Keith Allen Daniels, has been publishing poetry since 1972. His poems have appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, SomePIG! (an "arachnoid poezine"), Weird Tales, Recursive Angel, Poets of the Fantastic, Narcopolis, Once Upon a Midnight and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Dark Planet is designed and edited by Lucy A. Snyder. If you spot any errors, or if you have any comments, please contact her at lusnyde@indiana.edu. All materials copyright 1996-1997 by their respective creators. No stories, articles, poems or images from this webzine may be posted or published without the written consent of their creators.

The Houri and the Hoplites by Keith Allen Daniels As curvy as the space around collapsars, a starlord of a high albedo strain, she is lounging with the languor of iguanas, she is squamous in her crystalline domain. For long and long she's drifted here in darkness, pariah for the violence of her will, conjecturing stochastic, strange encounters, and dreaming of another chance to kill. Some scales have broken loose and float around her, a torus of detritus -- a tiara bejewelled like the diadems of yore. In time invaders come to mine her surface, to pry encrusted prisms from within -- a race of armored hoplites, avaricious, enamored of her lapidary skin. By slow degrees she sheds her wonted torpor, the interlopers wither in her gaze -- a gaze like that of some affronted Gorgon, a relict of the vaunted glory days. The hoplites cease their hopping, stand there frozen in postures nearly comic or obscene, like pieces in a pixilated chess game, a game whose only winner is the Queen.