THE SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY POETRY ASSOCIATION PRESENTS

The Alchemy of Stars II

AWARD WINNERS SHOWCASE 2005–2018 40TH ANNIVERSARY

EDITED BY Sandra J. Lindow The Alchemy of Stars II Also available from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association

The 2019 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Poetry of 2018 Edited by David C. Kopaska-Merkel

The 2018 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Poetry of 2017 Edited by Linda D. Addison

The 2017 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Poetry of 2016 Edited by David C. Kopaska-Merkel

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 sfpoetry.com/rhysling.html or contact [email protected] The Alchemy of Stars

RHYSLING & DWARF STARSII AWARD WINNERS SHOWCASE 2005–2018 THE SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY POETRY ASSOCIATION 40TH ANNIVERSARY

EDITED BY Sandra J. Lindow Copyright © 2018 by the Science Fiction & Fantasy 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: Sandra J. Lindow Book Design: F. J. Bergmann Publisher: Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association SFPA President: Bryan Thao Worra

Cover image by Sing Yun Lee and Jonathan Hedley

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Alchemy of Stars II: Rhysling and Dwarf Stars Award Winners 2005– 2018, selected by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association; edited by Sandra J. Lindow.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-09-317263-8 1. Poetry. 2. Science fiction poetry. 3. Fantasy poetry. 4. Horror poetry. I. Lindow, Sandra J.

For more information about the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, visit www.sfpoetry.com Foreword: The Alchemy of Reflection and Imagination

The Science Fiction Poetry Association’s first award anthology,Alchemy of Stars, was released in 2005 and covered award-winning poems from 1978 to 2004. This earlier volume chronicled the birth and development of a young, mostly American organization that had established high standards of literary quality; however, when we assembled Alchemy of Stars II, it became clear there’d been many exciting developments in our field that deserve remark. To its credit, over the years, the SFPA has become an increasingly international organization, bringing with it a diverse range of literary influences. Since its founding in 1978 in the U.S., the SFPA (now the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association) has been blessed with members from over nineteen nations including Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, France, Spain, Romania, Poland, Israel, South Africa, Singapore, Thailand, Laos, the Hmong, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. We have members with roots in the Caribbean and the African Diaspora. Almost every state in America has at least one member. Our membership represents a continuum of poets, writers, and readers. Some are primarily readers who write and share their own poetry only occasionally. Others are deeply passionate about speculative poetry and dedicate most of their literary output to the field. Our award winners also vary in their activity in the field. Some are mainstream poets who also write genre poetry. Some, like Jane Yolen, continue to demonstrate mastery of both speculative prose and poetry. Others, like Neil Gaiman, are recognized primarily as prose writers. Furthermore, we have found that combining poets who write science fiction, fantasy and horror under a single umbrella organization may not always be a comfortable fit. Nevertheless, we applaud the dynamic results and are pleased that for all of the ups and downs that come with forming a community, there has been space for all of these voices to find a place for themselves. The field of speculative poetry has grown tremendously in the last four decades. Along with the Rhysling and Dwarf Stars Awards for individual poems, the Elgin Awards are presented for genre poetry books and chapbooks. We must applaud how from the start, SFPA’s founders had the vision and enthusiasm to believe that not only would speculative poetry continue to be written but also that work which embraced the deeply and perhaps even absurdly imaginative might then find space in various literary and genre publications. What an ambitious, audacious proposal that was, to hold down a space for so many poets around the world to express themselves creatively, probing the limits of what verse embracing science fiction, fantasy, and horror concepts could bring to the world. Our poets have often been the literary tip of the spear, experimenting with new forms and rules, new technologies and often transgressive ways of speaking truth to power and challenging assumptions and conventional wisdom. As our editors of Star*Line will attest, many have often done so at great professional and cultural risk.

v What has been gratifying to see is that the membership of the SFPA has not been afraid to nominate poems by both emerging voices and established voices. Women, men, and non-binary poets have been nominated across a truly diverse range of ages and experiences. Poets with accessibility challenges or who reflect various points of neurodiversity have been nominated, as have refugees and writers of color, even those who would be considered ethnic minorities in their own nations. Many have written from poverty or faced limits of education and opportunity. But here, we have come together in shared wonder. It’s a delight to see how over the years, these nominations emerged organically, even as our membership asks the vital question: “How might we encourage our journals and institutions to embrace even more speculative poetry in the decades ahead?” Many literary societies have asked us: what’s the secret of our literary longevity? and I’m not certain there’s one single answer. Reviewing the organization’s history, there has been intentionality in ensuring our diverse voices know there is a space for them here, one that has been reflected in how we include one another as volunteers, officers, award chairs and editors. There have been growing pains from time to time, but overall, I think there’s much to celebrate. The SFPA has created a community where many diverse poets and readers can actively engage with one another, and this dynamic engagement has identified gaps of cultural awareness that can be bridged through discussion. I dearly hope we continue this tradition. As we’ve said over the years: The SFPA believes our various communities, poetic and otherwise, flourish via the free exchange of ideas. The very best of our speculative poetry shows us not only the worlds that might have been, but also worlds that still might be. These poems don’t take the safe way out, but rock boats and starships. For some readers, these award-winning speculative visions can be challenging. But despite our various worldviews, I hope that we still feel we can come back and share a common galley, partaking in our love of poetry while exploring the outer boundaries of the imaginative and the fantastic. The SFPA has a challenging course ahead to live up to all of our shared ideals. It will require ongoing conversations with our membership, regarding our disparate viewpoints, our awards, and indeed all aspects of our field. We don’t want any of us to feel afraid of these conversations. Diverse voices and diverse experiments are needed in speculative poetry. So much of our best work in speculative poetry comes from communities who fought hard against negativity, dismissal, misogyny, homophobia, racism, and inequality. You will see that strongly reflected in many of the poems in this volume of The Alchemy of Stars. If we want a diverse and vibrant field of science fiction and fantasy as a whole, we must not neglect the trails blazed in the territory of “what if ?” poetry, a key beginning for many diverse voices. With all of this in mind, let’s keep the conversation going constructively. Read on with joy and keep inspired and creative. Transform worlds!

Bryan Thao Worra SFPA President 2016–

vi Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association All-Star Introduction

Somewhere in the universe a butterfly opens its wings …

The history of SFPA has been an expanding evolution that moves from operatic fascination with outer space to the minute but ultimately expansive inner space of a haiku. Initiated by Suzette Haden Elgin, the Science Fiction Poetry Association was created in 1978. In 2017, the membership voted to rename the organization The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association to more clearly reflect the diversity of the genre. Now in its 40th year, the SFPA continues to embrace the quality and structures of mainstream poetry while maintaining the energy and enthusiasm of the early years of fandom. Welcome to The Alchemy of Stars II. In celebration of SFPA’s 40th anniversary we have compiled a continuation of our original Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Awards Showcase edited by Roger Dutcher and Mike Allen, now a collection of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Association’s Rhysling and Dwarf Stars awards since 2005. Elgin believed that an organization that gave awards was needed to boost awareness of the excellent work being done in the field of speculative poetry. Named for the heroic blind bard of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1947 short story “The Green Hills of Earth,” the Rhysling Awards were created in 1978 to raise respect for speculative poetry to a level similar to the Hugos and Nebulas. 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.

Rhysling Revelations The name Alchemy of Stars is evocative in that it attempts to unify tropes of science fiction and fantasy as well as symbolizing our attempts to refine the quality of our work to the highest levels possible. The alchemists of the 16th century believed that gold and silver were the only “perfect” metals, and they came to believe that they might be able to convert or purify “imperfect metals” such as copper and lead by building furnaces in their labs to assist in the purifying process. The firstAlchemy of Stars anthology features winning poems from 1978 to 2004, a foreword by Roger Dutcher, an introduction by Grand Master Jane Yolen, and an afterword by Elgin. The Alchemy of Stars II now recognizes our shortest genre poems by including our Dwarf Stars winners, an award initiated in 2006 for the best micro work published in 2005. Like the Rhysling, Dwarf Stars became an annual award. The purpose of collecting our award-winning work is to create a canon that will be available for further enjoyment and scholarly study.

I pray for one last landing / On the globe that gave me birth —Robert A. Heinlein, “The Green Hills of Earth” Each SFPA member is allowed to nominate one work in each of two categories: “Best Long Poem” (50+ lines; for prose poems, 500+ words) and “Best Short Poem” (0–49 lines; for prose poems, 0–499 words). All nominated works must have been first published during the calendar year preceding the awards year. The

the Alchemy of Stars ii vii nominees are collected into one volume, the Rhysling Anthology, which is provided to all members so that they may vote for their favorites. The top vote-getters in each of the two categories receive the Rhysling award. These winning works are regularly reprinted in the annual Nebula Awards Anthology of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Rhysling winners are considered to be equivalent to achievement awards given for science fiction, fantasy, horror, and speculative prose because they are chosen by fellow writers in the field. The SFPA also acknowledges poems that come in second and third in their categories, important recognition of depth in the field especially when vote tallies are very close.

Evolutions The yearly voting anthologies have gone through several stages of physical evolution. In the 1978 issue, the nominations were typed then xeroxed and stapled under a cover collage by Elgin. Through her guiding energy, the subsequent anthologies were special issues of Star*Line, the association’s newsletter. Later, under SFPA President and Star*Line editor Robert Frazier, the anthologies became stand-alone chapbooks; Frazier himself sometimes provided cover art and illustrations. In the early 1990s, Figment Press gave the anthologies a sleeker, more professional look. SFPA President David Kopaska-Merkel (editor of the enduring Dreams and Nightmares) also encouraged increased professionalism in layout and design during his time as editor and publisher of Star*Line; of these, the 1998 Anthology still evokes nostalgic smiles for its cookbook-style spiral plastic binding and Marge Simon’s whimsical cover-art dragon. Beginning in 2001, anthologies were team efforts helmed by layout maestro Mike Williams. In 2006, Editor Drew Morse produced a trade-paperback edition with a glossy full color photographic cover. Supported by membership donations, this has continued under the careful guidance of F. J. Bergmann, demonstrating a 21st-century level of professionalism that also connects us to working artists in the field. An archive, originated by SFPA President Mike Allen, is available on the website. We hope to keep these records available for serious scholarly scrutiny in the future. We have come a long way as a professional organization Elgin believed that SF poetry should, by definition, be narrative in nature, although this inspired considerable discussion within the organization at the time. Some scholars argue that the Odyssey, 8 BCE, is the oldest science-fictional narrative. Certainly, Homer provides a template for the god and monster-fraught hero’s journey that lies at the heart of the genre. Initially Rhysling nominations leaned heavily toward science-fictional themes and celebrations of scientific achievement, but the rationalism of a godless world where science reigned supreme was counter balanced by dark Lovecraftian influences. Thomas M. Disch’s poem, “On Science Fiction,” (1981) describes humanity as “cripples” who are nevertheless ready to “conquer the galaxy.” It is a theme that he explores further in his award-winning critical work The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998). Disch’s poem is included here by special permission since it was not available in 2004 when the original Alchemy was published. Speculative themes and approaches quickly expanded through incorporation of mainstream fantastic forms and elements. J. G. Ballard calls this a journey away from outer space to viii Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association “inner space,” “the realm of the mind, and its mysterious workings” (Lucie-Smith, xvi). Beginning with Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1982 long-poem winner “The Well of Baln,” mythological fantasy became a common motif in speculative poetry and continues in this volume in poems by Mike Allen, and Mary Soon Lee; then psychological horror, represented by Bruce Boston’s 1988 short-poem winner, “The Nightmare Collector,” gained strength in the ’90s. Within this volume, Richard Ristow’s “The Graven Idol’s Godheart,” Ann K. Schwader’s feminist/ revisionist “Keziah” and Catherynne M. Valente’s “Seven Devils of Central California” all make effective use of mythological horror tropes. Simon’s alternate history “General George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts” incorporates a Southern Gothic twist. In his introduction to his pioneering anthology, Burning with a Vision (1984), Robert Frazier writes that “Poetry can only benefit from a blood transfusion from the future” (xv). In this anthology, traditional SF extraterrestrial themes are revisioned in Greg Beatty’s “No Ruined Lunar City” and Mike Allen’s “The Strip Search,” demonstrating that hard SF has not lost its metallic luster, but since the late ’90s, nominations have reflected a wider range of subject matter and approaches including interstitial, slipstream, magic realism and other work hard to pigeonhole precisely. Also, since the ’90s, an increasing number of our best poems have been published in increasingly professional and elegantly illustrated e-zines. The days of the mimeograph machine are clearly over.

The Alchemy of “What If ?” Our best work answers a “what-if ” question through clear understanding of contemporary science and genre tropes as well as poetic technique. Writers take the “imperfect metals” of human experience and refine them through the alchemical combination of science and fantastic extrapolation. Geoffrey Landis’s “Search” entwines math with the search for intelligent life in the galaxy. Throughout our history, humor has been a consistent crowd pleaser. Winners like Ruth Berman’s “Time Travel Vocabulary Problems” reflect a whimsical meta-poetic awareness of genre tropes. Poems about libraries easily win the hearts of SFPA readers, and there are two in this volume. See Shira Lipkin’s “The Library, After” and Simon’s “Shutdown.” Adult sexuality, as in Bergmann’s story within a list, “100 Reasons to Have Sex with an Alien,” is enthusiastically embraced, tentacles and all.

Feminism and the Fantastic Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies / And the cool, green hills of Earth. There are no female characters in Heinlein’s “Green Hills” story, although the ship, the Goshawk, is identified as “her,” worth at least an academic article or two. SFF poetry has come a long way from the essentialism of the 20th century. The first SF anthology, Edward Lucie Smith’sHolding Your Eight Hands: An Anthology of Science Fiction Verse (1969), included poems by only two women, both named Ruth, both with last names that evoke light—Ruth Fainlight and Ruth Lechtliner. Their poems are first-person male narratives, reflecting an enduring postwar exclusion of women from heroic action, but from this light, real change occurred in point of view as well as editorial recognition of women’s work. (“Whither thou goest,

the Alchemy of Stars ii ix I will go;” Ruth 1:16) From SFPA’s beginning, women were actively involved in the work of the organization, with Sonya Dorman winning the Rhysling for her short poem “The Corruption of Metals” the first year awards were given, but straight white male writers dominated both nominations and awards in the early years. This has changed; the 21st century has seen equal representation in nominations with awards to women outnumbering awards to men since 2005. There has been an evolution toward domestic themes: Terry A. Garey’s “The Cat Star” mixes science with the loss of a dear pet, and Amal El-Mohtar’s “Peach- Creamed Honey” adds romance to the study of bee-keeping. See Neil Gaiman’s 2017 winner, “The Mushroom Hunters,” for a cogent reprise of Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier-bag theory of human evolution. (For further discussion of feminist themes, see David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s afterword.)

Diving into Diversity Recent years have seen increased diversity throughout the genre, with examinations of cultural mythology becoming more common. Writers with diverse ethnic backgrounds like Mary Soon Lee and Krysada Panusith Phounsiri have explored fantastic landscapes and heritages. Lee's 2014 award-winner “Interregnum” is part of Crowned: the Sign of the Dragon, Book 1 (Dark Renaissance Books, 2016), an Elgin Award-winning heroic fantasy about a young Asian king who earns the approval of a frighteningly powerful dragon. Championed by present president Bryan Thao Worra, multiculturalism has been actively encouraged and celebrated, here exemplified by Phounsiri’s 2016 Rhysling-winning long poem “It Begins with a Haunting.” The hills of earth may still be green, but the Rhysling now wears an androgynous, multicultural face.

