Online Issue Contents

• Wyrms & Wormholes

• Editor's Choice Poems
  • "Auspicious," by Bruce McRae
  • "Atoms of Me," by Alessio Zanelli
  • "Words in Their Poverty," by Daniel Roop
  • "diaspora scatters," by Stephanie Johnson
  • "Godzilla's Advice at the Pow Wow," by Juan Manuel Perez

• Full Table of Contents

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Wyrms & Wormholes: A year in the captain’s chair

I was awed and honored to look over the last year of Star*Lines and select our 2025 Pushcart nominees. What a trove of treasures! It also gave me pause to reflect on my editorial preferences, desires, and heartaches. When an editor wrote “inconsistent” in the margins of an Isaac Asimov manuscript, Asimov responded, “Emerson.” While I cannot claim to avoid the “foolish consistency [that] is the hobgoblin of little minds”—I definitely have preferences!—yet, as I build each issue, I try to imagine crafting a meal, so that no one has to eat five courses of broccoli—however much I love broccoli and imagine myriad ways of serving it. Here are five key points from my reflections.

1. Longer poems are a harder sell for me. I have a proclivity for short and tight. (Shortest I’ve accepted was 5 words, and the longest was 527, with a mean average of 83 words per poem.)
2. I like humor or a twisted sense of reality, or a poem that wrenches what I think of reality and posits something entirely different.
3. I’m tired of poems about AI.
4. I’m not inclined to formality, but I'm not opposed to it. I get excited when someone takes a traditional form and morphs it to fit their needs (especially if that is instead of wrenching the poem to fit the needs of the form).
5. I like experimental work and would love to see more of it.

Looking forward to another wondrously weird year!

—John Reinhart, Star*Line Editor

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Editor's Choice Poems

"Auspicious," by Bruce McRae

The weather promises to change
from man to animal.
Today’s forecast is absence,
with a chance of longing.
In the east, flying horses
and a scattering of flowers.
From the west, incursions,
barbarous hordes, black ice.

The weather changes its mind,
abandons its principles,
is forced to choose between
darkness and light.
They’re predicting hot flushes
and long cold showers.
They say the clouds might break
but we’re in for a hard spell.

Today’s weather is being
brought to you by sponsors
who’d rather you didn’t
put their names around.
Listener, the sea is rising
up out of its empty shell.
For all its talk of courage,
the wind is turning.

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"Atoms of Me," by Alessio Zanelli

Atoms of me,
right here and now,
how many times
has each one of you
already chanced in me?
Most just this once,
some quite a few,
a few so many.
Be that as it may,
please rest assured
you will be welcome
every single time,
until all of you
have left forever,
atoms of me.

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"Words in Their Poverty," by Daniel Roop

Don’t dialogue with someone you can talk to. Don’t interface with anyone.
—William Zinsser

As you idle at the stoplight,
now slumps in the gutter,
rattles a few loose coins
in a tin cup as
at this present juncture roars by
in a skysled.

In the alley, three carbonsilk-clad
press releases kick
a homeless haiku to death,
their garrulous taunts
echoing
on shadowed brick.
Death, eager to please,
gets a makeover,
reenters the scene as
unavoidable casualty,
as collateral damage.
A smudged, unintelligible blob
begs to clean
your windshield,
wailing as you pull away,
I used to mean something.

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"diaspora scatters," by Stephanie Johnson

diaspora scatters fragile-hard
knuckling down for keeps our
shooting-glass marbles into the grooves
on a generation-worn colony ship floor

who slides into humming notches
spinning along a pre-determined path
as abacus beads striving to shoot
our offspring from earth toward heaven
and who ricochets against cold walls
slivers of glass left behind
a quiet and treacherous
minefield for the unwary

each sphere skitters into its own eccentric orbit
trembling to a halt beyond these sterile corridors
where down means dirt not dreams

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"Godzilla's Advice at the Pow Wow," by Juan Manuel Perez

make yourself useful
when those you care for are cold
burn cities for warmth

be more resourceful
if your tribe is unhappy
wipe out enemies

always be polite
respect those who adore you
they will die for you

drums are always true
listen for revelations
sometimes, things must change

read all the symbols
that long, red hatchet of war
a nuclear blast

never fail to dance
life is just like a pow wow
were all is sacred

except evil men
make no quarrel about it
dispatch them at once

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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 * David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Sandra Lindow, Lisa Timpf
• Stealth SF * “All the Feels” * Denise Dumars
• SpecPo Writing * Interview with Marie Brennan * Jean-Paul L. Garnier
• SpecPo Publishing * Interview with Fred Coppersmith * Jean-Paul L. Garnier

