After a lengthy medical hiatus Riddled with Arrows Literary Journal is back with a SUBSCRIBERS ONLY stealth issue. RwA 5.1: “Candy Hearts & Little Literary Love Notes” is currently running 1 dz. once-a-day features of poetry, prose, and visual art through the end of February, each one hand-picked from among our evergreen and steadfast subscribers.
But that’s not all! Visit our 2022 Theme Calendar for a sneak peak at upcoming projects, submission dates, and further details.
Last month I had the honor of being featured in Sapling, the weekly newsletter of Black Lawrence Press.
Sapling is a subscription-based newsletter dedicated to showcasing small presses and journals (details and subscription options can be found here.) It’s an excellent resource for writers that includes open submission calls, interviews, and more. My interview as RwA founding editor is reprinted below, with permission.
Sapling: What should people know who may not be familiar with Riddled with Arrows?
Shannon Connor Winward: Riddled with Arrows is an online literary journal dedicated to metafiction and metapoems (ars poetica), and writing that celebrates the process and product of writing as art. We are zealously writer-friendly: we offer a modest payment for contributors, a super-fast turnaround on fee-free submissions and—when possible and warranted—a personal note for rejected work.
Sapling: How did your name come about?
SCW: The journal takes its name from “Poetry,” a poem by Pablo Neruda:
“…and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.”
Sapling: What do you pay close attention to when reading submissions? Any deal breakers?
SCW: Riddled with Arrows exclusively publishes metafiction/poetry and writing about writing. You could submit the most stunning piece of writing we’ve ever read, but if it is not about writing, or at least self-referential in some way, we can’t use it.
Sapling: Where do you imagine Riddled with Arrows to be headed over the next couple years? What’s on the horizon?
SCW: Right now we’re working towards sustainability. Riddled with Arrows is a passion project that is entirely writer-funded—we have been blessed with a wide network of writers and linguaphiles whose financial support has launched us into our second year—but we are hoping to generate enough in-house income to keep paying contributors for years to come, and maybe even raise our contributors’ rates.
Content-wise, we are very interested in the interactive nature of web design as it can be applied to literature. We’ve been dabbling in hypertext and embedded effects that enhance the reading experience—we definitely want to do more of that. The focus of Riddled will always be the writing, but we’ve got some fun interactive projects in the queue.
Sapling: As an editor, what is the hardest part of your job? The best part?
SCW: The hardest part comes at the very end of the selection process when I have to choose which of my favorites to put in an issue and which to set free. It’s always painful to say no to something wonderful that just doesn’t fit, for whatever reason. The best part, though, is seeing that finished product, and admiring the way all the selected works fit together to complete an issue. Particularly when Ro, our Design Editor, starts working her magic to make the words come alive on the site–it always surpasses my original vision. With all of the administrative work that goes into producing a journal, even an online one, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose sight of why we decided to do this—but that moment when it finally comes together makes it all worthwhile.
Sapling: If you were stranded on a desert island for a week with only three books which books would you want to have with you?
SCW: An anthology of world poetry, a blank notebook, and the fattest dictionary I can find.
Sapling: Just for fun (because we like fun and the number three) if Riddled with Arrows was a person what three things would it be thinking about obsessively?
SCW: Which journals are opening/closing to subs this week, a better word than “perspicacious” in the penultimate line of that poem, and whether coffee is the source of or the solution to all these strange somatic symptoms…
Shannon Connor Winward is the author of the Elgin-award winning chapbook, Undoing Winter and winner of the 2018 Delaware Division of the Arts Emerging Artist Fellowship in Literature. Her work has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Lunch Ticket, The Pedestal Magazine, Minola Review, The Monarch Review, Qu, Literary Mama, Rivet, and elsewhere.www.shannonconnorwinward.com
*
“Ghosts, edited by Shannon Connor Winward, is a moving and wide-ranging collection of spectral verses that largely succeed in channeling the ghostly in singularly imaginative and even untrodden ways… The poems included in “Ghosts”have an admirable potency and synergy when read together… That these poems skirt the Scylla and Charybdis of over-reliance on genre tropes is their greatest strength.”
Many thanks to Michael J. Abolafia for his fabulous review (Spectral Realms 6) of the October 2016 issue of Eye to the Telescope—the “Ghosts” issue—which I guest-edited for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association. Abolafia gives special shout-outs to poets L.W. Salinas, Holly Walrath, Suzan Pickford, Daniel R. Jones, Joe Nazare, Christina Sng, Andrea Bylthe, Jessica Horowitz, Lauren McBride, Ann K. Schwader, John W. Sexton, Rebecca Buchanan, Jane Yolen, James Edward O’Brien & Alex Harper.
In recent posts* I have been revisiting poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, “The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited. The issue went live October 15th, 2016.
In this last installment, we explore the “unmeasured” – the impossible up-not-down, the then that is too far to reach but close enough to feel, the ending that is not so much a beginning but a continuation.
*In case you missed any (or should you like to revisit them), links to the previous six posts in this series are located at the end of this feature.
Any exploration of a theme like “ghosts” that does not also deal with grief would be an exercise in frivolity. That is why in this issue of Eye to the Telescope you will find poems of lost love and sorrow interspersed with the quirky and uncanny and tales of high ghostly adventure. Death –that most central and inevitable drama of human existence–deserves the poet’s attention.