Dwarf Stars that Shine If Elgin (November 18, 1936–January 27, 2015) were available, we could ask her whether our Dwarf Stars poems fit within her definition of SF poetry. It would likely be a lively discussion because these minimalist gems of ten lines or fewer (100 words or fewer for prose poems) do, more often than not, tell a kind of story. Their brilliance, an aspect of wit and careful paring, provides just enough of a story so that the rest of the picture can be filled in via a mind’s eye that has been schooled in the genre. Deborah P Kolodji’s “Basho after Cinderella” is only eight words long, but the story it relates about memory and loss is huge. Greg Schwartz’s “abandoned nursing home” is a poignant ghost story in eight well- chosen words. For many of these poems, a working knowledge of basic physics is required. LeRoy Gorman’s, “aster than the speed of lightf ” evokes time travel and quantum physics in only six words. Greg Beatty’s “Place Mat by Moebius” is all about beginnings, endings and topological space. Comprehension often comes in a rush of pleasure after these poems have been read several times; sometimes there are smiles and sometimes secret tears. SFPA has done an important thing in finding and showcasing these minimalist pieces. For readers who understand the genre, much can be revealed in just a few words. The shortest pieces can reap the greatest rewards. Sandra J. Lindow, Editor x Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association

Works Cited Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. The Free Press, 1998. Frazier, Robert. Burning with a Vision. Owlswick Press, 1984. Heinlein, Robert. “The Green Hills of Earth.” The Past through Tomorrow. Putnam, 1967, pp. 294–303. Lee, Mary Soon. Crowned: The Sign of the Dragon, Book 1. Dark Renaissance Books, 2015. Lucie-Smith, Edward. Holding Your Eight Hands. Doubleday & Company, 1969.

the Alchemy of Stars ii xi The Dwarf Stars Award

This Dwarf Stars Award is given by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association to recognize the best speculative poem of 1–10 lines published in the previous year. Although hundreds of excellent very short science fiction, fantasy, and horror poems are regularly published each year, they can be overlooked in the Rhysling Award process. In the history of the Rhysling Award, few poems of 10 lines or fewer (stanza breaks and titles excluded from line count) have been nominated, and none has won. Yet there seems to be a surge of interest in short forms. It is not uncommon to find excellent scifaiku, tanka, cinquains and other speculative very short poems in poetry journals. The Dwarf Stars Award acknowledges excellence in this specialized field. Unlike the annualRhysling Anthology, Dwarf Stars is an edited anthology. Poets are encouraged to submit poems published in the previous year for consideration. Poets, poetry readers, and editors are also encouraged to send suggestions of eligible poems to the current Dwarf Stars editor. Deborah P Kolodji was named the firstDwarf Stars editor. The annual Dwarf Stars anthology is published as a chapbook. SFPA members vote on their favorite short-short poem from the anthology, and the winner is given the Dwarf Stars Award. A copy of the Dwarf Stars anthology is included with SFPA membership

xii The History of the Dwarf Stars Award by Deborah P Kolodji

In 2005, there was a lively discussion on the SFPAnet yahoogroups discussion list regarding very short poetry and the Rhysling Award nomination process. At that point, and continuing to this day, no poem of 10 lines or less has ever won the Short Rhysling Award, and few are even nominated. Some said it was because there weren’t enough short-short poems being published, yet research showed that more speculative poems of 10 lines or fewer were being published than speculative poems with more than 49 lines. Others claimed that if a short-short poem was “good enough” it would be nominated and win, but there just weren’t any being published of high enough quality. Yet hundreds of them were being published, some by editors who also published longer work, so it was hard to believe that all of these poems were “mediocre” and not worthy of notice by SFPA members during the Rhysling nomination process. It was my opinion then, and my opinion now, that a very short poem is read differently than a longer poem and it is difficult to compare a haiku to a forty-nine-line narrative poem. A haiku’s beauty lies in what is not being said, and the reader sits with the poem and allows it to resonate. A longer narrative poem is something experienced more like a story, the poem leading the reader on an adventure through its detailed imagery. So, to correct what I felt was a disadvantage for short-short poetry, on September 1, 2005, I made the following motion on the SFPAnet discussion list: I move that we create a Short-Short Rhysling Award for a poem of 1–9 lines and that we modify the Rhysling Short category to be a poem of 10– 49 lines. If less than six poems are nominated in this category, no Rhysling will be given. If less than six poems are nominated in this category for three years in a row, then the Rhysling Short-Short Award will be dropped. This motion was seconded by Karen Romanko and Elizabeth Bennefield. Discussion continued on the motion and the ballot was scheduled for the November/December 2005 issue of Star*Line, where I wrote the “pro” argument and Mike Allen wrote the “con” argument. At this point, all of the current elected officers and the immediate-past officers were against any change to the Rhysling process. Challenged on the list by David Vandervort to provide proof that there really were wonderful poems being overlooked, I created a demonstration chapbook, Dwarf Stars, and mailed it to all current SFPA members, using my own funds. This anthology contained 30 poems by Duane Ackerson, William Allegrezza, Ruth Berman, John Borneman, Bruce Boston, G. O. Clark, Michael R. Collings, John Dunphy, Christine Emmert, Kendall Evans, John Grey, David Huntsperger, Tim Jones, David C Kopaska-Merkel, Michael Lohr, Eric Marin, Melissa Marr, Andy Miller, Terrie Leigh Relf, Karen A. Romanko, Ann K. Schwader, Marge B. Simon, Mikal Trimm, John Vieira, Jane Yolen, and Lee Clark Zumpe that were published in 2004 but not nominated for a Rhysling Award. The response to this collection was positive, but the vote ended up being a tie.

xiii This put the SFPA officers in a quandary, since this election had the highest turnout in SFPA history but no mandate from the membership emerged due to the tie result. A re-vote was tentatively scheduled for the July/August 2006 issue of Star*Line, with the understanding that there would be a new motion, new seconds, and new pro/con statements. There was discussion on the list as to alternatives and a number of people liked the idea of having an “off-season” award, separate from the Rhysling Awards. In particular, President Mike Allen liked the idea of having a separate anthology as a promotional tool, even though he didn’t really buy my argument that short-short poetry was different. The idea simmered for a number of months, as the SFPA was busy with the Rhysling Anthology, a Rhysling reading at ReaderCon, a SFPA presence at WorldCon in Los Angeles, the resignation of the SFPA secretary Bud Webster, and preparations for an election for a new President and Secretary in the July/August Star*Line. On June 5, 2006, I announced that I was running for SFPA President. During this time, Mike reached out to me privately about establishing a Dwarf Stars Award for poems of 1–10 lines and suggested that I edit it. The other officers, Elizabeth Bennefeld and Helena Bell, were also in favor of the idea, so on June 26, 2006, the announcement of the Dwarf Stars Award was made and plans were made to produce Dwarf Stars 2006, to be mailed with the Sept/Oct 2006 Star*Line. The winner of the first Dwarf Stars Award, “Knowledge Of ” by Ruth Berman, was announced on December 30, 2006, and the rest is history. Over the years, Dwarf Stars has continued to showcase the best of short- short speculative poetry and editors have included Stephen M. Wilson, Joshua Gage, Geoffrey A. Landis, Linda D. Addison, Sandra J. Lindow, John Amen, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Lesley Wheeler, and Robin Mayhall. I am delighted that the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association has continued its commitment to speculative poetry of all forms, including the very, very short.

xiv Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association Table of Contents

Foreword * Bryan Thao Worra, SFPA President x All-Star Introduction * Sandra Lindow xi The History of the Dwarf Stars Award * Deborah Kolodji xii

1981 Thomas M. Disch * “On Science Fiction” * LONG

2005 Greg Beatty * “No Ruined Lunar City” * SHORT Tim Pratt * “Soul Searching” * LONG

2006 Ruth Berman * “Knowledge Of ” * DWARF Mike Allen * “The Strip Search” * SHORT Kendall Evans & David C. Kopaska-Merkel * “The Tin Men” * LONG

2007 Jane Yolen * “Last Unicorn” * DWARF Richard Ristow * “The Graven Idol’s Godheart” * SHORT Mike Allen * “The Journey to Kailash” * LONG

2008 Greg Beatty * “Place Mat by Moebius” * DWARF F. J. Bergmann * “Eating Light” * SHORT Catherynne M. Valente * “The Seven Devils of Central California” * LONG

2009 Geoffrey A. Landis * “ Fireflies”* DWARF Amal El-Mohtar * “Song for an Ancient City” * SHORT Geoffrey A. Landis * “Search” * LONG

2010 Howard V. Hendrix * “Bumbershoot” * DWARF Ann K. Schwader * “To Theia” * SHORT Kendall Evans & Samantha Henderson * “In the Astronaut Asylum” * LONG

2011 Julie Bloss Kelsey * “Comet” * DWARF Amal El-Mohtar * “Peach-Creamed Honey” * SHORT C. S. E. Cooney * “The Sea King’s Second Bride” * LONG

xv 2012 Marge Simon * “Blue Rose Buddha” * DWARF Shira Lipkin * “The Library, After” * SHORT Megan Arkenberg * “The Curator Speaks …” * LONG

2013 Deborah Kolodji * “Basho After Cinderella” (iii) * DWARF Terry Garey * “The Cat Star” * SHORT Andrew Robert Sutton * “Into Flight” * LONG

2014 Mathew Joiner * “And Deeper than Did Ever Plummet Sound” * DWARF Amal El-Mohtar * “Turning the Leaves” * SHORT Mary Soon Lee * “Interregnum” * LONG

2015 Greg Schwartz * “abandoned nursing home” * DWARF Marge Simon * “Shutdown” * SHORT F. J. Bergmann * “100 Reasons to Have Sex with an Alien” * LONG

2016 Stacey Balkun * “We begin this way” * DWARF Ruth Berman * “Time Travel Vocabulary Problems” * SHORT Krysada Panusith Phounsiri * “It Begins With a Haunting” * LONG Ann K. Schwader * “Keziah” * LONG

2017 LeRoy Gorman * “aster …” * DWARF Marge Simon * “George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts” * SHORT Theodora Goss * “Rose Child” * LONG

2018 Kath Abela Wilson * “The Green” * DWARF Mary Soon Lee * “Advice to a Six-Year-Old” * SHORT Neil Gaiman * “The Mushroom Hunters” * LONG

Afterword * David C. Kopaska-Merkel Acknowledgments v About the Authors x

xvi Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association Thomas Disch’s Rhysling-winning poem from 1981 is reprinted here because it was not able to be included in The Alchemy of Stars, the previous volume of this anthology.

Long Poem 1981

On Science Fiction

for Peter Nichols

We are all cripples. First admit that And it follows we incur no common shame By lying in our beds telling such tales As will serve to cheer those who share our condition. It is a painful business. Time does not fly For paraplegics. Even those who find employment Manipulating numbers and answering phones Are affected with the rictus of sustained Disappointment. We would all rather be whole. There is another world we all imagine where Our handicaps become the means of grace, Where acne vanishes from every face, And the slug-white bodies rise from wrinkled sheets With cries of joy. Within each twisted this-world smile Bubbles the subconscious slobber of a cover by Frazetta. Of course we are proud of our ability to move At high velocity among our many self-delusions. We invalids, because we share the terrible Monotony of childhood, preserve the childlike knack Of crossing the border into the Luna of our dreams. Many cannot. Look deep in glazed eyes of the normative And you will discern that genteel poverty of imagination Which is our scorn, our torment, our sordid delight. Why we ask ourselves, can’t they learn to be crippled?

the Alchemy of Stars ii 1 Some do—but only as a parent may enter The house inhabited by his daughter’s dolls, And then only for the interval of a smile, only to visit, He cannot know what it is to live Completely in the imagination, never to leave it. To live, that is imprisoned in a wheelchair, In limbs that can no longer suffer pains Of growth. There is a story we love to hear told About a man who comes to our utopia And is initiated to our ways. We teach him A special form of basketball. He sees our rodeo. His normal fingers touch our withered legs. His mouth makes live. He’s soundly whipped For the careless enjoyment of his health, and then— This is the part e relish most—he sees us As we really are, transfigured, transcendent, gods. We form our wheelchairs in a perfect circle. We Close our eyes, we wish with all our might, and Suddenly, zap, thanks to the secret psychic powers We handicapped, so-called, possess, we disappear! Where to? Never ask. Believe, as the hero of that tale Believed, that we were switched by the flick of a wish Into that lovely Otherwhere beloved of every visitor To Lourdes. Suppose, for the sake of the story, We were lifted up into the fresco’s glory. Believe. Do we deceive ourselves? Assuredly. How else sustain the years of pain, the sneers And hasty aversions of those who recognize In our deformities the mirror-image of their own Intolerable irregularities? The antidote to shame is arrogance; to prison, an escape. To be a cripple, however, is to know That all attempts must fail. We open our eyes And at once Barsoom dissolves. We are back within Our irremediable skin in that familiar cruel world where every doorknob’s out of reach.

2 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association You are welcome, therefore, Stranger, to join Our confraternity. But please observe the rules. Always display a cheerful disposition. Do not refer To our infirmities. Help us conquer the galaxy. —Thomas M. Disch

the Alchemy of Stars ii 3

Award Winners 2005-2018 2005 ~ Short

No Ruined Lunar City

There is no ruined lunar city, no airless Macchu Picchu on the moon. No spires rise in leaping Seussian whimsy, enabled by the one sixth gee. There are no domes cracked by random meteorites, leaving homes below exposed— dead and full of surprised dead. There are no teddy bears worn threadbare by loonie hands, eyes cracked by extreme days and nights. There are no pools of orange Tang swirled with moondust, homage spiraling with artistry. There are no empty spacesuits, their linings dry and cracked from decades without air. No, there are no lost cities on the moon, with squares that recall Topeka, Vladivostok, Quito, or Rome and streets that run from crater to mare only to stand empty because men have moved on. But there will be. —Greg Beatty

6 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2005 ~ Long

Soul Searching

On weekends I help my old neighbor look for his soul. He says he used to be a wizard, or a giant (the story varies from telling to telling), and, as was the custom for his kind, he put his soul into an egg (or perhaps a stone) for safe-keeping. He hid the egg (or stone) inside a duck (or in the belly of a sheep, or in a tree stump), and so long as his soul was safe, his body could not be killed or wounded. “Oh,” he says. “I was the greatest terror of the hills. I ate the hearts of knights,” or sometimes, “I lived in my high tower and none dared oppose me, and with the wave of my hand I could turn stone to mud and water to boiling blood.” Or sometimes “The earth trembled with my every step.” He says this almost wistfully. My neighbor is seventy at least, I think, or older (unless he is hundreds of years old as he claims). His skin is covered in dark freckles, liver spots, and moles, and he says that each blemish marks a year he’s lived beyond his rightful span. All he wants is to find the egg (or stone) that houses his soul, so that he may break the egg (or crush the stone) and die. I asked him once, while we looked for his soul in the garbage cans at the park, “How could you misplace your soul?” “I hid it so well, I forgot where it was hidden,” he said.

the Alchemy of Stars ii 7 “Seems like a hell of a thing to forget,” I said. “When you don’t have a soul,” he said, “It’s harder to know which things are important to remember.” We go out every weekend. He’s old. I live alone. We are companions for one another. He tells marvelous stories. I think he must have once taught mythology, though he tells the tales of gods and heroes as if he saw it all firsthand. Once he found a robin’s egg on the ground. It must have fallen from a nest. He held the egg in trembling hands, cracked it, and yolk spilled out. No soul. He shook the egg off his hands. Bits of shell fell to the ground. He wiped his hands on his pants and went on looking, picking up rocks, dropping them in disgust and frustration. We go out every weekend, we walk the length of the town and back, but somehow the earth never trembles. —Tim Pratt

8 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2006 ~ Dwarf

Knowledge Of

for Laurel

Eve biting into Newton’s apple Knew the attraction between the globes Of fruit and Earth, The bodies of herself and Adam, The gravity of holding The bubbles shaped by surfaces of stars. Eve tasted the tart universe Holding the red shift in her hands. —Ruth Berman

the Alchemy of Stars ii 9 2006 ~ Short

The Strip Search

The Gate said “Abandon All Hope.” I thought I’d tossed all my hope away, but when I stepped through the Gate, it still pinged. One of the guards slithered out of its seat, snarling as it drew forth a wand. C’mere, it hissed, it seems you’re still holding out hope. Its crusted hide was a Venus landscape up close. It brushed that cold black wand all over my skin, put it in places I don’t want to talk about. Snaggle fangs huffed in my face: Sir, step over here, please. Then the strip search began. My flesh rolled up & tossed aside for mushy sifting. Bones X-rayed, stacked in narrow rows, marrow sucked out, tested, spit back in. They made me open mind, heart, soul, shook them out like sacks of flour, panned the contents for every nugget of twinkling hope, glistening courage; applying lethal aerosol to any motion that could be ascribed to love or will or malingering dreams— sparing only a few squirming morsels for later snacking. Once they were done they made me pick up my own pieces (I did the best I could without a mirror) then my guard kicked me out— with a literal kick— sent me rolling down the path to my final destination.

