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Reincarnation by F. J. Bergmann

Posted on August 29, 2020 by publisher in
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Narrated by F.J. Bergman
Music by Fred W. Bergman

Reincarnation by F. J. Bergmann

Illustration by Sue Babcock

In a past life,
I was not a temple dancer,
black hair braided with beads and bells,
swaying behind veils,
who died young.

I do not remember
being a foot-soldier whom the legions
left behind when my feet froze
in useless sandals spattered
with elephant dung.

I could not have been
a Neanderthal, pale eyes wide with fear,
stumbling over the rocks on a broken ankle,
while Cro-Magnon hunters closed in,
shrieking their glee.

It is unlikely that I was
the model who spent weary days
immobile, naked in the chilly studio, waiting
for Michelangelo to notice
my sweet smile.

I was probably not
Aleister Crowley, living his iconoclastic,
tumultuous life. After all, I have acrophobia;
and despite my affinity for the Tarot, my poetry
is quite different from his.

Nor was I the first
mate of the Erebus, maddened
by lead, carefully packing the sledge
with my shaving-mug, cufflinks,
a dead man’s false teeth.

I was never anyone
or anything else or other
than I am as you see before you,
neither fish nor fowl, animal, vegetable,
or mineral, not frozen in substance

nor sublime and intangible,
not the signatures on the hemp-paper pages
of the constitution for a long-dead republic
nor an atom in the water raised to Plato’s lips.

I was not here, before.

 

BIO: F. J. Bergmann edits poetry for Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com) and (temporarily) Star*Line (sfpoetry.com/starline.html), and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. She has competed at National Poetry Slam as a member of the Madison, WI, Urban Spoken Word team. Her mostly speculative work appears irregularly in Abyss & Apex, Analog, Asimov’s SF, and elsewhere in the alphabet. A dystopian collection of first-contact expedition reports, A Catalogue of the Further Suns, won the 2017 Gold Line Press poetry chapbook contest and the 2018 SFPA Elgin Chapbook Award.

Our next issue will be published on February 1, 2021. We will open submissions for poems and stories on November 1, 2020.

Liquid Imagination

Issue 46 August 2020

Stories

Introduction to Issue 46 Fiction by Edwin Riddell

Long-Distance Call by Maria Greer

Stolen Moment by J.M. Faulkner

The Taste of Pomegranate By Maureen Bowden

All Dissolved by Nicholas Stillman

The Icewomen Cometh by John Mara

Footsteps by Mike Sherer

Poems

The Long Reach by Michael Gaspeny

Waterbaby by Avra Margariti

Ghazal by Joshua Gage

An Event of Sighs by Nnadi Samuel

Validation by Lee Nash

Reincarnation by F. J. Bergmann

Layering the Past by Jean Colonomos

Come to Me to Nitro by Cathy Bryant

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