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I ate all my greens. I was a good kid. My heart chewed into a leaf. The wind took it. The sky, blank & meditating, bore witness to everything. How spoon carves into soup, like key trying to find its lock. Funny that the Chinese spinach has no known origin despite its name. This weed that took over continents & colonies. This hollowness sprouting along rivers, waiting to be steeped in oyster sauce. In Southeast Asia, we say kangkong. In the school bus, I recognise the sizzling of Hokkien and Malay slurs. Their sodium stench stains my tofu skin, even after hours of scrubbing. In bed, I bend over to a boy who refuses to finish his vegetables. He plucks tender shoots off his plate, forms tablecloth trash pile. He is a spice I have learnt to swallow; his grease simmering inside. I smell nothing about my childhood in him: the hawkers’ wok-song, the cleaners’ cart-rattle, the sweat-stained seats. We were good kids. And yet, moulded from different recipes: he was preserved in garden salad & I, stir-fried with garlic. We weren’t lovers, just weeds in the city. Blades of dried grass emerging from asphalt. A variegation of rootlessness.

 

¹ water spinach



Andy Winter (they/them/theirs) is a non-binary ice goddess living in the warm tropics of Singapore. They dream of queer kampungs and celestial realms. They do not wish to be perceived. Find their chilling words at https://whispersinwinter.wordpress.com/.
Current Issue
18 Mar 2024

Strange Horizons
We are very happy to welcome Dante Luiz as a new fiction editor on the team! Dante is a Ignyte Award winning author, and has been with Strange Horizons working as an Art Director for the past several years. We’re stoked to bring him on to the fiction side and have him bring his wonderful insight and skill to the fiction team.
Day in and day out, the rough waters of the Pacific slam themselves against the protrusion of sandstone the locals refer to as Morro Rock. White streaks of bird shit bleed down the rock, a testament to the rare birds of prey that nest in its pocked face overlooking the bay.
in my defence, juggling biological and artificial, i tripped over my shoelace, and spilled my lungs empty of the innocence that was, before guilt.
the birds, / who carry with them / the many names of the dead
Wednesday: Overlap: The Lives of a Former Time Jumper by N. Joseph Glass 
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