Welcome to Issue 18. Though there is no Featured Poet in this issue, we still bring a full complement of speculative poems written by six excellent poets, as well as by your poetry editor. We are proud to publish so many established voices in this issue (and we often publish new and emergent ones [...]
The music of the stars is so very faint it is drowned by the sounds of the city, the steady drone of traffic, the whine of sirens wailing through day and night, the clamor of crowds and the hubbub of the media. The music of the stars is so very faint it is lost in [...]
Save my crew members: first mate, engineer, science officer, navigator, even the lousy cook. Save them from the red wind and the insidious foliage with its thorns like claws. Save them from the horned beast and the devil with seven eyes and the sky that rains fire. Save them from cracks in their helmets, [...]
Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska The sculpture of a head on the stairs creeps out the Martians. They can’t tell its gender. One whispers, The slashes at crown and throat suggest maleness. The furrowed brow, the x-ed out eyes, the lack of body makes them worry. They ask, What crime is punishable by head-loss? [...]
I feel the chill of winter In the white marrow of my bones – A wintry fever. The cold winds steer through ice Like an ax to wood. I lay on the bed, My pallor as bleached as death – No respite from the long, wide Cold of the night. Love’s run dry but [...]
They walk upright, seven feet tall, not counting the antennae, and pack a laser weapon fused to their purple shell-skin. They seem to be protected with a force field that our bullets cannot penetrate. Many major cities have fallen. The voice on the radio also says they are coming our way. It’s around midnight, [...]
The boy moves fast, young pup, to whom play and war are same: too soon he’ll know. The woman beside him is no kin, save the blood connection to this rock, to this tribe of warriors and herdsmen, males and females of both, who have huddled beside the rock since before they knew how [...]
When hearth light licks the black milk, the liquid turns to sky–stars in a shallow bowl, showing weather, blight, cities old or unborn. To see ahead, I sense the patterns underlying lives. These secret furrows have driven me to the edge of the woods as have the farmers who shun, and yet keep me [...]
My dress is as white as my hopes, my fear,
I dare not look into the mirror.
The wedding contract has been signed.
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