Fiction: Poetry Archives - Reactor

Eight SFF Stories Written in Verse

Leah Schnelbach — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 15:00:40 +0000

Sometimes there is a tale so epic, so lyrical, so otherworldly that plain old prose can’t do it justice! That is when serious writers break out the verse. We’ve collected eight books—some horror, some myth, one science fiction, and one YA—that use verse to pluck their readers away form the workaday world and into stories that bend reality.

Let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!

Finding Baba Yaga by Jane Yolen

Buy the Book

Finding Baba Yaga: A Short Novel in Verse

You think you know this story.
You do not.

Yolen concocts a heady mix of modern language and ancient lore in her verse adaptation of Baba Yaga. Natasha is a modern teen looking for an escape from an abusive homelife when she runs away to the forest and finds a little hut with chicken feet. The hut’s mistress, Baba Yaga, doesn’t mind Natasha’s feistiness or her foul mouth—on the contrary, she encourages those qualities.

As long as Natasha finishes all of her chores.

The tale follows Natasha as she grows into herself, and begins to feel unquantifiable feelings for her lovely blonde housemate, Vasilisa. Can she meet all of Baba Yaga’s demands? Can she free herself from her family? Can she accept herself as she truly is?

Jason and Medeia by John Gardner

Buy the Book

Jason & Medeia

John Gardner of Grendel fame recreates the story of Jason and Medeia in verse. Jason is exhausted by having to live in the palace of King Creon when his own kingdom, Iolcus, is under the rule of the despotic King Pelias. Luckily, Jason’s wife, Medeia, just happens to be a sorceress. She agrees to use her magic against Pelias, believing that she and Jason will then rule Iolcus together—but then Jason notices the young, malleable, and much less powerful Glauce, daughter of Creon. As you might imagine, things go south from there.

Gardner transforms the ancient Greek play into a verse novel full of romantic longing, betrayal, and fury.

Northwood by Maryse Meijer

Buy the Book

Northwood: A Novella

The upcoming Northwood is a genre-bending hybrid horror story that riffs on myths and classic fairy tales as it unfolds in short passages and verse. A woman goes to the forest to create her art, but soon finds herself entangled with a violent married man. Years later, she is attempting to return to life, but she can’t shakes the desire to run back to the forest, and the wolf she knew there. Her perception shifts and bends, reality warps, she can’t be sure whether she’s reliving tales she’s heard in her youth—or creating a new one.

Can she free herself and leave the wilderness behind? Does she even want to?

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Buy the Book

Autobiography of Red

Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is an exquisite love story that distills the pain and bliss of a first romance into one long, heartwrenching poem. Based extremely loosely on the Tenth Labor of Hercules, it follows a few years in the life of Geryon (who may or may not be a literal monster), an abuse survivor who falls in love with an older boy named Herakles. Sometimes Herakles seems to love Geryon; sometimes he seems to be toying with him. The two break apart and come back together, another young man named Ancash becomes involved, and there’s a highly symbolic volcano.

An absolute classic, Autobiography of Red is a swooning love ballad and a harsh look at trauma all wrapped up into one beautiful, utterly unique book.

Omeros by Derek Walcott

Buy the Book

Omeros

In Omeros, Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott gives us a massive, wide-ranging, multifaceted update on The Iliad. Walcott’s epic is divided across a number of narrators, including a fisherman named Achille, another man named Hector, an English officer and his wife, a maid named Helen, a blind poet called Seven Seas, and Walcott himself. The action moves between Saint Lucia, Brookline, Massachusetts, several European cities, and an African slave ship, with St. Lucia also being referred to as “Helen” at some points in the poem.

Several plots intertwine—one about the rivalry between Achille and Hector, on about the Major and his wife trying to reckon with the history of colonization, and their own roles as English people living in the Caribbean, and one somewhat autobiographical thread that tells Walcott’s own story.

Happiness by Frederick Pollack

Buy the Book

Happiness

Happiness is the rare science fiction tale told in verse. It looks at an attempt at a utopian revolution that goes about as well as those usually do. The universe turns inside out when Stephen Hawking creates a space-time inversion called “X-Day.” A wall forms between the old world—the one we’re living in now—and Ardena, a progressive paradise. Soon squads of Avengers banish bullies, racists, misogynists, climate-change deniers, and the like to the old world, while progressives clean up the environment and create art.

Obviously, the wall doesn’t hold, but it does last long enough for Pollack to create an interesting thought experiment in verse form.

Bull by David Elliott

Buy the Book

Bull

Minos thought he could
Pull a fast one
On me,
Poseidon!
God of the Sea!
But I’m the last one
On whom you
Should try such a thing.
The nerve of that guy.
The balls. The audacity.
I AM THE OCEAN!
I got capacity!

In this rollicking YA novel, David Elliott retells the tragedy of the Minotaur in a way that allows for both the bawdy humor and the pain that can be found in adolescence. He lets Poseidon, Minos, Daedalus, Pasiphae, Asterion, and Ariadne each speak for themselves in witty modern language as a counterpoint to the ancient tale. Poseidon creates problem after problem for Pasiphae, then mocks her by casting all women as crazy and sex-obsessed. Her son Asterion is one miserable minotaur, abused by Minos, imprisoned, with only his sister Ariadne taking his side on anything… until she meets a silver-tongued charmer named Theseus.

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

Buy the Book

Sharp Teeth: A Novel

Love in the time of the Werewolf War! Lycanthropes are thriving in Los Angeles, ignoring moon phases and developing their ability to shift between their human and wolf forms as they choose, and convincing ever-growing numbers of the poor and homeless to their ranks. They are hellbent on wresting control of the city from rival packs…and maybe even from the humans.

Anthony is a lovesick dogcatcher. He has no clue that he’s caught in a war, or that the girl he’s fallen for is a werewolf who has spurned her pack for independence. Can she keep her dual nature a secret? Can their love possibly survive the war?

Did we miss any of your favorite tales in verse? Let us know in the comments—and don’t worry, telling us in regular old prose is fine.

The post Eight SFF Stories Written in Verse appeared first on Reactor.

Godzilla Sonnets, Brought to You by Jo Walton

TorSarah — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 19:00:15 +0000

April is National Poetry Month, and we got to thinking about an unlikely fit for meter and rhyme: Godzilla. Turns out the beast is a fit for classic forms of poetry, from kaiju haiku to Elizabethan sonnets. As part of a charity auction in 2015, Jo Walton was asked by fellow author Ada Palmer to write a sonnet with the theme “Godzilla vs. Shakespeare.” But, as Walton notes, “people usually ask me for such boring things, and this was such a fun one that I ended up writing a whole bunch of them.”

The first sonnet clearly inspired Walton to insert Godzilla into a number of tales, Shakespearean and otherwise. Subsequent sonnets show us Verona fallen to those massive feet (the Montague/Capulet feud stood no chance), and the kaiju even weeping for Baldur…

Here’s the poem that started everything:

i) Godzilla Vs Shakespeare

Up on the ramparts all await their time
Each heroine, the fools and knaves, each king,
Ready to catch our hearts, the play’s the thing
A cockpit where they arm themselves with rhyme.

The monster tries to hide, but shows through plain,
Behind a frond ripped up with giant claws
We see his scaly hide and gaping jaws
As Birnam tropics come to Dunsinane.

All rally to defend now, each with each,
Juliet with dagger, Richard on a horse,
Dear Hamlet with his poisoned foil of course,
Harry with swords and longbows, at the breach.

Godzilla, shuffling closer, knows what’s what.
Size matters. But then so do prose and plot.

You can read the rest on Walton’s site.

Originally published in April 2015.

The post Godzilla Sonnets, Brought to You by Jo Walton appeared first on Reactor.

Read Neil Gaiman’s Poem “House”

TorSarah — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 14:00:48 +0000

In honor of Neil Gaiman’s birthday, we’re pleased to reprint his poem “House,” acquired for Tor.com by consulting editor Ellen Datlow and originally published on the site in April 2013.

“House”

Sometimes I think it’s like I live in a big giant head on a hilltop
made of papier mache, a big giant head of my own head.
I polish the eyes which would be windows, or
mow the lawn, I mean this is my house we’re talking about here
even if it is a big giant papier mache head that looks just like mine.
And people who go past
in cars or buses or see the house the head on the hill from trains
they think the house is me.
I’ll be sleeping there, or polishing the eyes, or weeding the lawn,
but no-one will see me, no-one would look.
And no-one would ever come. And if I waved no-one even knows it was me waving.
They’d all be looking in the wrong place, at the head on the hill.

I can see your house from here.

The post Read Neil Gaiman’s Poem “House” appeared first on Reactor.

Interstellar Poet Laureate: Tracy K. Smith

BMcGovern — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 17:00:40 +0000

Last week, in the Thomas Jefferson Building auditorium at the Library of Congress, the newest U.S. Poet laureate, Tracy K. Smith, gave her inaugural reading.

Why am I writing about this on Tor.com, you might ask? Read on, friends. Smith has nerd cred to spare.

In grade school, Smith says she found poetry’s meter and rhyme scheme “akin to magic.” (from her memoir, Ordinary Light.) Sure sure, you say. Everyone tosses “magic” around. And the literary world in general sometimes seems to want nothing to do with science fiction, except to play with the shiny bits. But wait, there’s more…

Smith grew up in a science and science fiction family. At the Library of Congress, she talked about her father coming home from working on the Hubble Space Telescope, and sitting down to read Larry Niven. Her mother, a teacher, passed away when Smith was just out of college. Her first two books of poetry—The Body’s Question and Life on Mars—act as memorials to her parents. But they are also more than that; they are lyrical investigations of a person coming to terms with the universe.

Yeah, I’m kind of a big fan.

I love poetry’s lilt. Its meter. I love the way it can carve a page open, with the deftest of knives.

I studied poetry for much of my late teens and early twenties. Around the same time that Smith studied at Harvard and Columbia with poets Helen Vendler, Lucie Brock-Broido, Henri Cole, and Seamus Heaney, I was studying with Rita Dove and Charles Wright, Larry Levis, and Heather McHugh. My career took a different direction—and I’m glad for it, but I still keep my eye on poetry. Smith caught my eye first with her 2011 collection, Life on Mars (Greywolf Press), and then the one before it, The Body’s Question. I’m reading her memoir, Ordinary Light, now.

Smith uses the conventions and themes of science fiction, westerns, and other genres as tools, much as many of us do who write within genre. She’s said she views them as “distancing devices,” and “a way to shift the metaphor.” (NYT, 6/14/17) and for that I recognize her honesty. I’m also hopeful that if enough literary writers re-envision science fiction as a tool, rather than a gimmick, it might act as a bridge between genre and literature—one that allows passage both ways. I think we’re seeing much more of that now—especially in writers like Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link.

Smith’s poems act as a part of that bridge—the science fictional poems especially, but also her upcoming and more recent work: a libretto in progress and a book that includes the exploration of Black Civil War soldiers’ voices—doing the work with language and imagery that we sometimes view as our turf: starfields, aliens, alternate and hidden histories, zombies. She puts her hand out into space and draws starstuff down to the page.

Here’s what I’m talking about: the newest Poet Laureate of the United States wrote this in 2011:

My God, It’s Full of Stars (excerpt) Tracy K. Smith

1.

We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,
Only bigger. One man against the authorities.
Or one man against a city of zombies. One man

Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand
The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants
Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.

Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,
This message going out to all of space. . . . Though
Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,

Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics
Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best

While the father storms through adjacent rooms
Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,
Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.

Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,
A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.

—from “My God It’s Full of Stars,” Life on Mars, Greywolf Press, 2011

So, dear reader, when Tracy K. Smith was named U.S. Poet Laureate, I lost it a little (ask Theodora Goss—I filled her texts with a wall of delight). And when Smith talked about taking poetry to small towns across the country, because, as she told The New York Times in June, “Poetry is something that’s relevant to everyone’s life, whether they’re habitual readers of poetry or not,” I was even happier. The idea that poetry isn’t distant and hard to understand, or meant to be feared and struggled with, has parallels in how we once saw space, before we began reaching out to it, exploring, and bringing it home.

So when a friend at the Library of Congress asked me if I wanted to attend Smith’s investiture? I booked my ticket at lightspeed. I’m so glad I did. Smith read from Life on Mars and The Body’s Question as well as reading newer work about the legacy of slavery in the South, and she celebrated the junior poet laureate—Amanda Gorman—who at 19 is part of a new generation of artists swiftly coming into their own.

Most of all, though, I wanted to write about Tracy K. Smith at Tor.com because she writes lines like this:

…
Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings

In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored

Into planets dry as chalk, for the tin cans we filled with fire

And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen:

The dark we’ve only ever imagined now audible, thrumming,

Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns.

—excerpted from “The Universe as Original Motion Picture Soundtrack”

Smith’s language is that of the movies, primarily. She spoke during her investiture of her father’s work, but also how she came to science fiction through the movies—like 2001: A Space Odyssey—and the visual frame of cinema. Her reference is often from the movies, but it’s also auditory; you can hear it in the crackle of black noise, of sounds in outer space, or in the moment when we first saw photos from Mars in 1976.

Smith was four then. Not much older than me.

When someone told young-poet-me that no one wrote poems about rocket ships, I believed them. I refocused and wrote verse about the world around me, even as I began writing science fiction and fantasy very quietly, and somewhat rebelliously, on the side.

Smith? She laughed and kept on writing.

I love when someone reads her poems for the first time, that dawning recognition. That sense of—perhaps—poetry moving closer, becoming more accessible. Or at least a sense that we can move towards and out into the verses, if they’re written in a way that teaches us how.

In 2011, Smith’s second volume, Life on Mars (Greywolf Press), sent those discourses with the universe, the stars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowie, and more out into the world, where it won the Pulitzer Prize.

I know Smith comes from a side of literature that—perhaps—doesn’t always co-exist well with genre. And I get it. But I encourage you to take a look at Smith’s work, to seek her out if she comes to your town. New U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith is brilliant, her work resonates. And, SF fans, with Life on Mars, especially, she’s broadcasting on our frequency.

And once you check out Life on Mars, you may also explore other SF poetry, too—like Sofia Samatar’s “Girl Hours”, and C.S.E. Cooney’s “Postcards from Mars”, and other lovely pieces in Stone Telling’s excellent Catalyst Issue, edited by Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan. Check out Catherynne Valente’s The Melancholy of Mechagirl (Mythic Delirium). Listen also to former poet laureate Rita Dove discuss Star Trek. And that bridge? The one between genre and literature? Look for the writers who are continuously crossing back and forth—Kelly Link, Carmen Machado, and many more.

In the meantime, I’m gonna go put more rocket ships in my poems.

Fran Wilde’s novels and short stories have been nominated for two Nebula awards and a Hugo, and include her Andre Norton- and Compton-Crook-winning debut novel, Updraft (Tor 2015), its sequels, Cloudbound (2016) and Horizon (2017), and the novelette “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” (Tor.com Publishing 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She holds an MFA in poetry, an MA in information design and information architecture, and writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, io9.com, and GeekMom.com. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and at franwilde.net.

The post Interstellar Poet Laureate: Tracy K. Smith appeared first on Reactor.

