Size / / /

To frogspawn
an egg is all.
(Together, a raft. A multiverse.)

A fox reads poetry
licks words till they stick to her tongue
(as anyone would).

The wasp makes her nest as soft as ash
a glue of whiskers adhere the layers
(without whiskers the fox cannot measure
herself
her home
the twin bowls her paws make in the snow that is
nothing more than tears
polished smooth as blue mirrors
or silk with a spider's web motif
ice bones beneath).

You splay, frozen in the pond.
Your lashes catch snow
(and sometimes my reflection).

At the end of the thaw
your body, a crescent
your hair a bloom of fox tail.




Jenn Grunigen is a writer, folklorist, and metal drummer. She is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion Writers’ workshop; her writing has appeared in Shimmer, Spolia and elsewhere. Her SF novel, Skyglass, a wild tale of sex, elves and rock ‘n’ roll, is available now from Chromatic Press.
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—
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