Much as I love modern poetry, one thing that feels like it's been lost from the Romantics is the notion of storytelling in poems. It's something I miss, not because I don't like the current forms, but because I tend to like all kinds of poems.

About fifteen years ago or so, I discovered that there's an active subset of the science fiction and fantasy writing world dedicated to poetry, and there are some fantastic things going on there (ignored in the mainstream poetry world, of course). This one, from a magazine called Lone Star Stories is hardly aiming for "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" length, but then again, neither was "La Belle Dame sans Merci." But it's a beautiful and tragic little moment.

By Shira Lipkin

She runs— feet pounding the desert, shove off, get more momentum harder faster legs like pistons half meat and half metal, and the meat slowly cooking, sizzling, searing not yet not yet—

No time for goodbyes, for anything. When the siren ripped through the station, her clock started ticking down to absolute zero. No time to fight with him, to explain.

This is the thing: when you take this job, managing a new terraforming station on a new world, they give you this body. Long list of specs, but it boils down to: you can go outside. you can take massive acceleration You can take all kinds of things.

They take you aside, and they tell you: These are the risks. And you are the failsafe.

They tell you: if everything goes wrong, if the shit hits the fan— it has to be you.

And you sign, and you get your augmentation, because it's a new world, an adventure. And you think, never in a million years will I be hugging a blown reactor, screaming through gritted teeth, tears evaporating, sucking the power in so the station doesn't explode.

You think, I will never be running down the corridor, past my friends, past him, no time no time, out the airlock onto the scalding weirdness of this planet.

Run.

Meat is cooking fast, charring sizzling; she smells like dinner, and she'd laugh if she wasn't trying not to scream. faster faster farther farther impact jarring her legs where joints have seared away running blind, just got to get far enough away

When her eyes open the desert turns to glass.