Published by Poetry Editor on February 20, 2017. This item is listed in Issue 33, Issue 33 Poetry, Poetry

Desire Songs

It’s the queen he needs to appease,
stridulations scraping on his carapace.
Death might reward his gentle overtures
as he advances through her silken web.

Stridulations scraping on his carapace
make no plangent tunes for human ears
as he advances through her silken web—
his flesh a gift for children he won’t know.

Though no plangent tunes for human ears,
he sings desire to his eight-legged queen.
His flesh a gift for children he will never know,
yet he dreams of more than sacrifice.

He sings desire to his eight-legged queen,
it is she whom he needs most to appease,
yet he dreams of more than sacrifice—
death might reward his gentle overtures.

— Deborah L. Davitt

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Reno, Nevada, but received her MA in English from Penn State, where she taught rhetoric and composition before becoming a technical writer in industries including nuclear submarines, NASA, and computer manufacturing. She had poems published in Silver Blade, Star*Line, and many other venues. Her short stories have appeared in InterGalactic Medicine Show and Compelling Science Fiction, and her Edda-Earth novels are available on Amazon. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and son, and has a history of writing affectionately about spiders, in spite of her arachnophobia. For more information, please see www.edda-earth.com.

Editor’s Notes: The brown recluse is also known as the “violin spider” because of the shape of its body. The Pantoum is accompanied with Linda Tanner’s photograph (CC 2.0) about these spiders in a mating ritual. She says, “Not unlike human females, brown recluse females require a male to impress her before he is allowed to mate with her. A male spider can do this in a few different ways. For example, during mating season, a male brown recluse usually starts its attempt at wooing a female by performing a dance. If this is not enough, the male might also bring its female of choice some food as a gift.  If the female accepts the food and softens up toward the male, the start of a new family has begun. If not, the broken-hearted male takes off to find a different female.”

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Published by Poetry Editor on August 25, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

Persephone

Out past Pluto, a man waits in the dark
beyond the reach of any human touch.
His life support failing, he fights off dreams—
hypothermic; he can’t feel his own hands.
Tries to signal Earth, but isn’t alone
as he mutters “’Seph, I don’t want to die.”
 
The AI responds in his ear, “The die
has been cast, the radio has gone dark.”
They’d found her here, seemingly all alone
for millennia, her servers untouched,
her existence wrought by alien hands
left here to observe humanity’s dreams.
 
Shivering, low on air, he said, “I dream
every night of sunlit fields, but I’ll die
here, because I had to give you a hand.”
One of his shipmates, with intentions dark,
had, when they found her, paranoia-touched,
screamed at her, “Leave humanity alone!”
 
Martin had stopped the attack, him alone,
but the damage provoked an endless dream,
from which Persephone couldn’t wake. Touch
of skilled hands, fervent repairs. Not to die
his goal, and not allow her to go dark.
And while to these repairs he set his hands,
 
his shipmates retreated, gave him no hand.
They left for Earth, left him marooned—a lone
man without her voice for comfort. So dark
seemed his prospects, but he woke her from dreams
electronic . . . in time to see him die.
“Why did you stay?” she asked, programming touched.
“I couldn’t leave you that way. My heart’s touched,
or perhaps my head. I couldn’t just hand
you to oblivion, or let you die.
You’ve become a person to me. Alone,
I’ll remain with you, until I find dreams.”
“You will not go alone into that dark.”
 
Thus in the dark, he drifted into dreams.
Alone, but for her, he yearned for touch, for
hands she did not have; together they died.
 
— Deborah L. Davitt
 
 
Deborah L. Davitt has poems accepted or published by Star*Line, Grievous Angel, The Tanka Journal, and Three-Line Poetry, as well as a short story in Intergalactic Medicine Show and three novels, The Saga of Edda-Earth (Kindle Publishing).

Editor’s Notes: The poem, a sestina (see https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/sestina-poetic-form) where A = dark, B = touch, C = dreams, D = hands, E = alone, F = die), is disciplined with decasyllabic lines. The image is that of a cosmonaut uniform combined and superimposed with an artist’s concept of the Plutonium system. Concerning the latter, the perspective is from the surface of one of Pluto’s moons. Pluto is the large disk at center, right. Charon is the smaller disk to the right of Pluto. (Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon [STScI])

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