Online Issue Contents

• Wyrms & Wormholes

• Editor's Choice Poems
  • She Rode a Gold Chariot with Lions into My Life by Isaac Black
  • Better Living Thru Alchemy by Don Raymond
  • demonwalk by Darius Williams
  • [new world landing] by Joshua Hiles
  • Museums of Earth by Mary Soon Lee
  • Grandpa’s Preserves by Gail Sosinsky
  • Where the End Lives by Joseph VanBuren
  • Bar Scene by John Reinhart

• Full Table of Contents

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Wyrms & Wormholes: There & Back Again

Black Lives Matter. Black Voices Matter. Because we don’t include bios in Star*Line, nor do bios necessarily mention race, racial demographics in SFPA fly beneath the radar. We rarely acknowledge Black speculative poets, who don’t seem to have a visible presence. That’s gonna change. The next Star*Line issue, 43.4, is restricted to poets of African ancestry, and will be guest-edited by Melanie Stormm, who is Black and First Nations.

Note that we now have created a bio page for Star*Line contributors at sfpoetry.org/sl/slbios.html. This is a historical work in progress; if you are or were a contributor, send your bio or updates to sfpaweb@sfpoetry.org.

Heartfelt thanks to Vince Gotera for the last three years of editing and producing Star*Line, and congrats for another S*L Rhysling winner! It’s a lot of work, as I can attest! But my re-ascendance to the Editorial Throne is intended to be fleeting; we seek yet another editor to take up the cursèd mantle/scepter/what-have-you. If you possess the necessary expertise (or would like to acquire it under live fire) and would enjoy not only selecting the poems, but reponding promptly, maintaining payment and mailing records, herding the cats who provide SFPA announcements, reviews, articles, etc., and seeing to it that Star*Line meets its quarterly deadlines, our Executive Committee would love to hear from you at sfpa-exec@googlegroups.com.

Please feel free to question me directly about the duties involved at starlineeditor@gmail.com. I may be able to continue doing layout for an editor who can handle the rest of it.

Remember to wash your tentacles with soap for at least 20 seconds.

—F. J. Bergmann, Star*Line Editor

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Editor's Choice Poems

"She Rode a Gold Chariot with Lions into My Life," by Isaac Black

I’m a great storyteller, I’m told. My favorite one a tale
of Goddess Isis, who’s holding my hand even now,
a treasure of good looks wherever I go. It’s said that
she has an ethereal air, an intoxicating Egyptian color,
pearl-tipped braids, a body cooled by dancing cobras.
She’s that hot. Knows it. Tonight we’re on Broadway
on an after-theater date. Our dinner nook is starlit,
candles, a roses centerpiece. This one gentleman, almost
curtseying in our aisle, is beyond charmed. He adores
my ladylove—her V’ed fuchsia vest, the decorative wrap,
what’s barely hidden. I can read his mind. He’d need

a libation to cool off, a bed with ivory tusks, drums to
beat out a Djembe rhythm. He doesn’t know the half of it.
How my Isis, on a cloud of coral-red dust, arrived in my
master’s suite. She rode a jeweled 2-wheel chariot pulled
by lions into my life. Did my Beelzebub antique mirror
(with its French oval-gilded frame), birth a spell? My Goddess
was elegant—ornate, bells ringing, the most ravishing
woman I’d ever seen. She asked about my TV, iPod, cell
phone. We’d play tag, to, fro, me juggling a hundred needto-
know questions for her to catch. She bared her breasts.
Day after day, I’d overheat beside her. I suckled her lacquered
toes. By year’s end, she swore she wanted to stay in my world.

After all, she said, in her Temple I wouldn’t know how to bow,
ride an elephant, or handle a saber. On my side she’d be
unforgettable (for sure), a seductress, worth her price in gold.
I didn’t doubt that. But I worried about my age, high blood
pressure, diabetes. What if, in this flamboyant city, she
suddenly found a wealthy libertine, some 21st-century Don
Juan? And what if I was abandoned on her side of the
mirror with those ox-carts, bales of hay, dung, never-do-well
peasants? Or maybe, have to endure the ungodly elite—
with their curious stares, costumes, arcaded galleries, medieval
wars, beheadings? Left alone without my Temptress, her
beauty and voodooish love-making, could I ever dial home?