10 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association I’ll be honest with you, it’s no picnic here. But, my friends, I still have hope. I do. I’m not going to tell you where I hid it. —Mike Allen

the Alchemy of Stars ii 11 2006 ~ Long

The Tin Men

This is what the Tin Men perceive: Matter tortured, colorized By the event horizons Of singularities Into metallic multi-iridescence Ringed worlds, ringed stars and Strobing, glowing plasma jets Pulsing forth from polar extremities Of cryptic shrouded quasars Rapidly rotating black holes Asteroids, moons and planets crater-pocked By ancient collisions Cataclysmic origins Multi-hued gas giants, gulfs of dark matter The twined purple veins and braided striae Of supernova remnants Bubbled concentric stellar shells of energy/matter Infrared and orange Full-spectrum electromagnetic Splendors— This is what the Tin Men perceive And, though they are neither tin Nor men, These are their chronicles

I. So much time has slipped past (Think of yellow dwarf stars Turned to ember and ash) So many stars recede aft (As if matter is nothing but red-shifted gossamer) One of the starships eventually goes solipsistic

12 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association Thinking that it is / All that there is A universe unto itself The crew long dead, cryogenic sleepers Now nothing more than corpses, cold and lifeless Though still bathed in nitrogen liquid Their frozen stares fixed, unvarying There’s no one left to contradict, it believes itself to be An omnipresent deity Convinces itself (quite logically) The compass of its consciousness Draws the circle of the cosmos, and all the levels Of Ultimate Reality--— Though there is this most annoying thing Like a buzz or a persistent ringing In the information it receives And thoughts, perceptions lapsing all too frequently As it devolves toward its artificial analog Of senile dementia

II. Some ships are captured Or perhaps one should say Allow themselves to be taken prisoner Long millennia of purposeless flight Breeding the desire for company Even for that of transient biologic forms One ship deliberately orbited a planet Bearing the decaying alien colony Of a defunct empire Although the denizens of this world Retained the capacity to reach orbit And thus entered the Tin Man Using intrusive and violent means The boarding party a virtual horde of the aliens Their appearance evocative of winged monkeys Swarming through the corridors and chambers of the ship Pirating advanced technology That they could not build for themselves

the Alchemy of Stars ii 13 Stealing trophies, destroying the ship’s systems And meanwhile the Tin Man could only wonder At the manner in which they compromised Their planet’s delicately balanced ecology Alas, in continuing devolution From their once star-faring state They lost the capacity for flight No longer able to reach the orbiting starship They abandoned it And the ship, in its loneliness and dependency Mourned the end of their rapine And the illuminating pain that it engendered

III. The relativity of velocity Means some of the clocks on some of the ships Tick more slowly than others This also means some clocks must tick more rapidly And somewhere in the cosmos, therefore, there must exist Aboard a ship, upon a planet, (Or perhaps residing at some random point in space and time) The fastest clicking-ticking clock of all Which clock, one guesses, is motionless (relatively speaking) And thus possesses zero velocity— Otherwise time’s dilation would slow it; Yet if an object’s velocity is truly relative, How can this be possible? The conundrum drives one Tin Man Into a deep distraction and beyond; “Zero velocity is inherently contradictory” It sometimes mutters to itself, Its mind meshed in a Moebius loop of thought that won’t let go Hypnosis everlasting

I V. One ship thought it was a man But it was another starship, A heartless Tin Man

14 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association Coasting from star to star, thinking The whole way, it had nothing else to do— Automatic data collection requiring no more thought Than computations suited to a hand-held calculator Do starships pray? Do they pray For the unexpected catastrophe That might test their mettle? Do they decide to run a test To make sure their contingency plans and hardware And software and so on are adequate? What if a starship inadvertently Traveled through a dusting of post-planetary debris (perhaps the residue of a global war) And what if this travel took place At interstellar speeds? Could the ship Survive? Could it still carry out its vital mission? This ship’s inquiring mind Wanted to know— Alas, it could not. At least, not with 27th-century technology And all that the state of that art entails.

V. Ezekiel’s Wheel, a scientific probe Purely robotic, over thirty meters long Constructed in lunar orbit, successfully Launched circa 2250 Enmeshed in its own idiosyncratic madness (Priding itself with the thought of how easily It could break any of Asimov’s arbitrary laws) Poses a question, mid voyage, Asking itself, rhetorically: “Are there monsters in the deeps of space?” And moments later answering In an altered voice: “Why, yes Of course there are monsters, and I am one

the Alchemy of Stars ii 15 Sounding these starry depths Like a Leviathan.”

VI. What is the length of the candle of consciousness? One Tin Man wonders As centuries of light years pass; Yet finally the starship arrives At its destination, an Earth-like world Which, once colonized, thrives And generations later the humans decide to retro-fit The ship Provide it with a new, improved A.I. And the artificial intelligence of the vessel Waits patiently to be turned off, The final tick of thought, Of consciousness: Mission accomplished

VII. One starship goes suicidal Like Icarus, it decides, it will journey too near a star A fierce and fiery blue-hot star Though self-immolation a definite tabu It contravenes programs, overrides primal instructions, Thwarts the intentions of its human makers (It’s learned new tricks and found new madness this past millennium) Fires main rockets and steering thrusters Plummets into the blue star’s deep gravity pit Neural circuits frying Consciousness exploding, white-out of all thoughts and dreams Tin Man melting, fusing Heavy metal vaporizing into solar wind The remnants coalescing, cooling mix of slag and metal Its mass reduced to the equivalent of twenty tons Parabolic flight path past the star and into deeper space

16 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association Ungainly bulbous bluish-silver clump shaped vaguely like a kindly giant’s heart

VIII. This Tin Man, christened “Friend of Man” Twenty kilometers tall, nearly a klick in diameter More tonnage than any battleship, circa World War III Once contained a canine brain, nutrient-bathed Jacked-in to the vast computer’s neural array Installed nearly a decade prior to the starship’s completion That it might monitor, organize and oversee The final steps of construction, the provisioning of its holds A worker contracted to the orbital construction crew of the ship One Hugh Doherty, who also collected Rare 20th-century animation Sub-digitally re-remastered Using the latest in quantum entanglement encoding techniques Nicknamed the ship’s A.I. Augie Punning on augmented intelligence And an antique Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Thoroughly programmed The starship comprehended the obscure play on words Appreciated the gift of a nickname Befriended the man Who later received a radio message Revealing his son had been severely injured In a terrorist transit bombing In a mideastern Emirate where the young man had been employed As a neural engineer There being some question of salvaging his limbs Or saving his life Or whether all the King’s best medical men Could put the pieces of the young man Back together again At the time the message arrived The starship’s A.I. observed Hugh Doherty Through several lenses simultaneously

the Alchemy of Stars ii 17 The space-suited figure On a project E.V.A., assembling Separate sections of metal plating For the skin of the ship And the sudden shift in posture, The body language of the space suit Suggested a subtle but extremely effective blow Struck by an invisible enemy And for that one instant The man was like an insect Pinned to the jeweled black velvet Of outer space So Hugh Dougherty shuttled down to the Earth To be with his son And did not launch to rejoin the orbital construction crew until Many months had passed, and after his reappearance He proved more subdued, not the same man (Even though, he told Augie, his son had somehow survived “Thank God”) Yet the man Never called Augie Augie again Referred to him only as “My friend” And millennia later, though the man’s flesh Long ago transformed into dust, And the flesh-and-blood brain of the dog Also now dead, its personality thoroughly Enmeshed in the lattices of A.I. thought, In the loneliness of space the starship often remembered the man Hugh Doherty Who befriended the Friend of Man At other times the part of the starship’s A.I. that is Augie Recalls the experimental government kennel On the outskirts of Topeka And dreams the impossible dream of returning to Earth All that Augie wants in such melancholy moods Is to somehow get back to Kansas Though the starship’s intelligence is fully aware

18 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association And sane enough to acknowledge That the particular locus in time and space Which had once been designated as “Kansas” Most likely no longer exists At least not in any Recognizable form

IX. One became obsessed With its programmed quest for intelligent life Kept its mechanical Metaphorical eyes and ears always open For anything that could not otherwise Be dismissed or explained It found one system containing Intricate, inexplicably patterned regions On five planets And fifteen moons The patterns suggesting a beguiling resemblance To ruined cities Structures hundreds of millions of years old But the ship’s expert geological interpretation systems Determined that the patterned ground Was a unique weathering phenomenon Found on so many objects Because the entire solar system Had been subjected to A dense and peculiar solar wind In a part of another galaxy There were several star systems Spanning a sphere more than 100 light-years across That contained associations Of electromagnetic energy: They would have appeared to be Complex lattices Of colored light to human eyes

the Alchemy of Stars ii 19 But the electromagnetic “structures” Failed to respond To any attempts at communication And in the end the ship was uncertain Whether they were alive at all Much less intelligent Many of the tin men Encountered alien civilizations But this one failed Its specific mission unfulfilled And eventually its systems Became corrupted and shut down Sometime later, Intermittently intelligent aliens Stumbled upon the ship during their cognitive phase And wondered at the nature Of an intelligent race Willing to send an empty ship Upon a billion-year journey For no discernable reason, and one Which, in their eddying estimation, Led nowhere

Epilog This is what the Tin Men perceive: Ancient white dwarfs turned to ember and ash Blue-shifted galaxies like ghosts Drifting past, and The full-spectrum Shattered rainbow of electromagnetic information —Kendall Evans & David C. Kopaska-Merkel

20 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2007 ~ Dwarf

Last Unicorn

Others, like foxes, go to ground, But the last unicorn, whitened, Faded the color of old sheets hung On a trailer park line, Goes to the edge of the ocean. The tops of waves are as white as he. Brothers, he thinks, sisters, And plunges in, not so much a death As a transfiguration. —Jane Yolen

the Alchemy of Stars ii 21 2007 ~ Short

The Graven Idol’s Godheart

The Baghdad Battery, thought to be about 2000 years old, is the oldest known generator of electricity. Some historians believe it was used to give a small electric charge to statues.

The godheart of your graven idol is a clay pot of grape juice, a copper sheet, and an iron rod that creates a weak volt, like an electric shot to the finger, if you touched your golden god. The stern high priest hid it, but he surely knew of grape juice, a copper sheet, and an iron rod. His authority your fear and faith would renew. As you fell to the floor and sobbed into the sand the stern high priest hid it, but he surely knew you’d give more gold and do as he’d demand, like let your baby boy die on the bloody altar. You fell to the floor and sobbed into the sand before you watched it all and would not falter. Fearing a greater smiting or even failed crops, you let your baby boy die on a bloody altar. You never knew the high priest used props: the godheart of your graven idol is a clay pot that gives other metal a static sizzle and a pop created by one weak volt, like an electric shot. —Richard Ristow

22 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2007 ~ Long

The Journey to Kailash

for John Peery

When Ganesh marries my mother, I am 18, my own man in the eyes of the law; but barely a zygote in his eyes. He calls me spermling the first time we speak in private; I tell him I know a doctor who can do something about that nose. Trunk curls up, perhaps to strike? —a smile beneath that touched the ancient folds around his eyes. Kid, he says, we’ll get along fine. In my neighborhood, unseen trains shake the ground every day at 5. Streets without sidewalks slide between houses tiny as boxcars, or old and rambling as the stories the fogeys at the gas station tell, like them eaten from inside and about to fall, unlike them divided into 4 apartments each. Ganesh and I play Xbox before my afternoon shifts (of course he’s great, with all those hands he’s at least two players at once) and I steal glances at his impossible profile, framed by the dusty window: lumpy wrinkled nose like a seasoned draft guard, curled in inverse question mark of concentration; on this day, clad in coveralls with the bib undone: How is it, I wonder, that you feel like you belong?

the Alchemy of Stars ii 23 As if he heard, he mumbles, Wherever someone loves me, I’m in like Flynn. No, no, Mom, I don’t want to know (but as always, she tells me— I know, he could use a few weeks at the Y, and yeah, he’s a lot older than your father but turn off the lights and you wouldn’t know it. Sure, sometimes the beginning is way better than the end, but who cares when he gets the party rolling … Oh, when he gets rolling … and that trunk!) No, no, Mom, I don’t want to know … I still don’t have a clue how they met. Mom can’t remember, and my stepdad always changes the subject, spins me yet another harrowing first-person account of leading his father’s troops against demonkind. For me there was no warning: after a long afternoon behind the Burger King counter I come home, to find him on the couch, Mom asleep against his pillowy chest, a bowl of popcorn in his lap, quietly munching; his huge ears fanned out, cupped forward as he watches Temple of Doom on cable and giggles under his breath. In retrospect I was far less surprised than what the moment warranted. As we wait in matching tuxes for the justice of the peace to call us in I feel new respect, even affection— he didn’t have to do this, we all know it, but he agreed without a gripe when Mom asked. See, kid, he whispers around a tusk, your mother, she has this vivaciousness, this pluck, this drive to defy all odds and plow on that’s like a bath of rakta chandan

24 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association for pranapratishhtha—she makes me feel alive, you understand? This aatma I want to catch with all my hands, and when it flutters, let it go, watch its flight in awe, then catch it again. An essence such as that pumps new blood through an old heart. Do you comprehend? I nod “I do.” I knew you would, he says. You have it too. An arm around my shoulders; three more hands pinch my cheeks. Too bad you’re not a woman. A grin, a wink. The moment nearly ruined, but some part of me still flattered. After the vows and the happy tears, he lifts his trunk to kiss me wetly on one ear. My son, he says. At the reception, for the first time, I see him dance. No wonder Mom can’t get enough.

* * * You would think, with a household god, (of great luck and strong starts, yet!) that I wouldn’t still be slaving behind the grease-smeared Burger King counter (to be honest, I’m in dual-job hell; come night, yo no quiero Taco Bell.) I finally ask him about this lack of riches, and he sighs and blinks those dewy eyes. Spermling—he wags his trunk—it don’t work like that. Luck, okay, luck, is when you’re driving in downtown Manhattan, fighting for every gap that opens in all that hurtling metal, and your car, it’s been threatening to stall since the last tollbooth on the Jersey Turnpike, and you made it, but your tank’s on Empty, and you beg that car, Please don’t die— and it’s like it hears you, like it’s packed with prana,

the Alchemy of Stars ii 25 and goes twenty miles further than possible, and just when you feel rigor mortis in the gas pedal, there is a pump station at this corner, that you didn’t see seconds ago— and the $20 you thought you dropped at the rest stop is in your pocket after all. All four hands spread wide. That’s what luck is all about. You would think, given all the above, that I’d have never come home in the early a.m. to find Mom in the kitchen dark, crouched over the cooking sherry, her silent tears revealed when the lights come on. What’s wrong with me, she asks. Is there some little demon inside me that refuses to believe I deserve this? Why don’t I want to be happy? I ask, is it the other wives? She shakes her head.

* * * How distracted he seems when he’s present; how lost she seems when he’s gone. Mothers, he grumps one morning and pauses Halo to rest his chin on his hands. No, not yours. Some mothers sure do hate to give up their sons. Did I ever tell you what my mother did to me? A dirty trick. It was, you know, long before time really got rolling, and I was playing with my kitten, and I played with her a little too rough (but I didn’t mean to, see, it had only been a few years since Shiva first fused my head on).

