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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19 May 2025

I could live or survive off of bunny breath alone, eating little clouds of fog.
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Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Elle Engel's Half Sick of Shadows read by Emmie Christie Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠
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