twists your jaw vengeance-parched. and yet, the soil is always
soil. may i always be soil. perfect and hungry and capable of
chewing slowly and without doubt.
(Editors’ Note: “lagahoo culture (Part II)” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 39A.)
© 2021 Brandon O'Brien
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and is published in Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is the former poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. His debut poetry collection, Can You Sign My Tentacle?, is forthcoming from Interstellar Flight Press.
Future Saints
by Terese Mason Pierre
But who would pray to you,
supply your canonization?
First, all is muted, a green,
speckled wash, and a balding man
has just heard the worst news of his life,
and your name comes to him as gently
as a silver blanket placed on
the face of a planetless child, the cry
for help not half doubting.
Second, a black hole opens itself
to the uninitiated, stars and glass
still in sameness, the woman
finds herself trapped, and your name
is patterned in the dripping waves,
the illusory scrabble of life, the clicking
of tree branches against universal rock;
you drag each other behind, cold.
Third, everything has decayed—
art that now wears black and a
reaching forward; there seems to be
a fire in both the distance and future,
some collective ripped from prestige.
They chant your name, call upon you
for miracles, the divine ignored for
wailing passion, the solitary life,
the panting immortality of the sky.
© 2021 Terese Mason Pierre
Terese Mason Pierre is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Hobart, The Puritan, Quill and Quire, and Strange Horizons, among others. She is the co-Editor-in-Chief of Augur Magazine, a Canadian speculative literature journal, and the author of chapbooks, Surface Area (Anstruther Press, 2019) and Manifest (Gap Riot Press, 2020). Terese lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
Of Monsters I Loved
by Ali Trotta
I spent years pulling my heart
out from behind my ribs, certain
that I didn’t need it, that barking
mess, making all that noise—
I threw it to the wolves,
took their offering of teeth,
thinking I could rid myself
of the whole aching
creature—
but it kept coming back,
loyal and broken,
a resilient wreck
of wanting.
Here are the bones
of what could’ve been,
polished into blurred lines,
woven into silence
like all good mistakes,
the lesson of darker things,
heartbreak resurrected,
perfect and villainous,
pieced together
from ash and rib—
the best of the worst spellwork.
The past is full of monsters
I loved, and I keep trying
to tell the wrong story,
the one that’s easier
to look at, to live with,
where I don’t swallow all the poison,
where I don’t lose myself in the woods,
where I don’t will my body
into a tree
just to have roots.
I am a treasury
of things gone wrong,
a roadmap of the unpromised,
mouth full of rubble
and ruin,
and I could hand you the words
as bright as stars, unmistakable,
but it’s not the darkness
that earned my silence,
it’s a thousand years
tethered to a rock, talons
tearing out my liver—
at some point,
you just stop screaming.
Sometimes, the ache of it all
feels immortal, but that’s just fear
spinning gold into straw,
and the only thing to do
is name it,
say the words out loud,
tame the wolves,
tell the right story,
go home.
(Editors’ Note: “Of Monsters I Loved” is read by Heath Miller on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 39B.)
© 2021 Ali Trotta
Ali Trotta is a poet, editor, dreamer, word-nerd, and unapologetic coffee addict. Her poetry has appeared in Uncanny, Fireside, Strange Horizons, Mermaids Monthly, and Cicada magazines, as well as in The Best of Uncanny from Subterranean Press. She has a poem forthcoming in F&SF magazine. A geek to the core, she’s previously written television show reviews for Blastoff Comics, as well as a few personal essays. Ali’s always scribbling on napkins, looking for magic in the world, and bursting into song. When she isn’t word-wrangling, she’s being a kitchen witch, hugging an animal, or pretending to be a mermaid. She’s on Twitter as @alwayscoffee, and you can also read her blog at alwayscoffee.wordpress.com. Four of her poems, including three for Uncanny, were Rhysling Award nominees.
Interview: Caroline M. Yoachim
by Tina Connolly
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. “Colors of the Immortal Palette” is Caroline’s second appearance in Uncanny, a novelette that beautifully blends art, history, and creation to capture the elusive search to be truthfully seen.
Uncanny Magazine: I loved the way you’ve captured the changing times and locations in history, not just in the scene setting but in the evocative paintings you use to set each time and place. Your story folds neatly around existing art that I’m familiar with, and so when you describe both the real and imagined paintings they all feel exact for the time and place. Did you choose the time periods first and then look for appropriate paintings to reference, or were there cases where an existing painting inspired you to use that setting?
Caroline M. Yoachim: I love impressionist paintings, so the starting point—Paris in the 1870s—was selected because of the paintings. After that, though, I mostly picked the time periods based on historical events. Ultramarine, for instance, happens in 1927 because Victorine Meurent (a painter famous for being Manet’s model, who my character Victorine was based on) died that year. Some of the other scenes were based on the timing of events in World War II. One huge perk of writing this story is that I stumbled across some really excellent artists that I wasn’t familiar with beforehand. Chiura Obata is one example of that; he’s an artist whose work I discovered while I was researching the Japanese internment camps.
By the time I got to Emerald Green, I’d become rather focused on the concept of negative space—the things omitted from the painting, or in my case, the story. Since this is something of a self-insertion story on my part (to the point of giving the protagonist my own middle name: Mariko), I decided to omit my entire lifetime from the story. Emerald Green is set sometime around 1975, a few years before I was born. The next scene, Titanium White, is a huge jump forward in time
and the timing of it is only vaguely specified by the mention of “mid-millennium arcologies”…I don’t even specify which millennium. I wanted to be sure I left myself plenty of time!
That said, there were definitely paintings that I knew I wanted to include. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise was one of the many inspirations for the story, and when I discovered during my research that Victorine Meurent had done a self-portrait I knew I wanted to reference that as well.
Uncanny Magazine: One of the facts that really stood out for me was in the Zinc White section, where we learn that Mariko makes her wedding dress out of a silk parachute. I had not known about that, and it is so poignant and thematically works so well with the story you’ve constructed. As you were digging into the art and culture scenes of all these different time periods, did you discover any other interesting facts that you could not use in your story?
Caroline M. Yoachim: This was a very research-dense story, and there are a lot of single lines or even just mentions of an artist’s name that were long research rabbit holes. For instance, I was able to reference the works of both Katsushika Ōi and Hokusai, but there were a lot of fascinating details about them that didn’t fit into the story. Ōi was Hokusai’s daughter, and as Hokusai got older she often assisted him with his paintings—though how much of the work was hers vs. his is unclear. After Ōi got divorced, the two of them lived together and by some accounts they were so focused on their art that instead of cleaning their house they’d just move anytime it got too messy!
Uncanny Magazine: I really like how the imagery evolves from Mariko being an artistic object, to an artist, to an artist fully in command of what she’s trying to say. I know that you have been doing photography for a long time as well as writing. Are there any experiences in particular that influenced your conception of Mariko or her artwork?
Caroline M. Yoachim: One of the things that draws me to impressionism is the way it relates to photography. The nineteenth century saw a big shift in the way that photography was viewed—initially it was more a means of documenting the world, but over time people came to see photographs as another kind of art. I think of impressionist paintings as being in conversation with photography, as painters think about what they can take from that other medium, what they can highlight better with paint, and just the general notion of being able to capture a moment in time.
More generally, I am fascinated by the way art interacts with other forms of art—fashions that are inspired by paintings, stories and novels translated into film, song lyrics influenced by poetry. Each format has its various strengths and weaknesses so it’s interesting to compare different forms that grapple with the same themes.
“Colors of the Immortal Palette” is a story inspired by (among other things) Sunday in the Park with George, a Sondheim musical which was in turn inspired by the Georges Seurat painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Writers sometimes dream of having their stories made into movies, but my utterly unrealistic pie-in-the-sky dream is that this story (based on a musical based on a painting), will become the inspiration for a Broadway musical, and that that in turn inspires someone to create some of the paintings I’ve described
Uncanny Magazine Issue 39 Page 20