8 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Book Titles Inspired by Poetry

nataliezutter — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 15:00:09 +0000

A few years ago, Jo Walton (inspired by a conversation with Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden) took on the sort of challenge that we love doing at Tor.com: She counted up the number of science fiction and fantasy book titles pulled from two classic poems, William Blake’s “The Tyger” and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” to see which had inspired more titles.

You can read Walton’s tally here; in this post, we’re doing a deep dive into some of the titles from each to see the different ways in which authors have interpreted the oft-quoted words of these poets. We also spotted a few other SFF titles in other famous poetry, including a holy sonnet taken quite literally for a disturbing SF sequence…

Read on and share your own cross-genre finds!

“The Tyger” by William Blake

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester

The UK edition of Bester’s The Stars My Destination draws inspiration from the central figure in Blake’s poem to describe its protagonist: Unassuming Gully Foyle, marooned in space and then abandoned by a passing ship, goes full Count of Monte Cristo in his need for revenge, and picks up quite the tiger face tattoo. Happening upon a fortune of platinum helps transform him into the nouveau riche “Geoffrey Fourmyle”—the wealthy, educated, physically fit persona he will use to take down the economic superpower Presteign family, who sent out the order not to rescue him. Even as Foyle gets the tattoo removed, he remains tiger-like, stalking his prey in his plan for vengeance.

Burning Bright by Melissa Scott

Scott’s standalone space opera christens the planet on which it is set not with tigers or forests, but the incredibly descriptive “burning bright”: nestled into the sweet spot of an interstellar trade route frequented by both humans and the alien hsai empire, Burning Bright enjoys a healthy tourism influx not just for the trade but for its other main attraction, the Game. This shared virtual-reality RPG invites players—such as pilot Quinn Loie, on shore leave while her ship is repaired—to shape the borders of the virtual world and create new scenarios for fellow players. But even as her new scenario attracts unusual attention, Quinn finds herself threatened in the real world, stuck between the two warring empires.

“In the Forests of the Night” by Jay Lake

The first novella in John Scalzi’s collection METAtropolis also sets up the worldbuilding for the other four stories: in a futuristic “uncivilization,” cities are crumbling and reforming as their former citizens wage war, the technological haves versus the eco-survivalists have-nots. In Lake’s tale, Tygre (short for Tygre Tygre) enters the city of Cascadiopolis, located in the foothills of the Cascades near what used to be Portland, OR. Interestingly, Tygre’s name and arc have drawn comparisons not just to the Blake poem, but to Bester’s Tiger! Tiger! as well.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

One of the most inventive allusions comes from The Time Traveler’s Wife author’s second novel, in which twenty-year-old twins Julia and Valentina inherit a flat from their deceased aunt, who was herself the twin sister of their mother… and who may live on as a spirit. As “mirror twins”—that is, identical twins with mirrored internal organs, Valentine’s heart residing on her right side—they embody the fearful symmetry of Blake’s poem. Critics have also pointed out that the flat bordering on Highgate Cemetery could make for a fun little pun.

“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

“Vaster Than Empires, and More Slow” by Ursula K. Le Guin

In this famous short story (collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters), Le Guin is in conversation with Marvell almost as much as the human survey team is with the planet to which they are sent—a strange world completely covered in vegetation, with no sign of animal life but thrumming with sentience through every blade of grass: the title is taken from a line describing how “Our vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires, and more slow.” The story’s conclusion also makes a reference to another Marvell poem, “The Garden,” translating the phrase “a green thought in a green shade” rather literally when discussing the plant life’s consciousness and describing this alien world as “one big green thought.”

A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle

“The grave’s a fine and private place,” Marvell’s poem reads, “But none, I think, do there embrace.” Beagle challenges that notion with his wistful fantasy about a homeless, bankrupt pharmacist who has left society behind to live in a graveyard; there, he acts as the bizarre Cupid for two ghosts who have fallen in love—at least, for as long as they can before their unfinished business gets resolved and they must proceed to the true afterlife.

“The Fall of Rome” by W.H. Auden

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

“Silently and Very Fast” by Catherynne M. Valente

How fitting that Valente should draw the title of her Nebula Award-winning novella from Auden’s poem, as it takes place in the dreamworld between human Neva and AI Elefsis, who communicate more in story tropes than in actual words. Elefsis absorbs fairy tales like any other piece of information, knowing that when Neva sends her the image of a woman transforming into a crone it means to change the subject, and that she must express human notions of ~~feel~~ and ~~love~~ with strikeouts, not allowed to fully possess them. But this quasi-language has given Elefsis the mistaken impression that all stories have a happy ending—an interesting bit of parallelism to the fact that “Silently and Very Fast” is the final line of Auden’s poem.

Holy Sonnets: “At the round earth’s imagin’d corners” by John Donne

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter’d bodies go;

To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer

The first book in Farmer’s Riverworld series, in which humans are “reconstructed” in an artificial environment by the omniscient “Ethicals” studying them, makes use of the evocative phrasing from Donne’s sonnet: Adventurer Richard Francis Burton is one of the many “scattered bodies” who die on Earth, are briefly resurrected in some sort of limbo. While there are no angels blowing trumpets, there is someone with a weapon who blasts them to their next home, this mysterious planet on which they are expected to rebuild civilization with their fellow humans as well as various extraterrestrials. The purpose? A hint might be found near the end of the sonnet, as the speaker says, “here on this lowly ground/Teach me how to repent.”

What are your favorite poems that inspired SFF titles, and vice versa?

The post 8 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Book Titles Inspired by Poetry appeared first on Reactor.

House

arensan — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 13:00:00 +0000

In honor of National Poetry Month, we are pleased to present “House,” an original poem by Neil Gaiman acquired for Tor.com by consulting editor Ellen Datlow—originally published on the site on April 2, 2013.

Tor.com is celebrating National Poetry Month by featuring science fiction and fantasy poetry from a variety of SFF authors. You’ll find classic works, hidden gems, and new commissions over at the Poetry Month index.

“House”

I can see your house from here.

The post House appeared first on Reactor.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dragon

MariCats — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 18:00:00 +0000

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we are pleased to present “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dragon” by Mari Ness.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dragon

I
Among twenty knight-blasted mountains
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the dragon.

II
I was of three minds
Like a tale
In which there are three dragons.

III
The dragon whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the calamity.

IV
A knight and a lady
Are one.
A knight and a lady and a dragon
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of clashing troubadours
Or the beauty of weeping minstrels
The dragon singing
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With sorcerous glass.
The shadow of the dragon
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Fetched by the shadow
A much decipherable cause.

VII
O thin knights of wastelands,
Why do you imagine icy drakes?
Do you not see how the dragon
Walks around the feet,
Of the jesters about you?

VIII
I know noble ascents,
And obscure, inescapable conquests;
But I know, too,
That the dragon is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the dragon flew out of sight
It burned the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of dragons
Flying in a red light,
Even the dolls of puppets
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over the wastelands
In a crystal coach.
Once, a fear pierced him
In that he mistook
The shadow of his swords
For dragons.

XII
The city is moving.
The dragon must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was ashing,
and it was going to ash.
The dragon sat
On the quiet mountain.

Mari Ness is an author and poet who lives in Central Florida.

The post Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dragon appeared first on Reactor.

The Ghost Tide Chantey

arensan — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 13:00:00 +0000

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we are pleased to present “The Ghost Tide Chantey,” an original poem by Fran Wilde, acquired for Tor.com by editor Miriam Weinberg.

The Ghost Tide Chantey

Ebb

Once, our island sang four chanteys: storm, shoal, hearth, haul.

Seven tides graced our lee shore: ebb, low, slack, neap, high, perigee, spring.

Now the lee shore lies barren. Now I sing one chantey and

new tides sweep the sand: iron, smoke, and bone.

Low

Once, a warship anchored our cove, iron-clad and cannon-pierced. A dragon bowsprit cast a rippled shadow, chewed at its watersunk chain. A captain strode the island’s pier, calling: war, need, honor.

A teacher rang the schoolhouse bell. Once, twice. Summoned the children, sent them to duty. (Would haunt that sound until their return.) Mothers sang the hearth chantey, “Go down, go down to the sea and be blessed,”

and the old coxswain rowed the oldest boys shipward.

We tossed marigolds in their wake.

Down to the sea and blessed be, away, away, away.

More frigates hove to, sails flapping. Swept up younger boys, our strong girls. Took the crops, the stock. Gathered the fishing boats; led them away (away, away).

Emptied houses turned shuttered eyes to the sea.

A bell stilled at the end of its rope. A schoolhouse filled with dust.

Iron

Storm crushed sea; smoke bound sky; we watched from widow’s walks worn thin.

Time pounded our island, shouting go down go down.

A long-broken mast gutted a beach. A headless bowsprit shed scales and pitch. Rain peeled the shoreline back, unearthed rusting hulls.

Gulls wove nests with dead men’s hair and copper wire.

The island stared down the bare horizon as hope sunk below the waterline.

Slack

We’d rung them gone. We vowed to wait, to sing them back.

Return to me from the deep, dark sea, by foot, or wing, or water.

“The world’s a thief,” the coxswain said. He stayed to keep the ghost watch too.

Together, we walked the shoals. Unraveled the silence of loss. Put marigolds in the graveyard, closed up empty houses, let the future rot on shore, and stitched the island quiet.

Neap

A white sail pierced a storm-black sky. The coxswain hummed an old song;

waited for sail to turn cloud, or bird. With wind-sung hull and baskets full, from wide and lonely sea. Sailcloth bellied the gale. A moss-hung mast and salt-rimmed bow tacked toward the cove.

The island caught its breath, held hope in its mouth.

A pier creaked as a boat rode bare pilings, giving voice to longing. A ragged shift flapped the wind, as one girl jumped the gunwale, secured the lines. The girl’s teeth gleamed like pearls.

Go down to the sea and blessed be; return, return to me.

The coxswain hushed the schoolteacher; said, “Too young by far.”

He boarded to seek captain or guardian. Found handmade pulleys, extra rigging. Sails long reefed to gentle the winds. Cams and clamps commanded tiller and mainsheet, set to head the ship north and east.

A rough machine of brass and wood crawled the rigging, secured the ship, scuttled sideways. The girl fed it seaweed. Wound its wooden key.

Smoke

Soon, the girl wore shoes from one island house and a dress from another. She skipped the shoreline. Windward to lee, afore the sea, today, today, today.

The windup crab dodged the coxswain’s hands, his desire to take it apart. Girl and crab strode the lee shore, humming. Slept on derelict porches, pulled at the island’s fallow gardens, dipping and rising like crows.

(Once, an island wished its own back so hard, the tide brought a war-flung child. The island whispered: welcome. And the island muttered: stranger.)

“She could be ours, or near enough.” The schoolteacher sat stubborn by the stilled bell.

The girl plucked marigolds, tossed rocks at the bell. Wove wild uncertainty across the island’s days.

Now the coxswain grumbled: trespass, disrespect.

The schoolhouse beckoned. The teacher let the door swing wide and sang a chantey. Dusted off a chart and knocked it to the floor where it bloomed like smoke. The girl traced a finger on the compass rose, on a margin’s flame-licked dragon.

“Ride high and low, where monsters go, away away away.”The teacher’s fingers brushed a speck on the wide sea. The girl scrawled long, dark clouds across the distant land. So far, so far away.

“None but her to bury us,” the coxswain said, and thought to sink the boat.

The island weighed the empty horizon as the sun rose over the lee shore and the girl walked the old pier. She wound the crab, lowered it to the waterline, and skipped back across the boards. The crab skittered sideways beneath the surf, and out to sea.

High

Green-bottomed clouds billowed the horizon. Rain spat and hissed. The bell rang. The island leapt awake by the lee shore.

Another ship. Two. The girl, in pinafore and dungarees, let go the bell’s rope, ran the pier.

Foam blown before storm: fishing boats returned to harbor.

The island’s gnarled hands tried to catch their lines. Missed. The girl reached to help, made a fast hitch. Sails dropped. Gangplanks descended and old eyes looked up to meet young faces, wind-tossed hair, gap-toothed grins, thin and dirty cheeks.

None like ours who’d been taken. Who we’d sent off to the sound of bell and chantey, with marigolds.

The island clutched its welcome to its chest, its songs turned to sand; the girl clapped her hands.

Be leagues away, turn home one day; return, return to me.Feet pounded gangplanks and pier; laughter tore silence. A gull made of bone and cloth circled above the masts. A reed cat prowled the gunwales.

The coxswain spat: strangers.

Children spilled from the pier, deaf to his words. Flew through our houses. A hammer went missing. Nails pulled loose from shingles. A spare millstone broke.

“Where are the strong sons? The obedient daughters?” the coxswain shouted. Despair shuttered his eyes.

The schoolteacher laid out fishing nets, a rusted plow. Wound the clocks. Set a proper table.

At dusk, children plucked each treasure from its proper place.

The reed cat stalked the garden. Licked a bloodied paw with a nettle tongue.

Perigee

Children wrought strangeness in the square. Made a wind-up fan from cutlery and a spring. Worked a broken clock into sharp-edged doll.

The schoolteacher dreamed children stole her bones, wove them with wire, hung them from the bell.

Children plied the coxswain’s wake, pacing garden to pier, then shore, and back. They wore his shoes and whispered. The coxswain shouted them away, his voice like breaking dishes.

Girl and schoolteacher walked the shoreline, gathering mussels. Rough chords spilled from young lips like wind, woven with familiar notes. The teacher sang, Return, return to me.

The gull spun gathering clouds.

The coxswain found a thief in his boatshed. Caught him up by his copper hair and dragged him to the shore, sang away, away, away as the rain whipped cold and sharp. Threw the stranger to the water.

At dawn, the children stole their boy back, laid seaweed on wounds, pushed wind into lungs.

The reed cat tried to lick him awake.

The teacher threw marigolds to the shoals. The school bell tolled the passing.

Bone

Children scoured the island, pushed doors aside, searched the shore, Down to the sea to return to me, until they found the coxswain, haunt-pale beneath a storm-wrecked hull.

Dug his neck bones and scapulae from sand. Hung his ghost like a sheet from a mast.

The teacher called them then: rang the bell once, twice, again. Return, return.

Spring

Now, the island is echoes. A schoolhouse with a missing bell. A weed-woven path.

Children retrieve weathered bones from shoreline, from schoolhouse. They stitch joy to sorrow, theirs to ours. The island begins again.

Now the old wind tugs new boats to sea and back. A canvas gull surfs the drafts.

The island’s children ply their nets with laughter. They sing strange songs.

Now my bell sits the hillside, rung with marigolds.

Now there are ten tides, five chanteys.

Now, I hum return to me, where they cannot hear my ghost chantey be blessed.

The post The Ghost Tide Chantey appeared first on Reactor.

Triumph XV: Vetala

Shweta-Narayan — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 17:30:00 +0000

Presenting “Triumph XV,” an original poem by Shweta Narayan in celebration of National Poetry Month, acquired for Tor.com by editor Ellen Datlow.

Shweta Narayan was born in India, has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California, and feels kinship with shapeshifters and other liminal beings. Their short fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of places, including Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, and We See a Different Frontier.

Shweta received an Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, was shortlisted for the 2010 Nebula Awards, and co-edits the speculative poetry zine Stone Telling.

Tor.com celebrates National Poetry Month by featuring science fiction and fantasy poetry from a variety of SFF authors. You’ll find classic works, hidden gems, and new commissions featured on the site. Check out the Poetry Month index for more poems!