Of all the poems that I read for this issue, none were so exquisitely sad as John C. Mannone’s “undying”. I do not use this phrase lightly–this poem is not maudlin, it is not gothic in its grief. Rather, Mannone gives us in unadorned language a series of mundane images–men doing everyday things like joking in an elevator, kissing their wives, drinking coffee. The power of the poem is in its form: the actions play out backwards, calling quiet attention to the enormity of their sadness through their finality–the last sip, the last kiss, the last ride down into the coalmine.
The strength of “undying” is also in its impossibility: the men do not know they are doing these things for the last time. We never know. The poem asks the dead to reverse death, which of course they can’t, so the imperatives–unchoke, unkill, unbreak, untouch her, repeated over and over, are absolutely hopeless and awful, and wonderful in their ability to articulate utter loss.
Note, too, the appearance of the poem (a long, vertical column, like an elevator shaft) and the structural || positioned throughout, wherever the narration pauses for breath. Clever, clever.
John C. Mannone has over 550 works published in venues such as Gyroscope Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Inscape Literary Journal, Windhover, 2016 Texas Poetry Calendar, Baltimore Review, Pedestal, Pirene’s Fountain, Event Horizon Magazine and Syzygy Journal. He’s been awarded a 2016 Weymouth writing residency and has two literary poetry collections, including one on disability, Disabled Monsters (The Linnet’s Wings Press, Dec 2015) featured at the 28th Southern Festival of Books. He edits poetry for Silver Blade and Abyss & Apex, and he’s a college professor of physics in east Tennessee. Visit jcmannone.wordpress.com
“Séance at Black Horse Pike” reads like an epigraph to “undying”, and, really, to all the poems in this collection. It has the thumps and flickers of a séance but it is really a reflection on death, and life– the whole painful business. I feel like Black Horse Pike could be anywhere we sense history, the comings and goings (always goings) of lives, “then” and “now” separated by a notion of time thin as a well-worn carpet, yet set apart by an impossible, impassible distance. Perhaps what we think of as ghosts are just those who, like us, have been struck by their own mortality there–perhaps the cold drafts and distant footfalls are just echoes of our existential dread.
I find the second-to-last stanza quite interesting: the only thing uplifting, life-affirming in the whole poem, the “overripe plumb” (our youthful expectations? the long-gone fruit of Eden?) appears out of nowhere and just hangs there, mocking, out of reach. How ghastly! But how gorgeous.
A bit of trivia: James Edward O’Brien wrote “Séance at Black Horse Pike” in traditional stanzas; it was a mysterious technical glitch that caused his submission to appear to me as a prose poem. We only discovered the mishap in the wee hours before publication; I liked it so much this way, I convinced him to keep it. Special props to Jim for obliging me. What do you think-how would the poem read, if framed differently?
James Edward O’Brien lives in Far Rockaway, NY, with his wife and dogs. His poetry has appeared in Nerve Cowboy, Black Bear Review, WordWrights, and Bathtub Gin. His speculative fiction appears in Cyclopean, 87 Bedford, and Hybrid Moments: A Literary Tribute to The Misfits. Jim’s chapbook, Broke-down Shotgun Blues, was awarded first place in Nerve Cowboy’s 2002 Chapbook Contest.
My choice to place Alex Harper’s “But After” at the end of this issue was largely self-indulgent: not only does it give us a much needed upswing after the dark turnings of the previous poems, it also encapsulates my own hope and faith for the afterlife.
In my submission call, I quoted these lines from Manuel Acuña‘s “Before a Corpse”: “Existence is a circle, and we err/when we assign to it for measurement/the limits of the cradle and the grave.” “But After” was the answer to that poem I was hoping for. In many of the works we’ve seen, death is not an ending, but Harper’s is the only one in which death is just a temporary reprieve from the real business of living.
To me, “But After” takes a stab at that most essential of life’s questions: why. Why do we do this? Why do die? Why do we live? Because
Existence is a circle, and, in a way, Eye to the Telescope #22 ends where it started; the ghost given form in the body, given meaning in the poem, here to be lived, read, written, over and over again.
Alex Harper has been published in Liminality, Mirror Dance, Not One of Us, Kaleidotrope, and Cordite Poetry Review, among others. He lives in England and can be found online at palexharperwriting.wordpress.com and on Twitter as @harpertext.
Part 1: Intro – featuring poems by y L.W. Salinas, Holly Walrath and Akua Lezli Hope
Part 2: From Archetype to Personal – featuring poems by Robin Husen, Dawn Cunningham, Suzan Pickford and Cathleen Allyn Conway.
Part 3: Planes, Trains, and Gooseberry Jam – featuring poems by F.J. Bergmann, Daniel R. Jones, Joe Nazare and Oliver Smith
Part 4: Ghosts Without, Ghosts Within – featuring poems by Christina Sng, Andrea Blythe, Aisha Tayo Ijadunola and Lev Mirov.
Part 5: Space Ghosts – featuring poems by Jessica J. Horowitz, Charles Christian, Lauren McBride, Ann K. Schwader and Deborah L. Davitt.
Part 6: Into the Wild – featuring poems by Wendy Rathbone, John W. Sexton, Rebecca Buchanan and Jane Yolen
Part 7: The Unmeasured – featuring poems by John C. Mannone, James Edward O’Brien and Alex Harper
In recent posts I have been revisiting poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, “The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited. The issue went live October 15th.
