Size / / /

Seemed like a good place

for the stolen mind

it needs to stay cool

and hidden

so we dug a room inside

an icy moonlet

and, well, we thought she was

comatose but maybe

she was simply exhausted

how else to explain

the haunting voices

her voices, that we hear

in every cable, every laser,

everything that passes through that moon

Who knew the switching station on one side

and the dormant mind on the other

could shake hands,

but they did

Now she's transmitting

copies of herself everywhere

netdogs have caught them all

so far but it's just a matter of time

we had to do something before,

you know, she found us

so it wasn't hard to steal enough explosives

to nudge the moonlet

In a few days

you'll need to duck

expect unusual weather:

a myriad hailstones

infected with her name


Kopaska-Merkel squints at rocks most of the day, which may help explain his poetry. Winters in Alabama are warm, but not warm enough, which also may be a factor. Anyway, fiction and poetry have cropped up like toadstools since the early 1980s, and 16 small books have been loosed upon the world. David's blog is located at dreamnnightmare.livejournal.com.



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.
Current Issue
31 Dec 2024

Of Water, Always Seeking 
remember, you are not alone, / and you have fury / as well as faith
The Egg 
By: River
faded computations / erased by the light of blood moons and / chalk
In the Zoo 
crocodile, crocodile, may we cross your river?
The Quantum and Temporal Properties of Unresolved Love 
Strange Horizons
Dante Amoretti, PhD, PE, Fellow, IEEE, Fellow, IET, IEEE-HKN   Abstract—This study explores the temporal and quantum properties of Unresolved Love (UL), drawing parallels with the resublimated thiotimoline discovered by Asimov in 1948. Much like thiotimoline, UL exhibits temporally irregular behavior, decaying not only in the present but also extending into both the past and future. This paper utilizes the concept of affectrons (i.e., love quantum particles emitted by the cardiac muscle), which directly influence the Cardial Love Density (CLD), the measurable amount of love per unit of volume within the heart. By tracking the concentration of affectrons over time,
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