A Magazine of Many Arts

MOON CREATURES

I miss the Sun
But I am alive,
Housed in rock homes
Inside the premiere
Lava tube on the Moon,
Carved to be an 
Underground city.

It’s almost like
Living on Earth here,
But for the sketchy
Sunlight we receive,
Depending on the
Alignment of the 
External mirrors.

We have twin islands
On an artificial ocean,
With deep sea creatures
Like the anglerfish
And the kraken eel,
With its stringy meat
And relentless stare.

Seaweed thrives, but
No fruit or flower has
Successfully bloomed here,
Despite our scientists’
Best efforts, so we eat 
What we have to endure
And survive.

In the mirror I no longer
See me, but a pallid beast 
With gills and webbed feet.
Tonight I will fish 
In the deep, my luminous
Eyes leading the way
So my family can feast.

“Burning Ship Fractal”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burning_Ship_Fractal.jpg#/media/File:Burning_Ship_Fractal.jpg

I.

First the storms come
and we do everything
we can to keep the ship afloat,
a three-masted frigate bound
to Portsmouth out of Ceylon ,
riding low in the water with
a heavy cargo of tea and spices.

Dark clouds fill the horizon
and race toward us faster
than the ship can run.
Light flees the sky and
in the false dusk that follows,
a harsh moisture bristling
with electricity fills the air.

Before we can trim the sails
sheets of rain avalanche
down, shafts of lightning
strike the waters about us,
and the wind begins to howl
like a bughouse monster.

Sometimes we manage
to ride out that first storm
and that gives us courage.
Then there is another,
dangerous as the first,
and a third fiercer still.

The masts topple,
the hull is breached,
and we are thrown
into the icy brine
amidst the lashing rain.

As we sink into the cold
and voracious deep,
fish with long rows
of razor-sharp teeth
tear us apart bite of
flesh by bite of flesh.

It seems to take forever
before we can drown,
our mouths screaming
soundlessly as our
convulsing lungs
are filled with water.

II

Worse than the storms
are the deadly calms that
leave the sea motionless,
a sheet of blue glass on
which reflections of the
light above are blinding.

We lie slack upon the decks
in whatever shade we find,
the sun beating down upon
us from a merciless sky.
We wait listlessly for our
rations of water and rum,
our minds lost and vacant
in the unremitting heat.

When the sun finally sinks
to the horizon, we anticipate
the temporary relief of night.
Yet there is to be no night.
Instead of shrinking the light
along the horizon grows.

Glowing orange clouds come
rolling across the waters,
horned clouds filled with
frightening shapes and figures.
The sea begins to boil as sheets
of sizzling lava sweep across it.
The wood of the ship catches
fire and the decks collapse.

As we are cast into the flames,
burning over and again,
the raging fires consuming
us endlessly, our dazed
minds come alive at last,
our pasts parade before us.

Now we realize that we
have never been sailors.
We are investment bankers,
bent politicians, cardsharps
and shady merchants,
rapists and thieves,
outrageous pimps
and audacious whores,
tyrannical husbands
and insidious wives.
All nevermore.

For now we understand
full well for the countless
time that we are nothing
more than unrepentant sinners,
mandatory guests at our own
damnations, sailing upon
the seas of Hell forevermore.

I, Sailko [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Don’t let cards or crystal ball get to you like that,
it’s just the fortune tellers’ curse;
learn to live
with the bearblood mark.

Fortune Teller
Sometimes my cards hold water like buckets
left out in the rain,
sometimes I feel their edges singe;
a glass ball is a strange thing,
shards beneath my feet, made whole.

The Tarot Deck
we are not just paint and cardboard, says The Hanged Man
but you’ll have to know us good to know, says The Priestess
Swords chatter their blades, not sure why people would read cards
and The Devil and The Fool sit smiling, back to back.

Old Seer
Before we had words on paper,
we had robes dyed bearblood dark;
people knew what we could do,
and so did we.

Glass Orb
Sometimes, I’d rather be the moon than this,
always clear so she can see through me.
Nobody asks the moon to be glass
and nobody asked me whether I wanted to be just
her crystal ball

The Green Candle
It is funny to watch her pick the truth apart
so she can make a proper fortune of it.
Sometimes, she works true magic, and that’s a different thing;
I’ve never burned so hot
as when there’s magic in my flames.

Fortune Teller
Sometimes I wish I could hide in a bearskin,
the bear’s claws and the bear’s teeth my own.

Why do people come asking for the truth
when it’s the last thing that they want to hear?

Old Seer
Remember that the moon is dark and wild
or starlight bright, yet no more tame.
We are of the moon you and I,
and a grain of moondust is wild in all of us.

