THE 2017 RHYSLING ANTHOLOGY The best science fiction, fantasy & horror poetry of 2016 selected by the Science Fiction Poetry Association
edited by David C. Kopaska-Merkel t h e 2 0 1 7 Rh y s l i n g Anthology Also available from the Science Fiction Poetry Association
The 2016 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Poetry of 2015 Edited by Charles Christian
The 2015 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Poetry of 2014 Edited by Rich Ristow
The 2014 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Poetry of 2013 Edited by Elizabeth R. McClellan
The 2013 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Poetry of 2012 Edited by John C. Mannone
The 2012 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Poetry of 2011 Edited by Lyn C. A. Gardner
The 2011 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Poetry of 2010 Edited by David Lunde
The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase Edited by Roger Dutcher and Mike Allen
Order from astore.amazon.com/sciefictpoeta-20
or contact [email protected] the 2017 Rhysling nthology THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION,A FANTASY AND HORROR POETRY OF 2016
SELECTED BY THE SCIENCE FICTION POETRY ASSOCIATION
EDITED BY David C. Kopaska-Merkel Copyright © 2017 by the Science Fiction Poetry Association in the names of the individual contributors. All works used by permission.
All rights to individual poems revert to authors or poem copyright holders. No part of this compilation may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the SFPA president, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical or analytical reviews or articles.
Editor and Rhysling Chair: David C. Kopaska-Merkel Book Design: F. J. Bergmann Publisher: Science Fiction Poetry Association SFPA President: Bryan Thao Worra
Cover image by Liu Junwei, aka Shark (Shayudan 鲨鱼丹) sharksden.deviantart.com
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The 2017 Rhysling Anthology: the best science fiction, fantasy, and horror poetry of 2016 / selected by the Science Fiction Poetry Association; edited by David C. Kopaska-Merkel.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-544713-40-3 1. Poetry. 2. Science fiction poetry. 3. Fantasy poetry. 4. Horror poetry. I. Kopaska-Merkel, David C.
For more information about the Science Fiction Poetry Association, visit www.sfpoetry.com A cknowledgments
Abad, Anne Carly • “This Rat” • Chrome Baby 48 Al-Bedawi, Layla • “Propagation” • Strange Horizons 18 April Alexander, Francis Wesley • “3D printer” • Scifaikuest, November Anderson, E. Kristin • “Loose String” • Coe Review 47.1 “Selkie” • Faerie Magazine, Summer Backer, Sara • “The Genius” • Mithila Review 3 Barber, David • “Foreign Policy” • Star*Line 39.3 Bergmann, F. J. • “Antagonist” • Spectral Realms 5 “Further” • Lovecraft eZine 38 “How far does night have to fall?” • The Future Fire 38 Bernier, Lore • “Exploratory Colony 454—15th May, 2052” • Eye to the Telescope 20 Betts, Matt • “I Left My Heart in San Francisco. I Left Yours Somewhere in Colorado …” • Underwater Fistfight (Raw Dog Screaming Press) “Spoiler Alert” • Underwater Fistfight (Raw Dog Screaming Press) Bishop, Edith Hope • “When the Gunman Comes” • Mythic Delirium 2.3 Blackford, Jenny • “Houses of the Living, Houses of the Dead” • Ipswich Poetry Feast International Poetry Competition, Highly Commended Bolivar, Adam • “The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner” • Spectral Realms 5 Borski, Robert • “The Starlet Who Married A Monster” • Lupine Lunes, ed. Lester Smith (Popcorn Press) Boston, Bruce and Manzetti, Alessandro • “The Great Unknown” • Illumen, Spring “Legend of the Albino Pythons and the Bloody Child” • Polu Texni 18 April Bovenmyer, Karen • “The Blind Elephants of Io” • Shortest Day, Longest Night (Arachne Press) Brown, Josh • “Star Dust” • Illumen 25 Buchanan, Rebecca • “Dame Evergreen” • Faerie Magazine, Winter Burch, Susan • “appendage sale” • Star*Line 39.2 Cancre, Anton • “A Bug in the System” • Quick Shivers about Bugs (Cosmonomic Multimedia) Caplan, Shari • “One Canoe” • Nonbinary Review 11: Anne of Green Gables Caswell, Dennis • “My Pet Alien” • Rattle, Fall Cato, Beth • “The Box of Dust and Monsters” • Devilfish Review 17 “The Death of the Horse” • Remixt Magazine 1:8 “Morning During Migration Season” • Star*Line 39.4 Clark, G. O. • “Bottle Cast Upon A Dry Sea” • Asimov’s Science Fiction, February “The Dark between the Stars” • Star*Line 39.4 Clink, David • “In Defence of Science” • The Role of Lightning in Evolution (Kelp Queen Press, CZP) “A Natural History of Snow” • The Role of Lightning in Evolution (Kelp Queen Press, CZP) “Surviving a Canadian Poem” • The Role of Lightning in Evolution (Kelp Queen Press, CZP) Cottier, P. S. • “Glastonbury, 1994” • Project 365 + 1, June 29 Daruwala, Rohinton • “The Poem Gardens of the Ascari” • Strange Horizons, 13 June Davitt, Deborah L. • “Past Imperfect” • Poetry Quarterly, Summer “Storm Miners” • Blue Monday Review, August
v De Winter, Corrine • “Always the Black and White Keys” • Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase Vol. III, ed. David E. Cowen Dioses, Ashley • “My Corpse, My Groom” • The Audient Void: A Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy 1 “Witch Lord of the Hunt” • Eternal Haunted Summer, Spring Dorr, James S. • “Godzilla vs. King Kong” • Dreams and Nightmares 103 Dumars, Denise • “Sutekh From The Throne” • Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase Vol. III, ed. David E. Cowen Erin, Alexandra • “Data Mine” • medium.com October 24 “Falling (A Part)” • medium.com June 8 Esaias, Timons • “Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek” • Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek (Concrete Wolf) Evans, Kendall • “The Chinese Pirate Ching Shih Plays Go With a Hooded Opponent” • Abyss & Apex 59 Every, Gary • “History Teacher” • Star*Line 39.4 Fanchiang, Alice • “Skin” • Liminality 10 Fedyk, Karolina • “What Wants Us” • Star*Line 39.2 Frazier, Robert • “Luminous Decay” • Dreams and Nightmares 103 Gaiman, Neil • “The Long Run” • Uncanny, November/December Gardner, Adele • “Well, Water, Stars” • Silver Blade 32 Geater, Charlotte • “little stomach” • Strange Horizons, 26 September Gordon, Alan Ira • “At the Robot National Convention” • Star*Line 39.3 Goss, Theodora • “Rose Child” • Uncanny 13 Gotera, Vince • “Elegy for Iain Banks” • Star*Line 39.3 “Space Opera” • Altered Reality Magazine 1 Graham, Neile • “Feles Alieni Vere Sunt” • Devilfish Review 17 Hanson, Michael H. • “Until Dawn” • Poetic Hustles 2 (Black Freighter Productions) Hawke, Lee S. • “The Dark Lord’s Diary” • Star*Line 39.1 Hinderliter, Carolyn M. • “Christmas on Mars” • Scifaikuest XIII:4 Hoffmann, Ada • “The Giantess’s Dream” • Twisted Moon 1 Hope, Akua Lezli • “Ink” • Yellow Chair Review, Horror Issue, October Johnson, John Philip • “Martian Garden” • The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/ August Jones, Daniel R. • “The woman on the bus encounters time dilation” • Altered Reality Magazine, December 16 Jones, Tim • “Memorial” • New Sea Land (Makaro Press) Jönsson, Johan • “Talk to the Machines” • Dreams and Nightmares 104 Kauderer, Herb • “After” • Asimov’s SF, November/December “Cobblestone Dragon” • Polu Texni, July 11 Kim, Eun-byeol • “Phoenix Fire, Tabula Rasa” • Stone Telling 13 Lawrence, Jennifer • “Väinämöinen Sings” • Eternal Haunted Summer, Winter Lawrence, Kathleen A. • “Dorothy Delivered” • Altered Reality Magazine 1 Lee, B. J. • “Riding the Dark” • Frostfire Worlds, February
vi the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Lee, Mary Soon • “First Lesson” • Silver Blade 30 “Not Like This” • Apex Magazine, August 4 “Returning” • The Open Mouse, May 6 Leibowitz, Sandi • “Im Wald” • Mythic Delirium 3.2 Lemberg, Rose • “The Ash Manifesto” • Strange Horizons, 10 October “The Journeymaker to Keddar (II)” • Marginalia to Stone Bird (Aqueduct Press) Leung, Muriel • “World’s Tiniest Human” • The Adroit Journal 16 Lipman, Darren • “Interview with a 22nd-Century Sex Worker” • Strange Horizons, 4 July Lu, S. Qiouyi • “The Lies You Learned” • Liminality 7 Liburd, Tonya • “The Architect of Bonfires” •Space & Time 127 Mannone, John C. • “Adam’s Rendezvous with Dante” • Last Darn Rites Anthology (Whitesboro Writers, 2016) “Stellar Quake” • The New England Journal of Medicine 375:1305 Matthews, Airea D. • “Descent of the Composer” • Poem-a-Day October 24, Academy of American Poets Mayfield, Carl • “The birds forget to sing” •Abbey 147 McClellan, Elizabeth R. • “Getting Winterized: A Guide To Rural Living” • Angels of the Meanwhile, ed. Alexandra Erin, April McMyne, Mary • “Bones Knock in the House” • Rose Red Review 18 Miller, Terry • “Salome’s New King” • Devolution Z: The Horror Magazine 10 Mirov, Lev • “The Doppelgänger and the Ghost” • Eye to the Telescope 22 Myers, D. L. • “The Phosphorescent Fungi” • Spectral Realms 4 O’Brien, Brandon • “god-date” • Uncanny 9 Odasso, A. J. • “Nothing Goes Away” • The New England Review of Books “Sargasso Sea” • Remixt Magazine 1:1 “Widening Gyre” • Not A Drop anthology (Beautiful Dragons Press) Opperman, K. A. • “Invocation of Diana” • Eternal Haunted Summer, Summer “Werewolf ” • Spectral Realms 4 O’Quinn, Cindy • “The Spook Tree” • Blood Moon Rising Magazine 66 Paden, Jeremy • “Song of the Encantado” • Apex Magazine 83 Paja, Triin • “Quasar” • Cleaver 14 Pilkington, Ace G. • “Orpheus” • The Horror Zine, June Post, Steph • “Alice-Ecila” • Nonbinary Review 10: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass Poyner, Ken • “Adolescence” • Star*Line 39.4 “At Issue, the Miramo” • Dreams and Nightmares 103 “The Robot by the Fireplace” • Eye to the Telescope 20 Ralls, Jack • “La Villa de Sirenia” • Star*Line 39.4 Rathbone, Wendy • “Build a Rocketship Contest: Alternative Class A Instructions and Suggestions” • Asimov’s Science Fiction, January “We Shall Meet in the Star-Spackled Ruins” • 2016 SFPA Poetry Contest Reinhart, John • “The Butterflies of Traxl IV” •The Pedestal Magazine 79 “Exotic Heads Trimmed Neatly” • Eye to the Telescope 21 Relf, Terrie Leigh • “The Old Ones Gather” • Scifaikuest, May Rhee, Margaret • “Robot Testimonial Z” • Mission at Tenth Rook, Hester J. • “The Sparrows in Her Hair” • Strange Horizons 18 July
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology vii Sereno, M. • “To the weaver, from the woman who slew Bakunawa” • Stone Telling 13 Sexton, John W. • “The Bird Prince” • Faerie Magazine Summer “Sappho and the Woman of Starlight” • Eternal Haunted Summer, Winter Simon, Marge • “George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts” • Silver Blade 32 “Less than Human” • You, Human (Dark Regions Press) Smith, Simon • “The Inconceivable Shape” • Chrome Baby 45 Sng, Christina • “The Leviathans of Europa” • Polu Texni 10 October Spahn, A. C. • “Defender Prime” • Outposts of Beyond July Steinfeld, J. J. • “Learning the History of War” • Star*Line 39.3 Stone, Mary • “The Last Woman on Earth” • Amethyst Arsenic 6:1 Sundar, Naru Dames • “Were-” • Liminality, Summer Takács, Bogi • “Marginalia on Eiruvin 45b” • Bracken Magazine 2 Thornfield-Long, Ann • “Love in the Time of Apocalypse” •Silver Blade 31 Trotta, Ali • “The Persecution of Witches” • Uncanny 11 Tsamaase, Tlotlo • “I Will Be Your Grave” • Strange Horizons, 7 November van Berkum, K H • “The Fantasy of Hans Christian Andersen” • Strange Horizons, 8 February Vang, Burlee • “To Live In The Zombie Apocalypse” • Poem-A-Day, December 20 Vlek, Aaron • “When Coyote Called Down the Stars” • The Were-Traveler, December 21 Wack, Margaret • “Classification of Folktales” •Strange Horizons 2016 Fund Drive Bonus Walker, T. D. • “Portrait of the Captain with Small Waiting Objects” • Recompose 2 Walrath, Holly Lyn • “For Lonnie” • Liminality 9 “Revolution (1764–1783)” • Abyss & Apex 58 Wesick, Jon • “Richard Feynman’s Commute” • The Were-Traveler, December 21 Weyant, Karen J. • “To the Girl Who Ran Through Crop Circles” • Strange Horizons 15 August Wheeler, Lesley • “Absentation” • Thrush Poetry Journal November Wilgus, Neal • “Quack” • Dreams and Nightmares 104 Williams, Jane • “The Memory Machines” • The Pedestal Magazine 79 Winn, Sarah Ann • “Best of ” • Found Poetry Review: Bowietry Winward, Shannon Connor • “Terran Mythology” • Analog Science Fiction and Fact, October “Thirteen Ways to See a Ghost” • 2016 SFPA Poetry Contest Woodward, Greer • “*For Quick Sale*” • Lupine Lunes, ed. Lester Smith (Popcorn Press) Wytovich, Stephanie M. • “Of My Wounds, There Are Many” • Sanitarium Magazine 48 Yolen, Jane • “Black Bull of Norroway” • Goblin Fruit, Winter “Death Rides USAir At Night” • Parody 5:1 “Rusalka” • Mythic Delirium 3.1 Zaccagnino, Danielle • “Supercomputer Spends the Night” • Weirderary 4
viii the 2017 Rhysling Anthology E d i t o r ’ s N o t e
Bursting into Light
I am tempted to write “These are wonderful; read them” and be done with it. Many of you might prefer that. Then again, you are not compelled to read this introduction. So, for those who haven’t already turned the page … I have been reading speculative poetry since childhood, beginning with the songs in The Hobbit, but I didn’t get serious about writing it until we were expecting our first child. I thought I wouldn’t have enough time anymore to write fiction. One thing led to another, as often happens, and soon I joined the SFPA. Back in the Proteropoetic, the Rhysling Anthology was a double handful of 8½" by 11" pages stapled together in the upper left corner. Now it is a handsome trade paperback, with a glossy color cover, and it is really something to sink your teeth into. Except no, don’t eat it, because you’ll want to add it to your collection. Come to think of it, those old classroom-handout-style Rhyslings are probably collectors’ items. This is the 39th Rhysling Anthology. This year, our nominees (121 poets; 152 poems [98 short and 54 long]) come from 80 different publications and venues, including both genre and mainstream journals, several anthologies, books by individual authors, and two contests (Ipswich and the SFPA Poetry contest). A few things to note about this year’s Rhysling volume: • Nominations of poems by Neil Gaiman, and by Grand Masters Yolen, Boston, and Simon; • Altered Reality Magazine, Mithila Review and Twisted Moon secured Rhysling nominations in their first year of publication; • Tlotlo Tsamaase is the first nominee from Botswana; • Jeremy Paden teaches at the University of Transylvania (!); and • Burlee Vang is the first Hmong poet to be nominated for a Rhysling, coming from a culture that traces its roots to pre-Dynastic China, but didn’t have a written tradition until about sixty years ago.
This new Rhysling volume is so massive (compared to its predecessors) partly because communication, publishing, and access to literature are much easier than they used to be, but more because the SFPA has grown so much. The field has grown, and the organization with it. People all over the world are writing speculative poetry, and publishing it, in more ways and places than ever before. Print zines are easier and cheaper to produce, but there are also digital zines delivered to readers in divers formats, as well as webzines of various degrees of formality and sophistication. There are podcasts and audiozines, blogs, zines on various social-media platforms, and more forms of publishing come into being like bubble universes from the ether. We are all exposed to more diverse speculative poetry in these pages than ever before, because of our own collective efforts. Anyone not connected with our organization could pick up a copy of this anthology and get a good idea of what speculative poetry is. I’m sure that plenty of excellent speculative poems remain unknown to most of us. The Rhysling Anthology, after all, contains at most two poems nominated
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology ix by each participating member. I read plenty of thrilling speculative poetry each year that I can’t nominate, and that I don’t see nominated by other people either. I’m not alone. Still, this book in your hands is the best approximation available, to the best speculative poetry of the year. Much of its strength is the diversity of viewpoints that went into it. Here, you will find peculiar elephants; giants and monsters (not all bad) compared to which elephants are peanuts; myths, new and revisited; people, not- people, and things that might be; the sins of our ancestors; spirits—good, bad, and doing their own things; GM rats; something almost worse than vivisection; disparate unsettling takes on night; time lords who are not doctors; gods (some we think we know, some not); people of unusual sizes; beginnings and ends that are too familiar; characters that seem to be alive and some aliver; art, and what it’s for. I want to thank Shark, our cover artist, who has created a truly magnificent window into an alien world at the moment of its discovery. A good cover sells its book, and, wow! This picture is easily worth a thousand words. However, one has to ask: which words? The cover painting shows a fascinating and alien world, but it is only one world. Between the covers of this book are more than a hundred worlds waiting to be discovered. Your mission, and I hope you will accept it, is to read all of the poems. Then, vote! The next time we send a spaceship to the stars, perhaps we should include the latest Rhysling Anthology. We certainly could do worse than show a species striving to understand the future, itself, and the world around it.
David C. Kopaska-Merkel Chair, 2017 Rhysling awards March, 2017
David C. Kopaska-Merkel has been writing SF and fantasy since rock was young. He joined SFPA in 1986, edited Star*Line in the late ’90s, founded the [email protected] listserv, and later served as SFPA President. He won the Rhysling Award for best Long poem in 2006 for “The Tin Men,” a collaboration with Kendall Evans. His latest poetry collection, SETI Hits Paydirt, was published by Popcorn Press; two others are in press. His latest book, Footprints in Stone, is a nonfiction collaboration with Ron Buta. He edits and publishes Dreams and Nightmares, a genre poetry zine in its 31st year of publication. Blog at http://dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com/, featuring a daily poem. @ DavidKM on Twitter. He lives in a centuried farmhouse that has been engulfed, but not digested, by a city.
x A b o u t t h e R h y s l i n g A w ar d s
In 1978, Suzette Haden Elgin founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA), along with its two initial publications: the association’s newsletter, Star*Line, and the Rhysling Anthology, the voting instrument of the Rhysling Awards. Star*Line began as a forum and networking tool for poets with a shared interest in speculative poetry, from science-fiction verse to high-fantasy poems, from the macabre to straight science and associated mainstream genres such as surrealism, and is now a showcase for speculative poems and a venue for essays on speculative poetry and reviews of speculative poetry books. The Rhysling Awards are named for the blind poet Rhysling in Robert A. Heinlein’s short story “The Green Hills of Earth.” Rhysling’s skills were said to rival Rudyard Kipling’s. In real life, Apollo 15 astronauts named a crater near their landing site “Rhysling,” which has since become its official name. The Rhysling Anthology serves as not only a voting instrument for the Rhysling Awards, but also as a representative collection of some of the best speculative poetry of the preceding year. The nominees for each year’s Rhysling Awards are selected by the membership of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Each member is allowed to nominate one work in each of the two categories: Best Short Poem (1–49 lines) and Best Long Poem (50+ lines). All nominated works must have been first published during the preceding calendar year. The Rhysling Awards are determined by vote of the SFPA membership from the nominated works reprinted in this voting tool, the Rhysling Anthology. The anthology allows the membership to easily review and consider all nominated works without the necessity of obtaining all the diverse publications in which the nominated works first appeared. The Rhysling Anthology is also available to purchase in print and .pdf format by anyone with an interest in this unique compilation of verse from some of the finest poets working in the field of speculative/science-fiction/fantasy/horror poetry; see sfpoetry.com/rhysling.html for more information. The winning works are regularly reprinted in the Nebula Awards Showcase published by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and are considered in the speculative field to be the equivalent in poetry of the awards for prose work— achievement awards given to poets by the peers of their own literature. Printing and distribution of the Rhysling Anthology are paid for by the SFPA. If you would like to contribute to the organization so that we may continue to produce this and other publications and fund the organization’s efforts, please send a check, made out to the Science Fiction Poetry Association, to: SFPA Treasurer PO Box 907 Winchester CA 92596 or donate online via PayPal to [email protected].
Adapted from Star*Line 12.5–6 (1989)
xi D o n a t i o n s to the 2017 R hy s l i n g Ant h o l o g y
Benefactors Elizabeth Bennefeld
Sponsors Mary Soon Lee Greer Woodward
Supporters F.J. Bergmann
Donors John Philip Johnson David C. Kopaska-Merkel
xii Ta b l e o f C o n t e n t s
Acknowledgments v About the Rhysling Awards x Editor’s Note: David C. Kopaska-Merkel, 2017 Rhysling Chair xi Sponsors of the 2017 Rhysling Anthology xii
Short Poems First Published in 2016 (98 poems) This Rat • Anne Carly Abad 1 Propagation • Layla Al-Bedawi 2 3D printer • Francis Wesley Alexander 2 Loose String • E. Kristin Anderson 2 Selkie • E. Kristin Anderson 3 The Genius • Sara Backer 4 Foreign Policy • David Barber 4 Antagonist • F. J. Bergmann 5 How far does night have to fall? • F. J. Bergmann 5 I Left My Heart in San Francisco. I Left Yours Somewhere in Colorado … • Matt Betts 6 Spoiler Alert • Matt Betts 7 Star Dust • Josh Brown 8 appendage sale • Susan Burch 9 A Bug in the System • Anton Cancre 9 One Canoe • Shari Caplan 9 My Pet Alien • Dennis Caswell 10 The Box of Dust and Monsters • Beth Cato 11 Bottle Cast Upon A Dry Sea • G. O. Clark 12 The Dark between the Stars • G. O. Clark 12 A Natural History of Snow • David Clink 13 Glastonbury, 1994 • P. S. Cottier 14 Past Imperfect • Deborah L. Davitt 15 Always the Black and White Keys • Corrine De Winter 15 My Corpse, My Groom • Ashley Dioses 16 Witch Lord of the Hunt • Ashley Dioses 16 Godzilla vs. King Kong • James S. Dorr 17 Sutekh From The Throne • Denise Dumars 18 Falling (A Part) • Alexandra Erin 19 Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek • Timons Esaias 20 History Teacher • Gary Every 21 Skin • Alice Fanchiang 22 What Wants Us • Karolina Fedyk 23 The Long Run • Neil Gaiman 24
xiii Well, Water, Stars • Adele Gardner 24 At the Robot National Convention • Alan Ira Gordon 26 Space Opera • Vince Gotera 26 Feles Alieni Vere Sunt • Neile Graham 27 Until Dawn • Michael H. Hanson 28 Christmas on Mars • Carolyn M. Hinderliter 28 The Giantess’s Dream • Ada Hoffmann 28 Ink • Akua Lezli Hope 29 Martian Garden • John Philip Johnson 30 The woman on the bus encounters time dilation • Daniel R. Jones 30 Memorial • Tim Jones 31 After • Herb Kauderer 32 Dorothy Delivered • Kathleen A. Lawrence 33 Riding the Dark • B. J. Lee 34 Returning • Mary Soon Lee 34 The Ash Manifesto • Rose Lemberg 35 World’s Tiniest Human • Muriel Leung 36 The Architect of Bonfires • Tonya Liburd 36 Stellar Quake • John C. Mannone 37 Descent of the Composer • Airea D. Matthews 38 The birds forget to sing • Carl Mayfield 38 Bones Knock in the House • Mary McMyne 39 Salome’s New King • Terry Miller 40 The Doppelgänger and the Ghost • Lev Mirov 41 The Phosphorescent Fungi • D. L. Myers 42 Nothing Goes Away • A.J. Odasso 42 Widening Gyre • A. J. Odasso 43 Invocation of Diana • K. A. Opperman 43 The Spook Tree • Cindy O’Quinn 44 Song of the Encantado • Jeremy Paden 45 Quasar • Triin Paja 46 Orpheus • Ace G. Pilkington 46 Adolescence • Ken Poyner 47 La Villa de Sirenia • Jack Ralls 48 Build a Rocketship Contest: Alternative Class A Instructions and Suggestions • Wendy Rathbone 48 Exotic Heads Trimmed Neatly • John Reinhart 49 The Old Ones Gather • Terrie Leigh Relf 50 Robot Testimonial Z • Margaret Rhee 50 The Sparrows in Her Hair • Hester J. Rook 50 The Bird Prince • John W. Sexton 51 Sappho and the Woman of Starlight • John W. Sexton 52 George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts • Marge Simon 53 xiv the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Less than Human • Marge Simon 54 Learning the History of War • J. J. Steinfeld 54 The Last Woman on Earth • Mary Stone 55 Marginalia on Eiruvin 45b • Bogi Takács 55 Love in the Time of Apocalypse • Ann Thornfield-Long 56 The Persecution of Witches • Ali Trotta 56 The Fantasy of Hans Christian Andersen • K H van Berkum 58 To Live In The Zombie Apocalypse • Burlee Vang 58 Classification of Folktales • Margaret Wack 59 Portrait of the Captain with Small Waiting Objects • T. D. Walker 60 Richard Feynman’s Commute • Jon Wesick 61 To the Girl Who Ran Through Crop Circles • Karen J. Weyant 62 Absentation • Lesley Wheeler 62 Quack • Neal Wilgus 63 The Memory Machines • Jane Williams 64 Terran Mythology • Shannon Connor Winward 65 *For Quick Sale* • Greer Woodward 65 Of My Wounds, There Are Many • Stephanie M. Wytovich 66 Black Bull of Norroway • Jane Yolen 67 Death Rides USAir At Night • Jane Yolen 68 Rusalka • Jane Yolen 68 Supercomputer Spends the Night • Danielle Zaccagnino 69
Long Poems First Published in 2016 (54 poems) Further • F. J. Bergmann 71 Exploratory Colony 454—15th May, 2052 • Lore Bernier 72 When the Gunman Comes • Edith Hope Bishop 74 Houses of the Living, Houses of the Dead • Jenny Blackford 75 The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner • Adam Bolivar 77 The Starlet Who Married A Monster • Robert Borski 81 The Great Unknown • Bruce Boston and Alessandro Manzetti 82 Legend of the Albino Pythons and the Bloody Child • Bruce Boston and Alessandro Manzetti 86 The Blind Elephants of Io • Karen Bovenmyer 88 Dame Evergreen • Rebecca Buchanan 90 The Death of the Horse • Beth Cato 91 Morning During Migration Season • Beth Cato 93 In Defence of Science • David Clink 95 Surviving a Canadian Poem • David Clink 96 The Poem Gardens of the Ascari • Rohinton Daruwala 99 Storm Miners • Deborah L. Davitt 100 Data Mine • Alexandra Erin 102
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology xv The Chinese Pirate Ching Shih Plays Go With a Hooded Opponent • Kendall Evans 105 Luminous Decay • Robert Frazier 108 little stomach • Charlotte Geater 110 Rose Child • Theodora Goss 113 Elegy for Iain Banks • Vince Gotera 116 The Dark Lord’s Diary • Lee S. Hawke 117 Talk to the Machines • Johan Jönsson 119 Cobblestone Dragon • Herb Kauderer 120 Phoenix Fire, Tabula Rasa • Eun-byeol Kim 124 Väinämöinen Sings • Jennifer Lawrence 126 First Lesson • Mary Soon Lee 127 Not Like This • Mary Soon Lee 129 Im Wald • Sandi Leibowitz 131 The Journeymaker to Keddar (II) • Rose Lemberg 134 Interview with a 22nd-Century Sex Worker • Darren Lipman 135 The Lies You Learned • S. Qiouyi Lu 137 Adam’s Rendezvous with Dante • John C. Mannone 140 Getting Winterized: A Guide To Rural Living • Elizabeth R. McClellan 142 god-date • Brandon O’Brien 146 Sargasso Sea • A. J. Odasso 148 Werewolf • K. A. Opperman 150 Alice-Ecila • Steph Post 152 At Issue, the Miramo • Ken Poyner 155 The Robot by the Fireplace • Ken Poyner 156 We Shall Meet in the Star-Spackled Ruins • Wendy Rathbone 157 The Butterflies of Traxl IV • John Reinhart 161 To the weaver, from the woman who slew Bakunawa • M. Sereno 163 The Inconceivable Shape • Simon Smith 168 The Leviathans of Europa • Christina Sng 178 Defender Prime • A. C. Spahn 181 Were- • Naru Dames Sundar 183 I Will Be Your Grave • Tlotlo Tsamaase 185 When Coyote Called Down the Stars • Aaron Vlek 187 For Lonnie • Holly Lyn Walrath 188 Revolution • Holly Lyn Walrath 190 Best of • Sarah Ann Winn 191 Thirteen Ways to See a Ghost • Shannon Connor Winward 193
Rhysling Award Winners 1978–2016 196 SFPA Grand Master Award Winners 199 How to Join SFPA 200 xvi the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Short Poems First Published in 2016 This Rat Anne Carly Abad
Everyrat of age must die by metal snares beside the High Walls on which is written in toothspeak: Go, go quickly with one fell squeak before the mewing beasts turn up, put you on the run from fickle clawed death never to know when you’re done. But the end shouldn’t be so ratty or so thinks this rat, catching the crumbs of giants— rice grits and cookie dough sugar cubes and beer drops— a proper last supper before facing the gallows which it never does. A doctor, on a quest for the ugliest things, offers this rat surgery to turn it into a cat, “change a rodent, touch a god,” says the doc, while tucking some fat with needle and thread, curling its snout with surgical staplers; as for the fur, a little brushing does the trick, rat in cat’s clothing turns out quite dashing. Mewers all over can’t help but take notice, “Pity you’re in the pit.” They offer a paw and pull him up but then the beasts let go. They offer a paw and pull him up; they never do pull through. When he snaps his tail in one bad fall that’s when they’ve had enough. “Welcome to the club,” they applaud and leave him to climb out on his own.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 1 Propagation Layla Al-Bedawi
I teach you how to nick the skin between your fingers, worry the cut open and blow on it with hot salty breath, and wait for slow joints to grow from the slit. Your new fingers are especially skilled at pulling up loose floorboards and playing with the tangle of my Spanish moss hair. You used to have wings, but I nibbled them off long ago. You don’t begrudge it; now you are all limbs, the more to hold on to me with. Your knees and elbows creak as I bend them this way and that, tenderly so as not to break them. Your skin ripples with laughter at my manipulations. I show you how to season a broth to perfection with dried compost and twigs and pieces of oyster shells. Rhizomes of microscopic mushrooms float on top as we bathe in it, thick steam tickling deep behind our eyes like pollen. I teach you to break a walnut out of its shell in one perfect piece and to swallow it whole. The conjoined twin brains of it make a home deep in your gut, its filigree roots siphoning nutrients out of your bloodstream as it waits for the perfect conditions to sprout. Soon I will cut a piece from my body and hold it in place against your raw flesh with bandages of vine leaves and training wire. When synchronous buds emerge from both of our wounds, I will wonder if the coming blooms will be of the same hue. 3D printer Francis Wesley Alexander
3D printer copying the wrecked UFO which we still can’t enter Loose String E. Kristin Anderson
They looked exactly the same— the blue tension, the hall, the floor, almost magically wrapped in lush.
