Size / / /

On their world, too, it grew: blue lotus

Thrust up from the fertile mud

Of memory & myth, from pools

That caught the morning.

                                        When we came,

They welcomed us, but understood

We were not gods, although star-fallen,

Tall & strange.

                         Our heads were ours,

Not ibises or cats or cattle,

Not jackals or that crop-eared horror

Who haunted deserts.

                                   The breath of chaos

Howled there like a solar wind

Too strong to ride, too wild to trust:

They clung instead to order.

                                            Balance

Built their lives of stone & gold

Imperishable, pyramidal,

Petrified.

          We understood

Perhaps a hundredth of their reasons,

But dreamed the rest one lotus night

Tinged blue with déjà vu.

                                         Next morning,

Tall & strange & fallen from

Our airless desert seared by stars,

We launched— & felt the balance tremble.




Ann K. Schwader lives, writes, and volunteers at her local branch library in Westminster, CO. Her most recent poetry collection is Twisted in Dream (Hippocampus Press 2011). Her dark SF poetry collection Wild Hunt of the Stars (Sam's Dot Publishing, 2010) was a Bram Stoker Award nominee. She is a member of SFWA, HWA, and SFPA. Her LiveJournal is Yaddith Times.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
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