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 has 1200+ published poems, short stories, etc. (since 1972). He won the Rhysling Award for best long poem in 2006 for a collaboration with Kendall Evans. His latest book is The Ambassador Takes One For The Team, a collection of speculative poetry. Blog at http://dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com/. @DavidKM on Twitter.
Current Issue
27 Mar 2023

close calls when / I’m with Thee / dressed to the nines
they took to their heels but the bird was faster.
In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Reviews Editors Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland talk to novelist, reviewer, and Strange Horizons’ Co-ordinating Editor, Gautam Bhatia, about how reviewing and criticism of all kinds align—and do not—with fiction-writing and the genre more widely.
If the future is here, but unevenly distributed, then so is the past.
He claims that Redlow used to be a swamp and he has now brought them into the future before the future. Yes he said that.
My previous Short Fiction Treasures column was all about science fiction, so it’s only fair that the theme this time around is fantasy.
I’ve come to think of trans-inclusive worldbuilding as an activist project in itself, or at least analogous to the work of activists. When we imagine other worlds, we have to observe what rules we are creating to govern the characters, institutions, and internal logic in our stories. This means looking at gender from the top down, as a regulatory system, and from the bottom up, at the people on the margins whose bodies and lives stand in some kind of inherent opposition to the system itself.
Wednesday: And Lately, The Sun edited by Calyx Create Group 
Friday: August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White 
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By: Catherine Rockwood
By: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Ciro Faienza
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Podcast read by: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Maureen Kincaid Speller
Issue 23 Jan 2023
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