Size / / /

It's night of course;

it always is, isn't it? Universal,

and I speak literally. Dark

is the natural state of things—

dark matter, dark energy, making up

ninety-six percent of the universe

we think of as our own

& the light

we survive by and worship

nothing but a trivial aberration,

despite the dependency of such entities as us.

Yes, let there be Light! Ah, the Glory!

that brings forth life upon the sludgy stones

kludging lonely in the dark . . .

each luminous object expelling its substance

into the dark quantum by quantum—

light the visual manifestation of decay,

like corpse-light, a celebratory sort of sparkle

surrounding indomitable entropy.




David Lunde is a two-time Rhysling Award-winning poet and translator whose work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov's SF, Absolute Magnitude, Star*Line, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, New Worlds, Galaxy, Worlds of Fantasy, Whispers, Poetry, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, and many other magazines and anthologies. You can see more of David's work in his published collections Heart Transplants & Other Misappropriations, Blues for Port City, and Instead, in our archives or on his website. You can email David at davelunde@earthlink.net.
Current Issue
16 Dec 2024

Across the train tracks from BWI station, a portal shimmered in the shade of a patch of tall trees. From her seat on a northbound train taking on passengers, Dottie watched a woman slip a note out of her pocket, place it under a rock, strip off her work uniform, then walk naked, smiling, into the portal.
exposing to the bone just how different we are
a body protesting thinks itself as a door out of a darkroom, a bullet, too.
In this episode of SH@25, Editor Kat Kourbeti sits down with Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li to discuss her foray into poetry, screenwriting, music composition and more, and also presents a reading of her two poems published in 2022, 'Ave Maria' and 'The Mezzanine'.
Issue 9 Dec 2024
Issue 2 Dec 2024
By: E.M. Linden
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Issue 25 Nov 2024
Issue 18 Nov 2024
By: Susannah Rand
Podcast read by: Claire McNerney
Issue 11 Nov 2024
Issue 4 Nov 2024
Issue 28 Oct 2024
Issue 21 Oct 2024
By: KT Bryski
Podcast read by: Devin Martin
Issue 14 Oct 2024
Issue 7 Oct 2024
By: Christopher Blake
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
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