A Magazine of Many Arts

Marcie Lynn Tentchoff

I was his first,
that means a lot to certain men,
and, for a scientist,
Paul has a love
of all that’s old –
done right, he says –
traditional.

He’s kept me well.
My cubicle’s luxurious and plush,
and properly maintained —
the maids all vie
to keep the polished
luster of my walls
gem clear.

And though I’m forced
to watch the newer models traipse about,
bedecked in jewels, and chrome,
and circuitry,
en route to dinners
or to plays
to suit his whim…

I know I was his first,
and that, while he keeps their upgrades fresh,
there’s so much to be said
for antique amber,
vintage verdigris,
unadorned, and classic
in the box.

David C. Kopaska-Merkel

We slept for centuries in metal tubes,
10,000 dreams of waking in the ship,
To find a planet we could make our home,
A ring of rocks that could have been a world,
Or outpost of an empire old as time,
Whose warriors were armed with weapons strange,
Or empty human colonies and dust
Of countless years since people last walked there.


At last we wake in orbit round a sun,
We find a world the blue of salty seas,
Its moons are small, no cities anywhere,
Bright green its hills, its valleys, and its plains,
But many of us stand in troubled thought,
And wonder when we’ll think we wake again.

Deborah L. Davitt

A giant loomed in their sky, swollen,
striped, and possessed of white-staring eyes;
the children of the trees paid homage to their titan
with bark-strip baskets filled with fungal cakes
each time he stole and ate the sun,
hoping to fill him up enough with sacrifice,
that he’d vomit her back up again,
release his hostage,
as they huddled in their homes.
 
In the long dark, the cold came,
and strange things flew upon the air,
screeching creatures who swooped down
and stole the unwary, who strayed too far
from the safety of the Tree’s mazy branches,
inward-turned and crooked into a labyrinth
that only the children could follow.
 
When the sun peered over the horizon,
staining the air with bronze, the youngest gamboled
in the maze, leaping and gliding, branch to branch,
finding leaves and fruits to eat, stockpiling mushrooms
against the titan’s appetite, and drank sweet sap
from under the bark that they stripped away,
while their elders hunted the huge and clacking beetles
that bored into the Tree’s heart;
they traded those shining carapaces,
those iridescent wings,
to the maddened children who’d forsaken their Trees
for lives of stone and metal in the mountains
or lives spent wresting crops from the ground in the plains.
 
The mad ones told the children that a house of stone
was proof against the nightflyer’s rage;
that if you traveled long and far, there were lands
in which the titan never ate the sun;
the children laughed to hear such tales,
proof of the mad ones’ insanity.
 
But when their crop of fungus failed,
they wept, for they knew the titan’s hunger;
to ensure that the sun would rise once more,
they prepared for him a greater feast,
selecting the youngest of their number.
 
To their dismay, he fled the honor
of being sacrificed to the swollen monster in the sky;
he fled to the mountains before night fell,
and found to his surprise,
more welcome in a house of stone
than he’d ever felt within his Tree.
 
Three hundred cycles of light and dark passed
before he returned to his ancestral Tree,
carrying blades of blackened earthblood
and with stories and truths to tell.
 
But when he arrived, he found that his Tree
of all the forest, stood withered and sere;
the tribes who lived in other branches,
claimed that all those who had dwelled within,
had set upon each other two hundred cycles past;
some had fled to other Trees and other tribes—
the rest had fallen to lie among its roots.
 
He found their skulls and vertebrae
tangled among the lowest vines—
he asked them softly, what had passed,
if the titan had indeed punished them,
if their deaths were, in some way, his fault.
 
The wind soughed in the branches,
but the dead ceded him no answers.
And looking up at the titan above,
he left his ancestral tree once more,
never to return.

illustration is Megalith Grave in Winter by Johan Christian Dahl 1824

Bruce Boston

Wind from the blast
ripped half the roof
off the venerable
building and broke
most of its windows.
Shelves have fallen.
Others are leaning.
Books have toppled
to the floor, spilling
their cargo of words
to an indifferent sky.
 
Snow, rain, and wind
have entered freely,
and the dampness
has invaded all.
Even deep in the
stacks a faint stench
of mildew prevails.
Wild mushrooms
sprout in the dark.
 
Librarians have long
since fled this shattered
ruin in the shattered city.
There are no students
hunched over their studies,
no old men leafing through
newspapers from cities
where they once lived,
no bored wives searching
out romance novels.
 
Yet the deserted library
still has many patrons.
Creatures small and pale
come in great numbers
to tunnel through one
volume after another,
devouring one letter
at a time until they
have the last word.