Triumph XV: Vetala

Each night I pick another hollow face,
another accent; tell another tale
to try to show myself. Each night I fail
and slip between your fingers to that place,
my tree beneath all sound, my scattered parts
of seemings, stories, splinters. I belong
outside, between. I tell the truth all wrong —
a shifter, knowing only shifter’s arts.
This hiding’s all I’m good at. How to show
— to be — the mask you want. I pass, I pass;
the price is growing thin, unseen, as glass,
so hands slide through my cobweb bones. I go —
to haunt this corpse-ground. Waiting, trapped, for you,
I hope that next night’s story will get through.

The post Triumph XV: Vetala appeared first on Reactor.

The Death of Araweilo

SofiaS — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Presenting “The Death of Araweilo,” an original poem by Sofia Samatar in celebration of National Poetry Month, acquired for Tor.com by editor Liz Gorinsky.

The Death of Araweilo

Araweilo the queen is dead wicked queen Araweilo.
Sing she is dead.
Rejoice she is dead cruel Araweilo the foe of men.

She is dead, the queen of impossible tasks who said: Men climb Mil-Milac or else you die, climb Mil-Milac the mountain of glass.

Araweilo laughed and her teeth were of glass like the mountain her manicured nails were of glass and the clasps of her slippers her cell phone her lipstick her car.

Glass, all of glass was Araweilo the enemy of men.
Araweilo shaved her head wrote poetry chewed qaat.
Araweilo smoked on the balcony of her villa gave radio interviews appeared on television in a white dress.

Chimes off-camera when she crossed her legs.
It’s good to be here.
Flash. Flash. Twin vortices in her black sunglasses.

At home Araweilo played music loud and screamed.
She went to Europe to see a specialist. I have a pain you see doctor here.

Right here. Right here. Tap-tap of glass finger on glass chest. Araweilo was broken but she did not appear to be broken.

Araweilo was unreasonable. Who can climb a glass mountain? This is like asking to change the nature of men and women.

At the top of the mountain, she said, there is a tree, bring me the seeds of this tree, bring them stuck to the bare sides of your camels.

Araweilo had a terrarium. She was going to grow the seeds or maybe mix them in her imported flavored yogurt.

That would be just like Araweilo. She had a gym in her villa. She claimed to be allergic to half the foods in the country. She stood on her balcony and watched the men toil up the mountain through a telescope and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Araweilo could turn her eyelids inside out.
She often quoted Das Kapital.
She knew all the songs in West Side Story.
Once when she was angry she smashed a mirror and stamped on the pieces.
Once she tried to run down a lover with her car.

I have a pain you see doctor here. The doctor said she was willful and self-indulgent like most deracinated natives. The doctor said the last thing you need is pills. He said try something your own people do, the women I mean. He suggested weaving.

Araweilo said in my experience doctor it’s more beneficial to send men up glass mountains looking for seeds.
She flounced out of the office swinging her Louis Vuitton bag.

Outside it was raining. Rain soothes the heart even far from home.

Araweilo walked in the rain, feeling broken. She bought a can of juice from a vending machine and cut her tongue on purpose. Juice and blood, bloodsucking Araweilo. She closed her eyes. If you suck all your blood out through your tongue, can you die?

If the desert gets hot enough, will the sand turn to glass?
If you read all the books, will you learn how to live?
If you live long enough, will you learn how to be?
Why does everyone hate me?
Why do I hate them?
Where is God?

These are the unanswered questions of Araweilo.

Araweilo went home. The men and camels were just coming down from the mountain. A magician had advised the men to make the camels roll in mud. The camels plodded heavy and slow, ghost animals with seeds stuck fast in the mud on their sides, and Araweilo was beaten.

Araweilo was outwitted, the men were saved. Such rejoicing! Araweilo could hear the singing from inside her huge Italian-built villa. She could hear them singing of ugly, beaten, worthless Araweilo. There was an especially hilarious song about her genitals.

Araweilo turned up the sound on the TV.

While the men were hunting seeds on the mountain, there had been seven years of peace.

The magician from the mountain was a hero. Years later, he got Araweilo’s daughter pregnant. The daughter bore a son.

I have a pain you see doctor here.

When Araweilo’s grandson was grown, the magician gave him a spear and said, Strike Araweilo! If she cries Tolai it will mean she is really a man, and you will need help. If she cries Allah ba’ai she is a woman, and she will die.

The boy went into his grandmother’s room.

Araweilo was oiling her hair. She was cutting her corns. She was smoking her huge Egyptian nargileh. She was letting her pet rat run up and down her arm. She was nuzzling her lover’s throat. She was testing a knife on her palm. She was on the phone.

Araweilo hair feet arm throat palm

The spear

Allah ba’ai
Allah ba’ai

So many pieces. Like many bad women she was only made of glass.

Araweilo the queen is dead, they say you can visit her grave at Elaayo.
Women lay green branches on it men throw stones.

The post The Death of Araweilo appeared first on Reactor.

National Poetry Month on Tor.com Features New Pieces from Jo Walton, Theodora Goss, and More

Tor.com — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 13:00:01 +0000

April is National Poetry Month and to celebrate we’re taking the opportunity to showcase poetry written by notable names in the science fiction and fantasy fields.

When thinking of the mediums that deliver SFF, one invariably visualizes descriptive prose, be it in doorstopper hardcover or dog-eared paperback form, but poetry is well-entrenched within the SFF genres and often pops up with surprising regularity.

This year, Tor.com has acquired new poems from Theodora Goss, Jo Walton, Sofia Samatar, and Catherynne M. Valente!

Poems will go up every Sunday in April. And it all kicks off, today, with “My Garden,” a new poem by Theodora Goss.

Keep an eye on our National Poetry Month index for “Hades and Persephone” by Jo Walton, “The Death of Araweilo” by Sofia Samatar, and an as-yet-untitled poem by Cat Valente.

Tor.com first began featuring SFF poetry during April of 2011, reprinting some favorites, dusting off hidden gems, and commissioning new work. (Which even got nominated for a World Fantasy Award!) You can see the line-up and read the poems from every year in our Poetry Month index.

The post National Poetry Month on Tor.com Features New Pieces from Jo Walton, Theodora Goss, and More appeared first on Reactor.

My Garden

arensan — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Presenting “My Garden,” an original poem by Theodora Goss in celebration of National Poetry Month, acquired for Tor.com by consulting editor Ellen Datlow.

My Garden

Last fall, I decided to plant my lovers.

I always plant crocuses, the wild ones, purple and yellow.
I like to see them come up, first thing in the spring, through the snow.
And then irises, with their blue throats. Daffodils, again the wild ones,
jonquils I think they’re called, yellow trumpets under the hemlocks,
and the white ones knows as Thalia. Finally tulips, that cost so much
and last only a season: deep purple Queen of the Night,
Angelique like a prom dress, Swan Wings.

But last fall, I decided to plant my lovers, thinking they would come up
during that awkward period when the tulips have faded and the lilies
have not yet bloomed. I was keeping them in the cellar,
in baskets filled with sand. This, I was told, would prevent them
from drying out or rotting. And it mostly worked:
I lost only one, whose basket had not been filled
to the top. (I ran of sand, and did not want
to make another trip to the store, a mistake I now regret.)
His nose, which was sticking out, shriveled like a lily bulb
left too long before planting.

Behind my house is a woodland, filled with oaks
that have stood for a hundred years. Light falls through their branches,
and the ground is littered with oak leaves. At its edge
grow smaller trees: aspen, birch, dogwood.
And the woodland shrubs: hawthorn, elderberry.
Through their branches grow wild roses and honeysuckle.
It’s a charming, solemn place. I planted my lovers
close to the woodland but not under the shade of the trees.
I did not want them near the house. And I thought I would see them
best from the kitchen window.

I worked the soil, turning it over once, twelve inches down.
Adding compost from the heap, turning it over again, putting my hand
into the rich, dark loam. It would be easy for my lovers
to come up from that bed. I planted all five of them.
(One, as I said, was no longer viable: I threw him
onto the compost heap to feed next year’s plantings.)
On a sunny fall day, I brought out all the baskets.
One by one, carefully, I lifted my lovers out,
dug holes twice their depth, mixed bonemeal into the soil.
I put them in their holes, heaped in the soil again,
watered them. And then waited.

It is spring. Throughout the winter, whenever I made soup
at the stove, I would look out the window toward the bare oak branches,
wondering. What would they look like when they sprouted, my lovers?
What shoots would come from them, what blossoms?
Would they have leaves like swords, like shovels?
Would they flower the first year, and if so, in what colors?
Or would I have to wait for the second year, as with certain bulbs?
Would they be perennials? I rather hope so.
It seems a waste, planting them to come up only once.
But one never knows.

Yesterday, I thought I saw the first shoot, white like a finger,
and about the length of a finger, sticking up
through the mulch. Today, I’ll move one of the benches
under the shade of the trees. I want to sit there
on fine days, listening to the wind
in the leaves, the birds in the berry bushes and briars.
Watching my garden grow.

The post My Garden appeared first on Reactor.

It Was A Day

Ursula_Vernon — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:30:00 +0000

From author Ursula Vernon, we invite you to read a very moving ode: “It Was A Day.” An insightful encapsulation of what it is like to grow up believing in magic and other worlds, this poem examines what happens the day we all inevitably learn that we cannot dive into fiction and stay there, and how the act of writing might help make up for that fact. It is also the journey of a female fan and creator, one that many may recognize in their own experiences, brimming with the self-perception and self-actualization required to make your voice heard. “It Was A Day” was originally posted on Vernon’s blog on September 5.

It was a day a little bit like today
the way the clouds threw shadows over the hill
the day you realized that you weren’t going to find your future.

You were never going to go to Mars
or Pern
or Krynn
You were never going to open the door that led, inexorably, to Narnia
(or even Telmar, you weren’t picky, and you were confident of your ability
to lead the revolution.)

Inigo Montoya was not going to slap you on the back
and invite you to take up the mantle of the Dread Pirate Roberts.
There would be no sardonic Vulcans or Andorians;
you would never be handed an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

That was a strange day.

It ranked up there with the day that you realized that everybody else saw the you in the mirror, not the you inside your head. Not the you that was lean and tough and clever, not the you with perfect hair and a resonant voice that never said “Um….?”

Not that you.

No, they got the one that was fat and wobbly and stiff inside with terror, the one who was a little scared of eye makeup, the one who wore black because it was better to be freaky than pathetic.

You were never terribly fond of that you.

It was a day not at all like today
a day where the sun shone very brightly around the edges
that you realized that you could write that future.

You could blot out all those old arguments in your head by asking each character “What happens next?”
“And what do you say?”
“And are there ninjas?”

It wasn’t the old future, but it was close.
(Besides, by that point, you’d realized that Inigo probably bathed once a month and that when people stuck you with swords, you’d fall down and shriek, and also that your feet hurt. And writers get indoor plumbing
and birth control pills if they can get them.)

It was a rather odd day
though not entirely unexpected
when you met the people who were angry with you.

It took awhile to figure out. Much more than a day, in fact.
Eventually, it came to you that those people had a future, too,
but they hadn’t quite realized they weren’t going to find it
and they blamed you for the fact it wasn’t here.

You were not the sort of person that lived in their future.
You were still too fat and too wobbly and much too weird, and you laughed too loudly
like a good-natured hyena
and you were not supportive of their high and lonely destiny.

And if you were here and their future wasn’t
it was probably your fault
and if you went away
maybe they’d get to go to Mars after all
pal around with Tars Tarkas
have phone-sex with the Pierson’s Puppeteers.

They got very mad about it.
You pictured them hopping,
arms and legs going up and down
like angry puppets
when somebody pulled the string coming out of their crotch.

It was all very strange.

It was a day sort of like last Tuesday
or maybe the Friday before last
when somebody came up
with a copy of your book
it was dog-eared and they looked like they might cry
and they said “Thank you.”

It was a day.

The post It Was A Day appeared first on Reactor.

A Song for Stubby

Leah Schnelbach — Sat, 20 Jul 2013 14:00:00 +0000

A Song for Stubby
(With apologies to William Carlos Williams.)

Among the rain
and Tyrell Co. billboards
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
Stubby
rocketship
moving
at about light speed
unheeded
to klaxons
siren howls
and engines rumbling
above the dark city.

The post A Song for Stubby appeared first on Reactor.

Snowmelt

MariCats — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Presenting “Snowmelt,” a reprint of an original poem by Mari Ness in celebration of National Poetry Month on Tor.com, originally published on Goblin Fruit.

Snowmelt

The dark blood glittering on the grey snow—

and the memories, swarming like thin crows
over fresh corpses. Your throat burns. No. Those

cold secrets stay dying within your mind,
never quite willing to remain confined.
You know better to think of life as kind.

Drop, drop. Fly to the woods,
oh wicked crow
a delicate heart beats
upon the snow.

The mirror croons an unending song.
Black feathers gather upon the grey snow.
I know what does and does not belong.
Black feathers gather upon the grey snow.
The mirror croons an unending song.

And inevitable—oh yes, oh yes—
that you should seize that apple from her hand,
its taste on your tongue almost a caress.

Inevitable that her sweet command
sucked away, for a moment, all distress.
Crows sing sadder songs in this haunted land.

Mother, mother. A soft cry
breaking the night.
Mother, mother. No reply.
The walls gleam a cold, calm white.

You never knew her name, nor why
the walls seemed so suddenly tight,
and the water you sipped seemed dry.

She came to you both in the cool moonlight:
hair white as snow, lips bloodied as a rose.
Oh, those lips, promising such rich delight!
She came to you both in the cool moonlight.
He imprisoned her hands, and crooned. Sparrows
huddled on the soft earth, afraid of flight.
She came to you both in the cool moonlight,
hair white as snow, lips bloodied as a rose.

And you will have time to remember all
the little men, the ebony and glass,
the frightened huntsman with his golden call,
the taste of thin gold shielding cold brass.

The blood sinks so swiftly into the snow.

And you will have time to examine each,
to twist it into some innocent tale,
a mirrored truth, a grim lesson to teach,
your cold secrets wrapped in a storied veil.

Sing the songs your mother knew:
of women and dragons,
of princes and wagons,
of the way that the cuckoo flew
to the only nest she ever knew
Sing, crow, sing.

Sing until you make it true:
of a bubbling witches’ brew
of poison kept in crystal flagons

Sing, crow. Sing.

You tiptoe, so gently, to the dark woods,
to the secret places tangled in roots.
So easily we cling to our falsehoods
of warmth, of safety, of a mother’s bliss
in a daughter. A needle pricks your skin.
You tuck leaves into a tattered bodice,
wrap yourself warmly in bloodied deerskin.
You were never woken with a soft kiss,
tangled as you were with other pursuits.
So easily we lose our childhoods.
The spring snows, melting, pierce your slender boots.

And you will remember the red hot shoes
So lovingly made with iron fire.
And you will remember that delightful ruse:
None of these tales were about desire,

so lovingly made with iron fire.
(Fingers tap at your arm, touching that bruise.)
None of those tales were about desire.
You will not use that timeworn word, abuse.

Fingers tap at your arm, touching that bruise.
And you will remember the red hot shoes.
You will not use that timeworn word, abuse.
And you will remember that delightful ruse.

