Size / / /

A burst of tachyons signals another wave of

Time-traveling starships,

You gotta marvel, I mean, how cool is that,

But, we're working on that ourselves,

I think the Chinese are too;

Our guys in New Mexico

Sent a ground squirrel back a week

And it survived,

It lived almost the whole week, anyway,

So we're almost there, which I suppose is why

Now of all times, in the history of time,

They come, because next year might be too late.

Next year,

We'd be all over time,

And kick their trans-temporal heinies

Back to the middle of next week.

But they caught us pants down;

We know just enough to know

That they're slipping thru time like

A knife thru butter;

Their temporal wake really takes me back..

They ignore everything we have in orbit,

And they're jamming communications anyway,

Nuclear missiles won't launch,

Our fighters can't catch them,

They seem to know exactly what we're going to do,

They know our strengths and weaknesses,

And now they emerge from the flagship,

(all Buck Rogersy and very cool),

And, duh, of course they know,

They are our own children after all.




David C. Kopaska-Merkel won the 2006 Rhysling Award for a collaboration with Kendall Evans, edits Dreams & Nightmares magazine, and has edited Star*Line and several Rhysling anthologies. His poems have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. A collection, Some Disassembly Required, winner of the 2023 Elgin Award, is available from him at jopnquog@gmail.com.
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29 Apr 2024

The Lightning Road cuts far across the Cosmos, a streak of dazzling gold amidst the star-studded void.
daily you suppress it and ride the shame / like a surfer rides a monster wave,
somersaulting in continuous turns
two wolves lope / behind the Atlantic
The thing is; I don’t set out to write neurodivergent characters. I write people – fictional people who are drawn from the people around me, the way I experience the world, and my understanding of these experiences. Too bad if other people refuse to afford my experiences as being real or relatable.
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