"Invaded" A Scifi Prose Poem by Victoria Grace

True to the new form of life, patterns are of our universe gone haywire. But nothing is to come that hasn't already been put in place by the consequence of actions, the revelation of history, final destination of a journey.

 

Parallel, nestled in the dark corner of magnificent space, are foreign ways of being that overwhelm our planet, taking us over and making us a part of its energy. Pulsing from a common source, it's the only one that matters. Whizzing by asteroids, soaring past the sun, bypassing Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and friendly stars, it comes at just the right and wrong time.

Although our ancestors bled so we could live, sweat so that we could drink, it became so hard to understand why so much poison was still forced down our throats and spat back on the soil. So that's why we were spun around, controlled by it looming over us, hanging over our heads and possessing our movement.

We walk in the streets pretending not to notice this new massive presence staring down at us with ferocity. We brought this on ourselves and I wonder but then I wonder about the point of wondering.

 

We're finally in lock-step. It's funny that it took the change-up of survival and existence to just shut our mouths and stop the damn agitating.

Emptiness replaced the old hate and I'm wanting some kind of passion, yet there's no room for passion, no kind of room for things a cosmic entity killed dead.

Life continues in an offbeat way. We have our little moments of memory while walking down these crumbling lanes. It fills our heads with fleeting fragments of comfort and our eyes never raise to look at the frightening sky.

 

This passion I keep longing for is now replaced with an unbroken feeling of consumption; small and temporary objects that fill the need for just a little while while making us forget the master ruling this dead-end chapter of our new world.

Our eyes are kept from the sky, our hearts are pointed towards unknown plains. Our minds are still our own but I wonder how much longer? Then I wonder the point of wondering and keep on walking while it keeps staring down.

"The Vampire's Refuge" a dark poem by Victoria Grace

 

(Original Picture sourced from Pixabay, edited by me on Ipiccy)

Stalking the darkness was a predator approaching prey, a creature hunting flesh,

wrapped in misery and cloaked in death.

It tore open men and women's bodies,

delighted in agony and consumed human breath.

History didn't stop the monster roaming the lands,

searching for new victims to sacrifice.

Civilization grew with this monster,

denying its evil and clueless to its obvious disguise.

Things got bad,

people hated and changed with time.

Innocence was the vampire's enemy

and its diseases infected blood, consciousness and mind.

Countries fell and skylines rose

from the mud, from the blood, out of the flood of pain.

Hungry mouths made and spirits sucked out of veins.

The vampire kept taking new shapes, forms and disorder.

The life kept flowing from the holes in its victims

and in and out of shadows it moved,

waiting for new eras and new slaughter.

It didn't take long for the world to end,

as it was, it struggled along on its last gasping breath.

It didn't take long for people to retreat to their last hiding place,

not quite existence but not quite death.

Sorrow built upon itself a new framework, structure, and home.

The vampire moved into those spaces too seeking out flesh and marrow, survivors' essence and soul.

A thousand years passed,

and some humans were scattered from one continent to the next.

The sun was still shining, the birds were still flying,

but life had slowed, industry toppled, and all that was left were scattered families' nests.

The vampire had achieved almost everything it sought, planned and desired.

The memory of the past and glory of man had been whittled down to a passing reference;

half-believed, inconsequential, long since transpired.

What was left were phantoms, but the hearts itself were not quite dead.

The survivors still clung to fragments of themselves,

their children were still loved and their blood was still warm and red.

The vampire could not yet retreat, could not abandon its cause.

It wanted deadness itself, blankness like it,

so it hunted down the last hiding places--from vulnerable flesh it refused to withdraw.

It slunk into tight corners, descended to its original home, the dirt.

It manifested as new rot in the food and created brand new hurt.

There were no more cities to conquer, no more armies to infest.

There were only the left over pieces of humanity's heart, their left over heartache, and this was their final test.

"Time For An End" An Apocalyptic poem by Victoria Grace

Our daylight 

came after the 

hottest 

week 

in winter 

we'd ever seen, 

sun like flame, 

scorching the land.

Smoke of torment 

wound 

through eternity

from fires 

of the obliviously damned.  

The land is gone,

so is our civilization

and minds.

One by one,

we chose our destiny below-ground,

where we long for death

and witness incineration

of our bloodline.

Sometimes we remember stories

of cool times, oceans and mist.

The others who cannot bear it,

fill with fury, scream and throw up their fists.

Our skin hurts to the touch,

our new home is filled

with our pain from morning to what was once night.

The lucky amongst us crawl out of darkness

into the sun's bright blazing light.

But of sanity,

I told you,

the rest have long since thrown aside.

It's become distant memory what we were,

before His punishment,

before the world died.

I listen to the howls of them in this hole,

how different it is now.

Our end time was bound to happen,

it was just the when

and the how.

My last few days in my corner

has had me thinking quite a bit.

I am only one of few left,

I guess it's time for our spirits to quit.

I whisper my last thoughts from a bleeding tongue,

into the diseased air,

finally closing the hope

that all is just a very long nightmare.

If everything has been taken from me,

erased and denied,

one thing is true--

I tried.

"Newworld" a Micro-Poem by Victoria Grace

Moving through life thinking on what's been given, 

slowly, surely heading

towards unknown distances, 

contemplating hell and heaven.

Snaking through the hours 

are moments of the mundane.



The question burns like neon:

would you rather be the human moss

or the righteously insane?

"A Planetary Enigma" a Horror Poem by Victoria Grace

It hides amongst the shadows

in cruelest form.

Doesn't take long to emerge;

it's been waiting

for eternity.

Slithering out of time,

the means to measure

the amount of chaos it contains,

cannot be found.

The howl of generations future

is its song.

The remnants of the past are not long

for this new world

of tormented flesh

and misshapen figures

crawling the new soil and diseased sky.

Below, above, and within has opened up,

and unknown phantoms from unknown places cross over;

haunting and afflicting,

poisoning and reawakening.

A trembling old woman and a little girl

hide in the dark.

She tells the child stories of sunlight and freedom

as the child sleeps a brief peaceful escape.

Science Fiction by women and about women

Right now, I'm in the middle of traveling through the guts of a Peter Straub book, Lost Boy, Lost Girl. The writing is some of the most imaginative I've seen so far in a book included in the 'horror' genre, but after I finish it, I REALLY want to switch up (because I've been reading a lot of horror lately), and settle into a good, meaty scifi story, preferably dystopian. I love the horror and scifi genres, have for over fifteen years, but I notice that they still tend to be a somewhat (well, more than somewhat) male-dominated genre.



So I was really happy to come across this list of science fiction tales by female authors, because as I said in a previous post of mine on women in speculative fiction--I love seeing what ideas women bring to the genre! I love seeing women front and center. The future belongs to all of us, so all of us should be well-represented, ya' know? Here is a list that includes books written by female authors of different cultures, backgrounds, and races. It's an excellent beginners' compilation showcasing some of the best and brightest of the women in the genre, but also demonstrating the breadth and complexity that can be found in a scifi book. Spanning from Europe to Africa to China, they tell very diverse stories but the connective tissue is the exploration of women's experiences within circumstances that are often completely beyond their control. Which is, interestingly, reflective of the situation many women find themselves in in real life, minus the fantastical scenarios.





11 Sci-Fi Books Every Woman Should Read by Crystal Paul

An author who was one of the few women of color in speculative fiction was Octavia Butler. Her writing came along at a time where narratives of Black women in the genre were pretty scarce.

I still have so many of her novels on my ginormous 'to-read' list! One of the novels on the list which I want to read immediately is Parable of the Sower. This book centers around a young woman with a spectacular ability to identify with the misery and pain of others like it was hers. The story is set in a dismal Los Angeles (only nine years from now, actually) where the privileged live behind walled communities and the rest...well the rest have no money, no work, no home and are ANGRY rampagers.

First of all, this is the kind of unique, socially conscious perspective I was talking about a few posts back, about how and why I love exploring the female voice in scifi literature. The protagonist Lauren Olamina, seems intruiging--a young Black woman featured in the kind of story that you don't often see revolving around the power and brilliance of women of color. Lauren's belief is that "God is change" and leads a form of spirituality around this conviction called Earthseed. This is right in the midst of violence and upheaval in this nightmare L.A. born out of economic and government collapse. Octavia Butler was a trailblazer in bringing the narratives of people of color to scifi in a fresh and highly original way. Butler's imagination soared in a genre where it was greatly needed. This is probably number one on my 'to-read list' now. When I finish it, I'll ultimately post a review both here and at Goodreads.

During the course of my journey as a reader and aspiring writer of speculative fiction, I've often tried to find stories that reflect the experiences of women, especially women of color, in a way that is exciting, unique, and outside-the-box. Along with Octavia Butler, I'm also interested in further exploring the work of author Alaya Dawn Johnson. 

She published a young adult novel I MUST READ called Love is the Drug about a young woman of color from a well-to-do family in Washington, D.C., who is drugged and ensnared in government intrigue in the middle of a flu pandemic sweeping the globe. Seriously. The plot sounds like a summer blockbuster waiting to happen.

When I first started becoming interested in writing speculative fiction, one of Alaya Johnson's short stories was one of my early inspirations...Shard of Glass and the biracial girl who is at the center of a desperate and supernaturally-based escape from danger with her mother, was one of the works of fiction I read that actually gave me a good amount of encouragement as a mixed-race aspiring writer in the genre. I believe what a female writer of color with creativity, consciousness and most importantly--PASSION--can accomplish through their writing in the genre is virtually limitless. I recommend any aspiring scifi/speculative fiction writer of color to read this story. The plot is thrillingly crafted and the twist at the end is superbly written. Her name isn't on the Buzzfeed list above--I just HAD to mention her work and how powerful I felt her writing was. You can read the story here.


Along with this Buzzfeed list and those like it, I also recommend checking out the lists compiled over at my main literary hang-out, Goodreads, for more titles both featuring female characters and/or written by women. I'm always on the hunt for more! 

Happy reading!