, received moderate praise from genre luminaries like S.T. Joshi and Wilum H. Pugmire. His short stories and collaborations are featured in Axxon Magazine (Argentina), Círculo de Lovecraft (Spain), Crypt of Cthulhu (USA), Vastarien (USA), the Ancestors & Descendants and Weird Tails anthologies (UK), and the Necronomnomnom and Lovecraft Cocktails illustrated culinary grimoires (Red Duke Games).

Issue 24 – Cosmic Horrors

Tentacle twitches
Strange dreams haunt alien mind
Cthulhu’s nightmare

By DS Davidson

Kosmische
By Cardinal Cox

First our machine intelligences migrated out into the void – Mars, Alpha Centauri, Polaris. We thought them immune but they built temples in orbit around neutron stars, projecting prayers around the gravity wall-of-death into the distant future. Humans had to negotiate with the higher-dimensional hive-minds of Yuggoth via their harvested multi-species tanked brains so that the flimsy spacecraft might be allowed to participate in the wormhole ceremonies of Yog-Sothoth. The whisper in orbital ports is that every starman’s a little mad. Well, when you’ve seen (ruins (older than all life on Earth) beneath a star teetering on the verge of going nova… or realised that the formulae reveals Dark Matter to be just the weight of loneliness between galaxies; the mass of insignificance before nebulae; the pressure of the microwave background radiation (the cool, ever pervading echo of the big bang)…

 

Void
By DJ Tyrer

Interstellar space
Strange horrors lurk in the void
Primordial things
Older than the galaxies
Incomprehensibly old

Alien Thoughts
By Aeronwy Dafies

Strange ideas, conceptions
Float within brains that
Float within fluid vats
Long since divorced from flesh
Long since gone far from home
So far they cannot even recall
Their home world, its star
Or even their own form
Let alone the alien beauty
Of silver skies, coral-like trees
Or strange crawling things
That once served them as cattle
Leaving a peculiar hole
In whatever passes for a soul
And an ache when they see
Blue skies, green grass, earthly trees
That boils into a cosmic rage

Originally published in Tigershark ezine

 

Interdimensional Ghosts
By K. A. Williams

Nightmares are caused by
interdimensional ghosts
that invade our dreams.

The Dream of the Worm
By Harris Coverley

 

Going through the Gates of Dzungaria
You come across the ruins of Gochen
Between the heights of Hyperborea
And tightly tucked within the blackened glen

 

Foolish mankind has long since been and gone
Not so much vanquished as destroyed in whole
Whether in Africa or in Ceylon
By the coming of the terrible Dholes

 

The worms ruled this world for a million years
The land stripped of all fair and nutrient
Other older races made clear their fears
As the megadriles acted prurient

 

But ev’ry civilisation declines
Falling from their arcologies of bone
Cultures decay, social orders unwind
Their slimy bodies were slowly dethroned

 

Now but an individual remains
Resting beneath that accursed city
Waiting eternally with frozen veins
The dreaming worm that still feels no pity

 

No fossilised corpses would dare to weep
While the conqueror worm so soundly sleeps

 

Originally published in Speculations: Poetry from The Weird Poets Society 2018 (March 2019, ed. Frank Coffman)

Arcane Stars
By DJ Tyrer

The arcane perturbations of the planets
Those wandering stars that dance through the sky
Mirrored by tiny, invisible movements of distant suns
And the more curious motions of dark stars unseen
Render a certain dread alignment
That coming together in blaspheming congress
Called by hidden savants the day
When the stars are right

Originally published in Spectral Realms issue 3