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They’re everywhere
If you doomscroll your way
to the wrong hall, click yourself into a dusty old
red room that asks for a name but never a face
they are there.

The dark patterns are a double slit box
that exists to be seen and unseen, an overexcited field of possibility
Rogue simulations
that wreak chaos on an unsuspecting body.
They delight in broken connections, severed
lifelines sewed back up with the wrong
stitches, a series of muddled portals in cyberspace
You can buy a discounted sweater and
find yourself setting fire to a factory in Bangladesh
It’s not so hard.

Prisms strobe inside your eyes, needling
the soft folds of your hippocampus
as a stranger tells you that they’d love to get to know you
Love is as sharp as the edge of a machete
hacking open your heart, those red-blue veins pumping your wet secrets
Go ahead, you say, guiding the tip of the blade in with your own hands,
Take as much of me as you want.



Angela Liu is a Nebula-, Ignyte-, and Rhysling-nominated writer/poet from NYC who writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. She formerly researched mixed reality storytelling at Keio University in Japan. Her stories and poetry are published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, The Dark, Interzone Digital, Lightspeed, khōréō, Uncanny, and Logic(s), among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela.
Current Issue
4 Nov 2024

“Did you know,” the witch says, “that a witch has no heart of her own?”
Outsiders, Off-worlders {how quickly one carves out a corner of the cosmos, / claims a singular celestial body as [o u r s] in the scope of infinity}
Lunar enby folks across here
Wednesday: The 2024 Ignyte Award for Best Novel Shortlist, Part Two 
Friday: A Place Between Waking and Forgetting by Eugen Bacon 
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
Issue 30 Sep 2024
Issue 23 Sep 2024
By: LeeAnn Perry
Art by: nino
Issue 16 Sep 2024
Issue 9 Sep 2024
Issue 2 Sep 2024
Issue 26 Aug 2024
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