The poem was first published in a small magazine called Silver Blade in 2013.
Bad Dreams
They come like reivers
on hardy nightmare nags,
crossing the borders
between waking and sleep.
Early winter is best,
when nights are long.
I fear them greatly,
for they steal away my rest.
Last night you came to me
in your steel bonnet,
death’s head staring straight out.
I knew you by your blue eyes,
those eyes that had followed me
for sleepless nights six years ago
when you died, your hand in mine.
I live in a Peel Tower now,
heart fortified against assault.
Love may try to smoke me out
but I will outwait and outwit you,
waking to a better morning.
The House of Seven Angels
I do not remember writing this story, or where I found out about all those angels. (I am 80, and the story was published in a collection of mine called Here There Be Angels, 1996, more than twenty years ago.) But several things I do know about the story: it is set in the same town as my grandfather Samson, grandmother Manya, and their eight children had lived. My father had been seven years old when they came to America, escaping the next pogrom.
The poem’s first publication is in this book.
Anticipation
Water drop
on the lip of a spout.
Trout lifting itself
after a fly.
Villella suspended
in mid-leap.
The night before
Chanukah.
Everything depends
on the gravity of angels
and that long fall into day.
Great Gray
So much about this story is true: the setting, the crazy lady, the irruption of Great Gray owls in Hatfield, the little town I have lived in for the past 50 years. My husband, a passionate birder, taught us all to bird. Our youngest son, Jason, at the time this story is set, was ten years old, rode his bike all around town showing itinerant birders where to the find the owls. Also, I came upon a bizarre group of people who seemed to be worshiping in a small swampy grove near the outskirts of town, kneeling down one after another as if in prayer. They turned out to be kneeling at the foot of the tree where a Great Gray eyed them in a puzzled manner, as they took his picture with their cameras. (This was long before cell phones existed!)
Jason is now approaching fifty, with a wife and twin teenage daughters, so no one murdered him as a child. A bit of poetic license. He’s a professional photographer and writer, taking photographs of nature—birds and fish mainly. Has won awards for his photography and has more than 25 books out, illustrated with his photographs. This story was first published in an anthology called Fires of the Past in 1991.
This poem was written for this book and first published here.
Remembering the Great Gray
I remember the winter of our Great Grays
three of them down from the Canadian wilds,
scavenging for moles, voles, mice under the turf.
They were as welcome as the busloads of birders
who drove up from Pennsylvania to genuflect
under a dead tree where a cloud in bird shape,
a specter with feathers, mesmerized them all
with its marbled yellow eyes.
My husband fed the owls white mice from a pet store,
our ten-year-old son became a tour guide on a bike.
We could not go a day without a bird report.
They were down by the dike. Two flew across River Road.
I watched one eat a weasel, swallowed it whole.
If we could have grown feathers, rain-cloud colored,
we would have flown north with them,
back to the taiga, wind puzzling through our wings.
But Nature, ever a cynic, dismisses such magic,
for she has her own.
Little Red (with Adam Stemple)
An invitation to an anthology, and I began to write a Little Red Riding Hood variant. It began to go too dark for me and I (quite literally) lost the plot. So I called upon my Prince of Darkness, aka The Plot God—my son Adam Stemple, with whom I have written many stories and books. (He always ups the body counts in our books.) He made the story darker, and bloodier, but in the best possible way, and I cleaned up what little there was with my cap, like a good Red Cap soldier should. I am only making a little bit of this up. It’s mostly true. The rest is metaphor. The anthology was Firebirds Soaring, edited by Sharyn November, published in 2009.
This poem is first published in this book.
Red at Eighty-One
So you thought to fool me again,
you old bastard, with your sweet growls,
your shoulders broad enough
to carry in the wood without sweat,
your big eyes blinking out lies,
your promises of cakes and wine.
You think you can cozen me,
undress me, steal my nightgown,
my skin, my bones, take me in,
devour me whole, leave me nothing
of myself, not even a shadow,
not even a memory.
