Online Issue Contents

• Wyrms & Wormholes

• Editor's Choice Poems
  • Better Read Than Dead * Robert Borski
  • "Pneumatic Music in Common Time," by M. Ray Vidrine
  • "Light," by Dolo Diaz
  • "Dog Days: A Postmortem Love Poem," by Taylor Hamann Los

• Full Table of Contents

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Wyrms & Wormholes: Haunting Time

I revel in the grand multiplicity and distinct character of words, words like foofaraw, maudlin, taxi, insubordination, plumb, and zeitgeist (literally time ghost/spirit in German). That last characterizes grand movements and gestures of eras, and yet, since we might slice time as thinly as turkey (as turkey is a temporal multitude), I might hazard characterizing this moment as one where speculative poets who submit to Star*Line are obsessed with issues of power and agency. I cannot say that will be reflected clearly throughout this issue—the most overt references to current political issues and so-called artificial intelligence are frequent topics for submitted poems, but often tend toward such a thin slice of turkey that I pass them by without a nibble—but it seems clear to me that whether it’s the Big Brother of political authoritarianism or the Big Brother of technological authoritarianism, the bigness and definitely unbrotherlyness of our world at large is being worked through by our poets.

I am grateful to be sitting in this chair, reading poems, knowing that out there, all across our complicated cosmos, you are writing poetry. That knowledge alone warms my heart enough to spark new fires to burn away the old, making space for the new.

—John Reinhart, Star*Line Editor

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Editor's Choice Poems

"Better Read Than Dead," by Robert Borski

Caveat lector. This is what
it should say at every library door.
Enter, and you are just one eyeblink,
scan, and flip of page away
from the necromancy of reading,
from exposing once more to the light
of day what has formerly been
regarded as, if not dead, at least
in serious suspension, especially
given its confining boards
and dust jacket shroud,
to say nothing of its interior pallor.

But at any rate,
now animated via check out
for however long or brief a moment,
the revenant is allowed to go
out into the world,
only days later to wind up
undergoing loss of life again,
then reinterment sans obit or epitaph
(the arid code of Melvil Dewey
does not count), unperfumed
except for the smell of pulp,
dark formaldehyde of print,
and faint musk of a librarian's shelving touch
along the foxed spine.

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"Pneumatic Music in Common Time," by M. Ray Vidrine

Lamplighters clop with vacuumed boots
Kicking on mechanisms
Illuminating crackling posts
To project skyward
Next to the piazza
With a solo horn player
Crafting serenades
To the vanishing stars

Down the street
Metronomic consistency
Begins to slow
As the pump press and
Hydraulics in the gasworks
Begin to cease
With whimpered wind
The brass drifts to silence

While across the bridge
The metered solars are repurposed
From breath to current
Into electroliers disturbing
All eyes leading starward
Seeking beauty through the night
Gazing at orbs
But hearing a low drone of bass

As a soloist turns into an ensemble
The cacophony of effects centralizes
Reverberating on the shop fronts crashing
And doubling the sounds to such a loud volume

It seizes suddenly
Fiery volume replaced by darkness
A few look starward at the fresh sky
Replacing artificial with actual.

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"Light," by Dolo Diaz

A pinprick—
you look,
and it reels you in,
magnetically, precipitously.

Your atoms
disintegrate,
then integrate
with theirs.

Inexorable,
unbearably vibrational—
an explosion of every nucleus,
yet contained,
pressurized,
roiling but unburst.

You question the nature of separation,
the illusion of barriers and borders,
the inescapable merging—

of all into one,
and all and all and all
into one.

The energy of fusing the atom—unleashed,
obliterating the energy of splitting it.

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"Dog Days: A Postmortem Love Poem," by Taylor Hamann Los

        The summer I was decapitated,
        I cradled my head in my hands,
        river of rosewood & agony
        dusking the dirt below.

Still, I turned my ears
toward the humid hum,
days of rabbits & wild-
flowers so delicate
I could tear sepal
from stalk & never
find out if he loves
me or not. Then came
the settling: of air,
of hours, of my body’s
trembling. There, in
the evening grass,
a salamander slipped
from its log to hunt
as I, segmented
as annelids
in the amphibian’s
mouth, brushed
the hair from my eyes

                        almost tenderly.

