|
Poetry
Speculative
The snow-haired mystic built the thing
Beneath the pines that ring the lake,
Of stones and sticks and, hid within,
Aluminum and wispy wires.
We lake folks thought the strange old man
Had built some altar to his god—
An oblong box, upright and crude,
A door to nowhere in the woods.
The day he brought a moving truck
And rumbled madly down our lane
He loaded it and left for Whitt.
Had bought a vineyard there, they said.
And two weeks hence, though no car passed,
We saw the old man on his porch.
He lounged upon a wicker chair
And smiling, sipped his sparkling drink.
Today I watched him (through the scrim
Of heavy limbs) step in the box.
I pushed across the quiet mere
And looked inside, and found him gone.
I waited there, just up the path
That leads beside his cluttered barn.
Two hours passed. I almost left,
But something hummed, then he emerged.
A bottle in each withered hand,
A smile upon his whiskered face;
And then he stopped and looked behind—
A single horn protruded there.
The cryptid’s head emerged and he
Returned and patted it one time
And pushed it back inside the box
And pulled some switch to break the link.
He tells me as I sip his wine,
“The quickest way from A to B
Is not a line through space, but time.
It cuts through worlds we haven’t seen.”
|
Click Here for Easy-to-Read B&W Format
If this contribution met with your satisfaction, please consider making a contribution of your own so we may pay our authors and keep the magazine delivering great speculative fiction far into the future. Thank you for visiting.
Copyright 2008, John Kuhn. All rights reserved. John Kuhn is a founding co-editor of Fear and Trembling Magazine. His own writing has appeared in dozens of small press publications in the US and the UK. He placed first in the 2006 and 2007 DKA Magazine (now Mindflights) poetry contest. He placed second in the long form category of the 2008 Mindflights poetry contest. His poem "We Build Our Captors Here" was listed among "The Best of 2007" by Aphelion Magazine. Several of his stories and poems have been selected for inclusion in "Year's Best" anthologies. Kuhn's first book, Texas Eccentrics, published by Atriad Press, is now available at www.amazon.com and from many Texas booksellers.
Contents
|
|
|