Fog Chorus

by Jennifer Moore

Helga nails dead ones by their legs,
bodies still blown and bloated with the glut 
of unspent song,
a pin through every pulled-straight limb,
blind eyes bulging.

'To keep the fog at bay,' she croaks,
as if their tacet tongues
could flick away the lowered sky
and, withering, lick 
the wettened valley’s breath
into submission.

As if the muted chant of death-stopped cheeks
were a talisman
to tame the crouching clouds,
each tethered corpse another charm, a chance 
to stem the rolling gloom –

that soft, slow haze of fog 
that comes creeping from the coombe,
stealing through the valleys
of her misting mind.

Jennifer Moore was the first UK winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition and is a previous winner of the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest. Her psychological thrillers The Woman Before and The Wilderness Retreat are published by HQ Digital, Harper Collins. She’s also published fifty books for children, writing as Jenny Moore.  www.jennifermoore.wordpress.com

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Phases

by Julie Shiel

The slow clock of the moon
has ticked closer to midnight,
growing fuller in this final phase
of my incarnation.

I remember running fleet footed
through the darkened forest,
exhilarated with the chase,
a taunting laugh leading him
to the old hickory tree
where he took me by starlight,
weaving a spell with the earth,
the rain, the thunder,
as the new moon hid her face 
at my indiscretion.

With the waxing of the moon
so did my discernment
and with the wisdom of foxes
I stretched into my skin
gaining confidence and
gleaning knowledge,
listening to the intimate communion
of wind with the trees  
learning the power to be found 
in the shyness of the crown.

As the moon shines full
over the tapestry of my life
my heart swells with it
that same strange yearning
still singing in the night,
twining warp of will
weft of energies 
as the wheel turns closer
to its apogee.

Now Luna fills the sky
in gibbous anticipation
and I teach those reckless young women
that run wild through the dark,
in an ouroboros cycle of renewal.

Julie Shiel lives on the Chesapeake Bay where she writes and dreams. Her work appears in issues of Strange Horizons, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Fairytale Magazine and others. When not writing she grows a moon garden and communes with her local murder.
Find her online at https://julieshiel.wordpress.com/about/ as well as at https://www.instagram.com/julielshiel/ and https://bsky.app/profile/forgottenbeauty.bsky.social

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Re Maid

by Juleigh Howard-Hobson

I line their claws up on my table. Two
from a raven. For wisdom. Next, I place
those of a hare. For re-birth. They leak dark
blood still. I crush fresh petals of goat’s rue,
yarrow, lady’s mantle, and Queen Ann’s lace:
each one fit for an aging matriarch

to dab with cold blood upon her old wrists
and make her pulse quicken. I know that I
am fading, know that every ancient inch
of myself is slowed. Slacked. But, I exist 
and plan to remain in existence. Die? 
That is for the mundane folk, not me. Since

girlhood can’t hold what crones have learned, these claws
must take what I will shed. Skin pierced with
each, my flesh can transfer magic learned and
hold it there until the unnatural laws
that youth cannot command begin to shift
and I’m remade/maid again, claws in hand.

Juleigh Howard-Hobson: A Brave New Weird Award winner, her writing has appeared in Amazing Stories, The Deadlands, Midnight Echo,  Fallen (Black Hare), Under Her Skin (Black Spot) and many other places. Her latest book is Curses, Black Spells and Hexes (Alien Buddha). She lives on the edge of the Pacific coast in an old haunted house.

X: @poetforest
Bluesky: @juleigh.bsky.social  
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/black_candle_poet/

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How to Tie the Devil to a Pillow

by Lisa Powell

First –
become carcass.

Then, 
pull the moonless pluck and clew of yourself
through horsewhipped garenkom.

Love the word, carrion, a poem in three syllables: 
care, carry, carry on – almost a spell, 
if you had a mouth. 

Knit an old ewe from gut, each purl 
a pearl of blood pricked on blackthorn pins.
Graze on the fallen flowers of the cut branches. 
Let them cluster like moths inside you
until breath. 

When you say your new name, listen 
to the one crow inside it speak  It says to
read the old ewe of you, a book of 
un-yielding.  You must read it 
with the bird's eyes. 

At night, when you sleep on stone,
every dream forms a syllable
of the spell you've learned to
chant: car-ri-on –

your root, a binding spell, 
born of dead flesh
and will –

_______

The Witch at The End of The Story

by Pinky Kumod Jha

There is a village where fairy tales go
when they have finished with their girls.
The forest keeps the evidence.
A spindle rusts beneath the foxglove.
A red ribbon hangs from a thorn,
still carrying the warmth of someone's hair.
Deep among the firs, a glass slipper
has filled with rain.
At the edge of all this lives the witch.
She has been waiting longer than the village
has had a church.
Her cottage is roofed with moss;
blue smoke threads its way through the chimney
and settles among the branches.
In winter, foxes sleep against her walls.
In summer, the elder bushes flower
until the doorway disappears.
Girls find her eventually.
They come carrying the questions
their stories have forbidden them to ask.
The witch never tells them
about the wolf.
She knows the wolf was only hunger
wearing another body's fur.
Instead she opens her cupboards.
There is the silver comb
that made a mermaid forget her voice.
There is the spindle whose thorn
drew one bright bead of blood
and called it sleep.
There is a wedding ring
blackened by a hundred years of rain.
“These belonged to women
who were promised endings,” she says.
Outside, the forest shifts in its sleep.
A girl asks what happened
after the prince carried them away.
The witch looks toward the window.
She has lived long enough
to know that every story lies
about what happens after the wedding.
So she pours another cup of tea.
“That,” she says,
“is when the real tale begins.”
And somewhere beyond the cottage,
beneath the roots of the oldest tree,
a sleeping kingdom turns in its soil.

