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This is the whole world: your shirt
stretched against your heartbeat,
your collar chafing your throat

as you swallow. Everything is fabric,
one fabric. You’ve been confused!
You were naked. You thought you were guts.

Days, you’ve sat among cockroaches
on cracked tiles. They eat the stale cake
on the plate beside you, and also your hair.

Before this apartment, you hallucinated
your way across desert. Remember?
The world was fantastic. The world was giraffes

on unicycles. This way you knew
the world was fabric: because the circus
of summer followed you into the desert come fall,

clinging like only fabric clings
to your skin. Your clothing is rags, but otherwise
faithful. Fateful. It is your whole world.



Zella Christensen is mostly from Wisconsin and studied creative writing at George Mason University. Her poetry has appeared in Star*LineMirror Dance, and elsewhere. She lives online at zellawrites.com.
Current Issue
18 Mar 2024

Strange Horizons
We are very happy to welcome Dante Luiz as a new fiction editor on the team! Dante is a Ignyte Award winning author, and has been with Strange Horizons working as an Art Director for the past several years. We’re stoked to bring him on to the fiction side and have him bring his wonderful insight and skill to the fiction team.
Day in and day out, the rough waters of the Pacific slam themselves against the protrusion of sandstone the locals refer to as Morro Rock. White streaks of bird shit bleed down the rock, a testament to the rare birds of prey that nest in its pocked face overlooking the bay.
in my defence, juggling biological and artificial, i tripped over my shoelace, and spilled my lungs empty of the innocence that was, before guilt.
the birds, / who carry with them / the many names of the dead
Wednesday: Overlap: The Lives of a Former Time Jumper by N. Joseph Glass 
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