Tag Archives: halloween

SFPA Halloween Poetry Reading

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The 2011 Science Fiction Poetry Association’s sixth annual Halloween Poetry Reading is online in what is most likely its final form. Near the bottom of the page are links to the readings for 2006 through 2010. This year I did not write a new poem, but instead contributed a recording of “Vision Stalker” to the online reading. It’s rather a “signature” poem that I wrote in 1996–another period of change in my life.

SFPA members reading their own spooky poetry include

  1. “Pumping Up the Local Economy” by David Kopaska-Merkel
  2. “Wicked Karnival: A Tribute to Tod Browning, Jr.” by Stephen M. Wilson
  3. “A House with No Windows” by F.J. Bergmann
  4. “The Head” by G. O. Clark
  5. “Sentient Shadows Rise” by David Glen Larson
  6. “A Night at Hotel Sedgewick” by irving
  7. “Not Alone” by Ann K. Schwader
  8. “The Cosmic Web” by David Lee Summers
  9. “All Creatures Great and Small” by Elissa Malcohn
  10. “Death in a Harlequin Suit” by Karen A. Romanko
  11. “Vision Stalker” by Elizabeth W. Bennefeld
  12. “Vicious Trees” by Mary A. Turzillo
  13. “Waking Beauty” by Lyn C. A. Gardner
  14. “Secrets” by Deborah P Kolodji
  15. “Renovation” by Kath Abela Wilson

In addition to my artwork, there are pictures by Geoffrey Landis and Kath Abela Wilson. 

Halloween Poem

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Since 2006, I’ve been coordinating the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Halloween Poetry Reading page. SFPA members make digital recordings of themselves, reading one of their own poems. This year, as in 2007, I wrote a new poem for the page; my recording is way at the bottom, if you’d like to hear me reading it. Here’s the text of this year’s poem:

Halloween at the End of the Universe
by Elizabeth Bennefeld

In the asteroid belt, the veil between the worlds grows thin.
Here, graveyards are orbits around the rocks
that once were home to those who circle round and round,
peering through our windows with empty, farseeing eyes.

Beyond, one by one, the stars blink out,
with no short, clear path from Earth–
a failure of applied topology–
to the one bright-burning star that promises
the beginning of a new beginning.

So, Trick or Treat?
Here we sit on this hunk of rock and ice,
watching through the windows for the ghosts
of Grandpa Pat and Great-Aunt Selene
to push aside the thinning veil, resume their bodies,
and guide our spaceships through the wall between our worlds–
to celebrate Halloween together
at the beginning of a new-born universe.

Reposted from my wordpress blog