Size / / /

I call the pebbles

broken by ice,

smoothed by water and time.

I call them

from the beds of dying streams,

from the unsuspecting gardens.

I call the gems

from the necks of fair ladies

and the crowns of kings.

I call them polished

and faceted.

I call the cursed and the blessed,

the rich things stolen from the earth.

I call the once-living,

the tiny carapaces

and bones of man-height.

Arise and stand forth, unblinking

in the sun of another day.

Remember the taste of living flesh.

I call boulders

spat out by glaciers,

cast down from the heights

to languish.

And I call the cooled lava,

the pulse forgotten

in the flow of stone.

Nor have I forgotten

the mountain ranges and great rifts

that break the land,

swallowing the veins of rivers

and giving rise to other streams.

All these I encompass

in my calling. All these I summon

to rise up and bring fire,

to dance creation on the fragile

and the unmindful.

These are the old gods,

shaking existence beneath my feet.




Shy and nocturnal, Jennifer Crow has never been photographed in the wild. It is rumored that she lives in the woods near Buffalo. Her work has appeared in a number of print and electronic venues, including several anthologies such as Ruins: Extraterrestrial, Desolate Places, Jabberwocky 3, and Sporty Spec. Her blog is located here, and she may be reached by e-mail at kythiaranos@yahoo.com.
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: