Online Issue Contents

• Wyrms & Wormholes

• Editor's Choice Poems
  • A Spacer’s Heart by Glenn A. Meisenheimer
  • The Echo Devours the Echo by Marc Pietrzykowski
  • “[we still don’t have the energy]” by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
  • Loophole by Beth Cato
  • Reasons Not to Bother a Dragon by Mary Soon Lee
  • Imperfect Storm by Robert Borski
  • How a Dog Saved Us from Zombies and Other Threats During Those Days of Horror by Angela Williamson Emmert

• Full Table of Contents

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Wyrms & Wormholes: Minions Wanted

Yes, friends, bubbly is still flowing at the vast, fortress-like Star*Line editorial enclave! For the first time in nearly twenty years, we are proud to have published a Rhysling Award winner, Mary Soon Lee’s long poem Interregnum from S*L 36.4.

Also, our color covers will continue for a while, thanks to Mary Soon Lee and an anonymous donor who each gave $100 to, um, cover covers, and to Shirley Valencia, who gave $10. Thanks, you guys! We’ll try to spend it well. Subscriptions to the Magazine of Speculative Poetry and Dreams and Nightmares are offered as perks to $100 donors.

Despite perennial rumors that the SFPA status quo is maintained by a cabal of hidebound dinosaurs, along the lines of the preserved brains in Alexandra Erin’s “Institutional Memory” on p. 8 of this issue, in actuality SFPA is controlled by its volunteers, of whom there are never enough. Most key volunteer positions are lucky to have even one qualified candidate with the necessary skills, availability, and willingness. Here, ideally, I’d blather on about electing officers who have proven themselves through prior service, but the truth is that the SFPA officers also are generally comprised of whatever hardy souls dared to offer themselves for immolation, or newbies who were inadvertently sucked into a clutch of tentacles. And so are the other positions.

        … You would think they
        had never had freedom, despite the rather long
        leashes employed.

        And it took several sharp jabbings and
        shockings most dire to garner their
        obeisance, dragging them somber and dejected
        to earth.
                  —Max Ingram, “Aerosol Tight”
                     from The Endless Machine

Originally, I was asked to step in as webmaster / designer for sfpoetry.org, then the same for eyetothetelescope.org, then as the editor of this very publication, then mailing it, then doing layout for it, the directory, Dwarf Stars, occasional Rhysling Anthologies (not this one, though!), and finally the membership database. Thankfully, the Star*Line and Dwarf Stars mailings have been mostly taken over by the capable Brian Garrison. All those other tasks, however, were originally within the purview of at least four different individuals, rather than just me. I could use some help—and it is unwise to repose so many functions under the aegis of a single frail mortal. The website needs a revamp, which my Jurassic training is not up to speed on; I intend stepping down as Star*Line editor in 2017, if not before; and we’d like to have backup layout people, given that three different SFPA publications require these skills (familiarity with InDesign and book-layout conventions strongly recommended).

You too, Reader, can easily rise to power as an éminence grise, verte, or whatever hue you favor, just by taking on a few—or even one–of the many duties that maintain the function, such as it is, of SFPA. Approach our president to volunteer. Wave your prehensile forelimb on the sfpanet@yahoogroups.com listserv (still our best venue for presenting ideas to the largest segment of the organization gathered in one place, and the only one where general discussion among members occurs) to not only volunteer but to make—and evaluate the merits of—suggestions for improving SFPA. I hope to encounter you and your bright and shining evolutionary visions there. But don’t go too far in castigating your stodgy predecessors. The original éminence grise, Cardinal Richelieu, is reputed to have said “Give me six lines written by the hand of an honest man, and I shall find therein some reason to hang him.”

          and the dreams came back
          floating and film-covered in sewage,
          but we’re
          getting re-acquainted.
                    —Max Ingram, “Merry Christmas”
                       from The Endless Machine

In hopes for the new year,

—F.J. Bergmann, Star*Line Editor

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Editor's Choice Poems

"A Spacer’s Heart," by Glenn A. Meisenheimer

A spacer’s heart is never quite her own,
Entangled with the anti-matter drive
It pulses in a throbbing monotone,
Uncertain what it means to be alive.

It skips across the cloth of time and space,
A pebble on a placid summer pond,
Unfettered by attachment to one place
Or time, which comes and goes yet makes no bond.

For there are always systems left to seek,
Adventures that remain for it to find.
So off it goes, a silent silver streak,
A ship the love for which it was designed.

A heart like this was never meant to hold.
It has the whole of spacetime to unfold.

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"The Echo Devours the Echo," by Marc Pietrzykowski

We rode chariots, mud, blood, and shit in a steady plume,
lay on rafts, floating our bones toward freedom or toothy reefs,
lost ourselves in a desperate evening, cloistered before the bonfire,
yearning for the smooth fur of dusk as the woods go black.

A cancer rose and we put it down; another rose, we scrubbed the corpses.
We took to the air and ate through the earth, though never
like bird or worm, always standing beside the thing,
a thick-fingered ideogram, a postulate scribbled on an inverted lens.

Those reeds in the water, the mind that watches them, undulating,
the squirm of the tongue as a not-quite-ripe berry bursts under teeth—
we are a brilliant, blistered crew, full of knots, bliss, and murder,
and if we are alone in the universe, I die a broken man.

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"[we still don’t have the energy]," by David C. Kopaska-Merkel

we still don’t have the energy
to model the entire physical universe
but we saved the interesting bits
I saved you

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"Loophole," by Beth Cato

the genie takes care to mention
the provision against wishing for wishes

he says nothing about wishing
for more genies

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"Reasons Not to Bother a Dragon," by Mary Soon Lee

Dragons keep your sheep well-exercised.

Dragons keep beer flowing,
conversations lively,
and peasants paying taxes.

Dragons breathe fire—
ferocious flaming fireballs of fire
that flambé foolish fellows.

Dragons are reluctant to tell you
where they have hidden their treasure.

If they have any treasure in the first place.

Which most of us don’t,
because the biggest dragons take it all.

And you really don’t want to bother them,
because those dragons are as old as they are big,
and they’ll talk until your scales drop off.

Plus they are capricious,
cantankerous and curmudgeonly.
Likely as not, they’ll toast you
just for practice.

Also, dragons have baby dragons:
adorable little golden-eyed hatchlings
who would starve if you orphaned them.

(Although the hatchlings are delicious
before their scales harden.)

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"Imperfect Storm," by Robert Borski

Though the thunder is deep enough
to rattle the stones of the castle

and the sky is whited out
for nearly minutes at a time,

none of the storm’s bolder strokes
ever seem to find the copper finials

set atop the parapets designed to conduct
the voltage down to the laboratory

below. As a result, the cold, stitched-
together dead thing lying on the slab

never receives the animating spark
it needs to kickstart its black heart.

Moreover, swollen with rain,
the clouds are so tumescently

dark, the full brilliance of the moon
never emerges, thus damping out

the dinner plans of one gypsy-slash-
part-time wolf, as well as complicating

the itinerary of a certain aristocratic
traveller, who, truth to tell, even

with his sophisticated animal radar,
is unable to navigate curtains of water.

And yet the next day, on the positive side,
damage appears to be limited,

although in the commodities market,
pitchfork futures suffer a downturn

the economy this side of the Carpathians
never really seems to recover from,

and half a world away in Hollywood
countless movie concepts wither and die

like ghosts in the clutches of dawn.

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"How a Dog Saved Us from Zombies and Other Threats During Those Days of Horror," by Angela Williamson Emmert

The little Amish dog stayed for the food,
a shepherd-terrier mix of muscle and heart—
we called him Fang and he was our savior
and taught us our code.

He knew better than we did whom we
could trust and when we must kill,
the newly infected or the guy on the bike
with the gun

(it was not easy but we had been told
he was coming and Fang gave us courage—
the dead die clean, we learned, but the living
die hard)

In fall a girl turned up in the overgrowth,
her yellow shirt torn, two braids still
holding her hair, Fang herding her
towards us

We did not have the heart and each
morning for weeks she was led to the yard
and teased to the woods at day’s end and then
we caught her

crouched, eating a chicken with feathers
and blood on her chin and she stood so still
like the good girl she was when I drove the spike
through her head.

And the scolding Fang gave me, how I
had to unlearn what I knew about mercy,
about morals and love, if I wanted to live
adopt the good sense of a dog.

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Full Table of Contents

Departments

• Wyrms & Wormholes * F.J. Bergmann
• President’s Message • Bryan D. Dietrich
• From the Small Press • Joshua Gage, John Philip Johnson, Alex Plummer Full reviews
• Xenopoetry • Obsolescencia Programada de los Prodigios (Planned Obsolescence of Wonders) * Valeria Rodriguez Mar, trans. Fred W. Bergmann

Art

• Frog Prince * Lillian Kopaska-Merkel
• The Future of Steeplechasing * Leona Bergmann

Poetry

• My Brother in a Space Capsule * Marijane Osborn
• “I sit zazen …” * Robyn Groth
• “zazen to frozen” * LeRoy Gorman
• Preface to an Investigation * John Amen
• Institutional Memory * Alexandra Erin
• My Nano Ain’t Fixin’ to Waste Its Time on That * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• The Ride * Mary Soon Lee
• true selves * Herb Kauderer
• Waterless Waterfall * Lauren McBride
• “I have made a museum” * Matthew Wilson
• Demon Eclipse * Mary Soon Lee
• “clocking in early” * C.R. Harper
• Garden of Stars * Joan Wiese Johannes
• A Spacer’s Heart • Glenn A. Meisenheimer
• The Process of Reduction * Claudine Nash
• The Echo Devours the Echo * Marc Pietrzykowski
• The Time Traveler’s Diagnosis * Beth Cato
• “we still don’t have the energy …” * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Sister Creature * Laura Bernstein Machlay
• Loophole * Beth Cato
• Ultraviolet * Robert Borski
• “no, not this planet” * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Life Cycle of the Fish * JD DeHart
• Pocket Universe #611 * Alan Ira Gordon
• From Above * Jeffrey Park
• “her tentacles crossed” * LeRoy Gorman
• “From the inside …” * Jeffrey Park
• Alternate History * Benjamin Schmitt
• I Get Mine Deducted Automatically * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Robot Uprising!!! * Benjamin Schmitt
• Kali * B.R. Strahan
• Notes for Next Week’s Sermon * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Airship * Gary Every
• Standing Watch * Jeffrey Park
• Gardens of the Pleiades * Banks Miller
• The Ships that Sang * Jessica J. Horowitz
• “the staring eye of Jupiter” * Fuson
• In a Field at Night * Fuson
• Falling asleep on a Cambrian beach … * Michael Kriesel
• Reasons Not to Bother a Dragon * Mary Soon Lee
• “wireless technology” * Fuson
• “five o’clock shadows” * C.R. Harper
• The Shuttle * Matthew Wilson
• “Hotel Mobius” * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• The Border Cowboy in Fairyland * Beth Cato
• “a Sirius Bloody Mary” * Lauren McBride
• “fingerprint” * Fuson
• The Border Cowboy’s Smile * Beth Cato
• Moon Swan * Mary Soon Lee
• Imperfect Storm * Robert Borski
• The Singularity * William Cullen Jr.
• Tachyon Muffin * Cornelius Fortune
• “captain dead …” * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Death’s Cameras I * Laura Madeline Wiseman
• Zombie Cuisine * Glenn A. Meisenheimer
• A Tale of the Old Country * David C. Kopaska-Merkel & Wade German
• 40 Parts per Trillion * Claudine Nash
• Surreal Couple * Bruce Boston
• How a Dog Saved Us from Zombies … * Angela Williamson Emmert
• Bring Something Red * Jeanie Tomasko
• His Caviar Mama * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• The Months after the End * Gerri Leen
• “where have all” * LeRoy Gorman
• wolfman’s lament * LeRoy Gorman
• “teens dare each other” * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• “nuclear holocaust” * Bruce Boston
• “crumbling castle” * Greer Woodward
• “engagement woes mount” * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Cooking with Extinction * John Reinhart
• The Big Crunch … * David C. Kopaska-Merkel