Today we continue the series with four ghost poems that subvert expectations, from humanity’s place in the universe and Nature, to the nature of grief.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/67194724@N03/8730930781
Any meaningful contemplation of ghosts must lead us eventually to life’s fundamental questions: not just “where do we go when we die” but “where do we come from”, “what are we made of”, and “why are we here?”
Some of my favorite poems among those submitted to the “Ghosts” issue are those that embrace these essential mysteries. Wendy Rathbone’s “Three Worlds” is one fantastic example. Appearing at the cusp of our extraterrestrial ghost poems, “Three Worlds” takes us not just to new star systems but other planes of existence entirely; realms of the spirit, or soul. Three, to be exact– each uniquely horrible and wonderful.
Though they read like pure imagination, we know these three worlds are somehow threaded to the life and death questions because of the poem’s first line (“Once when I did not exist/three worlds called to me”) and the closing (“I had to… give up the years/and make my eyes husks/and dangle my skeleton like a bell over the adrift dimensions/to meet my ghost”.
The lines imply a sacrifice, but they also suggest that the nature of our existence is a choice. It’s empowering, and it begs the question–if we could be anywhere, why are we here, in this plane where we are nursed on “leaves and stars”?
I love the possibilities engendered by this poem: it reminds me of that meme buzzing around the internet: you are a ghost driving a meat-coated skeleton made from stardust — what are you afraid of?
Wendy Rathbone has had over 500 poems published in places like Asimov’s, Apex, Pedestal, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Dreams and Nightmares, HWA Showcase and more. Her most recent collection, Turn Left at November, is nominated for an Elgin. She also writes and publishes novels and short stories. You can find her on Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, Tumblr, and her blog: wendyrathbone.blogspot.com/
http://nataliadrepina.deviantart.com/art/Evanescent-light-for-little-moths-559088206
Rathbone’s “Three Worlds” and John W. Sexton’s “Bright Matter” are both delightfully surreal. They also share an interest in the ghostly symbolism of moths–strange little beings that flutter, spectral and soft, in the dark. I could not resist positioning them back to back.
Yet where Rathbone’s moths are poetic and passing, “Bright Matter” is devoted to the creatures–a wholly unexpected and fascinating choice in which the human of the narrative (poor Sally) is really just an afterthought, a sad little phenom who for some reason can sense the presence of moth souls: thousands and thousands of them, all around.
Even more wonderfully bizarre is the poem’s revelation that moths are suicidal for a reason — “Destined to burn they are born already burned,” yearning for the greatest porch light of all. Sally cannot understand it, but the poet lets us in on the secret: their transitory existence contributes bit by infinitesimal silvery bit to a mysterious cosmic metabolic process, like an hourglass counting off centuries, or the galaxy slowly shifting its weight. When the sun finally reaches critical moth mass, what then?
John W. Sexton lives in the Republic of Ireland and is a Muse pagan. His fifth poetry collection, The Offspring of the Moon, has just been published by Salmon Poetry. His sixth collection, Futures Pass, is also forthcoming in 2017 from the same publisher. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. His speculative poems are widely published and some have appeared in Apex, The Edinburgh Review, The Irish Times, Liminality, Mithila Review, Mirror Dance, The Pedestal Magazine, Silver Blade and Strange Horizons.
While Sexton’s insect specters were an unprecedented choice, animal ghosts were surprisingly popular among the poems submitted to this issue of Eye to the Telescope. That is to say, pet ghosts were popular–many spirit cats padded their way across my laptop, along with a few faithful dead dogs (which begs the question – is it easier to imagine cat ghosts? or are speculative poets more likely to be cat people? hmm.)
Rebecca Buchanan’s “a stranger in the cemetery whispered to me” stood out for its focus on wild animals — denizens of nature haunting the woods and “edges of ev’ry/road”, echoing the cycle of seasons, of life, even in spirit form. More than this, though, Buchanan’s poem completely subverts our arrogant human assumption that we’re the only species that has ghosts; indeed, it dares to suggest that we’re the only species that doesn’t.
I like the mystery and subtle mockery of this poem–while the animal spirits are “bright-eyed” and animate, the eponymous “stranger” and “me” are both nondescript, abstracts that don’t even warrant capital letters. The “cemetery”, too, is a mere sketch of a setting –just a yard of stones, perhaps, demarking nothing of importance.
Rebecca Buchanan is the editor of the Pagan literary ezine, Eternal Haunted Summer. She has been previously published, or has work forthcoming, in Bards and Sages Quarterly, Faerie Magazine, Luna Station Quarterly, Nebula Rift, New Realm, and other venues.
Buchanan’s nod to Nature (and humanity’s less-than-consequential place in it) sequed nicely with another poem that juxtaposes death, wilderness, and human impulse.
By far the most common ghost poems I received were “lost love” poems–pets, parents, and children, to be sure, but something about romantic love seems to wed particularly well with the notion of ghostly return.
Because my goal with this issue was to seek out the unusual, I was drawn to Jane Yolen’s “Embracing the Bear”, in which loss is not romanticized– just the opposite. The poem evokes an almost aversive response to the bear that the narrator imagines, for a moment, is a returned husband. The creature reeks of piss and sweat, semen… decay–yet it is this miasma that speaks to the narrator’s grief– a reaction akin to a widow smelling old, unwashed shirts, perhaps, but far more visceral and complicated.
What I found particularly interesting is that the poem can be read a number of ways: is the husband truly dead, or might he just as well be? Does the narrator “choose the bear” out of disappointment that the “ghosting” was just illusion –is the pain of eight years’ separation, brought so unexpectedly to the surface by this surprise encounter, just too much bear? Or is death in the animal’s embrace preferable to even one more day with a husband who is sickly, depressed, “married to death” or otherwise alive but no longer the man he used to be?
Jane Yolen, often called “The Hans Christian Andersen of America” is a much-published poet whose poems appear regularly in magazines, journals, anthologies, and in her own collections of poems, both for adults and children. She is a Grand Master of SFPA (Science Fiction/Fantasy Poetry Association.) She writes a poem a day that goes out to almost 750 readers. To subscribe: eepurl.com/bs28ab
In recent posts I have been revisiting poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, “The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited. The issue went live October 15th.
Today we continue the series with five exemplary science fiction poems that explore the far-out possibilities of ghosts in space.
Following the heavy fare of the previous poems, Jessica Horowitz cleanses the palate with her sparklingly light short form, “Romance”. The flirtatious nod to both fantasy and science in this Dwarf Star darling quickly captured my heart.
Our Telescope now fixed skyward, “Romance” also draws us into the uncharted realms of space, and the ghostly possibilities therein, and beyond.
Jessica Jo Horowitz is Korean-born, currently living in New England where she studies historical sword work and Asian mythology. Previous poems have appeared in ChiZine: Treatments of Light and Shade and Star*Line. Find her on Twitter @TransientJ.
Our Eye to the Telescope exploration of space-ly ghosts starts relatively close to home with Charles Christian’s love song to Valentinka, a (theoretical?) “Little Lost Cosmonaut” whose corpse was left in perpetual orbit after a botched space mission. Decades later, the ghost of Valentinka still watches and waits, dreaming of what was–and, maybe, what could be?
Though macabre in concept, and infinitely lonely, “Little Lost Cosmonaut” yet has a charming, life-affirming musicality to it — I was taken with waltzing lines like “the taste of vodka, the smell of borscht/the sound of the balalaika/And walking hand-in-hand in Gorky Park.”
Christian offers the image of Valentinka sealed with her capsule “Like a Matryoshka nest of dolls,” but one could as easily imagine her as a ballerina inside a music box, just waiting for someone to lift the lid and let her dance.
Charles Christian is an English journalist, author, and occasional poet who writes about tech, geek stuff, folklore, pop culture and the just plain weird. He is the publisher of the Grievous Angel zine and editor of the 2016 Rhysling Anthology—and an English newspaper recently commissioned him to go on a werewolf hunt. He found nothing but does now have to shave more frequently when there is a full moon.
Bookending “Little Lost Cosmonaut” is yet another Dwarf Star potential, ” in the starship junkyard…” by Lauren McBride. While it’s a challenge to feature this one without reprinting the whole precious thing, I urge you to give it a read in context. Let the image sit with you a bit, especially this side of Valentinka’s lonely echo. Feel us drift far from our familiar arcs, out into space and time to distant tomorrows, where humankind expands ever outward, and our loyal machines dream…
Lauren McBride finds inspiration in faith, nature, science and membership in the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Nominated for the SFPA’s Rhysling and Dwarf Stars Awards, her work has appeared in numerous speculative, nature, and children’s publications including Dreams & Nightmares, Silver Blade, and Grievous Angel. She shares a love of laughter and the ocean with her husband and two grown children.
With Ann K. Schwader’s “New World Haunting”, our journey takes us out beyond all known borders into utterly alien ghostly realms. Building on the mechanical echoes of space capsules and starships in the previous poems, “New World” ousts us from sleep pods-turned-coffins into uncharted worlds, where we find ourselves short of bodies but no less eager to explore.
I love the forward motion of this poem, the way one line strains to become the next, mirroring the underlying theme of humanity’s ambition and drive. I love the concept of space travelers fueled by such passion that even death cannot halt their momentum.
Ann K. Schwader’s most recent poetry collection, Dark Energies, appeared in 2015 from P’rea Press. It recently placed third in this year’s Elgin Awards for full-length collection. Ann is a two-time Bram Stoker Award Finalist, and has received Rhysling Awards for both short and long form work. She was the Poet Laureate for NecronomiCon Providence in 2015. A Wyoming native, she now lives and writes in suburban Colorado. Find out more at home.earthlink.net/~schwader
With a thrust similar to “New World Haunting”, Deborah L. Davitt’s “Possession” also braves new alien realms. However, Davitt does this darkly, deftly weaving science fiction and psychological horror.
Though “Possession” (aptly named) revisits the possession trope, this poem eschews cliché by reimagining possession as technology gone wrong. Against a backdrop of planetary apocalypse, the possessor here is a human? maybe?–ghost? or program? sustained for countless years before being accidentally downloaded into an alien creature.
Or… OR, perhaps the alien is a human, and the “ghost” is the alien…
With the final stanzas, Davitt weaves together two points-of-view: the hapless space “ghost” and the rightful owner of the body it now inhabits. Drawing on even more classic genre tropes, “Possession” leaves open the possibility that perhaps the whole thing is just a story, a psychosis dreamt up in some demented being’s (person’s?) head.