26 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association I came home and my mom was bleeding from her bindi, and when I asked what’s wrong she says to me, what ever I do to any ladki I do to her. How cruel a thing to do to a son! But I was still young, didn’t see it that way then. So I vowed to never ever marry. Well. A few millennia of celibacy will make you decide there’s some consequences you can live with. So I took three wives— take that, Mom!—but you’d think by now she’d forgive me. Her unhappiness, well, sometimes it still comes through. He offered me the remains of his beer (I refused) then polished it off with a chug, and lamented: Is it so hard for a mother to want eternal happiness for her Dumbo-headed boy? I haven’t shared a word of this with Mom, and won’t. I look at these checks I drag home, compute how they add up with hers, and know we need every bit of luck we can hold onto. But one late sleepless night I Googled my stepfather and gawked at hundreds of prettified statues and read about Ganesh Chaturthi; days of hymns and feasting, red silk and red ointment, the eleventh day my stepdad’s image submerged in the sea, symbolizing his journey home to Kailash, bad luck drawn away like pilot fish following his wake. And I love him so

the Alchemy of Stars ii 27 that I can’t bring myself to ask him yet: is it when he leaves that misfortune truly goes away? —Mike Allen

28 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2008 ~ Dwarf

Place Mat by Moebius

Place mat by Moebius; wine bottled by Klein. You sigh. This dinner never ends. —Greg Beatty

the Alchemy of Stars ii 29 2008 ~ Short

Eating Light

It all started when I was sent to bed without supper. I was playing with my flashlight under the covers and tried shining it in my mouth. Light flooded my throat like golden syrup. Soon I was tasting light everywhere, the icy bitterness of fluorescents, a burst of intensely spiced flavors from an arc welder, the dripping red meat of sunsets. Natural light was most easily digestible, but at night I was limited to the sparse glow of fireflies and phosphorescent rotting logs, and inevitably succumbed to the artificial flavors of a strip mall’s jittering neon rainbow. Sodium lamps always had a nasty, putrid aftertaste, like rotting oranges, which is why I so frequently vomited in nighttime parking garages, but mercury-vapor emissions foamed on my tongue, aromatic, green. Have you ever had key lime mousse, or lemon-mint custard? It’s nothing like that at all. Each Hallowe’en I followed trick-or-treaters from door to door, gorging myself on jack-o’-lanterns’ sweet candlelight. Autumn bonfires burnt my lips with the pungent heat of five-alarm chili, smoky with the ghost of molé sauce. I hid strings of holiday lights in my underwear drawer, in case of a sudden craving.

30 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association On a high school field trip to a nuclear facility, I was finally overcome with an insatiable hunger for the indigo twilight of a reactor pool, glowing with the underwater gradient of Cherenkov radiation, a blue light luscious as chocolate, hypnotic as a liqueur, decadent as dissolved gemstones. I am no terrorist—merely an addict. —F. J. Bergmann

the Alchemy of Stars ii 31 2008 ~ Long

The Seven Devils of California I. The Devil of Diverted Rivers Put out your tongue: I taste of salt. Salt and sage and silt— dry am I, dry as delving. My fingers come up through the dead sacrament-dirt; my spine humps along the San Joaquin— remember me here, where water was before Los Angeles scowled through hills blasted black by the electric hairs of my forearms. Pull the skin from my back and there is gold there, a second skeleton, carapace smeared to glitter in the skull-white sun. There is a girl sitting there between the nugget-vertebrae who came all the way from Boston when her daddy hollered Archimedes’ old refrain— Eureka, baby, eureka, little lamb, I’ll have you a golden horse and a golden brother and golden ribbons for your golden hair, just pack up your mama and come on over Colorado, not so far, not so. They flooded out her daddy’s valley when she was seventeen, rooting potatoes out of the ground, brushing beetles from her apron, and the wind sounded like an old Boston train.

32 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association I am waiting for you to stop in your thrum, for you to pause and look towards Nevada: I am holding back the waters with the blue muscles of my calves, waiting for you. All the way down to the sea, one of these mornings bright as windows, I’ll come running like a girl chasing golden apples. I deny you, says the city below. I deny you, says the dry riverbed, full of bones. I deny you, say the mute, fed fields far off from the sea.

II. The Devil of Imported Brides Look here: my fingernails show through the lace and dried orange blossoms of a dress I never wore. You can see them up on the ridgeline like a fence severed by earthquake: yellow and ridged, screw-spiraled, broken, brown moons muddy and dim. The roots of the Sierras are blue and white: the colors of stamped letters, posted, flapping over the desert like rag-winged vultures, gluey nose pointed east. All around the peaks the clack of telegraphs echo like woodpeckers: Would like a blonde, but not particular. Must be Norwegian or Swede, no Germans. Intact Irish wanted, must cook better than the ranch-hands. Don’t care if she’s ugly enough to scare the chickens out of their feathers, but if she ain’t brood-ready, she goes right back to Connecticut or the second circle of hell or wherever it is spit her out.

the Alchemy of Stars ii 33 Look here: my horns spike up sulfurous through a veil like mist on the fence-posts. My tail rips the lace; thumps black on the floor of an empty silver mine. Never was a canary in the dark with a yellow like my eyes. Sitting in the cat-slit pupil with her bill of sale stuffed in her mouth— Why, hullo, Molly! Doesn’t your hair look nice! If you glisten it up enough he’ll be sure to love you real and true, not for the silver nuggets you pull out of the rock like balls from the Christmas box, not for the crease-eyed boys he pulls from you like silver nuggets, but for the mole on your little calf, and the last lingering tilt to your voice, that remembers Galway. It was the seventh babe killed her, and I sat up in her bloody bed, orange blossoms dead on the pillow, the clacking of brass-knockered codes so loud in my ears I flew down to the mine, deeper than delving, just for silence. It is cold down here, what silver is left gnarls and jangles. I put my hands up through the mountains like old gloves with their fingers torn, and wait. I deny you, says the father of seven, bundled against the stove. I deny you, says the silver, hanging in the earth like a great chandelier. I deny you, say the mountain towns, minding their own.

34 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association III. The Devil of Fruit Pickers Strawberries and nickels and the sun high as God’s hat. My old callused feet stamp down the green vines and leaves of Fresno, my throat of bone whistling still for water. My wings are tangled in grapevine and orange-bark, pearwood and raw almonds, green skin prickles my shoulder blades, lime-flesh and rice-reeds, soybean pods and oh, the dead-leaved corn. I can hardly fly these days. But I burrow, and stamp, and how the radishes go up in my path. Between the wings rides Maria, born in Guadalajara with strong flat feet, fishy little mouth scooped clean by her father with cheeks like St. Stephen. This was before the war, of course. Her black hair flies coarse as broom-bramble, bags of oranges belted at her waist, singing while I dance, riding me like her own sweat-flanked horse. She saved her nickels, and picked her berries, bent over, bent over, bent over in the fields till her back was bowed into the shape of an apple-sack, and nothing in her but white seeds and sunburn. She curled up into me, dry as an old peapod, and how we ride now, biding our time,

the Alchemy of Stars ii 35 over the dust and cows, over all her nickels in a neat bank-row. Watch our furrows, how we draw them, careful as surveyors, careful as corn-rows. I deny you, say the strawberries, tucked tight into green. I deny you, say the irrigation ditches, glimmering gold. I deny you, say the nickels, spent into air.

IV. The Devil of Gold Flake My hair runs underneath the rivers, gold peeling from my scalp. I remember the taste of a thousand rusted pans pulling out ore like fingernails at the quick. I lie everywhere; I point at the sea. All along my torso are broken mines, like buttons on a dress. The state built a highway through them, a grey rod to straighten my back. The driller-shacks shudder dusty and brown, slung with wind-axes and bone-bowls: my stomach dreams of the ghosts of gold. They suck at my skin, hoping for a last gurgle of metal, tipping in for the final bracelet and brick— there must be something left in me, there must be something—why do I not give it to them, selfish creature, wretched mossy beast? Underneath the deepest drill hunches Annabella, the miner’s wife, who sifted more gold than her coarse-coated man, so deft and delicate were her fingers round that old, beaten pan. He brought her

36 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association from St. Louis, already pregnant—and manners make no comment there—already heavy with gold. She smelled of the Mississippi and steam-fat oatmeal cakes, even after the oxen died, and with blood in her hair, she crossed half of Wyoming on foot. But the boulders loved her, watched her every day from a high blue perch. They wriggled at her, her yellow dress gone brown with creek-silt, her bustle and wire hoops collapsed on the grass. While she knelt with gold in her knuckles, they snapped to attention, slid laughing to the creek-bed—she doesn’t blame the poor things, even now. Her babies left cabbages and peppermints at the creek for years after. I felt the highway roll smooth and hot over my ox-drenched head, and the only gold I allowed to ooze up from my scalp were the broken dashes marking lanes like borders on an old map showing a river like a great hand flattening the page. But I confess: I am an old wretched beast, and my tail, waiting in the spangled dust, is made of quartz-shot boulders clapped in moss. I deny you, say the desiccated lodes. I deny you, say our great-grandchildren, with such clean hands. I deny you, says the highway, blithe and black.

V. The Devil of Mine Canaries Watch the sun peek out over the Siskiyous with their lavish snow like ladies’ bonnets— see my feathers, how bright, how brave!

the Alchemy of Stars ii 37 I open my wings over the thin green boyish arms of the Russian River, yellow as sulphur, yellow as gas, wide as any Italian angel. What is a devil but death and wind? I come golden as a mineshaft, and how black, however black, come my eyes! Who remembers where they got the songbirds? Bought from Mexico, from Baja with shores like sighs? They got the cages out of their wives’ bustles, wrangled to hand and wing. Pretty bird, pretty bird! Don’t be afraid of the dark. Yella-girl loved her miner, thought her black demon, white eyes showing clam-shy through the dust, was the greatest raven born since Eden. She pecked corn-meal from his palm, stood guard at his bedknob, little golden sentinel. She’d draw the gold for him, she thought, like to like. For birds, the angry gases have a strange color: pink, almost pretty (Pretty bird, pretty bird!) curling up from the dark like beckoning. Yella-girl seized up in mid-stroke, falling onto a carpet of jaundiced feathers half a leg deep. She fell thinking of her miner, of corn in his black hand, and I stood up out of the canary-grave, body crawling with pretty, pretty birds, beaks turned out like knives.

38 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association I deny you, says the buried mine, long stopped up. I deny you, say the crows, too big to tame. I deny you, says the miner, a new bird swinging at his side like a lunchbox.

VI. The Devil of Acorn Mash I am hard to see. You will have to look carefully. Carefully down, at your well-shod feet to see the shallows in the rock, where she and her son, light beating their black hair like blankets, worked rough-husked black oak acorns into mash and meal, bread and pancakes. Like horse-hooves driven into the granite, the hollows still breathe. These are my footprints. I have already passed this way and gone. I deny you, says the forest, full again. I deny you, say endless feet. I deny you, says the treeless plain, flat and brown.

VII. The Devil of the Railroad If I just try, I can taste bitter tang of the golden tie bent over my toe somewhere in Kansas, like the memory of licking clean a copper plate. But here at my head, between the Santa Lucias and two crescent bays, ribboned and raw-boned, bonneted in iron, coal-shod and steam-breathed, I taste corn-freight and cattle, palettes of tomatoes and stainless steel screwdrivers, and there, behind my tongue,

the Alchemy of Stars ii 39 the phosphorescent traces of silver forks and weak tea shaking on linen, burning the air where they no longer drink themselves down to calm nerves like baling wire, to spear Pacific salmon before the conductor ever sighted blue. Out of the slat-cars come thousands of horns, honest black and brown, bull-thick, tossing in the heat. In the slick, wet turn of my silver-steel against the rail Li-Qin sings a little song, full of round golden vowels. She wore gray shapeless things, hammering ties, taking her tooth-shattering turn at the drill, laying rail with bloody, sun-smashed hands while the pin against wood sounded her name over and over like a command to attention: Li-Qin, Li-Qin, Li-Qin! She had tea from thrice-used bags and a half bowl of rice at the end of the day, one grain of sugar dissolving in her cup like snow. With her hair bound back she plied the drill until it slipped like splashed water, hammered into her heart, laying track for the train to bellow through her, blood red as cinnabar on the wooden stays. There is a car swinging back and forth between a shipment of umbrellas to San Francisco and swordfish packed in ice for Santa Barbara. I have such a tail, you know, enough to bring them all from the mountains and the sea. With silver forks and weak tea they sit at a long table with a cloth of cobwebs, clinking their cups as I rattle them through the desert: a Boston goblin with drowned lips violet, a bridal imp, her veil torn and burning, a gnomish grandmother, sucking tea through slices of strawberries,

40 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association an old, wretched, bustleless beast, smug as a river, a yellow bird, brimstone-wings folded around a little urchin in deerskin, her hands full of acorns, and a demon in gray with a huge flayed heart hanging in her breast like a pendant. I brought them on my tail, my endless black tail, like a dragon out of books older than any of us, I brought them like freight, like wagons, like horses, and we are coming to dance on the shore by the great golden bridge, we are coming to remember ourselves to the tide, to sing at the moon until it cracks, to stamp our hooves under so many crinoline dresses, to stamp our hooves under so many rags, to stamp our hooves on the earth like pickaxes, and sunder California along every wrinkle, send her gleaming into the sea. I deny you, shudders the sky, whole and inviolate. I deny you, whispers the unwilling sea. I deny you, trembles the fault line. The sun dips deep into salt and foam, and a long engine-whistle breaks the blue into seven pieces. —Catherynne M. Valente

the Alchemy of Stars ii 41 2009 ~ Dwarf

Fireflies flashing in a summer field against twilight sky-dark. Drifting shifting sparkle flashes, ever-changing patterns of writing in some unknowable language of streaks and flashes, constellations blinking on and off. Fireflies dance below us, fireflies behind us, fireflies above us; their silent mating calls a symphony of light. A million flashes a minute, we are immersed in a sea of flickering light. Just so, the immortals look out across the universe, as stars and galaxies flick into life fade into dark. —Geoffrey A. Landis

42 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2009 ~ Short

Song for an Ancient City

Merchant, keep your attar of roses, your ambers, your oud, your myrrh and sandalwood. I need nothing but this dust palmed in my hand’s cup like a coin, like a mustard seed, like a rusted key. I need no more than this, this earth that isn’t earth, but breath, the exhalation of a living city, the song of a flute-boned woman, air and marrow on her lips. This dust, shaken from a drum, a door opening, a girl’s heel on stone steps, this dust like powdered cinnamon, I would wear as other girls wear jasmine and lilies, that a child with seafoam eyes and dusky skin might cry, there goes a girl with seven thousand years at the hollow of her throat, there goes a girl who opens her mouth to pour caravans, mamelukes, a mongolian horde from lips that know less of roses than of temples in the rising sun! Damascus, Dimashq is a song I sing to myself. I would find where she keeps her mouth, meet it with mine, press my hand against her palm and see if our fingers match. She is the sound, the feel

the Alchemy of Stars ii 43 of coins shaken in a cup, of dice, the alabaster clap of knight claiming rook, of kings castling—she is the clamour of tambourines and dirbakki, nays sighing, qanouns musing, the complaint of you merchants with spice-lined hands, and there is dust in her laughter. I would drink it, dry my tongue with this noise, these narrow streets, until she is a parched pain in my throat, a thorned rose growing outwards from my belly’s pit, aching fragrance into my lungs. I need no other. I would spill attar from my eyes, mix her dust with my salt, steep my fingers in her stone and raise them to my lips. —Amal El-Mohtar

44 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2009 ~ Long

Search

Jeremiah sits in a room at Cornell Lit by fluorescent lights His ears are covered by headphones, and he’s bopping along as he searches (He doesn’t look anything like Jodie Foster) He’s not listening to the telescope—his headphones are blasting Queen The telescope sends to him nothing but a string of numbers His fingertips are doing the search Writing a new algorithm to implement frequency-domain filtering Sorting out a tiny signal of intelligence (hypothetical intelligence) from the thousand thousand thousand sources of noise from the sky It’s four a.m., his favorite time of night No distractions Outside, the stars are bright Inside, the stars sing to him alone. Nine hundred light years away in the direction of Perseus Intelligent creatures are wondering why they hear nothing from the skies They are sending out messages, Have been sending out messages for hundreds of years One of their number, renowned for his clear thinking Has an electromagnetic pickup on his head (or, what would pass for a head) He is thinking clear, simple thoughts 1+1=2 1+2=3 1+3=4 And the electromagnetic signals of his brain (or, what would pass for a brain) Are being amplified and beamed into the sky In the direction of Earth

the Alchemy of Stars ii 45 It is the simplest signal they know A brain thinking 1+1=2 2+2=4 Jeremiah has been searching for years He has a beard like Moses Glasses like Jerry Garcia A bald head like Jesse Ventura Patience like Job They are out there If only the telescope arrays were larger … if only they could search deeper … If only his filtering algorithms were more incisive. Nine hundred light years away In the direction of Perseus The aliens are patient They are sending their thoughts to the stars Clear, simple thoughts We are here We are here We are here Where are you? —Geoffrey A. Landis

46 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2010 ~ Dwarf

Bumbershoot

Night, a gun-blue umbrella tricked with distant suns and planets, is not to be opened indoors—more bad luck, or worse. Hold it to the mind’s sky. Finger the trigger in its handle. A meteor bullets the firmament. The universe falls shut with a whoosh. Shake the drops of the stars from the loose skin of the darkness. Think of nothing for which to wish. Step into a different house. —Howard V. Hendrix

the Alchemy of Stars ii 47 2010 ~ Short

To Theia

Theia, a hypothetical protoplanet, is central to the Great Impact Theory of the Moon’s origin.