Art

• The Writer * Eric Joyner
• Covid Anxiety * Donald Patten
• Follow the Road * Denny E. Marshall
• Hissing Beams Smote Down * Henrique Alvim Corrêa

Poetry

• Harbor * Mary Soon Lee
• [prehensile tendril] * Nicholas De Marino
• Lunatics * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• Echo-Tread * Yuliia Vereta
• A Rack of Interstellar Hypersleepers * R. Mac Jones
• The Banquet * Jean-Paul L. Garnier
• [Distant sun’s light falls] * Trevor Basner
• [runner’s high] * Sarah Cannavo
• A Moon Witch, Summoned by Owls * Devan Barlow
• Disposable futures * Yuliia Vereta
• Mouse Dragon * Mary Soon Lee
• An Apocalypse * Garrett Carroll
• there is a waning moon inside my chest * Eva Onescu
• Simplicity of Execution * Ken Poyner
• We Who Were Left Behind * A J Dalton
• Verisimilitude * John H. Dromey
• The Unsteady Bicyclist * K. M. Praschak
• Bone Talker * Jennifer Crow
• Warp Speed Discoveries * R. Gerry Fabian
• Shakespeare Blend * Gretchen Tessmer
• Fusion * Ramiro Valdes
• All the way to earth * Adegboyega Kayowa
• [out-of-town tourists] * Ngô Bình Anh Khoa
• Is There Life in Mars * David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• [remembering earth …] * Anna Cates
• Body Clock Reset * Casey Aimer
• Little Things * Murray Eiland
• [jinn & tonic—] * Robert Borski
• Auspicious * Bruce McRae
• Spring–Summer 2026 * Richard Magahiz
• Impress Their Tales * Devan Barlow
• T01-1452 B * G.O. Clark
• Electric Sheep * Robert Borski
• Mulch Maids * Amelia Gorman
• Time Travel Jacket * Jason P. Burnham
• Mice on the Moon * Robert Borski
• [space hubris] * Alper Ghuchlu
• Atoms Of Me * Alessio Zanelli
• Hosting the First Game Night * Lauren McBride
• Postponed Event Horizon * John H. Dromey
• Pandora’s Box * Beth Cato
• [Back from extinction] * Jacob Bergstresser
• Dinner Date * Jordan Hirsch
• All We Can Imagine As Enduring * Robert Frazier
• Glimmer * Greg Schwartz
• Digital Bird Gods * Lesley Hart Gunn
• Limited Recall * Ian Willey
• Words in Their Poverty * Daniel Roop
• On Alfred Sisley’s Allée de châtaigniers à La Celle-Saint-Cloud * Joshua St. Claire
• Home * John C. Mannone
• When a Lamb … * Tony Kitt
• [starlight …] * Greg Schwartz
• Magallanes * Caroline Hung
• Progress * Howard V. Hendrix
• I Carried a Brain Under My Arm * James Machell
• diaspora scatters * Stephanie Johnson
• To the Xenomorph Queen…, * Beth Winegarner
• Supplanter * Rebecca Schier-Akamelu
• the night we all had dreams * M. Frost
• Chopin * Darius Jones
• [sentient seaweed] * Jean-Paul L. Garnier
• Schrödinger’s Dog * Robert Borski
• Arrested development in Candyland * Charles Richard Livesay
• When the City Breathes * Philip Madden
• Invisible Woman * F. J. Bergmann
• War * Beth Cato
• The Way of Enfrightenment * Nicholas De Marino
• The Math of Apology * Christopher Collingwood
• digging for time * D. A. Xiaolin Spires
• The Goddess of Creation Has a Nightmare * Gerri Leen
• [self-centered bastard] * Nicholas De Marino •
• [in the lab] * Anna Cates
• Planet Z’s Toilette * L. Acadia
• Godzilla’s Advice at the Pow Wow * Juan Manuel Perez
• Karma of Reverse Engineering * Howard V. Hendrix
• The Spiral Ledger * Katlina Sommerberg
• The Tiger Fungus Roams * Gerri Leen
• Haunted House Haiku * Helen V. Patterson
• Resplendent Once Befriended * Lauren McBride
• One Last Time with Feeling * Kim Whysall-Hammond
• Harvestman * Marisca Pichette
• [summer packs her bags—] * Elis Montgomery
• [winter chill] * LeRoy Gorman
• back Indigo * Leigh Therriault
• one claw stuck in sky * M. Frost
• [unauthorized] * Lisa Timpf