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"There is a lot to discover in Darkly Told. It doesn’t offer immediate answers, nor is it meant to do so, but it will repay careful listening. Hopefully, this chapbook will be successful enough to prompt Alicia Cole to make a few more. Fans are better off for its appearance." - Dead Reckonings No. 18
The Sending
by F.J. Bergmann
Creation is not so much the materials (semen,
a raw egg, et cetera) as the will—
which you like to think of as your personal charm.
Blood, saliva, and aromatic liqueurs are optional.
Some things are best when cold,
and some should be served molten.
Tell yourself that it is retribution—surely everyone
is collectively responsible for the world's suffering,
and the authors of your particular torment
can stand in for the rest. Really, of course, it is
merely an opportunity to allow you to demonstrate
your hard-won, harrowing abilities. You are trying
for superlatives from those who appreciate
the strictures of the craft.
The shape you give it is a simulacrum
of what they wish to see in the mirror of their—
let's be honest: it's not desire; it's need, an addiction
that watches the dimming multitude of its repetitions
fade to darkening silver. They never see it hovering.
Often, they welcome it over their threshold,
just as they welcome the possessions
they see as extensions of themselves,
the ideologies they cannot afford,
terminal diseases they refuse to acknowledge.
Now, it begins.
F.J. Bergmann's poetry has appeared in Analog, Asimov's SF,
Apex, Dreams and Nightmares, Silver Blade, and a bunch
of literary journals that should have known better. She is the
editor of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry
Association, and poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of
Social Change. Her manuscript A Catalogue of the Further Suns
has won the Gold Line Press chapbook contest and will
appear in 2017.