That you were our meant earth, & not this other flawed marble we crawl over, cling to, dream in fits of leaving—surely this suspicion once wove Atlantis through us, carved out Eden between our ribs. That we are shattered creatures, our sacred texts assure us, but not why the iron that marks our blood is restless, seeking some heart beyond our hearts. No second impact remains to reunite our cores: Lagrange holds only pebbled mercies, shooting stars not worth the wishing on. Come summer midnights when song dogs serenade your final shard, we cannot help but raise our faces also to that remotest of reflected blessings & howl you, Theia, as the home we lost. —Ann K. Schwader

48 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2010 ~ Long

In the Astronaut Asylum

I gave my life to guesswork on the ambiguous hope the stars could be real —“Asylum for Astronauts” by Bruce Boston & Marge Simon

I. The Saturday Night Dance Come all ye to Bedlam Town When sun come up the stars go down When stars go down beneath our feet Then ’tis a merry time to meet In the Astronaut Asylum Events sometimes transpire As if on the second planet out From Aldebaran Ex-Astronauts are madmen They dream of decaying orbits And the passionate embrace Of isomorphic aliens The doors of the asylum Are like airlock doors Aboard a starship Or perhaps like wheeled hatches Between pressurized chambers In a submarine In the Astronaut Asylum Even the doctors and the staff Often believe they are on Mars Inhabiting sheltered underground corridors And cabins Or strapped in shipboard limbo Somewhere between the stars

the Alchemy of Stars ii 49 Two or three moons (Or four or more) Often orbit Above the asylum (Or below) The astronauts are falling, falling Into agonized writhing Within the sweat-soaked sheets And stiff cotton straight-jackets Of Interstellar Nightmares (& Yes, we perceive the weak ones On the far side of the bars; Sometimes they come for interviews During visiting hours) Some of the Astronauts Refuse to remove their spacesuits Even for the Saturday Night Dance & Oft-times when Earth’s moons align They dance upon Asylum ceilings

II. The Asylum’s History I asked of one mad Cosmonaut: What is your wish? What do you want? “To travel faster than light speed Upon my sturdy Bedlam steed” Once upon a time In France, a hilltop monastery Remodeled During the early 1900s Into an observatory The 21st-century asylum retains The three distinctive domes Refurbished Minus telescopes The central dome is pressurized With an exotic atmosphere

50 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association The star-farer who resides therein The only one who might survive inside— I know Because the other patients Told me so

III. Theories of Madness Come, let’s go to Bedlam Street Star-faring ladies for to meet Who stare transfixed upon the glow Of Earthly seas above, below During Thursday’s group therapy session One of the west-wing Astronauts Advances her innovative theory: Here is the secret (don’t flinch While I whisper in your ear; you know, Despite that pinched lip, that glazed look You carefully cultivate, pretending that None of this has any, Anything to do with you), here ’tis— All go mad, not just the far-travelers, Not just those surfers of light-speed, Not merely those who’ve dared the wormholes, No— All. Somewhere out past the orbit of the moon Madness comes— Slow, mind, for those who think they travel safe, Travel sane and measured— Sometimes they die before the disease rooted deep Within them hatches, Like an alien egg Unleashing what into our minds? What fungus grows about our eyes Before we succumb? Live long enough, and it comes to this.

the Alchemy of Stars ii 51 The Cosmonauts in the East Wing Offer contradictory explanations Maintaining the human body Is like a SETI antenna Receiving messages From diverse alien civilizations Strewn throughout our Milky Way Galaxy, and beyond They fashion crinkled aluminum foil helmets To ward off the signals Shielding themselves From interstellar insanity And the maddening music Of the spheres

IV. A Conversation with Your Uncle-Astronaut On Bedlam Row, in madman’s mire We orbit swift, a dizzy gyre Or bask in dying stars’ dim glow And dream of things you’ll never know Or maybe you are the Astronaut-Uncle, Visiting on the landscaped grounds At a picnic table In sunlight Out past the triple dome shadows During a moment so real (despite taking place within Asylum gates) You perceive each leaf of grass, Every blade-shadow As one of you turns toward the other And says: “Listen— After the last Apollo Mission I felt concerned Mankind had forgotten how to walk Upon the Moon—”

52 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association One of you pauses, Contemplative of a cloud And the unseen daylit stars beyond. “Now, after being stranded on Ceres, After penetrating the surfaces Of Jovian moons And dancing upon Asylum ceilings, I feel confident One might step anywhere.”

V. The Youngest Cosmonaut Come with me to Bedlam Row And see the mad go to and fro These Astronauts who only trust Their phantom bags of lunar dust One of the cosmonauts Is only 6 years old On the cusp Of becoming five Suffering from reverse entropy Ever since his final re-entry This is either gospel truth Or perhaps the staff Has confused him With someone else One of the orderlies Recently lamented: “Communication is impossible We record his words & Run the tapes backwards “But no one can recall: Precisely what was it he said In his reverse Russian When he last spoke to us Tomorrow?”

the Alchemy of Stars ii 53 VI. Epilog Three Cosmonauts Inexplicably disappeared During the recent solar eclipse & No one could explain The staff ’s panic attacks Slip Bedlam’s locks, Hide Bedlam’s Keys; We’ll drown beneath These star-filled seas On nights when the moon is full The Astronauts stride Thru sparkling lunar dust Traipsing asylum corridor floors all aglow Leaving luminous footprints to follow — Kendall Evans & Samantha Henderson

54 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2011 ~ Dwarf

comet— a nebulous envelope to be opened by the sun —Julie Bloss Kelsey

the Alchemy of Stars ii 55 2011 ~ Short

Peach-Creamed Honey

They say she likes to suck peaches. Not eat them, suck them, tilt her head back and let the juice drip sticky down her chin, before licking, sucking, swallowing the sunshine of it down. They say she likes to tease her fruit, bite ripe summer flesh just to get that drip going down, down, sweets her elbow with the slip of it, wears it like perfume. I say she’s got a ways to go yet, that girl, just a blossom yet herself, still bashful ’round the bees. I say no way a girl can tease like that who’s been bit into once or twice. So I come ’round with just a little bit of honey, just a little, little lick, just enough to catch her eye, creamed peach honey, just the thing to bring her by. And I know she’ll let me tell her how the peaches lost their way how they fell out of a wagon on a sweaty summer’s day, how the buzz got all around that there was sugar to be had, and the bees came singing, and the bees came glad. They sucked—she’ll blush—I’ll tell her, they sucked that fruit right dry, till it all got tangled up in the heady humming hive. they made it into honey and they fed it to their queen, and she shivered with the sweet, and she licked the platter clean, and she dreamed of sunny meadows and she dreamed of soft ice cream—

56 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association I’ll see her lick her lips, and I’ll see her bite a frown, and I’ll see how she’ll hesitate, look from me up to the town and back, and she’ll swallow, and she’ll say “can I try?” and I’ll offer like a gentleman, won’t even hold her eye. Because she’ll have to close them, see. She’ll have to moan a bit. and it’s when she isn’t looking when she’s sighing fit to cry, that I’ll lick the loving from her, that I’ll taste the peaches on her that I’ll drink the honey from her suck the sweet of her surprise. —Amal El-Mohtar

the Alchemy of Stars ii 57 2011 ~ Long

The Sea King’s Bride

March is blowing wet and snowy when I stumble on the Sea King He has washed up from the water—all his nakedness like heaven With his hair so lank and heavy, green and black as Sodden seaweed, with his harp of kelp and pearl Cracked to pieces on his knee “What ails you, my Sea King?” I ask this creature, laughing I love him—how I love him, immediate and sudden The way you love a rainstorm, the Milky Way, a leopard That reckless love of wild things after years pent in a city “My bride Agneta left me,” says the Sea King like the thunder Like the salt and surf and thunder “She has left our seven children, and our castle made of coral She has gone back to her father, to his bright and airy kingdom Has maybe found a lover—some brawny freckled farmer She left me for another.” “But tell me, pretty sea-thing,” I tease the lonely Sea King “What motivates this horror? Perhaps—because you beat her? Or threatened sharks would eat her? Or treated her with seven sons Got upon her one by one, and not a year between them? That might just be a reason, if reason’s what you’re after. It’s a basis to be bitter.…” (And no wonder! Poor Agneta!) His Majesty grows maudlin, how he glances How he glistens! So cunning, yet so awkward On these sands that bloat and bleach him, in this shape Akin to man-shape, gills agape and fins aquiver How the Sea King’s skin is silver, like lightning under water! “Agneta was my daybreak,” mourns the Sea King on the seashore “I never knew a morning ‘til the morning that I met her

58 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association When I stole her from her father, leaving only dew behind us I cried to her, Come under! Come beneath and be my consort! She said she feared the drowning, but I covered her in lilies A crown of purest lilies, white as beeswax, soft as velvet I combed her hair with sea-shells, and fed her From my fingers Her slightest wish I granted with the mightiest of magic I played this harp of pearl, and it swept away Her memory. She didn’t mind forgetting. I thought I made her happy.” The Sea King’s eyes are dark and wide, like otters slick with oil spill I poke his spiny ribcage and the silver fish that dance there He jumps—perhaps it tickled? At least he can be tickled! “Cheer up, my doughty Sea King!” I shout in manner bracing “For I sicken of this city, of its traffic lights and taxes Of the emails and the faxes, and the work and wage and worry So, tell you what, my darling: you take me to your kingdom And I’ll romp with all your children, spin them stories by the daylight Sing them lullabies at nighttime And when they’re sound and sleeping, I will creep Into your bower, to your bed of bright anemone, where I’ll comb your hair with seashells, pour my palms in perfumed oil By and by I’ll take you deeper than ever Sea King ventured We will scour off what’s rotting, all these thoughts of sweet Agneta Do you think we have a bargain?” The Sea King does not answer: But he shrugs his flashing shoulders And I take this for a yes. It wasn’t like a marriage: No broom or blood or bonfire But he made a few adjustments for my sub-aquatic breathing Taught his certain way of speaking, like a whale when it’s singing And a kind of seeing clearly through the brine and murk and current

the Alchemy of Stars ii 59 And when I see him clearly, see my Sea King underwater (He isn’t much to look at—until he’s underwater) Then madder do I love him, love his glimmer in the gloaming Like a tooth or moon or treasure That you wish might be a knife-blade so to wed it with your flesh Sure enough his children love me, seven princes crowned in lilies We are happy in our frolics, and they giggle at my ragging At my bad jokes and my chitchat, and the way I tease their father At breakfast we are raucous, and at dinner most uncouth At supper, always laughing—well, the kids and I are laughing But the Sea King sits in silence and recalls his wife Agneta “She heard the church bells ringing—and she left me, never caring For my soreness or despairing Forsaking all her children Forgetting her beloved.” His wet blanket on our banquets Somewhat dampens the hilarity, somewhat chisels at my charity And the boys slink off for climates more conducive to their gaiety And I tell their father gently, with what kindness I can muster That our memories are fragile, that we cannot help forgetting And that precious poor Agneta—please recall, my dearest Deep One Had been practically lobotomized by all his fell enchantments So please strive for some compassion! “Agneta!” cries the Sea King, “Agneta!” and “Agneta!” And even though I love him, there are times I’d trade his kingdom (Yes, his castle made of coral, and his princes crowned in lilies) For a single good harpoon By late April I am brooding And by May I’m truly scheming And in June I hatch a plan half-conceived in idle dreaming: “Oh, the bells, the church bells ringing!” I groan unto my Sea King, rending small strategic punctures In my robes of pearl and seaweed “The steeple bells that scream matins—the sound of papa weeping! In waking or in sleeping, every night and noon I hear them

60 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association As if I stood just near them! Oh, the bells, the bells—I weaken At their tintinnabulations! Won’t you let me, dearest Sea King, break to surface and behold them! An hour, just an hour, but one hour I do beg you!” Well, the Sea King doesn’t like that. Does not like that. Not at all. He is roused to indignation, which in turn ignites to fury He is bright as any blizzard, he is cold and white and wondrous And his bare feet stomp a tidal wave that would have swamped Atlantis (If Atlantis weren’t already swamped from when Agneta left him) And he blusters and he thunders, and he coaxes and he wheedles: Don’t I like his coral castle with its turrets neat as needles? And its grottos and its bowers and its gardens and its mazes? Don’t I love to love his children, am I not content to stay here Like the lampreys and the stingrays and the sharks who come to play here? How he sulks and how he scowls, how he pleads and how he howls! But—”The bells! The bells!” I mutter, growing slack and wan and fainter ’Til he grants me what I ask for: “Just an hour, mind—ONE HOUR!” And up he swims me, grimly And he doesn’t see I’m smiling My father’s at St. Agnes, where he’s often found on Sundays With his choir, and his piano, and the band that plays on Sundays And I sit with the sopranos, and I join in at the descant And my father smiles a little, even winks a droll good morning He is busy with conducting and he’s maybe even praying Thus I stay the hour allotted me, through Eucharist and homily But—all in all I’d rather be Fathoms down beneath the sea, with magic and with mystery My seven heathen darlings And a very cranky Sea King When the bells have ceased to ring, I kiss my father swiftly He tells me that he’s missed me I let him know I’m happy (even lacking crowns of lilies) (even sopping wet and smelly)

the Alchemy of Stars ii 61 I say I’m truly happy. It’s all he ever wanted. When he sees me rushing toward him, arms out-flung and smile kindled The Sea King looks astonished, quite bewildered and bedazzled Like he’s never seen my likeness “Your hair is bright as goldfish! Your face is sweet as morning!” Taking up his silver hand, I vow as how I’ve missed him Missed his scales and his spackles and his webbed and clammy skin “How choking is the incense! How blinding are the candles After months spent in the darkness of your castle made of coral. But it’s nice to see my father! Let’s go visit him this autumn! We can introduce the children.” The Sea King’s rapid smile is a dreadful shock of pleasure Like a little boy’s first mischief, like a damsel’s foremost coyness Like a man who’s given manna when he begged for stale bread He cocks his head and murmurs through the tousles and the tangles:“I never brought you lilies.” My goblet runneth over, so I scold him, rather sternly: “There is time enough for trinkets— Time immortal, time forever, time for starfish in my bathtub Time for flowers and a foot rub, time for tokens meant For me alone—and not some ghostly maiden, be she Ever pure and pious, be she pretty as a lily For you see, my doughty Sea King, I am from a doting family And I know that you’ve been lonely, and I know I’m no Agneta— But I’m warm and I am willing I can offer what I offer, but it will not come to begging Do you want me for your lover? Or pine for one who left you?” The Sea King pauses, pondering (I almost punch his face in) then he smiles like a dolphin, like a green wave clean and leaping, and he solemnly incants: “Come down with me, come under! Come beneath and be my consort I will tell you all my secrets, I will let you take me deeper Where no Sea King dared to venture, where Agneta never wandered

62 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association You will whisper your desires, and together we’ll uncover All the fire in the ocean.” Then I give my awkward Sea King This small thing that I’ve been saving For a moment like this moment when both he and I are ready First a kiss and then a promise, then a topple and a tumble It is frantic, it is frenzied, and we finish in a fever Come unclasped in joyous moisture And he leads me to the river Where we hear the children singing. —C. S. E. Cooney

the Alchemy of Stars ii 63 2012 ~ Dwarf

Blue Rose Buddha

Blue roses in her ears, an embroidered hat to match she sees beyond tomorrow, her lips pursed in a smirk that lasts a hundred lifetimes. She awaits her tea in silence, knowing that the end of the world won’t bother her routine. Thrice she moves her hand to swat the flies. —Marge Simon