However you read it, “Possession” aced the challenge of taking ghost stories in new and unexpected directions. Genre poetry at its finest.
Deborah L. Davitt grew up in Reno, Nevada, took her BA in English Lit at UNR, and earned her MA in English from Penn State. Since then, she has taught composition, rhetoric, and technical writing, and has worked as a technical writer in industries including nuclear submarines, NASA, and computer manufacturing. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and son. She’s been fortunate to have her poetry published in Star*Line, Blue Monday Review’s Storytime Challenge, Dreams & Nightmares, Silver Blade, Poetry Quarterly, and other venues. A short story of hers, “The Cenotaph,” appeared in Intergalactic Medicine Show in Sept. 2016. She’s best known for her alternate-history/fantasy books, the Saga of Edda-Earth. You can find more of her work through her website: edda-earth.com
In recent posts I have been revisiting poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, “The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited. The issue went live October 15th.
Today we continue the series with four poems exploring a range of spectral manifestations, from ghastly ghostly weather to spirits that consume us from within.
Christina Sng’s skill with short form poetry shimmers forth in “Ghost Month”. Like traditional haiku, the poem reflects upon the natural world, obliquely evoking emotion or insight. Yet “Ghost Month” slips easily between the natural and the supernatural — a lovely vein of magical realism which accepts spirits as part of the everyday landscape — at least for the duration of “the ghost month“.
I was particularly taken with the atmospheric quality of these five concise couplets, with their gentle rhymes. Like spectral offerings, the effect is haunting and enduringly satisfying.
Christina Sng is a poet, writer, and artist. Her work has received nominations in the Dwarf Stars and Rhysling Awards as well as Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She is the author of several chapbooks, most recently, Dark Dreams (Smashwords, 2011) and A Constellation of Songs (Origami Poems Project, 2016). Her first two full-length books, Astropoetry (Alban Lake Publishing, 2016) and A Collection of Nightmares (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2016) are slated for winter this year. Visit her online at christinasng.com.
Of course, “Ghost Month” dovetails perfectly with Andrea Blythe’s “Summer Hauntings”. Like “Ghost Month”, Blythe’s poem describes the overlap of the ghostly with the everyday as if it were a natural phenomenon, like a heat wave.
“Summer Hauntings”, too, is delightfully atmospheric; the reader comes away feeling sticky and damp with these wonderful words.
I especially love the invocation of Dalí, to compare sagging ghosts with melting clocks — it gives a certain authority to the images, allowing the entire poem to serve as a surrealistic painting. Blythe’s descriptive technique is fantastic, enviable. I love chewing on this poem, like summer taffy.
Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. Her first chapbook of poetry, Pantheon, is forthcoming from ELJ Publications in August 2017. Her work has also appeared in several publications, including Yellow Chair Review, Nonbinary Review, Linden Avenue, and Strange Horizons. She serves as an associate editor for Zoetic Press and is a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Learn more at andreablythe.com
In a dramatic shift of tone, “No Longer Mine” by Aisha Tayo Ijadunola is a powerful short piece that leaves the reader feeling anemic, gutted, like the child held captive by a rapacious spirit.
For this issue of Eye to the Telescope I was careful to draw distinctions between ghosts and other myths and beasties, such as corporeal undead (zombies) and, say, demons. But “possession” stories are part and parcel with ghost cannon — this idea that spirits envy us our flesh, and seek to take it from us, subduing or ousting our own souls in the process.
Abiku is a Yorubas (West African) word meaning “that which possesses death” or “predestined to death”, referring to a type of spirit that attacks children; its victims are often the successive offspring of one mother. Perhaps the Abiku is something alien, a demon that develops a taste for a particular bloodline; or perhaps it is the ghost of a child who won’t let go, returning to its natural mother over and over. In either case, that mother-child bond, (“She was crying for me/She knows I’m close) is at the heart of this poem, and the heart of its horror.
I found the repetition of the final lines particularly moving: the “Aren’t you full/Aren’t you done” refrain strikes like a hollow drum, and sucked-out bone: an echo of longing, hunger, and loss.
Aisha Tayo Ijadunola is a London-based fantasy writer and digital artist. Her works often feature elements of Nigerian as well as other African myths and legends.
There is a notable similarity in theme between “No Longer Mine” and Lev Mirov’s “The Doppelgänger and the Ghost”. Both deal with the struggle of spirits for ownership of flesh. But while “No Longer Mine” gives a human voice to a ghostly myth, “The Doppelgänger…” does double duty as a metaphor and memoir.
In this poem, the narrator is the natural, rightful owner of his own body — a survivor of a battle with a pretty changeling who’d ensorcelled his parents into believing they’d birthed a girl. The real tragedy, though, is that after defeating the usurper, the narrator has no victorious homecoming; his family grieves for their lost “girl”, the illusion. Their disappointment drives him to examine “self”, again and again, searching his body and mind as if he must now constantly justify living in this skin.
While “The Doppelgänger and the Ghost” is a compelling story in its own right (a mash-up of the “fairy changeling” and “evil double” motifs, with a cool gender subversion), and beautifully written, it’s also a powerful metaphor for the psychological- and body-trauma often faced by people on the LGBT spectrum.