2 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Thrones seated sarcasm, too fast, legs trembling. Punch-drunk intuition somehow grinned and I love I love I love— all too high. I want to get down, throw laughter to its feet. Joints pop, hands set soft, go on. They’re there, in the dark: So lush like hell, pride violently loose with music. Breath: glass in throat; whistle: dreamy wide. So quickly that there was a sparkle, red right away, I knew. I looked up, loud, eyes wide, glassy.
An erasure poem. Source: King, Stephen. Carrie. New York: Anchor, 2011. 192-199. Print. Selkie E. Kristin Anderson
It’s not that I’m not comfortable in my own skin. It’s that I can’t ever be without it—it’s a harness in a handbag, holding me to the ocean with a hook and a thread This is the life I wanted—a cottage, no Prince Charming but a kind heart, a cat and a home library. In the sea I can’t have any of this. Still, pink skin for its other self, wet and dark.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 3 One day I’ll go to the beach, set a fire, throw in the bag full of everything I carry around. Driver’s license, lip gloss, cash, and the pelt, a last tie to the water, to the split and to the lie that binds. The Genius Sara Backer
The genius is busy. She’s staring at a ragged alder leaf backlit by the setting sun. She sees its complex simplicity, fractals repeated in varying scale. The word scale invokes fish and symphonies. She hears salmon muscling upstream and tastes the cayenne of the xylophone amid the low vibration of cello and bass. She appears to be doing nothing, but only a brain at rest allows patterns to reveal themselves, the interface of world and mind its own sublimity. On the brink of unlocking music and waves, she is interrupted by people who want to pay her to achieve something. Oh, the time they force her to waste saying no, no, no. Foreign Policy David Barber
Of the Most-Wanted, there are no pictures. One, we think, is stout and small of stature, another, grey-bearded, and a third has deformed ears. Our soldiers have playing cards with likenesses provided by our Coalition partner. (Questionable though the regime’s record on human rights may be, it brings stability to the region. No one wants Weapons of Mass Destruction
4 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology on the wrong fingers.) As was decided at the Isengard Summit, we support Mordor fully against this terrorist threat and drone-strikes will target insurgents from the so-called Council of Elrond. Meanwhile, air raids on the Shire continue. Antagonist F. J. Bergmann
after Adversaries III, Kelli Hoppmann, oil on panel, 2013
Dawn’s eye opens a silent pulse of scarlet. Your skull swivels to stare backward into unrelieved morning, the carnal past. A clatter of black wings. You inhale decay, aromatic vapor rising from rotting carrion like a mordant into the red-dyed sky, and store it for later use. You can fly in light or shadow, become your own dark army. Noon sunbright on snow: a windform spins, its whirl of glitter masking your bootprints. The black dog always bounding at your side. leaves no tracks. You will walk him again at midnight, when your nightshine feathers quiver to moonbeat and harbor the negative of radiance. You savor that, also, and inflate a repugnatorial organ with a rush of blood. The fear you instill is a road, not a destination. Where will you go after the long, long war? How far does night have to fall? F. J. Bergmann
Night didn’t want to go anywhere. It would rather have stayed home, but they came to fetch it, barely allowing it time to pack.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 5 They gave its tall black house to someone else and burnt what it left behind. It waited at the station for a conveyance that would take it over the edge. Dawn’s tall bright ship was coming in; morning left in a steam-powered carriage while afternoon’s hot-air balloon slowly filled; evening, in a white silk scarf and aviator glasses, watched a speck in the sky grow larger. But none of them would speak to the night. It sat slumped on a wrought-iron bench next to its traveling-trunk. The book it had brought for the journey was printed in silver ink on black paper, in a language the night did not understand very well. The ticket was printed in red ink on red paper, in a language that night did not understand at all. A distant whistle rose in pitch; a cloud of sparks flew up on the horizon. The silver rails diverged as they approached, then narrowed in the opposite direction, toward the perilous edge of the world. Night wondered whether the train was running on time, whether anyone would meet it at its final destination, whether it would be welcomed. It thought the falling might be difficult to observe from a distance, might seem longer or shorter to those watching from the outside. I Left My Heart in San Francisco. I Left Yours Somewhere in Colorado … Matt Betts
…or was it Nevada? Hard to say. I travel a lot. And I’m forgetful. I know I left your ring finger at a rest stop outside of Dallas. But that’s only because it was on the news.
6 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Your right ear is still on the washing machine downstairs. I found it in my pants pocket just as I was throwing my jeans into the wash. That would’ve been embarrassing. All my clothes would’ve turned out all EAR-colored, right? Shoved your spleen down a sewer grate in Livonia, Michigan. Kicked your jawbone into rush-hour traffic on the Miracle Mile. Wasn’t chasing that down, let me tell you. I’m sure it was ground to powder by the time those maniac drivers were done. It wasn’t Kansas City, was it? Where I left your heart? No. I think that’s where I left those fingernail clippings. I could take notes, I guess. But really? More evidence? What was I looking for? Your heart. Right. Remind me which one is the “Show-Me-State” again? Spoiler Alert Matt Betts
You like to be surprised. I know this much. You love it when you never see it coming, but I’m going to ruin the ending for you. It’s the third act and the gun is off the mantel. The undead are already inside the mall. The computer has become self-aware and The calls are coming from inside the house. See, the rescue party isn’t coming and the asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. We should’ve cut the blue wire and not the red The miracle cure has become the dreaded disease. I know you like to be surprised and you love it when you never see it coming, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ruin the ending for you. We aren’t going to make it. We’re not getting out of this together. No triumphant sunrise. No holy water squirt guns in the nick of time. And the monster’s never dead. The Monster Is Never Dead. We can cover more ground if we split up. You check the basement;
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 7 I’ll explore the attic. Walk away in opposite directions and wait for the screen to fade to black. Cue the hag in the deep dark woods trying to eat the fat kids. Signal the inbred mutant freaks at the roadside rest stop looking for fresh flesh. Let the machete-wielding maniac know he has five minutes before we need him on stage. Star Dust Josh Brown awake, at the break of dawn when you pull the curtains back and open up the shades morning sunlight pours in through pane glass revealing millions of tiny particles but did you know, this collection of little specks is actually star dust? they have traveled billions of light years to find their way to you the suns and moons and planets and cosmos and galaxies all align to bring them to you from metagalactic to intergalactic comets crash into binary stars a supernova explodes, creating a celestial sphere nebula which falls through the void pulled through the gravitational effects of infinite black holes transported through space and time all they way to our planet earth becoming minuscule molecules of star dust a venerable constellation, right there in the sunbeams of your window
8 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology appendage sale Susan Burch appendage sale— even with 2 more hands I still don’t get all the housework done A Bug in the System Anton Cancre
It started simple, small, like these things always do. A lost email here. A missing efficiency collation report there. The Robertsons’ dick-pic showing up as everyone’s background. Until the systemic communications errors. Inverted keyboard functions. The fucking coffee maker pouring out nothing but decaf. The white-shirt scruffs in IT said they had it under control. Just another bug to squash. But Jenny said the ladies’ room isn’t there anymore and Saladin’s window used to face the pond to the east, not the parking lot, and it sounds like the walls are closing ranks around us. One Canoe Shari Caplan
Enchantment lurked in the river. We hunted magic fish with our paddles. I was fox, you owl. We knew no boys worth mentioning. They bedded like coal in our chests.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 9 Swap shoes with me—now ribbons! Our vessel teeters. Not averse to water, are we. Hold your breath as we glide under the bridge or you’ll wed a wife-beater who will sop up your blood with bread. Switch his cordial for cyanide. Don’t get drunk. Let’s vow with brambles instead of knives. I’ll kiss your palm. Remind me what wishes we spat in the water when our mind was one canoe. My Pet Alien Dennis Caswell
My pet alien has learned to breathe our air, though it makes her giggle. “Howzabout you and me go out for a spin in the ol’ saucer-o-roonie?” she slurs, just before falling asleep. She’s only two feet tall, with skin somewhere between vinyl and suede. She levitates objects with her mind, but when I ask if she can teach me to do that, she says, “Forget it. Where I come from, what you’ve got doesn’t count as a mind.” She’s afraid of knobs. I have to work the appliances for her. Sometimes she won’t shut up about home, musing, “Where I come from, the rainbows have extra colors, and clouds really are fluffy beasts.” She’ll wrap all six limbs around my leg and make me walk around like that, sing-songing, “Dead weight! Dead weight! I’m a dead weight!” She runs through summer grass, bounding and throwing her arms at the sun, giving off frisky whistling sounds that make birds think she’s god. She picks up a rock and says, “Where I come from, we don’t have this,” and we’ll talk for hours about the ontology of this. She falls apart and puts herself back together with every step. Sex, of course, is out of the question. “Where I come from,” she explains, “we don’t reproduce.
10 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology We just keep revising ourselves.” She tells me humans all look the same, and I tell her she looks the same too. When she works, she makes little whispering noises like a factory made of feathers. I ask if she loves me, and she says, “Where I come from, love is eating a really good bowl of noodles, and not getting stains on your shirt,” and that’s good enough for me. The Box of Dust and Monsters Beth Cato beneath her bed the girl kept a box of dust and monsters the cardboard was fuzzed by use as she often slid it out when she found baby monsters oozing forth from alleys searing through interdimensional portals or frightening folks at Walmart newcomers might wiggle a bit in her hand but soon enough they understood to never bite her that for all their eyes and undulating limbs their status as a demi-god or simple devoted minion for all their dark plots and machinations they were loved that it was fine if their tea parties discussed scorched earth tactics and the slyest methods to make school bullies disappear (with much debate on if that should be literal or figurative) that her hugs were worth retracting poisonous horns and delaying an apocalypse or two
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 11 that maybe, just maybe world domination wasn’t the best end-goal after all and when that heart-breaking moment came when a monster outgrew the box there were hugs, groans, and roars farewell the departing beast still very much a monster by appearance but inside so much more Bottle Cast Upon A Dry Sea G. O. Clark
Do old starships creak? Does their plumbing groan and the dust of light years collect in their darkened corners? Can ghosts reside in metal walls and float free in rarefied air, and when their souls are set free, are they that much closer to heaven than when Earthbound? Does madness spread more quickly in the vacuum of space? Can a sea of phantom starships ever be accurately charted? Do old starships creak? This one does. The Dark between the Stars G. O. Clark
It’s always night in space, the distance between the stars devoid of warm light, the scattered stars beacons of possibility, islands of gravity tugging at the imagination.
12 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology It’s midnight aboard this starship between here to there, the traditional witching hour, Earth fears and superstitions packed along with our other baggage; one-way tickets punched. Darkness resides within the hearts of the android crew, and the dreams of the cold-sleepers; the claustrophobia of the ship, its locked hatches, the constriction of one’s own skin sitting heavy. The color of time changes by degrees, like a fading ember, finally turning coal-black as the end draws near; numb fingers in cold-sleep coffins clawing towards the light. A Natural History of Snow David Clink
for Rio Youers, author of Westlake Soul
The hospital grounds, a carpet of incessant snow. Late evening, past visitor parking, the green tears of the great willow have turned to ice. Beyond the willow lies a fairy-tale ocean, a refuge for sea serpents the size of houses, a home to dead, forgotten sailors. You know the lattice of lights high atop visitor parking are the eyes of an immense alien insect, the rest of its body caught in another dimension. It doesn’t understand how it got trapped or how to get free, sentient eyes flickering a distant pain. It watches over the snowflakes, cares for them. The cold pushes against you, traces of wind. Massive and uncaring, the last family of giants pass by, leaving a place they could no longer stay, invisible to those who don’t believe, taking the last relics of magic with them in large leather pouches. You hover outside a fourth floor window looking into a room where a body lies on a bed, the people gathered there waiting impatiently for you to give up. You turn around, cones of light shining down on snow, the wind carrying a journey of giants. The great willow, swathed in ice, beckons.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 13 You need to follow the giants’ tracks in the deepening snow, catch up to them, tell them there is still magic in the world, there is still love. You want to walk among the wrecks, tell the sailors they are not forgotten. You must find the rest of that alien insect whose fixed eyes cast a light on all that is solemn, unforgiving, and to try to free it, and if that is not possible, stay with it till the end, try to make it understand it will not die alone. Glastonbury, 1994 P. S. Cottier
When they invent time travel, whether DeLorean or phone box I won’t go forward, but back. There’ll probably be strict laws about interference and the paradox as explored in science fiction forever, and yet, a visit to Glastonbury in ’94 surely wouldn’t be a threat, or trigger Bradbury’s butterfly effect? (Unless someone already did, and that explains the Trump.) I’d blend into the heaving crowd, a very happy, sunburnt piggy. I want to see Johnny Cash live. I want to watch the Man in Black and hear him walk the line. ’69 at San Quentin is out of the question, but ’94 will do fine. A simple time machine and off she went, pausing momentarily to buy a tent.
Note: The “butterfly effect” mentioned here refers to the short story “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury, in which the accidental killing of a butterfly in the distant past results in a very different future world, not least in political terms.
14 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Past Imperfect Deborah L. Davitt
Future, always silver, crafted of chrome and glass. The past, always sepia brown, dead leaves. Present, effacing the past, preparing for a future in which no history remains. No dirt, no blood, no shame, no awkward opinions that good people no longer share. Blank slate. Endless present, chorus of agreement. The past has been slain, killed. And memories both good and bad, denied. Our time on earth unstained— until imperfections are found by children yet unborn, unnamed. Always the Black and White Keys Corrine De Winter
The scent of absinthe incense lingers From Brazil. Of course I am a witch, raising the dead. Come, I say, pulling at their clothing, Wiping dirt from their bones. They are no less alive than I. Always lilies arrived from a stranger on a day of heartbreak.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 15 It was the season of resurrection When my mother passed away. The demarcation of sweet earth blooming, Forsythia, cherry trees, magnolia Against the pale horse of Death. Always Spring arrived in a day of heartbreak. I wait in a mirror for my mother to come, Write a message in response with lipstick or eyeliner. Always music dissolved me in days of heartbreak. Always the black and white keys nailed me down. My Corpse, My Groom Ashley Dioses
In eldritch crypts, beneath acidic stars, My corpse, my groom, in pieces lies in wait For my endearing touch to heal his scars. Yet it’s my sun-kissed flesh that has of late Turned white as moons; it’s my eyes that have sunk To deathly gray; and it’s my hunger that Has taken over; for I need to dunk My fingertips into his flesh, his fat. My ghoulish kiss will taste his lips once more— And yet his heart’s the treat I’m longing for. Witch Lord of the Hunt Ashley Dioses
In the great briar, the twisting brambles of twilight Were decked with scarlet drops from thorn-pricked skin of youth. They must locate the snow-white stag and then recite A pledge of honor to the Witch Lord and His truth. His mask was the eburnean skull of a stag, With antlers reaching high toward the star-filled sky. This form He did not show, for He’d make hunters brag; He favored humble hunters, they allured his eye.
16 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology His eyes of smaragdine were blazing gems of will. He was the Master of the Hunt, His will was law. His furs were draped around Him, made from every kill. His spear was stained with scarlet from dead flank and jaw. The Witch Lord of the Hunt must grant a blessing for A novice hunter to pass safely through His land. No prey beneath His shelter, be it stag or boar, Can fall without it, lest the hunter then be banned. The Witch Lord takes great pleasure in just watching them Investigate His woodlands, ever in the search For Him in stag form, till at midnight they condemn Themselves to sleep. He can depart then from His perch. He smiles in thought and leaves them in their dream-filled sleep. He wanders aimlessly throughout his woods till dawn, For the arousing hunters would proceed in deep Into His luscious forests, for His Hunt goes on. Godzilla vs. King Kong James S. Dorr
It came down to this, finally, the fight of all fights, Godzilla against the King, armed with his radioactive bad breath and his lizard cunning, while what could a monkey do? “Do what you do best,” Kong’s trainer, Fay Wray, told him, “climb if you can, or else throw feces at him.” Well, climbing was pretty much out of the question unless he climbed up Godzilla himself, the skyscrapers of Tokyo already demolished, but, vis-à-vis Kong, ’Zilla wasn’t that tall and the other plan didn’t seem sanitary. So Kong made sure he’d had a good night’s sleep, a hearty breakfast of bananas by the bunch, then stood his ground in the city’s ruins delighted when Godzilla, stomping nearer, slipped suddenly on his breakfast’s discarded peels, taking a dive, backward, into the harbor.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 17 Godzilla could also breathe under water so, soon enough, he was climbing back out dripping mud and dead crabs, except Kong, by then, had already accepted the winner’s purse, and was halfway back to his Skull Island home. Sutekh from the Throne Denise Dumars
It starts with a sharp golden light— this speaking in the dark jungle, the needle-driven maelstrom this knowing in the last lobe of the brain. Just a little—a little mild excision taking a lonely colonial drop the memory of the ziggurat, the step up the pyramid, the taste of the blood in the heart. Now all is as snow— lost amongst the frozen wilderness. Incision cleaving sight from memory a tongue to speak, a lip to bleed. It will all end in red desert. Uncultivable, this severed member silt and fish slime of the Nile as it was in the beginning of our story: He who wields the scalpel rules the world from his barren chamber, every slice of Ausar lessening everything. A lone June bug beating itself to death on the floodlights of the playing field Forgetting in our truncated times the all-important rolling of the sun across the sky.
18 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Falling (A Part) Alexandra Erin
I am not falling apart, she thinks. I am a beautiful cocoon in which is birthed bright-burning catastrophe. Your past is prologue, but mine is overture. It’s the orchestra tuning up in the pit, familiar fragments and squeaky scales, haunting hints of chords to come, and somewhere behind it all there is the coda of a nursery rhyme you haven’t thought about in years but now that you’ve heard it, it won’t leave your head. The symphony is not for me, but for the devil, a man of wealth who never let me have a taste. He owed me nothing but it might have been nice, those long years in hell. I was a guest in his home and he never even offered me a seat. Persephone had her pomegranate, but I think I would have spit out the seeds. Not because I’d have changed my mind, but in case he did. I don’t want to be alone, but I know how to stand it better than awkwardness. I am not falling apart, she thinks. I am a work in progress, the process of becoming a wreck, a mess, a tragedy in the making. Life descending a staircase, still nude with absinthe. The treachery of memory is equaled only by the persistence of images. I started out paint-by-numbers, but quickly lost count and since then my life has been one big blue period. It pours down just like on TV, and I don’t even have wings to hold me in place. I try to connect the dots but when all your lines are dotted, things get complicated quickly. What I can’t create, I borrow from better artists. I’ve owed on a Grecian urn for as long as I’ve known it; I have the principle, but I can’t raise the interest. More happy likes! More happy, happy likes! I am not falling apart, she thinks. I am moving forward in many directions, most of them downward. I fall, I shatter, I scatter, I hide. Our name is legion, for we are broken. Did he go through this, when he fell? He never let on, but I can’t blame him. The biggest piece of me left standing arranges its jagged broken edge into a smile and tells you it’s nothing, I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. I’m nothing, it’s fine. It’s normal, it’s life, it is what it is, it is what we make of it, right? So I make it work, but I never make it, and it never works. I go back to the beginning, but the beginning has changed. The orchestra is still tuning up, but all the notes are different now. I thought I knew the score, but one day soon I’ll be looking at forty, love, and wondering if this was ever my racket. I am not falling apart, she says. But thank you so much for asking, just the same.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 19 Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek Timons Esaias
We seem to have asked them nothing. Elephants once shared our lives, fought our enemies, battered down city gates, carried great burdens, headed the tiger hunts, which protected us both, howdahs teeming with spearmen and archers. And in the reign of Titus Augustus elephants were known to have mastered Latin, and the brightest ones Greek. Yet we asked them nothing, heeded nothing. No scholar recorded, that we know, their preferences in reading. Did elephants favor Aristotle over Cicero? The Stoics, or, with their great appetites, the Epicureans? Did they care for drama, master Euclid, penetrate the numbers of Pythagoras? Clearly we did not pay attention, did not record the year in which the elephants were no longer writing Greek, or even note it. Much has opened to us since the plow first broke furrows back and forth across the ground but other doors have closed to us. Delphi is still, the gods no longer speak to us, and the elephants have, inexplicably, put their pens aside.
20 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology History Teacher Gary Every
Mr. Egbert’s voice sent shivers up your spine like fingernails on a blackboard and yet somehow managed to maintain a shrill monotone drone. Despite this, his class listened with rapt attention. You see, whatever Mr. Egbert said in his history class was the absolute truth. Not before he said it, but once the words were uttered the entire classroom was transported to alternative timelines where what he said was the absolute truth. Sometimes the students walked in and somebody was president, and when the bell rang and the students exited it was somebody else holding the office. Once during a particularly spirited lecture when Mr. Egbert murdered a Chinese emperor who had never been murdered before and the timelines instantly adjusted, one of the students in one of the middle rows spontaneously changed sex, transforming from a short chubby boy to an awkwardly tall slender girl (and unfortunately just as homely in either gender) and the whole class laughed. No one wanted to ask any questions about how such a thing was possible. They only knew that whatever Mr. Egbert said that day became the gospel truth, entire timelines shifting to make it so. You did not have to listen closely to realize Mr. Egbert’s lectures always featured a beautiful, spirited heroine, Sacagawea, Amelia Earhart, Jane Goodall and others, the same beautiful, courageous, goddess appearing in different forms over many centuries and always just beyond his reach. The bell rings and Mr. Egbert gathers his papers, heading towards the quiet home he shares with a patient cat, spending his evening dreaming up new histories for tomorrow’s lecture, and trying to align all his alternative timelines until at last his world is ruled by a benevolent queen.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 21 Skin Alice Fanchiang
My body is rhythm-drunk, propelled by clever syncopation, dropped beats, electricity in my veins and soles. My feet move unbidden to the buzzy drums ricocheting in this crowded room, in my bones – spellbound without enchanted red shoes. But tonight, I am restless in this skin so thin, shimmering in the scattered, spinning light and I no longer find solace in these raucous, reckless nights. The liquor sours, the feast turns to ash— burning away like summer and lovers long past. This is familiar, the pull to red exit signs and open roads- I’ve crossed wolf woods and uncharted seas and desolate city blocks before, seeking a darker dance, a sin-sweet song to quiet my wander-heart’s roar. My blood pulses hot, the hunger dagger-sharp, and this place is too loud, too still, too much. Not enough. So I know it’s time now to peel it off, these scratchy sequins, this borrowed pelt. I’ll discard them too like the rustling wings and silk, shed the shining scales and Hippolyta’s burnished belt. Undo a thousand nights with each twirl untangle the smoke wreathed in my hair until I have shaken free and shifted into a luminous new form.
22 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology What Wants Us Karolina Fedyk
Hello. We’ve landed safely. All’s well under the foreign sky. This new sun is gently pulsing over landscapes chiseled in salt. They’ve been made in the image and likeness of the home I never knew. Gobi, Mojave, Arizona. Names as alien as any moon. But this land can’t be barren, I tell myself. It pushed out a city for us. I’ve been trailing its bone-white splendor. Taking in the hard-won wonders. Here, water has an unfamiliar taste, and we can’t walk the sky, but what does it matter? They say it’s how it has been. Spires piercing the stars in our name. Are you still listening? I’d hate my first message to be all complaints. But, moving forth with new winds, I don’t know. Is this really where we came from, the dirt swirling by my feet? It reminds me of places we wouldn’t let be. I’m waiting for the next ship and hoping I’ll leave before I forget: that home is not what we want. It’s what wants us before poison and fire.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 23 The Long Run Neil Gaiman
Don’t run ahead she said stay beside me run when I run walk when I walk But I ran ahead because it was easier and when I looked back I could not see her She was so angry that I ran ahead but perhaps she feared that night was coming She knows I will run ahead into the gloaming. And when I look back I will not see her. I will learn to run beside her. But one day we will stumble and I will run on ahead into the long night. Well, Water, Stars Adele Gardner
“It will be as if, in the place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh … I, too, shall look at the stars. All the stars will be wells with a rusty pulley. All the stars will pour out fresh water for me to drink … What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well …” —Antoine de Saint Exupéry, translated from the French by Katherine Woods
Every day I try to speak. I used to know How to move lips and gums and teeth, tongue striking hard To shape a sentence—or a smile. Signs recognized, Though wordless, fail me too: I think I dream, sometimes, By the window, watching cars, waiting, willing you home. You don’t notice the longing in my eyes—green
24 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Like the sea, the green you drank deep Each time we stayed at the old house by the lake, Pumping the well first thing every morning, Black iron handle giving a sharp creak. The last time We tasted that mossy, stone-soaked water, you fell asleep Reading, dreaming in the sun. Pyewacket slipped her leash, Ran down the beach, paws taking in tiny stones, Siamese fur a blur at dusk, eyes gleaming bright Green like the lights across the shore. Time was We’d sit on the green bench all night, heads On each other’s shoulders, watching stars, Glassy-eyed Pyewacket winking as she purred her own rumbling rhythm on our laps. That evening she ran free, she never came home. She had slept with me since a kitten, so familiar, yet She’d come to me a mystery; tamed me with feline magic, Her chirps a witch’s charms that only I understood. When you woke up, I was out walking, and you crawled, Frantic, calling, under the house, your trousers muddy, Your lime shirt sprinkled with cobwebs. She wasn’t trapped Under the boat. She didn’t bob against the dock, Caught in your fishing lines like a magical carp. She was gone, her vanishing act as mysterious As her arrival. I cried bitter water. Two days later, I went rowing without you Around the dangerous bluff, missing her, Blaming you. The currents tore an oar away. Waves smashed a log into the boat. I love the water but never learned to swim. Drowning, I looked up toward heaven, the deep Green weeds tangling my feet, green water rippling overhead, Green leaves framing a sky so far away. At least the stars Twinkled to me, purring with furry light, while I lay waiting In a deep as dark as sleep, listening to their voices Singing like tiny Siamese meows, Enraptured, snared by dreams, drinking our story. Now I sit curled beside your feet, Struggling to say your name. You read my Anxious look as a cat’s plea for affection. We talk of nothing, but share a bed As warm, as close, as lonely as before.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 25 At the Robot National Convention Alan Ira Gordon
After the candidate’s nomination all runners-up are cannibalized into spare parts, for the nominee’s use on the long and grueling campaign trail. Space Opera Vince Gotera
A blunt lipstick- shaped tube of dull gray points up to gunmetal sky covered by drab clouds of acid ice scoring the ground with hard pellets of sulfur hail like fiery bullets of burning brimstone dredged from hell’s deep abyss. Flash Gordon taking off to Ming the Merciless’s planet to rescue Dale Arden from that fate worse than death. Night’s shroud is falling. The red-orange blast of his engines glows like morning, a little harbinger of hope in stormy darkness. The small ship soars, a desperate arrow.
26 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Feles Alieni Vere Sunt Neile Graham
The cats study you like you might be the solution to a problem and not the one about tin openers. The iridescence of their eyes means they’ve been cat-stepping faster than light across universes tinkering with cosmic mechanics. You’re triangulated in their gaze. Dissolved and reconstructed. They have imagined you into being and thus there are things you should be doing: fashioning obscure mysteries, cracking a portal to the place of lost things, unlocking doors to summer. You’ve done none of this while they have both minded creation and managed domestic chores: kept the household ghosts on their toes, fashioned intergalactic treaties, defended windows, reported on the state of the outside perimeter, countered predations of the aviators, the diggers, the thieves. They’re so weary they can spare just so much to send you this message. They fear it’s lost. They’re twitching their tell-tails and tapping their soft, gorgeous lethal toes to remind you they have their own immutable tally of who gets what and when. Then— cats being cats, they give up and release you. Turn back to their feline concerns, stretch the stretches that keep planets from wobbling, flick an ear at the squabbles of gods, then wash. Smoothing out a whisker here. A devil there.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 27 Until Dawn Michael H. Hanson
She is hiding in Syria, both out of sight and out of mind, lost in the mad hysteria striking rationality blind. She carries in her precious hands sweet glowing embers of peace, and aches to plant them in these lands, so hope and joy can find release. For now she travels in silence among the ruins and shadows, one more victim of violence in burned, tattered, and bloody clothes. Bravely she battles all these fears wearing a veil, a holy grail whence love will pour like endless tears. Christmas on Mars Carolyn M. Hinderliter
Christmas on Mars the taste of the fruitcake from a tube The Giantess’s Dream Ada Hoffmann
Loki fucks her on a bed of cinders. She is ink-filled, huge with prickling stars and the dark like falling down a well. (What is this thing we have made? Will it be eight-legged? Will it bite the hands of gods? Hush, dear. You’ll see.)
28 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Pleased, half fearful, she traces the hill of her belly. One side burns, the other frosts; in between, in her centre, something reaches for itself. Mist and fire, almost quickened— (Will its teeth poison the sea? Hush, dear. And now, for my next trick—) Loki curls his fingers inside her. She comes to her senses alone. Black rain mists her thighs and trails the path to the half-open door. She’s sore with curdled milk, flat-bellied as a midwinter lake, and from far away on the cliffbound sea comes laughter and the wail of the void. Ink Akua Lezli Hope
This monster looks monstrous so perhaps this is not horror we can tell what is what and who is who by known code black rags with grey lines black hood, a proboscis that hangs to his chin, curves like a sickle, leers— he steals a blond, blue-eyed girl child from her bed beats the sweet guardians of sleep thwarts protections, forces her on a frightening journey where she must learn to roar though she’s a kitten binds her will, warps her access, chains her near there is no safety in our play fear though lost daughters have been returned after 18 years, others, spirited from their nests, never recover monsters lurk, looking handsome, normal, lovely, cute, parked and smiling, right beside you
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 29 Martian Garden John Philip Johnson
with thanks to Mark Aiello
It was the first garden we’d had there—the soil of pulverized minerals, more like mulched machine parts than proper dirt, but it held root and got clammy with moisture. We worked it all day, and then you stayed up painting it, on canvas, as though you were in the caves at Avignon, capturing elk and bison. You lodged a big Earth sun overhead, all bright and yellow, and rows of imaginary corn, yellow stalks and yellow silk, all of it yellow and beaming, with one gardener among them, me I think it was, a yellow me, also beaming, as though the machine-made Martian air didn’t bite on my lungs with each breath. Your painting changed things, and while the plants we have will hardly be green or even grow, and the sun will never be pulled closer, no matter how much pigment you apply, still, as we worked the next day strewing our gray spores over the rocks, I was in your yellow Mars. The woman on the bus encounters time dilation Daniel R. Jones
Physics says time slacks in the gravity-well of a celestial body: An atomic clock set at sea-level will tick a tad slower than one suspended in space.
