RHYSLING AWARD WINNER

BEST SHORT POEM

SHUTDOWN

MARGE SIMON

Marge Simon lives in Ocala, Florida and is married to Bruce Boston. She edits a column for the HWA Newsletter, “Blood & Spades: Poets of the Dark Side,” and serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees. She won the Strange Horizons Readers’ Choice Award, 2010, the SFPA’s Dwarf Stars Award, 2012, and the Elgin Award for best poetry collection, 2015. She has won the Bram Stoker Award ® for Poetry, the Rhysling Award and the Grand Master Award from the SF Poetry Association, 2015. Her new collection with Mary A. Turzillo, Satan’s Sweethearts (Weasel Press), is upcoming in 2017. Marge also has work in the anthology Scary Out There, a story and poems in You, Human (Dark Regions Press), and fiction in Chiral Mad 4. www.margesimon.com.

They barred the library doors today.

Men in uniform stand patrol, armed and ready

their lantern jaws firm, lips a straight line.

Stoic women, also armed, jog up and down

the block, buttocks moving like pistons.

Someone dashes from a building

a hand-held reader clutched close.

Shots are fired; I don’t stay to find out more.

I’ve packed the car with books, little room for else.

It is my car, his gift to buy my silence,

to make up for the bruises real and otherwise;

never marry a politician who has no use

for literature, has no use for a wife that does.

Eagles have left their nests to vultures

the barren palm trees whimper for their loss

there are ceaseless storms, mud is everywhere

while two legged insects multiply unchecked

The car radio plays Ibsen, bassoons herald the trolls.

I roll down the window, taking a deep breath

outside of Pyr Gynt’s Hall of the Mountain King,

foreboding notes of the oboe, a palpable stench of fear.

Am I leaving that, or taking it with me . . .