Size / / /

With ink I feathered you, at your fingertips sketched

storm-static and the dust of masks, set crooked all

the haloes of a holy fool to crown you double-tongued

and quicksilver: this hand of faces you dealt yourself

in pasteboard riddles and commedia deadpan, that now

I shuffle like a cadenza to hand back as slant and true

as any con: pick a card, my lovely assistant, any card.

We two only, we know: they are marked all with your name.




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.
Current Issue
18 Nov 2024

Your distress signals are understood
Somehow we’re now Harold Lloyd/Jackie Chan, letting go of the minute hand
It was always a beautiful day on April 22, 1952.
By: Susannah Rand
Podcast read by: Claire McNerney
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Little Lila by Susannah Rand, read by Claire McNerney. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
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Art by: nino
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