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Full Table of Contents

Departments

• Wyrms & Wormholes * John Reinhart
• SFPA Announcements
• President’s Message * Brian U. Garrison
• From the Small Press * Herb Kauderer, David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Lisa Timpf
• Stealth SF * “Put Down Your Flamethrower” * Denise Dumars
• SpecPo Publishing * Interview with Arley Sorg and Shingai Njeri Kagunda * Jean-Paul Garnier

Art

• Shroomland * Gal Barkan

Poetry

• Eulogy for the Invaders * Stewart C Baker
• [luminescent window—] * Robbie Coburn
• Moonmoons * Robert Borski
• Never Change * Alper Ghuchlu
• Cosmic Conflicts * John H. Dromey
• Dreamscape * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Better Read Than Dead * Robert Borski
• [greetings from] * Lauren McBride
• The Deniers * Matthew Harrison
• The Watchers * Deborah L. Davitt
• [Implant splinters mind(s)] * John R. Platt
• The Census Taker’s Search * Mike Collins
• Darker Darkest * A J Dalton
• How the Qilin Came to Have One Horn * Arukoya Tomais
• Dragoncology * Randall Andrews
• The Future Archaeologist’s Report * Jacob Bergstresser
• Dyer’s Polypore: A Romance * Amelia Gorman
• [makeup roses] * LeRoy Gorman
• CDM * Richard Magahiz
• The Face That Sees Me Shines Down from Above * Jordan Hirsch
• [time-travel boredom …] * Alan Ira Gordon
• On Second Thought * Lauren McBride
• Time Travel Promises (A Romance) * Howard V. Hendrix
• Fireflies in a Void * Murray Eiland
• [time warp] * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Pneumatic Music in Common Time * M. Ray Vidrine
• It’s Not Me, It’s You * Gerri Leen
• Retrofuturism * John H. Dromey
• Light * Dolo Diaz
• Cosmic Nihilism * Jade Doumani
• Commodity * Ken Poyner
• Lagrange Point Herons * Mary Soon Lee
• Beware the North * Ian Li
• Apollo 17 and Beyond * Adele Gardner
• Dear Mary Shelley * Jacqueline West
• The Time Traveller * Matthew Wilson
• What Ravens Know * David C. Kopaska-Merkel & Ann K. Schwader
• Winged Girl * M. Frost
• [one breath—] * Greg Schwartz
• Mandelbrot * Dolo Diaz
• [a wave shifts …] * Anna Cates
• Rats in Space * D J Tyrer
• What Chuck Yeager Didn’t Say * Howard V. Hendrix
• While You Wait * Jaymee Thomas
• [microplastics] * Ann K. Schwader
• [steel bodies rust] * Nicholas De Marino
• Splitting a Bottle of Eden’s Sour Apple Wine with Grandpa Nietzsche * Gretchen Tessmer
• Tiptoe Through the Tulpas * Robert Borski
• The Voices Calling Us Back * Daniel Ausema
• The Last Price * Jenny Thompson
• Cemetery Row * Rebecca Olson
• Beauty’s Captor * Nico Martinez Nocito
• Ghazal for the Sugar Skull Lich * Nicholas De Marino
• The Exoplanets Were Never For Us * Art Holcomb
• Venus, In Transit * Devan Barlow
• On the mourning of future history * Brian Hugenbruch
• What Black Holes Read * Mary Soon Lee
• [save] * Lauren McBride
• The Anatomy of Things That Never Should’ve Been Born * Joy Yin
• Cry of the Curio-Hawker * Bree Wernicke
• Dies Sanguinis * Grace R. Reynolds
• [his blue eyes] * Sarah Cannavo
• Stop Clinging to the Meat * Miguel O. Mitchell
• when stars speak * Herb Kauderer
• [last drop of water] * Melissa Dennison
• [God closes a door] * Nicholas De Marino
• As Sweet as Silk * Nicholas De Marino
• Dog Days: A Postmortem Love Poem * Taylor Hamann Los
• [reddening leaves] * Ngô Bình Anh Khoa
• Three Hunters At Their Ease * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Freudian Trip * Greg Schwartz
• ghost story of a lost sister * Christina Tang-Bernas
• Accidental Harvest * Denny E. Marshall
• Angels in the Architecture * Sandra J. Lindow
• [bored ghosts] * Christina Sng
• [broken-hearted] * Greg Schwartz
• Couch Bound * G. O. Clark
• [apocalypse] * Ngô Bình Anh Khoa
• The desert hermit’s voice * Richard Magahiz
• Uses For a Bed of Cyborg Tulips * Robert Frazier
• [quantum chromodynamics] * Joshua St. Claire