My story “The Beautiful Horizon” in The Purpose of Reality: Solar has been shortlisted for the 2022 Aurealis Awards in the Fantasy Short Story Category. Info about The Purpose of Reality collections below.
They’ve built a block of apartments
across the street, all the way along.
My neighbors over there had to vacate,
but I heard a little wailing
beneath the motors’ roar
when the night machines
ground their houses to gravel.
An inconspicuous library
in a forgotten country town.
The librarian won’t let you borrow it,
but you may read it in the library,
hold it in your calloused hands,
even riffle its soft pages
gently with your fingertips,
like so many have before you.
In my youth, I pored over arcane
manuscripts, in the vain belief
that I could comprehend
their mysteries.
A car the color of the sunset disappears
around a corner, the sky recalls a long-ago
metropolis, and films of rain are shining
on the concrete and the bitumen,
the bushes and the trees.
I think about what I’ve done and
what I will, and wonder where’s the sun?
Am I any closer to it?
He won a prize at the Marimbondo Circus,
proxime accessit, said that he treasured it,
more or less.
Compasses and crossroads
confused him, and he couldn’t tell
the narrator from the narratee.
The skyward myths, the poppy-field poets,
have vanished, the inexpressible
has evanesced above the tar pits
like the long-lost Brachiosauridae,
and in the cities, all that’s left is
Amazon and online dreams.
The Purpose of Reality illustrated short story and poetry collections from Meerkat Press, with pretty fair reviews from Publishers Weekly and the like, now available on Amazon and at other outlets, click for details including reviews.
“It’s time to write in the first person,”
he declared, “no more
of the inconsequential,
the vaporous, the bland quotidian.”
The Purpose of Reality illustrated short story and poetry collections from Meerkat Press, with pretty fair reviews from Publishers Weekly and the like, now available on Amazon and at other outlets, click for details including reviews.
A sun shower in the kitchen
washed my thoughts away,
dissolved my maudlin words.
I didn’t care, my pointless pen
and paper only served
to pass the time.
The Purpose of Reality illustrated short story and poetry collections from Meerkat Press, with pretty fair reviews from Publishers Weekly and the like, now available on Amazon and at other outlets, click for details including reviews.
“You know Rodney, you’re just
a hanger-on, a waste of
space, time, and air.”
She never got my name right,
but I knew where she was
coming from. I was her ghost
companion, a Dapto tourist
information brochure
for an interstellar traveler—
unnecessary and pointless
in every way.
The Purpose of Reality illustrated short story and poetry volumes from Meerkat Press, with fair reviews from Publishers Weekly and the like, now available on Amazon and at other outlets, click for details including reviews.
Beyond the glass, the water birds
are gliding on the rails of rain,
and, for a moment,
their distant pattering melody
recalls a semblance
of another chance
at hopefulness—even with
the knowing that it’s far too late
for all of that.
Previously on Blade Walker: the earth is inhabited by extraterrestrials, and humans are an endangered species. Blade Walker (human) and Alícia (alien) have been freed from mind-controlling insects by an electromagnet in Rick’s scrapyard. The previous episode is here.
Alícia was always herself,
and now I was me again as well,
following my path of faux pas.
But I wasn’t a shallow as I used to be,
because I had a secret.