99 poems
I'm embarrassed to admit that I've fallen rather far behind on reading various online publications, including most of the other departments at SH. But our reader poll is providing me with impetus to go do some catching up. Among other things, I noticed that we've now published 99 poems over the magazine's lifetime, so next week's poem will be our 100th. Cool. I'm afraid I'm often not fond of the speculative poetry I see, but I'm pleased to continue to find that I like SH's rather more than most. (I can say that 'cause I have absolutely no say in choosing our poetry. Our departments are pretty autonomous.)
Anyway, if you want to vote in the poetry category and you haven't been reading our poetry, you probably ought to read through the entire 2002 poetry archives; about 45 poems, most of which shouldn't take more than a couple minutes apiece to read. An hour or two to get through the whole set, I imagine.
But if you want some specific suggestions for starting points, here are some of the ones I particularly liked, complete with pull quotes:
absolution of our myriad sins
in one swift Lenten smear of ash, faint thumbprint
shadow on a shattered concrete sky.
the two seem to go hand in hand,
a kind of logarithmic function of desire and fulfillment.
one body, two, a dozen
and he wonders if their ghosts
remember him. . . .
And there are many such; the years like leaves behind us swirling
In our plasma trail. Have I aged well, you think?
I like to believe you do under your frost.
in the bottles crying, like kids snatched
away from their mother, like lost kittens
grabbed by the scruff and stolen away.
Finally, my favorite poem we published last year is ineligible for the reader poll because it's a reprint:
- Troy: The Movie, by John M. Ford (4/29/02)
- The motion for the Trojan's
From the goddess with the bodice,
The Greek who's got the grief
Is in the stew from the blue,
As they'll say in the talkie remake