Though its length might have made it a hard-fit because of budget constraints (see my comments on “Tulpa” here), I found “Doppelgänger” too big – that is, too important – to pass up. I’m honored to debut it in Eye to the Telescope.
Lev Mirov is a queer disabled mixed race Filipino-American medievalist who lives with his wife, fellow writer India Valentín, and their two cats in rural Maryland, where he feeds the ghosts of Antietam when it rains. His Rhysling-nominated poetry has been featured in Strange Horizons, Liminality Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, and other fine magazines and anthologies. His fiction appears in anthologies including Myriad Lands and the forthcoming Sunvault Anthology. To read his magical worlds and poems, find him at levmirov.wordpress.com or by following him on Twitter @thelionmachine.
Part 3 in a Series:
In my previous posts, I featured several poems from the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, “The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited. The issue went live October 15th.
Today we continue the series with four very different genre poems that embody a spectrum of ghostly possibilities.
In the last installment, we looked at how the ghost poems in Eye to the Telescope#22 transition from the abstract and epic to the intimate. F.J. Bergmann’s brief “Not a Destination” deftly moves us through a personal death towards what we might think of as the ultimate destination… only to find that the journey has just begun.
The blinking hospital lights and beeps of “Not a Destination” are a perfect fit with the poems just before and after: “Admittance” recalls a father’s resurrection in a hospital setting, while the you in Daniel Jones’ “Fevered Ream” slips from this mortal coil in room 607 of St Vincent’s. To me, this trio of poems suggest a crossroads of possibilities: three slightly different routes for the departing soul.
The path of Bergmann’s “Not a Destination” takes a nicely dark turn; the deceased barely has a chance to settle into new accommodations before finding himself shuffled off again, sugar-plumb fantasies of the afterlife dispersing with an ominous plume of smoke. Like all the best ghost stories, this poem leaves it to the reader to fill in the gaps; it is our imagination that takes off from the station, towards a dark unknown.
F.J. Bergmann dreams of a future in which bios will need to be neither provided nor updated due to the perfection of mind-melding via hyperspatial dimensions. See fibitz.com for more ideation. She is the editor of Star*Line and the poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change.
“Fevered Ream” was one of those poems that rises up out of the slush and just stops time for a minute — what did I just read? I love the breathlessness of this one, the rambling fever dream string of images, similes; a literary tossing and turning that suddenly lets go with an explosive stanza of light and motion and a curious mixture of religious and scientific references (“Elysian nebula”, “between the star of Bethlehem and another”, “…blip on the Hubble”, “…a far cry from Mount Moriah”).
“Fevered Ream” raises more questions than it answers ( where does the arc of the soul lead, and what happens when it lands?) ; however I find the pace and tone and vivid organic language offer a promising counterpoint to the dark machinery of the previous poem.
What really sealed it for me, though, was the final line. Gorgeous sci-fi poetry, that is. Still gives me shivers.
Daniel Jones is a an MFA candidate at Lindenwood University, and a writer from Indianapolis, IN. Previously, he’s had work published in Aphelion, the South Bend Tribune, In the Bend, Spill Words Press, Time of Singing, and he won an award for best poem in the 2013 edition of Bethel College’s Crossings. He is currently serving as an editorial assistant for Issue 7 of The Lindenwood Review.
Now with nanobots! https://www.flickr.com/photos/29233640@N07/3137493718
Speaking of science fiction: enter “Hex Machina” by Joe Nazare. I just couldn’t say no to this one: ectoplasm, nanotech, an Armageddon of abundance… this was one of the most imaginative and clever poems in the bunch.
Truly, “Hex Machina” is so exemplary for this issue — a speculative poem that posits new and unexpected visions of the afterlife — there isn’t much more to say; except that “indiscriminate widgecraft” is my new favorite phrase ever.
Joe Nazare earned in a PhD in American Literature from New York University. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction can be found in such places as Dark Discoveries, Clowns: The Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix, Pseudopod, Star*Line, Grievous Angel, Death in Common, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, and Butcher Knives & Body Counts. He is also the author of the collection Autumn Lauds: Poems for the Halloween Season, and is currently hard at work readying Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: Ultimate Annotated Edition for ebook release on Amazon this autumn.
Another one of my early favorites, “Ma’s Late Knight Jam Session” takes the chaos of “Hex Machina” and raises it to a level of delightful absurdity. I LOL’d when I read this one, enamored with lines like “ground strawberries swelled red/ As the thrashed buttocks of masochistic elves” and “Now at breakfast time an eyeball stares/Accusingly from the bottom of the jar. It is red-rimmed and horribly medieval.”
I enjoyed Smith’s lofty language and descriptive prowess throughout, as well as the opportunity to refresh my understanding of British history.
I’m also a sucker for food in poetry. He had me at “summer fruit” – though the combination of ghosts, food, and humor is deliciously and brilliantly macabre.
Oliver Smith is a visual artist and writer from Cheltenham, UK. He was born in 1966 and recently returned to university 25 years after graduating in Fine Art to study Creative Writing as a post-graduate research student. His poetry regularly appears in Spectral Realms and his short fiction has appeared in anthologies from Inkermen Press, Ex Occidente Press, Dark Hall Press, and History and Mystery LLC. Many of his previously anthologised stories and twenty poems are now collected in Basilisk Soup and Other Fantasies. You can find out more about Oliver here.