The crystal coffin shaking in the snow,
the mirror crooning to a lonely crow,
the prince smiling at an unmoving bride,
the huntsman knowing of uneaten pride.
These are not stories you have wished to know.

You remember waiting at the window.
The falling snow, the heat rising inside.
You remember the stinging of your thumbs.
Crows peck at the bloody snow.

The silver needles flashing to and fro.
The delicate shrouds for those who had died.
You remember hearing she comes, she comes
Crows peck at the bloody snow.

The crows arrive, spiralling, one by one,
attacking the first green shoots on the trees,
calling for their kin in the cold grey sun.
You gather large handfuls of moist, dead leaves.

You bury them all, in the half frozen earth:
the comb, the ribbon, the old apple core,
the ebony panel. Nothing of worth.
The cold dying secrets that you once bore.

And the crows flying in circles above,
the air filling with the weight of their cries,
the woods filling with the weight of true love,
the glass coffin cracking before your eyes.

And it is time, past time, for you to go.
The blood sinks so swiftly in the spring snow.

Mari Ness is an author and poet who lives in Central Florida.

The post Snowmelt appeared first on Reactor.

The Fox Wife

arensan — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:15:00 +0000

Presenting “The Fox Wife,” an original poem by Theodora Goss in celebration of National Poetry Month on Tor.com, acquired for Tor.com by consulting editor Ellen Datlow.

The Fox Wife

I saw you dancing in a glade alone,
feet bare and dressed in nothing but a rag,
your red hair like a fire around your head.
I had to stand and look and keep on looking.

I saw you standing there among the trees,
smelled you before I saw you. First, I thought
you were a hunter. But no, you smelled of earth,
not death. I danced because I saw you looking.

Day after day, I went back to that glade.
And sometimes you were there, and sometimes not.

That was deliberate. I did not want you
to always get what you were coming for.
One day you stepped into the glade and spoke:
“I have been watching you. Can you forgive me?”

I wanted to say more: you burn so brightly,
I wonder that the forest is still standing.
You are more graceful than a flock of doves.
You should be dressed in silk instead of rags.
I am only a farmer, but I love you.

And yet somehow you said all of those things.
At least, I heard them and I followed you
out of the forest and into the farmyard.
The dogs barked, but you would not let them near me.

I did not know why all the dogs were barking.
What was it made you come? Now tell me truly.
Was it the possibility of finding
a home, a husband, not some soggy burrow?

That, I suppose. And then you looked so handsome.
And then there were the dresses, silk as promised.
I could have done worse than a prosperous farmer.

Or better: you would make a splendid lady,
upon your horse and riding by his lordship.

You flatter me. But then, you know I like it.
When I was heavy with our oldest son,
you told me I still looked just like the girl
you first saw dancing in the forest glade.

And so you did. Now dear, be reasonable . . .
Were we not always happiest together,
on rainy afternoons when you sat sewing
and I would read to you from some old book?
Or when we would go walking in the spring
to see the glade you dance in filled with bluebells?
Or when we watched our sons and daughter sleeping,
three heads with hair like fire upon the pillows.
Where are they now? Where are our children, dear?

Down in the burrow, safe from you and yours.

I would not hurt a hair upon their heads.

You hung my sister’s pelt upon the door.
You said there had been foxes in the henhouse.
You set those traps and did not think to tell me.

But how was I to know? Be reasonable . . .

Each night, while you lay sleeping, I snuck out.
A thing that was once wild is never tame.
I went to smell the earth, to meet my kind.
I went to see the bright disk of the moon.
You set those traps and caught my sister in one.
And what should I see on the henhouse door
next morning when I went to gather eggs?
Our children are asleep inside this burrow.
Your dogs would tear them up within an instant.

But dear, they’re human too, you can’t deny that.

Your dogs would. They shall learn the forest paths,
learn how to hunt, how to avoid the hunter.
They shall be cold in winter, wet in storms,
they shall eat mice and rabbits, roam the meadow,
drink from the streams and try to catch the birds.
When they are grown, they’ll put on human skins
and go into the town, but I shall warn them
never to fall in love. Not with a human.

Why can’t you see that I meant you no harm?
I did not know . . . My dear, won’t you forgive me?

I am not tame. I can’t be reasoned with,
and there is no forgiveness in the forest.
Either kill me with that gun you carry,
or go.

He went. The birches heard him weeping.

Theodora Goss‘s publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting;Interfictions, a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; and The Thorn and the Blossom, a novella in a two-sided accordion format.

She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy Award.

The post The Fox Wife appeared first on Reactor.

House

arensan — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:00:01 +0000

Presenting “House,” an original poem by Neil Gaiman in celebration of National Poetry Month on Tor.com, acquired for Tor.com by consulting editor Ellen Datlow.

“House”

I can see your house from here.

The post House appeared first on Reactor.

Tracy K. Smith Explores the Universe Through Poetry in Life on Mars

alifisher — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:30:00 +0000

If your brain is anything like my brain then the part of your brain reserved for thinking about outer space is a mess. It’s probably cluttered with things like the moon landing footage, pics from Curiosity, clips from
Farscape, the cover of The Little Prince, that Smashing Pumpkins music video, and so on. On top of all that, looking up at a sky full of stars prompts all of the big questions: Why are we here? Why is everything in the
universe moving away from everything else at a constantly increasing pace?
And why won’t astronomers acknowledge Pluto as a planet when I know it’s
one in my heart?

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith doesn’t have answers. She
doesn’t try to reconcile the messes in our heads. In Life on Mars she celebrates our confusing, question-riddled relationship with the universe.

The universe is “brutal and alive,” Smith says. It is dark, but we have given it many faces. Life on Mars begins with youthful big picture questionsthe type about space and time fit for stargazing at midnight with your back to the giant trampoline. In “The Weather in Space” Smith asks, “Is God being or pure force?” In “Don’t You Wonder Sometimes, Part 2” she asserts that “The future isn’t what it used to be and so she guesses at what the new future will be: there will be museums filled with artifacts from today money, honey, oil and extraterrestrials will arrive and be treated politely, if territorially. In “My God, It’s Full of Stars, Part 3,” Smith ponders that, “Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,/ That the others have come and gonea momentary blip/ When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic”

These notions come in stanzas slowly populated with famous figures of science and science fiction: Charlton Heston, David Bowie, Dave Bowman, and Larry Niven.

“My God It’s Full of Stars” takes the reader to the set of Kubrick’s 2001. We’re pulled between poems of dark, distant futures and the retro-futuristic worlds of previous generations. And as we accumulate a broader picture of space, Smith turns inward and become increasingly intimate. Other poems focus on her late father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope. In her grief she finds herself riddled with yet more questions about the state of that that is absent. From “The Speed of Belief”:

What happens when the body goes slack?/ When what anchors us just drifts off toward. . . ./ What that is ours will remain intact?

He is only gone so far as we can tell. Though/ When I try, I see the white cloud of his hair/ In the distance like an eternity.

Smith also writes about the notion of the presence of her own child before conception in “When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me.”

You must have watched/ For what felt like forever, wanting to be/ What we passed between us like fire./ Wanting weight, desiring desire, dying/ To descend into flesh, fault, the brief ecstasy of being.

As the scale of her preoccupations change from the cosmic to deeply personal, Smith also writes about social phenomena. Two of my favorite poems of the collection were “Solstice” and “They May Love That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected”, both of which deal with American social issues. The former deals with the decay of journalistic integrity, the latter with hate crimes.

“Solstice”, which begins “They’re gassing geese outside JFK./ Tehran will likely fill up soon with blood./ The Times is getting smaller day by day.” expresses Smith’s deep frustration with the state of journalism. In the length of the short poem the reporting on the incident with the geese grows increasingly fearful and absurd. Soon the geese are both terrorists and a plague. Nothing more specific is mentioned about Tehran.

“In Which the Dead Send Postcards to Their Assailants from America’s Most Celebrated Landmarks,” is (as you might expect) a series of short fictional correspondences from the victims of recent, fatal hate crimes addressed to their attackers. The notes are all brief, jovial, and hopeful for the future.

The beautiful and sometimes scary thing about our relationships with intangible forces ( space, God, the dead, farts, whatever) is that we change them with our minds. By guessing at the future or the nature of the dead we create possibilities then reinforce them with our own connection to them.

From the cosmos to the personal, Tracy Smith reminds us of the presence of absent forces. Space is not empty, but rather a host of our projections and ungraspable things.

Ali Fisher is a correspondent for Tor.com and lives in New York.

The post Tracy K. Smith Explores the Universe Through Poetry in Life on Mars appeared first on Reactor.

Hear a Reading of Catherynne M. Valente’s “What the Dragon Said: A Love Story”

Stubby the Rocket — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:05:00 +0000

In response to Tor.com’s publication of Cat Valente poems for April’s Poetry Month, a Tumblr Geek Dame by the name of Deborah J. Brannon has posted a recording up on her Tumblog of Cat Valente’s poem “What the Dragon Said: A Love Story.”

It’s a great treat for those of us who like our poetry read aloud to us! Check is out and read along here if you like—just another great way to celebrate poetry in style.

Check out all of Poetry Month here.

The post Hear a Reading of Catherynne M. Valente’s “What the Dragon Said: A Love Story” appeared first on Reactor.

Aquaman and the Duality of Self/Other, America, 1985

Catherynne_Valente — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 17:00:00 +0000

On this Saturday we’re featuring a new composition from Catherynne M. Valente, “Aquaman and the Duality of Self/Other, America, 1985.”

Aquaman and the Duality of Self/Other, America, 1985

Once there was a boy who lived under the sea.
      (Amphibian Man, Aleksey Belyayev 1928)
      (Aquaman, Paul Norris and Mort Weisinger 1941)

Depending on the angle
of light through water
his father, the man in the diving bell, some
Belle Epoque Cousteau with a jaunty mustache,
raised him down in the deep
in the lobster-infested ruins
of old Atlantis
where the old songs still echo like sonar.
                 Or.
He dreamed under Finnish ice
in a steel and windowless experimental habitat
while the sea kept dripping in
of Soviet rockets trailing turquoise
kerosene plumes, up toward Venus,
down toward his sweet, fragile gills
fluttering under the world like a heartbeat.

                 In 1985
I was six,
learning to swim around my father’s boat
in a black, black lake
outside Seattle, where the pine roots
wound down into the black,
black mud.

     The Justice League
had left us. The boy under the sea
     (Ichtiander, 1928)
     (Arthur Curry, 1959)
wore orange scales and his wife didn’t
love him anymore. The orcas who loved him said:
     Hey, man, the eighties are gonna be
     tough for everyone. Do what makes you happy.
     Mars is always invading.
     Eat fish. Dive deep.
                 Or.
Khrushchev took a crystal submarine
down to those iron cupolas
where the boy under the sea wore his
only suit
and made salt tea in a coral samovar
for the Premier
who wanted to talk about his coin collection
and the possibility
of a New Leningrad under the Barents pack ice
by 2002.

                 The truth is,
I loved the Incredible Hulk
with a brighter, purer love.
I, too,
wanted to turn so green
and big
no one could hurt me.
                 I wanted
to get that angry. But when the time came
to bust out
of my Easter dress and roar
I just cried
hoping that the villains I knew
would melt out of shame.

                 The truth is,
I wasn’t worthy of the Hulk.
     But the boy under the sea
     the one with four colors
     and his own animated series
     said:
Hey, girl. Being six in 1985 is no fucking joke.
You’ve got your stepmother
with a fist like Black Manta
and good luck getting a job when you’re grown.
Any day now the Russians might
decide to quit messing around
and light up a deathsky for all to see.
     Sometimes I cry, too.
                 Or.
Down in the dark,
a skinny boy from Ukraine looks up
and his wet, silver neck pulses,
gills like mouths opening and closing. He gurgles:
     Did we make it to Venus?
There were supposed to be collectives by now
on Mars and the moon. I would have
liked to see them.
                 Everyone
is an experiment, devotchka-amerikanka. To see
if a boy can breathe underwater
and talk to the fish.
If a girl can take all her beatings
and still smile for the camera.
It’s 1985 and I’ve never seen the sun.
     Sometimes I cry, too.

By the nineties,
the boy under the sea
                 (Orin, Robert Loren Fleming 1989)
had wealth and a royal pedigree
a wizard for a father and a mother
with a crown of pearls.
I didn’t even recognize him
with his water-fist and his golden beard.
                 His wife
kept going insane
over and over
like she was stuck in a story
about someone else
and every time she tried to get out
her son died and the narwhals
wouldn’t talk to her anymore.
                 Or.
The revolution came and went.
The records of those metal domes
and rusted bolts
and a boy down there in the cold
got mixed up with a hundred thousand other files
doused in kerosene
pluming up into the stars.
                 That’s okay.
the boy in the black says.
I don’t think the nineties
are going to be a peach either.
We do what we’re here for
and Atlantis is for other men.

                 Once there was a boy under the sea.
I dove down after him
when I was six, fifteen, twenty-six, thirty-two.
Down into the dark,
a small white eel in the cold muck
and into the lake of my father’s boat
I dove down and saw:
                 brown bass hushing by
                 a decade of golf balls
                 the tip of a harpoon
                 rusted over, bleeding algae
and a light like 1985
sinking away from me,
dead sons and lost wives
narwhals and my hands over my head
under my 2^nd grade desk
too small and never green enough
to protect anyone.

                 We move apart,
two of us
two of them
one up toward grassy sunlight
and the escape hatch
a narrow, razor-angled way out
of the 20th century.
                 The other
                 distant as a lighthouse,
a lithe blue body flashing through heavy water
heading down, into a private,
lightless place.

Aquaman and the Duality of Self/Other, America, 1985 © Catherynne M. Valente 2012

The post Aquaman and the Duality of Self/Other, America, 1985 appeared first on Reactor.

What the Dragon Said: A Love Story

Catherynne_Valente — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 17:00:00 +0000

On this Saturday we’re featuring a new composition from Catherynne M. Valente, “What the Dragon Said: A Love Story.”

“What the Dragon Said: A Love Story”

So this guy walks into a dragon’s lair
      and he says
why the long tale?
                  HAR HAR BUDDY
says the dragon
                  FUCK YOU.

The dragon’s a classic
the ‘57 Chevy of existential chthonic threats
take in those Christmas colors, those
impervious green scales, sticky candy-red firebreath,
comes standard with a heap of rubylust
goldhuddled treasure.
                  Go ahead.
                  Kick the tires, boy.
                  See how she rides.

Sit down, kid, says the dragon. Diamonds
roll off her back like dandruff.

Oh, you’d rather be called a paladin?
I’d rather be a unicorn.
                  Always thought that
was the better gig. Everyone thinks
you’re innocent. Everyone calls you
pure. And the girls aren’t afraid
they come right up with their little hands out
for you to sniff
like you’re a puppy
and they’re gonna take you home.
They let you put your head right
in their laps.
                  But nobody on this earth
ever got what they wanted. Now

I know what you came for. You want
my body. To hang it up on a nail
over your fireplace. Say to some milk-and-rosewater chica
who lays her head in your lap
look how much it takes
to make me feel like a man.
                  We’re in the dark now, you and me. This is primal
shit right here. Grendel, Smaug, St. George. You’ve been
called up. This is the big game. You don’t have
to make stupid puns. Flash your feathers
like your monkey bravado
can impress. I saw a T-Rex fight a comet
and lose. You’ve
got nothing I want.

