Who Lied About the Mermaid’s Ghost? by Chris Hemingway

The slack-jawed captain,
who thought he could quell
an ancient mutiny
by a simple crew majority.

Ghost Towns by Madison McSweeney

+++Some places are all history.
+++I grew up in what some would call a dying town. I don’t think that was an especially apt descriptor – “dying” implies an end is near. My town wasn’t approaching any inevitable end-point – it was just stuck in time. A place with a deep past, but no future.

The Afterlife by Bayveen O’Connell

+++++Ghosts are lifting my bones, sorting and weighing them. They are washing my femurs to hang curtains from, using my patellae as saucers.

Sundown Town by Richard Wayne Horton

+++++Those are big horses out front. Never seen horses like that. Course we’re your average tourists passing through. You get a bunch of us I bet.

Ghosts by Peter Burrows

‘Ghosts are what we fear and what we hope for.’ Adam Nicholson

I always believed in ghosts
Fearing the inevitable
That someday I would see one.

Playground by Scáth Beorh

+++‘I know where a weird playground is, Scooter.’

Diving In by Jennifer Ruth Jackson

I swung from the ledge, arms and legs
wrapped around the thick, fuzzy rope like a lover
screaming as I launched toward water.

Long Before Twilight by James H Duncan

There were ghosts everywhere; I borrowed book after book from the library saying so, amazed and stunned that they kept this knowledge out in the open and available for anyone to read.

Refusing Oblivion by Richard Manly Heiman

A blown-up tintype covers one library wall. This is what the school looked like in 1885, I say, that year in history when—

Shared Bodily Warmth by Thomas Tyrrell

Few things are bleaker than Dartmoor when the winter nights draw in like wolves around a campfire.

Bleak Row by Laura Potts

After the first, my star still north and rising,
they patched his purse of blood-burst skin,
my sleeping bud and starless.

Lullaby by Ali Jones

They linger on inside hollow hills,
until songs bring them back,