Size / / /

after Elise Matthesen

He should be ice in a northern garden,

a moss-flanked marble whose fingers cling

as stilly to his flute-stops as last night's rain

between the bowing heads of roses,

sheltered forever by a symbolist's afternoon

from November and the winter's stripping chill,

yet here he lounges in an abstract of boxwood

and holly, under a slate-lid sky,

the black of his pelt like the soft lees of Setinum,

his horns as sweetly whorled as pinecones,

a gold annealing in the slots of his eyes.

His throat like oiled olive, his warm arms smell

not of rut and vinegar, but resin and stillness

disturbed, the hot light filtering on the beeches

and river-veins, the muddied onyx

of one hoof jinks: and if I cry

ὁ μέγας Πὰν τέθνηκεν, he will fall

like the curvetting of aspen leaves, to plain air,

the piper at the gates of sunset,

a wind-topped, tuneless reed.

But if it sang out true from Paxi to Palodes,

mourning, exultant —that voice of dying gods—

who haunts my path like a heart's missed beat,

holm-oak, stone pine, the dark stelae of cypress

glimpsed out of shot from clipped corners of yew,

whose wordless mouth reels modes of ivy in?

The little wind frets the hedges in their fading,

bellies a spider's shell-strung caul: a sibyl.

The faun in the summer of the world smiles,

too late to uninvoke, growing home.




Sonya Taaffe reads dead languages and tells living stories. Her short fiction and poetry have been collected most recently in As the Tide Came Flowing In (Nekyia Press) and previously in Singing Innocence and Experience, Postcards from the Province of HyphensA Mayse-Bikhl, Ghost Signs, and the Lambda-nominated Forget the Sleepless Shores. She lives with one of her husbands and both of her cats in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she writes about film for Patreon and remains proud of naming a Kuiper Belt object.
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14 Apr 2025

back-legg-ed, puppy shaped and squirmy
the pastor is a woman / with small birds living in the hollows of her eyes.
Strange Horizons
On June 4th, we will be opening for speculative fiction novelette submissions between the word count of 10,000 and 18,000 words. We will cap submissions at 300.
Strange Horizons
On November 3rd, we will be opening for speculative fiction stories written by Indigenous authors. We will be capping submissions at 500.
The formula for how to end the world got published the same day I married the girl who used to bully me in middle school. We found out about it the morning after, on the first day of our honeymoon in Cozumel. I got out of the shower in our small bungalow and Minju was sitting in bed, staring at her laptop.
In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, editor Kat Kourbeti talks to Charlie Jane Anders about her Strange Horizons publications dating all the way back to 2002, charting her journey as a writer and her experience with the magazine over 20 years, as well as her love for community events and bringing people together.
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