In my last blog post, I featured several poems from the beginning of the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Eye to the Telescope #22, “The Ghosts Issue“, which I guest edited. The issue went live October 15th.
Today we continue the series with four poems that explore ghost tropes in skillful and novel ways, ranging from the abstract to the personal.
As you might imagine, the haunted house was one of the most popular themes for Eye to the Telescope #22 submissions (second only to lost love poems). In “Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits” we find ourselves within the archetypal haunted house — no context, as if in a dream, no entrance or exit, just an Escher-like unfolding of housely features; the ticking clock, the creaking stairs.
In dream theory, the house represents the dreamer; Husen’s “Upstairs…Downstairs” suggests an eerie sympathy between the “you” that wanders room to room and the house’s bookends and edges, it’s beating heart.
I was particularly enamored with the second-to-last stanza, in which “everything turns on the/corner step” and the poem, too, takes a turn, a shift in perspective, speculating ominous possibilities. It reads like a spiral, inviting you in, and down, again and again…
Robin Husen is a writer from Nottingham, England. He is an Open University graduate, and has an MA in Literary Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, where he wrote his dissertation on the use of negation in creating a sense of unease. “Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits” is his first published poem. His short fiction has appeared on Daily Science Fiction and is forthcoming on Far Fetched Fables. When he isn’t writing, you can usually find him walking the dog. You can also find him on twitter @reliant_robin’
Like “Upstairs Watches, Downstairs Waits”, “A Night at Gran’ma Ginny’s” struck me as a delightfully different take on the haunted house trope. In this poem, too, we view the house as if through a dreamer’s eyes; or, rather, one stuck in that moment between dreams and waking, when everything has a quality of unreality, and we’re not sure we can trust what we perceive.
Cunningham uses vivid and sensory language and creative use of space to evoke a fun-house of impressions that make this poem so much more than an accounting of something creepy that happened in the middle of the night. Though what is left unsaid–the reason the narrator is asleep in Gran’ma’s chair, perhaps, with a coat for a blanket–keeps us grounded in real life, in a real place, which makes the encounter all the more uncanny.
I especially love the soft ending of this poem: the sigh of a closing refrigerator door, the quiet snuffing out of a light so as to not disturb those sleeping nearby (and those, perhaps, who have had enough) .
The career of writing stories and poems began with Dawn Cunningham’s Gran’ma Ginny, where the Native American tradition was passed down. Through the storytelling, Ms. Cunningham began to write, first fiction, then poetry, and now nonfiction as well. She earned a BGS and MA through Indiana University. Her recent publications are in Confluence, Flare: The Flagler Review, Misfit Magazine, Shuf Poetry, and the upcoming Dandelions first appearance.
As far as haunted houses go, the cemetery-straddling, portal-pulsing suburban two-story in”Poltergeist” (1982) takes the horror cake. I grew up with this movie, I identified painfully with the straight-haired Carol Ann (gods rest her soul), and what remake, I can’t hear you, lalalala.
One of the perks of being an editor is that you get to pick what you like; so when Suzan Pickford answered my not-really-joking call for Poltergeist-themed poems with this tongue-in-cheek darling, I couldn’t resist. While I suspect that the term “villanelle” is loosely applied, I love how she roped the most iconic bits from the film into the form. Plus I love the internal rhyme and turn-of-phrase in “perplexed by the vortex”. I just want to hug this poem like a scary clown doll.
Suzan Pickford: master of insomnia and java enthusiast. Born in Virginia to two New Yorkers, Suzan has been writing since early primary school when she began running out of accessible reading material and began crafting her own. Most recently featured in the Summer edition of The Cicada’s Cry—a micro-zine of Haiku Poetry, Suzan Pickford brings levity to themes not usually considered comedic in the fields of poetry, fiction, and screenwriting.
With “Admittance” by Cathleen Allyn Conway, we move from more abstract ghost poems into the realm of the intimate; personal tales of lost lives and lost loves.
“Admittance” begins with a phone call from beyond the grave, which places it squarely in the speculative genre. However, the details are so relatable (“the nurse/straddled his Buddha belly like a lover”, “the flag was folded and the rifle-cracks in the cold/shocked choking sobs from Mom”), and the voice of the narrator is so insistently normal, this poem strikes me as one of the most realistic of the bunch.
The father’s impossible voice on the line is almost secondary to the voice of loss expressed within, subtle but exquisite. The universality of that grief is what struck me most about this poem. “Admittance” deftly reminds of that we cannot examine ghosts without examining the empty places left among the living.
Cathleen Allyn Conway is finishing her PhD in creative writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the co-editor of Plath Profiles, the only academic journal dedicated to the work of Sylvia Plath, and the founder and editor of women’s protest poetry magazine Thank You For Swallowing. Her collection Static Cling is available from Dancing Girl Press. Originally from Chicago, she lives in south London with her partner and son.
This summer I was given the opportunity to guest-edit an issue of Eye to the Telescope, the online literary magazine of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. As editor I chose the theme “Ghosts”, which I thought was fitting for the Halloween season and reflective of my lifelong love of the subject:
The response to this issue was amazing. The SFPA received a record number of submissions. The overall quality was humbling; it was a challenge and an honor to curate the “Ghosts” issue in a way that I feel truly represents the breadth and vision of modern speculative poetry.