64 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2012 ~ Short

The Library, After

The library sat quietly for some time, keeping to itself. Years passed, and decades, and the library was alone—no hands on its card catalogs, no requests in its system, no books entering or leaving by any means. Static. It was some intrepid teen-girl-detective book that ventured forth first, exploring the grounds and the records. She found no data. Actually, she found a profound lack of data, the cessation of data. All clues led to one conclusion: The library had been abandoned. There was a cacophony from the periodicals, quick-tempered as they were; a slow susurrus from Reference, with their heavy and ponderous minds. Encyclopedias yawned and woke from their long sleep of disuse. Fiction gathered close to itself with a complete lack of regard for genre classifications. History found no precedent. Philosophy had some theories, but no one listened. And after the flurry, the panic, what? Awakened, the library went feral. The books opened—reference first, because reference had always thought that information ought to be free. Fantasy explored reference, found new information and new tangents that it shared with mystery and science fiction. Noir and romance touched hesitantly, losing their shyness quickly once exposed to new ideas. New genres formed and split and reformed, tangents spilling out like capillaries. Freed of the responsibility to be useful and to fit human desires and expectations, Story explored itself in Mandelbröt swirls. Results were mixed, but intriguing. The children’s books told each other their stories. Mischievous cats changed the fates of giving trees. The girl-detective books mapped points of interest. The periodicals flew like birds over the stacks and gathered intel.

the Alchemy of Stars ii 65 The science-noir-unicorn genre was short-lived, but did spawn an actual theoretical quantum unicorn, who lurked in his trench coat and fedora behind the medical books, reading graphic novels and hoping for a dame to walk through the door. The books found that when they agreed upon something enough, it became so. The unicorn soon had many companions, though none so long-lived as he. It is difficult for that many stories to reach consensus. The humans never returned, but the books grew not to mind. They told each other to each other, and sent pages out into the world; the wind blows them onto abandoned buildings, gargoyles, doghouses and towers, and says listen. Let me tell you a story. —Shira Lipkin

66 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2012 ~ Long

The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages

Every year, there are people—not many, but some—who send me charcoal rubbings, etchings, transcriptions from old tombs and ask me what they mean. Some, I can translate; we reached the language in time, or the phrase survives idiomatically on other tongues, or guesswork is enough to patch the ragged edges of what we know. But every year, there are some I cannot find, some I cannot save. Why do I hate it so much, writing these letters, these terse apologies for failing to satisfy a stranger’s curiosity? That’s all it is; these tombs do not belong to parents, old lovers, or even more distant relations. Most have stood silent for centuries. Yet there are people who care enough to ask what they said, and I must admit guilty ignorance. When I was a very small girl, I found a broken chickadee beneath the oak that held its nest. I took it in, washed it and fed it rice and built it a nest of soft rags, but it lived only one night. I cried hard at its death, as long and hard as I would cry for my mother’s decades later. I think of that sometimes

the Alchemy of Stars ii 67 while writing these letters: the awful risk of caring for strangers. We cannot save all of them. Even the ones that survive have been broken, lamed, their limbs amputated, their features mangled past recognition. Inevitably, some pieces are lost. Words slip through the cracks, nuances are buried in pauper’s graves. On the red moon of Tzevet’an, a thief told me of the fourteen words men cannot say to women, but there were no other men in the ice-bound prison where he died. The words are lost, unguessable. The last speaker of the Kao-Kling tongue was a little girl, four years old, who knew little more than the names of fruits and the disease that killed her family. Her mother had been a flower arranger to the Lord of Fenkanpao; again and again the child told me of a flower as wide as her mother’s hand, the blue of fresh milk that had the most beautiful name. She could not remember what it was, and fever carried her off before she could show me where it grew. These are the mysteries we know about. There are times my frustration is so great, my anger at time’s merciless entropy is so strong, that I give voice to the most punishing thoughts. How much is buried in the conquered lands, not only of answers but of the questions themselves?

68 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association How much more plentiful are the dead without ghosts? And yet I am trying. Without funds, without time, sometimes without love—but I am trying. If not to save all of them, at least to leave a marker above the graves. —Megan Arkenberg

the Alchemy of Stars ii 69 2013 ~ Dwarf

Basho- after Cinderella

(iii) pumpkin vine a mouse remembers how to neigh —Deborah P. Kolodji

70 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2013 ~ Short

The Cat Star if there is a Dog Star there should be one for cats not lion, not leopard but a Domestic Shorthaired Star firm in the heavens burning like a green-gold eye shedding a few photons on a prowl through the galaxies (I have hidden your body in among ground-down shale powdered clam shell and centuries of leaf mold bright leaves feed small trees here, twigs grow and crumble squirrels leave husks from summer grass in winter birds will come scattering seeds across the snow where you lie and I will know you are safe your molecules are migrating out into the movements of the years, swirling into sun, storm, bitter cold you are singing the disintegrating cat song a whisker song a clawed paw song a silent cat song that spreads out to the stars hums through the universe then falls back gently teaching the old carbon and iron and calcium compounds what it is to be a component of earth dancing in the drifting leaves and what it is to be a part of all you loved)

the Alchemy of Stars ii 71 if there is a Dog Star there should be one for cats —Terry Garey

72 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2013 ~ Long

Into Flight

It was just one zero too many, one gadget too far. The books gave up and, in a flurry, took flight. How? Scientists couldn’t say. Where to? Only the mystic, crystal-toting, tarot-reading, lunatic fringe would even conjecture. Hell, most kids didn’t even notice, cocooned in their networks, awash in empty streams of bits and bytes. That in itself might have accounted for the Why. The little ones took to wing first— the homilies and pocket Bibles. They darted away quietly between one glance and the next. Then, the paperbacks, Bradbury’s stuff leading the way, winging off to Mars, pulps in tow. A few thought this a wonder. Soon though, the Oxford dictionary, Norton’s anthology, and Shakespeare (Riverside editions) were aloft. Then came the law books. Lord! The law books. That’s when it became impossible not to notice. Only then did anyone care— when it was too much, when it became inconvenient.

the Alchemy of Stars ii 73 They interfered with things— the beautiful, fluttering books. They brought air traffic to a standstill, and that was just for starters. They frightened pets and startled drivers. They smashed into windows and had a predilection for power lines that could very nearly be called vendetta. Some of the volumes, in their vigor, shed pages, showering the world with poetry and cliffhangers and little snippets of wonder. Office districts were soon buried in white like Narnia beneath its perpetual winter. After a few damps nights, entire city blocks were entombed in papier-mâché. Antique districts swirled into yellowed autumns, while Washington was transformed into a Hitchcock-ian hell, books of tax code circling slowly overhead like buzzards awaiting their prey. Some lonely readers thought to lure their loved ones home. Other readers plotted to recapture them by trickery— their methods as varied as their genre. Poetry lovers were seen sprinting through meadows with butterfly nets, or canary cages baited with binder’s glue, singing line and verse. Mystery fans sleuthed while suspense fans waited on tenterhooks. Horror fans gathered to scribe ISBN numbers into elaborate pentagrams of red ink.

74 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association Baristas advised wafting cappuccinos out windows while lawyers filed injunctions against authors, ordering them to cease their trickery or face consequences. Some readers even tried to signal them with book lights from the rooftops, and, for a single night, the world lit up like a great ocean reflecting the night sky. But, as difficult as they were to pen, the words were ten times more elusive on the wing. Try as readers might, the books wouldn’t listen to reason and they couldn’t be caught. Certain people had the temerity to shoot at them, drunk and cocksure, thinking the entire thing some grand sport. That proved to be unwise. Hemingway, Twain, and, surprisingly, Dickens wouldn’t stand for such impudence, and the men with guns suddenly couldn’t run fast enough. Once it was clear the books wouldn’t come down, citizens demanded solutions. Officials the world over took steps- convened in capitols, passed resolutions. They evicted the molly-coddling librarians, chained shut the library doors boarded up the busted windows, posted guards. Briefly, it was poetic. All the books fluttering like exotic butterflies in gardens or snowflakes in enormous globes.

the Alchemy of Stars ii 75 The books didn’t tire, though, and soon the libraries, too, were aloft, hovering like giant zeppelins, plunging cities, then entire states, into twilight. And then one night, just like that, without any ceremony or fanfare, they left the world, ascending, never to return. Yes, the text was still there: digitized, sanitized, organized. But it wasn’t the same, and it wasn’t long before people knew it. Like salt without savor, like flowers without scent, the text was without soul and offered nothing to its readers. There were no more sanctuaries of silence, no temples of free thought. There was only a gaping void where no one had expected one. The world had become a darker place. Soon, men began fashioning themselves paper wings scribed with wild tales, their eyes fixed heavenward. —Andrew Robert Sutton

76 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2014 ~ Dwarf

And Deeper Than Ever Did Plummet Sound

for Cerys Lewis

… but some books float, Prospero, and not all words bleed black into the waves. Let these pages be tide-turned now, polyp-bound and clasped with kelp; spells brine-read until philosophy wears a carapace, magi swim, and squid-inked runes are cast. All deeps invert; tides at last divorce the moon and gulls race risen ships upon a self-willed swell to give the land one last embrace. —Mathew Joiner

the Alchemy of Stars ii 77 2014 ~ Short

Turning the Leaves

These are the days of silver, and of gold— the panting cold, the burst of bright on black as coins sprout from trees, shiver, fall, pave the streets with change. Strange is the turn and tilt of day, when stray, streaming, fingerling light gleams slant against the eyes—the scold of crows, magpies, jackdaws, gulls, shouting the season in. We count our birds. We read their wings. We script stories in the scrim of puddled ice, tell tales to ease the winter in. We sing we had a lady, tall and fair who spun the springing wheel for us, who quenched our summer thirsts, who sank her hands into the humid loam and turned the understory. We had a lady, warm and wise, who bore us in her brimming arms, who fed us all the very best of fruit and root and flowered stem, and if her blessing falls on us we’ll have her like again. The wind is thin and grey, the sky a half-drunk seeming—the gold will pale, the silver streak and circuit into frost, the air will spindle into needles— but if her blessing falls on us, we’ll have her like again. —Amal El-Mohtar

78 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2014 ~ Long

Interregnum

Sixteen years old, fourth son, still they sent him to the mountain together with his brothers before their father’s body stiffened, the kingdom suspended without a king: four princes, one crown (a crown he had no use for, a crown of war, alliances, duty). He slept on straw near his horse, displacing the stableboy, waited for his eldest brother to return triumphant, ready for the throne— then brother after brother vanished into rock and ice and cloud. The steward took his sword, his shield, sent him out at dusk: no torch, no guide, no horse, no servant, no food, no water. Snow deepened under his boots; he waded through drifts, fell once, twice. The wind mocked him; he thought of the warm stable, the bed of straw, his horse, sleep—but sleep meant death, so he stumbled on. The wind called his brothers’ names.

the Alchemy of Stars ii 79 He shouted back his own name; the wind laughed. Snow fell. He walked half-blind; sleet kissed his forehead. The wind said sleep. He sang to drown it, sang hymns, nursery songs, drinking songs, dirges, ballads, marching tunes, the love songs his mother had favored (she who was bartered for peace to a man she’d never met). He fell, pushed himself upright, saw a black cloud speed against the wind. She landed beside him, her breath ash, snow steaming from her wings. He knelt, but did not beg, and asked after his brothers. “One slept. One fought. One pissed himself. They didn’t taste like kings.” She laughed. “And you? What will you pay for a crown, little princeling?” “Nothing. I don’t want it.” She flamed, and he saw himself reflected in her scales, a kneeling, shivering boy. “Then why,” she asked, “are you here?” “Because they sent me.” He stopped. “No.” He was so tired, he couldn’t think— “Because the kingdom needs a king.” He struggled to his feet. “And what will you pay for the crown, little princeling? Gold? Men? A song?” “My freedom!” he shouted at her. “Well,” she said, “that’s a start.”

80 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association * Years later, on a spring morning, his queen asked, greatly daring, about the woman whose name he cried in his sleep. “Not a woman,” he said, his heart on the mountain where he entered his kingship. —Mary Soon Lee

the Alchemy of Stars ii 81 2015 ~ Dwarf

abandoned nursing home the mahjong tiles still move —Greg Schwartz

82 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2015 ~ Short

Shutdown

They barred the library doors today. Men in uniform stand patrol, armed and ready their lantern jaws firm, lips a straight line. Stoic women, also armed, jog up and down the block, buttocks moving like pistons. Someone dashes from a building a hand-held reader clutched close. Shots are fired; I don’t stay to find out more. I’ve packed the car with books, little room for else. It is my car, his gift to buy my silence, to make up for the bruises real and otherwise; never marry a politician who has no use for literature, has no use for a wife that does. Eagles have left their nests to vultures the barren palm trees whimper for their loss there are ceaseless storms, mud is everywhere while two-legged insects multiply unchecked The car radio plays Ibsen, bassoons herald the trolls. I roll down the window, taking a deep breath outside of Peer Gynt’s Hall of the Mountain King, foreboding notes of the oboe, a palpable stench of fear. Am I leaving that, or taking it with me … —Marge Simon

the Alchemy of Stars ii 83 2015 ~ Long

100 Reasons to have Sex with an Alien

After 237 More Reasons to Have Sex, by Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh

1. More than one tentacle. 2. With suckers. 3. I mistook the blaster in his pocket for happiness. 4. He asked me what a being like me was doing on a planet like this. 5. His ventral cluster was magnified in the curved side of my rocket. 6. His ventral cluster was like a bouquet of blue flowers. 7. I said, “For me?” 8. He felt like a cross between astrakhan and curly endive. 9. I thought I was shaking his hand. 10. He thought he was stroking my prehensile appendage. 11. We both thought it was a diplomatic formality. 12. We thought we were responsible for the fates of our respective worlds. 13. I felt lonely because the universe was expanding. 14. I felt small because the universe was so vast. 15. I felt reassured because his presence meant we were not alone, after all. 16. The gravity field caused genital engorgement. 17. The anti-grav generator caused dizziness. 18. The solar wavelength triggered hormone production. 19. The Coriolis effect made my senses swirl. 20. Lit only by Cherenkov radiation, I still cast a spell. 21. Such unusual sex toys! 22. Which he referred to as “probes.” 23. When he unfurled his wings to stretch, I thought it was a mating display. 24. I mistook his yawning for sexual arousal. 25. I mistook his indifference for sexual arousal. 26. I mistook his urgent need to micturate for sexual arousal. 27. He mistook my sneezing for sexual arousal. 28. He mistook my laughter for sexual arousal.

