Full Table of Contents

Features

• Quarks & Strings • Marge Simon
• President's Message • Deborah P Kolodji
• Stealth SF • Denise Dumars
• Call for 2009 Rhysling Nominations
• Reviews from the Small Press • G. O. Clark, David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Sandra Lindow

Poetry

• Free Falling: Editor's Note • Bruce Boston
• The Treachery • Thomas Wiloch
• The Abnormality • Thomas Wiloch
• My People • Paul L. Bates
• Our Wings • Kurt Kirchmeier
• The Inverted World • Andrew Joron
• Apollo VII, December 21, 1968 • John Tumlin
• Astra Atra Inca • Robert Borski
• A Shower of Fireflies • Ursula Pflug
• The Cardmaker • Jennifer Crow
• The Brains of Oz • Adam Cornford
• The Mask of Souls • Malcolm Deeley
• Night Reverie • Phillip A. Ellis
• Remembering Astarte's Three Moons While Stranded on Earth • Terrie Leigh Relf
• Violin • Duane Ackerson
• A Winter's Night • David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• A Land Lost • Phillip A. Ellis
• A Living City • Rose Lemberg
• Sound and Light • Ann K. Schwader
• The Switches You Have To Search For • Alex Dally MacFarlane

Editor's Choice Poems

My People, by Paul L. Bates

Nicholas admires his work on the sand castle, adds another pebble to the tower ramparts, listens to the surf's steady pounding lullaby. "My people," he whispers.

"Nicholas," his mother shouts, putting too much emphasis on the first syllable.

"What?" he answers without enthusiasm, the sound lost in the sea breeze, born off by the tide.

"Nicholas!" she roars, standing up like a hydra rearing but one of its ugly heads.

He looks at her and scowls.

"You need more sun block, and put your hat back on. You'll get sunstroke."

Reluctantly, he reaches for the white baseball cap, half buried in the sand.

He brushes the damp tan granules into the rushing wind, which responds by snatching the hated cap from his grip, sending it tumbling down the beach to Nicholas' utter delight.

"My people," he says, watching the hat spinning into the surf.

"You get that cap at once—do you hear me?"

"Yes'm," Nicholas says.

He kicks the sand castle to pieces before running down the beach, glad for an opportunity to be beyond earshot of the dragon.

Dark cumulus clouds, seemingly from nowhere, billow across the horizon, stacking thick blue-gray mountains one atop the other, knocking them down, stacking them higher.

Nicholas pauses at the water's edge, feels the cool sea tickling his ankles and toes, looks up, shields his eyes from the wind.

"My people," he says.

The ocean tumbles the baseball cap, spits it back upon the beach at Nicholas' feet. He snatches it up and continues running, oblivious to the shrieking waving harpy, shrinking in the distance, clutching her own sun bonnet in the face of the coming storm.

The voice of the thunder joins the chorus of the surf and wind. Nicholas runs faster. He flings the cap back into the sea, spreads his arms, lets the wind lift him into the air. He will have none of it. Not the hat, not the commanding voice of authority, not the schoolroom that lurks at summer's end, not the workaday world that looms before him at childhood's end.

"My people," he cries, rising high above the sea.

Far below a terrified woman cringes before the pelting sand and shouts the hated name that once bound him to this place—shouts it like a broken spell lost upon the building storm.

---

Our Wings, by Kurt Kirchmeier

Our wings have changed. The membranous tissue grew hard and unforgiving as we slept, as we waited for the world to wake us from our dreams. Instead, the world forgot us, abandoned our magic for mountains of plastic and steel. Forest to forest, field to ravaged field; so much of the magic is gone now, and that which remains has turned.

Our wings have changed. Metallic now, and razor sharp, they hang like burdens on our backs. The ground shudders when we beat them, blades of grass becoming rigid, like filaments of iron. Trees petrify at our passing, leaves solidifying into curled wafers of burnished aluminum.

Our wings have changed. Where once we flew, we now must walk. Our footfalls echo behind us, waves of liquefied steel rolling out from our heels, enveloping the foliage like so much morning dew. The alloy hardens over flowers and shrubs, traps animals within their burrows.

Our wings have changed, and so the world will, too. Forest to forest, field to ravaged field. The air grows thinner.