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"Better Living Thru Alchemy," by Don Raymond

Spring and we stay busy, our projections bright
as Sunday morning’s sunlight shining through these bottles
darkly colored—cobalt and umber, tinctures of mercury
and of silver—the sharp thin scent of solvents dissolving
the forest’s vegetable grace—transmuting its fecundity
into matter more profound—an intimation of enlightenment,
or the surcease of pain that seems so similar.

Pray the weather holds, and grants to us another quarter
of continued growth: honeycomb and amber, velvet petaled
inflorescences and wind-borne bits of insects or seed;
the pieces of the older world that fuel this cottage industry—
trading fungal assets on the woodland floor. Gather up,
in mossy handfuls dripping water, the morels growing
by the rivers edge; they say they’re goblin’s tears, to heal

an injury done through love, though too much at once
may cause the heart to harden into stone—and this too
may serve its purpose; there is room enough for a calculus
within our common cause: to cure stories with stories,
construct what meaning we find from what we bring;
densify each thicket of grass with reason to be, a purpose
worth its birth into the sacred world thickening:

a twig, a branch, brambles, sudden dead-end paths,
the creek where the trees—aspen and willow—crowd in close
and hungry for the sweet, heavy syrup of light distilled
into new life, the fleshy mystery and buzzing of the invisible
college among the leaves, its atoms numinous in twilight,
composed of selves, repeated and reflected, a truth hidden
concealed within the empire of unexamined things.

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"demonwalk," by Darius Williams

and that horse knew what she brought
and she came into the town weeping
those birds heard her wailing from the far belfry
those birds winged into a fog over the town
that was a darker day with hungry clouds
that rain kept our cowls on and our gazes down
yet by my whetted eyes, i saw it walk
yet though a noose had worked its neck, it walked
and the mare fell limp as the corpse went
and the driver leaned back into the hearse
it was mere bone and skin under a gown
its lip-less smile swaying with its jaw
i spoke out to none that might be in its way
i warned not one that wandered onto its way
many fall to pave the path it walks
many shoulders bracing the steps it takes
and that corpse led the walk along my homeward path
and that corpse stopped before my home’s front pane
with its heel towards a grave at my door
with my body there to stay, my soul it to follow
then it led me over the path it had laid
then my eyes wetted at the dying’s stench
crossing the town’s gate, i heard the hells gathering
cross in my heart, might you save me
and the demon cackled walking me into the wood
and the woods cackled with the demon in the wood

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"[new world landing]," by Joshua Hiles

new world landing

drifted leaves and sere ruins

we have been here

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"Museums of Earth," by Mary Soon Lee

In the weightless centers
of ten thousand asteroids,
Earth remade in miniature.

No spin gravity, no screens,
no piped music, no data feeds,
no interactive tour guide.

Rock walls machine-smoothed
to receive murals of oceans,
blue sky layered over blue.

Models of iconic landmarks
floating midair like bubbles,
each one laboriously handmade.

The Eiffel Tower fabricated
from the asteroids’ riches
of gold, palladium, rhodium.

Tiny soldiers in frozen march
along the Great Wall of China,
minions of mythic emperors.

And simulacra of a commonplace
now almost unfathomable:
houses, streets, a playground.

That intensity of sunlight,
the atmosphere breathable,
not an airlock to be found.

Even the youngest visitors
allowed to touch the exhibits,
fingering what we’ve lost.

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"Grandpa’s Preserves," by Gail Sosinsky

Behind the rhubarb
and the untouched beets,
enwebbed, encrusted
with the dust of decades,
sits Grandpa’s contribution
to the family stores—
a jelly jar
with a double-headed chick,
a wide-mouth quart
with half the hired man’s left foot,
a brine-filled pint
with the minuscule man,
sky-fallen during deer camp’s bacchanal,
great black eyes
in his little blue head,
tiny clenched fists
ceaselessly pounding the glass.

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"Where the End Lives," by Joseph VanBuren

Somewhere in the vastness of eternity
stuck in a starlit barred spiral of gas and dust
trapped under the atmosphere of a heliocentric rock
stranded on a giant island of ancient depleted soil
within the boundaries of mental constructions
among a cramped collection of artificial dwellings
embedded in the bloodstream of a bipedal species
an apocalypse-inducing microscopic parasite
has finally found a home.

"Bar Scene," by John Reinhart

She spoke only in sunflowers
while at the other end of the bar
he delicately removed the label
on the beer bottle with his mind.
The bartender spoke in broken
iambic pentameter, rhyming
occasionally with the waitress’s bad hip.
TV on but no one watched the static—
focused more on the pool,
where a dragon, recently recovered,
was bathing in gin.

