Each Fall when the Wheel of the Year turns and the trees begin to change colors, I revisit my routine and once again swear to update my journal with more regularity. It’s been a roller coaster of a year, but I’m hoping to pick up the pace and finish several projects in the next few months…so hopefully, more blogging!
My poem, “Boys on Bikes” was published in Strange Horizons as part of their fund drive! After they reached their first pledge goal of $1500, my poem and Nin Harris’s new poem were both unlocked in the Fund Drive Special Issue, and you can read my poem inspired by the Grimm fairy tale of “The Six Swans” on their website here.
It’s also not too late to support Strange Horizons on Indiegogo! 4 more days!!!
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/strange-horizons-fund-drive-2017-magazine-fantasy#/
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Edited to add: It’s rare and welcome when a poem gets a review or press online, so a special thanks to Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews for his review of “Boys on Bikes” and the other stories and poems of that Strange Horizons issue.
Payseur writes:
“This is a vaguely strange and rather gutting poem about a woman watching a group of boys ride their bikes through town. She watches, and the impression for me is that this is a moment out of time, relived for her or perhaps she is transported back to a day that she cannot forget, that she cannot escape. Perhaps it’s just a moment in a small town that she never left, that contains the same intersection where these boys met some fate that she never quite spells out. But I love the way the poem weaves this image, this mirage, this haunting. The way that it shows the woman much older, seeing in these boys something of the past, of a childhood that cannot be recaptured. They are the idea of summer, the carefree of being young and invulnerable. Immortal. And yet also so very mortal, as the poem implies. The piece really sells the feeling of being trapped in a moment, unable to look away, knowing that something is going to happen and yet hoping that it won’t. It evokes that moment in E.T. when the boys ride their bikes into the sky, only here it seems much more metaphor, an action that they could not do in life and now, in death, is the best that she can imagine for them. It’s wrenching because it reveals this person who seems to want nothing more than to join those boys, even knowing what happens, even having lived with it for so long. It shows the romantic vision the boys represented, the freedom and the innocence and the danger that was never real until it was, until that shattering moment when it was, and it’s just a hitting and visceral piece that you should definitely check out!”
