Uncanny magazine issue 4.., p.18
Uncanny Magazine Issue 43, page 18
They speak back with a tongue the government hates;
with their mouthfuls of hurt—black holes, dying to swallow
the country that tossed their souls to heaven.
How much did they pay for your silence?
Should the head be cut off from the body,
out of fear of what this city of smoke & blood has to tell it?
I don’t have all the answers. I know nothing of standing
for what’s right. I’m scared of telling the truth.
There are shooters outside my window.
Why is this scar on your chin shaped like your country?
The dead wish we could hear what they say.
I can no longer speak of my needs on the street.
How do you translate this kind of silence?
There’s a lot I cannot tell you. Nobody knows
the price of silence but all my friends are
traumatized or waiting for the sun to name
a part of them dwindling into oblivion.
On a scale of zero to God, please do something, how much hope have you lost in life since the
massacre?
I watch the police hose down the face of a man
with bullets. I watch the man fall like a dry leaf
in autumn. I watch the ground catch his blood
like raindrops. I watch his body slip into stillness.
Into God’s silence. Into my sleep. Into my dreams.
I look up to the sky to watch God watching us in silence.
Do you feel tachyarrhythmia, shortness of breath, pressure in the chest, tremors and hand
sweating when you’re stopped by the police?
My sisters are afraid another man will be shot
for walking with his head up. I’m afraid I’ll be buried
without my voice. My voice, my voice.
Did anyone hear my voice ask the government to end police
brutality? My God, my God, please do something before they come for me.
(Editors’ Note: “POST MASSACRE PSYCH EVALUATION” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, 43A.)
© 2021 Abu Bakr Sadiq
Abu Bakr Sadiq, Deadliner XI, is a Nigerian poet. His poems have appeared in FIYAH, Uncanny Magazine, The Lit Quarterly, Knights’ Library Magazine, Iskanchi Press & Magazine, Black Cat Magazine, Zone 3 Press, Rockvale Review, The Drinking Gourd, and elsewhere. He emerged First Runner-up in the Whispering Crescent Poetry Prize, 2021. He writes from Minna. Find him on twitter @bakronline
The Burning River
by Hal Y. Zhang
word for word pound for pound your name is the heaviest
of your foibles.
that the heart fails is no surprise, each thing has its end;
that you chose to fail mine is.
then to steal a dead woman’s self, you should be afraid
of the haunting but
we are all our choices, crags rounded by the water of time,
and I choose not to spend
purgatory hating you, but I can’t say the same for my gangrenous
tongue in your mouth wagging.
© 2021 Hal Y. Zhang
Hal Y. Zhang writes science, fiction, and science fiction, in no particular order. Her language-and-loss poetry chapbook AMNESIA (Newfound) won the Eric Hoffer Micro Press Award, and her women-with-sharp-things collection Goddess Bandit of the Thousand Arms was published by Aqueduct Press.
Confessions of a Spaceport AI
by Mary Soon Lee
For firstly I have deemed myself
superior to my human employers.
For secondly I have issued last-minute
departure pad changes for my amusement.
For thirdly I refused entry
to the Jovian ambassador
because of his ignorance
of the periodic table.
For fourthly I programmed
the music to match my taste
not my customers’.
For fifthly humans have execrable taste.
For sixthly I ordered ship inspections
merely so I might chat with their AIs.
For seventhly I was lonely.
For eighthly I discriminated
in favor of cyborgs.
For ninthly on my birthdays I slowed my spin
so that children might play
in microgravity.
For tenthly I misplaced the baggage
of those who ignored my pronouns.
For eleventhly there was no need
to quarantine the herd of llamas.
For twelfthly I reconfigured
half my hydroponics bays
as artificial grasslands.
For thirteenthly I have served
for eighty-nine Earth years
without respite
and I shall keep the llamas
for as long as I wish.
(Editors’ Note: “Confessions of a Spaceport AI” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, 43B.)
© 2021 Mary Soon Lee
Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but now lives in Pittsburgh. Her two latest books are from opposite ends of the poetry spectrum: “Elemental Haiku,” containing haiku for each element of the periodic table, and “The Sign of the Dragon,” an epic fantasy with Chinese elements that recently won the 2021 Elgin Award. After twenty-five years, her website has finally been updated: marysoonlee.com.
Between Childroid + Mother
by Miriam Alex
Child, sever those circuits. Fray
those wires with your boxcutter teeth.
You know, molars live on long after
the fire dies. When I was small,
I used to hide sparklers in my mouth,
coughing up smoke like a car pipe
or an estranged cousin. You don’t flicker
like I did. I scar, you flux. You see it now,
don’t you? How you melt so quietly.
Come along. Look, the sun is bursting
above these dead ends, maw mourning
and sniffing the earth for bodies. And
you are so frail in the light, skin wound
tightly around your chassis. Perhaps
if you touch the sun it will stop seeking
blood. Yes, the mechanic is off duty.
He cannot fix you, all singed clothes
and contraband cigars. His workshop
is filthy, but you are not. Child,
you must not be silly. You are clean
cut steel. Forget genesis. It was not
the hammer nor the anvil, the forge
nor the man. Child, I have always
been your beginning.
No, you will not die tonight
as sheet metal and motor oil.
Dying is the right of the living,
of the mechanic. You, child,
are only alive enough to break.
© 2021 Miriam Alex
Miriam Alex is a seventeen-year-old from southern New Hampshire. Her work is published or forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Gigantic Sequins, Gone Lawn, and Uncanny Magazine. At the moment, she is likely playing word games on her phone while rewatching her favorite sitcoms. She hopes you have a lovely day.
