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
12 May 2025

You saw her for the first time at your front door, like she wanted to sell you something or convert you. She had light hair and dark eyes, and she was wearing fatigues, which was the only way you knew that your panicked prayers of the last few minutes had not come true. “Don’t freak out,” she said. “I’m you. From—uh, let’s just say from the future. Can I come inside?”
Time will not return to you as it was.
The verdant hills they whispered of this man so apt to sin / chimney smoke was pure as mountain snow compared to him.
In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, editor Kat Kourbeti talks to Naomi Kritzer about her non-linear writing journey, imagining positive futures, and how to deal with the world catching up to your near-future specfic.
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