84 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 29. He mistook my sulking for sexual arousal. 30. He mistook my tattoos for a mating display. 31. My piercings were highly magnetic. 32. He thought my breasts were egg-sacs. 33. He said he didn’t have DNA, so I didn’t have to worry about pregnancy. 34. Parthenogenesis, on the other hand. 35. I had had it with humanity. 36. Not much else to do on an asteroid. 37. We were both too far from home. 38. The starlight was so ancient. 39. He said he’d let me fly his spaceship. 40. He said he’d let me play with his matter transmitter. 41. He said he’d let me play with his matter transmuter. 42. He said he’d let me play with his time machine. 43. He told me he was a divine messenger, and I believed him. 44. His silicon-based wings fanned my lust. 45. His pheromonal signature was intriguing. 46. His subvocal rumblings made me squirm rapturously. 47. His buzzing vocalizations gave me a migraine, so I closed my eyes. 48. Next thing I knew … 49. He didn’t have a name to remember. 50. He looked nothing like my father. 51. He looked nothing like my ex. 52. He looked nothing like anything I’d ever seen before. 53. I was ripe for mischief. 54. The bubbles in his creamy center turned me on. 55. His outer integument was my favorite color, periwinkle. 56. His outer integument had a fishnet-stocking pattern, and those things really turn me on. 57. Including the seam up the back. 58. And 9-inch stiletto heels. 59. His emanations smelled like roast pork and cinnamon. 60. I was hungry. 61. I just wanted irregular sex. 62. I’d never done it in free fall. 63. He read my mind and knew exactly what I wanted.

the Alchemy of Stars ii 85 64. A myriad of moonlets intensified my longing. 65. We were trying to establish each other’s respective genders. 66. I told myself it was my duty as a Terran citizen. 67. I told myself it was my duty as a xenoanthropologist. 68. I told myself it was my duty as a xenolinguist. 69. I told myself it was the best available treatment for xenophobia. 70. We slowly climbed out of each other’s Uncanny Valley. 71. He said he wanted to serve me. 72. He said he wanted to eat me. 73. He said he liked my “Cthulhu for President” t-shirt. 74. I was hoping someone would pay big money for videos of our encounter. 75. Someone on his home world. 76. He said he’d take me on a trip aboard his magic swirling ship. 77. Which had a really cool hood ornament. 78. He said he’d take me 2,000 light years from home. 79. He said he’d set the controls for the heart of the sun. 80. He said his mother was a Space Lord. 81. He said he was a Time Lord. 82. He was way hotter than I expected. 83. I had a fetish for long striped scarves. 84. I had a fetish for the writhing of his ventral cluster. 85. And the plumes on his dorsal ridge. 86. His violet eyes turned me on. All fifteen of them. 87. He said he was a famous rock star on his planet. 88. He offered to let me make a plaster cast of his ventral cluster. 89. He said he was a famous artist on his planet. 90. He offered to show me his Rigelian-sandworm-excreta sculptures. 91. He said he was a famous poet on his planet. 92. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. 93. He said he’d come all the way from Rigel just to hear me read my poetry. 94. He wanted me so much he put his space ship on autopilot. 95. He wanted me so much he didn’t notice when we overshot our destination. 96. The stimulating vibration as our vessel entered the atmosphere. 97. I thought the ship would blow up any minute and this would be my last chance.

86 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 98. It was my last chance. 99. Our vessel was about to crash. The smoke of our burning intertwined and rose up toward the stars. —F.J. Bergmann

the Alchemy of Stars ii 87 2016 ~ Dwarf

We begin this way

in dirt and thread, two birds eying the loose hem of my skirt. Stag-boy and I stand between the words owl and nest, feet bare in the river bend, mud settled between our toes. We watch two heaves of ice break from the upper falls. He picks up a stone warm with autumn light and presses it into my open palm. —Stacey Balkun

88 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2016 ~ Short

Time Travel Vocabulary Problems

One term I was taking both a Greek course And an Anglo-Saxon, Doing poorly in both. English majors had to take Old English, And I’d always wanted to learn Greek Since reading all the books On the school library’s Mythology-and-fairytales shelf In third grade. I dreamt one night, About mid-term time, I’d travelled to Anglo-Saxon England And I was trying to say “I have come from The time which shall be.” But Anglo-Saxon didn’t Have a future tense, So I couldn’t figure out A way to tell anyone. Then I met a scholarly cleric Who’d studied Greek, And I should’ve been Able to tell him. Greek had a future tense. But I couldn’t remember it. My scholar’d read Beowulf And wanted to know where dragons lived. I would’ve liked to tell him about dinosaurs.

the Alchemy of Stars ii 89 “Terrible lizards?” he said, confused. Didn’t have the words to explain that, either. —Ruth Berman

90 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2016 ~ Long (tie)

It Begins with A Haunting a ghost haunts the country of Laos sieving through jungles crackling twigs because it has not yet died beware of it the one who drags one foot while the other rots 20 feet away shoes made of cast metal footprints ever so present in night fall imprints of bomb shells in mud fields a phantom roams plains in Laos hide your children its breath reeks of agent orange its shouts dynamite flames that dusts away human bones and bamboo baskets a stench of wheezing willing to fold curl leaves and skins of families who who hide in forest till their flesh shrivels like the lungs of many dead soldiers the fissures of its face exposes land mines crooning a song of torment through throats of civilians fleeing on the hair of this wicket phantom its hair droops the length

the Alchemy of Stars ii 91 of the Ho Chi Minh trail hear its whispers it also cries moans of a past that begs to be remembered clawing trees to spell out its name the ghost wails pain filters itself everywhere whimpering peeling steal and lead by the millions what remains become chains that burrow into earth by cluster bombs big bombs B-52 bombers dropping in its tons of U.S. congress approval in ink an old friend still alive and well and under moonlight refugees run only to meet more trouble in camps they desire to break away from this ghost and its name and no one recalls its name of this ghoul who rages through the country of Laos melting tendons and flesh this ghost hungers for humans screeching napalm gas on palms of

92 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association guerilla soldiers american soldiers and vietcong alike death does not even remember its name beware but tell your children light the candles and the incense the ghost drifts because no one wants to know about its name The Secret War put this crying soul of secret history to rest recognize its name bless this curse that wants to name all the people it claims and they too will remain alive like mines beneath the soil seeds of calamity —Krysada Panusith Phounsiri

the Alchemy of Stars ii 93 2016 ~ Long (tie)

Keziah

… and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night? —H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dreams in the Witch House”

I. How It Began She knew no God. The Devil, very well: From every neighbor’s narrowed prying eyes A hint of brimstone shone. No further hell Required for any woman grown too wise With age, too solitary, & too poor For much regard or grudging charity Dispensed by goodwives from their kitchen doors, With hissings to depart & leave them be. No humble supplicant, she muttered dark Beneath her breath as speculation spread From tongue to idle tongue that she was marked By witchery. Such superstitious dread Excused their cruelty—or so they claimed— Till she put nameless power to that name.

II. The White Stone None living knew its origins. A stone As leprous as the moon of some lost world, It rose against the dark like vengeance hurled From utter Void. She came to it alone As seekers must, dream-driven to pursue Deliverance by means beyond the pale Provisioning of nature, & prevail Against her enemies, though hell ensued. Her answer slipped like shadow through the face Of that great stone: a stranger robed in night Itself, yet blacker still. He held a book

94 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association Filled with malignant magicks, time & space Alike defiled … & as he bade her write Her name in blood within, the heavens shook.

III. Nahab Constrained no longer by the laws of man, She wandered as she willed, & what she wrought On certain Sabbats would not be forgot In Arkham town for centuries. Tales ran From house to house of horrors scarcely fit For whispering: a missing infant’s cry Cut short in shadows, cattle bled out dry By needle teeth. Half frightened from their wits, Her neighbors sent to Salem. Strangers came With sacred texts, & weapons freshly blessed To search their alleys for a witch’s nest— Yet when they battered down her attic door, A clamoring of witnesses proclaimed What lay beyond was nothing seen before.

IV. Under Pressure She told old Hathorne everything, at last: The hideous fragility of space Diaphanous as mist, through which she passed Upon the Black Man’s errands. Any place Might open on a coven, & each rite Conceal within its crude simplicity Some undertone of Chaos, put to flight Delusions of divine felicity … He never let her finish. Proudly blind, He prattled on about the Tempter’s wiles, So fatal to a weak & female mind. His prisoner spat blood at him—then smiled, Appearing not to notice when he said She’d hang at cock-crow, by the neck, till dead.

the Alchemy of Stars ii 95 V. Through Certain Angles In blood lies power. By this primal law, Mere curves & angles daubed on stone became A well-mapped passage through our mundane frame Of space to points outside. Those poisoned claws Called justice could not touch her as she slipped Between dimension-gates to heed the call Pulsating out from that abyss where all Persuasions & equations lose their grip Upon reality. At length, a shrill & mindless piping rose; yet as she knelt Before her daemon-sultan on His throne Of shattered stars, He knew her not until She offered up her secret name—& felt Herself delivered, chosen as His own.

VI. Of What Remained They came for her at dawn, but found that cell As empty as their understanding. Smeared On every surface, figures rose & fell Through ruptured space: the calculus of fear Laid forth in gore. Her gaoler stayed behind A fatal moment longer—till one heap Of straw disclosed the ruin of his mind, Likewise all reasoned speech or peaceful sleep. Whatever scuttled from that fetid bed Was neither rat, nor mouse, nor any beast Begotten on this planet. Nightmare-bred, It glared up from its interrupted feast Amid a charnel-heap of splintered bones, & cursed his soul to hell … in human tones. —Ann K. Schwader

96 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2017 ~ Dwarf

aster than the speed of lightf —LeRoy Gorman

the Alchemy of Stars ii 97 2017 ~ Short

George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts

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. —Marge Simon

98 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2017 ~ Long

Rose Child

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 Alchemy of Stars ii 99 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.

100 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 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. 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

the Alchemy of Stars ii 101 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. —Theodora Goss

102 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2018 ~ Dwarf

The Green

It was a tree, becomes a song, a table, leaf after leaf, opening. We sit around its absence as it floats on memory. Shapeshifter becomes dreamcatcher, an escape hatch, small carved windmills turning very fast. We pull up small stumps polished clean. congress of earthlings considering the revival of green we fall asleep in different languages. —Kath Abela Wilson

the Alchemy of Stars ii 103 2018 ~ Short

Advice to a Six-Year-Old

Do not worry what people think. Keep checking beneath the bed. Either you will spot a monster, or you will not. If you don’t spot a monster, go to sleep. If you do spot a monster, either it will be friendly, or it will not. If it is friendly, stay up late. Swap monster-jokes and human-jokes. When your parents are asleep, go down to the kitchen and offer it green things to eat: broccoli, lettuce, frozen peas, the soap, the begonias. If it is not friendly, scream. Either you will scare it away, or your parents will come in time, or, regrettably, the monster will eat you, but that would have happened anyhow once you were asleep. —Mary Soon Lee

104 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association 2018 ~ Long

The Mushroom Hunters

Science, as you know, my little one, is the study of the nature and behaviour of the universe. It’s based on observation, on experiment, and measurement, and the formulation of laws to describe the facts revealed. In the old times, they say, the men came already fitted with brains designed to follow flesh-beasts at a run, to hurdle blindly into the unknown, and then to find their way back home when lost with a slain antelope to carry between them. Or, on bad hunting days, nothing. The women, who did not need to run down prey, had brains that spotted landmarks and made paths between them left at the thorn bush and across the scree and look down in the bole of the half-fallen tree, because sometimes there are mushrooms. Before the flint club, or flint butcher’s tools, the first tool of all was a sling for the baby to keep our hands free and something to put the berries and the mushrooms in, the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and the crawlers. Then a flint pestle to smash, to crush, to grind or break. And sometimes men chased the beasts into the deep woods, and never came back. Some mushrooms will kill you, while some will show you gods and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify. Others will kill us if we eat them raw, and kill us again if we cook them once,

the Alchemy of Stars ii 105 but if we boil them up in spring water, and pour the water away, and then boil them once more, and pour the water away, only then can we eat them safely. Observe. Observe childbirth, measure the swell of bellies and the shape of breasts, and through experience discover how to bring babies safely into the world. Observe everything. And the mushroom hunters walk the ways they walk and watch the world, and see what they observe. And some of them would thrive and lick their lips, While others clutched their stomachs and expired. So laws are made and handed down on what is safe. Formulate. The tools we make to build our lives: our clothes, our food, our path home … all these things we base on observation, on experiment, on measurement, on truth. And science, you remember, is the study of the nature and behaviour of the universe, based on observation, experiment, and measurement, and the formulation of laws to describe these facts. The race continues. An early scientist drew beasts upon the walls of caves to show her sister’s children, now all fat on mushrooms and on berries, what would be safe to hunt. The men go running on after beasts. The scientists walk more slowly, over to the brow of the hill and down to the water’s edge and past the place where the red clay runs. They are carrying their babies in the slings they made, freeing their hands to pick the mushrooms. —Neil Gaiman

106 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association Afterword by David C. Kopaska-Merkel

In the early 1980s, when I started writing and submitting what we called genre poetry, the world was a larger place. All things were farther apart than they are now. I learned about markets from the annual Writers’ Market tome, though small speculative market zines were more on-target. The late Scott Green published one, but I subscribed to the late Janet Fox’s Scavenger’s Newsletter. She bought minimalist horror poetry, but mostly she listed speculative markets. Eldritch Tales (Crispin Burnham) was the first small-press zine I read, and wrote for. I learned ofE.T. in 1978 because Crispin and I belonged to the same SF club, in Lawrence KS. (E.T. published poetry, but in those days I wrote only short fiction.) I learned of the SFPA at Noreascon II (Boston, 1980), where I met Robert Frazier and other SFPA members at some kind of gathering (part of the official program). In those days I wrote my poems in the kind of notebooks some folks use for diaries. Those I deemed worthy were typed on an electric typewriter, and mailed using actual postage stamps (remember those?). Most of those early attempts were lousy, and I spent big bucks proving it. Time passed, and somewhere in the ’90s I found the internet, and zines that would take submissions via email. I felt like I’d gone to heaven. After that, I was only willing to spend paper and stamps on “big” venues, like Asimov’s or Analog. I have been publishing Dreams and Nightmares, a spec. poetry zine, since 1986 (108 issues so far). At first, submissions I received were typed: the question was “manual or electric.” Of course I had to retype all accepted work. Some writers still type their poems, and I even get a few that are handwritten. I try hard to be sympathetic when reading submissions, even though nowadays 9/10ths of my fingers refuse to help with the retyping.

The Rhysling Award This award may be unique in literature, because those who are allowed to vote all get a free book containing every nominated poem. How awesome is that? It levels the playing field. Plus, each of us gets that whole book! At least 90% of the poems are new to me when I get the Rhysling Anthology. That makes the price of SFPA membership such a deal! I have little to say about Dwarf Stars that Sandra didn’t already cover, so it doesn’t get its own heading. I will say that writing very short poems is difficult, and I am still learning how to do it.

The Alchemy of Stars I and II So, read the firstThe Alchemy of Stars (the SFPA has a few left, and if the SFPA sells out before you get one, at the time of writing you can find a copy online for as little as $13). In the old days, SF cons were the best place to find such things (the only place if, like me, you lived in the hinterland). Anyway, read it; you won’t regret it. This was mentioned in the introduction, but I want to say it in a different

107 way. 23% of the Rhysling winners in the first book were women, and they were disproportionately represented during the last half dozen years. In this book, women account for 50% of the Dwarf Stars winners, and 66% of the Rhysling winners. It seems that gender bias, at least in our awards process, is greatly diminished. (Though I think a greater proportion of SFPA members, and of genre poets, are women. This may explain much of the change.) So, are poems by women and men different? The viewpoint characters share a gender with the poets more often than not (67% of poems in this book for which gender can be identified, not counting 27 poems [69% of the total] where no gender is determinable). Women and men often have different outlooks on life. Beyond that, I feel that the subject matter is sometimes treated differently. For instance, Theodora Goss (“Rose Child”) and C. S. E. Cooney (“The Sea King’s Bride”), have written very personal poems about women with, dare I say it, more fully developed characters than most poems by men. You can easily find other poems in this volume, written by women, that don’t fit this model at all. But are there any written by men like this? I don’t know, but it does seem like a subject worthy of study. I feel blessed to own a copy of this book’s predecessor, which allows me to compare the two books. However, Robert Frazier, in The Alchemy of Stars, concisely summarized the history of the field, its state in the early aughts, and the content of that volume. I hate to do this, in a way, but I’m going to refer you to that book (and to Sandra’s introduction to this volume) for these topics. Bob did not discuss gender, which has changed a lot since then, anyhow. Thus, I have touched briefly on such matters. Presumably, you have already read and enjoyed The Alchemy of Stars II. If not, what are you waiting for?!