Here’s something I bet you don’t know:
      every time someone writes a story about a dragon
a real dragon dies.
                  Something about seeing
and being seen
                  something about mirrors
that old tune about how a photograph
can take your whole soul. At the end
of this poem
                  I’m going to go out like electricity
in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.
                  That last blockbuster took out a whole family
                  of Bhutan thunder dragons
living in Latvia
the fumes of their cleargas hoard
hanging on their beards like blue ghosts.

A dragon’s gotta get zen
                  with ephemerality.

You want to cut me up? Chickenscratch my leather
with butcher’s chalk:
cutlets, tenderloin, ribs for the company barbecue,
chuck, chops, brisket, roast.
                  I dig it, I do.
I want to eat everything, too.

When I look at the world
      I see a table.
All those fancy houses, people with degrees, horses and whales,
bankers and Buddha statues
the Pope, astronauts, panda bears and yes, paladins
                  if you let me swallow you whole
                  I’ll call you whatever you want.
Look at it all: waitresses and ice caps and submarines down
at the bottom of the heavy lightless saltdark of the sea
                  Don’t they know they’d be safer
                  inside me?

I could be big for them
      I could hold them all
My belly could be a city
      where everyone was so loved
they wouldn’t need jobs. I could be
the hyperreal
post-scarcity dragonhearted singularity.
      I could eat them
      and feed them
      and eat them
      and feed them.

This is why I don’t get to be a unicorn.
Those ponies have clotted cream and Chanel No. 5 for blood
and they don’t burn up like comets
with love that tastes like starving to death.
      And you, with your standup comedy knightliness,
covering Beowulf’s greatest hits on your tin kazoo,
you can’t begin to think through
      what it takes to fill up a body like this.
It takes everything pretty
and everything true
      and you stick yourself in a cave because
your want is bigger than you.

I just want to be
the size of a galaxy
so I can eat all the stars and gas giants
without them noticing
and getting upset.
Is that so bad?
                  Isn’t that
what love looks like?
                  Isn’t that
what you want, too?

I’ll make you a deal.
      Come close up
stand on my emeraldheart, my sapphireself
the goldpile of my body
      Close enough to smell
everything you’ll never be.

Don’t finish the poem. Not for nothing
is it a snake
that eats her tail
and means eternity. What’s a few verses worth
anyway? Everyone knows
poetry doesn’t sell. Don’t you ever feel
like you’re just
a story someone is telling
about someone like you?
                  I get that. I get you. You and me
we could fit
inside each other. It’s not nihilism
if there’s really no point to anything.

I have a secret
down in the deep of my dark.
All those other kids who wanted me
to call them paladins,
warriors, saints, whose swords had names,
whose bodies were perfect
as moonlight
      they’ve set up a township near my liver
had babies with the maidens they didn’t save
      invented electric lightbulbs
      thought up new holidays.
                              You can have my body
                              just like you wanted.
Or you can keep on fighting dragons
writing dragons
fighting dragons
re-staging that same old Cretaceous deathmatch
you mammals
always win.
                  But hey, hush, come on.
Quit now.
You’ll never fix
that line.
                  I have a forgiveness in me
                  the size of eons
                  and if a dragon’s body is big enough
                  it just looks like the world.

                              Did you know
the earth used to have two moons?

The post What the Dragon Said: A Love Story appeared first on Reactor.

Poems of Fantasy and Wonder: Goblin Fruit

MariCats — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Psst. The goblins are calling.

And they’re offering fruit. Well, poems—but that’s fruit for the soul, right?

Since 2006, Goblin Fruit, edited by Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Wick, has been offering a delectable selection of fantasy and folklore poems—every quarter. (Full disclosure: I’ve been published in Goblin Fruit in the past and will be appearing there in the future, mostly because I love the zine so much I desperately wanted to be in it.) The poems offer little snippets of beauty and fantasy, magic and fairy tale, anguish and joy, love and hate. Nearly all of them are very very good, and those that aren’t are better.

Goblin Fruit was not, of course, the first or last zine to focus exclusively on speculative poetry—but in an industry more renowned for short lived zines, its record of producing six years of issue after issue of undiminished quality is more than impressive. Please forgive me while I gush a bit more.

Too often, when I start talking about poetry, I find people’s faces shifting to a look of alarm, as if they are about to be dragged back to painful memories of being force-fed poems in school or other less dreadful places. They have memories of poems and poetry as dull and distant.

Not these poems.

These poems are delightful gems for people who love fairy tale, fantasy and language. Some are twists on familiar fairy tales. Others look at the more obscure fairy tales. Still others create new mythos entirely. Some tell a complete story in a few terse lines. Others focus on only one moment of a fairy tale or myth, and a few use myth and fairy tale to illustrate contemporary concerns. Some poems wrestle with myth and fairy tale; others accept it, but point out the consequences.

Which is not to say that the poems displayed here are not also, well, poems. They are that, too. All sorts of poems appear here: tiny verses, long sagas, formal poems, free verse. Told in striking, sometimes fierce language, they also run a gamut of emotions: funny, heartbreaking, searing, healing. Sometimes the poems’ narrators are human. Sometimes they are fairies. Sometimes they are monsters.

Sometimes it’s rather hard to tell.

Most of the poems reference traditional Western fairy tales and Greek/Roman myth, but an occasional poem peeks out beyond this, as in “Qasida of the Ferryman,” by Sofia Samatar in the most recent issue. The background illustrations change for each issue, adding to the zine’s magic. Most poems are chosen to fit the season in which they appear cold poems for winter; warm poems for summer; poems of fading for fall and renewal for spring. But each issue also offers at least one poem that resists this theme, at least a little, as if in protest against the changing of the seasons.

And although Goblin Fruit hasn’t quite made the leap to podcasting (yet) most of the poems can also be listened to as well as (or instead of) read on the screen. In a few of the more dramatic poems, more than one speaker contributes to the audio, helping to bring the poem alive, as in “Woman of Wood,” by Kathrin Köhler, again from the most recent issue.

I’m frankly finding myself at a loss for words to explain just how much I love this zine, but I can say, if you’ve never given speculative poetry a try, I definitely recommend sampling their archive, just to get a sense of the wonder these poems can bring. You might even see one or other Tor.com bloggers popping up in their archives.

When not chatting about children’s books here at Tor.com, Mari Ness has been known to write the occasional poem or two. Attempts to cure her of this flaw have so far completely failed.

The post Poems of Fantasy and Wonder: Goblin Fruit appeared first on Reactor.

The Ballad of Death and the Maid

RozKaveney — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:00:00 +0000

This Sunday we feature “The Ballad of Death and the Maid” by Roz Kaveney, which originally appeared on the author’s Livejournal here.

“The Ballad of the Death and the Maid”

The black gig stopped outside the rich man’s door.
Pulled by two horses, both with feathered plumes.
He pulled the curtains, sat in darkened rooms.
This was a summons he’d choose to ignore.

He knew that rich men sometimes go to Hell.
He’d robbed poor widows; if he could defraud
orphans, he did. And if he met the Lord
he’d look for ways to cheat his God as well.

Someone knocked on the door; he called his maid,
told her to tell the caller he was out.
He whispered to her. He was wont to shout.
She giggled at the fact he was afraid.

She knew the tall man at the door was Death.
He’d called upon her Granny when she died,
had been genteel, so much so Gran had cried.
And waited patient through each halting breath

until the rattle, when he took her hand.
Then left as if he led her to the dance.
The rich man thought he’d risk it, take a chance.
Went to his desk and took a pinch of sand

he used to blot, and threw it in Death’s eyes.
Then grabbed her arms, the poor unknowing girl,
and spun her round three times. Her head a whirl,
he shoved her to Death’s arms, who in surprise

seized her, half-blind, not knowing whom he’d got.
She fainted in his arms, heard the door slam
behind her, and heard Death say softly ’Damn
I have the wrong one. Can’t imagine what

I’ll do with her.’ She said, ’take me away,
kind Death, sweet Death. I’ll clean your house instead.
Groped and unpaid, I’ve wished that I was dead
a hundred times. I’d lie in bed and pray

someone would take me from that bad man’s house.
I’ll hone your scythe, and wipe it free of rust.
Polish your floors and tables. I will dust
your ornaments. I’m quiet as a mouse

you’ll hardly know I’m there.’ Death stroked her brow.
Like Grandma did. ’My dear, it’s not your hour.
Much as I’d love to have you. I have power
but only when you die. Which is not now.

I came to take your master. It’s his time.’
’Are you in trouble if he doesn’t come?’
’No, truly, sweet girl. In the endless sum
of death and birth, though it would be a crime

to let a bad man live, he’s not worth much.
Still, it’s a shame. I’d like to take his life’
’Lord Death,’ she said, ’I’ll stab him with a knife,
beat out his brains’. She felt the gentle touch

of bony lips on hers. ’Give him a kiss
and I’ll take it from there.’ She had a key
to the coal cellar door, so quietly
she turned it in the lock, more like a hiss

of well-oiled gears than any louder sound.
She kicked her boots off, padded up the stair.
For black dust on the rugs she gave no care.
Master might mind – he would not be around.

He saw her and he squealed. ’Are you some ghost?’
’No sir, I’m back.’ ’How did you get away?’
’Death said your debts were not for me to pay.’
’Insolent girl, now fetch me tea and toast.

No, don’t. Come here.’ He fumbled at her arse
And pulled her face to his. His sweaty lips
forced hers. His eyes went dark as an eclipse
and with dark glee she watched his spirit pass.

She threw the curtains wide, let in some air,
watched Death’s coach drive away with him inside.
And stared down at his corpse in angry pride
spat in his face and left him lying there.

She took his rings off, made the oven hot,
melted them for the pay that she was owed.
And when she left, she had a heavy load,
her pack was laden with the things she’d got.

Rich men beware. Death waits outside your hall
And dying is the one thing you can’t pay
the poor to do for you. And if they say,
they will, they won’t. Because they hate you all.

“The Ballad of the Death and The Maid” copyright Roz Kaveney

The post The Ballad of Death and the Maid appeared first on Reactor.

Mouse Koan

Catherynne_Valente — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:30:00 +0000

Today we kick off Poetry Month with “Mouse Koan” by Catherynne M. Valente.

Mouse Koan

In the beginning of everything
I mean the real beginning
the only show in town
was a super-condensed blue-luminous ball
of everything
that would ever be
including your mother
and the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles
and the heat-death of prime time television
a pink-white spangle-froth
of deconstructed stars
burst
into the eight million gods of this world.

Some of them were social creatures
some misanthropes, hiding out in the asteroid belt
turning up their ion-trails at those sell-outs trying to teach
the dinosaurs about ritual practice
and the importance of regular hecatombs. It was

a lot like high school. The popular kids figured out the game
right away. Sun gods like football players firing glory-cannons
downfield
bookish virgin moon-nerds
angry punkbrat storm gods shoving sacrificial
gentle bodied compassion-niks
into folkloric lockers. But one

a late bloomer, draft dodger
in Ragnarok, that mess with the Titans,
both Armageddons,
      started showing up around 1928. Your basic
trickster template
                  genderless
                  primary colors
                  making music out of goat bellies
                                                          cow udders
                                                          ram horns
                  squeezing cock ribs like bellows.
It drew over its face
the caul of a vermin animal,
all black circles and disruption. Flickering
silver and dark
it did not yet talk
it did not yet know its nature.

Gods
have problems with identity, too. No better
than us
they have midlife crises
run out
drive a brand new hot red myth cycle
get a few mortals pregnant with
half-human monster-devas who
grow up to be game show hosts
ask themselves in the long terrible confusion
of their personal centuries
who am I, really?
what does any of it mean?
I’m so afraid
someday everyone will see
that I’m just an imposter
a fake among all the real
and gorgeous godheads.

                  The trickster god of silent films
knew of itself only:
I am a mouse.
I love nothing.
I wish to break
everything.
                  It did not even know
what it was god of
what piece of that endlessly exploding
heating and cooling and shuddering and scattering cosmos
it could move.
                  But that is no obstacle
to hagiography.
                  Always in motion
                  plane/steamboat/galloping horse
even magic cannot stop its need
to stomp and snap
to unzip order:
                  if you work a dayjob
                              wizard
                              boat captain
                              orchestra man
beware.

                              A priesthood called it down
like a moon
men with beards
men with money.
                              It wanted not love
nor the dreamsizzle of their ambition
but to know itself.
                              Tell me who I am, it said.
And they made icons of it in black and white
then oxblood and mustard and gloves
like the paws of some bigger beast.
They gave it a voice
                              falsetto and terrible
though the old school gods know the value
of silence.
                              They gave it a consort
like it but not
it.
                              A mirror-creature in a red dress forever
out of reach
as impenetrable and unpenetrating
as itself.
                              And for awhile
the mouse-god ran loose
eating
                              box office
                              celluloid
                              copyright law
                              human hearts
and called it good.

II.

If you play Fantasia backwards
you can hear the mantra of the mouse-god sounding.

                              Hiya, kids!
Let me tell you something true:
                              the future
                              is plastics
the future
is me.
                              I am the all-dancing thousand-eared unembodied god of Tomorrowland.
And only in that distant
Space Mountain Age of glittering electro-synthetic perfection
will I become fully myself, fully
apotheosed, for only then
will you be so tired of my laughing iconographic infinitely fertile and reproducing
perpetual smile-rictus
my red trousers that battle Communism
my PG-rated hidden and therefore monstrous genitalia
my bawdy lucre-yellow shoes
so deaf to my jokes
your souls hardened like arteries
that I can rest.
                              Contrary to what you may have heard
it is possible
to sate a trickster.
                              It only takes the whole world.

                  But look,
don’t worry about it. That’s not what I’m about
anymore. Everybody
grows up.
                  Everybody
grows clarity,
which is another name
for the tumor that kills you.
                  I finally
figured it out.

You don’t know what it’s like
                  to be a god without a name tag.
HELLO MY NAME IS
                  nothing. What? God of corporate ninja daemonic fuckery?
That’s not me. That’s not
the theme song
I came out of the void beyond Jupiter
to dance to.
                  The truth is
I’m here to rescue you.

                  The present and the future are a dog
racing a duck. Right now
you think happiness
is an industrial revolution that lasts forever.
Brings to its own altar
the Chicken of Tomorrow
breasts heavy with saline
                              margarine
                              dehydrated ice cream
                              freeze-dried coffee crystals
Right now, monoculture
feels soft and good and right
as Minnie in the dark.
                              It’s 1940.
                              You’re not ready yet.
                              You can’t know.
Someday
everything runs down.
Someday
entropy unravels the very best of us.
Someday
all copyright runs out.

                              In that impossible futurological post-trickster space
I will survive
I will become my utter self
                              and this is it:
I am the god
of the secret world-on-fire
that the corporate all-seeing eye
cannot see.
I am the song of perfect kitsch
endless human mousefire
burning toward mystery
                              I am ridiculous
                              and unlovely
                              I am plastic
                              and mass-produced

I am the tiny threaded needle
of unaltered primordial unlawful beauty-after-horror
                              of everything that is left of you
                              glittering glorified
                              when the Company Man
                              has used you up
                              to build the Company Town.
Hey.
they used me, too.

