Every autumn, the billions of maple trees turned the entire surface of the 27^th moon a vibrant red. It had happened every year since the settlers of New Earth had landed 362 years ago. Except, this year, Tiradel’s trees had no leaves.

When Jan reached four years into sixty, his daughter and her son flew off into the glorious first exploration past the Milky Way to somewhere called Z-1.

Something in the way their too-small heads bobbed on their long necks stirred a primal, instinctive fear inside Georgie, like an ancestral memory passed down from a coelacanth had lit up in her brain.

Kisa wrapped her scarf around herself and folded her knees up against the window. The daytime roared outside like an endless fire, but the lights were coming soon. The black lights.

I forgot how to take off my shoes /
How do normal people /
Take off their shoes /

Every Tuesday they saunter up next to our chicken coop, mustaches twitching in unison, and blast the house full of holes. They always seem surprised when no bodies are there to pile in a heap in the yard because we knew they were coming and are down by the river. Pisses the chickens off to no end, of course.

The day that Maisy stopped believing in God, she began seeing the skeletons.

Marilka went on so many walks her arms disappeared /
regressing inside her clavicle like two large ropes /

It's the loudest on windy days. In the spring, when the temperatures swing in Nebraska from 34 to 80 in a day, the wind gusts roar up 50 mph. On those days, the fan squeals like a newborn tyrannosaurus rex. 

The wind prowled the world, restless, until it skulked through a maple grove on a hill and its memory returned.

Aloe waited in the mailbox, shivering in the February freeze along with his three foster siblings, Cactus, Snake Plant, and Jade.

The door opens like tree boughs reaching for /
the sun, and you’re sure /
you didn’t move, but the floor moves you inside /
like wind buoying a bird through its branches /

In the morning, Harriet the Centaur selected her groceries /
with a purpose in mind. She plucked the whistle-greens /

In the autumn, we trek /
Into the Red Grove /
Where the little fox-fires grow /

The face in the window /
Much like a small moon /
Pitted and reflecting /
The light from my lamp /

Dawn pressed his lips to the horizon and Sky blushed like a schoolgirl. All pink and pastel, she twirled her birds up into the winds.

Panic Attack: WAKE UP THERE’S A BEAR

Me: what no there’s not

Panic Attack: BEARS EVERYWHERE

A swarm of moths, not butterflies—not yellow sunny-sweet nerves, but a gray chill of disquiet—swarmed through her.

They named me Diana /
they vilify me on their news reports /
they say that I’m insane, a category five /

Every day, Niska climbed the rope ladder into the harbor of the sky to watch the cloud boats sail.