The wolf will take you up in dance. / It will take you up in danger. / It will take you up / in ecstasy.

biology and botany tell me that roots don’t look like this

The night before I marry you, I start to have a panic attack.

They look to the generation ship. (Editor's Note: This poem contains animated typography with a mild strobing effect.)

there is something queer about this intention—

In my calculus class was a man in an iridescent polo and pigeon feathers in his dark, tangled hair.

The comb is kept in a small case and a magnifying glass is there for you

Know that the end / is something that you cannot escape here.

the rattle of the rails, the shuffling-muttering of hundreds of passengers nestled in the one long limb of you

The truth is: / she does not have to bend into a ceramic plate to carry us beautifully, & my father / isn't the hand that will break her.

The collar will fray, and I will consume its threads.

The key attribute of the city will be its silence.

// Your cadaver lies supine in a tranquil field of lavender //

and oil rigs make men believe they are nephilim, invincible as david until they meet him and his electric teeth.

If in dreams I stalk White Rabbit

The old man waits, hoping someday someone would come off the bus needing to have been waited for

every time I use / abuse / the slash / sounds like // a clap //

& i understood that wa(te)r / does not wash the red tint off the scalp of a bleeding ocean.

Cups of broken light at corner Photon bars.

Do spaceships sound / Like helicopters? Churning & sloped in hover?

the fabric of time / itself has begun to tear and collapse, to the point / that, as I stand before you now, viewers, I’m also / standing again, as a child, in my mother’s kitchen.

I tell smug Cyclops that I’m as gay as the next mutant, and that all mutants find themselves within battles

from my tower we climb, shroud as my veil. We leap on his fae steed

they are quoting Darwish at the picket & i am finally breathing again

where oil slurped up out of the dirt, they drink the coffee

Bring my stones, my bones, back to me

Like this woman, I am carrying the world on my back.

a few miles from the fallout zone. / You double-check the index card

Unripe morning / cut open too soon

We do not speak, but / send letters back and forth by paper airplane. The way back is / long.

and the champagne, as always, was excellent

They came in uniforms to protect themselves from damp days

Suck a [sticker of a fat cat in a clamshell bikini]

while i sway in the wind like a matador’s flag / a long-tongued ghost laps at my silk skirts

We are amazed, awed, delighted and have wept (in a good way) at the sheer talent represented in the stories, poems and essays. In fact, we are saddened that we couldn’t represent all of Southeast Asia. We have so much talent. 

Is this the period of rage / prophesied and predicted

By the chorus she was a young woman again.

we tried to photograph this phenomenon but self does not appear in the images

an elephant wept in ancient memory and the uncles in all the kopitiams raised their cups of ang ji kao

When oceans / are rooms / I could never breathe in, the city / held its breath.

I stalk walk and hunger curdles like a middle finger on the ramp, merging into traffic.

sometimes, / I wonder what weapon / birthed his posture.

I dreamed buildings were exploding / all over the old city

During recess, we would fight all the time.

Their eyes trace the curves of our gears / like birds eyeing the shoreline and we / recite the songs our makers wrote

Cia transits between you: a moon the size of home, a tiny hole in Shapa’s swirls.

my uncle walks around with amulets tied to his waist

ants, yams, outcrops / still water, sparks, coals

What did you become after all these years of running from the beast? / A shadow wandering at the boundary of light, alive in the deadest way

your staircases looping themselves with infinite regularity

STEP ONE: Remember we are heathens not researchers.

I must be the last person to notice this

Each night I bid good evening to the great mass in my closet.

in full day you’re hillock and divot, camouflaged in plain sight

you ask Mother. She wraps you in teeth, tendrils,

my companions saw a golden statue and seized a rope

my grandmother was a bear, you know, so that’s probably why

A crack in my leg opened my world, shattered it like thunder announces the arrival of lightning

it's only natural that // If I'm going, I want to be gone with you.