Petitioner
I have brought boughs of oak, white ash, and last year’s sage,
incense and a few coins…

I have so many questions!
What say the cards? What is my fortune?

Old Seer
See, when we wore the bearblood robes
all they’d ask us for were proper questions.
These days…
well, you know yourself.

Just make it up
as you go along.

Fortune Teller
I’ll shuffle, and you cut the cards.
Now let’s see what’s in the cards for you:
they are like rivers full of rain
but don’t you worry about that…

for t. winter-damon

Forever interpreting
ancient texts
as their tattered
scrolls unrolled
within his mind,
treading the borders
of the Axis Mundi
with no more than
an empty leather satchel,
ranging the streets
of Xanadu and Carcosa,
Asgard and Babylon,
tracking like a beast
with a ravenous beast
astride its back,
whispering sacral curses
and foul blessings
to the eldritch winds.

Immersed in dreamtides
and chimerical visions
and cimmerian prophets
whose shadows rose
from the dust of ages,
worshipping priestesses
created for the day,
following transient avatars
down to a dim beach
and the dark sea
of a false dawn
to hear the damp cries
of beached mariners
echoing in his brain.
Intoxicated by secret keys
and magical rings,
obsessed by puzzle boxes
with hidden compartments
only to be opened
by the wisest of men
and most cunning women,
drunk on myth and
history and a tomorrow
that foreshadowed
more than night.

Enthralled by the occult
and the fantastic,
Crowley and Blavatsky,
Faustus and Paracelsus,
Levi’s Dogme et Rituel
de la Haute Magie,
poring over maps
revealing the locations
of imagined kingdoms,
Mu and El Dorado,
Atlantis and Shangra-La,
the Archipelago of Dreams,
maps fashioned by madmen
on a transcendental high
over a fifth of Ravens Rum
and a pinch of fly agaric.

Anticipating the excavation
of underwater ruins
and red temples
crumbling to red sand
in some distant desert,
astounded by age-old
architectural mysteries,
the Great Pyramids,
the dour monoliths
of Easter Island,
the astronomical
savvy of Stonehenge,
awaiting the lab tests
on the Shroud of Turin
and the release of
a revised annotation
of the Bardol Thodol,
praying for the miraculous
to snuff the everyday.

Last heard from
traveling to parts unknown,
head down and eyes afire,
carrying no more than
a worn leather satchel
stuffed with worlds.

The pages curling like lovers
around her flame phoenix fingers
their color darkening like the blushing of lips
in an orgasm, lasting as long
before the ash purls away on the breeze of paper turned.

She strays all along stacks and racks
and piles of her lovers, one-night-stands
all of them, to be collected on her lips,
their ink and vellum like questing tongues
longing for her voice…

…her hands, her eyes, her very breath
a disaster that poets have called love;
sometimes the spines remain, pages she did not turn
a tale she could not see through
to its end for reasons hidden within her own heart.

She puts them, one atop the other, high
as walls, porous as the promise of true love
and walks past them every night
before she goes to bed alone
pretending to herself
that both sides are happy in this charnel place

It was not the owl, with moonlight in its feathers,
that gathered me up from my earthen bed
in the woods. It was not the owl, with its tarnished
beak, that called me to service.

It was not the bear, with its bee’s hive trumpet,
that summoned me either. It was not the bear,
with its sleepy growl, that opened the door
of the root-house.

It was not the wolf, with blood on its tongue,
that brought me blood when I was bloodless.
It was not the wolf, when the moon leant close,
that howled me awake.

It was not the worm, in its coat of tunnels,
that stirred me from death. It was not the beetle,
nor the mouse, nor the feral pig, that turned me
out of my shut room.

It was the cold, that fell from the pines when snow
was merely a rumour, that filled my mind
with life. When not even bones was I, or rotted flesh;
then did the cold rouse me out.

In my skin of pine needles, rotted lifetimes
of the trees, I am the blur deep in the woods.
I am the wavering light with each step you take.
I am the chill that clings to your thought.

Initially just a blip in the new hi-tech
dark spectrum telescopes,
The thing came through the sol system
At a good clip; two grad students
from Bangladesh first spotted it
still outside the orbit of Saturn.

A Chinese ice miner
happened to be inbound
right place-right time
asteroid-gleaned snowcone slowed it
Brazilian tug nudged it into orbit.
It was imaged with all the best telescopes
some massive mottled thing
jagged at one end,
reason for being here problematic
but eroded symbols down the side
proved it no mere rock.

Then it disappeared for a while
static burst stage-magic-style poof
no trace remained
tensions flared:
Who took it? Where was it?
Talk-show coverage bloomed;
died.

