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current that “Sucks me/back to birth, that long canal of dark,” Mandy Michno celebrates “early sunlight sweeping the back steps,/light awed as the skin of a tadpole,” and Jesseca Cornelson evokes an adolescent kiss transcending chemistry. My mother, a World War II veteran, once told me that you never laugh so much as during a war. This issue offers dark chuckles from Arthur Gottlieb’s “Alligator Plans” through Christopher Bernard’s take, both sly and wry, on the plea- sures of poetry. Gordon Phipps' satire of Oscar season rolls out the red carpet for Martha Engber’s Swiftian vision of the body politic as body. Speaking of body politic, science fiction is all about the day it was written and Ho Lin’s new 
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adventure novel set on the outskirts of Asia and the outskirts of time draws us into a utopian/dystopian world where slogans like The East is Red and Double Your Pleasure “probably actually meant something once.” For cinematic dystopian visions, I recommend Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men. If you go expecting a tightly plotted sci-fi thriller or a faithful adaptation of P. D. James’ 1992 novel, you'll be disappointed. But, if you can nerve yourself to open your eyes and watch what you know already goes on where you can't see it, you'll find a moving parable of the unexpected and unavoidable consequences of living on this planet as though we own it. And at the end a hope, shy as new grass. -- Anna Sears
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