Size / / /

Hardly has the wax seal dried

on this common twilight in late September

when I long for fingertips

I've never felt, reassurance

of starlings migrating over Wal-Mart,

calligraphy of the inexplicable

silence heard ever since I could talk

and asked what it was I saw,

just there on reality's platinum fringe.

No matter that men called it foolish,

that women smirked behind fans

and pronounced it sweet

for grown boys to be so lovesick,

this full of ache for what has no name,

lacking both mass and magic

but what, under a microscope,

under the dirty thumbnail of God,

could unstop all the laws of the universe.


Michael Meyerhofer's second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, is forthcoming from Steel Toe Books. His first book, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He has also published four chapbooks. His work has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Ploughshares, Arts & Letters, Mythic Delirium, Ideomancer, and others.



Michael Meyerhofer is the author of a fantasy series and several books of poetry. His work has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Analog, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and other journals. For more info and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit troublewithhammers.com.
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: