Kaori Praschak

Hour By Hour
by Lindsey Duncan

Weepers And Ragers
by Aliette de Bodard

Diminished Capacity
by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

And Saturn Below
by Wade Ogletree

Flash

The Road To Heather Cove
By Richard A. Lovett

The Devil You Know
By Heidi Wessman Kneale

Dreams of Sinaloa
by Alveraz Ricardez

The Japanese Businessman
by Kyle Hemmings

An Alien Ate My SF Poem
by Elizabeth Barrette

Partial–birth Revolution
by Kaori Praschak

Vault
by John Fyffe

Pancho' s Email
by Marie Vibbert

Twelve Dancing Daughters
by Pam McNew

Alone No More
by William Trowbridge

]

Machine–born in low Earth orbit
I observed hard–eyed Vika
Mired in her daily obsession
To conquer biology's fickleness.

Within hours, she labeled me her first failure.
Left in the rubbish, I continued to multiply
And hidden behind coils of paperwork,
I diagrammed revenge by micrometers.

Around the corner of her awareness
I flickered, a midwife functioning between
Her organic chemistry's fluidity
And the lab's womb–curved walls.

With a mother's inexplicable instinct
She disregarded the system's warnings
Of all my fractional adjustments
To her latest slab of research.

Nine hundred seconds later, above our grudge's cradle,
We stood watch over a misshapen nativity,
A single boy composed of non–bioplastic,
Camera–eyed and unprogrammed for his future.

Oklahoma writer K.M. Praschak's science fiction novella "Paragon" appears in The Amityville House of Pancakes 3 from Creative Guy Publishing. Her sf poetry has been published in Star*Line, Raven Electrick, and Mount Zion Speculative Review.