You believe I have learned nothing
in seventy-four years, that the woods
have taught me little: the scurrying ants
carrying ten times their own weight,
dung beetles rolling their foul burdens,
coyotes wallowing in rotting meat,
vultures, with their appetites
worn around naked necks.
You are wrong, old man, mistaking me
for an innocent, counting on my curiosity,
expecting my obedience, requiring my silence.
I am too old for such nonsense.
I’ll eat you up this time.
Winter’s King
There was a wonderful artist (alas, name forgotten) who did a fantasy painting of a sere and stunning “Winter’s King.” The painting got picked up as cover art for Martin Greenberg’s fantasy anthology that was a bow to Tolkien’s work, After the King, published in 1991. Marty and I had edited a bunch of books together, so he asked me to write an introduction and a story for the book. This was my story. I didn’t mean it to go where it did, but the story had set its mind on a quasi-tragedy and didn’t let me know until the end.
This poem’s first publication is in this book.
If Winter
If winter has a king,
then surely Frost is his fool,
speaking a kind of frozen truth
to the powers of wind and snow.
He takes a little nip at the nose
of his bottle of schnapps
and hurries into a soliloquy
about ice and its uses,
about the power of cold,
before light-footed Spring comes in
and sits on Old King Winter’s lap
persuading him with soft breaths
to hand over the kingdom
for another useless half a year.
Inscription
My husband and I bought a house in St Andrews, Scotland, which we’d been renting during his second sabbatical. He was a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and already working with people at St. Andrews University. It became our summer home. I still go there every summer to write and to see dear friends I have made over the more than 30 years there.
We did a lot of driving around and investigating Scottish sites, sometimes just the two of us, or with visitors (and occasionally our grown children). Sometimes I accompanied him on computer science conferences in interesting places. At one of the latter, we discovered a grand circle of stones. And the first two lines of this story sprang into my head. When we returned home, the rest followed. The story wa
s first published in an anthology called Ultimate Witch, 1993, that I had just been invited into, and then appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology. I still have quite a fondness for the story.
This poem was written for this book.
Stone Ring
Touch the stone,
cold with the death
of the Pictish makers.
Cold with the nights
of the reivers’ rivers,
crossed to steal some koos.
Colder than the dead
at grey Cullodon,
fighting for Charlie’s greed.
History’s reminders:
Ghosts in stone.
We die together or alone.
The ring binds us all.
Dog Boy Remembers
I wrote a few public posts back and forth on a folklore site called Sur La Lune as a kind of challenge/writing prompt with the wonderful writer Midori Snyder. It became a short story and then a novel, which we sold. One of the characters whom I liked especially was the compromised anti-hero Dog Boy. He was half-human, raised by his Red Cap father as a sort of pet, though he was human. (A Red Cap is a particularly nasty kind of murderous gremlin who dips his hat in the blood of his victims.) But Dog Boy is saved in the end by his love for a complicated young human woman and the memory of his human mother. However, we never delved into his backstory in the novel. Years later, being invited into a fantasy literary journal, Unnatural Worlds, Fiction River #1, published in 2013, I decided to write Dog Boy’s birth story. As I knew, it was not going to be a sweet story.
The Path
Step onto the path,
let it wind and unwind
along the silver stream.
Here bluebells wave,
ferns uncurl,
puffballs reveal their heft,
and the paw print of a dog
who has gone ahead
shows you where to go.
You can smell the darkness
and the light,
taste it on the air.
Time compresses,
and then like the road,
unwinds into the rest of your life.
That is the only magic that counts.
The only magic.
It is in your hand, your mouth,
your heart, your belly.
It is on the road.
The Fisherman’s Wife
Ah—mermaids. Not always Ariel. This one grew dark and darker.
I like strong women. Come from a family of them. So this moral and mortal battle between two strong women for the love of a drowning fisherman, was a no-brainer for me. Just a bit on the wet side. It became part of my collection Neptune Rising, 1982, a book of mermaid/merman stories and poems. The poem was first published there as well.
Undine
It is a sad tale,
the one they tell,
of Undine
the changeling,
Undine
who took on legs
to walk the land
and dance
on those ungainly stalks
before a prince
of the earthfolk.
He betrayed her;
they always do
the landsmen.
Her arms around him
meant little more
than a finger of foam
curled around his ankle.
Her lips on his
he thought cold,
brief and cold
as the touch of a wave.
He betrayed her,
they always do,
left her to find
her way back home
over thousands of land miles,
the only salt her tears,
and she as helpless
as a piece of featherweed
tossed broken onto the shore.
Become a Warrior
Sometimes a story starts in one direction and while the author stops thinking about it, it makes sharp turn. As this one did. On a quiet morning I was trying to write a story for a Warrior Princesses anthology a friend was putting together and published in 1982. The story—which I’d envisioned as a positive, uplifting story—went darker, and then darker still. Sometimes a story has its own mind and the author has to run after it shouting, “Wait for me ”
As for the poem, it is published here for the first time.
The Princess Turns
the princess turns,
skirts bivalving around her.
She looks little like a dragon,
though once her nails were hard,
brown, broken.
Her hair once crinkled,
cracked, split-ended,
dyed green.
Her belly once bloated,
bones bleached, eyes runny,
teeth yellowed.
Amazing what a night
in a spa, good dentists,
detox, delousing can do.
The princess turns.
An Infestation of Angels
For some odd reason, the first few paragraphs of this reboot of the Biblical Exodus came to me when I was on a ten-day author tour (plus dogsledding trip) in Fairbanks, Alaska, in March. It wasn’t that I was dreaming of the sun of the Middle East as an antidote to snow and frost. Rather the young woman who’d been appointed my spirit guide by the Arts Council that brought me there showed me an angel story she’d written (as I recall it was quite wonderful). It became a kind of challenge. Her angels were the golden kind. Mine are . . . NOT. I borrowed a typewriter from my host’s home (quick—who knows what a typewriter is?) and got down the first paragraphs. Another possible point of interest—I minored in Comparative Religions at Smith College, along with majoring in English Lit, so I knew the Hebrew Testament quite well. The story was published in Asimov’s Magazine, 1985.
This poem is first published in this book.
Work Days
There is work to do, angels,
roll up your gossamer sleeves.
Shutter your wings.
Leave the halo rusting
by the side of the road.
The world turns by labor,
not just hymns.
Pickers in the field know this.
Workers in the factory know this.
Artists at their easels know this.
Teachers in their classrooms know this.
Even the poet, in her moment
of inspiration grasps this knowledge.
Why is it so hard for others
to think this through?
News you do not like is still news.
So, do your work.
Names
In order to fill out a book of my fantasy short stories to be published by Peter Bedrick Books (a publisher known for its Jewish books, though this was not a collection of Jewish stories), I wrote this short Holocaust survivor tale. It has been reprinted a number of times and also may have been my first-ever story in Year’s Best Horror Fiction. You never know how far a story will go to find its audience.
The poem was first published in my second political collection of poems, Before/The Vote/After in 2017. So now you know which way I lean. Left.
What the Oven Is Not
The oven is no sanctuary;
The food knows it, the Jew knows it.
Oil poured on, water bubbles out,
We crisp as easily as chicken,
though not as kosher.
Cancers, like stuffing, fill the gaps.
I’d not know, nor do I care
what you think of the Shoah.
I have spent half a lifetime
writing about it, intruding into the pain
my family—ever early adopters—
escaped via immigration and long luck.
There is a sickness here,
but it bears no name.
The oven knows it, and does not say.
Afterword:
From the Princess to the Queen
&nb
sp; Alethea Kontis
HEIDI E. Y. STEMPLE loves to tell the story of the year I showed up at Phoenix Farm for the Picture Book Boot Camp (PBBC) Master Class taught by her and her mother, Jane Yolen.
“I found out one of our students wore a tiara and fancied herself a princess—can you imagine? I couldn’t wait to tell Mom. Of course, she immediately ran upstairs to fetch a crown. Because this girl might call herself a princess, but J. Y. is the Queen.”