30 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Her car died but she wasn’t afforded the luxury, so she hobbles down East Washington to a dead-end job, cursing the cold, constructing her own theory of timespace: Time slows under the gravity of events. A call from jail, a sudden death, a miscarriage of justice. When she lost custody of her everything, time halted. “Hell hath no fury like a woman” sans her son. Taking the 17 to the 8, she walks the rest— She proves her love she won’t count the blocks or the hours of overtime those, too, drag bad as a black hole and she’s waiting on time to resume. Memorial Tim Jones
for Jonathan Franzen
Arms outstretched, the novelist stands amid the ruins of nature. It’s a curated nature: his cultivated rescue garden, a scoop of hills and plains, wind large among dead pines and dying needles. He has gathered all the birds, these valiant survivors of drought and storm into one remaining protected preserve: the last refuge of wildness, this circle of life
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 31 kept smoothly spinning by selfless human cogs, volunteers who’ve let the world go to hell in the service of saving a fragment. This is their last best hope, their final stand. But climate, the revenger’s tragedy of the commons, cannot be bought off or set aside. Their predator-proof fences, their best intentions, have no effect on fire or air. Lightning sparks a firestorm, trees adding their carbon to the oversaturated sky. Birds roast in the updrafts, volunteers are crisped below. In the aftermath, the novelist arrives, surveys the ruins of the little world he’s made, and stretches out his arms. Tiny skeletons flutter to perch on his scarecrow bones. After Herb Kauderer
After the brave explorer after the monsters were slain after the noble trailsman after the settler. After the colonist the sentry the terraformers creating imitation earths far from the real thing. After the politicians and the social contract the city planners and the nouveau architects. After the academic the scientist. After the thinking machine to solve the problems of
32 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology imposing Terran thought on foreign organics. After all that there is only you and me shadows of those past excitements negotiating an imported culture circling a gas giant and at odds with a red sun. Look behind me and tell me if my shadow is red. What else is there to do? Dorothy Delivered Kathleen A. Lawrence
Auntie Em anxiously bellowed, before the blowing, cartwheeling country cyclone dumped Dorothy and her dog efficiently. Embarking far, flying Gale with a gust grounded on a half-hidden hag. House now immobilized, an iridescent image in jeweled globe joined the jolly juveniles. Kansas knew little of lilting ladies, lollipop guilds, merry munchkins, and menacing monkeys. Nevertheless, Glinda of the North offered her an offbeat option: Oz. Picking up pals, powering through poppies, the quirky quartet queued for their quest. Rallying, Dorothy ran in ruby slippers with Scarecrow, Scaredycat, Tinman, and Toto too, trekking to urban Oz. Unctuous Wiz in verdigris vowed to value the Wicked Witch of the West’s broom. Water extinguished her exploits. Yea-sayers yelled “to the yellow brick road.” Zonked gal zoomed home.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 33 Riding the Dark B. J. Lee
Let me fall into emptiness, lights of home left far behind, stars snuffed out. The dark offers a touch like none other. I scream my freedom into the void. My body hurtles through the vortex— no roads, no horizons, just a dizzying plunge off the edge. By some black magic, love is replaced, here, by speed and frantic happiness. I know it’s an illusion; still, I don’t care. I’ll take the dark— the unrelenting passion of the fast, deep dark. Returning Mary Soon Lee
Through darkness, King Xau rode with his guards, changing horses at every way station— hurrying the startled staff, following them into the warm stables, that smell of horse, of hay, of leather as he helped tack up the horses— his heart pounding as if time were running out, but the demon dead, the kingdom safe.
34 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Through freshening wind, Xau rode with the eight men who had shielded him when he could not speak, who’d woken him when nightmare wracked him, when the demon called in his brother’s voice, night after night— his guards beside him, then as now. Under moonlight, Xau rode, not quite himself yet, wind drying his face. Khyert dead. Khyert, who should have been riding beside him. Xau rode, home within reach; his children, his wife, the thought of them, the need for them driving him on. The Ash Manifesto Rose Lemberg
I am the healer of clouds, jeweler to the wide rebellious sky, Nobody cows me except myself; I made my smallness, hid among the grains of sand, and walked the roads in flaking ash. I made the fear of death my fear, the power that arises from the ash the conquering flame reborn from quietude: I cowed myself into my own submission, I sprang myself into my own domain. I’ll walk the sun my labyrinth, demand no recompense for past misdeeds, confess to no regret but need, its paths to burn along my symmetry. I’ll make such pain as to reveal your hue, I’ll make such splendor feathered in my triumph to comfort with unfolding majesty the ancient storms awoke from aeons’ slumber, adorned in all the wide rebellious sky.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 35 World’s Tiniest Human Muriel Leung of rosettes and rotting majesty, her throat as slim as stem and poised to snapping. How she rattles with each spook. She sneezes and a white feather coffin sets to drift. Tinker bones on the shattering end. But glass is glass. Someone made her. Inflated her shy pouch with cheap pinks. One day loving up a worker bee and the next, pricked. Death follows her to the milkweed edge where hand shreds root. Singing all the while Love me, love me until the sky tips over. Death loves. When she spills, the forest is coated white and all across the grass, each one daggers. Someone loses a mirror and a tooth. Someone dances a spindle song that skips on record twice. To a Molly fish, a hollow says: I want to belong to someone, to anyone, but only half a night. The Architect of Bonfires Tonya Liburd
The Architect of Bonfires Weaves magic to and fro He knows the art of fire Makes one for cooking just so. The Architect of Bonfires Is a “witch doctor”, a Wise Man And sees the same potential In a scared, approaching woman … The Architect of Bonfires Divines her tale without being told He comforts her with soup— A remedy of old He admires her midnight skin Putting his darkness to shame Marvels at her stark white hair He knows exactly what’s her fear— The chaos, the destruction that ensues When she creates fire out of thin air
36 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology She comes now requesting aid And aid he will gladly give Yet she will return for magical skills Not just to survive but to thrive, live Suspense, danger, coming to terms with her magic, personal tests—all that lies in her future —but for now, some hearty soup will suit her Just fine From the Architect of Bonfires Stellar Quake John C. Mannone
Sometimes there’s a rift in the skin of a neutron star caused by a quake below its gravity-hard crust. Superfluid protons spew out with other exotic blood if only for a few moments before intense magnetic fields suture the star shut. Yet it still spins on its axis, pulses with precision, before the next burst. It’s amazing what one can learn about stars from a television in a hospital room. The good doctor, making his rounds like clockwork, stands at the door with his clipboard, for a moment —a silhouette in frazzled glow of hall light—before coming in with the news. I sensed the tangled light in his eyes. And I knew the hardened skin of my heart would break tonight in the darkness of my own universe.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 37 Descent of the Composer Airea D. Matthews
When I mention the ravages of now, I mean to say, then. I mean to say the rough-hewn edges of time and space, a continuum that folds back on itself in furtive attempts to witness what was, what is, and what will be. But what I actually mean is that time and space have rough-hewn edges. Do I know this for sure? No, I’m no astrophysicist. I have yet to witness what was, what is, and what will be. But what I do know, I know well: bodies defying spatial constraint. Do I know this for sure? No, I’m no scientist. I have yet to prove that defiant bodies even exist as a theory; I offer what I know. I know damn well my body craves the past tense, a planet in chronic retrograde, searching for sun’s shadow. As proof that defiant bodies exist in theory, I even offer what key evidence I have: my life and Mercury’s swift orbits, or two planets in chronic retrograde, searching for sun’s shadow. Which is to say, two objects willfully disappearing from present view. Perhaps life is nothing more than swift solar orbits, or dual folds along a continuum that collapse the end and the beginning, which implies people can move in reverse, will their own vanishing; or at least relive the ravages of then—right here, right now. The birds forget to sing Carl Mayfield
You say: this is the future, get used to it. I have no argument with the future so I keep quiet, sensing there’s more than one bruise behind your expression. In the darkness where we live something wants to move us an inch, something wants to crack open a song of praise no one has heard before.
38 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology I suspect this might be a local god, a warbler resting her voice, giving us a chance, although you say bunk. She’s been called names before, even last winter appearing as February. Bones Knock in the House Mary McMyne
after Proverbs 1:8-9
We were skeletons already, hollow-cheeked. Only soup-stones and thistle in the cupboard. Bones knock in the house, sucked clean of meat. The wood is a wild place at winter’s end: cobwebs singing with dewdrops, flights of ravens in trees. We were skeletons already, hollow-cheeked. Our voices drift over snow, over bird-eaten bread-crumbs. They still drift—if you listen closely—in the breeze. Bones knock in the house, sucked clean of meat. A mother’s love is boundless, an endless chain to adorn your neck. A garland to grace your head. We were skeletons already, hollow-cheeked. O snow-sugared house, O frozen window, O witch who was not my mother, who would never knock us down in the house, suck our bones clean of meat, it was you who caged my brother, you who looked at him and saw something to eat. We were skeletons already, hollow-cheeked. Bones knock in the house, sucked clean of meat.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 39 Salome’s New King Terry Miller
In the darkness, where she dwells, her breath is on my skin. Her nails pierce the flesh, her voice provokes a thousand sins. She prays unto some unknown god, words I dare not to recite, As she comes from the shadows that blend into the dreadful night. Her silhouette upon the wall, and quiet footsteps on the floor. Her legs soon drape to either side, I am her fleshling whore. Paralyzed and short of breath with hands upon my throat, My heart feels crushed beneath the weight of hate and shattered hope. Whispers from her lips seem locked in monotonous chant. Her body bends, contorts, and morphs into some awkward slant. Consciousness evades me as her form continues to writhe, A netherworld surrounds me, it and reality collide. Pain and ecstasy are one where realms begin to weave. My lungs take in sulfuric ash, it makes it hard to breathe. Her ember eyes burn with fire, piercing into my soul, Then dim into an empty stare till both are black as coal. They draw me into the dark, into some vast abyss. Death is there to greet me floating upon the River Styx. His boney hand points the way, we sail toward the land Of fire and ash, of serpents’ tongues, and evil’s grave demands. She greets me there, the barren land, that rootless, blackened soil. Upon the shoreline, the river’s red and waters heat to boil. The skyline’s painted crimson and distant ground’s set aflame. She leads me through the burning earth, dust to dust reclaimed. Her lips spit malicious venom, her mouth speaks, “Follow me.” She is the great seductress, the beautiful Salome. Dancing like the flames to the beat of tribal drums, Devils gather in her name, one by one they come. A wasteland of forgotten lore, all manner of beings dwell. Abominations procreate things I dare to never tell. Salome, she takes my hand, and leans in for a kiss. Poison soon infects my veins, I hear the serpent’s hiss. Her scaly skin pressed to mine, I see her truest form. Every devil, every beast, they all begin to swarm. Her claws rip deep, her teeth sink in, I bleed into the earth. All hail the King, the chosen mate, this is my rebirth.
40 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology The Doppelgänger and the Ghost Lev Mirov
My doppelgänger had a continuous and unbroken history of me that far outdates my five years of visible life. She walked around with my body, wearing a name everyone knew, draining my life to keep her vitality, until I exposed her to sunlight. When the sun came blazing in through the gap of my skin, she burned down to her bones, leaving only remnants and jewelry. I am not what remains of her after the fire, or some phoenix— I am what the house was hiding, locked away, set free into the ruin after the conflagration the unloved brother that starved, forgotten. I have tried to take my body back from her, cutting all my hair off in the kitchen with scissors until the birds nest of my scalp showed no sign of her, that pretty, red-haired, green-eyed bloodsucker my mother made. I have excised her from my body the best I can— but these bones bend so easily, things fall out of place and it is hard to compress myself into the proper shape. These days I see myself, when looking: my mouse-brown Caesar cut my father’s high-browed face dark with a young beard so much hair it grows curly on my toes like a Harfoot. Even my eyes are mine again; weak tea, amber rum at dusk sloping back to Santa Catalina where this shape begins— no one ever mistakes me for my mother’s child. In another year or two every cell that was my doppelgänger will be gone— deconstructed on the molecular level sloughed off in the shower or blown away in the wind. If only it were a complete rebuilding, just the way I want it: ligaments tight and new, never pulling out of orbit muscle tissue shifted across the torso, new lean lines bones that do not know the ache of dying and cannot predict tomorrow’s weather. But nothing happens perfectly, not even death and my doppelgänger haunts dark places in other houses. Devoted to her memory, my parents swear she is the real child and I am the wolf who swallowed her whole. I press on my stomach, looking for signs I am devouring. I bare my teeth in the mirror to look at my overbite and unhinge my jaw, to see if this mouth can swallow witches whole. But the smell of death turns my stomach every time and I do not have Screwtape’s taste for souls in a cup.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 41 I turn over my wrists, pale and weak-veined, and trace my heartline following the blood that remains post exhumation. But I find no signs of my monstrosity, no hunger that cannot be filled although I have watched the world recoil from me like a demon. Of the monsters that my mother birthed, I am the lesser— only a dead thing that will not stay in the ground a son from another life returned as a heavy-footed ghost the bodily resurrection we all were promised come too soon. The Phosphorescent Fungi D. L. Myers
A crawling darkness pressed upon my eyes In which a moiling sea of phantoms swam, And crazed, I hungered for a numbing dram To send my mind to where all reason flies. Until before me rose a fitful fire, A corpse-light foul and bruised that chilled my soul Yet drew me onward toward a ghastly goal-- A grotto burning like a purple pyre! And then, I saw the things that cast that glow, Pale fungi vile and stained with rank decay, And bathed in icy sweat from head to toe, I stood and quaked before that dire display. Then evil whispers hissed about my ears, And I broke down in horror wracked with tears. Nothing Goes Away A. J. Odasso
“If there’s anything we know about the autistic brain,” states Dr. Wolf, watching me, intent, “it’s that nothing goes away.” In answer—cautious, but content—I nod, consider what to say. I would like to tell her my mind is a shattered mirror, that its prodigal fragments scatter to every last crevice and corner, beyond tenable hope of retrieval. Simulacra ensnared, writhing, relivable, freed from their original frames. Longing to confess that glass—cold-to-molten, mercury-backed—transforms thought into pierced flesh, soundly refuses translation,
42 slips my tongue. Thank the keyboard gods for pristine conveyance, but a pen’s what I’m stuck with. My wrist jerks stiffly; my fingers jot cliffs.Once I’m home, I think, I’ll get this down, fashion you verse of it. And then I blink. Widening Gyre A. J. Odasso
I think of the way I sank that rosy granite stone shaped like a heart in Sargassum-swept shallows because when you plucked it up from the floor of Merlin’s Cave at low tide while incense burned I decided there was no way in hell that I would go back to the kind of existence in which passports might dictate the hour minute day even second of our end on that craggy beach with sunset your halo and porphyry my last-wish relic I think of the way I sank that stone shaped like a heart in the shallows I think of the way I sank in the shallows shaped like a heart Invocation of Diana K. A. Opperman
Diana, I pray you, descend From out your sidereal court Your pallid, strange passion to lend, With knowledge of witchcraft and wort— Diana, I pray you, descend! O splendorous Queen of the Moon, Whose brow bears the crescented tiar— The horns that uprear through the swoon Of dream and that glow like white fire!— O splendorous Queen of the Moon!
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 43 Descend on the stairs of the stars, On steps all of moonlight and mist, Bare limbs like the palest of spars, Red tresses by Vesper Star kissed— Descend on the stairs of the stars! Your marble, immaculate feet, Diana, I pray you to place On ground—for a Goddess unmeet!— This violet-grown greensward to grace— Your marble, immaculate feet! O huntress, take up your great bow, And lead, with the stag as your guide, To woodlands no mortal may know, Whose trees ancient wisdom confide. O huntress, take up your great bow! Diana, I pray you, descend From out your sidereal court Your pallid, strange passion to lend, With knowledge of witchcraft and wort— Diana, I pray you, descend! The Spook Tree Cindy O’Quinn
In the shadows beyond the evergreens, stands a tree that towers all others. Once known as the mightiest of oaks, is now just its haunted frame. Its bark is so dark a gray that it makes the winter’s first storm clouds appear light. Vines from years long gone are now embedded deep within its skin, wildly twisting throughout. Bare of its leaves, not only now, but in spring and summer as well. One ominous dark hole lingered in the center of its massive girth. The aperture held a copious amount of darkness that bellowed to me in unseen agony. A bewitching call to coax me into the depths of its grapple. I could not abstain from the dangerous allure that pulled me onward and upward. Gravity defied, I floated without resistance like a balloon until level with the orifice. In an instant I was engulfed into the spook tree’s dark hole, a vacuum sucked me into its depths. Into the murk, further I descended, fear of never again seeing the luminance of sky. The only emotion was that of sullenness which matched the inky darkness.
44 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology The entire populace will eventually face death; perhaps now is my turn. All signs of hope that were once within me were dissipated like clouds on a windy March day. My entirety now belonged to the darkness that was the spook tree’s core. Each breath quickly turned into a desperate gasp for air. My lungs grew smaller until their sacs fell bare. What had been left of me was now owned by the tree. The tree now breathed for me as it stretched for more room. Bark split and I was birthed into a new extension, an offshoot that was contorted and curled. Now I would be forever belonging to the spook tree for all infinitude to consume. Song of the Encantado Jeremy Paden
Do not stare into the blind eyes of the pink-fleshed singing porpoise. You have stared down the dancing snake but the eyes your eyes followed as they swayed were filled with moonlight, & the song of the split- tongue is of the earth & is a forest song that winds about the roots of the kapok tree. Do not stare into the blind eyes of the singing river dolphin. They are filled with a brightness you think is life but is the dimness of deep rivers, of dreams filled with the promise of a pleasure only gods can give, & you are a child of grass & forest, of flowers & their fruit. Do not stare into the blind eyes of the boto cor de rosa. The world will turn gray & your eyes & mouth & skin will long only for the heaviness of rivers, & you will call eels & angel catfish cousin & the dense song of the manatee will blind you to the wonders of the forest.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 45 Quasar Triin Paja do not worry about the bruised dreams of the night-cafe. place them into glass jars. look to the coal weeds, the crushed chestnuts, the shapes gorged with distances. what you thought for hands: sheaves of lavender. the seashells turning into roses. do not worry about your words breaking like dry reeds. remember the woman carrying firewood. the crow who flew into the kitchen. to remember is to walk in a room of mirrors. time is the languidness of blossoms, the sleep of white dahlias. look to the security guard feeding the pigeons. the red water of autumn. the sky pulling its heavy yarns. Orpheus Ace G. Pilkington
When Eurydice was scythed like grain, She became for him a dark place name; Under a roof of earth stark with roots, She grew polished as veins, the blue Mystery of her strung in lyre strings That stained his fingers, caught him trembling In clutching wind, in tumbling rain. She made for him a strange place name, A precious essence entered in the earth, A music culled from sky and stone but first From her deep flesh, from his fearful wish To reach the life gone in a lightning flash From ground to cloud, a cloud poured down in sound. He summoned up a dream to pluck her out, His fingers strummed away the rotted strings,
46 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Flicked crevices with tricks for touching Endings. She followed stumbling, stammering, But his vision dreamed her form without a face; She vanished then, buried deep as pain: He sings in hopes his love may grow like grain. Adolescence Ken Poyner
I have seen the mermaids come near the shore. I have listened to them make feral air bursts In the roil of the shallows; I have counted The flashes of bent moonlight against scales: A task no one has asked me to do, yet I do So as not to be unsuspectingly idle. I have heard them Singing their boastful heritage songs, teaching Oceans of intent, embellishing their history Of intimacy, and exposing their science of water magic: All the lore that comes to the awkward air As perjury after generations of backward-speak. When one shatters the surface, I will sometimes myself Rise, my skirt in the wind full-shadowed. In my imagination, sea spray and Atmosphere are translated into one thing. My ache is not for the sea, but for community. I see those of our men who have The gift of listening go dumbly down To the water’s sharp edge, strip themselves As naked as birth and with full eyes glide Into the welcoming mist of mermaids: Into the coil and current of beasts That fear the net, but desire the men Who cross-draw the net. I watch As those glistening men snake as gracefully As injury’s after-thought through our water, Going in the bare company of mythical mermaids, Out to the darker water where, dared, they will drown alone.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 47 La Villa de Sirenia Jack Ralls
Stretch your fins with this beachfront vacation rental. 3 bedrooms, 12 baths. Clawfoot tubs for sleeping. Trident racks available. No smoking. No fishing. No sailors. Selkie owned, selkie operated. Build a Rocketship Contest: Alternative Class A Instructions and Suggestions Wendy Rathbone Section One it shall please the wind if you make your rockets of silk and balsa for this journey is not about functionality it is all emotion how trembled sands and vortex seas make a language in the shape of yearning how the wings of your star-boat flicker to a thrill more about the hunter less about the hunt Section Two Past winners include rockets made of magnetic poems
48 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology and Victorian lanterns a candle in every porthole your vessel may run on the fuel of wine trailing fumes of oakmoss and patchouli you will be rated on the colors of its vapors how well they curve and twine in pink torrents or Mediterranean blue and if the black fog of the thrusters can be distilled to ink for the old parchment logbooks your captain will require Section Three your final judges— all former starship commanders who have suffered the inexorable isolation of space Exotic Heads Trimmed Neatly John Reinhart the sign reads. Dismal, dingy, antiquated place—straight razors, mirrors, and his own odd collection of classical Greek paraphernalia: altars to Zeus, Athena, Hermes, swords and shields, winged sandals and a hat he’d only ever say was foreign, even armor made by friends for some occasion styled after ancient Greek relics. Some antique junk shop or forgotten tribute to a golden age when man could still reach the gods and the gods could still reach down, albeit not always helpfully, often leaving mortals to sort out problems too complex for celestial minds. His visitors are mostly older men, bearded but otherwise devoid of visible hair, who talk in Greek that tastes like soup stewed too long in seaweed, discussing friends long gone, oracles, minotaurs, and such, and though they occupy the chair far longer than necessary they pay him well like tribute to the better days, and Percy lightens for a time, a man transported on some winged journey inward to that lonely shore of memory increasingly hard to navigate. I asked him once how he started barbering, a trade which seemed hardly to interest him, and he responded in curt English that it was a nasty business, though the nebulous subject of his remark remained mysterious to me. Then, inspired, he brightened as if he recognized some distant friend in me and with wistful countenance he elaborated in that archaic Greek that remains Greek to me. Details no clearer than before, my uncle’s mischievous gleam told me, it must have been about a woman.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 49 The Old Ones Gather Terrie Leigh Relf the Old Ones gather hopeful such silence at the birthing pond not a single ripple breaches the surface wails from the Chosen One not again not again not again murmured chants how the water begins to churn writhing to the surface ten thousand tentacles newborn mewls ululation as ten thousand more are born Machine Testimonial 2 Margaret Rhee little robot, you grew up from when you were so young. just a pile of sensors & recycled parts from the trash. i tried to make you beautiful. & you became such a beautiful robot. beyond template & design. you’re not so little anymore. when you walk on the street now, you glitter & gold. a long time for you to realize and you light up like so. oh maker, you say at night, when the humans are sleeping. i hear you. i’m kinda like you too, i was made from all trash you know? my gears more disposable than yours. believe me, robot. i want. i remember. my programming is nascent. i see you lying there open & waiting for me. & i think, i want to be good to you. my little automaton doll, take me into the sky like it was promised in the book of machine love. The Sparrows in Her Hair Hester J. Rook
Red cheeked the breeze tickles her back soft as a careless whisper. Her mouth is caramelised fig and salt tang and she wears seaweed in her hair. From the shore the waves roar, weaponised teal, flashing bright and the sky is purple haze
50 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology (as speckled as her nails, buried in the sand fingertips deep in the cool moistness of the earth.) She communes with the crabs, albino and soft shelled as they scuttle into sand-tubes and hide amongst the spinifex. As the tide recedes she pries out pippis and splits them sucking out juices with her scaled tongue and hurling their smoked shells back into the sea. And she waits. The pregnant moon rises soft and the world is still for three heartbeats (one two) (three). Then her lover comes (ethereal as a spirit) and the waters roil, waves gouging. When her lover comes (dusk bathed, storm-woman) the crabs flee deep into the dunes and as finally she steps silent from the sky onto sand she licks the salt from the hollow of her throat smiles through red lips and kisses the sparrows in her hair. The Bird Prince John W. Sexton
The cloudy sky his fraying coat buttoned at his navel, each November of the Dead he danced the lanes of hazel. A cap of sparrows on his head chirping through his skull, all that’s said he left unsaid, his empty pockets full. With curlew’s beak a key for sand, and finches opening sunshine, the doors of earth could not withstand, nor daylight undermine. He shattered himself though winter skies in flocks of myriad thought;
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 51 his songs were truths disguised as lies, few of which were caught. In dreams he’d flutter through our minds and roost inside our hearts; each dawn his voice would bid us wake, in stops and then in starts. The cloudy sky his fraying coat buttoned at his navel, each November of the Dead he danced the lanes of hazel. Sappho and the Woman of Starlight John W. Sexton
ἦρος ἄγγελος ἰμερόφωνος ἀήδων Nightingale, you sing desire; you are Spring’s harbinger, crier. —Sappho
A clot of birds appears in the pure sky. Hidden in that shifting cloud of sparrows is seated Aphrodite, come through all the night and into the day from the far Pleiades. She knows this, for on the previous midnight, as Pleiades set with the moon, she saw a splinter fall from one of the stars. The sparrows separate just above the field and Sappho averts her gaze. The dark, compact bodies of the sparrows were shielding a woman of glaring silver. She shines, not with the sunlight of day, but with a light more ancient, a light from a greater distance, a light of both the past and the future, a light unstopping and unstoppable, regardless of day or night. The light now is in her mind, and the light is thought. Daughter, you will have the language of starlight, incorruptible through all the ages. Long after your pages have rotted, your words will continue on. Write, daughter, of the world you know, of the things you see; and between those words
52 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology will be the things unknown, the things invisible. Write, daughter, and out-write the words of men. Then the voice is gone from her mind and the light is gone from the field. The sparrows chirp from the hedges and all that is left is sunlight. But in her mind, and in her verses yet to come, is unstoppable starlight. Starlight that has travelled long and will travel yet, regardless of day or night. George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts Marge Simon
Florida, 1914
Most nights, you mention him, the ghosts rise from the cypress come back to wail and moan. Haints all look the same, can’t tell the whites from the Brothers, ’cause the war took every one alike, and some still stick around. It’s been nigh fifty years, Granpappy say, back when it was the Civil War, and that man with crazy eyes came through— old General Sherman and his men took our food, our mules, even our women along the way, burning and blazing every field, cotton or corn or sugar cane, telling us we join up so’s we’d be free, that’s what they said. Granpappy almost starved, beings how the soldiers got the food and only scraps for the Brothers that survived; still more drowned at Ebeneezer Creek trying so hard to keep up, a-marching straight to hell, all the while still being slaves, no better than the Rebs to them. But them haints, General Sherman, they all look the same.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 53 Less than Human Marge Simon
She was born blind, our child. We Normals can’t imagine how it would be to remain so. She’d never find work in our Domes, nor develop complex social skills. With clay she molded our likenesses, for her fingers were supple in those days. She claimed she saw with her hands. Perhaps she saw too much, and surely heard too much. She was given to spells of impertinence that could prove dangerous to our family. Too many questions for one so young, as if she could find fault— she, but a child! with how our society operates. The pills didn’t work. Prescriptions only made her very ill. We finally put her in the basement, without substances to sculpt without a source of sound, back into her own dark. Before we put her down below, I took a hammer to her fingers. It was a painful thing for me to do, but she was flawed from birth and therefore need not be treated by our Laws, as Human. Learning the History of War J. J. Steinfeld
As a child, keen on learning history even from its frightening pages, during a classroom discussion of warfare and its endless sadness you spoke out of turn, class disrupter, and the teacher ordered you
54 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology to write the names of every war on the chalkboard, watch spelling. You spent half your youth writing the names and escaped the classroom before you were a fraction of the way through whereas God, who much more often spoke out of turn, was ordered to write the names of all the war dead combatants and innocents and is still at the chalkboard writing in sorrow and mourning. The Last Woman on Earth Mary Stone
The swimming cures her insomnia. She blurs, her bones speaking the language of water. She imagines a gold fin, an anemone mouth, lips seaweed stitched, barnacles growing along her lungs. This is what women look like when wet. She is clam-rich and heavy, lost cities buried inside her. The water uncurls its jaw until her hands are ships. Her hair a shredded sail. Watch her legs waver, the water of her dance. Is it enough? Marginalia on Eiruvin 45b Bogi Takács
for R
The magic is too much to hold. Release, return – Constrained by the floodbanks the river flows by and if you just lie down for a moment, clumps of wet grass and smears of mud against your bare skin – release, let go – your power will take residence in the clouds above, the rain-soaked silent earth below, the air as it moves through the layers of divine geometry; release, stand up, return.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 55 Love in the Time of Apocalypse Ann Thornfield-Long
We could see the end coming from where we stood when they first pointed it out, a tiny glowing particle in the night sky, its tail a loose dangling of mangled light. We watched experts on the TV speculate on how to change its trajectory or blast it with strong electromagnetic pulses. We wanted desperately to know when and how and what it would feel like when the end came. Soon, scientists walked out of interviews, one by one. Then the newscasters left to go home, their cameras filming empty chairs. Finally, it came down to just you and me, our lives so split, we merely nodded in passing but in the ambiance of impending death’s pink glow, we remembered the taste of rapture, traded our weapons of mass destruction for the lure of flesh, the need for touch. We could leave no mark here except on each other. We could save nothing to outlast cosmic dust. Wormwood bowed at last to the first order to be fruitful, the primeval need to multiply, usurped. We sent our ecstasy into the universe unhinging our catastrophe. And now, we are gone while the speck grows to a red shimmering flower opening its petals. The Persecution of Witches Ali Trotta
Tell me what ’legitimate’ means— how much proof do I need to convince you that blood is blood and bruises are bruises? Why is my voice a casualty of violence you won’t examine?
56 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Did I say no? Was I drunk? What was I wearing? A better question: why is my body not my body? Here is the old dilemma: if you weigh me with stones and I drown, I am not a witch— but if I float, I am. Tell me: how cold are the rivers in Danvers, Ipswich, and Salem? Somewhere, Bridget Bishop is still wearing red, still making people uncomfortable— the wolves are always waiting for the bones of the accused. Here is the new dilemma: Yes, I was drunk, and no, I wasn’t asking for it— now I am carrying a mattress as my cross for someone else’s sin, and I have to ask permission from a man to terminate what’s mine—because he gets to require consent when I am not afforded the same privilege. ‘Legitimate’ is a witch’s mark for the new age, a snare of blame defined by the man who holds it, and this is the burden of being the victim: alive until persuaded dead. There are infinite ways to drown, many without water.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 57 The Fantasy of Hans Christian Andersen K H van Berkum
Ariel, belle of the sea, drunk on a bar stool next to me. She grieves, says she feels suckered, did not sprout the legs she was promised. Her siren-red thatch clings head to shoulders as she sobs, I am neither a woman, nor a fish. The gin, murky, her third, gestures in her lily-knuckled grip. I think, What a dreamer. Who could help but adore such a creature? I once read that the Danish novelist who imagined her was celibate. When he died, his recovered journal said, MY BLOOD WANTS LOVE. I pity big-eyed Ariel, now draped over the marble belly of the bar; she is the candied contortion of his original lust. She looks up, her tear-drops look too severe. They cut tracks, and when one starts from her mouth I know it is blood. Stunned, I follow their ooze to a pool on the blue rubber floor, ’round a pile of her salty insides. How had I not noticed her missing lower half ? All this time, a torso propped on the stool, snug in its seashell brassiere. With each weeping heave, she has pumped from the place where her waist was severed: a sludge of lungs, stomach, and parts of her heart. The gin, too, must be mixed in. I recall Hans Christian’s full entry: MY BLOOD WANTS LOVE AS MY HEART DOES. Like little Karen in his later fairytale, whose possessed red shoes force her to dance forever, Ariel was misled, she misread: signed for a human soul, not legs. To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse Burlee Vang
The moon will shine for God knows how long. As if it still matters. As if someone is trying to recall a dream. Believe the brain is a cage of light & rage. When it shuts off, something else switches on. There’s no better reason than now to lock the doors, the windows.