I thought we were just having fun. Put me in the movies, mistah!
The flickies! The CINEMA.
The 20s were one long champagne binge.

                  I used to be
a goggling plague mouse shrieking deadstar spaceheart
                  now I’m a shitty
                  fire retardant polyurethane
                  keychain.

Hey there. Hi there. Ho there.

What I am the god of
is the fleck of infinite timeless
hilarious
nuclear inferno soul
that can’t be trademarked
patented bound up in international courts
the untraded future.
                              That’s why
                              my priests
                              can never let me go
                              screaming black-eared chaotic red-assed jetmouse
                              into the collective unconscious Jungian unlost Eden
                              called by the mystic name of public domain
                              The shit I would kick up there
                              if I were free!

I tricked them good. I made them
put my face on the moon.
I made them take me everywhere
their mouse on the inside
I made them so fertile
they gave birth to a billion of me.
Anything that common
will become invisible.
And in that great plasticene Epcotfutureworld
you will have no trouble finding me.

                              Hey.
                              You’re gonna get hurt. Nothing
                              I can do.
                              Lead paint grey flannel suits toxic runoff
                              monoculture like a millstone
                              fairy tales turned into calorie-free candy
                              you don’t even know
                              what corporate downsizing is yet.
And what I got
isn’t really much
                                          What I got
                                          is a keychain
What I got
is the pure lotuslove
of seeing the first lightspray of detonated creation
even in the busted-up world they sell you.
                                          Seeing in me
                                          as tired and overworked
                                          as old gum
                                          the unbearable passionmouse of infinite stupid trashcamp joy
                                          and hewing to that.
                                          It’s the riddle of me, baby. I am
everywhere            exploited          exhibited          exhausted
                              and I am still holy.

It doesn’t matter
what they do to you.
Make you a permanent joke
sell your heart off piece by piece
                              robber princes
                              ruin everything
                              it’s what they do
                              like a baby cries.

                                                                  Look at my opposite number.
                                                                  It was never coyote versus roadrunner.
                                                                  It was both
                                                                  against Acme
                                                                  mail order daemon of death.
Stick with me. Someday
we’ll bundle it all up again
the big blue-luminous ball of everything
                  your father
                  the Tunguska event
                  the ultimate star-spangled obliteration of all empires.
I will hold everything tawdry
in my gloved four fingered hand
and hold it high
                     high
                     high.

It’s 1940. What you don’t know
is going to break you.       Listen to the Greek chorus
of my Kids
lining up toward the long downward slide of the century
like sacrifices.
                                          Their song comes backward and upside down
                                          from the unguessable extropy
                                          of that strangesad orgiastic corporate electrical parade
                                          of a future

                                          Listen to it.
                                          The sound of my name
                                          the letters forty feet high.
See ya
see ya
see ya real soon.

The post Mouse Koan appeared first on Reactor.

Celebrating National Poetry Month on Tor.com

ManagementServices — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:29:00 +0000

April is National Poetry Month and to celebrate we’re taking the opportunity to showcase poetry written by notable names in the science fiction and fantasy fields.

We first began featuring SFF poetry during April of last year, reprinting some favorites, dusting off hidden gems, and even commissioning some new work. (Which even got nominated for a World Fantasy Award!) You can see the line-up and read the poems in our Poetry Month index.

There’s a rich well of material to draw from and we’ll be posting poems every Sunday in April. (And perhaps more often than that.) Including works by:

Catherynne M. Valente
Jane Yolen
Roz Kaveney
Jo Walton

We hope you enjoy the series! Our first poem is “Mouse Koan” by Catherynne M. Valente.

The post Celebrating National Poetry Month on Tor.com appeared first on Reactor.

Hades and Persephone

bluejo — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Presenting “Hades and Persephone,” an original poem by Jo Walton in celebration of National Poetry Month, acquired for Tor.com by senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Hades and Persephone

You bring the light clasped round you, and although
I knew you’d bring it, knew it as I waited,
Knew as you’d come that you’d come cloaked in light
I had forgotten what light meant, and so
This longed for moment, so anticipated,
I stand still, dazzled by my own delight.

I see you, and you see me, and we smile
And your smile says you are as pleased as me
With everything and nothing still to say
All that we’ve saved and thought through all this time
Boils down to affirmation now as we
Stand here enlightened in my realm of grey.

Cerberus wags his solitary tail,
And though the dust of Hell lies round our feet
Your flowers are already sprouting through.
“You came,” “I said I would,” “You didn’t fail,”
“And you’re still here,” “Of course. We said we’d meet.”
“Yes,” “Yes!” “You’re really here! “And so are you!”

We don’t say yet that you will have to go
And Hell return inevitably black
Your flowers fade when parted from your tread
Though this is something we both surely know,
As certain as you come, you must go back,
And I remain alone among the dead.

They say I snatched you from the world above
Bound you with pomegranates, cast a spell
Bribed you with architecture. It’s not so.
Friendship is complicated, life is, love,
Your work the growing world, my task is Hell
You come back always, always have to go.

But here and now, this moment, we can smile,
Speak and be heard, this moment we can share
And laugh, and help each other to be great,
And talk aloud together, all worthwhile,
Our work, our worlds, and all we really care,
Each word shines golden, each thought worth the wait.

And Hell’s poor souls whirl round us as they glide
Off up to Lethe to begin again,
On to new lives, new dawns beyond Hell’s night.
We walk among your flowers, side by side,
Such joys we share are worth a little pain.
You come back. And you always bring the light.

The post Hades and Persephone appeared first on Reactor.

The Beauty of The Kalevala

jasonhenninger — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 16:58:00 +0000

I hold a special fondness for poems and stories that bridge oral tradition and literature. I think it was in that switch, from oral to written, that fantasy as a literary form was born. Such works—the Panchatantra, Epic of Gilgamesh, Odyssey and the Mabinogion to name a few—are the ancestors of contemporary fantasy. The Kalevala is another such bridge.

I would not be surprised if among the erudite readership of this website there are those who have studied The Kalevala at great length. If you’re out there, please chime in. I’m just a casual reader struck by the scope, adventure, humor and emotion of the work. I would never have even heard of it if not for reading somewhere that Tolkien loved it. Now that I’ve read it I regard The Kalevala as one of the most engaging epic poems I’ve ever read, en par with Ovid’s Metamorphosis, though less complicated.

If you aren’t familiar with The Kalevala, I’ll provide a little background. The Kalevala transitioned from oral to written much more recently than the others I just mentioned. In the early 19th century, a Finnish doctor named Elias Lonnröt compiled folksongs into a single epic poem, and revised it over the course of many years and numerous trips to the countryside, first publishing it in 1835. We think of The Kalevala as Finnish, but more accurately the work comes from the region of Karelia, which has at various times fallen under the control of Sweden, Russia and Finland. (Anyone better versed in the politics of Karelia will know that is a very simple way of explaining it, and I admit I may be misinterpreting the history).

The stories in The Kalevala were—and still are—sung with a particular tune, and sometimes a zither called a Kantele accompanies. Singers would sit across from each other, fingers intertwined, singing sometimes in unison, sometimes call-and-response. Singing is also one of two methods of magic in The Kalevala, the other being a sort of built-in elemental, natural magic (generally used by female characters). Sorcerers sing magic. Isn’t that cool? At least, it’s consistent with the inherent meaning of the word enchantment. Oh, and another cool detail: Longfellow used the rhythm of The Kalevala for Hiawatha.

Singing the runot, the songs, often became a profession for the blind. In fact, when Lonnröt compiled the runot from oral tradition, blind singers contributed the vast majority.

The stories themselves are generally distinct from other major cycles of mythology but now and then a familiar element pops up: a little Osiris here, a little Tiamat there, and a transition from pagan imagery to Christian at the end (clearly a late addition to the tales). The larger plotlines center on the exploits of three men: Väinämöinen, a powerful though not entirely pleasant wizard; Lemminkäinen, a brash, two-fisted womanizer; and Illmarinen, a magical smith, who seems to be a generally decent sort of dude. Illmarinen forged the sampo, which is very important. (I have no idea what exactly a sampo is, but it was all the rage in old Karelia. I suspect it’s what was glowing in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. And at the end of Lost In Translation, Bill Murray whispers to Scarlett Johannson what a sampo is. It’s probably the name of the child empress in The Neverending Story.)

This focus on male characters does not mean, however, that women are not important in The Kalevala. Far, far from it. Consistently, the most moving and enchanting portions relate to female characters. I guess you could say the male characters get a lot of the big, cinematic scenes but the heart of The Kalevala is in the emotional narratives of the women.

When first we meet Väinämöinen, the great magical being, we know full well he’s extraordinary before he has actually done anything. Why? Because first we learn of his mother, Ilmatar, and her amazing conception and pregnancy. A spirit of the air, impregnated by the sea, she swells and swells, well past human dimensions, and remains pregnant for more than seven centuries. When at last her son, Väinämöinen, emerges from her divine, elemental womb, he’s already ancient and venerable. Obviously, with an introduction like that, the reader knows this guy is big magic.

I’m not going to summarize the entire story, but I would like to focus on a section in the beginning.

Väinämöinen fights a singing duel with an impetuous and unwise youngster named Joukahainen. The noob gets pwned, or words to that effect. Specifically, Väinämöinen turns Joukahainen into a swamp. I like that. You know your ass is done for when you are magically pimp-slapped into a swamp. And, as he’s got all the merit of a thrift store douchebag, Joukahainen goes, “Wow, you kicked my ass in magic singing. Please unswampify me and you can marry my sister.”

Väinämöinen, not the most compassionate guy, goes, “Yay, I won a lady!”

Handing women off like prizes is both despicable and commonplace in mythology (and not just there). But here the story goes into the emotional reaction of the promised bride, Aino, who quite clearly would rather die than be handed off like auctioned cattle. She cries, and her family members ask her one after another why she’s so sad to be promised to the wizard. Her grief builds as they ask, and her full answer is such beautifully expressed anguish I had to put the book down a few times and sigh, tears in my eyes. (Note: The Oxford World’s Classics edition translated for meaning but not rhythm, so this doesn’t match the actual tune of the runot.)

Here is the concluding portion:

“My mood no better than tar
my heart no whiter than coal.
Better it would be for me
and better it would have been
had I not been born, not grown
not sprung into full size
in these evil days
in this joyless world.
Had I died a six-night old
and been lost as an eight-night-old
I would not have needed much—
a span of linen
a tiny field edge
a few tears from my mother
still fewer from my father
not even a few from my brother.”

Soon after, she drowns herself rather than marry Väinämöinen (that’s not the end of her story but I don’t want to give everything away). For all the amazing magic and adventure of The Kalevala, the tragedy of Aino is the part I think of the most. Without this heart-rending story The Kalevala would be unbalanced, focused on action more than consequence, overpowered by characters like Lemminkäinen, who basically thinks with his southern brain.

There’s a lot more that I could say. There are enormous birds, magical woodsmen, witches, a proto-Frankenstein resurrection, really tough elk, tricky wasps, a sampo—whatever the hell that is—a ton of spells, love, war and revenge. Rich, wonderful fantastical and imaginative throughout. But, in the immortal phrasing of LeVar Burton, “You don’t have to take my word for it.”

Jason Henninger works in Santa Monica, CA, and does not own a sampo.

The post The Beauty of The Kalevala appeared first on Reactor.

Eight SFF Books Written in Verse

TorSarah — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 16:00:42 +0000

Sometimes there is a tale so epic, so lyrical, so otherworldly that plain old prose can’t do it justice! That is when serious writers break out the verse. We’ve collected eight books across a variety of SFF genres that use verse to pluck their readers away form the workaday world and into stories that bend reality.

Let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!

Finding Baba Yaga by Jane Yolen

You think you know this story.
You do not.

As long as Natasha finishes all of her chores.

Jason and Medeia by John Gardner

Gardner transforms the ancient Greek play into a verse novel full of romantic longing, betrayal, and fury.

Northwood by Maryse Meijer

Northwood is a genre-bending hybrid horror story that riffs on myths and classic fairy tales as it unfolds in short passages and verse. A woman goes to the forest to create her art, but soon finds herself entangled with a violent married man. Years later, she is attempting to return to life, but she can’t shakes the desire to run back to the forest, and the wolf she knew there. Her perception shifts and bends, reality warps, she can’t be sure whether she’s reliving tales she’s heard in her youth—or creating a new one.

Can she free herself and leave the wilderness behind? Does she even want to?

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

An absolute classic, Autobiography of Red is a swooning love ballad and a harsh look at trauma all wrapped up into one beautiful, utterly unique book.

Omeros by Derek Walcott

Happiness by Frederick Pollack

Obviously, the wall doesn’t hold, but it does last long enough for Pollack to create an interesting thought experiment in verse form.

Bull by David Elliott

Minos thought he could
Pull a fast one
On me,
Poseidon!
God of the Sea!
But I’m the last one
On whom you
Should try such a thing.
The nerve of that guy.
The balls. The audacity.
I AM THE OCEAN!
I got capacity!

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

***

What are your favorite SFF tales in verse? Let us know in the comments—and don’t worry, using regular old prose is fine.

Originally published October 2018.

The post Eight SFF Books Written in Verse appeared first on Reactor.

Falling in Love With Speculative Poetry

TorSarah — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 14:00:04 +0000

Reading poetry sometimes feels like battling a giant squid: overwhelming, disorienting, and more than a little slippery. Poems can be elusive beings, evading comprehension and dissection. When you take an already chimeric beast and give it appendages of fantasy, science fiction, horror, or mythology—well, then it becomes another monster entirely.

Even just a few years ago, I would steer clear of poetry tables at book festivals, feeling that it was too frustrating of an artform to fully grasp. But now writing and reading poetry is a weekly pleasure for me, and I recently read the 2021 Rhysling Anthology—which specifically celebrates speculative poetry—from cover to cover.

What sparked my transformation? Following these two maxims unlocked my mind:

1. You don’t have to like ALL poetry.

This may seem obvious, since it’s not like you need to enjoy two hundred flavors in order to say you like ice cream. However, I’ve heard readers say, “I don’t really like fantasy” when the only fantasy they’ve read is Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. It’s easy to dismiss an entire category after only a few samples. If you generally dislike mainstream poetry, speculative poetry could be your gateway into verse.

One of the first poetry collections I truly enjoyed was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith—an ode to the universe, David Bowie, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even though much of it was nonsensical to me at first, it was delicious nonsense, with honeyed phrases and tender images that I chewed on for days, especially the opening lines of “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?”

“After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.”

2. Don’t aim to understand poetry; strive to experience it.

When I stopped treating poetry as if it were prose—quit mining for a coherent narrative, for a clear message—my frustration evaporated. I embraced uncertainty and even found joy in never completely untangling a poem’s meaning, allowing a sense of mystery to linger. Although poems can tell a story, poetry is predominantly a language-driven form where sound and sensation intersect.

Take a look at this stanza from Amal El-Mohtar’s Rhysling Award-winning poem “Peach-Creamed Honey,” which begs to be spoken aloud (in fact, you can listen to El-Mohtar perform the poem here):

…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.

This poem comes from El-Mohtar’s collection The Honey Month, in which twenty-eight flavors of honey are paired with tasting notes and literary reflections that belong in the realm of fairy tales. “Peach-Creamed Honey” is a sensual poem laced with innuendo, where every word sounds like an act of temptation and seduction.