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Full Table of Contents

Departments

• Wyrms & Wormholes * F. J. Bergmann
• SFPA Announcements
• President’s Message * Bryan Thao Worra
• From the Small Press * Denise Dumars, Joshua Gage, John Philip Johnson, Deborah P Kolodji, Sandra J. Lindow, John C. Mannone, Marge Simon, Lisa Timpf
• Stealth SF: What Fresh Hell • Denise Dumars
• XenoPoetry: The Cosmonaut’s Prayer • Ana Tapia (translated by Lawrence Schimel)

Art

• Dart • Denny E. Marshall

Poetry

• She Rode a Gold Chariot with Lions into My Life * Isaac Black
• When the Company Pays * Beth Cato
• [Recirculator on the fritz] * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Coming Up Empty * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• What Phoenixes Read * Mary Soon Lee
• [event horizon] * Jay Friedenberg
• [the sound] * Harris Coverley
• Better Living Thru Alchemy * Don Raymond
• [pressed in the pages] * Deborah P Kolodji
• demonwalk * Darius Williams
• ok millennial * Davian Aw
• Walking on Eggshells * Robert Borski
• Welcome to the Future * David Barber
• [black rabbits] * Michelle Muenzler
• All the Possibilities * Stephen C. Curro
• Travel Agent * Juleigh Howard-Hobson
• Underwing * Kurt Newton
• [starships rerouted] * Nick Hoffman
• Leaving Luna * Greer Woodward
• Salvage Rights * Juleigh Howard-Hobson
• 2.7 Billion Years Ago * Paige Caine
• [governmental order] * Baishampayan Seal
• Slow Boat To Centauri * David Barber
• [mass grave] * Greg Schwartz
• [in the slow lane] * John Reinhart
• [ten dinosaurs] * Brendan McBreen
• Terraforming * David C. Kopaska-
• Merkel
• [heartland] * Joshua Gage
• [new world landing] * Joshua Hiles
• Body double for the oldest organism * Daniel Ausema
• Not by a Nose * Matthew Wilson
• Wet Work * Paul Szlosek
• I Think the Article Said Something about First Contact * R. Mac Jones
• Hurricane Prayer * David Rogers
• [still learning] * Lauren McBride
• Deep Space Tryst * Robert Borski
• [days of solitude] * ayaz daryl nielsen
• [frozen alien found] * Matthew
• Wilson
• [Social distancing implemented] * Alan Ira Gordon
• [gynoids fighting] * Baishampayan Seal
• Museums of Earth * Mary Soon Lee
• [pawn shops, tarnished brass] * Colleen Anderson
• Grandpa’s Preserves * Gail Sosinsky
• Defining the Parameters of Nightmare * Jennifer Crow
• Where the End Lives * Joseph VanBuren
• Fenrir and Sigyn, After Ragnarok * Marissa Lingen
• [lily-pad throne] * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• The Luck Eaters * Beth Cato & Rhonda Parrish
• [bloody steak] * LeRoy Gorman
• [Kissing frogs] * Matthew Wilson
• The Martian Invasion * David Barber
• Bar Scene * John Reinhart
• I Carried Magic * Kevin J. Fellows
• [door prize] * Noel Sloboda
• This Year’s Monsters * Phoebe Low
• [sweetest of flowers] * Karl Lykken
• Dear Future * Holly Lyn Walrath
• In the Eye of the Beholder * John C. Mannone
• What If It Hurts? * Gerri Leen
• The Joy of Travelling * Christina Sng
• [fireflies] * LeRoy Gorman
• Unobtanium * Robert Borski
• Chrysalis * Robin Helweg-Larsen
• Were You There, On Phobos? * Elizabeth R. McClellan
• This is Much Better * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Flora and the Cruel Machinery * L. P. Melling
• [can] * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Appliances * Craig Kurtz
• [android apocalypse] * Christina Sng
• [i swear …] * William Clunie
• Old Gods Sang Deep the Green Water * Oliver Smith
• I’m an Accident * Marilee Pritchard
• [trying to lift] * Susan Burch
• Champion * Mary Soon Lee
• Fallen Angel * Gary Every
• The Four Evangelists of the Apocalypse * Robin Helweg-Larsen
• The Coral Fairy * Lorraine Schein
• Armageddon * Ronald A. Busse