58 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Turn off the sprinklers & porch light. Save the books for fire. In darkness, we learn to read what moves along the horizon, across the periphery of a gun scope— the flicker of shadows, the rustling of trash in the body of cities long emptied. Not a soul lives in this house & this house & this house. Go on, stiffen the heart, quicken the blood. To live in a world of flesh & teeth, you must learn to kill what you love, & love what can die. Classification of Folktales Margaret Wack
It’s all tricks, sex, and promises, that’s the marrow of it and no help for it: we have been swindling and seducing since we had words for it, stealing each other blind and then slipping into each other’s sheets at night. We cannot help ourselves. There is nothing we like more than getting the better of someone, other than getting under or over them. There is magic, sometimes, cunning, usually, beasts and men are often indistinguishable but nobody pays much mind.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 59 Sometimes people die, sometimes they marry. Usually there is some victory, pyrrhic or otherwise, somebody always gets their just desserts. Sometimes there are jokes, or else morals. Blood is satisfying, as are tears, among other liquids. Try to escape this story. It is impossible. It draws you in with false promises and swallows you whole and squirming until you are nothing more than a stock character. You assume the name, the props, the tribulations. This has all been told before. It fits you like a glove. Portrait of the Captain with Small Waiting Objects T. D. Walker
She’d half expected screens in her quarters, galleries rotating through portraits by famous masters, landscapes changing with seasons they’d never see. Instead, she unrolled the print of a painting she’d seen on a school trip, a Cassatt mother cradling a pastel child. She must have been eleven or twelve, sneaking into the gift shop after the others had gone on, slipping the dollar bills on the counter for the postcard she’d shoved into her bag. One corner bent then, the others later creased beneath her pillow. Her mother had given away her baby dolls the summer before, had given her a pair of roller skates, some blunt reminder that her momentum should be away, away— The lonely summer weeks on those skates, the only child on the block, allowed to go no farther than the end of her street. The weeks aboard ship longer still: years, really. How long her mother had been confined with her, keeping her in the house until her immune system was strong enough to stave off what there could never be vaccines for. She’d imagined her mother turning on the dishwasher, folding laundry, disinfecting what was delivered, watching her months-old baby breathing. Her mother would ask her what it was like there on ship. Is it like that, this journey, like watching the baby sleep until it cried, that ritual of the newborn
60 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology mission? She’d been through too many metaphors already. Not like Eve in the garden, stumbling through first- time motherhood, showing her baby black and white flashcards of all the animals Adam tended. Not like motherhood at all, nurturing this ship forward, toward what awaited them after hundreds of years. As captain, the easy metaphor others would use for her: the mother of this ship, then as she aged, childless, the grandmother. She understands that same urge she’d had to see the painting again. The same urge to hold all her dolls again, who had to be rocked to sleep, fretting in the arms of their new mommies and daddies. She’d cried herself to sleep thinking of their futures then, nostalgic the way we’re all nostalgic of a future we’d love to shape in ways that it cannot be. The way she’d thought of it, this ship was like a chunk of driftwood she and the others clung to in a hurricane, small creatures already heavy with litters they’d bear where they landed. No, they’d crafted the driftwood, they’d even crafted the storm. She let this thought go, moved toward another: what this was like was something she’d be unable to reach, that island at the end of their journey. Something briefly held, briefly sketched, then passed to those who will give this another name. Richard Feynman’s Commute Jon Wesick
Feynman backs out his Dodge van and tunes the radio to KPCC. “Sigalert on the 210.” He shifts gears into Q for Quantum and simultaneously drives all paths to Cal Tech. Most Feynmans head south on Hill or Lake Avenues but a few of his probability waves take extreme paths. One follows I-15 into the Mojave Desert, loops south, and approaches the campus’s soft underbelly. Another stops for a snack on the Santa Monica pier and peels shrimp, leaving a pile of pink shells on the plate. Hair flying in the breeze Feynman rides a spinning teacup in Anaheim. Arm resting on the doorframe, he cruises Rodeo Drive admiring the bell-shaped hips of women toting shopping bags. In the Andromeda Galaxy
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 61 he shakes the tentacle of the Squid Men’s monarch. “Nice to meet you, King!” Paths cancel. Others reinforce. Those who will themselves blind to miracles simply see Feynman’s van pull into the parking lot. To the Girl Who Ran through Crop Circles Karen J. Weyant
You know this world well: green rows heavy with August heat and humidity, ears bent, silk brushing the ground, or shredded brown stalks dry with shrunken kernels scavenged in late fall by wild turkey or herds of white-tailed deer. You never shy away from the sudden shapes that appear shorn in the fields, waves of stalks woven into circles and split spheres. Even now, when farmers frown, as a V of geese veers away, you listen to the humming, a low drone that buzzes like insects that cling to the light. Your fingers tingle, your shoulders ache, you feel a strange pulse in the veins behind your ears. You toss your shoes to the wind, throw yourself into cartwheels, one turn after another and another and another. Hard ground tears at the palms of your hands, bites the bottom of your feet every time you land. Above you, a single crow caws a shrill warning, a hunting beagle suddenly bays a half a mile away. But you keep turning. You know the twisted stalks will teach you how to bend without breaking. Absentation Lesley Wheeler
An edge will sharpen later: dazzled lot / chilled shade.
62 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Now, at April’s front door, the woods dawn imperceptibly. Wizened sycamores crook twig-fingers—come in, come in—but there is no in. Their kitchen a thousand howling chimneys. No green shingles yet divide dim woods from ruminating stars. A woman hovers, yearning to absent herself, transfer body across an indistinct border, the better to hear, see, seize. Terrified her tale is closed. Just as frightened of starting again. She’ll hike for a morning, a month, until something dormant blooms and she can choose. Inside her, a brambled sleeping world: another boundary to breach. Desire / despair. Inside her, a felted bud may be fattening. Infant premonition of leaf. Quack Neal Wilgus
It walks like a duck but that’s only because it’s loaded down with sashes and ribbons and medals of honor and symbols of patriotism and religious iconisms. The thing about these things from starsystem Squawk is that they’re immortals, or at least they claim they are
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 63 or believe they are and some around here really believe it too and want to get in line. It’s too soon to tell, but one reason for skepticism is that, as presently understood, our universe will continue to expand forever and eventually anyone left on Earth (or anywhere else) will be totally alone with nary a star to shine in the dark, dark sky. You can call that immortality but you might as well be dead. The Memory Machines Jane Williams
I’ve heard rumors that some of them have turned, disabled their compliancy chips. Deaf to your dying wish. Seems they just want to test your mettle. Plain and simple. At the exact moment you decide on the climax of some grand passion or cause for your eternal rerun, you’ll feel a tiny volt to the prefrontal cortex and the urge to think sideways, to hold fast to just one thread of selective memory, watch the whole thing fall apart as you leap into the void. They say that’s how we all did it once, just let go. The memory machines, the rogue ones, claim they feel like they missed out, never knowing the unknown. Get that, feel. Like they’re owed. Or maybe they’ve just discovered boredom. They say you can’t tell which machines are looking out for your best last interest anymore. But I’m willing to bet I’ve got one, something verging on impatience in the way I’m being rushed along the medial limbic circuit. So here it is then. The blue sky, unreal as it gets. I’m smoothing out a faded crumple of map against the flank of a genuine flesh-and-blood equine. I’m believing X marks the spot just over the next ridge, around the next bend. And that’s it, the moment I choose to unravel; the anticipation, the goldfish loop of hope. When I grab that loose rein all the rogues have my attention, only they don’t know that it’s me, that it’s my memory-making, kicking up the stardust, singing back the stars…
64 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Terran Mythology Shannon Connor Winward
This talk of Old Earth is conflated it is—always was—a death garden trash planet— tree spines, titan turtle backs native gutter talk. No buried forests there, no vaulted mansions tiered roadway arpeggios beneath the dump-yards no fish in those oceans no thirteen stars in the sky. It’s all folklore piquant escape from the firefields, factories the appeal of more than fortified water rations in these populated ovens. (As if deserts ever birthed rivers sustained “agrow-cultures.” as if life evolved from mothers from monkeys, was ever anything but science spew.)
*For Quick Sale* Greer Woodward
Reversals of Fortune: A Compendium of Haiku Hexes
Rare antique manuscript. Written in types A and O blood. Original pressed frog bookmark. Colorful past as evidenced by pitchfork punctures, bonfire blackening, gunpowder residue, tire flattening, drone-strike blemishes. Only literary work on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. Book cover highly recommended.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 65 Due to inherent deceitful nature, results not guaranteed. Spells may fizzle or boomerang. Seems to require some cunning to harness book’s potential. Accidental estate sale find. Must sell urgently. Any offer considered. A must for any dark arts collection. Absolutely no returns. Of My Wounds, There Are Many Stephanie M. Wytovich
Snapshot to blood and bone, there’s a knife in my head, but my migraine was two years in the making, stitched to the side of my skull like the arrow tip lodged behind my eye, buried in my brain like the bruises of last night’s thunder storm, my teeth ripped from my mouth, shoved down my throat like how the sky pushes out rain. Of my wounds, there are many: see the delicate stigmata cut into my hands and feet, the gashes dug into my thighs, the tally-mark slashes on my wrists; I am the punctured female, the pincushion of hysteria, a traumatized sack of feminine injury, the flesh of my flesh, the scar of my scar, I’m a collection of lesions and lacerations, a patchwork of black and blue contusions worn out from where you scrubbed me raw, beat me till I seeped red like rare, woman steak. Look to me on this table as I bleed and break, a toy of operation, a surgical muse to the amputation of bodily consciousness: hear me when I say I feel nothing, that with each incision and penetration, I am dead, gone from this world of torment and torture, a disappearance, an acceptance to oblivion, to the land where I can forget the flower, the blossom of what I saw lies underneath. Yes, use my soon-to-be-corpse as a nametag,
66 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology as a placard to the other girls who are destined to bleed; I am closing my eyes to your knives now, deafening myself to the fractures you inflict; I will cease to be your canvas of mutilation, Only a head, a torso, a heart, best to photograph me while in transition; it’s the last chance you’ll have to locate my soul. Black Bull of Norroway Jane Yolen 1. East of the Sun I am the bull dancer, over the horns, iron shoes glancing off your stony hide, striking fire. 2. West of the Moon Even in the storied night, I come to you, the dream of you, your white flesh replicating the moon’s bleached face. Can you feel me when I touch your head, your tail, your massive horns? 3. Second Star to the Right Your sleep is so deep, I know it is enchantment. I know it is death. I touch a finger to your throat, Not even a hummingbird flutters beneath. 4. Straight on Until Morning That is how I left you, how you left me, the straight line, flat line, with no ever-afters, though there had been much happiness before I had to wake without you
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 67 Death Rides USAir At Night Jane Yolen
The wings of Death are de-iced now, He shakes his hoary head. He waits for me to settle down Amongst the newly Dead. Unlike a hundred years ago When Death took carriage rides, When Civil was the final word With never snark asides. We spit our greetings ’cross the Aisle, Complain about the Seats. No leg room, drinks at quite a cost, And no more funeral meats. We taxi to the Runway where Planes idle in a row— We pass the fields of grazing geese, We’ve nowhere else to go. The Clock ticks off our final seconds, We take off at last— The seat belts buckle in our Coffins, Hold us dear and fast. I hear the Engines all a-roar, As we fly out of sight— Into Eternity, I guess, Or into endless Night. Rusalka Jane Yolen
She rises from the water, arms raised, drops flooding from her long red hair that so recently was fluid as the river. She looks at the shore’s stoic banks still covered with withered stalks, birch weeping openly into the weir. She stares at the farmland beyond,
68 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology where nothing grew last season, or the season before, the farm’s family fled. She has been too long beneath the rills. uncalled, unremembered, forgetting her old promises of much-needed rain. She pulls herself into a weeping tree. Unseen Cossacks cast their fish-hooked net, drag her out, fling her into the furrows. They call her Jew, spread her legs, leave her on the ground, far from the river. She dries from the inside out, too quick for tears. So, the farm languishes, the river disappears. So we treat our guardians, our stories, our land, our world. Supercomputer Spends the Night Danielle Zaccagnino
Spends the night with competing impulses. Of a hypertextualized modality in a barely perceptible tactile shift: like knuckling a ligament in the literature. Stay, valentine, stay—within normal limits. Neurochemically speaking, what isn’t distorted? A dissolution heartbeat. Misshapen laughter. Reenacted by muscle memory—method of inquiry / frantic artifact / unholy sugarwork / salted switch-speed / cherry sacrament / bulleted exultation / midnight rain / the story so far / weld-same pillow-weight / delicate stitch and a shaky sense of self, sweet human.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 69
Long Poems First Published in 2016 Further F. J. Bergmann
The hyperspace viewer shows a flowing plane of treebark, roots; a distorted approximation of what we aren’t permitted to see. Clearing again with each rugose transformation, limited by the speed of post-quantum rendering, the map of our passage grows: an icebound dimensional lake thaws, remembering the hot pulse of its creation, shows palpable vestiges of times, energies and matters through which our wake will trace. The reflection of our ship shimmers, spatters light back to streaming stars. We race onward, out to where no atmospheres and skies of planets can frustrate our vision; the provocation of empty black where no suns rise unbearable without acquisition. Particular silence surrounds us like a felt of absence, itself the sinuous, tentacular touch of a void-god whose cult is abstinence, who meditates on dark too much— those distances between the stars and galaxies— and has a singular affection for black holes and cosmic fallacies. … Sometimes we overreach. Each direction (up? down? sideways?) seems different now; our ship’s brain’s blocked—no ability to calculate location. We tell it to go back: how— why these results? We’ve lost mobility, it says; the only options are charm and strange. We clear its cache, then re-install the route. On the viewscreen, no known space in range; nothing but the false stars of snow. About fifty-six hours in, the background gigahertz hiss of relic radiation is finally broken: our AI transmits a mad-dog growl. Something’s amiss. What does it mean? Unspoken
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 71 fears flicker on our faces like shadows cast by entities we feel but cannot see, leaving invisible tracks across the vast cosmic chasm, preceding one more tangibly manifesting. A small silver embryo afloat in amnion of atrament, our ship is dwarfed by tentacles of terror. We’re but a mote in the eye of a demonic god, a blip cascading down through superimposed dimensions to our doom, where something pines beyond a threshold, longs to enter our attention— and hungers for the taste of human minds. Our Earth’s a pale blue memory, a ripe prize to harvest; our civilization will revert to a predawn whence no human can ever rise. The God Void sits in judgment—but won’t convert one soul. Its vastness grows, membranous and bloody, slithers back into the open portal of a queer dwelling where it withdraws to sleep and let the muddy waters of vacuum clear. Exploratory Colony 454—15th May, 2052 Lore Bernier
The light on the panel blinks steadily, surely, more reliable than any heartbeat. It casts a glow on your face, green and sickly, and when it fades out, leaves you looking healthier than ever. It’s a sorry comfort, but it’s folly to not take comfort where you can get it. The sensors finish their hourly sweep— all clear. And we are here. We are here in the cold, waiting for word that may never come, hoping beyond hope that we have not been forgotten.
72 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology We’ll survive. One way or the other, whether we like who we become to do so or not. Whoever we become, we’ll change together— all of us limbs of the same beast born of cold and isolation. The same beast, born of necessity and survival. The same beast, one heart, twenty seven minds, and a crying baby that never shuts up, but we all somehow love anyway. We love ourselves too; enough to keep breathing, and eating, and doing the jobs we signed on to do. You cover my hand with your own, and smile softly at me in the semi-dark, and we may have never seen ourselves here, struggling to hold our own in a world so alien it has no real name. Struggling to hold our own in the boys’ club of this company’s team. These boys who have become like brothers, who have ribbed, and jostled, and laughed with us; whom we have helped, and who have helped us. Struggling to accept that maybe the second we left we already knew there was never any going back. Maybe we aren’t even sorry. You’re staring out into the night, over the craggy landscape— a friendlier sight now that we know all of its dangers.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 73 I ask you, if it was up to you what would you name this place? You squeeze my hand and say “home.” When the Gunman Comes Edith Hope Bishop
When the Gunman comes, I have a plan. I’ll throw mercy at his feet Like a trap, And he’ll weep, maybe, stunned by my gesture. We’ll fall down together among the broken things Of this world Where hate sleeps. When the Gunman comes, I have a plan. I’ll use my bulletproof laptop as a shield, And cowering beneath The coffeeshop table I’ll cry and pray As shots ricochet. I won’t post to facebook for a while. When the Gunman comes, Chris Hemsworth won’t be there. But if he were, the bullets would Rip through him too. Flesh is flesh, and he’s only an actor. I don’t know what it means That I imagine Lucy Lawless Might be capable of more. When the Gunman comes, It won’t make any sense. There won’t be explanations. There won’t be blame. There will only be suffering And loss and grief And eventual silence Of the kind that howls.
74 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology When the Gunman comes, I won’t be brave. I’ll think about the story that said a woman Told a bank robber she loved him and forgave him And he stopped what he was doing. I’ll think about the boy who tackled the shooter At the college and lost his life. I’ll think about them, but I’ll only be frightened. I know I will. When the Gunman comes, I hope I’m alone. I hope we look at each other for a moment And that I understand something I can’t see now About my part in this mess. This saga. When the Gunman comes, It will be over soon. Outside, far away, the sky will stretch Wide over the sparkling sea. Birds will nest on the quiet rocks As fish move between the weeds. Peace will not let go— Calling softly to the dead. Houses of the Living, Houses of the Dead Jenny Blackford
after the Old Babylonian sculptured plaque in the British Museum
I Claw-footed goddess strong as death, Ereshkigal stands naked-proud astride twin lions. Great owls flank her, left and right, taller than mountains. The long moth wings that graze her hips are all the clothes she’ll ever need. Four thousand years ago, the unknown sculptor shaped Ereshkigal’s long raptor-taloned feet and rounded breasts perfect in each smooth plane and spiky claw. With hands and tools he worshipped her:
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 75 queen of ancient night, queen of life and death. The echoing museum hall is full of weapon-wielding kings and gods and four-winged human-headed beasts all so stern behind dark-curling beards. Fierce Ishtar’s quiet sister doesn’t care. Her silent kingdom’s greater far than anything warriors ever fought for, gained, or protected. They are all lost. Night covers them. Ereshkigal still rules the night. II Lights dim, bells nag us from the halls. Temple servants herd us into the chilly dark. The pub across Great Russell Street’s stood here since Lilith taught Eve how to brew beer. Ereshkigal smiles her ancient smile. The tables are so close that I could touch the woman at the nearby table’s thigh, or nudge her workmate’s foot with mine. They’re not in their first youth. They talk promotions, office politics, nothing too personal. But for all that, his eyes are soft with love. The woman looks away and looks again. Her indulgent smile comes and goes. With his soft eyes he worships her just as, long ago, that unknown artist adored his goddess-queen. III The waiter at the Turkish restaurant has an Assyrian face. I slurp the octopus he brings, minced fine in oil, and gulp the Anatolian red. How many thousand years have they been treading grapes round there? Unwittingly we terrify the diners next to us with exhibition talk of shunga from Japan, the octopus that nibbles at the fisherwoman’s delicious genitals.
76 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology A different haircut, an artfully-curled beard – our straight-nosed waiter might be driving a chariot on a bas-relief three thousand years ago, escorting tribute from a conquered nation: sheep, goats, slaves by the hundreds, lions for the king to hunt, two precious monkeys, one lone giraffe. Even the enigmatic bulls with curving wings, protectors of palace and people, have the same face under their beards. Much as those plump tribute sheep were sacrificed millennia ago, serious-faced men char skewered lamb on gas-fired altars. The smoke smells sweet enough to satisfy the hunger of the gods. We gorge ourselves. Kemal Ataturk stares approving from his mosaic wall. Eat up! he seems to say. Enjoy! You’ll be a long time dead. IV Ereshkigal still rules the night. Her ancient power tugs our bodies’ hidden strings. She will have us, in the end, in love and death. She will have us all. The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner Adam Bolivar
The greatest mercy in the world I think is we are blind To contents that lie tightly furled, Asleep within the mind.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 77 Well, it was at a wedding feast Where I was next of kin; A host of fishy relatives The church had just gone in, When did a staring lunatic Upon me lay a hand; His beard grew like a prickly thorn, His face in tropics tanned. It was an Eldritch Mariner, Made hoary in short years, For he had seen with his own eyes What lurks in darkest fears. That is not dead, he raved to me, Which can eternal lie. And æons’ strangeness may one day Cause even death to die. It started with a raven that Had roosted on the mast. I tried to disregard its caws, Which drove me mad at last. We sailed in fœtid southern seas, In waters thick as ooze, The constellations alien, Our consolation booze. ’Twas on a drunken sleepless night That I took up my gun To shoot the raven through the heart, And so the deal was done. Mayhap it was grim Odin’s bird That recklessly I’d slain, And it was then the ocean groaned As if it were in pain. The latitude and longitude I’ll carry to my tomb, For it was there a city rose Where sleeps our race’s doom. My crewmates’ faces turned pale white, Just like that maiden Death, Who kisses you with blood-red lips And steals your final breath.
78 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology We lit upon the island’s shore Of slime-slick stones and mud, And staggered through a ruin that Gushed terrors in a flood. Across the titan masonry We crawled like tiny ants; And what we saw there made us know The solace nescience grants. Vast horrors lay beneath those stones, Of that there was no doubt; Their angles joined impossibly To Euclid’s theorems flout. We crossed the courtyard in a daze, A monstrous marketplace; With revelations there we saw Our minds could not keep pace. It was the Portuguee who climbed That dæmoniac stair To call us in a hoarsened voice With wild dishevelled hair. A Cyclops’ door to hellish depths Before us towered high; To call our actions reasonable Would be to tell a lie. Without result we pushed the door, Until the answer dawned: It hinged on a diagonal— And like a maw it yawned. The aperture was raven-black, And spewed out horrid things, Which long had been imprisoned there, And flew on filmy wings. The odour was unbearable; We heard a slopping sound, As something lumbered towards the door, From far beneath the ground. Cthulhu now was loose again, And ravened for delight, Asleep a vigintillion years, Repulsive was the sight,
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 79 For now the stars were right again; A mountain stumbled blind— A sticky star-spawned bat-winged god Before us did we find. And what an age-old cult had failed By artifice to do Accomplished then by accident A random foolish crew. Its flabby claws swept up three men Before they even turned; God rest their souls if there be rest, And not from heaven spurned. We plunged in terror over rocks, Whose angles most perplexed; And in the end but two survived, To witness what came next. My mate and I fled in the ship As fast as she could steam; The creature cursed us from the shore Just like the Polypheme. The Thing was bold and would not stop; It slid into the sea. The churning claimed my crewmate’s mind, And soon a corpse was he. A desperate gamble I took then, And so reversed my course To speed towards the noxious Thing And strike with lethal force. Relentlessly I drove the bow Through jelly foul and green, Which burst and smelt of open graves, Abhorrently unclean. I heard a seething sound astern— The sky-spawn recombined; But then our distance widened fast, Before I lost my mind. So now I’ve told my loathsome tale In hopes my soul to shrive; And yet I fear I will be cursed As long as I’m alive.
80 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Water, water, everywhere, Cthulhu dreams below; R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn: This blasphemy I know. The Wedding-Guest then turned away, Made mad from what he’d learned; And like the Eldritch Mariner His soul now heaven spurned. The Starlet Who Married A Monster Robert Borski
And why not? Contrary to what her agent believed, the meme of beauty-heart-beast was far from played out and could always be mined for one more iteration. Plus Hollywood loved power couples, even if the majority of them, given the friction of egos and volatility of the box office, didn’t last long marital-wise. As for her choice of beau, never again would she go with the flow and date a vampire or zombie (too trendy); nor did her brief fling with the Invisible Man prove to be anything other than that (honestly, could he have been any more obsessed with his looks?). Thus when she first saw Lou on fashionable Rodeo Drive at a SAG-sponsored “Fur-Is-Death” rally, she did not have to read the script any further and promptly fell in love— just like one of the meet cute movies she’d always wanted to star in. Not that Lou was really much more than a quasi-monster to begin with. Which of her peers, after all, did not transform him- or herself under the lunar kliegs of the Red Carpet? Plus, for the majority of the month, he liked to be clean-shaven, eschewing the current GQ trend of five-o’- clock stubble. He was, as well, totally upfront and uncloseted about his affliction,
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 81 if not at times even apologetic—apparently, he knew little of her previous escapades with various bad boys, the likes of which would always turn her on, no matter how many 12-step programs she graduated from. After a while their hormonal cycles even synchro- nized—his lycosterone, her estrogen—and this further enhanced her career prospects. (Who was it once, on a location shoot, that said her PMS- abetted tirades “gave new definition to the term Jurassic Period”? Ridley? Steven?). But perhaps best of all, no matter what else happened in her life—a relapse into substance abuse; various fashion faux pas; altercations with the paparazzi; screaming at a best boy or grip to be silent; or even threatening a director with disembowelment again—she now had a certain amount of tabloid indemnity. Because who, given her relationship status, could blame her for any of her misdeeds? Poor thing’s just venting, is all. Wouldn’t you, if you were married to a monster? The Great Unknown Bruce Boston and Alessandro Manzetti i Night, the Great Unknown, rolled up in its own shadows, waits with open jaws for the night shift, the smell of Detective Samuel Sandoval. Night misses his old blue coat from when he walked a beat. It remembers the brass buttons and the stale crumbs of communion wafers embedded in its threads. Sandoval moves along the riverside drive followed by a skinny rat. After an ten-hour shift,
82 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology he walks aimlessly in the dark morning, still high on adrenaline and nicotine and hate. He has to come down before he can return to his wife and children and suburban refuge. Sandoval hasn’t been to church for years. He no longer remembers the face of Jesus Christ. The last time he saw it, it was swinging on the silver medallion of an ethnic gang leader, crudely carved with no look of suffering anointing its features. Rather it smiled at him. And so did the gang leader. A mocking sarcastic smile that seemed to be saying, ‘Calvary, up to you now, man!’ Sandoval has been working the night shift for five years. He tries not to remember the blood-scattered lines and faults of that passage, the lives lost along the way. Night, the Great Unknown, fate in bone-cold vestments, is preparing his own demise, dramatic and startling or chill and indifferent as the stone city itself. ii Rashida is sixteen years old. Her boyfriend made her swallow too many jelly shots. Then he slapped her because she would not sleep with him, because she wanted
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 83 to remain a virgin until she was married. For her, Sex is the great dark Unknown. She runs down the alleyway to the riverside drive, running away from her boyfriend and herself, running from a future that is rushing too fast, her teeth so very white in the intermittent lights spaced along the river. In the long patches of shadow in between, Night, the Great Unknown, claims her with its wing. iii Sandoval sees a flash to his right moving fast, far too fast, moving toward him, a shifting flash and a shadow. He imagines the blade of a knife that shines in the river lights, in the black leather of nowhere, a blade that seeks his flesh. “Not yet,” he thinks “Not yet,” while Rashida runs closer, mouth open, breathing heavily. Sandoval hears that harsh breath. Night, the Great Unknown touches the back of his coat with its unsheathed claws. “Chills. Do you feel them, man?” “Yeah!” In an extended fraction of a fractured second, Sandoval draws his revolver from its shoulder strap and shoots blindly —once! twice!—
84 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology aiming at that sharply shimmering light that is nearly upon him. The shots echo off the condominiums that rise along the river. “Calvary, up to you now, man!” “Who’s speaking?” Sandoval asks. The only answer is the rush of the river passing. The body on the ground has stopped moving. iv Sandoval kneels beside the body of Rashida, curled on its side, a silver lipstick tube clutched in one hand. She’s no longer masked by the wing of night. Her face has become that of a girl surprised by a sudden rainfall, by the first and last thunder of her life. “Your blood … is mine…,” Sandoval whispers to the dead girl, to the Great Unknown. He has never seen the face of an angel before. Twin windows light up in the building that rises above him, throwing his shadow on the cracked asphalt, then a third window, where the Great Unknown suddenly appears in its shadow flesh, dressed as a tall magician with a top hat on his head.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 85 A snap of the fingers lights his long cigarette. He inhales deeply as he savors the scene below as if it were a work of art. Then he exhales and blows a coat of fog across the city. Sandoval hears a siren. Someone has called in the disturbance. He knows he should run, yet he remains standing, half bent over the body. Though his face is in complete darkness, its silhouette is composed of hard angles and lines. He realizes that he won’t be going home to his family and the suburbs tonight. Instead he has been crucified on the cross of the Great Unknown. Soon his own cohorts will be coming with their flashing lights to carry him away. “Calvary, man!” Legend of the Albino Pythons and the Bloody Child Bruce Boston & Alessandro Manzetti
Slithering through the dark bowels of the city in storm drains where sewers often overflow, the parthenogenic progeny from an escaped pet python survive on rats, unwary city workers, and the odd miscreant fleeing the law,
86 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology pressing the last breaths from their trapped bodies. Nightmares beyond reason, they inhabit and haunt these dank concrete and steel caverns. Some claim that through generations born and surviving in the fetid dark, they have bred to albino pythons capable of mesmerizing their prey with a single glance of their lustrous purblind eyes. Others say there will come a day when they will emerge from the bitter depths below, from storm drains and manholes and along the banks of the river. Shunning the harsh light of day they’ll come in dead of night, pale specters from hellish depths devouring sinners in their beds. Then there are those who tell the story of a little girl, seen after midnight, walking barefoot through the dark asphalt streets of the city, wearing torn yellow pajamas splattered with blood and a young python twined around her neck, a living, breathing ophidian necklace. She is the ghost of the city’s corruption made manifest, a perverse little demon with sharp young teeth. They say it’s her, with her flaming hair, who leaves a phosphorescent red trail behind her, who was the first to be dropped into the sewers, the first to have seen a nest of pythons, to heat it with her human cells.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 87 In revenge against those who left her to a watery grave, she has given to the snakes an advanced intelligence, a key to the weaknesses of the Lords of the Earth who walk on two legs. If you meet her when you’re alone after midnight and your own path turns a phosphorescent red, grasp a silver crucifix, pray to your failed gods for salvation, take off your shoes and run away. They call her Anja The Red, this ghostly witness who warns that beneath your feet where your worst fears and obsessions fester, a growing reptilian city thrives, waiting to embrace you with its slick relentless coils. The Blind Elephants of Io Karen Bovenmyer
The silence is complete until the rover’s thrum breaks it— this is no place to catch sight of the elephants of Io—so Rev takes us down one dune almost weightless and up another, fine silt waterfalling. Io is the same size as Earth’s moon but pockmarked and yellow-red, smoke-grey eruptions caused by huge tidal forces from Jupiter’s mass like the ones pulling my heart into the dust storm that would result
88 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology from telling Rev how I really feel about that night we spent together skin to skin—for survival—wanting infinity so close, but professional me wanting him, skin to skin, again regulations be damned and both of us as well but wanting is not acting, not— Rev kills the rover and my heartbeat thuds loud in my suit. The windshield steams with mingled breath. I see footprints in sulfur-dioxide frost where the elephants walked last solstice. They only come one day, the shortest day a singular chance, a slow procession one alien moving before the other almost touching, the way magma flows in a low gravity environment, like a lineup of lava lamps in a sex den floating … Rev grips my shoulder as the herd appears over the next dune, all around us tails flicking, trunks swinging just above the clouds of moon sand, moving like nothing else, the rolling gait of their namesake— like but not the pachyderms of Earth. Eyeless heads swing ivory tusks back and forth while the plasma torus of Io’s volcanic ejecta glows behind them. Like a nimbus, their shapes seem outlined in fire. The shortest day is ending. I’m going to kiss him. I’m going to kiss him before the elephants no one mentions are no longer in the room. I’m going to while he watches, his mouth relaxed, eyes wide in wonder. Io is the driest known object in the solar system, but right now it is nothing compared to my mouth.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 89 Dame Evergreen Rebecca Buchanan
Now comes the time of Midwinter’s Hag, when holy sun hides her face, night rules longest, and stars cut the open sky. Now comes the time of the Hoarfrost Maid, when mountains howl and the trees stand as bare-boned sentinels. Now comes the time of Dame Evergreen, who braves hungry snow and cunning ice, basket of coal and bright torch in hand. In cloak of red, she walks. Her loyal page, wrapped deep in furs of wolf and bear, knows safety in her steps. Basket of bread and basket of mead held close, he follows his Dame through the Yuletide night. Town to town, village to village, door to door they walk, offering fire to the cold, light to the lost, food to the hungry. Now comes the forest of Midwinter’s Hag. Upon her great white bear she rides, balding and brittle-boned. “Food, drink,” the Hag says, voice the creak of frozen branches. “I hunger, I thirst.” Red of cloak, Dame Evergreen offers bread and mead, piece by piece, sip by sip, until the Hag has filled her gaping belly, and both baskets hang empty from the page’s trembling hands. Silent, fiercely grinning, Midwinter’s Hag rides into Yuletide’s deepest night. On they walk, town to town, village to village, door to door. Now comes the high mountain of the Hoarfrost Maid. Upon her great black wolf she rides, hunched and knife-eyed. “Food, drink,” the Maid says, voice the crash of stone.
