The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

sitting down and falling into the world behind the keyboard. She had a clear picture of her muse — her very male muse — and she said she could always feel his hand on the nape of her neck, urging her on as she wrote. That may have been why she wrote so constantly, at such a breakneck speed — like a runner chasing the rising sun, like a woman running toward her lover. And in the end, I think she caught him.

—Kathleen Bartholomew

RHYSLING AWARDS

Since 1978, when Suzette Haden Elgin founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, its members have recognized achievement in the field of speculative poetry by presenting the Rhysling Awards, named after the blind bard protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth.”

Every year, each SFPA member is allowed to nominate two poems from the previous year for the Rhysling Awards: one in the “long” category (50+ lines) and one in the “short” category (1–49 lines). Because it’s practically impossible for each member to have read every nominated poem in the various publications where they originally appeared, the nominees are all collected into one volume, called The Rhysling Anthology. Copies of this anthology are mailed to all the members, who read it and vote for their favorites. The top vote- getters in each of the two categories become the Rhysling winners. Past winners have included Michael Bishop, Bruce Boston, Tom Disch, Joe Haldeman, Alan P. Lightman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Palwick, Lucius Shepard, Jeff VanderMeer, Gene Wolfe, and Jane Yolen. In 2006, the SFPA created a new award, the Dwarf Stars Award, to honor poems of 10 lines or less.

SONG FOR AN ANCIENT CITY Amal El-Mohtar

Merchant, keep your attar of roses,
your ambers, your oud,
your myrrh and sandalwood. I need
nothing but this dust
palmed in my hand’s cup
like a coin, like a mustard seed,
like a rusted key.
I need
no more than this, this earth
that isn’t earth, but breath,
the exhalation of a living city, the song
of a flute-boned woman,
air and marrow on her lips. This dust,
shaken from a drum, a door opening, a girl’s heel
on stone steps, this dust
like powdered cinnamon, I would wear
as other girls wear jasmine and lilies,
that a child with seafoam eyes
and dusky skin might cry, There
goes a girl with seven thousand years
at the hollow of her throat, there
goes a girl who opens her mouth to pour
caravans, mamelukes, a Mongolian horde
from lips that know less of roses
than of temples in the rising sun!

Damascus, Dimashq
is a song I sing to myself. I would find
where she keeps her mouth, meet it with mine,
press my hand against her palm
and see if our fingers match. She
is the sound, the feel
of coins shaken in a cup, of dice,
the alabaster clap of knight claiming rook,
of kings castling — she is the clamour
of tambourines and dirbakki,
nays sighing, qanouns musing, the complaint
of you merchants with spice-lined hands,
and there is dust in her laughter.

I would drink it, dry my tongue
with this noise, these narrow streets,
    until she is a parched pain in my throat, a thorned rose
growing outward from my belly’s pit, aching fragrance
into my lungs. I need no other. I
would spill attar from my eyes,
mix her dust with my salt,
steep my fingers in her stone
and raise them to my lips.

SEARCH Geoffrey A. Landis

Jeremiah sits in a room at Cornell
Lit by fluorescent lights