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I slid open the capiz-paned windows
and howled as if I was answering
the far-off cry of a demented dog.
My frustrated father said
I would be conjuring the aswang.

All night I remained awake on the hard floor,
the woven mat etched lattice on my back.
At the corner, between the hanged clothes,
there was a man standing, with moon-translucent face.
Outside, empty bottles whistled and bamboos creaked
but the nocturnal bugs were silent.

The next morning Father asked me
to fetch some water from the clay jar.
Through its opening, I noticed someone's head rising—
with glutinous seaweed hair.
I quivered as ice pick-tip nails scraped
the clammy earthenware.

* aswang—a vampire-like ghoul in Philippine folklore



Romalyn Ante has been a member of Writing West Midlands Room 204. Her poems appeared in a variety of magazines such as Cannon's Mouth, Southlight, and Ink, Sweat, & Tears, amongst others. She has also prize-winning poems in The Yellow Book (2015). Her first novel, Chasing Deimos, was shortlisted for The Asian Writer Chick-Lit Competition in 2014.
Current Issue
27 Mar 2023

close calls when / I’m with Thee / dressed to the nines
they took to their heels but the bird was faster.
In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Reviews Editors Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland talk to novelist, reviewer, and Strange Horizons’ Co-ordinating Editor, Gautam Bhatia, about how reviewing and criticism of all kinds align—and do not—with fiction-writing and the genre more widely.
If the future is here, but unevenly distributed, then so is the past.
He claims that Redlow used to be a swamp and he has now brought them into the future before the future. Yes he said that.
My previous Short Fiction Treasures column was all about science fiction, so it’s only fair that the theme this time around is fantasy.
I’ve come to think of trans-inclusive worldbuilding as an activist project in itself, or at least analogous to the work of activists. When we imagine other worlds, we have to observe what rules we are creating to govern the characters, institutions, and internal logic in our stories. This means looking at gender from the top down, as a regulatory system, and from the bottom up, at the people on the margins whose bodies and lives stand in some kind of inherent opposition to the system itself.
Wednesday: And Lately, The Sun edited by Calyx Create Group 
Friday: August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White 
Issue 20 Mar 2023
Issue 13 Mar 2023
Issue 6 Mar 2023
Issue 20 Feb 2023
Issue 13 Feb 2023
Issue 6 Feb 2023
Issue 30 Jan 2023
By: Catherine Rockwood
By: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Ciro Faienza
Podcast read by: Catherine Rockwood
Podcast read by: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Maureen Kincaid Speller
Issue 23 Jan 2023
Issue 16 Jan 2023
Issue 9 Jan 2023
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