Size / / /

Every day I eat a clock,

excrete a clock.

Time jewels around me.

Blue diode digits flash in my eyes.

In my cave, I liquefy the crystals—

make them seethe and blaze.

I text spells that writhe on the pulsing quartz walls,

answer invisible psi phones from the future.

Piles of hoarded sundials, solar cells,

pendulums, balance wheels, church bells,

wristwatch gears, faces and hands,

broken hourglasses and their sands,

from too many distant lands,

surround me.

Sapphire chips, alarm chimers,

and yellowed daytimers.

Paper calendars,

atomic oscillators, and

marine chronometers.

Mainsprings, bezels, windup keys,

as far as the eye can see.

Chronographs, escapements, and star charts,

rock, water, electric, and cuckoo parts—

everything with a tick or tock

heaped around me.

I am a time bomb, set to detonate

into an unknown future.

A Druid terrorist,

waiting for his moment.

She planted me ticking here—

my co-conspirator, mad lady bomber.

Snared with my own spells, beguiled and caught by her

like photons, we are quantum-entangled forever.




Lorraine Schein is a New York poet and writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vallum, Women's Studies Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Witches & Pagans, and New Letters. Her poetry book, The Futurist's Mistress, is available from Mayapple 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—
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: