May your Halloween be haunted and rock-free.

It’s time to put on your best Scotchtoberfest kilt and tune up those bagpipes; Issue 59 is here!

Gio Clairval kicks things off with a tale of a dental assistant who sends some of her patients home with a little something extra. Then Don Katnik cools things down with a wintry supernatural tale. Mark J. Mitchell reflects on the grim state of the job market in a melancholy yet whimsical sonnet, and Gary Moshimer sets spines a-tingling with a story of a babysitter with questionable taste in dairy products and a baby who is anything but helpless. Next up is Yvonne Yu, who takes a surprisingly candid look at sexy mermaid fantasies. Finally, Gregory J. Wolos ends on an upbeat note with a story about a crematorium explosion survivor and his furry neighbor. And over everything the lovely, spooky cover art from Yuri Shwedoff sets an autumnal mood.

Read it by a crackling bonfire, if you can. And don’t forget the s’mores. Check it out online or read the PDF.

Resistance is futile.

Ah, October. The month where every beverage and dessert tastes like jack o’ lantern farts.

We’ll be foisting our fifty-ninth issue onto your eyeballs and into your brains (mmm . . . braaaiiiiins) shortly, but in the meantime, if you haven’t had a chance to check out the radical flash and dope poems in our September issue, you totally should.

And if you’re more in the mood for a novel, we highly recommend the spooky, swampy Hagridden, by our own Samuel Snoek-Brown.

We recommend enjoying this issue with an Albemarle pippin.

Our fifty-eighth issue is packed with dazzling poems and phenomenal flash fiction. It opens with “The Perfect Zen Dance of the Boulder” by a poet we first featured in our Poetry Special Issue last year, William Doreski. Next up are Devin Strauch with “Substitute Angel,” a story that will change the way you think about pasta, and Mansour Chow with two haiku that might raise Basho’s eyebrows. Anna Lea Jancewicz’s story has a fresh take on what to expect when you’re “Unexpecting,” and Anton Rose reminds us why they call them the wee small hours of the morning in his poem “Back Garden, 2 AM.” A client gets “Even” with his barber in Fredric Sinclair’s story, Sally Houtman answers the “Question Mark” with a poem, and Annesha Sengupta finds herself in the “Wrong Dream” in a fanciful fiction piece. Closing out the issue is the newest member of our staff, Amanda Chiado, who appeared in our Poetry Special Issue and also contributed a lovely poem to our special issue for Eirik and Monica, the founders of Jersey Devil Press. (For more on Eirik and his shiny new lungs, please visit our homepage—double-lung transplants are literally lifesavers, but they don’t come cheap.) Also, Telmo Pieper reimagines a childhood doodle in this month’s cover art, “Walvis.”

Read it online or download the PDF.