Online Table of Contents

• Editor's Choice Poems
  • Olam by Charlee Jacob
  • Three Letters to the Prince of Falling Leaves by Rachel Manija Brown
• Full Table of Contents

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Editor's Choice Poems

"Olam," by Charlee Jacob

Sitting quietly in the port of stars, he was Auschwitz psychic: which meant he received flashes of the future whenever he caught a whiff of gas or overheard a harsh word spoken in German. He wrote prophecies in his crippled scrawl. Omens in Yiddish, slips of crisp Sirian parchment sat in a bowl for visitors departing for the frontiers.

The past is a painful pause in a journey with preset margins; the future is only a stay of execution from infinity's neurons; the present wraps in guilt for one and fear of the other … trying to forget concentration camps and to anticipate starships.

Another man slept in gray walls which crumbled from too little moisture, having been erected with alleys on a sere moon for the planet to keep its unhappier citizens confined to. He dreamed he was Rabbi Loew in a previous ghetto. He tried to build a golem from titanium but couldn't figure out why carving emeth into its forehead didn't make it live. He'd forgotten the key of clay from which all are born. He made it little shoes of this substance and lo! it walked, at least, even if its volition was weak and its political savvy shaky. Feet of clay, nu? Loew's spirit didn't mock him from afar. It wept and blessed the man in the name of another century on another brittle planet.

Where the past is walls of slow stone and the future is a fantasy held in suspense, the present ignores the one and worships the other...trying to forget the incarnations that ended in meaningless deaths and trying to anticipate the birth which will render the living among the scattered stars eloquent.

A woman believed she was the gravedigger, having buried each of her children in a different spinning galaxy, having wept for them at sunsets and moonsets and had her tears counted as they fell into varied darknesses. She patrolled the vast cemetery in her ship, left hand on the chaos-drive, right clutching prayers. She would be the first to see judgment when it came … when each color ever swallowed by a black hole climbed out again in rainbows and every name spoken since the dawn was heard through Hallelujahs. Then would she raise her shovel high, the gravedigger become a terra-former, sons and daughters again at her skirts. Gabriel would make sounds elastic across space, and the new shape of the universe would be a synagogue for resounding.

First appeared in Tales of the Unanticipated 18, 1997

With more than 950 publishing credits, Charlee Jacob has been writing dark poetry and prose for more than twenty-five years. Some of her recent books include the novel Still (Necro), the poetry collection Heresy (Necro), and the novel Dark Moods. She is a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner. Visit her at charleejacob.com.

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"Three Letters to the Prince of Falling Leaves," by Rachel Manija Brown

i.
Was it you I met in India, when I was just a little girl? The leaves didn't fall yellow or red in my water-poor town unless they caught a sticky spray of Holi dye. They spun in devils, the color of dust, over earth as cracked and powdery as a potter's discards.

Was it you who gave me one crisp skeleton, veins bled dry of chlorophyll, intricate as spiderweb? I didn't know your language, but I understood your message: Look!

ii.
Were you there in the crowd at Kiyomizu Temple? All those rapt faces, all those upheld cameras, all those exclamations repeated until I learned Japanese in a day: "How pretty! What a beautiful fall! The maples, the ginkgoes, so yellow, so red. Oh, look!"

Were you there when it rained, and the crowds stayed home? I walked alone without camera or notebook in the gardens of another temple. Matsu, pine, is a pun in two languages: a tree, and to wait with longing.

Wait long enough and even those sharp-tipped leaves will fall.

iii.
Where are you now, in the Arizona desert? I would show you plump leaves stretched tight with precious water. I would show you the books I can no longer read without their pages fluttering down.

Where are you now, after so many falls? I would strip away my clothes of yellow and red, and show you the veins beneath my papery skin.

Cup your hands, and catch me.

Rachel Manija Brown's memoir, All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: an American Misfit in India, was published by Rodale, and her manga-style graphic novels Spy Goddess and The 9-Lives were published by Tokyopop. She also writes for television and recently sold an animated series, Game World (with Sherwood Smith), to the Jim Henson Company. Visit her website at rachelmanijabrown.com.

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Full Table of Contents

Features

• Quarks & Strings • Marge Simon
• President's Message • Deborah P Kolodji
• Stealth SF • Denise Dumars
• Conference News • Gwynne Garfinkel
• The Dark Surreal Garden of Verses • David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Call for 2010 Rhysling Nominations
• Reviews from the Small Press • Edward Cox, Joshua Gage, David C. Kopaska-Merkel

Art

• Interior illustrations • Randy Moore

Poetry

• Godzilla's Better Half • Matt Betts
• Paparazzi • Robert Borski
• A Partial Failure of the Kurzweil Process • H.F. Gibbard
• Lepidoptera from Space • Elissa Malcohn
• Bungee Jumping on Araneide • P.S. Cottier
• Cabbage Patch • Robert Borski
• Olam • Charlee Jacob
• Excerpts from The Dreamtides of Tantalus • t. winter-damon
• Lord of Infinite Diversions • t. winter-damon
• The Tombs of Mars • G.O. Clark
• The Crackling Diameters • Lee Ballentine
• For a Few Coins, I Draw You a Picture • Marge Simon
• Three Letters to the Prince of Falling Leaves • Rachel Manija Brown
• The Sorrows of Elaine • Greer Woodward
• The Sadness • Steve Rasnic Tem
• Once that Last Star Dies • Michael Fosburg
• The Dreamgod • Elizabeth Barrette