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is licking the translucent mirror; reflection of nodules
on my post-menstrual face. A Pan-Asian queen’s voice
of profanity and agony with no makeup on, rubbing
the guitar fret with her fake Manchurian fingernails,
like I’d imagined a voluptuous blonde fingertips sliding
on my Best Friend’s naked torso down to his swollen member.
The night before my Best Friend and I are about to fuck,
his queen-sized bed splits into halve due to wear & tear
just like my mother’s tear duct flushed to dryness,
forcing me to finish a plate of fish n’chips, while
the nurse wheels my father’s body into the elevator;
a new mother stood beside me, breastfeeding her newborn,
demanding for words of congrats. Her expression changed
when I showed her my father’s rigor mortis posture.

I ask my Best Friend to bury my alter-egoistic heart
after each beautiful fuck. He kisses my third-eye,
my brain’s heavily pumped by the balance of Tao,
the living and the dead, the fluidity mass of Adam & Eve.
Tonight we cook blood curry & dead white potatoes,
baking marmalade cakes, overloaded with poppy seeds.
His family’s prayer unable to cure their insomniac slumber,
by the time he’s sowing horny seeds into yours truly
under the papaya tree of futile pistil, stamen and leaves,
the twin-flame ashes succumb to the danger of self-love.
At the stroke of midnight, my Best Friend exhumes
glowing seeds and my fluids inside a banana tree flower,
burying right next to the adolescent papaya tree,
I named the spawning experiment Bianca Jayne,
after the initials of our favourite foreplay.



Deborah Wong was born in Kuala Lumpur and raised in Subang Jaya, Malaysia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crack The Spine, East Jasmine Review, Streetcake Magazine, The Stray Branch, Eksentrika, Thought Catalog, Ricepaper Magazine, Rat's Ass Review, Seagery Zine, Liquid Imagination, and other publications. While working on a fictionalised memoir and revising a stack of stories, she also collaborates with an emerging Australian artist in an artwork-poetry crossover project on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @PetiteDeborah, or on Instagram @deborahbie.
Current Issue
31 Mar 2025

We are delighted to present to you our second special issue of the year. This one is devoted to ageing and SFF, a theme that is ever-present (including in its absence) in the genre.
Gladys was approaching her first heat when she shed her fur and lost her tail. The transformation was unintentional, and unwanted. When she awoke in her new form, smelling of skin and sweat, she wailed for her pack in a voice that scraped her throat raw.
does the comb understand the vocabulary of hair. Or the not-so-close-pixels of desires even unjoined shape up to become a boat
The birds have flown long ago. But the body, the body is like this: it has swallowed the smaller moon and now it wants to keep it.
now, be-barked / I am finally enough
how you gazed on our red land beside me / then how you traveled it, your eyes gone silver
Here, I examine the roles of the crones of the Expanse space in Persepolis Rising, Tiamat’s Wrath, and Leviathan Falls as leaders and combatants in a fight for freedom that is always to some extent mediated by their reduced physical and mental capacity as older people. I consider how the Expanse foregrounds the value of their long lives and experience as they configure the resistance for their own and future generations’ freedom, as well as their mentorship of younger generations whose inexperience often puts the whole mission in danger.
In the second audio episode of Writing While Disabled, hosts Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston welcome Farah Mendlesohn, acclaimed SFF scholar and conrunner, to talk all things hearing, dyslexia, and more ADHD adjustments, as well as what fandom could and should be doing better for accessibility at conventions, for both volunteers and attendees.
Issue 24 Mar 2025
Issue 17 Mar 2025
Issue 10 Mar 2025
By: Holli Mintzer
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 3 Mar 2025
Issue 24 Feb 2025
Issue 17 Feb 2025
Issue 10 Feb 2025
By: Alexandra Munck
Podcast read by: Claire McNerney
Issue 27 Jan 2025
By: River
Issue 20 Jan 2025
Strange Horizons
By: Michelle Kulwicki
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 13 Jan 2025
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