Lone Star Stories #25, February 2008 (Poetry)

The February issue of Lone Star Stories contains three poems. The first of these, “Up North” by Elizabeth Hand, is a rather long piece of prose poetry. “Up North” uses rich language and surreal imagery to describe what is either a world only slightly different than our own, or our own world going subtly mad. It follows a woman’s early morning ramble through a storm-whipped city surrounded by fields of frozen lava, and allows us to experience, through her eyes, a final encounter that is out of place even within the insanity of the world in which she dwells. “Up North” is a very strange piece, and darkly magical, which leaves the reader full of wonder, as well as an almost pleasant confusion.

Like “Up North,” “Light” by Jaime Lee Moyer draws readers into a different world. The realm portrayed in Moyer’s poem seems at first to be far brighter and more positive than Hand’s, if no less magical. The first stanza paints a picture full of impossibly bright colors and images, then goes on to dazzle and tease our other senses:

Light is different here,
shining cotton candy pink,
shadows like cherry syrup stretching from
chocolate dunes around an inland sea,
and the waves don’t crash
or roar in battle with the shore,
they sneak in with a sigh.

However, bleaker notes, even within the blissfully bright world shown here, are soon introduced, and the reader is left, in the end, with a strong sense of wistful loneliness.

In many ways, the darkest poem in this issue of Lone Star Stories is “The Queen of All Snow” by John Borneman. This is one of those pieces where it’s hard to tell if any of the fantastic elements verge on in-story reality, or if they exist only in the mind of the viewpoint character.

The Queen of All She Sees,
little Sally Louise,
feels her stomach rumble
and barks a command—
“Bring me a feast. Fit for a Queen.”

So her friend and companion, brave Sir Bear,
Commander of the Royal Hunt,
trundles off and returns with a flank of wild stale bread
roasted just the way she likes.

While the fantastic elements may be pure coping mechanism for Sally Louise, the horror elements in the poem are distressingly real. Unlike the authors of the first two poems in the issue, Borneman shows us through his main character’s eyes not one new world, but two, fairy-tale version and mundane. Both are very, very bleak. “The Queen of All Snow” is a distressingly effective poem, brightened only by a note of hope at its end.