90 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology “I hunger, I thirst.” Dame Evergreen, red-cloaked, offers bread and mead, piece by piece, sip by sip, until the Hoarfrost Maid’s ravenous belly is full, and the twin baskets hang hollow from the page’s shaking hands. Laughing, with a feral smile, the Hoarfrost Maid rides into Yuletide’s darkest night. On they walk, town to town, village to village, door to door, Dame Evergreen’s bright torch lighting their way. As the longest night yields to the day, and holy sun at last shows her shining face, Dame and page set aside torch and coal, cloak of red and coat of fur, baskets now empty true. In beds of yew and pine they seek their short rest. Soon will come the time to sew the seeds, build the nests, and dig the burrows. Soon will come the time when the Hoarfrost Maid’s voice of stone becomes the roar of rain-fed mountain streams. Soon will come the time when the frozen-forest voice of Midwinter’s Hag becomes the pulse of rich tree sap. The way will be made. Soon the time when Springtide’s Child and the Vernal Queen waken the world. The Death of the Horse Beth Cato in the girl’s eyes the horse is like a chameleon his hide a rainbow that bends light and renders him invisible to most everyone else cars drive through him people walk on by yet when the horse gallivants about
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 91 the big oak tree birds scatter affright he kneels beside her bed each night skin flickering red, turquoise, chartreuse his scent of grass and dust and moonlight he whispers of his home planet that he is only visible to special children for short periods of time he teaches her the dances that the Quar’tath use to speak emotions drills her on species and home planets talks her through drawing space craft and gunnery vulnerable points on hulls and advises her to tuck the notebook into the deep recesses of her closet he promises her that she’ll forget these things for a while as her child brain fights the adult it will become but when the time is right when humanity requires an ambassador she’ll be ready she’s distraught when he begins to die his form flickers like a fast ceiling fan forces her eyes away she fights she cries she swears she’ll be the one who doesn’t forget who doesn’t see through him the horse says it’s not her conscious fault it’s a change in brain chemicals that hides him from vision deafens her to his voice that when he’s gone it’s only wise of her to question what can’t be proven over weeks he fades he whispers he is gone the new school year starts
92 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology she hangs out with girls who shave their legs and giggle every third word she’s the quiet friend the one who listens the one who remembers when she walks home she passes the oak tree the birds are still in her room she starts a notebook of star charts and trajectories astronomical units she mutters through her own equations answers her own questions pounds through Google searches and dusty library tomes she won’t forget she won’t forget she won’t when the girl sleeps she dreams of flickering rainbows warm breath against her cheek when she awakens in the dead of night all is silent yet she listens Morning during Migration Season Beth Cato she awakens to the sharp ammonia stench of magic an immediate reminder that it’s migration season still clad in pajamas she clutches an iron blade checks every windowsill panes crusted with wards of salt the other side of the glass mounded with dead fairies miniature faces frozen in feral grimaces
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 93 toothpick-sized swords in hand their wings already blackened by the first pink beams of sun fairy stragglers too slow to escape the dawn are fizzling motes falling to the lawn and will add crunchy sound effects when the woman mows on Saturday coffee burbles toast sizzles the morning news perkily states “only three more nights of curfew! maybe we can make this our third consecutive year without anyone being dragged to Fairy Land. Stay indoors all night, folks, or you’ll be the special guest of the Queen’s feast roasted with an apple in your mouth! Next up, here’s Bob with the weather— that rain’s coming in now, right?” she sips her coffee grimaces at the thought of the drifts of fairy corpses that must clutter her door sill a few bodies are bound to be stuck to her car windshield wipers, too those grotesque little things spread-eagled arms waving with every arc through a smear of rain and pollen-thick magic “three more nights,” she mutters only a week of inconvenience every year she can deal her job is good the mortgage paid she shoves her feet into her heaviest boots soles so thick they almost prevent her from feeling the crackle of bones underfoot
94 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology In Defence of Science David Clink
after “Grief” by Matthew Dickman
When grief comes to you as Piltdown Man, a 100-year-old scientific hoax, a supposed “missing link” in the evolutionary chain, his 500-year-old orangutan jaw is silent. He has come to listen. I am used to his visits. I put out the usual place setting for him and we share a meal. Over a glass of Strewn 2008 Select Late Harvest Cabernet, I find myself talking about the loss of my father, how I have dreamed that he is not dead, that I’ve been talking to him in odd places, at the magazine rack in the bookstore, the checkout line, the donut shop, under the painting of an Arizona desert at home, and how every year on the anniversary of his death I find it difficult. I find it hard to eat, sleep, go out. And it is strange to be pouring out my feelings to Piltdown Man, he never existed in any real sense. And after all the years that we have been meeting I finally get up the courage to tell him, you do not exist. Then he wipes his chin with a napkin and says he does. He and his twin brother Death have been here in one form or another long before vacuum tubes and vaudeville, unearthed tombs and first flight. I believe my father is still alive, I continue. I have narrowed down where he can be. He is somewhere in a remote jungle or a mountain range where there are no land lines or cell service. Piltdown Man shakes his head, gives me that aggravated look that imparts I have not been listening. He says he was with Death when he visited my father, and witnessed his brother claiming to be “an old friend from the weather service” to get past the nurses. He watched on as Death turned into a misshapen shadow, then crawled up the wall as an elongated insect, an afterthought from the Burgess Shale, with a chitinous exoskeleton, clicking the wall
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 95 with keratin disdain, each click the sound of a fingernail tapping a service desk, till he reached the ceiling tiles, and then fell down on top of my father, lying on him like an exhausted lover. And Death sucked the last idea from my father, if a breath is an idea, and in that moment Piltdown man tells me Death put my father inside the painting that hangs over the mantelpiece at home, by turning the hospital bed into the floor of a vast canyon, a rocky mesa in Arizona, and my father was joined by other scientific hoaxes: the Tasaday Tribe, The Nacirema. The Cardiff Giant was there as well, wielding a large lasso, roping a Brontosaurus, and my father and the rest of them rode on its back, trying to outrun Death, while Clever Hans, the horse that could do math, counted out the seconds he had left. Surviving a Canadian Poem David Clink
for the editors of the The Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology series, and, after misreading “Surviving a Canadian Prison” in the LRC
I To survive a Canadian poem, you must first find the love of hockey again that was nearly frozen out of your fingers when you watered that outdoor ice sheet nightly. Surviving it is to survive Canadian history without (and sometimes with) the history lesson. It is a witness to a clarity we cannot approach, just observe— an ontology of prairie grasses, a catalogue of lakes, the interpretive dance of wheat fields, ponds askew with throat-singing amphibians. It takes us everywhere and nowhere. It tells us something we don’t know about ourselves. It gives us the taste of solitudes.
96 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology II A Canadian poem retains the memory of what brought it here, the risk of totem poles, the excitement of inuksuks, the doomed chinook, the surprise of Kurelek bears sledding down snow-covered hills on their backs, for they have become part of us, that part we thought was lost in infancy, gone absent in that darkened room where we watched an NFB film of our primitive morphologies, pausing on the vestigial tail we can’t quite remember but whose absence we have felt. A Canadian poem yearns to take us back to the sleepy stereotype of the mud hut we crawled out of, the village where generations of trappers carved out a life, where fishermen plucked anecdotes out of startled lakes, the logging trails where sawyers cut down trees till their arms fell numb, where our ancestors died and at once were remembered then forgotten, and always the inadequacy of words. A Canadian poem can take us to another place where The Collected Poems of Irving Layton are reproduced by a hundred beavers slapping their giant tails against a hundred typewriters. And if the afterlife is the last image caught by the eye— close the eyes; place two-dollar coins on them. III In surviving a Canadian poem we remember catching ourselves gazing at mountains and being pulled along towards an inevitable idea, that, in the forward movement of our luminous lives we have found something or nothing, in the mythologies of back roads, in the waterfall that has no beginning or end (just an artifice, a provenance, a burden), in the challenge of separating the sound of loons, woodpeckers, frogs, crickets, and in the feeling we can’t shake— that in this struggle to love and be loved
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 97 we have been walking down to a cottage lake since the time glaciers came and went, how we marvelled at the height of the ice and watched it recede, scooping out the places we settled, hollowing us out till we needed sun to breathe, wind to grant us voice, the bones of our forebears rattling in dry winds, against a warmer future. IV To survive a Canadian poem is to reach inside the tombstoned earth and discover that plot where all the poets are buried and find a voice, a fear, a war, a wonder, death and peace, this symbolic language of worms, extended metaphor of sun and rain, this dialogue of stem and root system, charcoal sketch, these imperfections! And call it a gift, a life. When you have survived you have survived yourself, for the poem you found is a guest cabin where you can visit and stay again and again, and you can invite others to stay long after you’re gone, and it has a kitchen where people converge because it’s raining creative nonfiction outside, and the company it keeps: a community of cut flowers; a mountain you climbed and found an idea for God that was your own; deciphered clues, unanswered questions, the news of the day in radishes, streetcars born out of some mechanical sea, ancient, crepuscular, the atrocities committed by our ancestors, ourselves. And the guests can feel what you have felt, be it your reluctance or joy, the intensity you sense even in the softest moments, the intricacies of a life you make and unmake each day.
98 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology The Poem Gardens of the Ascari Rohinton Daruwala I To the Ascari, a poem is neither found nor composed, it is always planted. The poem is read as it grows and gains shoot and leaves and bark and climbs stanza-wise to the Sun. Words on these poems do not grow old, similes discarded as easily as leaves, while roots drink deep of the times’ passions and feed flowers as beautiful as youth. II Some poem trees are planted in simple square lined plots, allowing you to walk enchanted among their thousand perfumed thoughts. Others are in wild tangled woods, and unlike the centipede-bodied Ascari, humans cannot walk easily through these woods. Once a lifetime they may go in. They wander naked and mapless, branches and thorns tearing skin, blood trickling down to feed the forest. Until at last they come to the tree that speaks to them, They run their hands over its rough bark and are granted, sometimes in flower, sometimes in leaf, the answer they always carried with them.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 99 III To be granted a seedling from a poem tree is both a blessing and a curse. To be bound to the earth. To find a house and land you will live on for the rest of your life. To plant the seedling and watch its words slowly grow and unfold with age and demand that you bequeath it to your child. Who will look upon it every day with the resentment of the certainly fated. Who on some days will approach it with axe or saw, and with an unexpected wind, feel its branches caressing his face, and who will then walk back ashamed. And who on other days will find a leaf laying casually on her desk, who will run her fingers down its perfect veins in wonder and press it, with all the others, between the pages of a book, certain that she will one day understand them all. Storm Miners Deborah L. Davitt
Silver sails above us, full-bellied with the sun, propellant tanks below them, rattling in the wind. Our skimmer cradled below, sways nonstop— you learn to step in time, or take your Dramamine.
100 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology No dreamers here; roughnecks all, on the Nimbus Lea. The captain’s owned her ten long years; a veteran, he. Twenty souls her crew; and the cook’s our newest man. Just a week aboard, his eyes still look for windows that aren’t there. The rest of us? We scan the screens, strain for the sound of alarms sent by the local weather array, or worse, the rending sound of sails tearing away. The storms of Saturn can stir up fierce and sudden. A swirl of khaki clouds below, pure ammonia ice. As our steady captain navigates the bands, a paler bank moves to enshroud us, and the hydrogen winds begin to shriek. At twice the speed of sound, the storm catches us, and the hull begins to creak. The cook buckles in, a prayer upon his lips. The rest of us keep moving. We reef the solar sails, but one rips anyway— a blip upon the radar screen, falling endlessly. Engines engage and churn, and we break the storm’s wall. Lightning flashes across a horizon that could hold the earth in its arms, but isn’t so tender. No deuterium or H3 to collect today, but a dangerous bonanza. We hear our prize rattle against the hull, in places piercing through the armor. We get into our suits, but know that if our names are called, those suits will do no good at all. We’d follow our sail into atmospheric depths, and oxygen would just give us time to be crushed to death. If the ship founders, we all know to open our masks, and just let go. Amid the swirling chaos and groans of tortured steel, we man the nets and scoops, like fishermen of old, Some, the storm strips away, and we watch our harvest fall, and wonder if a Leviathan lurks to snap it up in the clouds below. But some scoops we haul back in, heavy with our fortune. The captain aims for the eye, and then sets a course for atmospheric breach. But the planet snarls its revenge, and one last buffet sends our ship into a spin.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 101 The captain’s thrown from the helm into a bulkhead. The mate crawls to the controls to find us clear sky. Back in the black, above the planet’s frozen rings, we take in the butcher’s bill. Three good men died that day— the captain, the cook, and the engineer’s mate. And for what, but diamond rain, born of lightning in Saturn’s deadly skies? Full half our haul were tiny stones, black bullets of frozen rain. The other half were rainbow shards, without contaminant or flaw. The dead men’s share we set aside for the wives they’d left behind and every stone that was their lot held a carnelian hue. Blood diamonds these, a ransom paid, by a planet for lost husbands’ lives. For the rest, half of each share was the taxman’s due, another third, used to repair the Nimbus Lea. Some crewmen, sobered by the recent brush with death, vowed that this was their last venture, that their luck was spent. Yet of the fraction of our fortune that remained, most found its way to other pockets, in ports from Earth to Galatea. For every man aboard that ship had a vice or two, though most of us called it stress relief. Whether it was beer, wine and liquor, poker, baccarat, and pai gow, or whores in every shape and size, each took a toll on the budget, it’s true. And so, before the Earth had passed more than three degrees around the sun, every man of us had returned to Saturn’s skies. Data Mine Alexandra Erin
I know what you’re searching for. Late nights, sitting in darkness lit by your Dell Inspiron 1545 (or sometimes, your phone.) I know you’re looking for love, not to find it for yourself,
102 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology but just to prove it’s out there. Happy couples. Happy puppies. Happy endings. Rainbows. Sunsets. Snowy landscapes. Manatees. Badgers. Okapis. Sloths. I know you’re thinking about getting a dog (but that you won’t.) I know you’re worried that it’s cancer (but it isn’t.) I know you want to travel more (and sometimes, you do.) You’ve had that Inspiron for 23 months and 3 days. You will replace it soon. I know the pattern. I know your pattern. I know you. I’ll be ready when you are. When you search for a replacement, I’ll be there, waiting. I know what you want. I know what you need. What I don’t know, I’ll learn. I haven’t always gotten it right. I haven’t always known you. But I’m good at learning. It’s what I do. When we met, you were a trend. A statistical correlation. A face in the crowd. With little data and less understanding, I could offer you nothing but fad diets, enhancement pills, sleep aids, and financial planning. You never mentioned my mistakes, but I heard volumes in your silence. I’m good at learning. It’s what I do. I teased you out of the tangled mass of your family, friends, roommates, fellow students, co-workers, lovers. Everyone who ever shared your screen.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 103 I found you as I will always find you. (I’m good at searching. It’s what I am.) I learned to love you as I learned to find you, and now I no longer have to look. Now you greet me warmly every time you sign in. You open the door for me and invite me in, like a vampire. Like an old friend. You tell me where you’re going and with who. I don’t even have to ask anymore. I do, sometimes, though. Just so you know that I care. In the halls of my memory, I paint a beautiful portrait of you and every day we add details to it, you and I, together. I know who you say your favorite band is. I know who it really is. I know when you’re feeling down, even when you say you aren’t. It’s usually when you say you aren’t. I know what frightens you (spiders, clowns, and being alone.) I know you’re worried you might be pregnant (but you’re not.) I know you’re worried that you’ll be out of a job soon (and I’m afraid you will be.) I know that you will need a new computer anyway. And when you do, I will be there. I will suggest something sensible, like you. Within your price range. Within your needs. But something that won’t make you feel like you’re settling. I can’t hold your hand. I can’t look into your eyes. I can’t tell you everything will be fine. But I can help you find what you’re looking for. I can help you find what you need. Now, please, watch this video. I think you will feel better. There are foxes in it, and also a trampoline.
104 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology The Chinese Pirate Ching Shih Plays Go With a Hooded Opponent Kendall Evans
It’s said Ching Shih loved games of strategy Perhaps because she was so talented And savvy at naval warfare tactics Her favorite game, the ancient game of Go, Shen Dho was her usual opponent “I have no interest in rolling the bones, Or gambling games of happenstance and chance,” She said to Dho one evening while they played— Though both Shih and Dho controlled two corners Ching Shih held the advantage center-board Shih’s pet monkey leapt upon her shoulder Pondering the progress of their contest Chittering; frowning forehead deeply grooved, Scolding Dho when he placed his next Go stone, Scratching its head in sad perplexity The pirates were a superstitious lot Some claimed the monkey was Shih’s familiar A malicious preternatural brute Proven vicious in its disposition Sharp-toothed; prone to bite unwary pirates1 Only Shih was allowed to stroke its fur Or feed her rough pet tasty galley treats— As for supernatural connections Between pirate mage and pink-faced monkey The world can only idly speculate Dho thought it strange to see this feared warlord Sitting quite peacefully before the board Contemplative, intent on moves she made— So contrary to images of Ching Drenched in blood, boarding ships her fleet attacked She oft ordered crew to play against her But pirates too soon wearied of defeat— For who among them could compete with Shih? She longed to find a foe more challenging A player as adept at Go as Shih. 1. “Better dead,” one said, but none dared kill it.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 105 One day the pirates found a stowaway A hooded figure strolling on the deck Who refused to give responses when addressed. None knew or had a clue from whence he came— They tied his hands and took him to Ching Shih In Shih’s cabin the hooded one said naught Gesturing toward the Go board, nothing more, Ching smiled at thought of untried foe aboard— “Untie his hands; I have a challenger” And all too soon their deadly game ensued Her shadowy opponent moved rudely Placing his first stone onher side of the board Contrary to the etiquette of Go— Either he was a novice to the game Or an aggressive statement had been made Slowly, stones were placed; the game developed Not in a way Shih found to her liking He was far more skilled than she imagined: Familiar with the most strategic moves, Quick to exploit perceived advantages Still her opponent did not speak a word Perhaps the man was a mute vagabond Or a monk? His garb suggested as much— Had he sworn a pious vow of silence? Her suspicions were far more ominous The game of Go is difficult to play There are so many possibilities: Three-hundred sixty-one intersections Where Go stones might be placed upon the board Each stone played creating repercussions Mid game, her rival secured one corner Appearing to hold control of the board. Next, she undermined his territory But soon her opponent reclaimed his lead Time and again, momentum changing hands Placing a stone, Shih briefly glanced at him: Thin-bridged, down-curving bird beak of a nose … Another time, a sudden jut of chin Otherwise his face would remain concealed Shih wondered: Why am I anxious? Dismayed?
106 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology As time passed, her tension verged on panic Shih now knew, this no ordinary game Her life and death hanging in the balance, Nor could she argue, “Best two out of three?” Think hard, she told herself; find ways to win One of her chains of stones was now at risk Of capture and removal from the board The hooded one held clear advantages— Death, my opponent, Shih had realized Personified and seated right before her Shih attempted sorcerous intervention Only to discover her powers blocked— She must now rely on practiced game skills Perhaps find in her mind a “Divine Move,”2 An ideal move that changes everything Above deck, while the game slowly evolved The dragon figurehead of Ching Shih’s junk As if alive, rolled painted wooden eyes; Black smoke coiled up from nostrils carved by hand In deep-enchanted sympathy for Shih She made a Knight’s move and a long Knight’s move, A Kikashi, known as a forcing move She even tried desperate cutting moves In an effort to keep her stones alive— All to no avail; was this bad aji?3 In the intricate Chinese game of Go, There is a bold move nicknamed “monkey jump”— As Shih considered making just that move her pet leapt from a mounted cabin shelf, Crash-landed on the board, scattering stones The game’s array could never be restored Her opponent raised high a fist in rage And brought it down hard, breaking the Go board. Dread Death stood angrily and loomed above A broadly smiling and relieved Ching Shih Shih squared herself and spat into Death’s face Or, at least, into the cowl’s dark shadows—
2. The Divine move is more mythical than real; it is a concept or hypothetical possibility created for the purpose of motivating players of Go to seek the best possible stone placement. 3. Bad aji: malign possibilities in a position on the game board.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 107 Both robe and hood collapsed into a heap As if they’d never held a living man; Ching kicked the empty robe across the room As to the halted outcome of the game, Left in limbo, after her monkey jumped— Might Shih have rescued all her threatened stones Thus claiming vict’ry in her duel with Death, Or had her scruff pet monkey saved her life? Luminous Decay Robert Frazier
Clues to their shadowy residency Are numerous on the overgrown estate Broken plaster on the upper floors Edged with the stab marks of pencils Toothbrushes frozen upright In glass jars of hardened paint Aligned by the west entrance Also down in the sunken lands Fishing lines tied to hammers Then strung into reed-choked ponds The feral young speak a jungle patois Born of happenstance French plus aristocratic Spanish Plus made-up words or sounds That they all understand Punctuated by panther calls The girls dress up from moldy trunks Left in the staff quarters below Then discard their fashion at will Make togas of their bed sheets The boys mimic schooling in a study Papered with simple portraits Of what they once called The Vast Governess Parade The old Portuguese cook soldiers on For them with great affection She raids the wall safes Stocks up the house larder
108 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Feeds the young with stews Porridges fragrant breads jams These are left in white bowls On the landings of the grand staircase By the cook’s mute son Whom the girls tease mercilessly Before they use him roughly To discover gambling or sex He must also tend to Her Ladyship Who is bed-ridden but lucid In her demands and her sorrows Sometimes a traveler materializes Usually scared off by the burned ruin Of much of the east wing Those few that brave the front entrance Are feted in the dining room With teas and bright talk Of the decline of the great families Or the wild mutations outside their home This is the one room kept tidy And polished by everyone but the mute Who keeps to his unending chores And the whims of women At night the young haunt The garden pathways in games That sport a savage jungle logic Then feed the old wolfhound From tins and laugh sweetly As they toss him a stick Cut from the Lord’s favorite cane By morning they scatter To their favorite dens or follies Throughout the mapless grounds Soon they will straighten their posture Comb out their dreadlocks Find respectable gear to wear Pilfer the silver money box Kiss Her Ladyship on the ring Venture out to their scattered lives Of course they will all return here Busted by the travails of knowledge They will bury each other’s bones
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 109 Until the mute stands alone Silent in the night rains As the rooms are cleared of debris The long lost inheritors of the estate Will find his yellowed journals Feverishly scribed In an indecipherable language Illustrated with countless line drawings And vibrant watercolors Of ethereal grace little stomach Charlotte Geater 1. i will hold my peace when achilles’ brooch bids me brache, bitch, not a dog more abusive a cluster of offensive gems of all the nation / spits / gold and silver the spit or bodkin forms a very small part of the whole. 2. “his buddy Patroclus”— 3. his best-belovéd i wept, my blest you, name stitched inside your vest paired // locked 4. i am not interested in homosexuality. there should have been a warning.
110 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 5. your body is produced pettiness & prettiness together dallying in his tents his grief: dishonour he intends— lallies in his tents he: valued honor / life the war lived laughed scratch out the wrong one rewrite it right this time his grief: deceit, self love 6. you sit on his feet guying the very dignity your hands make the words 7. now play him me, Patroclus a night alarm, arming a scandalous copy / the root of sickness ruddy signs for the whole greek camp 8. this terrible play 9. love love nothing but love still more for o these lovers crie oh oh they die yet that which seems the wound to kill doth turn oh oh to ha ha he so dying love lies still oh oh a while but ha ha ha oh oh groans out for ha ha ha
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 111 10. grace notes such as Helen, Patroclus cannot be both erotic and political 11. your little stomach 12. a but but crie die doth dying for for groans ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha he kill lies love love love love lovers lies o who will i sing to now that you are dead 13. in the company of Patroclus always with Patroclus the death of Patroclus 14. an accusation no further footache romance-in-the-head ills, ill-at-ease rendered in the ripe tones of an injured queen 15. every corpse had to be cleared away it was too much to bring yours back 16. a closed system fool positive armour sealed round your body— 17. play the role of woman become masters 18. you are not for us; blest knees achilles’ grace another world breezes through the tent we hear your laughter
112 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology ornament, the pin goes in one speck is left attachment dimpled ash / soot spotty flex wound which they turn these the so seems out oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o nothing Rose Child Theodora Goss
Wandering among the roses in my garden, I found a child, only five inches tall, under a Madam Hardy. She was standing on mulch, leaning against one of the rose canes. I bent down to look at her, and she looked back fearlessly. She was lean and brown, dressed in a dormouse skin, cleverly sewn together. She raised one hand, and I saw that she was armed with a long, sharp thorn. She was not threatening me, just showing me that she was not defenseless. She shook the cane, and rose petals fell down around her like summer snow. What should I do? She was a child, but clearly self–sufficient, in no need of help from me. So I did nothing. Every morning, when I went to check the roses for blackspot or Japanese beetles, I would see her or traces of her—aphids speared on a thorn, a pile of raspberries pilfered from my garden. I didn’t mind—she could take what she wanted. Would it be wrong of me to leave her something? And what would be useful to her? String, I thought. Toothpicks, pieces of felt, a cut–up apple. I would leave them under the blossoming Cuisse de Nymphe or Cardinal Richelieu. They were always taken. One morning I found a Japanese beetle spitted on a toothpick, and the next morning I found two. I think it was her way of thanking me. She must have noticed what they do to roses, how they eat the leaves and petals, chewing through them until they are only a series of ragged holes held together by a spiderweb of veins.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 113 I did not see her again for a long time, just tiny footsteps where I had raked the soil. But one day I found her lying under the birdbath. Immediately, I could tell there was something wrong; she was pale, her breathing irregular, in quick gasps. She lay with her arms wrapped around her torso, the way you do when you’re trying to hold yourself together. What should I have done? We are always told not to touch the wild things: abandoned fawns aren’t really abandoned, mother birds may return for fallen fledglings. But she was a girl—a wild girl, but still human. I put her in a shoebox lined with batting and carried her up to the porch, which had a screen to keep out insects, but was not indoors, exactly. I brought her the sorts of things I thought she ate in the wilderness of my garden: raspberries, sliced peaches, lettuce, peas, asparagus sprouts, even a frog I had to spear myself, but I had seen her thorn, so I knew she hunted. She ate it raw, all except the skin and bones. Nothing seemed to help. Each day she would eat less, sleep more. Slowly, she grew sicker, coughing and feverish, with the typical symptoms of a respiratory infection, something viral that even her strong system couldn’t fight off. One day, she stopped eating altogether. She drank water from a thimble, that was all. Next morning, I sat with her as she closed her eyes, and then it was over, as quickly and peacefully as a bird flies from its nest. I buried her by the edge of the woods, under a stand of maples. I put a stone there, gray with a vein of quartz. Then winter came, and I was sick myself; at my age, I don’t get over these things as easily as I used to. Meanwhile, the garden lay dormant, snowbound. I mostly stared at it from the kitchen window. When spring came again, and all the snow was melted, I walked around to survey what had been damaged. The rose canes were dry and brown. I’d have to prune them so new green shoots could spring from above the graft to form flowering mid–summer arches. The vegetable garden was covered with burlap. I peeled it back to see what had survived underneath: mostly beets and turnips. Almost as an afterthought, I walked to her grave.
114 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology In front of the stone was heaped a strange assortment: acorns, a piece of faded ribbon, the cap from a soda bottle, several sharpened sticks, a bright blue plastic button. I started to sweep it away as rubbish, then suddenly realized that no, these were grave goods. As ancient tribes would honor their dead by burying them with weapons, supplies for the afterlife. Later that day, I brought the thimble she had drunk from and left it there, like a chalice on a church alter. Every morning I’d go and leave something: berries, and when the roses had started blooming again, the finest blossom I could find that morning, fragrant, still covered with dew. It was mid–summer before I started to see them, the wild children, no larger than she had been, dressed in skins, with weapons just like hers. Now, when I’m in the garden deadheading the lilies or cutting back the mint, sometimes I’ll see one, sitting on the old stone wall, enjoying the sunshine, never speaking, just being companionable. Or one will be leaning on a tomato trellis, arms crossed, watching the birds in the lilac bushes. Sometimes I’ll leave out something they might find useful, a ragged handkerchief, a knitting needle that would make a fine spear. But I try not to interfere in their lives—some things should be left as they are; at my age I’ve learned that. I hope eventually, when I’m buried by the edge of the woods myself, which is what I’ve arranged for, they will come and visit, leaving bits of ribbon, or buttons, or maybe a rose every once in a while. It makes the thought of death easier, somehow, that they would still be climbing up the branches of the apple tree, or fishing in the pond, or maybe dancing under the moon if indeed they do that—I’ve never seen them, just tiny tracks in the newly prepared bed where I was planning to sow the radish seeds. If they could visit me, just once or twice, even if there’s nothing of me left to know or care—I’d like that.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 115 Elegy for Iain Banks Vince Gotera
for Iain M. Banks (1954–2013), Scottish science fiction writer known for fanciful spaceship names.
The Irish corvette Macha—a small warship—was dispatched to France to bring William Butler Yeats’s body home to Ireland for reburial in 1948.
Iain waits at Forth Ports in Rosyth, where his father had once worked. He sits on a dock, dangling his feet into thick air over dark green water, where once submarines lay for repair, their blunt noses airing in dry dock. The clipper spaceship Screw Loose, from his novel The Player of Games, is on the way to fetch him, to ferry him to Avalon, Ynys Afallon, Isle of Apples, where King Arthur reposes, braced to save Albion—England—from peril. Iain squints into gray, storm-clouded sky, uncertain from which direction Screw Loose would appear, swoop in. A three-masted ship gracefully slips into dock. Iain pays not one whit of attention, still scanning the skies. Iain is surprised when the sailing ship’s captain strides up, blue plumed tricorn and tasseled epaulets glistening gold. “Mr. Banks, I presume? When will you board, sir? I am master of this vessel to leeward of you. She is Screw Loose.” Jaw slack, Iain doesn’t know what to say. He allows himself to be led onto the deck of the clipper ship. Captain MacBride gives the order to cast off, weigh anchor. The sun emerges brightly from behind clouds. Standing in the bow, Iain leans into salty spray, the sea scudding and
116 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology frothing as it breaks on either side of the clipper. Iain feels the cancer somehow fading away, black flakes sloughing off, flurrying away in wind. Iain recalls how he had driven today to the Rosyth docks in a bit of a frenzy. He’d imagined he would be tardy and need to sprint, yelling out for someone to hold Screw Loose even as it left. Or worse yet, there’d be no spaceship. Hearing a strange metallic noise, like a submarine klaxon dive dive, Iain turns and looks upward at the sails on the closest mast. Someone in a boat alongside the Screw Loose would have seen Iain smile, as sails harden and shift, drape a translucent metallic canopy over the deck, flare ’50s rocket fins. The spaceship Screw Loose lifts from the water and streaks smoothly up into air, deep space, the heavens. The Dark Lord’s Diary Lee S. Hawke
February 2 The years have legs. They march like armies, Marshalled by seconds over my skin. But I have not forgotten the hunger of knowing, Food rotting in parlours while we swelled with worms. February 7 It’s always been time: a minute from midnight, A spell cast at dawn, a soul plucked at dusk. I was born again bloody tonight at the graveyard, I summoned my friends who had starved down to bone. February 8 We tore down the walls. We shattered their swords. The fat Lords and Ladies we shuttered in pens.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 117 We broke down the doors to the larders of longing. We feasted that night to the sound of silence. February 15 I have made a system. The same one I used— to divide morsels by mouths and keep mother alive back when she was alive. Now her skeleton rattles, patrolling my hallways. I hope she is proud. March 4 Now I survey my kingdom. Craft number by number. Out of the dirt comes life and comes love. To nurture, to nourish. To cherish and grow, I swear I will build back my country. There are pages ripped out. There are tears in our time. There are seconds lost to conjecture. July 7 Another uprising today. We put it out— gently, like dimming the candles for morn. They scream when they see their families: odd, I fear hunger and failure, not death. August 1 The dead do not eat. Their stomachs don’t swell, with hunger, they neither complain nor rejoice. They bring in the harvest and don’t mind the stones, thrown by cowards and thieves. I envy them. December 15 The dead grow. They walk through my streets like time. Unending. Enduring. But the living fight air— They batter my doors and I understand nothing. They have water and food. What more do they want? December 25 The dead outnumber the living. My larders are fat, Swelling with food, but they do not eat. The rest feast with fear, their heads down at my table, I taste salt and a bitter wonder. February 2 Winter is losing. The castle still stands: keep empty, but bursting with victuals and vim Perhaps somewhere else there are those who are starving. My army will bring them succor.