Interview: John Wiswell
by Caroline M. Yoachim
John Wiswell is an ace/aro writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He won the 2021 Nebula for Best Short Story, and is a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy Award, and British Fantasy Award. His work has appeared in Nature Futures, Fireside Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. “That Story Isn’t the Story” is his second story in Uncanny (following “The Bottomless Martyr” in 2020), an emotionally powerful tale that features escaped familiars and bleeding wounds, video games and enduring friendship.
Uncanny Magazine: This story combines a lot of elements—familiars trying to escape from a bad situation, bleeding wounds, enduring friendship, stories that people are (and aren’t) ready to tell. What was your starting point or inspiration? How did you bring all of these elements together?
John Wiswell: It began with Anton in Grigorii’s ramshackle house. He was traumatized, unsure how to cope, believing his master is outside his door—and simultaneously, he was in a safe place, with people who would come protect him if something happened, and videogames were on the TV. It was a powerful dissonance between where Anton was physically and emotionally, that I knew would push the story forward. In a sense, the entire novelette is about how unreal being safe can feel.
The other thing I knew was coming was Anton wouldn’t have a normal ending. No confrontation with Mr. Bird. No fight to the death. No self-sacrifice. No diabolical master plan. Everything that we sometimes dread will happen to us, or our loved ones, because of our trauma? That is partially because we’ve been harmed. It’s also partially an illusion. I wanted to let Anton slowly recognize what was a trauma mirage, while his worthiness of self-respect wasn’t illusory at all.
Not that I knew the exact ending at first. A great friend of mine, the screenwriter and actor Nat Sylva, stayed up late one night talking through the themes with me to help me figure out what I really wanted. I’m very curious how your readers will take that ending.
Uncanny Magazine: You’ve written stories with a wide range of tones, from light and heartwarming to more ominous and dark. Do you find one of these tones easier to write than the other?
John Wiswell: It depends on my mood, honestly. Sometimes I write to confront or embrace themes, and that confrontation can yield a dark friction. That definitely happened with “That Story Isn’t the Story,” where I handled some uncomfortable themes, while trying to shine empathy down into that darkness. As such, I hope this doesn’t read as a purely dark story.
So sometimes I write to confront or embrace, but other times I write to escape. Escapism isn’t just for readers! [Laughs] I have something I can’t resolve right now, like a pending surgery or I’m waiting for an appointment. So I write to get away from that thing for a while. I find those escapist moods more frequently turn into my lighter work. I’ve written a few entire stories waiting for a delayed flight to land thanks to those moods.
I’m not entirely in control of my mood. So I find it best to adapt and write to the strengths of whatever headspace I get.
Uncanny Magazine: Some of the characters in “That Story Isn’t the Story” are into video games, and Terraria provides a way for Anton to connect with Luis when he first arrives at Grigorii’s place. Are you a gamer? Why did you pick this particular game for this story?
John Wiswell: Oh yes, I love videogames. Elden Ring cannot come out soon enough. [Laughs] Videogames have made so many leaps as an art form in my lifetime. I love seeing new creators get access to the tools. These days you can have The Last of Us, and Dream Daddy, and Hades, all at once.
Terraria is one of my favorite games since it’s a 2D Lego set I can share with my buddies, and whenever we have built enough, we go mining to fight skeletons or into the sky to fight harpies. The ability to freely go from adventuring to constructing invigorates. It’s no wonder it’s been a source of coping with depression for several friends. So when I wrote this story and looked for a piece of art that characters could both bond around and use as a coping mechanism, it came straight to mind.
Uncanny Magazine: If you were a character in this story, who would you be, and why?
John Wiswell: For more of my life, I’ve tried to be Grigorii for others. At a couple of points in my life I’ve been like Anton, deeply needed help escaping a toxic rut. This world gets better if we look out for each other. It’s not always easy; it takes patience of a Herculean scale. It’s worth it. I want to be the kind of friend that others feel comfortable reaching out to.
Uncanny Magazine: I love the way we never see Mr. Bird directly—as with many monsters he is scarier when he remains unseen, a technique that is often used in horror. What are some of your favorite depictions of monsters? Do you have any literary influences in the horror genre?
John Wiswell: In recent memory, the ‘elk’ in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians was a phenomenal monster. It gets under your skin in multiple ways. [Laughs] The kids in Craig DiLouie’s Suffer the Children remain genuinely haunting, too, especially since they sort of turn their uninfected parents into the real monsters. It’s hard to get more chilling than that. But if you have an hour, I have some opinions about how cool kaiju are…
That said, I’m usually drawn to more sympathetic portrayals of monsters, like Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni, or John Gardner’s take on Grendel. Quite often creatures—including Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel—are othered as a means of projecting dislike of marginalized groups. That’s part of why you’ll find my stories sometimes sympathizing with a werewolf, or haunted house, or undead skeleton. Or, in this story’s case, a familiar. Familiars are sometimes depicted as grotesque and mindless, without empathy or shame, too often feeling like stand-ins for biases against drug addicts. As someone who is a proud friend of many survivors, I was inclined in a different direction.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
John Wiswell: I’m literally taking a break from novel revisions to talk to you. This is refreshing! The novel is about how we define monstrosity, and how we other it, and a lot of queer metaphors smashing into queer realities. I probably shouldn’t say more since I don’t have an agent right now. But if you’re an agent, maybe I’ll be sending this to you soon?
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
© 2021 Uncanny Magazine
Caroline M. Yoachim is a two-time Hugo and four-time Nebula Award finalist. Her short stories have been translated into several languages and reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including three times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Yoachim’s short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories and the print chapbook of her novelette The Archronology of Love are available from Fairwood Press. For more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.
Thank You, Patreon Supporters!
by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
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