Cover: The Philosophy of Lenscraft © Austin Arthur Hart
Editor: Jean-Paul L. Garnier
Layout: F. J. Bergmann
Production Manager: F. J. Bergmann
Mailing: Brian U. Garrison
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Wyrms & Wormholes: Spreading Light
Congratulations to all of our award winners! It’s always wonderful to see people’s work honored during awards season, and this year is no exception. I’m seeing more and more specpo out there from a multitude of venues, and I recently read an announcement that there will be a special Hugo next year for poetry, and the possibility of a Nebula coming soon as well. How cool is that?
I am also excited to announce that my successor as editor of Star*Line has been chosen, John Reinhart. He will be taking over as of issue 48.2 and I know that all of you wonderful poets will be in good hands under his editorship. There are also other changes afoot in the SFPA. We have elections coming up, so if you’ve ever thought of running for SFPA office, now is the time. At the very least I encourage you to vote and let your voice be heard when the time comes.
I still have one more issue, after this one, as editor, but I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the executive committee members and our volunteers. All of your hard work and dedication to the SFPA and speculative poetry is inspiring, and it has been a great honor to work with you all! Star*Line and the SFPA have been around longer than I have been alive, and I’m looking forward to seeing it thrive long into the future.Firstly, thank you to all who voted and made your voices heard concerning the SFPA’s new AI/LLM policy. It’s always a great thing to see democracy at work. And congratulations to all of the Rhysling finalists and to the Elgin and Dwarf Stars nominees! It’s so wonderful to see that there is so much incredible speculative poetry out in the world! Keep up the great work, my friends.
—Jean-Paul L. Garnier, Star*Line Editor
Editor's Choice Poems
[when you died] by LeRoy Gorman
when you died
did you see the blue sunset
on Mars
we saw one
on Earth
(for DPK)
"Time’s a Lousy Tipper, But Still …" by Lisa Timpf
Three dimensions of time
walk into your bar
and your coworker says,
What can I get you?
And What Was replies,
You already have,
while What Is
crosses her arms and smirks
but What Might Be
smiles and says,
“We’ll take three
Tom Collinses.”
Your coworker throws you
an eye-roll, and you know
what she’s thinking:
Time’s a lousy tipper,
so you shrug, and say,
“I’ll look after them.”
By the end of the night,
you regret your offer
to tend the Times’ table—
your head is pounding—
too much time with Time
can do that to a person.
On the way out, What Might Be
hangs back, and whispers,
for your ears only,
I wouldn’t take my usual
route home, if I were you,
and before you can clarify,
she’s gone. Lousy tippers?
Maybe. But there are tips,
and tips.
This piece of knowledge,
you keep to yourself.
In case they come in again
sometime.
"Stonemaiden" by Marisca Pichette
Today I’m carving a stone
out of sculpture.
I wield chisel in one hand, brush
in the other.
Planting bare feet on gravel
I touch the face of the woman
I’m about to unmake.
She is fair, but still.
She is smooth, but inert.
She is—when all is said and done—
terribly boring.
I chip off her nose, trim her hair.
I uncarve her breasts and amputate
her hands.
Where her legs stood, I brush lichen back in place.
Over the holes of her listenless ears
I pockmark minerals and dust.
We all know an artist—
squirreled away, focused,
unique.
I am not she.
I prowl through estate gardens
picking concrete apart.
In the shadow of architectural follies
I pluck fate’s string into dissonance.
In late afternoon, I’ve broken
and folded
and weathered
and rolled a false maiden into
a rock.
Mottled with life, yellow and gray
and green moss coats her once-skin.
No longer tall, she squats,
inelegant as a clod.
But look at her.
Touch her imperfections,
admire her hulking shadow,
run your fingers
through the wildflowers
already colonizing her base.
Step back, admire my unwork,
and tell me now
is she not beautiful?
"Cosmik Hubris" by Howard V. Hendrix
coin a globe-girdling term like Earth’s atmospheric five
(troposphere stratosphere mesosphere thermosphere exosphere)
but one for full and fuller with millions of Zipfian-scattered pieces
from paint flecks to dead multi-ton satellites ASAT weapons test
debris and glint-clutter swarm satellites eating ozone at re-entry
everything moving in low earth orbit 7 to 15 times faster than
a mushroom bullet in an ever-thicker trashopogenic Rubik’s shell
of hypersonic shrapnel bombing around Earth rendering satellite
orbital space a Cantor-dusting ballistic maze so unnavigable
it shuts the sky like a prison gate—
call it a Kessler ballistosphere
and don’t those boys down at the Billionaire Rocket Club break
on black felt orbital commons a mean game of shatterball billiards
from which even their descendants won’t escape…
"Emily Austenson Brontëbot" by Adele Gardner
She was everything I’d ever dreamed of in a writing professor:
Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and the Brontë sisters
rolled into one. Thanks to the genius
of reconstructed engrams—take that, biographical fallacy!
Thank you much, psychoanalysis of literary figures!—
Emily Austenson Brontë sat on my desk,
her crooked, satirical smile
knowing so much more than I ever would,
one raised eyebrow seeming to tear my work to shreds.
But I’d asked for this, hadn’t I? When the school
required each student to fill out a profile
of their favorite works of the imagination
and the traits of the ideal teacher,
they weren’t kidding around. The mini
Emily Austenson Brontëbot still looked ever so wise
and superior at her perfect desktop height,
her eyes level with mine as I sat in front of my favorite window,
while she dissected my latest creative attempt
to join literature’s Great Conversation,
my dialogue with all beloved works that had gone before.
“You have wit,” she conceded.
“Yes?” I asked nervously
“Tell me, was that your childhood, or your childhood as you understood it
with the help of Charlotte Brontë?”
I flushed, and tried to hide my face
behind the heavy velvet curtains that shielded my window nook.
Jane Eyre’s window. On my lap rested a writing desk
modeled after Austen’s. What could I say? They were my heroes,
mothers of the mind. “Isn’t that the point?” I said.
She looked startled. “Go on. And tell it slant.”
I shared my truth. “Each work we imbibe leaves its imprint.
Shifts the furniture around in our brains.
Their shape becomes part of ours. Transmission complete.”
She nodded sagely. “Now find your mind in all of this.”
She swirled my papers, then tossed a handful
toward the mud-swirled ceiling. Released from her fingers,
each page turned itself into a unique shape: snowflake,
bird-plane, sunflower. A snake slithered across the flowers
of my carpet, then curled under the arch
of my blue-stockinged foot: formed of my curled-up page of poetry,
it shivered nervously. With one clever paw I caught a flying fish
from the air, consuming its airy papercraft
with one quick guzzle: my words layered on her imagery
like sketch over sketch, like an album and a novel inspiring one another,
both based upon the shared death of one father—the Danielewski siblings,
whose Poe-like House of Leaves so Haunted me. Hello!
Like Fionn mac Cumhaill of my grandpa’s Irish fame,
I tapped one tooth, my grin as sharp and silver-flashing
as Emily’s biting pen or the fins of Fionn’s fish of knowledge,
a Salmon Beyond Doubt that might have provided Douglas Adams’s
Deep Thought with a different answer than “42.”
I toasted, “May your Conversation last a thousand-thousand years,
dear Emily Austenson Brontëbot.”
“I’ll give Will a run for his money,” she promised.
“Just be sure you do the same.” Her crooked grin
held all meaning, all mystery.
“I will if you will,” I swore. I spread my fingers
to release all the jazzy, bold letters
from my poetry shelves, their pages fluttering with love,
beating against one another or arching up to join in bridges and hearts,
fantastic forms still flying up to find new meanings.
Her robotic eyes sparkled with self-conscious life.
“We all keep each other going.”
“It’s not only nature who needs that mirror,” I agreed.
Full Table of Contents
Departments
- Wyrms & Wormholes * Jean-Paul Garnier
- SFPA Announcements
- A Farewell to Deborah P Kolodji
- President's Message * Colleen Anderson
- From the Small Press * Herb Kauderer, John Reinhart, Ann K. Schwader, Thomas E. Simmons, Lisa Timpf
- Stealth SF * “Death and the Maiden” * Denise Dumars
- SpecPo Publishing * Interview with Jenna Hanchey * Jean-Paul Garnier
Art
- The Philosophy of Lenscraft * Austin Arthur Hart
- From the Crab Nebular * Denny E. Marshall
- Microwave Hill * Denny E. Marshall
Poetry
- The Scientific Method * Ian Willey
- [AI Turing fail] * Ann K. Schwader
- [spring—] * Greg Schwartz
- [space migration] * Ngo Binh Anh Khoa
- One part per ten billion * Richard Magahiz
- good pickings * D. A. Xiaolin Spires
- [time dilation] * Joshua St. Claire
- Two Lines * Lee Clark Zumpe
- Predictive Armageddon * Garrett Carroll
- Afterlife * Shana Ross
- [galactic habitable zone] * Jay Friedenberg
- Grocery Shopping * John Reinhart
- [my flower garden] * Gabriel Smithwilson
- A Gardener’s Field Equation * Robert Frazier
- Autonomous * Howard V. Hendrix
- [werewolf wins bet] * Gary Davis
- Paper Cuts * Gretchen Tessmer
- [when you died] * LeRoy Gorman
- Feeder 5000 (Prototype) * Joshua Emery
- Love Beyond Larval * Meg Smith
- [They keep my eggs refrigerated] * Yuliia Vereta
- Insect Horology * Howard V. Hendrix
- Gla-Mer: The Fashion Magazine for Mermaids * Katherine Quevedo
- [laryngitis …] * Kimberly Kuchar
- [selling horrible alien bugs] * F. J. Bergmann
- Transmissions From El Chicano Futurismo, Volume One * Juan M. Perez
- [Pluto] * Royal Baysinger
- [Neptune] * Christina Sng
- Her Favourite * Beth Cato & Rhonda Parrish
- The come-to-Noah moment * Richard Magahiz
- [they left us nothing] * Richard Magahiz •
- [Defenestration] * Jason P. Burnham
- Carpe Noctem * Greg Schwartz
- [ecdysis] * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
- Housegoblin * Lynne Sargent
- [his mood ring eyes] * Anna Cates
- Heart Shape * Lauren McBride
- [shape shifter] * Denny E. Marshall
- Pity They’re Now So Rare * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
- [witch’s cocktail] * Anna Cates
- A Father Puts Food on the Table * Jordan Hirsch
- Data plant * Richard Magahiz
- [space debris] * F. J. Bergmann
- Time’s a Lousy Tipper, But Still … * Lisa Timpf
- Don't They Feel It? * Gerri Leen
- [your rough alien hands] * Greer Woodward
- The Snowmelt Queen * Marisca Pichette
- Song Through Wires * Jacqueline West
- To the Laws of Physics * Mary Soon Lee
- if I’m being honest * Laura Theis
- Demonspace * A J Dalton
- The Huntsman, the Sorcerer, and the Gargoyle * Kendall Evans
- [The world's first time traveler] * Randall Andrews
- [Excuse my regression] * Denise Dumars
- Making a Case for Steve: Under Section 34, Subsection D, … * Nnadi Samuel
- Troubadours * Devan Barlow
- This Glittering * Denise Dumars
- Languidity * Carlye Wilder
- An Alphabet of Forty-Two * Dawn Vogel
- [she says it’s saved our marriage] * Royal Baysinger
- Manifestation * F. J. Bergmann
- Stonemaiden * Marisca Pichette
- When One Person Deletes a Shared Memory * M. Ray Vidrine
- Masquerade * DJ Tyrer
- WayUpward Mobility * John H. Dromey
- Cosmik Hubris * Howard V. Hendrix
- Lucas Major Announcement * Micháel McCormick
- Unpredictable * Michelle Koubek
- Fighting Evolution * Debby Feo
- Bonus Ticks * Debby Feo
- [Rabies free] * Yuliia Vereta
- Selkie * Ian Hunter
- Cheaters never prosper * Matthew Wilson
- Emily Austenson Brontëbot * Adele Gardner
- Forced Relocation * Herb Kauderer
- Wreath * Colleen Anderson
- The Darkness * Joy Yin
- [temporary] * Denise Dumars
- Origins * Anna Cates
- The Decomposer * K. M. Praschak
- The Youngest Son * Roger Dutcher
- How we came to enter the thought hotel * Richard Magahiz
- Long-Distance Interstellar Romance * Alan Ira Gordon
- [reaching out] * Richard E Schell