The End of Science Fiction
BY LISEL MUELLER
This is not fantasy, this is our life.
We are the characters
who have invaded the moon,
who cannot stop their computers.
We are the gods who can unmake
the world in seven days.
Both hands are stopped at noon.
We are beginning to live forever,
in lightweight, aluminum bodies
with numbers stamped on our backs.
We dial our words like Muzak.
We hear each other through water.
The genre is dead. Invent something new.
Invent a man and a woman
naked in a garden,
invent a child that will save the world,
a man who carries his father
out of a burning city.
Invent a spool of thread
that leads a hero to safety,
invent an island on which he abandons
the woman who saved his life
with no loss of sleep over his betrayal.
Invent us as we were
before our bodies glittered
and we stopped bleeding:
invent a shepherd who kills a giant,
a girl who grows into a tree,
a woman who refuses to turn
her back on the past and is changed to salt,
a boy who steals his brother’s birthright
and becomes the head of a nation.
Invent real tears, hard love,
slow-spoken, ancient words,
difficult as a child’s
first steps across a room.
Lisel Mueller, “The End of Science Fiction” from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press.
Source: Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)
A Color of the Sky
BY TONY HOAGLAND
Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.
I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.
Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.
Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,
which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.
Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.
What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.
Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,
so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.
Bird of Fire
by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, from Granta Jan 2012
E il suo
Volo di fuoco m’accecò sull’altro
The blurred moon, blanched in the new evening sky,
Amazed me as a child. How could it live
At the same time as the sun, (Downstar
I called it), captured by the melody
That rang out from it, dusk-bright, like a phoenix
Downed in civil twilight. The difference
Between the two, I thought, was difference
Itself: it made things real. But is the sky
Real? Aren’t its blue moments, like the phoenix,
Just the mind’s conjugations of ‘to live,’
Or the brain’s long division of ‘to die’?
Rouge le soir, bel espoir, sings the Downstar
Down night’s starry throat, already elsewhere, Downstar
No more, no longer the sweet difference
Between real and dream I knew. I will die.
I am not a dream. I am not quite real.
I am a dream’s firm ground. And I live
Because they are not what I am. Keep this
Thought for me, Poetry, as the phoenix
Seduces dreadnoughts to strum the Downstar
To sleep, and the skyline’s lights begin to live
Like notes in air; and in that difference,
That sleight of sun, may night remake the torqued sky
And distill dream and real from live and die.
A red cloud, speckled like an amorphous die,
Ferries the Internet’s dead. ‘Off to Phoenix!’;
‘TGIF!’; ‘Double Rainbow!’; ‘Nice sky
Tonight!’; ‘Don’t let this get you down, Starr.’
They speak, spammed or hacked, the indifference
In that act excused in saying, ‘A guy’s got to live.’
I chased the verb with the bird that always lives,
Saddled on its nape as it dove to die,
Its neck arched to the moon. Indifference
Spread through its ash-blond body now phoenix
No more, now part of the ground, now downed star.
Its frame, first feathered by flames, flailed blue. Sky
Swallowed the phoenix, seized round the Downstar,
Sang sky down to the city, burned livid
Until it didn’t, then praised the difference.
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