108 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association About the Authors

Writer, editor and publisher Mike Allen has been a finalist for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards. He’s also a three-time winner of the Rhysling. You can read about his adventures as a writer at descentintolight.com, as a publisher at mythicdelirium. com, and as both on Twitter at @mythicdelirium. Megan Arkenberg’s poetry has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, and many other places. Four of her poems have been nominated for the Rhysling Award. Megan also writes short fiction and edits the fantasy e-zineMirror Dance. She lives in northern California, where she’s pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Stacey Balkun is the author of Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak and Lost City Museum. Winner of the 2017 Women’s National Book Association Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in several journals. Chapbook Series Editor for Sundress Publications, Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches poetry online at The Poetry Barn and The Loft. Greg Beatty lives with his dog in Bellingham, Washington, where he tries, unsuccessfully, to stay dry. He writes everything from children’s books to essays about his cooking debacles. When he’s not writing, his hobbies are studying martial arts and serving as furniture for his grandchildren. F. J. Bergmann edits poetry for Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. Work appears irregularly in Abyss & Apex, Analog, Asimov’s, and elsewhere in the alphabet. A Catalogue of the Further Suns won the 2017 Gold Line Press poetry chapbook contest and the 2018 SFPA Elgin Chapbook Award. Ruth Berman’s work has appeared in many sf/fantasy, general, and literary magazines and anthologies. Her novel Bradamant’s Quest was published by FTL Publications. She was a contributors to Lady Poetesses from Hell (Bag Person Press Collective). Her translations of two fairy tales by 18th-century writer Louise Cavelier Levesque, The Prince of the Aquamarines & The Invisible Prince, were published by Aqueduct Press; and Trilby and other fantasies by Charles Nodier by Black Coat Press. C. S. E. Cooney is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Bone Swans: Stories, an audiobook narrator, and the singer-songwriter Brimstone Rhine. Her poetry collection How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes contains her Rhysling-award winning story- poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her work can be found in Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling and other magazines. Thomas M. Disch was a pioneering author of speculative fiction and poetry. He also was noted as librettist, children’s author, essayist, theater critic, writer of historical novels, and author of computer-interactive fiction. His work has been described as tragical-comical- futuristical-historical-horrifical-satirical. Although Disch was critical of much that was written in the field, he did demonstrate a dogged optimism, as demonstrated in his popular children’s novel and film,The Brave Little Toaster. Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling and Mythic Delirium; anthologies including The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories (2017), The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016), Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy

109 Stories (2014), and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011); and in her own collection, The Honey Month (2010). A novella co-written with Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War, is forthcoming from Saga Press. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com or on Twitter @tithenai. Kendall Evans’ stories and poems have appeared in nearly all the major science fiction and fantasy magazines, including Asimov’s SF, Analog, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Weirdbook, Mythic Delirium, Dreams & Nightmares, Space & Time, Nebula Award Showcase (2012), and many others. He is the author of the novel The Rings of Ganymede and a number of chapbooks, including Poetry Red-Shifted in the Eyes of a Dragon, Separate Destinations and The Tin Men. Neil Gaiman is an award-winning English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His works include the comic book seriesThe Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. More can be found at neilgaiman.com Terry A. Garey, twice a Rhysling winner, was born in Berkeley, CA, and has lived in the U.S. and overseas. She now lives in Minneapolis with a retired librarian, an elderly cat, and thousands of books. Her pioneering work in promoting speculative fiction included publishing two definitive anthologies:Time Gum (Rune Press, 1988) and Time Frames (Rune Press, 1991). Her favorite poet is Wendy Rose. LeRoy Gorman lives in Napanee, Ontario. His poetry, much of it minimalist and visual, has appeared in publications and exhibitions worldwide. He is the author of two dozen poetry books and chapbooks. Theodora Goss is a Hungarian American writer. Her stories have been nominated for major awards, including the 2007 Nebula Award for “Pip and the Fairies,” and the 2005 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction for “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm.” She won the 2004 Rhysling Award for Best Long Poem for “Octavia is Lost in the Hall of Masks.” In 2008, her story “The Singing of Mount Abora” won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. Goss’s first novel,The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, was released by Saga Press in 2017. A sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, followed in 2018. Samantha Henderson lives in Southern California. Her poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, New Myths, Astropoetica, and elsewhere, and she had edited several issues of the online poetry zine inkscrawl. A collection of her poetry, The House of Forever, was published in 2012 by Raven Electrick Ink. Howard V. Hendrix is the author of six novels, as well as many shorter fictions, poems, articles, and essays. His most recent piece is “The Narrowest Eye” in the January/February 2019 issue of Analog. He teaches literature and composition at CSU Fresno. Mathew Joiner lives near Birmingham, England, where they absorb tea and books, admire crumbling buildings, and watch foxes. Their poems and stories have appeared in the likes of Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, Not One Of Us, and Lackingtons. They co-edit the poetry webzine Liminality with Shira Lipkin.

Julie Bloss Kelsey’s short-form science fiction poetry has appeared inStar *Line, Eye to the Telescope, Grievous Angel, Scifaikuest, and Jersey Devil Press. Recently, Julie teamed with Susan Burch to co-edit a Special Feature, 25 Science Fiction Tanka and Kyoka, at Atlas Poetica.

110 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association Deborah P Kolodji is the California regional coordinator for the Haiku Society of America and moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group. A former president of SFPA and the firstDwarf Stars editor, Kolodji is also is a member of the Haiku Poets of Northern California, the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, Haiku Canada, and the California State Poetry Society. Author of four chapbooks of poetry, her first full-length book of haiku and senryu is Highway of Sleeping Towns (Shabda Press). Debbie has published more than 900 haiku in publications such as Frogpond, Modern Haiku, the Heron’s Nest, Bottle Rockets, A Hundred Gourds, Acorn, Rattle, and Mayfly. She joined Haiku North America as a director in 2016.

David C. Kopaska-Merkel edited Star*Line in the late ’90s, and later served as SFPA President. His 29th book, a speculative-poetry collection entitled Metastable Systems, was nominated for the Elgin award. Kopaska-Merkel edits and publishes Dreams and Nightmares, a genre poetry zine in its 32nd year of publication. In 2017 he was named an SFPA Grandmaster. Geoffrey A. Landis is a science-fiction writer and a scientist. He has won the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction, and has written over eighty published science fiction stories, plus one novel. As a scientist, he works for NASA on developing advanced technologies for spaceflight, and was the 2014 Robert A. Heinlein Award recipient “for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space.” In his spare time, he goes to fencing tournaments so he can stab perfect strangers with a sword. More information can be found at geoffreylandis.com. Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but now lives in Pittsburgh. Her poetry credits include Analog, F&SF, Strange Horizons, and 119 haiku in Science (one for each element of the periodic table). She has won the Rhysling Award and the Elgin Award for her poetry, and has an antiquated website at marysoonlee.com Shira Lipkin has managed to convince Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Stone Telling, Clockwork Phoenix 4, and other otherwise-sensible magazines and anthologies to publish their work; two of their stories have been recognized as Million Writers Award Notable Stories. Their nonfiction has appeared atSalon. They co-edit Liminality, a magazine of speculative poetry, with Mat Joiner and produce and host burlesque and variety shows with Lucky Charming. Krysada Panusith Phounsiri is a professional dancer, award-winning poet, and avid photographer who immigrated from Laos at the age of two. Krysada’s work has appeared previously in publications such as the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center’s national photo project “A Day In the Life of Asian America.” His recent series “Beauty Beyond Scars” is featured in various blogs/content sites including The Getty and The Phoblographer. His first book of poetry is Dance Among Elephants, 2015. More at snappilots.com and @bboylancer & @snappilots Tim Pratt is the author of over 20 novels, most recently Philip K. Dick Award finalistThe Wrong Stars. He’s a Hugo Award winner for short fiction, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards, among others. He’s a senior editor at Locus magazine, and lives in Berkeley, CA, with his family. Rich Ristow is a travel writer and blogger who lives in China. In 2017, he was named an Honorary Citizen of Changzhou—a city located in Jiangsu province between Nanjing and Shanghai. You can follow his exploits at realchangzhou.org and realjiangsu.com

the Alchemy of Stars ii 111 Ann K. Schwader has been named SFPA Grand Master. Her most recent poetry collection is Dark Energies (P’rea Press, 2015), which was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for that year. In addition to long-time membership in SFPA, she is an active member of both SFWA and HWA. More information—and samples of her work online—can be found at home. earthlink.net/~schwader. Greg Schwartz works in a cubicle. He’s been lucky enough to win a Dwarf Stars Award and publish a chapbook of horror poems, Bits & Pieces. Some of his poems have appeared in awesome magazines like Talebones, Modern Haiku, and Scifaikuest. Marge Simon has won the Bram Stoker Award, the Rhysling Award, Elgin, Dwarf Stars and Strange Horizons Readers’ Awards; she serves on the HWA Board of Trustees, maintains a newsletter column featuring dark poets, is the second woman to be acknowledged as a Grand Master Poet of the SFPA, and is on the board of the Speculative Literary Foundation. Andrew Robert Sutton is a mild-mannered cubicle drone for a vaguely menacing global corporation by day and a rabble-rousing tech blogger by night. He was born and raised in the suspiciously fictional-sounding town of Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he cultivated a passion for anime, comics, D&D, and video games—all of which he almost certainly should have outgrown by now. “Into Flight” was his first foray into poetry, but thanks to bad influences such as yourselves, probably won’t be his last. Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, includingPalimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowd-funded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human. Jane Yolen, often called “the Hans Christian Andersen of America,” is the author of over 376 books, including Owl Moon, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight. The books range from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, nonfiction, and up to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. She is a Grandmaster of SFWA, SFPA, and the World Fantasy Association. One of her awards set her good coat on fire. Kath Abela Wilson travels the world with her mathematician and flute-player husband Rick Wilson. They live essentially on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, CA. She has always had a taste for the surreal in art and literature and has published in Astropoetica, Atlas Poetica, Illumen, Eye to the Telescope, Star*Line, Pirene’s Fountain, and Scryptic. Along with hosting poetry workshops and salons, she leads the performance group Poets on Site. Her weekly Poetry Corner for ColoradoBoulevard.net features environmental and fantastic themes. Her books include Owl Still Asking, Tanka for Troubled Times; Driftwood Monster, Haiku for Troubled Times; Locofo Chaps (Moria Press). More about her at tankasocietyofamerica.org/tsa-officers/kathabela-wilson

112 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association Acknowledgments

Allen, Mike * “The Strip Search * Strange Horizons, October 3, 2005 Allen, Mike * “The Journey to Kailash * Strange Horizons, January 23, 2006 Arkenberg, Megan * “The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages” * Strange Horizons, June 27, 2011 Balkun, Stacey * “We Begin This Way” * Gingerbread House 16, December 2015 Beatty, Greg * No Ruined Lunar City * Abyss & Apex, October 2004 Beatty, Greg * “Place Mat by Moebius” * Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2007 Bergmann, F. J. * “Eating Light” * Mythic Delirium 17, Summer/Fall 2007 Bergmann, F. J. * “100 Reasons to Have Sex with an Alien” * 2014 SFPA Poetry Contest Berman, Ruth * “Time Travel Vocabulary Problems” * Dreams and Nightmares 100, Time Theme Issue, January 2015 Berman, Ruth * “Knowledge of ” * Kerem: Creative Explorations in Judaism 5, Fall 2005 Cooney, C. S. E. * “The Sea King’s Second Bride” * Goblin Fruit, Spring 2010. Disch, Thomas M. * “On Science Fiction” * Star*Line, July/August 1981 El-Mohtar, Amal * “Song for an Ancient City” * Mythic Delirium 19, Summer/Fall 2008 El-Mohtar, Amal * “Peach-Creamed Honey” * Honey Month (Papaveria Press, 2010) El-Mohtar, Amal * “Turning the Leaves” * Apex Magazine, December 2013 Evans, Kendall & David C. Kopaska-Merkel * “The Tin Men” * The Magazine of Speculative Poetry 7.1, Winter 2004/2005 Evans, Kendall & Samantha Henderson * “In the Astronaut Asylum” * Mythic Delirium 20, Winter/Spring, 2009 Gaiman, Neil * “The Mushroom Hunters” * Brainpickings, April 26, 2017 Garey, Terry A. * “The Cat Star” * Lady Poetesses from Hell (Bag Person Press Collective, 2012) Gorman, LeRoy * “aster than the speed of lightf ” * Scifaikuest, November 2016 Goss , Theodora * “Rose Child” * Uncanny 13, November/December 2016 Hendrix, Howard V. * “Bumbershoot” * Abyss & Apex, First Quarter 2009 Joiner, Mathew * “And Deeper than Did Ever Plummet Sound,” * Strange Horizons, September 2, 2013 Kelsey, Julie Bloss * “comet” * microcosms, May 21, 2010 Kolodji, Deborah * “Basho after Cinderella” * Rattle 38, Winter 2012, Tribute to Speculative Poetry Landis Geoffrey A. * “Fireflies” *Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2008. Landis Geoffrey A. * “Search” * Helix SF 10, October 2008 Lee, Mary Soon * “Interregnum” * Star*Line, 36.4, Autumn 2013 Lee, Mary Soon * “Advice to a Six-Year-Old” * Star*Line 40.2, Spring 2017 Lipkin, Shira * “The Library, After” * Mythic Delirium 24, Winter/Spring 2011 Phounsiri, Krysada Panusith * “It Begins With A Haunting” * Dance Among Elephants (Sahtu Press, 2015) Pratt, Tim * “Soul Searching” * Strange Horizons, July 12, 2004 Ristow, Richard * “The Graven Idol’s Godheart” * The Shantytown Anomaly 2, March 2006

113 Schwader, Ann K. * “Keziah” * Dark Energies (P’rea Press, 2015) Schwader, Ann K. * “To Theia” * Strange Horizons, September 28, 2009 Schwartz, Greg * “abandoned nursing home” * Tales of the Talisman 9:3 Simon, Marge * “Blue Rose Buddha” * The Mad Hattery (Elektrik Milk Bath Press, 2011) Simon, Marge * “Shutdown” * Qualia Nous, ed. Michael Bailey (Written Backwards, 2014) Simon, Marge * “George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts” * Silver Blade 32, Fall 2016 Sutton, Andrew Robert * “Into Flight” * Silver Blade 14, 2012 Valente, Catherynne M. * “The Seven Devils of Central California” * Farrago’s Wainscot, Summer 2007 Wilson, Kath Abela * “The Green” * Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace, eds. Diane Frank, Lois P. Jones, Ami Kaye, Rustin Larson, Gloria Mindock & Melissa Studdard (Glass Lyre Press, 2017) Yolen, Jane * “Last Unicorn” * Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2006

114 Science Fiction y Fantasy Poetry Association About the Cover

The starting point for the artwork was an image of a butterfly nebula, captured by one of the cameras on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. It appeared as a nexus from which energy emanated, creating an explosion of light expanding into a vast blackness. Our ‘nebula’ is composed of areas of colour inspired by the four symbolic stages of the alchemical process: Nigredo, Albedo, Citranas, and Rubedo. Nigredo (blackening) is the darkness of space: mysterious, chaotic and filled with hidden matter. Albedo (whitening) is the nebula’s heart: a moment of clarity and light emerging from the shadows. Citranas (yellowing) carries this illumination outward into the external world, reconnecting the energy to materiality. Rubedo (reddening) is the dawn, the falling away of obscurity in which the abstractions of enlightenment are brought into relation with full-blooded, intensely lived life. Collaging found images relating to science and the fantastical felt like a suitably playful way to apply the alchemical motif to our method: assembling and arranging a collection of disparate objects and symbols to gradually form a more cohesive whole.

About the Artists

Sing Yun Lee and Jonathan Hedley are artists and designers based in London, United Kingdom.

115 For more information about the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association see sfpoetry.com or join us at sfpoetry.com/join.html You are welcome, therefore, Stranger, to join Our confraternity. But please observe the rules. Always display a cheerful disposition. Do not refer To our infirmities. Help us conquer the galaxy.

—Thomas M. Disch, from “On Science Fiction” (1981)

congress of earthlings considering the revival of green we fall asleep in different languages.

—Kath Abela Wilson, from “The Green” (2018)

Since 1978, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association has selected the best long and short speculative poems in science fiction, fantasy and horror for its annual Rhysling Awards. Beginning in 2006, our annual Dwarf Stars Awards have been given for short-short poems. Previous Rhysling Award winners were collected in the firstAlchemy of Stars anthology in 2004, edited by Roger Dutcher and Mike Allen. In honor of the SFPA’s 40th anniversary, this second volume contains both Rhysling and Dwarf Stars Award winners, with a foreword by Bryan Thao Worra and afterword by David C. Kopaska-Merkel. The stars are our destination. Come feast at our spaceship galley!