Many, many thanks to all the writers who published with Dark Sky during the last year. We love you all. But all cannot be nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Only six. Bah! That’s way too hard. Nonetheless, we went through our archives and picked short stories, poems, and novel excerpts that struck us as especially strong. Congratulations to the following folks:

* Tom Williams — The Mimics Own Voice (novel excerpt)
* Justin Sirois — Falcons on the Floor (novel excerpt)
* Jason Larson — The Burts (fiction)
* Roxane Gay — We Are Magnificent (fiction)
* Wendy Xu — If You Aren’t Busy I Think I’m On Fire (poetry)
* Mike Young — Is That It’s You (poetry)

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About the Author: Josh Spilker 

About the Book: Ambient Florida Position

Brett DeFries’s poems appear in the fall Web issue of Dark Sky Magazine. Here, Brett gives us a brief look at Ezekiel, talking seeds, and why heaven may or may not be polluted water.

Could you introduce me to Ezekiel?

As a collection, Ezekiel is a book length poem series. As the speaker in the collection, Ezekiel is someone nearly unable to cope with every day sense experience. Color is sometimes ecstasy and other times hell. Ezekiel is a victim of hauntings, and dogs are allergic to him. He is friend to Simon, son to his mother, client to Sasha, and burden and lover to Monica. He often confuses one relationship with the other, and sometimes he forgets his roles altogether.

Why is heaven “a dirty bowl of water?”

I’m not sure it is, and neither is Ezekiel, though if we were dogs, we might believe such a thing. From my own observations, though, I can say that as water is revealed to (some of) us, it is not the purity it stands for. If heaven is a revelation of world in time—and why not—then heaven is not remote from terror or soil or drought or spit. Instead heaven is worsened or improved by what populates it.

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We’re told Spain needs babies. Statistics have the birthrate slumping down near sub-replacement levels; demographers report that if not for the reproductive efforts of immigrant populations, a Spain of Golden Girls would already be upon us — a country for old men, and of them. But if all of this is true, you wouldn’t know it in Puente Genil. Around here, stores with names like Dulce Bebé (Sweet Baby), Los Peques (The Small Ones), and Little Kings (Little Kings) do brisk business catering to the vagaries of moda infantil (infant fashion). Family-portrait studios appear to be surviving the economic downturn reasonably well, and clothing outlets can be counted on to carry maternity wear. Puente Genil may have been spared American fast-food chains for now, but Dulce Bebe has three stores in Puente Genil, in as many blocks. Even as a venerable local real-estate firm recently closed up shop, a new baby-shoe store — not a shoe store with baby shoes, not a baby clothes store with baby shoes, but a baby-shoe store, cobbler to the recently fetal — opened up in its place. If Spain really is aging, it would seem to be doing so somewhere else.

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Buy the book: ASUNDER

Or visit his blog: Robert Lopez