ETTT#22, “Ghosts” went “live” on October 15, 2016, with a super-sized issue of twenty-seven poets, including veteran speculative writers and promising new voices in the field.
To celebrate the “Ghosts” issue launch, I thought I would take us into Halloween by featuring various poems from the issue. You can read the full text over on the ETTT website (and I hope you will!). Here, I’d like to look at highlights of the 27 “ghost” poems from an editor’s perspective, including what won me over about each and why I feel these poems took the tropes of ghosts and ghost stories in new, unexpected directions.
A convenient definition of “Tulpa” refers to “a being or object created through sheer spiritual or mental discipline”. While the idea has roots in early Buddhist teachings, it has parallels in many mystical traditions (modern occultists posit that magic is possible because thought has form; add intent to form and you get power). The concept of “tulpa” has even found its way into modern internet culture.
This was one of the later poems I received, after ETTT #22 was already taking form in my imagination, and in my computer’s notes. So it was late to the party and at a disadvantage due its density of language (each issue of ETTT comes with a budget, and poems are paid per word). It’s also one of the less genre-y poems in the batch. While the literary ghosts that haunt “Tulpa” may also be literal, the poet really just posits a possibility: what if the written word is a kind of ghost — an afterlife in a sense, by which we can go on to haunt the living — the readers — even after our bodies are long gone?
Hypothetical, but creepy, if you think about it. And let us not forget that “what if” is the true heart of speculative literature. Everything sci-fi and fantasy and undefinable or not-yet-defined — heck, even science itself — begins with the question.
Also the idea of a poem about words as ghosts as the introduction to a collection of ghost poems was too deliciously meta to pass up. Once I realized how perfect “Tulpa” was as a gateway to the ideas in this issue, it’s fate was (forgive me) writ in stone.
Plus, “Tulpa” offers us poetry that is simply beautiful in its own right:
L. W. Salinas is a podcaster, a voice actress, a writer, and a crafter from Houston, Texas. Her fiction has previously been published in the collection Ten Days of Madness. This is her first poetry publication. She can be found at lawofalltrades.wordpress.com
If “Tulpa” was a treasure in the last wave of submissions, “Hart Island” was the very first poem to win my heart. I knew I had to have it from the first read, even before I’d done my due googling and learned that the titular island is a real place with a fascinating and appalling history.
Walrath’s descriptive prowess is the kind that makes my chest hurt. I couldn’t tear my eyes away, and when the poem finally dropped me off a cliff with that abrupt and mysterious final stanza, I went back and read it another few dozen times, and kept reading it until I could send the poet an official “yes”.
What I wanted most for the “Ghosts” issue of Eye to the Telescope were poems of “the unexpected, the unmeasured… poems that belie the limits of life and afterlife and what we think a ghost story should be”. With its nightmare vision of souls heaped and shoveled like so much refuse, “served up like a feast for the island’s heart”, “Hart Island” delivered the unexpected in spades, while still evoking the sense of place and tragedy that all good hauntings require.
I particularly like the element of the unexplained in this poem: the unknown “He” at the end, and the sense that there are stories within stories, here; archeological layers of humanity to lay bare, and haunted places within this haunted place, where even the ghosts dare not go.
Holly Lyn Walrath’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Abyss & Apex, Liminality and Kaleidotrope, among others. She lives in Seabrook, Texas, just five minutes from NASA. She wrangles writers as a freelance editor and volunteers as the associate director of Writespace, a nonprofit literary center in Houston, Texas. Find her online @hollylynwalrath or hlwalrath.com
When I began to select poems for the “Ghosts” issue, I found that many presented themselves to me as couples; distinct but complimentary spins on similar genres, ideas or themes. While “Mysticeti” and “Hart Island” are very different poems, they both struck me with their imaginative and epic depictions of afterlife. They are also both concerned with the fate of ghostly bodies, positing unusual landscapes in which the dead take up space, however supernaturally redefined — and they both raise questions of personal autonomy vested — or taken — from the “surviving” soul.
“Mysticeti” (which refers to a species of whale, often called “great whales”) was possibly the most unusual ghost story I came across. In this poem, the spirits of drowned people cast from slave ships are sustained, woven to an ancient whale, protecting her from the same type of profit-minded greed that stole their earthly lives. Perhaps the whale carried old Inuit prayers on her body, enabling her to catch up the souls of the dying as if with a net. Or, perhaps there was some mystical symbiosis at work, born from kindred experience among victims, among the hunted. Either way,”Mysticeti” offers us the hauntingly beautiful image of the ghost-wreathed whale, living out her life untouched, her autonomy preserved.
As one of the trio of poems to usher in the “Ghosts” issue, “Mysticeti” informs the reader that we are heading into uncharted waters.
Akua Lezli Hope is a creator who uses sound, words, fiber, glass and metal to create poems, patterns, stories, music, ornaments, wearables, sculpture, adornments and peace whenever possible. Her awards include two Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Ragdale U.S.-Africa Fellowship, a Hurston-Wright scholarship, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for The Arts. Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest book award for poetry. Her manuscript Them Gone, awarded Red Paint Hill Publishing’s Editor’s Prize, will be published in 2016. She won the 2015 SFPA short poem prize. A paraplegic, she’s developing a paratransit nonprofit so that she and others may get around in her small town.