Size / / /

Content warning:


I lie when I say they’re the only part of him I remember, him spitting the porcelain mold into his blistered hands and chasing me through the development’s dust, clacking his teeth at me the way disgruntled skeletons rattle bones, as though he were trying to scare a cloud of red into my heart, hurling his laugh skywards toward the void his constellation would soon live.

I remember his hair long like the sinew of a red willow’s heart. His feet light as starved November leaves carrying his tree-trunk self clear across the pow-wow, aunties holding me in their laps and telling me his stories—how he had kept a pet skunk, how he saved a girl tossed into the lake by a spurned lover, how he and his brother had set fire to a boarding school.

To me, he had always been living legend. Unattainable, spinning out of reach from me

like planets from their moons.

But it is his teeth that clench the eye of my memory the way weasels win throats, or how roots hold strong in the snow. If I could cradle them in my hands, I’d hold them close and let them dissolve into my chest, listen as his molars blossom like seeds in the dank mulch of my heart, ask if he were proud of who I’ve become.

His teeth would chatter and implore me to gaze into any stretch of sky and see a mirror.



Halee Kirkwood is a recent graduate of Northland College and will be soon attending Hamline University’s MFA program. Kirkwood also served as an editor for Aqueous Magazine, a Lake Superior region Literary & Performing Arts magazine. You can often find Kirkwood haunting the Twin Cities Metro Transit, staring out of windows and daydreaming about what secrets the roadside plants keep.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
Issue 18 Mar 2024
Strange Horizons
Issue 11 Mar 2024
Issue 4 Mar 2024
Issue 26 Feb 2024
Issue 19 Feb 2024
Issue 12 Feb 2024
Issue 5 Feb 2024
Issue 29 Jan 2024
Issue 15 Jan 2024
Issue 8 Jan 2024
Load More
%d bloggers like this: