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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
15 Dec 2025

Strange Horizons
Strange Horizons will open to general fiction submissions on January 19th, 2026, at 3 p.m. UTC! This window will remain open for 48 hours, closing at 3 p.m. UTC on January 21st 2026.
My obsidian shadows knifed the moon, drank moonblood until my wandering mouth filled to bursting
In this endless dark winter / he comes as furious as / a lion’s claw
Now that I am back in our homelands, I am haunted. I dream of faces hovering over me, taking my blood. They suck at my veins like infants at a bottle.
Wednesday: The Deep Forest by Sofía Rhei, translated by Kendal Simmons 
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