Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

I once sketched out a cycle of about a dozen poems based on the game Candyland. But I only ended up writing the opening poem of that series&#8212″Life as Candyland,” which was published in the November 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Here’s what appeared mixed in with stories by Robert Silverberg, Orson Scott Card, Allen Steele and Walter Jon Williams:

You pick your color; it sticks for life.
You cannot avoid this. You have to choose.
Become a blue (of peace), a red (of strife),
One of a limited number of hues.
You cannot create new ones. The choices
Have been made for you. Possibilities
Are limited. No room for new voices.
No room for personal agilities.
Then other colors are made yours. A card,
Square or squares upon it, then another.
Will you flip them in your favor? Will Hard
Times come? Milton Bradley is Big Brother.
For ages four to eight this game is made.
Yet by all is it feared, and by all played.

I still have the notes for the rest of the Candyland poems somwhere. Think I should dig them out and finish the cycle?