Size / / /

Content warning:



no one loves a mind-reader,

not one who delights in secrets, lining

them up one by one on a mahogany shelf

dripping lemon honey from each glued on screw

there are emerald hummingbirds at the window

snapping their beaks against the fairyglass

but she will never let them in because these secrets are mine

 

mine, mine, and so the shelves grow,

the wood expands with each passing exhale. soft affairs

no husband would notice turn into big hulking monstrosities that people

prayed they could forget.

once upon a time this mind-reader told a boy

her secrets, she gave him half her dripping heart

and he took a bite, gave her his. she told him

about crouching cicadas falling dead onto her six year old head

rolling shattered fairyglass between her teeth daring for it to cut her

when she was twelve she read in her father’s biblical mind that the world was ending

she tried to beat it to the finish line. once upon

a time she read this boy’s mind as he held her in his arms. she asked him questions.

she didn’t like the answers his slippery tongue told.

 

honey grows mold

deadly bacteria hides in the sickly yellow

she gets drunk on it anyways.



Ashley Bao is a Chinese-Canadian-American high school sophomore. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Liminality and Cast of Wonders.
Current Issue
27 Mar 2023

close calls when / I’m with Thee / dressed to the nines
they took to their heels but the bird was faster.
In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Reviews Editors Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland talk to novelist, reviewer, and Strange Horizons’ Co-ordinating Editor, Gautam Bhatia, about how reviewing and criticism of all kinds align—and do not—with fiction-writing and the genre more widely.
If the future is here, but unevenly distributed, then so is the past.
He claims that Redlow used to be a swamp and he has now brought them into the future before the future. Yes he said that.
My previous Short Fiction Treasures column was all about science fiction, so it’s only fair that the theme this time around is fantasy.
I’ve come to think of trans-inclusive worldbuilding as an activist project in itself, or at least analogous to the work of activists. When we imagine other worlds, we have to observe what rules we are creating to govern the characters, institutions, and internal logic in our stories. This means looking at gender from the top down, as a regulatory system, and from the bottom up, at the people on the margins whose bodies and lives stand in some kind of inherent opposition to the system itself.
Wednesday: And Lately, The Sun edited by Calyx Create Group 
Friday: August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White 
Issue 20 Mar 2023
Issue 13 Mar 2023
Issue 6 Mar 2023
Issue 20 Feb 2023
Issue 13 Feb 2023
Issue 6 Feb 2023
Issue 30 Jan 2023
By: Catherine Rockwood
By: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Ciro Faienza
Podcast read by: Catherine Rockwood
Podcast read by: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Maureen Kincaid Speller
Issue 23 Jan 2023
Issue 16 Jan 2023
Issue 9 Jan 2023
Load More
%d bloggers like this: