Introduction
Another year has passed, and we are pleased to offer you the annual speculative poetry issue of The Pedestal Magazine. We received over 1200 poems to consider for this issue. As we read them, we each put our own “Maybe” or “No” with the poem, along with “Personal” for those poets we knew or recognized. After discussion, we kept the mutual “Maybe” poems that we then pared down to our final choices. The process is time-consuming, but we believe it affords fairness to all submissions. As Bruce once remarked in an earlier introduction, none of our priceless china or antiques were broken during the final decisions. Not this time, anyway.
Herein you will find some excellent speculative pieces, such as one in which a woman changes her persona as often as she changes the color of her hair; another is a deft portrait of New Orleans at Halloween, including rising ghosts and mystic vampires; there’s a hallucinatory take-off on “The Telltale Heart”; a visit to a world of microbes not that different than our own; a dying woman in search of a new body, and much more.
Here’s hoping you enjoy these poems as much as we did.
Bruce Boston & Marge Simon
