Goblin Fruit: Autumn Edition
Art by Marge Simon Blood Birch
Rio le Moignan


Once silver birches,
these trees have changed,
no longer fit their name -
their pale gleam is lost
and they wear sunset sumptuary,
shades of earth and autumn,
fever's glow;
garnet, rust, and terracotta,
warm tones
unnatural in this context.
The spirit has gone out of this land,
and the trees wither from within.
Their bark is stained dark with sap,
drying blood
from dying dryads,
in the poisoned heart of the wood.
This is a world that once welcomed trees,
but the earth is no longer green.


Rio Le Moignan currently lives near London. Originally from Guernsey, she spent five years of her childhood living on a yacht in various parts of the Mediterranean, and has been left with restless tendencies. She is probably too old to play on swings, but doesn't let that stop her. She has poems in Jabberwocky, flashquake and Strange Horizons; also a short story in Reflection's Edge.

She says: "What poem does the word 'cherry' immediately make me think of? I was influenced by the context, perhaps, as the first thing that came to mind was Rossetti's 'Goblin Market,' which seems a little like cheating, somehow. So I'll tell you that my second thought was of 'Red Boots On' by Kit Wright. (There are no cherries in that poem, and I've never envisioned those boots as cherry red either, so why that occurred to me I'm not quite sure, but that is what I thought.)"

Marge Simon continues to survive in the swamp known as Ocala, deep in the Florida Everglades. She's been sighted running through the cypress screaming "Nevermore!" but she keeps coming back anyway to edit Star*Line, journal of the SF Poetry association.

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