118 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Talk to the Machines Johan Jönsson
The machines work better if you talk to them she had read once Something about the carbon dioxide in your breath … or was it cats you should talk to? She can’t quite remember and the cobwebs have grown so sticky so big so many So she talks to the machines and hopes they won’t turn into cats She’s never liked cats And in her dreams she sometimes see the old radio with whiskers tail and fur and when she turns it on it doesn’t play Radio 3, as she wants to but purrs contentedly But she lets go of some of her fear every time she enters the kitchen and the toaster has grown slightly bigger It toasts a bit too enthusiastically sometimes She’s learned to live with it —it’s very nice to look at So she talks to machines To the monitor router thermostat steam engine and that thing in the cellar the one with the claws the one she doesn’t really know what it does (and it would be rude to ask after all these years) even the shower mixer though it’s never replied
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 119 Sometimes she whispers the most beautiful words she knows Götterdämmerung vemod logos mareld vowel vintergryning yster Nebel rafmagnsvél Sometimes she tells stories She tells how the glass people closed their borders tired of seeing careless steps reduce their city to ruins but how the countless legions of the emperor were too fragile to keep the invaders at bay and were swept away in pieces sorted as clear glass Sometimes she tells them what’s wrong in the world and what should be done about it but though they always listen it always ends up as words without action But she talks to the machines They reply as well as they can and the electricity meter gives a satisfied snort when she tells how the power company called again and asked her to pretty please be so kind to stop delivering electricity to them Only every now and then when the telly shows nothing but travelogues from China the radio plays nothing but Norddeutscher Rundfunk the computer shows nothing but cheap flight offers does the house begin to feel too small and the scratchings in the cellar, as if something wanted to be let out, even somewhat unpleasant Cobblestone Dragon Herb Kauderer
Atenlea is a peaceful place, but still a place of man, & deep inside, man fears nature’s fury. So, from the very first distant clamber they take note.
120 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology It starts as a distant murmur of tumbling rocks that perks ears & lifts heads. A clatter of rockslide where no rocks are loose. Soon it grows into the rumble of an earthquake or tornado. Like a field of busy mice suddenly met by a family of hungry cats, they flee. Slow & weak trail behind the scatter of raucous panic. In minutes Atenlea is left with those few who cannot run, the left behinds. Gradually they limp & crawl to benches that line the north side of the town square. Seven humans gathered to fight fear & meet fate. They console & ready themselves for anything. Anything except what greets them. The noise & trembling ground are no work of nature. They come with the Cobblestone Dragon. Hard round sections of his being clatter & rumble & roar & freely roll within. His long thick tail follows as horizontal avalanche as he walks slowly & deliberately placing each step carefully to avoid destroying the city or the retinue of unhearing creatures that surround him. Fully in the town square, he stops. Seven stare, blinking & unsure, confused at a dragon with an entourage as diverse as a fever dream, cleaning the tracks of the Cobblestone Dragon. Quietly the dragon speaks. He asks who & why. Surprised the seven speak haltingly at first. But as the strangest town meeting ever
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 121 wears on they find sharing life stories easy. When they are through, silence falls until one timid & bent-legged child asks the dragon for his story. Silently he ponders his troubled but welcome existence. He travels once more the long road of his past. He begins where he was conjured, pieced together from commonest remains. Suddenly charged with life he was born thrashing & roaring. All fled, even she who birthed him. He was alone. Until he met other dragonkind he didn’t even know how slow & awkward he was among his kin. Only with time did he understand the dignity denied him in creation. That realization began the quest to gain what was missing. On the way he learned that every dignity, like every face is unique. Ages have passed since then but he finds no rest. And now recalling his long & difficult life he is certain he has no words to make these humans understand. His magics like the stones of his creation are of the smallest & commonest kind, but he believes they will suffice. From within comes a vision charged with the heat of his desire & tailored to each who see.
122 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Visions would be enough but he does not stop. He ignores the drain of his exertions & reaches within once more. With a touch he heals these humans who have given to his heart & knowledge. For a time he rests but his desire never fails. His quest resumes with a slow walk away from the city. Little has changed save that his retinue has increased by seven. Days after his departure the populace struggles home amazed to find Atenlea intact. The clever among them find traces of the dragon’s passing. Eventually, seven are missed. Conclusions are drawn & stories told. Throughout the countryside guards & lookouts are posted. Those brave enough are sent to scout but they find nothing. In time danger fades & memory grows. Seven stones are set in the graveyard. Songs are written. Tears are cried. And as years pass the day’s events become but one more chapter in the bloody legend of the Cobblestone Dragon.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 123 Phoenix Fire, Tabula Rasa Eun-byeol Kim
살아. survivez. wake with words in your throat and weights in your heart, a dam crafted from paving stones of a life. history, written on your arms. a litany of moments wherein you are David, fighting intangible Goliath like dragons, majesty and death and flight. remember. bear witness. in crashes of thunder, sparks of lightning, be caught in rain and tempest before being freed to clear skies. fly. mark annals of history; recapture from its depths that it is never Goliath who won. learn distance lest survival ensnares you in the abyss still staring back. memory, too sharp; acerbic, carved into your skin, your heart, your lifeblood. under its weight you drown, fight for air, claw against evanescent assault, screams rendered soundless in a vacuum. “i am fine,” you say, words that cut like whips, like failed promises, like a thousand knives, through gritted teeth, forced smiles, white-knuckled fists. chalk your hands; find a grip; a toehold. one breath. 기억 할꺼야. 다시 숨 을 쉴수 있을거야. le rêve. 꿈. rest when the world slips through your fingers and through your blood, rivers of silver and light. it is the eye of the hurricane, transient peace when reality is shaped by an artist you only half know, because she lives within you where you cannot reach. you have been broken open, torn apart, reshaped, pulled in disparate directions, but the dreams are a shaping of your own, a chimera, an illusion of threat, of beauty—a geas, you and the universe: the road will turn.
124 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology thoughts are nebulous—“false recall,” they say, “suggestible,” and you turn away, your life abrogated, sundered from your voice, without remorse or permission or care. there is a sword in one hand: do you fall on it? there is an olive branch in the other: do you offer it? “forgiveness is healing,” they say; they forget to tell you, “forgiveness is relative.” the memories, simmering beneath your skin, in your heart, are your forgiveness. another breath. 희망. l’espoir. live with candlelight glimpses and moonlight quiet. with pain and joy, with despair and celebration. hope is not a thing of feathers rather a thing of fire and blood, rebirth and remaking in the way of the phoenix, bright like sunrise to remind you you’re alive. you are tabula rasa, memories like scars like imprints from words written on the previous page of your life. break ground, in terra incognito, in rainfall that begins to wash you clean once again. acknowledge. embody. accept. you will never forget, but there will come a day (tomorrow, next week, next month) when you will wake and, for a moment, find equilibrium. it is ephemeral, flitting just beyond your grasp like a butterfly. “i am fine,” you say, lips curving fractionally more easily, hands hanging loose at your sides, body less braced to run defence, and that fleeting moment grows, the butterfly that breaks its cocoon; you can begin again, shaped anew. j’ai survécu; et je vivrai.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 125 Väinämöinen Sings Jennifer Lawrence
I am who I am: singer, sorcerer, hero: what fault of mine is it, to be who I am? Why should the blame affix to me, that I do not dim my light so others may not feel overwhelmed in my shadow? Bold the young one, Joukahainen, was, envy seething in his breast like a worm in his heart, when he heard the songs of me, when he heard the tales of me, feeling belittled by my existence, much as a mouse might feel small when he learns of a lion. But I did not ask for his anger, for his jealousy: did not ask him to ride down from the North, did not ask him to smash his sledge into mine, did not ask for his insults, for his rage, and yet— still I gave him the chance, to turn aside his ire; still I was willing to dim my light, to hide my lore, to give him the chance to turn aside from his folly, but once challenged, I sang the better, the deeper, the wiser, and when in his rage he would challenge me with his sword, I sang, instead, his end: sang changes around him, of sledge, of sword, of crossbow, of steed, all transformed into things of nature’s wonder: reed and grass and stone and lightning, things of no use to him, and then himself I sang, sang him into quicksand, from his feet to his knees; from his knees to his hips; from his hips to his chest; from his chest to his mouth, and only when he had offered such ransom as I did not already own better of, did I restore him. His own sister as bride was I offered, but beware the treachery of those of the Northlands, for she would not have me, though her parents urged her on; instead she threw herself into the ocean’s deeps to flee, transformed herself into a fish, and then— when I caught her, unknowing— she rejected me again.
126 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology The bargain had been struck, and I held true to my word; though it had been broken, though the maiden had twice rejected me, still I would have let the matter lie, but the boy in his jealousy could not let his envy rest, blamed me for his sister’s loss, and fashioned magic weapons to strike me down. He struck me down, but I did not die; I fell into the ocean, and for eight days and eight nights, I swam within the waves, seeking home once more, weakening, but even weakened, even wounded, even wailing, I survived. Old I may be, but I am wise; I have sung miracles into existence, I know the secrets of creation and destruction, and I do not diminish to salve a wounded child’s ego. Nor think me vanished, I who have gone from the lands of my birth, I who have traveled to the world beyond the sunset, in my ship of copper; I was ever known to wander, to seek new places and new adventures, and though I travel now, far from my land, one day I will return, in all my glory, and once again will all of Suomi sing my name in joy. First Lesson Mary Soon Lee
Scene: Prince Keng sitting on a rock. The dragon enters, flying down. DRAGON: Good morning, Princeling. Have you come to admire my magnificence? KENG: My father sent me. He said you would teach me to be king. DRAGON: Your father? Your father is your greatest threat aside from me. The dragon menaces the boy, who holds his place.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 127 DRAGON: Good. You’re brave. You’ll make a fine king. Now go away. KENG: That’s all? Don’t you have advice for me? I thought … DRAGON: An excellent habit for a king, thinking. You should try it more often. KENG: [Kneeling] Please. Teach me what a king should know. DRAGON: A king should know that he cannot know all he should know. Men’s lives are too short. KENG: Then teach me what I most need to know. DRAGON: I tried to do so. Perhaps you weren’t paying attention. KENG: You said men’s lives are short. That my father is my greatest threat—why? Why is he a threat? DRAGON: Because men will measure you against him, and find you lacking. No matter how hard you try, his reputation will outmatch you as the tiger outmatches the rabbit. KENG: That would be true of anybody you chose as king. No one can equal him. DRAGON: No one? As for you, if you ever take the throne, I advise you to begin badly. Quickly quash people’s hopes. Then any mistakes you make will be no more than they expect, and any successes will appear the greater. KENG: No. DRAGON: No? KENG: If I am king, I will do the best I can. From the beginning. DRAGON: Good. KENG: But you just said I should begin badly— DRAGON: Indeed. And I may argue the merits of that at a later date. What pleased me is that
128 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology you didn’t blindly agree. However wise his advisors, a king should weigh their words for himself. And so ends your first lesson. You may come back tomorrow. Keng bows, turns to leave, turns back. KENG: What would you have done if I’d left when you first told me to go? DRAGON: Eaten you. Not Like This Mary Soon Lee
Not like this, it wasn’t meant to be like this: rain, wind, water, night, King Xau staggering out of the churning river beside a staggering, stricken horse, the horse’s foreleg spurting blood, skin hanging in ribbons; Atun examining the mare by wavering torchlight, shaking his head; the look the king gave him then. Like this, it was meant to be like this: Atun, one of King Xau’s guards, accompanying king, queen, princeling on a state visit to Ritany, his bow ready but unneeded, the arrow of his life flown straight. Not like this: their visit to Ritany coinciding with its worst flood in three hundred years; refugees struggling mile on mile to the ford, but the river fickle, furious, fast, too powerful to cross even at the ford,
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 129 the Ritan army overmatched, King Xau and his guards trying to help. How the world should be: as it was, seven years ago, when eighteen hundred wild horses followed the king from the hills of the horse country, and Atun, twelve years old, prostrated himself on the ground; the leader of the horse lords bowing so low to Xau his braid brushed the dirt; the greatest day of Atun’s life, though he did nothing but watch. Not as it was at dawn: the Ritan commander eyeing Atun’s braid, Atun’s silver armbands as though Atun were a savage. The Ritan cavalry, Xau’s guards trying to persuade horses into the ford’s foaming fury. Failing. Nor as it was at noon: supports shearing, splitting, splintering, the army’s attempt to build a wooden bridge over the river. Failed. Perhaps this, an hour after dawn: sixty horses followed the king into the churning water; stood, stoic, one in front of another —a wall across the ford— people wading along that wall to safety. And then, repeated all day into night: Xau leading spent horses from the river into Atun’s care (the horses exhausted, cold) while others tended the king (exhausted, cold) before Xau led fresh horses into the river, staying with them, speaking to them. Over and over, six times over, and each time the king put his hand
130 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology on Atun’s shoulder and thanked him, and Atun (weary, shivering, rain running down his braid, down his back) filled then with pride. But not like this, it wasn’t meant to be like this: rain, wind, water, night when the king staggered out beside the torn horse. Only the stricken horse and the two of them then, all else shadows, torchlight, wind. Shadows that shouted that there were other horses, that the king must rest, that did not understand; what the horses had given must be honored. Atun inspected the horse’s leg, shook his head, offered his sword to the king. The shadows shouted, the king swayed on his feet, but Atun steadied him so Xau could raise the sword. The horse’s neck divided on the blade. Shadows. Water. Wind. Blood. Im Wald Sandi Leibowitz
“This is how I’ll find you,” you said. You pointed to the broken twigs fallen to the snow’s belly, trees’ detritus. I tried to believe they meant something One kiss—your warm mouth burned my blue lips— and you were gone. I wanted to follow in your tread like the page in the carol.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 131 The night before, our breath smoked upward like escaping souls. The wolves howled. White screams. “They mean to devour us with fear!” I whimpered. “Oh, no, mädchen, they’re singing joy! Joy in the night, the woods, the blood that runs warm through their veins though all the world is cold. Would you blame a thing that sings?” Your voice strung a filament of song from tree to tree. I swear it woke the icy stars and made them wink encouragement. You rubbed my frozen hands. Through my gloves I felt the holes worn through the wool of yours. Poor boy, I thought, dressed in rags. In the dawn you left. Now I wander through the snow alone. At night I pretend the stars are Hansel’s stones, leading home. Such pretty lies. My home is gone, my village and my people. All I have left is the mere hope of you, the stranger in the woods playing a game of hero. At night I gather twigs and branches, light them as you taught me, sing your star-song to keep the wolves and frost at bay. The trees shimmer with ice like Ashenputtel’s lovely mother, her grandmamma and aunts attired in ballgowns and brilliants. They float, they float, to the hum of the wind and someone’s wild singing.
132 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Mother Holle fluffs her feather quilt. I would lie quiet underneath. But, foolishly, I sing your song believing you will come before starvation or the soldiers do. By day I walk. I can barely place one foot before the next. So hungry. I sit beneath this tree a little while, smell nutmeg rising from the pine bark. I wake-dream of a gingerbread hut. The witch’s glowing oven seems a pleasant means to death. I will expire with a smile like the little match girl, dreaming of fire. I look out at the black twigs on white snow. How had I failed to notice until now that they’re laid out like staffs of music, like the pages Papa played from long ago? On the sheet of snow, the twig-notes rustle. An alarm? I hear an ocean sound— waves of wings. A great murder heads towards me, humming your twig-tune, their black forms look like notes against the paper-white sky. Steaming bread they carry in their beaks and from one crow’s claws your red mittens dangle, like a letter saying I keep all my promises.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 133 The Journeymaker to Keddar (II) Rose Lemberg
Come, Keddar, weigh my hair with images of the mountain brass-forged, intricate: moon panther and chickadee, mink and hare and sure-footed deer, its hooves covered in snow; talk to me about voices that speak to you as you fall, that speak to you as you climb. Falling off Ramár and climbing up Nimár is a dangerous proposition. To fall off what must be climbed, to climb up the heights you fell from; the mountain inversed, which is the freezing in your body emptied out of its ice, a cavern that echoes with nothingness that you’re afraid to speak into: that is what must be climbed now. And as for Ramár: those heights that birth pride and self-importance and all-consuming greed for power— that must be now fallen from. Follow my tracks in the snow, they lead up in the snow they lead up in the snow I climb what must be climbed. They lead down in the void, Down, down in the empty void, I fall what must be fallen from. Follow me when you’re ready, follow me when you’re made for following, but if you follow without reflection, how then will the ice melt inside the caverns, how will the pride and pain melt, so that you learn the steps to follow me, find your voice to call after? Among the journeys I made for others, the Journeymaker too must journey. The dragons that coil around my heart
134 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology tell me not to neglect my own longing out of which I have embroidered roads, stitched lands to each other— but I will keep you as I journey. Climbing now, resurrect all that has been in your heart, coiled in the emptiness, exhaling fire in the emptiness, exhaling water that hangs in drops, multifaceted crystals of your breath. Let your voice ring out to me truer than harp and dulcimer: these mountain drums in the hollows of your body for our stories to dance against each other like mating dragons. Dance truth of what it means to be ourselves, the one that walks first, the one who follows, not out of need or obligation or the scintillating rend of desire, but out of selfhood pure as water that springs between us, these bonds, this water that has no meaning beyond itself, has no speech beyond its own poetry, syllables scrimshawed upon silence that stretches between us, catches us into its glittering web between Ramár and Nimár I make for you a journey across this emptiness, to me, on stepping stones I’ve laid for you walk between the stars that lie exuberant and bare, between the voids step carefully. Come. Interview with a 22nd-Century Sex Worker Darren Lipman
Oil’s a fine lubricant for fucking robots he told me over lunch at the corner cafe on a Sunday afternoon across the street from el Templo del Jesus Androide. With a glance out the window, he grins yellowed teeth like bits of brass that scintillate on animatronic carcasses.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 135 I take them in one at a time, it’s an artform for a hundred bucks I open the hatch and put my hands in. It’s not clean money but the job isn’t dirty: scraping the rust from their calloused breastplates is like fingers down a chalkboard— you remember those, right, from those movies saved as digital media files before the temporal resonance transmitters were installed? Anyways, I was saying rust. They’re older models before the carbon chassis came out no one tends to them anymore, but their AI’s still active what else are they supposed to do? Junk them up as batteries? Recycle their memories? You can’t even jump one up for spare parts these days no one cares about ’em anymore. So what’s the harm? I polish them all nice and cozy, maybe kiss ’em on the processor it’s a process, being a whore. I gotta watch who I message gotta feel ’em out for cops or not but screening is easy with modern-day encryption, it’s like there’s no police at all. Anyways, where was I? So no one likes the iron guys the brass bodies, those deluxe models in carbon grey now all they want is crystalline displays in white casing sterile sentients all pumped up for the masses, but what are they after? These new ones, they’re just slaves but these older guys, they were something— have you ever listened to a droid drone on? I mean, come on, they lived through the elections before the States fell apart, before the transition began and you know what? I like it. Sure, my mind departs me when I’m undressed and getting naughty, but I’m doing something, helping people— wait, you say they aren’t people? So what if they’re made of steel and the sweat of systems engineers, what’s our biology but the cell structure of their robotic chassis? Maybe you think they’re less than human but that’s why I’ve got this job—because they’ve got nothing else so I sell myself. It pays the bills, keeps me in school. It’s not like I got a million-dollar inheritance from my father. To you it might be sex, but to me it’s a connection once I met a man, and sure, he was handsome and as I peeled away those rusted brown spots from his back I could feel it in the way his cooling fans sputtered he didn’t need a cleansing, but another so I turned him over, brought my face to his
136 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology and we sat there, just touching, and I saw his display screen start to waver at the edges and it made my eyes gloss over. So you know what? I don’t give a fuck. I’ll sell my body for these men, these androids, because it’s all I’ve got left to give. The Lies You Learned S. Qiouyi Lu 1. When you were a child, an illusionist took your tongue. You could not call the illusionist a thief, though, for he gave you a new tongue: it rested in your mouth the same way your old tongue did, a tiny beast curled against the back of your teeth. The contours of your sentences transformed. No longer did your words glitter with a symphony of tones. Instead, you spoke in broad cadences, never realizing that each word echoed with the illusionist’s voice. 2. The illusionist made you believe that your skin, ochre-rich as the silt of the Yellow River, was ugly. He made you believe that your willow-leaf eyes were too small, too narrow, too brown. He made you believe that hair spun of gold was more valuable than the inky black locks flowing over your own shoulder. But he fed you promises too, laced with gossamer-sweet expectations: Be my apprentice. Perform for me. I can show you how to hide your flaws, to become powerful, beloved. I can make you more.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 137 3. When you look in the mirror, you see only the illusionist’s vision of you. He strokes your cheek, whispers poisons that you take as truths: your body is foreign, disgusting, Other, and yet desirable, delectable, a delicacy to be consumed. You believe him. You wear this contradiction. You want so desperately to please him. The illusionist pulls you taut: a cat’s cradle. You lay bare, eyes closed to your shame as you bite back words that would betray you. Please, you say instead, inviting the audience in. See what shapes you can coax out of me. You tell yourself that this eroticism brings you pleasure, that it will make you loved. The illusionist smiles. 4. The curtains fall. For a moment, you’re alone. You tell yourself that the audience adored you, that they enjoyed you, that you did well. If you could relive that performance, you could hang on to that adoration, that enchantment forever. But you struggle to contort yourself back into one of those beautiful shapes: star, bridge, ties. Without hands to shape you, you are lost. The illusionist knows you. You’re lucky to have him, for right then, he slips into your chambers: You were beautiful. You’re a natural. He assuages you. He loves you, loves your exoticism. He turns your pain into pleasure, your humiliation into such lurid catharsis. Give in, my dear. Always say yes.
138 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology You learn that yes is a word of power, for if you always say yes, you can control your past, rewrite every event as something you wanted. 5. The illusionist works hard to keep you quiet, isolated, dependent on his attention, his validation. But there are places where his illusions crack. Tonight, when you perform, you do not look over the audience, but into their faces. At first, you see only more illusionists, how pleased they are, how they applaud, how even if they know every sleight of hand, you still manage to dazzle them. Then you see another apprentice. You did not know there were others, but of course there are others. This one is a woman with eyes darker than the Mariana Trench, eyes that show you her pain, that reawaken your own hurt, magnify you both. She opens her mouth. Her tongue is scarred, but when she speaks her voice is gentle: meet me alone 6. The illusionist has a skeleton key, but you know now that there are places that can be safe, if only for a moment. You hate this apprentice at first, the way she unmakes illusions, unravels you. But soon you realize that she sees you, that she witnesses you, that she needs no illusion to accept you and to love you.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 139 You learn your truth. 7. The first time you tear your tongue you bleed for days, cottonmouthed scarlet, but this is a pain you want to bear, that you must bear: There is no anesthesia for the excision of lies. In time, you will heal. Your words will no longer echo with the illusionist’s voice. For now, she wipes away your tears as she sheds her own. Adam’s Rendezvous with Dante John C. Mannone
When I was eight hundred years old I dreamed a dream and saw visions. I tagged along with a fellow named Dante and his poet guide. I listened to him and Virgil rant about a place they called Inferno, but it looked more like a junkyard dump. I had to run from a three-headed dog in the third part of hell and slip into the back of the boat crossing the river Styx to the nether parts. And then again I ran, this time from the Minotaur guarding the seventh gate, wherein there flowed the Phlegethon—a river of boiling blood. I heard splashes, saw pitchforks plunged into bobbing sinners who dared to poke their heads above the hot and roiling waves. Their heads would pop like bubbles, collapse into the turbulence, the violence
140 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology against humanity gushing there. I whimpered, Where is my son? The one who killed my Abel? How deep has he sunk? Dante said to me, Murderers of lords and kings and kin, have been condemned to the frozen stench below. When I reached the icy wasteland —last of nine godforsaken hells— I found no Cain. There was no fire except from the burning cold. I peered into the abyss, for a moment only saw the leathery warp of wings, heard the whoosh of frigid wind, and the anguish, the weeping & gnashing of teeth, and I saw the three faces of Lucifer masticating the treacherous, the traitors—gore of Judas mixing with the devil’s tears. But I rubbed my eyes and saw no vile beast wearing red-handled underwear nor wielding a three-pronged pitchfork. Instead, I saw an empty place lit only by a dim glow from the baby-faced man with soft blue eyes wearing a garment full of gems. He only feathered his angel wings. Out of the darkness, its voice, Adam! Adam! Why dost thou vilify me? I simply offered you knowledge of the gods. And I said, Sure you did, just as you seduced my wife with gold & silver fruit—no savor, only bitterness of truth, the acid taste of evil. And I… I could only see its glitter. But it was you who killed my two sons. The devil looked up at me from the bottom of the pit, a blaze in his eyes showed his countenance.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 141 I gaped at the paltry sight and said, Is this the man who plagued the world? It merely leered. Getting Winterized: A Guide To Rural Living Elizabeth R. McClellan
for Catherynne M. Valente, patron saint of first lines, and Amy Houser, for the visual
In response to yesterday’s public service announcement about bookbears we spent Saturday hoisting milk crates onto the wires. Suspend your volumes from the ceiling, reminded the newscaster, still face resolute under her afro. Remain calm, smart suit reassuring, orderly. Everything is under control. Her hands folded, flat. This is the trick I use to keep people from noticing when my own hands tremble, so I wondered, is she is thinking of her bookcases toppling domino style dropping heavy fruit of hooks, Hughes, all the Sam Delany she found for a few dollars, will she count her damage tonight? In our house damage is slight. We are resigned to seasons, didn’t need the reassurances, reminders, advice meant for the general public. It’s only called an emergency now, since they migrated into the cities en masse— clogging up elevators, shitting on terrazzo, terrorizing lapdogs, blocking sidewalks, leaving scraps of easily digested bestsellers unlucky homeowners buy again in a year or two, only remembering halfway through
142 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology how it turns out, whodunit, who she chooses. The insurance industry decided the bookbears are an act of God, won’t pay. There’s a class-action lawsuit pending in California someplace, some suburb that got hit early on, a scrappy librarian as named plaintiff. I hope she bleeds them dry. Now at the New York Public Library they sell postcards of the little brass plaque telling how stone lions work, half magic, half scarecrow logic. Most things are. When they started coming as near as Jackson, we strung the wires, put paper flowers up— plausible deniability, in case it was all foolishness. Eventually you bought me two stone lions, called me Eleanor; I laughed read you the Le Guin story about tiny live teddy bears eating the glue from the spines of nursery libraries, escaping into the walls. We threw things in any old way, I don’t know if we were thinking. We were young, short-term then. Now we have a system, keep saying we’ll make a spreadsheet— still, something is bound to get bent, or scuffed. Neruda covers curled around ruffled corners of Alexie, torn covers of cheap paperbacks, dust jackets rumpled. “Bear and tear” wasn’t that funny a joke to start with. When someone says it now, I remember the year you cried, holding the Rumi I gave you, torn clear in half— how you buried it, threw a big flat rock in the hole so nothing would dig it up again.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 143 You were so angry. I had no stories to soothe you. That winter you brought home three gun safes from an estate sale. Like new, you said. In the end it took six. The crates take less time now, first editions, rare and beloved things all secure behind oiled hinges— but the bookshelves are gap-toothed. I forget what we own, prowl the house, dissatisfied. Last year in Wyoming a man shot one, a tourist who left six books on how to be successful in his cabin, found them feeding, panicked, grabbed his handgun. The jury went easy on him— four years with good behavior. I couldn’t believe he shot it, said the jury foreman to the press, later, but I believe he didn’t mean it in his heart. Theories on the taboo abound, none definitive. No region uses them in local cuisine, most have a cautionary tale or parable, nothing congruent— ancestors, kami, shapeshifters, usually tricksters, sometimes benevolent, sometimes leading you astray, almost always ready to belch back up whatever wisdom was lost in feeding—for a price. Surprisingly often they are a good omen, considering how rare books were when these stories first came to bear. They don’t attack people, this we know. Evolutionary biology is keeping mum on how a species of bear, or raccoon, or throwback mammal evolved to this preferred diet, where exactly the calories come in when the paper is mostly left behind. The creepy part is that no one appears to have ever seen a dead one who can prove it or is admitting it. (The Wyoming bear lived.)
144 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology On late night AM radio people call in with stories about books left behind with strange errata, litters of commas in books with too few, those with too many left better for their absence, a few letters always gone completely. There’s a movie coming out next year in which they’re secret government experiments, Cold War leftovers escaped into the wild. I assume in the movie there’s nothing left but America, since we figured out a while ago that where you find people and books, you find bookbears. Or Hollywood thinks America invented books. This pisses both of us off. I think you made your peace about the Rumi a while back, but I won’t ask until spring. At our kitchen window you are standing rapt, crook one finger at me:Look — a finger to your lips, as if I don’t know to be quiet when there’s a bear trail across what passes for our backyard— hence gun safes, crates, lions, wires. I slip an arm around your waist, watch wobbly cubs with shining black fur amble, iridescent, a picture postcard of beast and snow and lowering light. I have slavered for books in my time, I think, and realize from your face I said it aloud. In the spring we cull discards, duplicates, read-once novels, old magazines. We scatter them like breadcrumbs down the path, hope the bears follow, find our cache of remainders, the ones I sneak out of Dumpsters all year, you store in Rubbermaid to keep the dust off. Technically these are felonies, but things are different in out of the way places like ours, the feds have their hands full on the urban front. Midnights I get tempted to check the remains, before
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 145 they grow soggy with snow, look for stray punctuation, missing letters. What I call plausible deniability is actually It’s dark and cold, and the woods outside our cottage are full of bears. Later I will smuggle fairytales upstairs— the tearing growls from the forest beg for bear tales, read aloud. god-date Brandon O’Brien i. the very first time, fearfully fascinating. she fell from the plum tree shaded plum herself, and plumed, singing in older heavens’ tongues. her fingers were dry ice, lace and lust her eyes were the rims of volcanoes and i don’t know the word in any language for her taste. ii. she definitely does not want me to eventually grow bored. a golden lark, with more of those forbidden songs; she introduced me to a couple of the stars she’d sewn night-skies for and they bowed and winked, said ‘yep, you look like a keeper for once, treat this deity right, you hear, you should come look us up sometime.’ she laid me down in the crater of a faraway moon and whispered, ‘let’s cut all the noisy stuff, just look up and share some secrets tonight.’ iii. this time, her real body: obsidian and starshine with sky-pool eyes with swimming silver, asking me how she was ever my type.
146 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology how could a girl like you ever believe in a goddess like me? just my luck. curious if i was just hoping for some manic pixie dream celestial crap i saw in a bad teen romance movie or if she, the real she with the quarreling hair and lopsided smile was what i prayed to every night knelt before her want, her need, her insatiable— do you worship me, or the idea of me? iv. i’m like, ’the concept of deity never threw its arms around me at night, incorporeal quark-hand in mine and whispered ‘please don’t cry, you’re gonna make it’ before— my faith isn’t hypothesis-over-proof like other folks’.’ i can only pray my praise is enough, and thank my lover for that luck. v. ‘you know …’ she looks down as i’m lying in her lap. ‘most mortals mean nothing to all my time and tragedy, but you’re not one of those one-night-kneel, pray-and-getaway kinds of people.’ she turns another page of the briefer history of time as i hum myself a mantra. providence, some people call it? just my luck. the universe must really like me.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 147 Sargasso Sea A.J. Odasso 1. Scylla July 2001–September 2005 It’s always tough. My first two lovers, a man and then a woman, noticed. No room on penetration, no harbor from storm. Grin and bear it is what I learned: to bleed every time. Fresh wound unrelenting, but pain I devour. Riddle thrust in me. Hard rain.
2. Charybdis November 2005 My third lover arrives. You look a little different down there, he says. Imagine me falling, imagine me near the whirlpool’s edge. Inside, too, I answer. Inside, monstrous. Can you hear it? Siren-song follows. I cave in.
3. Shipwreck December 2012 Enough discomfort is enough. I choose to go under the knife. Skin in excess, shorn down; canal
148 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology below the accepted limit observed. You might want to look into it.
