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