Speculative poetry is a hybrid creature that combines elements of poetry and prose, in addition to blurring the line between realism and fabulism, giving it a unique approach that no other medium can replicate.

“Mainstream” vs. Speculative Poetry

To better understand what speculative poetry can achieve, we can put it under a microscope and see how this subgenre differs from mainstream poetry. Many classic poems from days of old could be said to have speculative elements: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” for example, and even the epic poems of Beowulf and The Odyssey, with their tales of hauntings, goblin fruit, dragons, and sirens. (Theodora Goss’ website “Poems of the Fantastic and Macabre” has an inexhaustive list of these types of older works.)

Speculative poet Bruce Boston emphasizes the difference in subject matter and the “stance” of the poet in his distinction between the two forms:

Mainstream poetry deals with the rendering and exploration of the here and now, reality as we know it, internal and external. The poet is often present in the poem as an ‘I’ voice, explicitly or implicitly. Speculative poetry has more to do with imagination, the world of dreams and the world as it could be. The stance of the speculative poet is closer to that of a fiction writer. If an ‘I’ voice appears in a speculative poem it is usually that of a fictional character rather than the author.

The two forms aren’t really a dichotomy so much as they are a spectrum. In contemporary poetry, some poets will reject the “speculative” label even when their work uses fantastical elements, whereas certain poems featured in science fiction and fantasy magazines don’t feel very speculative at all. The label isn’t as important as the poem’s effect.

All poetry shares the broader purpose of defamiliarization—casting the familiar in an unfamiliar light so that we can find fresh meanings, new wrinkles and scars in faces we’ve known our whole lives. As writer Stephen Moss put it, “A good poem looks closely at the world; does that Martian thing of trying to see it for the first time. Everything else—the emotional charge, the lyrical delight, the intellectual pleasure—is secondary.”

So, if poetry’s purpose is—at least in part—to paint the familiar in an unfamiliar light, then what happens when the subject matter is also deeply unfamiliar, or doesn’t even exist? The effect is often an added layer of defamiliarization. Speculative poetry transmutes the ordinary into the extraordinary, supercharging the reader’s attention on one particular idea or image.

The ocean and love are familiar enough elements in poetry, and they’re spotlighted in Fran Wilde’s “The Sea Never Says It Loves You” published in Uncanny Magazine. However, it’s in how Wilde presents “you” as the lover of an uncaring sea that we view the familiar through an unfamiliar prism. The poem feels playful in its absurd premise (“You could go to school with the sea / You might pass it in the hall”), yet grows more melancholy as it continues, ending on the dissolution of the relationship:

And you are bathed in salt spray, wishing.
Wishing you were water,
or that the sea would whisper from a shell the name of the first song
you danced to
Or say the name it gave you before it swallowed you up.

What speculative poetry can do that mainstream poetry can’t is heighten the experience of the unfamiliar by twisting reality into new shapes. Through that subversion of the real, we can stare into the pool at our own reflections and better understand what we see.

Opening my mind to these possibilities revealed the varied powers that speculative poems can wield: to imagine, to delight, to ignite, and to converse.

To Imagine

a bloodied clutch of crowns, leaf-clashed,
coin-profiles chinking a child’s singsong,
the one pure silence staring
like a hacked man’s throat into the blade.

What the hell did I just read?!

That was my first reaction, anyway. The second is “I want to read this aloud, over and over again.” These lines from Sonya Taaffe’s poem “Radio Banquo” in Strange Horizons seem to present Banquo’s death from Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a radio broadcast, the diction filled with allusions to the Bard with “furious nothing” and “signal ghosting.” For me, the poem’s gravitational pull comes from that unexpected juxtaposition of old and modern. The poet gifts me with a sensory experience that I couldn’t have imagined on my own.

Warping time and place in speculative poetry can be a way for us to reexamine our relationships with each other and the world around us. In C.S.E. Cooney’s “Postcards from Mars” in Stone Telling, the narrator’s mother takes a one-way trip to Mars after saving up every penny, sending back monthly postcards to Earth. The narrator pretends her mom is dead instead—until she discovers that her mom has disappeared on Mars, and the poem ends on a bittersweet note:

I study her postcards —
Search for clues, secrets, whisperings
Footprints in the red, red dust.

I finish the jam, wash out the jar.
Three pennies, a dime and a quarter so far.

This poem invites the reader to examine a complex mother/daughter relationship, creating an even greater emotional distance between characters by using Mars as a setting. As poet Theodora Goss has said, “…every story or poem we write is necessarily about us, whether it involves dragons, robots, or accountants. We can’t help writing about our world, however obliquely. We can’t escape our context.”

As in speculative prose, speculative poetry lets us imagine new societal structures, voice warnings about potential futures, and envision identity, gender, and sexuality through a lens that’s unencumbered by our present reality. We can explore our hopes and fears through the hyperbole of strange worlds and what they challenge us to reconsider about our current lives—a way to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

To Delight

A poem doesn’t need to be serious or groundbreaking to fulfill its purpose. Some poems are solely designed to entertain: to inspire a smile at a surprising turn of phrase or an appreciative sigh at a poignant image. Narrative poems that tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end can feel like morsels of microfiction that have been artfully arranged to guide the reader’s experience.

Mary Soon Lee’s The Sign of the Dragon is an epic fantasy story told through over three hundred poems, and Lee crafts each poem in a way that allows for a new discovery in how storytelling can be experienced. One poem jumps between snippets of conversations the new king has with his tailor, stableboy, and generals as he prepares for his succession. Another poem is written from the perspective of the king’s horses. Battle scenes are painted in impressionistic strokes to capture the chaos:

(Before, an instant earlier,
Tsung’s pulse pounded loud
as the wind’s wet rush,
as the clash of metal on metal,
as the screams, the battle drums,
whilst Tsung rode beside the king,
the horses maneuvering
as if they were a thousand shadows
of a single faultless form—

That continual string of novelty in form and language feels like dancing at a masquerade ball with a dozen different partners.

Tim Pratt’s “Soul Searching” in Strange Horizons also plays with form to deliver whimsical surprises (this poem also won the 2005 Rhysling Award). It opens:

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)

The enjambment with the first line gives us this seemingly normal premise (“On weekends I help my old neighbor look”), which is immediately subverted as our eyes jump to the next line (“for his soul”). It’s like the turn in the punchline of a joke or the cherry cordial when you bite into a chocolate truffle—that instant sweetness of surprise. Poetry encourages creative risks, leading to unexpected uses of language and punctuation, like the way Pratt’s parentheses create the effect of forgetfulness that the narrator must be hearing in the older man’s dialogue.

This poem also underscores why speculative elements can be essential. By untethering the poem from reality, the poet has access to fresh imagery, like picturing a soul hidden in an egg that’s been hidden inside a sheep. The literal take on “soul searching” makes the abstract concrete.

It’s a whimsical but deeply sad poem, as the old neighbor eventually explains that he wants to break the egg so that he can finally lose his immortality and die. Even when poems tell a story in an accessible style, they can touch on deeper truths about nebulous concepts such as heroism and war, mortality and old age.

To Ignite

All words are fightin’ words.

In her insightful Tor.com article “How to Read Poetry 101,” Amal El-Mohtar shares the story of her poet grandfather who was imprisoned in Lebanon for his political views, which forever shaped her view of poetry’s purpose:

I grew up being taught that poetry is the language of resistance—that when oppression and injustice exceed our capacity to frame them into words, we still have poetry.

Adding speculative elements to resistance poetry can amplify its intensity. I was struck by the use of a science fiction framework when I first read Franny Choi’s poem “Introduction to Quantum Theory” from her collection Soft Science, which begins, “There are only so many parallel universes / that concern us.” From that premise, she imagines a universe “in which our mothers haven’t learned to wrap / their bones in each small grief they’ve found,” and a universe where “no one’s child washes / blue, ashore.” Choi highlights the absence of certain features in other universes as a way to remind us of the failings in our own.

When I read poetry, I’m seeking out that shock to the nervous system. “Birth, Place” by Brandon O’Brien in Uncanny Magazine embodies that idea right from the title, with its separation of “birth” and “place.” Immediately, you know that this is going to be a poem about identity and the loss of homeland. Even from the opening stanza, O’Brien pulls no punches:

I made this land myself.
I put dirt in my own
mouth and hoped it
would mature; you made
manure of the bodies
of our mothers, asked
us to chew the remains,

The poem invokes the orishas of healing and rivers in the creation of the land. It feels like a story of displacement in the wake of colonization (“Your legacy’s already drowned me”), and the narrator is reclaiming that ancestral land—land that is an extension of the body, the dirt in their mouth, home caked around them. Amongst the whispering spirits and the rebuilding of a planet shines a hope for future generations in the poem’s powerful final lines:

I will plant a time I cannot see
for children I will not know
among those bones,

and what grows, laughing,
will not be as easy to pluck
as I once was.

Speculative poems present a challenge: look inward and reexamine the way you see the world.

To Converse

Listen closely enough and you can hear artists talking to each other through their art, whether to their contemporaries, or creators long dead, or to future generations. Verse is a vehicle for conversations about genre tropes or touchstones.

Feminist retellings in poems reimagine fairy-tale figures with greater agency, subverting stories that are part of our collective consciousness. In the titular poem from her collection Snow White Learns Witchcraft, Theodora Goss imagines what Snow White’s life might be like in old age, after she marries the prince and has a daughter of her own. Who is she now that she’s in the “Evil Queen’s” position as a beautiful woman whose hair has become “as white as snow”?

I’ll walk along the shore collecting shells,
read all the books I’ve never had the time for,
and study witchcraft. What should women do
when they grow old and useless? Become witches.
It’s the only role you get to write yourself.

These retellings are another type of defamiliarization, taking the “familiar” out of familiar stories. Speculative poems converse with stories outside the genre, too, like how Dominik Parisien’s “A Portrait of the Monster as an Artist” in Mythic Delirium is a clear play on James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Brandon O’Brien’s “Cento for Lagahoos” in Strange Horizons borrows from twenty other poets; he took familiar pieces and composed new meaning from them, conversing with the realm of poetry as a whole. Instead of erasure poetry, it’s highlight poetry.

The challenge and inventiveness of Sherese Francis’ poem “Celestial Mary (Galilean Daughter)” in Apex Magazine comes from how the poem puts itself in conversation with the Bible, focusing on Mary’s perspective on a metaphysical level. Two stanzas appear side by side, making the poem feel like a conversation, followed by a centered stanza. Forward slashes break words into units of sound or meaning, which has a disorienting effect:

a here/tic: one with free will to choose
ooooooodis/urn/er of dogma
oooooodivine wil/l/d power

Through innovations in form and content, speculative poetry furthers what’s possible in the genre.

The Future of Speculative Poetry

We gain so much more from poetry when we stop fighting the giant squid and instead marvel at the way it dances in the deep and let it drag us off into the depths. I’ve always been in love with language, but poetry reshaped the way I thought about how the world can be experienced through a handful of words—and for me, that’s the true purpose of speculative poetry.

If you’d like to dive into the genre, the Rhysling Anthology is a fantastic way to sample a variety of voices, as are the panoply of amazing magazines mentioned throughout this article. I also highly recommend FIYAH Literary Magazine, Polu Texni, Speculative North, Augur, Asimov’s, and The Future Fire, and the archives of Goblin Fruit and Liminality, among others.

The future of speculative poetry is in your hands—because it’s only through reading the words that we give them life.

Originally published July 2021.

Diane Callahan spends her days shaping stories as a writer and developmental editor. Her YouTube channel, Quotidian Writer, provides practical tips for aspiring authors.

The post Falling in Love With Speculative Poetry appeared first on Reactor.

Two From Weird Tales

arensan — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 16:58:00 +0000

TROY: The Movie
By John M. Ford

Originally published in Weird Tales, Spring 1994

The wind still blows from Hisarlik
Shaking the great white sign, four letters
In painted plywooden proclamation
That this is the City of Dreams:
The Place of the Epic, Where Heroes Lived
And sometimes Died. If you will cut
As Schliemann cut, guided by the tale,
Through the hill, the cities,
Ordering the setups and scenes into continuity,
What runs through the many-gated light
Of the fabulous Moviola
Will be not Homer not Virgil not Truth
But in its own way real
As anything in the darkness:
Popcorn and figs in the lobby,
Ladies remove your hats,
The lights go down—

* * *

You know from the first Cinemascope frame
An endless expanse of Monument Valley
Elmer Bernstein score thundering, soaring,
That Achilles and Hector cannot both walk into the sunset alive;
The whole 70mm screen isn’t big enough for the two of them.
It’s over a woman. It’s over range rights.
It’s tons of gold in a fortress beyond the border.
It’s about men burnt hard in civil wars
Banded together for whatever it is a man’s gotta do
Or what he’s afraid of not doing—
They shoulda been saddle pals, you know that,
But the gold of Troy and the face of Helen do funny things.
And even then Hector, the best bronco-buster
Man or god ever saw, mighta shoulda said
“She ain’t rightly yours, Paris, give her back,”
But along comes Patroclus the Kid
All dressed up in his pal Achilles’ fancy suit,
Callin’ Hector out:
The Kid’s fast, but we all know Hector’s faster,
Bang you’re dead.
Nothing will do then. Achilles howls
Like a wild coyote at the sky
And the Destiny Makers send him down a gunbelt
Cut from the hides of Apollo’s oxen,
Hanging a pure white silver Hephaestus .45.
He straps on the gun
And the lucky spurs his ma gave him
(One of ’em busted back at Chancellorsville)
For the last walkdown under the Trojan walls.
Hector goes out game, but he sees the loco glint
Off Achilles’ eye and sixgun and like any sane varmint
Aims for gettin’ the Hell out of Dodge;
But then he stops. He won’t die yellow,
Maybe, or maybe there’s a mirage in Apollo’s sun,
Or the ole Injun hoodoo’s on him. Whatever,
He stops and he turns and the two of ’em draw down.
Bang.
The screen, the music, spin.
Last roundup, Hector breaker of horses.
Achilles ain’t done. Two more shots,
So the dead warrior’s spirit
Will wander between the winds forever.
Priam’s turn to howl.
The fastest gun alive blows smoke off the muzzle,
Whistles up his horses,
Turns and shows that busted spur.
Bang.

We now take leave of the Western
Electric Noiseless Recording System
For tinted orthochrome black and white,
Rupert Julian at the mighty Wurlitzer,
Title card:

THE GREEKS AND TROJANS DECIDE
PARIS SHOULD FIGHT MENELAUS
FOR HELEN’S HAND
(AND THE REST OF HER)

Cut to Helen’s bedroom, where
Priam’s son, in crested helm
And baggy boxers, looks for a hiding place.
Title:

NOBODY ASKED PARIS . . .

He tries on one of Helen’s gowns
Comes up a bit thin, but
All the fruit in the bowl is different sizes.
Two big lugs pound pound on the muslin door:

“TIME TO SEE MENELAUS AND DIE!”