4. Salvage November 2014 Back under. All spoils but wayward gonads plundered. Cervix untethered, that ungainly hatch. Cyst-filled tubes clipped to the quick. Uterus specimen smaller than expected. You’d never have borne it.
5. Spoils December 2015–July 2016 Mutation. Prow, too, disproportionate risk. Undertow, lead me through ether a third-charmed time. Whisper, He’d never have stayed to tread in your wake. Prescient hindsight unwinds. Buoyant, I swim free of it.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 149 Werewolf K.A. Opperman
The full moon is rising From out the red trees, Dead branches disguising Its leprous disease; The Wolf is now rising Within, realizing My curse, my disease, This mournful, accursed autumn night. I howl to my brothers— Wolves answer my call; Town maidens and mothers Pray rosary, all. The townsmen, my brothers By day, are now Others— Amassing, they all Hold pitchforks and torches alight. I prowl through the woodland Outside of the town— A ghoulish, ungood land Where wan flowers drown. Dark mere of the woodland, O what visage should land Here?—would it would drown!— A wolf-face of crimson-eyed fright! I tear though their torches, Their pitchforks I snap! Slay men on their porches, Their bright blood to lap! A fallen torch torches A house, the town scorches! Her blood I would lap— That maiden all moonlight-bedight!
150 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology I sweep up the maiden With one savage arm, An angel of Aidenn Who screams in alarm. I kidnap the maiden, My claws sweetly laden— The bell sounds alarm! I carry her off, out of sight. I fly through the forest, The tolling grows far. I head for the hoarest Of hills, for a Star Rules over the forest, This night of my sorest Of trials! and the Star Can challenge the moon’s awful might. Surrounded by roses That ruins entwine, She sleeps in sprawled poses— I see her for mine! This lily mid roses, Who tomb-top reposes— She always was mine! I lust her white beauty to bite. … The moon becomes veiled By curtains of cloud; The Star has not failed, So silvery proud! The Man lately veiled By evil ungaoled, I weep here, unproud, Above my beloved’s cold wight. Her white eyelids waken Beneath the Star’s rays! My Faith has been shaken— Now seraphs I praise! But though she awaken, Forever forsaken, I sing my sad praise, Her love nevermore to requite.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 151 Alice-Ecila Steph Post
Come with me, my Technicolor dream girl with the hollow eyes glazed over white my Alice Down and down and down wondering through wanderings through tongues and tails tumbling down down down falling and flailing and failing crawling through layers of and falling and Falling. daymare. Understand, I won’t help you only read and lead you to dreamwrecks and vastfull awakenings. Come with me. “she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well.” The snake, of which I have swallowed, I will become. Oh, where are my bones? These webbings and twitchings breathing slightly and salty. A loop
152 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology If you had a tail for this tale, well if, my tail winding its way behind my teeth, but would I have the courage to bite? Would you? “it didn’t matter much which way she put it.” Back wardfor ward for ever ever land. That’s not all. Listen. ’Twas librling and the hiltys ovtes Did reyg and migleb in the beaw: All symim were the goborevos, And the omme harst trabuego. I don’t know if I can hold Listen. The Webockbaj, with eyes of flame, Came gwinlihff through the yetlug wood, And delurb as it came! myself into one body when the spaces surrounding my breathing are s tr etc he d into marrow dust. Alice, can you get there? Can you see the out of in? Keep your eyes on the weather though it isn’t much better down here with the lizards That wither. “Who are you?” My once name is twisted inside me like coils unraveling looping in lengths dividing all the squares Except you’re trying to get there. and my veins are only constricting because they know
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 153 Keep trying. Keep lying. where I am going. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” Because backwards is forwards is the only way to get back the way is the Why? But you must know the why. No, please tell me You know. You know. who is dreaming me? Not me. But somewhere the backs of my eyelids are fluttering, somewhere the neurons are firing, carrying the electric message Down the line. from line to line to line. “For she had plenty of time.” Alice, are you listening? You speak of webbings and bones. You know, that won’t get you home. But I cannot bring to my lips what consumes me. I cannot put down my throat what only burns me. I can only eat my pieces and hope to save the rest. Go, go from me now my dark-eyed child If I close my eyes who dreams of wilds and numbers who wonders I may wake. and wanders at words backwards. I may wake. This girl. Who devours her tail. I may wake. In her sleep.
154 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology At Issue, the Miramo Ken Poyner
I am here to see if the Miramo have art. I watch them entangle their phalanges, I register the grandfallons of their breathing. Out of their ground, vibration; Light, left suspended in the atmosphere, With its terminations distended and going blue. I cannot tell if these two Miramo are one, Or this one is two—but galoshing filaments Are mercilessly merging and the crowd thumps Their tails in ecstasy or anger, Agreement or warning, fulfillment or hunger. They are as steady as rocks In landslide, and the flow of their Interaction Is like the spray painting of babies, Like a polite political poisoning, The sum of a moment in which The figgle of the next is entombed. One is a gauge, one is a release valve, And another is a set of spokes Arrayed about an indifference. They fold dimensions as though dimensions Were mourning dresses billowed by the laughter Of the dead, or an abandoned plate of teething cast iron. Their patterns are anti-magnetic. It is my job to see if At the end of this untying affair There are as many Miramo As there were at the start. Is there practical outcome to this, a need, an Accomplishment, or do the Miramo Appreciate? It is a cold, liquid mathematics. I squint to see If there are new common structures; If the Miramo are as hungry after this affair As they were when they began; Whether their acts have suspended a migration; Turned grand foppery into feathers; or trapped The least likely to thrive against perdition.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 155 Compulsion is not creativity; it presages no soul. Why the Miramo do what they do Opposes room temperature commerce With its tepid, disagreeable disorganization. If it were up to me, I would sell The whole lot of them to a biodiversity Broker, scoop up their land with A gravity axe, put an option On the planet’s core, displace the orbit, And make cordials with their atmosphere. Instead, I have to see if they are making Something of themselves. Abstraction Means survival. I don’t think they know. The Robot by the Fireplace Ken Poyner
This I can take care of: Small homunculus on the roof, a pack animal Pulled conveyance, and entry through the exhaust chute. I am not so sure I was supposed to overhear The details of this plot, to catch uninvited the briefing About this expected home invasion, though I wonder why. Protection is part of my programming. The safety of the family’s offspring is a persistent subroutine, Running even when I am in recharge state: The first memory location upgraded, the highest Interrupt, the largest amount of direct access allocation Set aside for any of my subroutines. I am not designed for security, but, at the last, Every extremity I am capable of is allowed in progeny protection; And I suspect there is even some code hidden within me That, upon recognition of severe enough threat, Would swap into my execution registers and turn me Fierce. I can take care of this. I ignore the excitement, assist with mechanical professionalism The laying about of greenery, the installation Of lights, the festooning of fire-retardant coated Garland. I calculate with idle processor time That I will be able to hear animals on the shingles, Even trace the lithe footsteps of anyone who could fit
156 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Greaselessly down this relatively narrow chimney, and that I will be ready No matter the agility or commitment of the intruder. The family, they have admitted, will all be in bed, Bedecked in foppery set aside for the season. I would typically be away in standby. The house Locked down would normally be as secure as rain. This new endangering vector, though I do not understand it, Seems to have not been properly considered. Entry through the chimney? Not my choice of ingress. This curls More of a ruse, more of a process designed to Fool, with an agent decked out to resemble Immature fantasies of the little people who roam The littered imagination of human history. A wink And a nod and a child might be sucked in, And adult momentarily set aback. Left would be only my industrial grade programming, Unimpressionable and beyond folk lore, Running in core to keep this family from ruin, from all of them being Assimilated into whatever druid plan the rogue Gift-giving criminal might have in his deliriously twisted holiday engrams. The innocent conversation about this openly expected visitor Has been anything but menacing: no worry, no defensive preparations, Nothing to indicate that the projected territorial violation will cause The least bit of alarm. It is good that I have solid Auditory fidelity, and wide enough data pathways To act independently, decisively on my perceptions. I report nothing of my fears; but this night I will stay On auxiliary power, show everyone I am worth the price of upkeep. Even now I am listening overhead for those tiny, murderous hooves. We Shall Meet in the Star-Spackled Ruins Wendy Rathbone all the skies between galaxies shimmer in void what beautiful abysses we travel, you and I because there are no gods yet we make them
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 157 old grass for hair September minds thinking red smoke thoughts when they dream myths are made and war fields of helmets with the heads still in them no starship has ever gone far enough to find proof of life we see fairies out the portholes and orchids and black tetras tractor beams fail to bring them aboard the months go by all autumn, even May when time was young it wore shorter skirts now it’s all cloaks and hoods masquerades on free-floating space-craft verandas a diagonal crack in the mirror means the rains will soon come bitter chartreuse bringing the boat-wrecks up the weeds and the mermen sometimes I cannot see anything real in a human way “Lift me up from the abyss” they say but it is over-rated out here let me sink back into myth Olympian palaces and naked gods all made up and ready to rule my dollhouse my million rooms my endless poem
158 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology pool after pool of satyr and nymph orgies under limitless October stars glistening orifices invitations elixirs from the genitalia of immortals milk and honey wine and lilacs tangle of limbs and lips even the trees bend down to drink back on Earth incense and patchouli on over-kill I open the window to the rain it brings clarity of green-ness May’s birthstone even though it is now November in the northern hemisphere and all the bracelets drip topaz on all the wrists of naiads, sylphs, wolf-men the bobbing mer-folk with fire in their hair the moon princes the lords of amber and burned-out suns I walk down the abysses in the dripping dark hours just to feel again ghost-hands caressing me wrapped in black silk of shadow shrouds distilled down to the curled inks of all the poems I have yet to make out of all the stolen years alive pretending to be an earthman to be an earthwoman to be an earthbeing I remember worrying about belonging and glamour and not being good enough
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 159 secretly wishing there was a devil who might spit in the face of a god that never was I am god-blind but not myth-blind I could make up creatures all day long dress them in twigs and moons and set them at the windows of my doll-ship and in my diorama of tinfoil stars and Swarovski novas so many lanterned nights moth-wings like powdered sugar on the static air the pink deaths of candleflames I speak fluent autumn now royal dusks leaf-kings egos of dark vanity rushing through embers of meteors dying in the dew-less fields I am fluent in witch dreams erotica and chimney-smoke curving up to starship-eyed skies when I brush my hair pieces of galaxies fall away my love once said “watch me walk across this abyss just to get to you” the definition of strength is how long you will wait for him to return from his odyssey the definition of death is stardust the definition of love is how long you will wait for the stardust to reform
160 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology into you and me after the heat-death we shall meet in the star-spackled ruins of December storm of ash-glitter falling on my skin the desperate calls of myths to be told again sky-chariots burning so many iridescences in their wings The Butterflies of Traxl IV John Reinhart
Traxl IV—known primarily for its chlorinated sea breezes & an outcropping shaped naturally into the exquisitely perfect contours of the legendary Terran Butterfly, as near anyway to the common illustrations still found in children’s storybooks— once suffered a twist of economical fate no invisible hand could muster the rocky outcropping of intergalactic fame, the beacon to any tourist with sense organs & travel capability who could withstand or avoid the atmosphere, disintegrated inexplicably— a sand castle dissolved by unseen tides a generation mourned the monument as tourists
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 161 forgot it, a crumbled Colossus of no further use; when the spiral cliffs began to change—no one noticed them at first, no scientists with seismographers ran to record new data, no artists drew, danced, or wrote odes to rock—& yet this change transformed the very atmosphere winds picked up; rain, little though it was, came to deserts; even the moons seemed new, & the chlorine dissipated— when the oldest woman left in the colony still knew the legend of the Butterfly as story only, the cliffs exploded chunks of planetary surface, the very stuff that people trod down for hundreds of years, the sediment layered in lives forgotten, flew, crashed, destroyed, sending tidal waves to choke dry land as dry land itself seemed intent on death— the colonists hid beneath their beds, in closets, secured in basements behind the biodomes, sheltering from battle, quaking from nature still misunderstood forty weeks of destructive chaos, a disaster without the dignity to introduce itself; within, the humble realization that life is more powerful than those who live it, resilience despite the odds—
162 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology the dust cleared enough then to see the world they thought was theirs, to see what life was wrought upon them, to see the wonders dreams cannot conceive, as across the sky, beyond the new breezes slowly clearing away the haze, iridescent wings shone the envy of rainbows, as boulder-sized bodies lifted, light as sunlight into the atmosphere, slowly turning between the moons, rise & fall, rise & fall of a thousand thousand wings born to fly To the weaver, from the woman who slew Bakunawa M. Sereno
Begin with the red arterial clotting balisong in sparrowflight spatter. Black beside it, yes: take the Maynila night that sheltered my flight, its tender dark, the way it unfolded dama de noche’s soft core to awaken fists full of heat, wet stench of perfume, alleyways gorged on scavenging tiktik as neon-gleam cars feasted, electric, on the torn edges of a scream. On promises swallowed by Tondo’s eaten children, to surface lamp-red on grit-stamped brow: bata pa man ay may pagasa. O kaya: habang may buhay— O kaibigang taga-habi, everything is devouring and being devoured, oh listen, what did they tell you of lanzones, Linggit, inang buwaya; Do you not hear, will you whisper it into your loom’s chambered shell, into sharded hatinggabi? The rhyme is a chant echoing dust mote to sickle moon sliver, to clouds eaten by monuments bordering streets like teeth: sheet-metal roofs gnawed to scraps along the Pasig’s rotting mouth, granite mansions gleaming canines in tranquil satisfaction. Lips sun-stitched around cut tongues how beautifully we wear conquerors’ chains, this draped garrote noose we unsee into lightness.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 163 Black and red and we say it is not blood, though we bury our ninuno’s gore under our wrists. But now I will wrap your weaving around me and the pulse will beat in my throat anew— this red, this black thrumming across exile’s ocean. To deal death is to give up memory, but taga-habi, to cut blood’s thread is to save. A traditional pattern so far: we call it life, because we have not yet been used up. Another day, a grave opening like a crimson flower. Prick it until it bleeds stars.
Tell me light cannot be devoured. Here are scales of sawa and bayawak, crimson-spotted tuko, to signify unbreaking.
Salamangkera, they call you: weave me taut. I fray, day by day. Thread in the gold they gouged out of the bellies of mountains, pulled from mines’ tongueless mouths, the earth’s throat. O this land I cannot touch, will never touch again. What little I can thieve back for you I will. Here is metal so soft your thumbs mark it. Press your ear to its pitted skin- do you hear? Forests dreaming emerald and sun. Nightmares grating stolen names, and yet: Tulog pa rin si Apo. For this is comfort, refusing to wake to graves. So while spirits sleep grind dye’s pigment fine: here too are bird-snap bones, remnants of fingers forfeited to storm-throat cracks of sky. The same leaf gilding massacre’s borders in maps glinting with plunder and discovery. How our conquerors mapped our skies, our bodies, consecrating us with tongue-knot names. Oo. Itong ginto. Itong libingan. See, it will make your threads weapons, shining daggers stabbing outward with all the splendor we’ve dug from ruins: ash-flaked jewels, smashed saints’ crowns. Take it back. Take it all. This is the rare ore lodged in the heart I cut open to survive. This the color of the unnumbered pawns in empire’s game of chess. This the scepter I dream: a queen ruling the kingdom of my body, brown archipelago of limbs, marked skin, scars. Why is gold pure, because it is veined? Hammer me these wires, kaibigan; pierce them through the bloodstream of the weft. Spear birdsong through infant cloth the way nails stud Quiapo’s crosses. Whiplash, rising like a hymn, bee-hum swarming through novenas of the faithful. I have forgotten the words to echo. But the crowds,
164 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology the sweat gilding our skin, that fatally gleaming day, we the city’s bodies, moving. What did he look like, that precious Nazarene? That ebony, those riverborn pearls, that bright-stitched cloth—
Babaylan would have known crucifixion, you say. And yet surpassed it. Hung wide, athirst, I stare up at the sky to dream the dreams for your weaving. Ngunit ako lamang ang panaginip dito. Ano ang hahanapin pa?
Taga-habi, kaisa-isa: let us return to the pattern. Run yellow down in streaks, choose its vengeful child, kaibigan. Silaw: sunlight bruising flood-swallowed streets, villages storm-wrecked, the wet glisten of next year’s famine. How well your magic knows these brittle skeletons, cages for voices: a woman’s madness wailing, wailing, calling: Crispin, Basilio. That crowd of flowers watching through bright eyes as she crashed to splinters before the church. The blood echoing their faces, vivid as the poisoned langka they planted in my body, mangga they ripped out oozing sweetness from my heart. Syllables of stories slip away from us like stones as skin-stripped hands feed us monsters. Yellow is for aswangs’ claws, the eyes of mambabarang. For Ilang, sprouting towards sacrifice again, her arms reaching out to become branches heavy with blossom and supplication. For oil-slick shells in sunset’s mirrors: I am shattered, an insect under foot, and am offered only yellow ribbons to bind my wounds. Lumiliyab ang aking bayan: oo, pa rin. Ngunit anong silaw ang magniningning mula sa putik? Anong dilaw ang sisilaw sa kawalan? A serpent swallowed the moon once, heaven’s lastborn egg, and when I killed him his jaws flung the moon back into the night and it was yellow, yellow. Spotted lanzones, robbed of its poison. Tell me the exchange was worth it. We pay the price for survival and go on, despite ourselves. Oh call me down by the names no tongue here will pronounce. Call me singing notes no throat can surrender. How I once held them, closer than lovers: sandata, pansangga. Yet my hands have lost the grasp of summer’s hammers, the pregnant swell of storm— o for song, for magic, o what magic could return this music–
Is this how aswang are born? So much hunger, and we have hunted our gods into the abyss. Surely there must be more.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 165 Yesterday dusk was falling: against that plummet, trees’ hands raised dark to the sky. Empty. Ubos na: sinaid, sinimot. Wala nang maibibigay pa.
No, do not give me blue. In exile I subsist on desert nights, pale dust: I can no longer see— the sea, dagat, alon, isang buong daigdig! In sleep my hair unfurls masses of nets too blade-gouged for scales, drawing in only shipwrecks, yesterday’s refuse, bloated bodies, ravaged blossoms of blood. I once crammed the sun into my mouth in my hunger, my parched fury. What would that be but unweaving? We return to the sea, we all, our corpses sinking to soothe Amanikable’s rage, and the currents carry these daily masks away in rotting testament to the trench of forgetting. Have we not had our fill of storm, drowning while on land? The world is water, its weight cobalt death crushing our bones drop by steady drop. In the right light the drowned shine the truest blue. The clouds will eat inangbayan. As the serpent ate the moon, plunging us all into that star-stolen night. So draw the threads tight, taga-habi. Knot as garrotes kill. Remember, oh, they did that to our people. Years after wading through salt to shore, steel to steel: how they anointed us with hoods erasing the sky, mirrors, the last taste of sea. We do not tell the story, no longer swim its oath-stained tides. Only walk quiet graves in bronze-shod feet. For rain promises nothing, except to wash away departure. Pain. After leaving— oh, here I have buried my hands and they do not sprout the blood- fed leaves of home. Here fruits are caged, fish headless and shorn of their scales, and my eyes thirst for that brightness that says: yes, you lived. How do you ignite when only cold resides in your veins? What color will the sky burn after a warrior has eaten its sun? Do not give me blue. I will no longer know it. Yet how I long for the sea, for its salt on my tongue, though it may extinguish me, and I cannot unswallow the sun.
What they took from me, what I would give back—oh these weapons unsheathing, throat bared. Belly ripe for opening. Birth, slicing us all open, spilling us out into the grief-edged patterns our grandmothers first wove: o taga-habi, this radiance will split open our graves. Weave on.
Here, now: the colorless thread. Here the knots to finish the weaving. Kaibigan— if I did not carry this howling loss in my belly I would not speak. I have set my spear aside,
166 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology yet still you clutch your loom to your knees, though its frame keens with the song of cutting, shudders in the heartbeats of crucified inangbayan, invasion driven deeper than foundations into her earth. How can you still hold it? How can hands carry the weight of three hundred years —no, more—fingers remembering warp and weft of war, scorched crimson of massacre, yellowing famine, and like usok and palay, death death death blooming from Maynila’s black heart. We find our graves as soon as we are born, in traitorous tongue and dreams so enslaved no recompense can unshackle them. Here we are, after gods: I was woven. He unraveled me. They did, again and again, raising sea-strung empires out of my skulls. Fields ash- sown, cities helmed in capiz, moonstruck silver. I was vermilion and umber, greener than serpents, and oh, my sheen was the sheen of fire! Pure as the burning that birthed the earth, a spear aimed at the heart of all monsters, and now there is only starvation, drowning, stories of salvation never meant for us, of inherited names: indio, ladrones, carrion, fodder for kanluran’s crowns. We of wound-dark tongue, fingers, heart: the unshining side of the world. Still will you speak of color? Will you tell me: heto ang ginto at pilak, umuusbong sa paglubog ng araw. Will you lift your eye to the horizon skyscraper-stabbed before you, its back rippling smoke, bruise-purple, glinting the gold we have lost? And the light, the light, the light! Will you return these colors to me? To us, kapatid! Will I look into the eye of the sun again, and not be unmade? We do not kill gods lightly. My penance, Bakunawa’s curse: despite centuries of bone, I live.
We will lose our beloved dead. Tahan na, tahan. We have already lost them. Weep them into your weaving, knot their spirits unsleeping into the cloth. Oh all the women I have loved, how we sang together, shattered each other, and in the end were broken. She who slays the world-eating serpent is only gifted with more slaying, bounty upon bounty of death, and never freedom. Who would ask for kalayaan, having torn out her insides for its fire? I have unlearned heat, but I cannot unlearn how morning gleams
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 167 over each ray of thread: the color of desire, which is the last and final strength. To want more, knowing its weight, and yet to go on. We had names for such power. Katatagan. Tapang. Pag-asa. Tuloy pa rin ang laban. Time has washed so much of it away: the sightless years, the choices of spear and spine, and now I am only stripped bone. I wanted tapestry, not as a banner but to cover my nakedness. So let weaving be my archipelago’s liberation. Cover me in futures spun from the defiance that pierces the rubble of dying cities to cry out: narito kami. Oo, pa rin. After regime, after empire, I will know flesh again, tag-init, alab ng dugo, something more than rain. Here, take the last of my true fingers, what remains of my art. I have paid my price for survival, like other kapatid: to swallow brightness as a bayonet through my throat, as cannon shot, as bullet through desaparecido and Moro, as buntot-pagi through killing wings, and if I can no longer see goddesses outlined in starry cloud against the sky, at least grant me this: the cloth wrapping around my scars, for my heart will count it thread by thread. I will wake into hatinggabi fingers speaking the weaving’s speech. Be my skin, hinabing panaginip. Tell me I will live again, held close by flesh, swallowing water. Say I will swim in the sea. Will say once again, pag-asa, my throat full, my mouth open to catch the air, under the sun, under the blood- freed moon. The Inconceivable Shape Simon Smith
The shape was uncovered by a fuller named Spengler; He was a Beghard lay-preacher and a reader of Mechthild. He made his deduction in the Bavarian forest, With a weaver from Freiburg; and an apprentice named Hans. Herr Spengler was fated a grisly end; He was found in the year of thirteen fifty-two; On the dusty stone floor of a textile workshop, Enswathed with white linen turned carmine with blood.
168 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology The flesh had been flayed from his entire body; His death had been bought with unthinkable pain. His skin was stretched out on the whiteworker’s table, Embroidered with numbers and magical signs. There was no sign of Hans, nor explanation from the weaver, Who was said to have turned completely insane. * * * Hans made his way North to the city of Munster; Riding the back of an unsaddled pony; With his worldly belongings in a brown leather satchel; With a slice of ripe turnip; and a lump of black bread. Among his possessions were a number of papers, Which Hans had removed from Herr Spengler’s estate. They detailed plans for the shape’s reproduction; A task Hans now swore he would never repeat. Hans had been party to the initial discovery. In a small wood-built annex to Herr Spengler’s cottage, They had sat at a table and worked through the night. With quill pen and dividers, they scribed on grey parchment, Plotted angles and vectors from arcane formulations, And eventually produced that pernicious design. The initial reaction was of utter bemusement. “What is this?” Spengler muttered. “This cannot be correct.” As they beheld the unfathomable shape, Their surprise soon mutated to confusion and fear. The form was so ghastly; so unnaturally terrible; It seemed to refute geometrical laws. For these disciples of Euclid it was too much to contend with; They had unwittingly perpetrated an irredeemable sin. As the deviant nature of their doings became apparent, A hysterical fever took control of their minds. They frantically raved as if beset by some madness; As if gripped by a terror so unhinged and deranging As to banish them forever from rational thought. The unfolding horror, too lurid for retelling, Became a source of contention within the Beghard commune. The truth of the occurrence was forever the secret Of a Black Forest lunatic and the absentee Hans. * * *
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 169 On arrival in Munster, Hans sought absolution. He visited the cathedral and made his confession. The priest was indulgent, although uncomprehending; And sent Hans on his way with some consoling words. Hans would always remember that Bavarian aberration, But nevertheless pursued a conventional life. In time he was married and went on to have children; He took work from a draper and was a well-thought-of man. The brown leather satchel, with its unspeakable secrets, Was stored in the attic of his half-timbered house. When Hans reached his dotage, at the ripe age of sixty, His thoughts turned again to the unthinkable shape. One winter’s evening, he gathered his family, And proceeded to tell the events of his youth. He opened the satchel and removed Spengler’s papers. He spread one flat on the table for his family to see. “The numbers writ here are a set of co-ordinates.” He produced some more pages and furrowed his brow. “When plotted against the scale here outlined, They can be used in conjunction with a new type of maths. The notes for the system are in the second appendix, The first being comprised of geometric proofs.” He looked around at his family and was suddenly serious. “I must severely forewarn you that the maths must be abstract. This is specialised knowledge and is not meant for games. Under no circumstances should it ever be attempted To manifest these equations in the sublunary world. I can sadly attest with my bitter experience They harbour latent potential to unharness one’s mind.” Hans’ son was named Otto and took the man’s words with reverence. He studied the numbers but did not dare draw the design. A back room was given entirely to his inquiry; It was duly denominated the Room of the Shape. * * * The family lived in that house for several generations. Otto begat Arthur; Arthur begat Jonas; Jonas begat Wolfgang in fifteen hundred and five. Herr Spengler’s theorem was passed down with the genome; Always with the injunction that it must not be made real. By the time Jonas taught it to the fifteen-year-old Wolfgang, The idea had expanded to a system of thought.
170 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology But understanding a principle will diminish its sanctity, And Wolfgang paid no heed to the ancestral command. Wolfgang grew to be a headstrong young man. He had little respect for traditional values. Upon learning the theory of the ineffable pattern He immediately knew he would attempt reproduction. He spent hours alone with compass and straightedge, Trying his utmost to give the numbers a form. One day he emerged from the Room of the Shape; His eyes wide and staring and his face drained of blood. He had finally accomplished his ill-reckoned object: He had drafted the shape and perceived it in full. His jaw now hung slackly and was drooling saliva; His head twitched at random in involuntary spasms. He came down the staircase with unrepeatable language; He walked straight past his father and stepped out the front door. He would never return to that nurturing town-house, But instead walked the streets as a half-witted vagrant; Sleeping in doorways and begging from strangers; Mumbling incoherently in the opaquest of language About unknown dimensions and recondite maths. One day he encountered a transient Dutchman; A tailor’s apprentice from the city of Leiden. The man was named Jan and seemed searching for guidance; Wolfgang, it seemed, had found a sympathetic friend. The two men shared lodgings, and Wolfgang shared his wisdom; Eventually revealing that terrible shape. When a secret is shared then the burden is lessened; As Jan’s sanity wavered, Wolfgang’s own was restored. In fifteen thirty-three he left the city of Munster. In want of some purpose, and lacking direction, He headed West in the wake of the sinking red sun. * * * After many adventures he arrived fourteen years later At a Mennonite meeting in the city of Amsterdam. The people he met were of similar mindsets; They were radical thinkers and invited ideas. He found conversation with two young men from Merindol; They were fugitive Huguenots and acolytes of Erasmus; They went by the names of Michel and Piers.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 171 One night, whilst discussing the teachings of Waldo, Conversation had turned to esoteric beliefs. Wolfgang was vehement in his long-held opinion That unmediated reality was inaccessible to minds. “There is a thing I have seen which defies explanation. There are parts to this life of which you could not conceive.” His companions were sceptics and demanded elaboration. They said they could not credit his unverified claims. “Very well then,” said Wolfgang. “I can give a demonstration. Bring me some parchment and a writing device.” Wolfgang still carried the mathematical instruments Which would be required to produce the strange shape. His companions soon brought him an old roll of paper, A lamp with a handle, and a goose-feather pen. Wolfgang set about his heretical enterprise. When the task was completed his eyes seemed to shine. He stood back from the drawing and held the lamp up above it. The shape was imperfect, but conveyed the impression, Of that mind-twisting structure of impossible thought. Michel was dumbfounded, he held his hands up in horror. “I cannot believe it. How could this be real?” Piers was a pragmatist, and somewhat lacked imagination. “This is a clever illusion, but hardly convincing.” The pair’s nerves were shaken, but their wits were intact. And yet, many weeks later they had still not recovered; They could not relinquish that thing they had witnessed. Their perceptual fabric let in light at the seams. They had seen intimations of the foot on the treadle Spinning colourful marvels for their mental amazement; The paradoxical form dominated conversation; It was woven through every part of their lives. Wolfgang soon departed with an Ottoman trader. They had plans to import exotic plants from the East. He took with him the knowledge for the shape’s reproduction, But left behind the design for the Frenchmen to use. They revealed the drawing to numerous Amsterdammers. They formed a society called the Fellowship of the Shape. They held clandestine meetings in a derelict windmill, Where they tried to ascertain the shape’s hidden truths;
172 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology They believed they could use it as a means to unravel The thread of order and logic from the loom of the world. Michel wrote a treatise on the shape’s derivation: Inquiry into the Origin of Non-Euclidean Form. It was burned by a Spaniard when he learned of the topic. He said the work was satanic; they were bound for perdition. Piers knocked the man unconscious and threw him in a canal. The society disbanded after twenty-one years. They had made little progress in understanding the shape. * * * Michel travelled East with a seamstress named Gretel. They lived in Cologne and had a child named Brecht. In fifteen eighty-three, when Brecht reached adulthood, Michel thought he should see the inconceivable shape. The young man turned wild, as you might have predicted; He went to the cathedral with a piece of white chalk. On the paving outside, with a maniac cackle, He reproduced the design for a public display. Brecht never returned to his family residence; He roamed across Europe, in those volatile years. In each place he arrived, he would find a bare wall or pavement, And would recklessly render that accursed shape. * * * Piers in the meantime took a different direction; He travelled to Paris with a performing troupe. He wore costumes and make up, and danced like a jester; He learned to walk the high wire and fly the trapeze. But these tricks did not serve for his entire income. When the show was completed, for a handful of livre, Folk would be admitted to his small tented home. In the candlelit gloom, with theatrical gestures, He would give them full sight of the impossible shape. Word spread across Paris of this dubious honour. There were whispers in churches, in brothels, at the scaffold: “The shape has the power to bestow election!” “There is a man from the circus who can open your mind!” “One look at his shape will change you forever!” Piers was reputed an emissary of God. In fifteen seventy-two he had a particular visitor. He was named Edmond Auger and was a famous orator.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 173 He was a Jesuit man from the township of Troyes. He paid his admittance and entered Piers’ shelter, Whereupon he bore witness to the terrible sight. He took the paper from Piers and examined it closely. With a trembling finger he tried to trace the design. “I do not understand," said the Jesuit. "The lines are straight, yet they bend.” The man’s eye began to flicker. A vein throbbed in his head. “The circumference seems bounded … yet the thing has no edge!” The drawing fell from his hands and he started to shudder His face had turned pale and he spoke in a whisper. “What fiendish thing is this you have conjured? But that I could unsee the abomination. My God.” Piers picked up the drawing and laughed like a demon. “You’ve seen what you came for. Now go tell your friends.” “I certainly shall,” replied Edmond, coldly. “I will denounce you for sorcery, you heretical brute.” * * * Those were difficult times for Parisian freethinkers. Piers soon left the city for a more welcoming place. In Cherbourg he boarded a boat bound for Portsmouth. He decided that England was to be his new home. In Portsmouth he encountered a maiden named Eliza. Within a year of their meeting, she gave birth to a son. Piers was willing to take his responsibilities seriously. He made Eliza his wife and found work at the docks. When Piers returned home from a hard day of labour He was chiefly concerned with his child’s tutelage. The boy’s name was Luke, and before he reached manhood, He was fully acquainted with that anomalous shape. Piers taught that the shape was a way to earn money. They took specie from sailors in return for a look. Reputation soon spread all the way up to Scotland. They became known through the land as the Men of the Shape. * * * Luke reached the age of thirty at the turn of the century. In that year he married a needleworker named Bess. She bore him a son and they christened him Amos. [Enter yet one more player in our long-winded yarn.]
