The Great Kilonova Slam — Part One
By Lorraine Schein
This week, The Daily Tomorrow is thrilled to showcase a virtuosic new fiction by the accomplished poet and writer Lorraine Schein. Best paired with an oversize mug of tea, ginger snaps, and slacking off at work until January. - The Editor
THE GREAT KILONOVA SLAM
By Lorraine Schein
We the citizens of artificial MetaEarth celebrated the arrival of the giant kilonova in our sector of the galaxy with a planetary-wide open poetry slam.
The onset of the stars’ merging created gravitational waves that caused a space-time distortion our instruments could detect, enabling us to schedule our reading to coincide with it.
My name is Gim Feest. I’m the official emcee for the royal slams.
Our Empress J-42 (Jingu, cloned 42 times) had decreed the slam be held in honor of the stellar event. The royal astrologers had deemed the kilonova especially auspicious because it coincided with her birthday.
After all, it was most fitting for humans to do as the universe does--celebrate the cosmic collision of two neutron stars with our own slam.
The palace’s heraldic avatars were sent flying through the realm, flashing invitational quantum news-beams to notify all its poets.
The winner would get all the heavy elements that the explosion created—uranium, platinum, silver and of course, the best one, gold (though you can make a bomb out of the uranium, and nice jewelry out of the silver).
As an emcee, I tried to be impartial in my introductions and not play favorites. There were two rival schools of poets at the slam, the Spoken Worders and the UnSpoken Worders—those who performed without oral language. Though the Empress and her court were solidly old-school pro-Spokens, I admired the Unspokens for their daring.
I was getting weary of hosting slams, though. I had heard so many of the same bad poets read the same bad poems—or new bad ones.
The contestants had lined up outside for days, hoping to be picked first from the stochastic e-hat to read. Word had gotten out about the slam to even the hip-hop poets of Xyzzander 3>< who were usually not allowed to participate. The marsupial hop poets from New Auztralia came too—no hip, just hop.
I recognized the usual cast of characters: The poet who always read too long over the time limit, but couldn’t take a hint to stop and had to be dragged off by the metallic arm, the singsong poet, the one whose voice was so soft and mumbled that no one could hear them, the one whose introduction was longer than her poems.
If only Lady Sho were here my evening would be bearable. But she had been banished to the Outer Asteroids for insulting the Empress after reading a poem that satirized the court. She was still in exile, maybe never to return. I sighed, knowing the Empress’s advisors had recently spread further rumors about her.
Lady Sho—also known as “Slay” because of her unmatched record in defeating other poets--had been the reigning champion of the Spoken Word poets.
We had had a tryst once. I had sent her a tone poem—a quatrain of four ascending chimes on an echo-branch after our little encounter, as was the custom.
Still, this was an Open and anyone could come, so maybe some better contestants would show up. One could only hope. Nobody said this was going to be easy.
Besides applause, the audience could show approval by stamping their feet (if they had them), waving their tentacles or eye pods, snorts or coos. Dislike of a poet elicited catcalls (except our planet had no cats, so we called them Zliptcalls, after our green-furred domestic mammals).
The audience voted by pushing their wrist buttons, giving each contestant a rating of 1 to 10. Quantum computers then analyzed and totaled the responses using algorithmic analyzers, posting the scores on the board overhead.
The slam was held on a floating platform. From here, all would have an unimpeded view of the astronomical event taking place.
“There’s a three-minute maximum,” I said to the audience. “You know what happens to those who go over,” I winked. Laughter rippled through the room.
The stage was suspended over a crater whose sides were the two tallest mountains on MetaEarth, under which a methane sea surged. The platform could be tipped remotely, tilting low-rating poets into the sea. Then the Society for the Protection of Mediocre Poets would attempt to save them before they went under—not always succeeding.
Lorraine Schein is a New York writer and poet. Her work has appeared in VICE Terraform, Strange Horizons, Scientific American, and Michigan Quarterly, and in the anthologies The Unbearables, Wild Women and Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath. The Futurist’s Mistress, her poetry book, is available from Mayapple Press. Her newest book, The Lady Anarchist Cafe, was published by Autonomedia and available on Amazon.
Copyright © 2024 Lorraine Schein