Several months later,
tiny hillocks appeared.
The mounds rose smoothly
one and a half to two meters tall
spiral trail curling precise as Roman roads;
entrance at the top.

Nocturnal emissions from apical vents
unknown insectoids descending the spiral trail
venturing forth in search of food
perhaps data gathering as well

In Georgia
(The one once part of the USSR)
An amateur entomologist
Excavated a nest
During its quiescent daylight hours
Discovering thousands of spider ants,
he called them, linked together
Right antenna to left, left to right
spiral within a spiral, all connected,
circuit complete:
tiny ant-like aliens linked.
A hive mind?

Autopsies revealed neural connections
Sheathed within telescoping
antennae, whose termini
lock in place when adpressed

But so many mounds, such
prolific breeders. And impossible
to monitor the wilderness remnants
of our entire Earth. Mounds multiplied–
an exponential, deadly increase.

A conference convened in Beijing
where learned exobiologists
exolinguists, exosociologists and the like
discussed how best to deal with the visitors
whilst the UN, NATO, and similar groups
probed the alien military threat

I guess it was about a week later
the venomous Thinning began;
yet survivors were fit and healthy
in Indiana and a part of Laos–
in retrospect a generous allotment
considering our minimal fertility now
and we were spared the nuclear war
we probably would have inflicted on ourselves
when we reached 10 billion or so.

I do miss the feeling I used to get
looking at the sprays and clots of stars
wondering at night
who might be out there.

“Cetonia-aurata” by I, Chrumps. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cetonia-aurata.jpg#/media/File:Cetonia-aurata.jpg

Blessed is the day. Blessed is the bitterness
of burning leaves. Blessed are the lonely
notes of iridescent insects.

Do not mind the crow, his fierce bark.
He will guide us through the ghosts.
He is the patron of the lost and potsherd.

Blessed is the desert. Blessed are the blind
their fingertips touching warm fruit.
Blessed are the scarlet blossoms.

Bees thrum in and out, trembling
the flowers. They are scentless, dusty,
like the eyes of the prophesied dead.

Blessed is the dawn scattering its flushed seeds.
Blessed is the light that cups our breasts.
Blessed is the milk.

The morning hours will evaporate
these spirits like frost, will shed their skin
until there is only hunger.

Blessed are the forsaken, the hollows
where their hearts have seized.
Blessed are the stones which sow this sad earth.

“PikiWiki Israel 12326 Plants of Israel” by צילום: אורן פלס, Oren Peles. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PikiWiki_Israel_12326_Plants_of_Israel.jpg#/media/File:PikiWiki_Israel_12326_Plants_of_Israel.jpg

Their barbed-wire brambles cutting into your skin,
they hold you tight as you heave and gasp for air.
A guardian brushes away the sweat on your forehead,
his fingertips soft and round like acacia leaves,
leaving rubbings of soil grains against your skin.

The flowers can start to erupt any time now –
you can feel their stems coiled in your throat
like a tickling, disconcerting promise of the future,
soft springs wound up and crickets clicking time.
Small insects move in your stomach and heart.

A weeping willow cries out the signal to begin
and the guardians press you down on your knees,
the undergrowth catching your calves, attaching –
like to the like, kin to kin. You can feel the forest
spread into you as your breath pushes out.

You shudder more with promise than with pain,
and – eyes closed – you miss the first glance
but hear the appreciating hisses from the trees.
You do not need to see flowers to recognize them
from the touch they leave behind on your palate.

White flowers unfold from between your lips
and green stalks strain outward. This plant you like,
more than the complacent oats and sunflowers,
well-rounded fluffy marigolds and dusky roses.
It emerges from you and eats you from the outside.

Morning glory. Ololiúqui. The Christmas vine.
Xtabentún. Turbina corymbosa. Many names
but only one sensation. The vines will invade,
breaking your skin, turning calmly on you,
their root and singular life-source. Their parent.

You cannot scream, only whimper and gasp –
there is no room for sound except in your thoughts.
The guardians lower your body onto a rough bed
of weeds and decay. You cannot move any further.
Insects crowd out your nose and take to the treetops.

Rain patters on you softly, tree-branches opening
to the night sky, allowing you peace and rest.
Your mouth is sweet with nectar and ambrosia
and you smile as tears wash over your face.
The bursting season will soon arrive again.

Bogi Takács is a neutrally gendered
Hungarian Jewish person who’s recently moved to the US. Eir speculative
fiction and poetry has been published in venues like Strange
Horizons, Apex,
Scigentasy and GigaNotoSaurus. You can visit eir website or find em on Twitter, where e runs a semi-daily recommendation series for #diversestories and #diversepoems.

Payment for this poem was donated to Keshet.