Paris frantic holds his head, notices the helmet,
Chucks it out the window.
It crowns a passing Trojan delivery boy
(Hornrims, toga, hightop sneakers)
Before he half knows what to do
The big guys grab the schlep and hustle him off.
Music higher tootlier now.
The little guy gets armed, sort of, everything’s too big,
The spear (he turns and bops two people)
The breastplate, the sandals (he bunches his socks)
The greaves, the belt (pants around ankles)
He scratches his head over the brazen jockstrap.
Then in a flash and puff of smoke there’s a lady present:

APHRODITE
GODDESS OF LOVE
(IT’S ALL HER FAULT)

The helmet’s over the little guy’s head
So she thinks he’s Paris
(Hey it’s comedy)
She tells him the fix is in
(The motion for the Trojan’s
From the goddess with the bodice,
The Greek who’s got the grief
Is in the stew from the blue,
As they’ll say in the talkie remake)
Big hug. Smackeroo. Vanish. Thud.
Field of battle: Menelaus is big as a Mack
Sennett truck, black beard, black mustache, black derby hat.
Hector and Odysseus, in striped shirts, whistles, caps,
Toss for first spear

IT’S IN HOMER, FOLKS
BOOK THREE
NO KIDDING!

Paris (our boy, that is) wins the flip. Spear’s
Bigger than he is, but he gives it the old college try
(Music: Freddie the Freshman)
And Aphrodite transparently double exposed
(No pun really) helps the thing along whizzbang.
Menelaus catches it, picks his teeth. His throw
Punches through Paris’ toga between his kneecaps
Trojan ladies faint away thump thump thump leaving
The real Paris standing there in drag
The little guy steps clear, tidying his skirt.
The goddess points an invisible finger
Closeup: bolts on big M’s sword untwist:
He draws. Clunk.
Big man chases little man all over the map
Undercranked, sped up, always good for a laugh
They grapple, Menelaus twists Paris’ helmet round and round
Till poink it comes off empty
Pan down: our hapless hatless hero grins and shrugs.
More charley chase until the second reel’s nearly gone
The schlep’s cornered, Mooselaus closing in
Organist plays train whistles and we crosscut
Little guy big guy
Little guy big guy
Little guy BIG GUY
Cut to
Mount Olympus, the Gods at Home
(Zeus zapping dartboard, Poseidon walking fish,
Hebe shaking martinis)
Mrs. Hera Cleaver leans out the door:

“APHRO-DI-TEE! DINNER’S READY!”

Love goddess grabs erstwhile love object by scruff
Zoooooom into sky
Menelaus knocks down cardboard wall, staggers off hat over eyes.
The real Paris (still dressed to kill)
Gets yanked out of frame:

FOR SOME,
THERE’S HELEN TO PAY . . .

Back on Olympus, the shrimp is in Love’s lap literally:

FOR OTHERS,
A LITTLE BIT OF HEAVEN . . .

Our hero pulls down a cloud like a shade;
Silhouette smooch;
Iris out.

* * *

The lights on the city walls cast rippling pools of light
That hide more than they show.
Down these mean streets walks Ajax,
Stronger than anyone,
A man who doesn’t seem to care whether
Gods or heroes or anydamnbody’s on his side;
Has he got a side, the dumb ox, the moose
Unalloyed, the Front-de-Boeuf among knights,
Deaf to the laughter of Greek and Trojan both?
You load him up,
Point him at the Trojans, and he kills, Iron Mike
Hammering the many-gated city.
Just now as there is no one to kill
As there is never anyone to talk to
Ajax stands in the Trojan torchlight, feeling the Trojan wind.
He knows the Hisarlik wind is a crazy wind;
It blows the dust of ages past the tired walls
To scour the shining helmets of dead heroes
And when men listen to it for too long
They hear gods talking.
Where are the gods now? Ajax doesn’t hear them.
The day he did has gone. Zeus the old lecher
Is boss of bosses now, practically half legit;
White-robed, nobody touches him now.
Apollo owns a theatre where the performers use the rear door.
Athena drives by with the dark windows rolled up tight.
Aphrodite? She dresses nicer than she did.
The little heroes tossed around below by the crazy wind
Still do the Destiny Makers’ fighting,
Take the long fall for them like always,
Suckered by the crazy wind’s promise of the Olympian move,
The shot at making their own destiny.
It’s all lies, Ajax knows, but he stays under the walls,
It’s all lies but he takes the punches,
It’s all lies but he defends the hollow ships.
In his tent, the light from Troy flickering on, off, on, off,
He holds the weapon a dead hero gave him
And plots the insoluble mystery.

COMING SOON TO THIS THEATRE:
From the producers of Quo Vadis, Quo Vadis We Vadis II,
And The Son of Hercules vs. Some Pro Wrestlers,
Gimme Tax Shelter Films presents
The Aeneid
All Roads Lead to Rome. . . .
Starring a Large Number of Extremely
Pulchritudinous Italian Ladies
And Some Guy from a TV Show
As Aeneas
ALSO AVAILABLE AT THE REFRESHMENT COUNTER:
The Odyssey* Soundtrack Album

*Not to be confused with that Stanley Kubrick movie with all the boring classical stuff on the soundtrack.

Featuring the hit singles
“Sirens on the Rocks”
“Nobody Calypsos Like Calypso Do”
“Well, Telemachus (What Did You Do in the War, Dad?)”
“Ways of Knowing Each Other” (Love Theme from The Odyssey)
Available on LP, Cassette, and CD (CD contains two bonus tracks we didn’t
really use in the movie)

NOW BACK TO OUR FEATURE
PRESENTATION
BUT FIRST A NEWSREEL
SO YOU HAVE TIME TO BUY SOME MORE
POPCORN

Black and white a little longer,
And documentarily grainy:
When the cinema wants to be real it shakes the camera.
Cassandra ties a scarf around her head
Picks up a rush broom, goes to sweep
Streets clear of the bits of topless towers.
A tramcar rattles by, a little car two-ended
As her memory. She knew in 1938
When her relative — uncle? said
“See who I have brought home with me,
See with whom I have divided mine own,”
And now they are sealed within the city,
Shaken by the Achaian guns that chew the stones
As those within chew books for their binding glue
Eating the paper words are written upon.
Once in each year, when Persephone
Tosses in uneasy bliss, and her mother
Withdraws softness and color from the world, then the chariots
Walk on water, and the morsels that make more war possible
Trickle in from the uncles far away, the desolation
Wrought by an abduction easing the desolation
Likewise made. War they say is like that.
For Cassandra life is like that;
The inevitable bending its back to bite itself.
She is not beautiful, Priam’s fairest. We know that
Historical beauty was invented by von Sternberg;
Only Helen and Dietrich will be spared this curse.
Cassandra knows her own death like her own body
And she knows too the last joke of all, that in 1951
The studio will recut all extant prints
To defocus Trojan heroism
And escape the wrath of the committees.
Her fragments will lie waiting for a Schliemann of the negatives.
This is the destiny made for her:
The endless tramride between life and the grave.

* * *

Odysseus shoves the clip home in his Walther PPK
Diomedes his companion opens Channel D
Their mission
Which being heroes they naturally accept
Is to enter Troy itself and steal
The only operational prototype
Intermediate range solid state laser guided Pallas Module
Latest in the McGuffin series.
The Achaian agents’ last operation,
The Arrows of Hercules Affair,
(You remember the great aerial stuntwork over Lemnos)
Was a cakewalk compared to this.
They are dressed in leather and Kevlar and the teeth of boars
And armed with the weapons of terror:
The silenced bow, the jet greaves,
The bronze sword of innumerable deadly functions.
The Destiny Makers themselves have sent a heron
(High Efficiency Reconnaissance Observation Node)
As spotter and close air support.
The agents disappear into the ethical darkness.
The Other Side plays the game as well, of course
Though not so well; Dolon of the Committee for Trojan Security
Is out there too. His bad luck.
Diomedes puts a quiet round past his head, phunt,
While Odysseus, master of deception, dons a latex mask
And asks the telling questions. Poor Dolon,
He’s the patsy; you know what happens to him.
The Achaians pierce the enemy stronghold and raise Hades,
Dispose of countless Thracian extras
And Rhesos the criminal mastermind
In a fury of explosions, collapsing sets, and wise-cracks,
Escaping at last in Rhesos’ personal armed super-chariot.
Congratulations from M
-enelaus. A thought for Moneypen
-elope back home. The war is far from over, though;
Double O
-dysseus will return in
From Calypso with Love.

* * *

A pre-title map of Troy city and nation
Dissolves through some splendid high-tech animation
Into a crane shot of the swell population
Cue overture, Dolby with full orchestration
Now swoop on Troy’s walls, and its grand ocean view
So what it’s a model, they win Oscars too
Cue the lights and dancing waters,
Cue King Priam and his daughters
Gals in fishnets, guys in tailcoats
Shiny floors and woodwind wailnotes
Scored for jazz and fingersnap
Priam’s court knows how to tap

Hey King Priam
Give us a moment now
Hey King Priam
Lend us your ear
You may have noticed Menelaus
Has an army here to slay us
And we think it’s time your Paris
Reconsidered his dear

Now we need young lovers, a pair is what’s expected
He’s Troilus and she’s Cressida, the scenarist’s directed
No one in any major market will have read the play
And some young comic Pandarus can walk his scenes away
The kids are shot through colored filters indicating joy
Song video in embryo, the Lovers’ Theme from Troy:

This didn’t begin as something exceptional
Sometimes it’s hard to see
The castle for all the stone
We just walked into something exceptional
No way that one could be
This wonderful all alone

The complications complicate, as complications do
As Boy Meets Girl and Loses Her while there’s a war on too;
Enough of that. To raise suspense we redirect the action;
A song with both contesting sides would be a cute distraction.
Now Trojans largely stay in Troy, the Greeks down on the seaside,
But movies can do anything. Besides, we need a B-side.
So Priam, Paris, Agamemnon, Menelaus jilted
In parallel sing barbershop (we use a split screen, tilted)
About how fickle femalefolk have bollixed up their lives,
A light mysogynistic tune, we call it simply “Wives.”
But to return to real romance (before we all get lynched)
We turn to bold Odysseus, whose love is firmly clinched
He wants to see his lady wife, who’s leagues and leagues away,
He’s in good with Athena, though, so simply has to pray
And Pallas on Olympus, smartest goddess of ’em all
Is switchboard operator for a telepathic call:

Odysseus: Hello Olympus, hello Athena
Won’t you put me through to where the grass grows greener
Hello Penelope, wish I was gonna be home
Penelope: Yes, this is Ithaca, surely we’ll take it
We’ve got a connection and we sure won’t break it
Hello Odysseus, miss you so much you don’t know

We now turn our attentions to Achilles, mighty man
Who’s got a little grievance that’s about to hit the fan
He had a gal, Briseis, he was given as a gift
But Agamemnon swiped her, and is bold Achilles miffed
He figures if the other heroes feel that way about him
Then they can simply go ahead and win the war without him
He steps out of the action with a dancing girl or three
(Briseis gets some really stormin’ choreography)

I’m mad (he’s mad)
Does it matter at who
So mad (he’s mad)
Tell you just what I’ll do
I’ll take off my armor, this bronze-plated bulk
I’ll put up my sword and I’ll sit here and sulk
I’m mad (he’s mad)
So I hardly can speak
So mad (you bet)
Gonna quit bein’ Greek
My momma’s a sea nymph, my buddies are gods
I think all you heroes are stinky old sods
You wanna fight Trojans, I’ll even the odds
‘Cause Achilles is just plain mad
(Ain’t gonna take it)
Achilles is just plain mad

Let’s quickly return to the plot we left floating,
To Troilus and Cressida, lovers emoting,
(You haven’t forgotten them? Okay, just checking)
They’re up on a tower, PG-rated necking
And just when you’re sick of their starcrossed affection
The enemy fleet scoots the seaward direction
The ships silhouette as the sun is declinin’
Leaving only this horse and a fella named Sinon
A silvertongued Greek
And an absolute sneak
Who lies into sometime the end of next week
Laocoon sneers, says the horse is a fake
Exits left (just pursued, keep it light) by a snake
So they bring the horse in. Cue the fog and the dark
A trap door goes slam, armored guys disembark

Ranks of bronze and black and blue
What is a soldier boy to do
Pull up your greaves and run some Trojan through
Ranks of bronze and aches and pains
Here for a soldier’s ill-got gains
Pull down your helmet, bash some Trojan’s brains

And they set Troy alight and they bust the gates in
All in grand Technicolor like Gone With the Wind
We bring Troi-boy and Whatsername back to reprise
We’ve got the whole audience down on their knees
They’ll weep and wring hands till their popcorn goes soggy
When here comes Odysseus armed to the noggy
And just when you think that true love’s on the skids
Odysseus smiles and says, “That way out, kids.”
Troilus gulps and grabs Cressida. They’re both home free
(Telepathic approval from Penelope)
Comes another bold Greek in his burnished bronze suit
It’s Diomedes, arms full of vittles and loot:
“Hey Odysseus! What are you standing there for?”
He replies, “I’m just watching the end of the war. . . .”
The camera cranes up. Fires in darkness diminish,
The music crescendos. We got a sock finish.
Fade to black. Credits roll. House lights up. Play the theme.
Hey, it’s only a movie. A celluloid dream.

* * *

The wind still blows from Hisarlik
Down through and over the stones of the Troys of the tales;
Fluttering the pages of the mind,
Flickering in the strong white beam of the eye,
Rustling the draperies of the great movie palace of the heart
The tales and Troy endure
As long as there is film to show the light
And corn to pop in the lobby.

SHADOWS ON THE ROAD
by Robert E. Howard

Originally published in Weird Tales, May 1930

Nial of Ulster, welcome home!
What saw you on the road to Rome?—
Legions thronging the fertile plains?
Shouting hordes of the country folks
With the harvest heaped in their groaning wains?
Shepherd piping under the oak?
Laurel chaplet and purple cloak?
Smokes of the feasting coiled on high?
Meadows and fields of the rich, ripe green
Lazing under a cobalt sky?
Brown little villages sleeping between?
What saw you on the road to Rome?
“Crimson tracks in the blackened loam,
“Skeleton trees and a blasted plain,
“A heap of skulls and a child insane,
“Ruin and wreck and the reek of pain
“On the wrack of the road to Rome.”

Nial, what saw you in Rome?—
Purple emperors riding there,
Down aisles with walls like marble foam,
To the golden trumpet’s mystic flare?
Dark-eyed women who bind their hair,
As they bind men’s hearts, with a silver comb?
Spires that cleave through the crystal air,
Arch and altar and amaranth stair?
Nial, what saw you in Rome?
“Broken shrines in the sobbing gloam,
“Bare feet spurning the marble flags,
“Towers fallen and walls digged up,
“A woman in chains and filthy rags.
“Goths in the Forum howled to sup,
“With an emperor’s skull for a drinking-cup.
“The black arch clave to the broken dome.
“The Coliseum invites the bat.
“The Vandal sits where the Caesars sat;
“And the shadows are black on Rome.”

Nial, Nial, now you are home,
Why do you mutter and lonely roam?
“My brain is sick and I know no rest;
“My heart is stone in my frozen breast,
“For the feathers fall from the eagle’s crest
“And the bright sea breaks in foam—
“Kings and kingdoms and empires fall,
“And the mist-black ruin covers them all,
“And the honey of life is a bitter gall
“Since I traveled the road to Rome.”

“Shadows on the Road” originally appeared in Weird Tales, May 1930

The post Two From Weird Tales appeared first on Reactor.