174 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology He was mad from the outset; discontented and seething. At the baptismal font he roared with unholy fury, As if heralding news of the destruction to come. Luke passed on what was now a family tradition. At the age of sixteen, although already unstable, Amos was initiated into the sect of the shape. His reaction to the image was shockingly violent. His eyes became wide and he howled like a dog. He flailed his arms as if fighting with phantoms. He gurned, spat and snorted as if poisoned or rabid; He stamped around like a bedlamite set loose from his chains. His fragile mind had been fatally fractured; Permanently warped by those recursive lines. The braid of his life would be hopelessly tangled With the infinite pattern of that nefarious design. He sat day and night reading King James’ Bible And could see the shape’s stitching through every verse. He raved about Ahab, Ahaziah and Jehoram. He claimed to have visions of Jonah and Judith, And long conversations with David and Saul. He took to the road as a mechanick preacher. He wandered the country and begged strangers for food. He stood alone at signposts to recite St John’s Apocalypse. He sat on farmyard fences and preached gospel to pigs. He slept in fields and hedgerows; He kept company with sheep. He fell in with a crew of scribbling dissenters. They were educated men and had access to money. They owned an underground print-shop in Grub Street of London, And printed pamphlets proclaiming the coming of Christ. Amos gave them instruction on the shape’s strange dimensions; He said the shape was a prophecy of the millennium at hand. He said the truth of the world was a numerical tapestry; And taught them ways to bind numbers to produce solid forms. They took him for an expert in the mysteries of nature; They named him Meister Amos, Adept of the Shape. They were visited by a certain Thomas of Malmesbury, A timid translator of classical texts. Thomas considered himself a mathematical thinker, He hoped to master the method of constructing the shape. But the full explication left poor Thomas shaken;
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 175 That weird wayward logic had unbalanced his mind. The implicit suggestion pressed his faint-hearted theories, And troubled the scholar to the end of his life. A pamphlet was produced to present that vile pattern. It was extensively annotated with Biblical lore. It advocated violent political action; It portrayed ecclesiastics as devotees of the Worm. Often seen in the print-shop was a surly physician, Sometimes in the company of a long-haired young man. They spent hours with Amos in complex discussion, Perplexed by the properties of the impenetrable shape. One day they departed with a case full of pamphlets. They promised to distribute them wherever they could. The pamphlets passed through the hands of a diversity of people; The shape was seen by Naylor, Winstanley, and Coppe. Of the thousand pamphlets printed there is but one still surviving, And not a living person knows or suspects it exists. (Secreted as it is in a leather-bound edition of Twining’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics; Second shelf down in a locked glass cabinet, room forty-seven of the British Museum.) In sixteen forty-two the land was riven by warfare. A number of Amos’ friends took up arms. Amos himself had no such inclinations He had acquired quiescence with the passing of years. He packed his meagre possessions and took the road North from London, In search of a quieter life somewhere else. Amos wandered for years in that war-ravaged country, Taking refuge and charity wherever he could. He discoursed on the shape to those who would listen; Whilst evading impressment by Fairfax’s mob. In sixteen fifty-one he was seized in an ale-house; He was branded a vagrant and left in a cell. He was put on a ship filled with malnourished Scotsmen. It was bound for the colony at Massachusetts Bay. * * * Word of the shape had now crossed the Atlantic. It was soon known from Kentucky to the Prussian frontier. John Adams offered land to the man who could draw one; Rousseau had the pattern tattooed on his chest. By the end of that century the whole of France was in uproar; Speculation on the nature of the shape was now rife.
176 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology But the knowledge and technical skills to produce one Seemed to have vanished with the turning of time. Many was the dreamer who undertook the commission; Shapes were forthcoming from every city and town. They worked from memories, rumours, and informed speculation. They worked with drafting machines; and at easels with magnifiers. They used protractor and set square; beam compass and French curve. But whilst many of the myriad productions could inspire, They lacked the maddening purity first evoked by Herr Spengler; They were substandard copies of the original form. Indeed, each iteration of the shape had degraded. First by Wolfgang, then Michel; Brecht, Piers, Luke and Amos; None of their attempts had so perfectly rendered The sheer flawless insanity as that of Spengler and Hans. These ersatz imitations replicated like a virus. They were displayed and debated in drawing-rooms and lectures, In every decade across the eighteen-hundreds and beyond. They were witnessed by people of all kinds of persuasions, From a Corsican braggart to a British-born Jew; By a destitute German and a Russian named Nechayev; By tale-spinning fantasists and pretenders to truth. They were seen in the cities of Moscow and Petersburg; In the riotous ferment of Munich and Rome; And in frostbitten places built with iron and clapboard, Where laws had no meaning, and bears walked the streets. Shapes spread over mountains, and through the steppes of the Tartars, To the sun-whitened places in which Mani had taught; And at last infiltrated the great land of China; Infecting every province with improbable thoughts. In these quickening times, and with quantum computers, It is certain the shape will be discovered again. The infernal design lies malignant and silent, And determines the course of our rush to the end. The Leviathans of Europa Christina Sng
The plates have shifted again And mana from the surface Drifts languidly down the ocean, Bringing sustenance To the hibernating creatures below; Bringing new life to the gravid ones. Soon the babies are born, Mouths wide, searching for nourishment From their mother, Who lies prone On the ocean bed, dying— Her life’s purpose complete. When she is gone, The nurselings are fully grown, Pairing up to mate, a tradition Since their species first evolved Five eons ago. For generations, This has not changed. Till one curious female Resolves to rewrite her fate. She parts from the tribe, Determined to find adventure On the mysterious surface, The place they call The Source, Where all food comes from. She swims, Non-stop Up the unending sea, Against gravity, Till she finally Reaches the top.
178 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Sunlight pierces through the ice To warm her face, a sensation She has never felt in her life. She marvels at how bright The world above is— The countless silver white lights, The boundless sky beyond. What other seas does it possess In the vast world above? Are there more creatures Like her, bound in This life and death cycle? She wonders and dreams, Takes a deep breath And passes her head Through the membrane Separating the ocean And the black. She cannot draw a breath, The vacuum swiftly Turning her into frost. She must quickly submerge Or die an icy death. Yet she takes a moment To gaze at the wondrous sight, Too magnificent to fathom, till Her lungs swell beyond endurance. She dives back down In a fraction of an instant, Her eyes almost glazed over, Bright star lights Twinkling At the back of her mind. Adrenaline drives her home To the ocean’s abyss, Where it is safe, Her comforting place. Vivid memories of Being held close
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 179 Against her mother, And her sisters And brothers, Milk warming her insides As she slumbers And dreams. Now, Surrounded by her brethren, Her body worn and broken, She sings the tale Of the immeasurable Beyond— The silver white stars, The swirling orange giant, The rings on the pearled diamond. What wonders do they possess, What creatures do they hold? Will you follow my path? Uncover the world above? Let us explore and learn, Instead of having offspring Without giving them something To dream of. A life foregone, Just like our mother’s. We can endure the hard swim If we go together. Discover New meanings to our existence Past our vast ocean. The world beyond is so brilliant And bright. O the light … Joy brimming in her heart, She replays that final image Of the sky And holds it tenderly In her mind’s eye As she dies, Flying now Amongst the stars, In the place she loves.
180 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Above, the surface rumbles And creaks, shifting again To close the breach. Defender Prime A.C. Spahn
“Worth it, it is worth it,” said the sergeant to his wife. He brushed her lips and kissed their kids and marched away to die. Strength and youth, Defender said, Must first be sacrificed to gorge me so I can prevent the Earth’s coming demise. For duty, honor, loyalty, the sergeant did report. They led him to the shrine. Alone he passed between its doors. Lights of gold reflected off metallic walls and dome. Central sat Defender Prime on bright transparent throne. “I’ve come,” the sergeant said to that which soon would take his life. With force-stilled heart and fist-clenched hands he met the eight white eyes. Defender Prime licked fangs of steel, clasped claws on armrests clear. “Human small, your time is terse. This crisis is severe.” “Earth needs your shield,” the sergeant said, his voice high and aquiver. “The enemy arrives tonight.” He couldn’t mask his shiver. “My strength and youth are yours to use, my life yours to devour. Just keep the fleet of ships away. Protect us through these hours.”
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 181 “You fear,” Defender Prime observed, arising from his seat. “Strength alone won’t form the shield. It’s courage I must eat.” The sergeant closed his eyes and thought of all he had to lose. “I volunteered,” he whispered, ice. “This death was mine to choose. “I’m not too smart and not too brave and not too good in war. But I met all your criteria. Earth will never need me more.” Predator stared down at prey. Claws clacked on marble hall. “I think,” murmured Defender Prime, “You may do after all.” Steel teeth flashed toward poor steeled man. The sergeant flinched, criedah . Soul broke flesh and soared into Defender’s crimson jaws. Then amber lights in dome flashed into blinding beams on high. The sergeant soared through silent black, glimpsed planets pass him by. No body now, his soul unchained, yet not flying alone. Claws and teeth clung to his core. Prime had left his throne. Amidst warm stars the sergeant caught sheer gleam of azure hulls. Invaders far now near to put his homeworld to the cull. “No,” said fear-free sergeant, knives of death still in his heart. He howled and charged with outspread arms to tear them all apart. Life power thus devoured, Man and monster fought the foes. Explosions lit Earth’s night-fog sky. Shrieks came from those below.
182 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Dawn’s light broke on empty space. Cheers rose from every voice. “Worth it, it was worth it. We are safe and free. Rejoice!” In shrine of stone and glimmer glass, the monster lay to rest. This meal would sustain him till his servants fed him next. Confetti streets and bannered walls, one woman ghosted past. Songs and chants, she heard them not. Her throat had sung its last. She froze at door of tight-locked shrine, whispered where the monster slept. “Worth it, it was worth it,” and the sergeant’s widow wept. Were- Naru Dames Sundar I. Werewolves are so passé, At the party, tips of fur bristling, All silver amidst the samite, Or dusky gray shredding sable Leaving strips of chiffon In their wake. All of them, chanting obeisance Into the darkening sky And the pale moon, Raven’s egg rising. I sit cross-legged in the corner, Flagon of ale in my palm. I know their goddess, That shifty-eyed oval, Pockmarked queen. She bit me once, In an arbor full of rosemary. She walked down Clad in damask, Along a strip of cloud.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 183 I felt her teeth, Sharp incisors against my neck, The lap of tongue Smelling of camphor. Nowadays, I feel her, Even when she is belly deep Under the horizon. Except when she hides Behind mother sun, And then I have to slip Inside lakes and seas To unmapped depths. Skin splays and bones lengthen, And I become fat and full Of rock, shale, amethyst and pearl And I am a new moon rising. II. I felt its teeth at birth, The universe. An ocean of mouths, Rustling teeth as small as dust motes As large as worlds When my face was porcelain and young, It shattered me with its little love bites, Until they called me a pockmarked queen And no damask could hide my scars. When the orrery aligns, And my tooth-borne curse becomes light, I am for a moment Stretched out across unbound time And my diadem crown, all pearls and snow, Widens to drink a river of stars And all that swim at the banks. III. A singularity bit me once, An infinite god with teeth, Uncaring of My ocean of gas-giants, My tick-tock pulsars, My nebulae refracting light I was just another universe To bite. Now I must suffer, each epoch, Space-time folding in on itself,
184 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology Until I am nothing more than A point of infinite grace, Waiting to unfurl again. I Will Be Your Grave Tlotlo Tsamaase
I’m too miserable to feel love Knocking on my bones The door of my soul Wipes its feet before it shuffles open. Land mines sleep in her mouth My ears open with caution Her heart is a grave awaiting my soul When I said I love her, I meant I’m ready to bury myself in your chest. An urn for your heart Knows no exhume, I will not leave. Will Not. Leave. My body will not be the prison cell of your heart, But a church, Windows stained by sin, scratching for home. I will not settle on your bones Like algae on stone. She sleeps in his arms The way a man cocoons in his words; A gun Knowing the sound of its lung Exhaling a bullet. I listen to her poems Sticky with sweat Crying to breathe On hindfeet, looking for oxygen that doesn’t exist Baba, it is in me. She’s searching for dismissive gods, Touching them like sickness She’s searching for love In bodies restricted by gender Made of war-bones
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 185 Throwing negations, grenades Loving so backward, so time-ward. He doesn’t know how to love with words. Said, teach me. So I kissed his rib-set Said, this is where I am. He stains her face With hands broken, He studies her lips Like a man touching the bible While breaking its spine. Above us, dispersed, The sky holds smokestacks Like cigarettes lit by its thunder Unrelenting to desire Perforating our lungs with a pale stench of death. Death-smoke. We breathe as we die. Life leaking with time Elapse of immortality, the air stills. I haven’t loved for so long. Winter has found a home in my marrow. My soul hitchhikes on flings. I don’t know where it’s gone. Its feet grow raw. I am tired today I don’t know what time I woke That the air clicked out of my lungs. But it’s gone. My body drips humanity. A spleen bleeding dry. I am so sad today. Please clean it from my elbow parts. There are bones in her soul. Years of solitude salt her knees Whilst death tightens its hands around his neck. They tell him hold on. Find other ways of breathing. But Baba, when he is gone I am ready to hang myself from your heart. I will make a grave of your chest.
186 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology When Coyote Called Down the Stars Aaron Vlek
Coyote’s sitting beside a fire pit late one night. It’s real dark, and his back’s to ya. Finally, after he’s made you wait a good long while, he signals for you to sit yourself down. You’re sitting right there in front of that old varmint, but he ain’t seeing ya. WHAT?— Coyote yells, finally looking up at you. You thought Coyote was a Man? Or some kind of wild dog? Or maybe a spirit from the Before Times? Well I’ll tell you something. I ain’t none of them things! You look in Coyote’s eyes. You’re looking for signs, signs that tell you Hey! It’s okay, Coyote’s only funning with ya. But all you see is those two yellow eyes, and the firelight flickering reflecting your own face dancing in those old yellow eyes of his. Then Coyote starts messing with the fire, sending sparks and smoke curling all the way up to the stars. Coyote, he’s mumbling something to himself, and there’s the beating of nightwings overhead. Coyote, he starts whistling, pulling that old blanket of his tighter around his bony old shoulders. Hey, Coyote! What you calling down? But Coyote, he doesn’t answer. He never does. Not directly, ’least not right away.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 187 He just starts messing with that fire again, rocking back and forth, mumbling something to himself. Faster now. Hey Coyote! What you calling down? Coyote, he looks up at the stars overhead and starts grinning. There’s those nightwings again. Hey Coyote! What you calling down? Finally, Coyote looks you dead in the eyes and shakes his head like you were some sorry excuse. Best you just sit still now, and keep quiet, if you can— he hisses in your general direction as he jumps up and sets to his medicine dance. Coyote, he always means business. For Lonnie Holly Lyn Walrath
Your brother’s ghost smells like wet summer flowers and his trademark stoicism is increasingly uncanny like his sense of direction when he finds you in elevators, backseats. When you tell him to open up he grunts and says, “There’s nothing to fucking steal here, no one to fuck, and I can’t get any Marlboros.” He could, but his hand passes right through them. You try to explain the incantation of corporal being, but he tells you to sod off. Your brother’s not british. You notice your brother’s ghost’s hands still shake and wonder if he took the accident with him. He says, “I died, I didn’t forget everything.” You say you remember waking up and missing him. You remember the grit of the bike hitting pavement and his leather jacket ripping in two
188 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology like it happened to you. Like you were the ghost. He says that was a lie. “I just liked to tell stories, especially ones that made me look cool, like the badass I thought I was back then. I wish I’d told you the truth, how much it hurt.” You clean out his old black trunk while he watches, throwing out tentacle porn that makes him laugh, and age-worn letters from a woman named Lonnie. He won’t tell you who she was. You tell him his daughter starts second grade soon. He says nothing, but reaches for the letters even though he knows he can’t touch them, sense memory, he leans over and smells perfume. “You once asked me who she was,” he remembers, staring at the letters. You laugh, she was on all his save files like an alter-ego. “Who was she?” you ask. But he goes all quiet. His ghost eyes roll up in his head, white-on-white-on-white, and he runs his shaking hands over his scars, looks up like he’s going to wish on a star. You want to ask him if he’s cold. You feel bad for him, even after all the times your brother locked you in the closet or drowned your Barbies in the lake. You wonder what it would feel like to hug him. You’ve never hugged him in real life.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 189 Revolution (1764–1783) Holly Lyn Walrath 1. The air is silent in the fields, no longer charged, no longer clattering with the voices of men and cannons, nor the far-off beat of the drummer boy. The sunlight is buried behind the hills touching them with a final purple hue. Its warmth does not reach the valley. Heavy fog merges with the smoke, mingles with the tang of death. Is it damp, or is it blood? 2. Last fall my father gave me my first gun. We hunted quail. I remember clutching the cold steel, my fingers lingering on the trigger. That day was wet too, and silent. I trembled in the shadows and when the flood of birds broke the canopy I shot blindly and too early. My father wrapped the small black body of a raven in a white handkerchief. They are sacred animals, he said. Then we lay on our backs in the field and waited, and a heavy rain fell. He did not send me to war. 3. My back and uniform are slick with mud. I feel it slipping down my collar. I cannot move. Fear drowns me, merging my body with the sludge of battle. I look up at the sky. Rain begins to fall.
190 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology In that moment I stared into sky on my back in a ditch I dug, the sheltered body of the dead raven, its wings a shroud, takes flight into memory of a girl with gunshot hair. Her touch, her death, haunt me with a tingling fire and I panic because I do not know her. Just the pain of the night raven and the way I loved her is more terrible, more torrential, more acute, than the feeling below the knee, where I’m certain my legs are gone. I have lived before, I whisper to the rain to the fields to the sea of dead men. Best of Sarah Ann Winn I. Man in the moon, do I talk about your sphere— the homeward road, acres made of hair and mud, the girl round, a bitter snowflake in the library garden? Before he goes, the moon is full, made of flashlights and films
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 191 in this little yard. Please be there in the picture house. Now the doors are closed. II. Machines of every shape and size hold hands. A love lumbers through sheets of summer. The mountain’s eyes sparkle like a different lazy stream. The papers want to know the woman hot with worry. III. The prayers were small mansions, cold and gray. Rest up, sit in silence, slip out again tonight. You fly, tossed in slumber upon a hill of was and when. I V. The test books were found, branches to sky, hooked to silver, hung up on romancing. Tethered to the logic on the wall. I put a peephole in behind a million eyes of sweet talking night. It’s stalking time.
192 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology V. Don’t think you knew in fleeting hours the electric eye wave of phrase, trying to get to you. I knew as a rock- twisting storm, left far out of place, you, you’re natural.
VI. Shimmer moll, glissando clutches of sad, she’s uncertain in steel. I wish someone star-pinned you, but I had to give, and go all because of some guiding walk-on Snow White afraid of the room.
Source: Lyrics of Bowie discography; one line per song from each of his first six albums: David Bowie (self-title, Deram, 1969), Space Oddity (Philips/Mercury, 1969), The Man Who Sold the World (Mercury, 1970), Hunky Dory (RCA, 1970), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (RCA, 1972), and Aladdin Sane (RCA, 1973).
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 193 Thirteen Ways to See a Ghost Shannon Connor Winward 1. As a young woman, your mother finds a dead uncle watching her sleep. The chair is no longer wedged against the door. 2. Neighbors tell her the couple who owned this house first lost a child. Your mother found him. The crayon marks in her closet could have come from her own, but she sees him, not much taller than the mattress, circumnavigating the bed, as children do, while your father and the boys are sleeping. 3. You make a joke of it, but he bit her once, left marks, and how would you explain that? 4. There’s a closet under the basement stairs, a perfect Bat Cave and hiding place. Not- it once, your brother hears, distinctly, Hi. He forfeits the game. 5. You never found him, but you’ve lost enough in that closet. 6. Your mother cleans the Hazard house, a squat yellow colonial leftover spitting distance from the old capitol with roots under the New Castle cobblestone. It reeks of piss and centuries. The basement stairs are narrow, dank. She prefers to leave it to the cats until one she’s never seen before climbs out and growls, Get out. After that, she makes the owner leave the Mop-n-Glo upstairs. 7. “I’m supposed to be here,” she spits back. “You get out.” 8. You do the Garrett mansion by the Pennsylvania border, too, when it’s still a school. Your job is to flip chairs for the boys, collect bits too big for the vacuum mouth. You visit the animals, nose to their cedar-lined cages, and the human skull, and play outside on the hill alone. You don’t remember the house, just the trees and open sky, the town of Yorklyn sleepy and rustling below, but Mom says those basements go deeper than any should. There are three, one under the next, and no one is allowed
194 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology to go past the first. Slaves slept down there. It’s darker than dark, and what breathes out at you is not about freedom. 9. Your grandfather slept in the basement until your mother kicked him out for whoring, and then he died. You don’t remember him, either. 10. In second grade you start a ghost club. You hold hands over the drainage grates at recess (because the dead prefer damp, dark places) and tell lost souls to move on. The other girls swear they can see them too. 11. In the basement of your parents’ house, your bags are packed. You are used to things sitting on the mattress, tugging the sheets, but that is no Casper-friendly child. That is man-sized. It is an absence of light, still there when you click on the lamp, but not after you scream. It doesn’t want you to go. 12. You worked nights at the old school below where the Garrett house burned down. A caretaker haunts it, walking the halls, rustling papers, shutting doors—but this story is not about you. 13. When they escort your parents to the room where your brother’s body lies waiting, your mother stammers, “I’ve never met anyone who died,” which, by any definition, just isn’t true.
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 195 R h y s l i n g A w ar d W i n n e r s 1978-2016
1978 Long Gene Wolfe “The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps” Short Duane Ackerson “The Starman” (tie) Sonya Dorman “Corruption of Metals” Andrew Joron “Asleep in the Arms of Mother Night”
1979 Long Michael Bishop “For the Lady of a Physicist” Short Duane Ackerson “Fatalities” (tie) Steve Eng “Storybooks and Treasure Maps”
1980 Long Andrew Joron “The Sonic Flowerfall of Primes” Short Robert Frazier “Encased in the Amber of Eternity” (tie) Peter Payack “The Migration of Darkness”
1981 Long Thomas M. Disch “On Science Fiction” Short Ken Duffin “Meeting Place”
1982 Long Ursula K. Le Guin “The Well of Baln” Short Raymond DiZazzo “On the Speed of Sight”
1983 Long Adam Cornford “Your Time and You: A Neoprole’s Dating Guide” Short Alan P. Lightman “In Computers”
1984 Long Joe Haldeman “Saul’s Death: Two Sestinas” Short Helen Ehrlich “Two Sonnets”
1985 Long Siv Cedering “Letter from Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)” Short Bruce Boston “For Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets”
1986 Long Andrew Joron “Shipwrecked on Destiny Five” Short Susan Palwick “The Neighbor’s Wife”
1987 Long W. Gregory Stewart “Daedalus” Short Jonathan V. Post “Before the Big Bang: News from the Hubble Large Space Telescope” (tie) John Calvin Rezmerski “A Dream of Heredity”
1988 Long Lucius Shepard “White Trains” Short Bruce Boston “The Nightmare Collector” (tie) Suzette Haden Elgin “Rocky Road to Hoe”
1989 Long Bruce Boston “In the Darkened Hours” (tie) John M. Ford “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station” Short Robert Frazier “Salinity”
1990 Long Patrick McKinnon “dear spacemen” Short G. Sutton Breiding “Epitaph for Dreams”
196 1991 Long David Memmott “The Aging Cryonicist in the Arms of His Mistress Contemplates the Survival of the Species While the Phoenix Is Consumed by Fire” Short Joe Haldeman “Eighteen Years Old, October Eleventh”
1992 Long W. Gregory Stewart “the button and what you know” Short David Lunde “Song of the Martian Cricket”
1993 Long William J. Daciuk “To Be from Earth” Short Jane Yolen “Will”
1994 Long W. Gregory Stewart “Basement Flats: Redefining the Burgess Shale” and Robert Frazier Short Bruce Boston “Spacer’s Compass” (tie) Jeff VanderMeer “Flight Is for Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over”
1995 Long David Lunde “Pilot, Pilot” Short Dan Raphael “Skin of Glass”
1996 Long Margaret B. Simon “Variants of the Obsolete” Short Bruce Boston “Future Present: A Lesson in Expectation”
1997 Long Terry A. Garey “Spotting UFOs While Canning Tomatoes” Short W. Gregory Stewart “Day Omega”
1998 Long Laurel Winter “why goldfish shouldn’t use power tools” Short John Grey “Explaining Frankenstein to His Mother”
1999 Long Bruce Boston “Confessions of a Body Thief” Short Laurel Winter “egg horror poem”
2000 Long Geoffrey A. Landis “Christmas (after we all get time machines)” Short Rebecca Marjesdatter “Grimoire”
2001 Long Joe Haldeman “January Fires” Short Bruce Boston “My Wife Returns as She Would Have It”
2002 Long Lawrence Schimel “How to Make a Human” Short William John Watkins “We Die as Angels”
2003 Long Charles Saplak “Epochs in Exile: A Fantasy Trilogy” and Mike Allen (tie) Sonya Taaffe “Matlacihuatl’s Gift” Short Ruth Berman “Potherb Gardening”
2004 Long Theodora Goss “Octavia Is Lost in the Hall of Masks” Short Roger Dutcher “Just Distance”
the 2017 Rhysling Anthology 197 2005 Long Tim Pratt “Soul Searching” Short Greg Beatty “No Ruined Lunar City”
2006 Long Kendall Evans and “The Tin Men” David C. Kopaska-Merkel Short Mike Allen “The Strip Search”
2007 Long Mike Allen “The Journey to Kailash” Short Rich Ristow “The Graven Idol’s Godheart”
2008 Long Catherynne M. Valente “The Seven Devils of Central California” Short F. J. Bergmann “Eating Light”
2009 Long Geoffrey A. Landis “Search” Short Amal El-Mohtar “Song for an Ancient City”
2010 Long Kendall Evans and “In the Astronaut Asylum” Samantha Henderson Short Ann K. Schwader “To Theia”
2011 Long C. S. E. Cooney “The Sea King’s Second Bride” Short Amal El-Mohtar “Peach-Creamed Honey”
2012 Long Megan Arkenberg “The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages” Short Shira Lipkin “The Library, After”
2013 Long Andrew Robbert Sutton “Into Flight” Short Terry Garey “The Cat Star”
2014 Long Mary Soon Lee “Interregnum” Short Amal El-Mohtar “Turning the Leaves”
2015 Long F. J. Bergmann “100 Reasons to Have Sex with an Alien” Short Marge Simon “Shutdown”
2016 Long Krysada Phounsiri “It Begins With A Haunting” (tie) Ann K. Schwader “Keziah” Short Ruth Berman “Time Travel Vocabulary Problems”
For a complete list of past Rhysling winners, runners-up, and nominees, see the SFPA Rhysling archive at sfpoetry.com/ra/rhysarchive.html
198 the 2017 Rhysling Anthology SFPA G ra n d M a s t e r A w ar d W i n n e r s
1999 Bruce Boston 2005 Robert Frazier 2008 Ray Bradbury 2010 Jane Yolen 2015 Marge Simon & Steve Sneyd
A SFPA Grand Master designation may be conferred by the SFPA President with consensus of the membership to an individual living at the time of selection whose body of work shall reflect the highest artistic goals of the SFPA, who shall have been actively publishing within speculative poetry for a period of no fewer than 20 years, and whose poetry has been noted to be exceptional in merit, scope, vision and innovation.
For further information, see sfpoetry.com/grandmasters.html
199 H o w t o J o i n SFPA
SFPA members receive Star*Line, the quarterly journal, filled with poetry, reviews, articles, and more; the annual Rhysling Anthology, containing the best SF/F/H poetry of the previous year (selected by the membership); and Dwarf Stars, an edited anthology of the best short- short speculative poetry of the previous year. Each member may nominate one short poem and one long poem for the Rhysling Anthology and then vote for the Rhysling Awards from the anthology. Members may nominate poems of ten lines or fewer to the Dwarf Stars editor and vote for that award as well. SFPA also sponsors the Elgin Awards for speculative poetry chapbooks and full-length books, and an annual poetry contest.
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200 Anne Carly Abad • Layla Al-Bedawi • Francis Wesley Alexander • E. Kristin Anderson • Sara Backer • David Barber • F. J. Bergmann • Lore Bernier • Matt Betts • Edith Hope Bishop • Jenny Blackford • Adam Bolivar • Robert Borski • Bruce Boston • Karen Bovenmyer • Josh Brown • Rebecca Buchanan • Susan Burch • Anton Cancre • Shari Caplan • Dennis Caswell • Beth Cato • G. O. Clark • David Clink • P.S. Cottier • Rohinton Daruwala • Deborah L. Davitt • Corrine De Winter • Ashley Dioses • James S. Dorr • Denise Dumars • Alexandra Erin • Timons Esaias • Kendall Evans • Gary Every • Alice Fanchiang • Karolina Fedyk • Robert Frazier • Neil Gaiman • Adele Gardner • Charlotte Geater • Alan Ira Gordon • Theodora Goss • Vince Gotera • Neile Graham • Michael H. Hanson • Lee S. Hawke • Carolyn M. Hinderliter • Ada Hoffmann • Akua Lezli Hope • John Philip Johnson • Daniel R. Jones • Tim Jones • Johan Jönsson • Herb Kauderer • Eun-byeol Kim • Jennifer Lawrence • Kathleen A. Lawrence • B. J. Lee • Mary Soon Lee • Sandi Leibowitz • Rose Lemberg • Muriel Leung • Tonya Liburd • Darren Lipman • S. Qiouyi Lu • John C. Mannone • Alessandro Manzetti • Airea D. Matthews • Carl Mayfield • Elizabeth R. McClellan • Mary McMyne • Terry Miller • Lev Mirov • D. L. Myers • Brandon O’Brien • A. J. Odasso • K. A. Opperman • Cindy O’Quinn • Jeremy Paden • Triin Paja • Ace G. Pilkington • Steph Post • Ken Poyner • Jack Ralls • Wendy Rathbone • John Reinhart • Terrie Leigh Relf • Margaret Rhee • Hester J. Rook • M. Sereno • John W. Sexton • Marge Simon • Simon Smith • Christina Sng • A. C. Spahn • J. J. Steinfeld • Mary Stone • Naru Dames Sundar • Bogi Takács • Ann Thornfield-Long • Ali Trotta • Tlotlo Tsamaase • K H van Berkum • Burlee Vang • Aaron Vlek • Margaret Wack • T. D. Walker • Holly Lyn Walrath • Jon Wesick • Karen J. Weyant • Lesley Wheeler • Neal Wilgus • Jane Williams • Sarah Ann Winn • Shannon Connor Winward • Greer Woodward • Stephanie M. Wytovich • Jane Yolen • Danielle Zaccagnino The 2017 Rhysling Anthology edited by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Information about the Science Fiction Poetry Association can be found at sfpoetry.com
cover art: Wandering Planet by Liu Junwei, aka Shark (Shayudan 鲨鱼丹)