Each insect like each other, each human equally stone

It is all recorded, the misfortunes of all grandmothers and even the triumphs of an ant

stretching its spiral arms up the curve of my backbone

this serious girl with a documentary got me by the arm started walking

some villains decompose into gods, he tells me  

Calls / Drop here, constant, caws and clicks and whoops

some sweet taboo silhouetted against red temptation

I refuse to be quieted by what quiets my thirst.

Fields of bowed green gripped onto your feather wrist | her quantum veil hiccupping

She has a body like a needle and a voice like radio static.

Would the rightful owners of these 17 bodies please turn up to claim them?

My family and I / lived and dined / and enjoyed sunny picnics / and celebrated Christmas / with the bones inside us / silently howling

i tuck myselves under coffin nails. and then i am the sun like a nairobi fly, burning spine and skin.

we are whispered into this new land, this old land, whispered anew

I notice the lizard is again green as my daughter counts the glass stones

Bathroom lights dancing to the beat of the ground

what’s more sci-fi than a gundam is that, somehow, all the friends i’ve ever had are here.

ridges of triangular teeth / press a tiny ring against your fingertip from within

but, we asked, do we not rise also?

Luciferian makes me think of this term I cannot remember.  What is the fancy term for when you know something

Someone is tossing fish from the roofs / and you, you swim the violent current

the seed catalogue singsongs. Long after has arrived and gone without ceremony

and yes the pomegranates were out of season / and yes the plums could have been less bitter

The night death was let into the world / we were playing faro with no aces

You have to know what you’re looking for—the charmer’s affinity for deep-red things, their seamless smiles

If I go subatomic, will I desire a particular flavor of quark?

The ocean is a library of skin. / I cross the paper waves and printed sands.

gold dripping off the bone that stains your fingers.

now that the last unstaked earth we can claim, is the triangle wedged beneath fore and hind wheels

Ribs all around your sides. Caged like that. / This body, bone than body. Cathedral of tight skin.

Fortunately for you I am but a potter / And not a detective

He played the brakes He called to the Bison

Twist and love and love and twist / I am the mother of monsters / I am a monster of mothers

Graveyard of red stars. Shimmering mirage in heaven.

Seventeenth-century violin: Used twice, guaranteed to harness the departed souls of a beloved pet.

Somehow, it is this world/In this world, swords still cut

the feeling of being swept off your feet

Take a walnut glazed/ with the honey of their name / crush it with a mortar and pestle/ let the pythons wrap themselves around you/ till you learn again to breathe/ underwater

the time is stuck and the magazines are covered in colors

children get bigger when it rains

[this poem has been non-archived at the request of the author]

Sometimes, writing is removed from our archives at the request of the author. All Strange Horizons authors have the right to request this at any time, as long as it's more than six months after publication.

the memory of echoes of the big bang

It’s classic meet-cute. He’s a seven-foot cyborg on a quest to rid the galaxy of an ancient evil.

reaching for tender branches / while the sparrows take flight

Some people, right? We’ll fold you into sparrows, help you disappear—I’m so glad we found you alive

Piece of my essence, accept my sorry.

No one gets married before going to space.

I writhe in bed with fever, chills, chatters and shivers. The near becomes far as the far comes close.

There is a djinn for everything: every act of forgetting, every act of remembering. Every act of oppression, every act of protest. Every act of civil resistance, every arrest, every injury, every death. There is a selfish djinn, and a selfless djinn. There is a djinn for beauty, a djinn for zakhm, a djinn for kindness, a djinn for empathy. A djinn for absence, a djinn for inaction; a djinn for climate, a djinn for crisis, a djinn for war, a djinn for peace. What are words but djinns?   * A, a: Aama, Aadhar (March 11, 2016), Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (1936 / February 16, 2016), Aśoka (c.

Before she knew it, she was falling out of the sky like a waterfall and through a canopy of thick, wet leaves. Fell hard into the soil.

My words; How distasteful / My thoughts: ill-begotten

Well he’s my son, now / mine, like the village is mine