Pinky Kumod Jha is a writer with a love for stories that linger long after the telling. Drawn to folklore, the uncanny, and the many lives women lead, she finds inspiration in the peculiarities and contradictions of being human. She loves to bake cupcakes with her daughters.

_______

Crone Moon

by Lauren Stoker

By the rising of the moon, she bent her wizened limbs over her basket, gathering in the berries that could heal or harm, depending on what was deserved.  Karmaberries, she called them. They looked just like cranberries, didn’t they? But none would want them at their Thanksgiving table, though thanksgiving they could surely bring.  

Her young customer, a naïve girl enamored of a boy the crone knew to be worthless, would soon discover whether his love was true or faithless. 

His corpse would tell the answer. 

The berries had brought release when she was young. They would do so again.

Lauren Stoker’s short stories and non-fiction have been published in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. Lauren also has four books of satire published, including two fantasy novels, Blood Will Out (With the Proper Solvent) and, most recently, Biting Back. She lives in Massachusetts with her cat (and Chief Shreditor) Sam.

______________

The Day the Mirror Shattered

by Beth Sherman

The Queen had been out buying High-Potency Wrinkle Filler for her forehead, and the skin around her eyes and mouth. Her body aged so quickly she couldn’t keep up. Saggy breasts, varicose veins, thinning hair, brown spots. The King too busy with her courtesans to notice. No one listened to a crone. She rubbed the wrinkle cream onto her face. It smelled like dirty feet. Come on, she exhorted, like she was cheering a knight at a jousting match. Work your magic. But when she wiped the gunk off, there were the same old droops and lines, her skin puffy as a raisin bun. Mirror, Mirror, she began. Before she could finish, a vision appeared in the dirt-streaked glass: A raven-haired girl with snowy cheeks and lips that didn’t need plumping. The girl swept the floor of a cottage in the woods while seven tiny men shouted orders at her. Poor thing. Spending each day as a thankless servant. Grabbing the mirror by its inlaid handle, the Queen hurled it across the room where it struck the wall with a satisfying thunk. Never, she said aloud. Life’s too short. Youth is wasted on a pretty face. The Queen went to her balcony, surveyed her kingdom. From up here, her crow’s feet didn’t matter. What use did she have for beauty anyway? She could almost touch the ravens that swooped beneath the clouds.  

Beth Sherman is the author of HOW TO GET THERE FROM HERE (Ad Hoc Fiction). She has had more than 300 stories published in literary magazines, including Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, Bending Genres, and SmokeLong Quarterly, where she's a Submissions Editor. She is also the author of five mystery novels. Find her online at https://www.bethsherman.site/

Cailleach, Goddess of Winter

by Melissa Denny

Dear one, I have known you since you were a tiny thing, an eyes closed blob of fur,
wiggling, hunting for a teat and milk.

I watched you grow into a strong young wolf – sassy and free, leaping and chasing your
sisters and brothers. I chose you then, but I let you be young, there on the mountain.
Brief years later, I called you to me. And you came running on limber legs, sure paws.
Your breath smoking in the cold, your eyes bright.

I asked you to carry me across the mountains, to carry me as I sang the storms to life.
You howled your approval. Your teeth gleamed. You danced on the cliff’s edge and dared me to join you.

We raced the wind, the ice, the snow. You, my white warrior, my proud companion. We flew across the sky of the world, together. And we brought the storms.

We were maelstrom and bitter glory. We were crone and wolf, fury and gale. We were death and sleep. We challenged the peaks and chased the stars in the black sky. Nothing could stop us. Nothing. Nothing…

Until now.

Dear one, we are both old. Ancient. The storms are past. You trot slowly to the edge of the cliff, turn to me, whine a question. “No,” I tell you, “We are done with flying. Others will sing the storms. Our time is past. Even goddesses tire.” I reach out my hand, “Come.” We sit on the stone as the winter sun sets. You lean against me. I stroke your fur, feel your warmth. You are my dear one. You are my friend. The sun sinks behind the mountains. The clouds glow red and gold. We watch as the night comes, long and cold.

Melissa Denny lives on a small farm with a collection of apple trees and an assortment of ponies, dogs, and cats. She grew up reading folktales and loves to write stories that twist the old tales into a new form. She also acts in community theater, sings sea shanties, and brews a fine tankard of cider.