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On the bus, my mother presses her forehead
against the one-eyed vulture in the glass
Missed calls,
funeral bills,
old pockets that smell of
pennies. We talk about medications
like relatives no one wants to see.

Don’t look
at the creature’s wrinkles
the burn scars along its neck and face
like rusted train tracks,
its wet eyes
hungry for decades-old debts.
Instead
look out the window:
the dollar store sandals in cardboard boxes,
the McDonalds
with the bullet-cracked window,
the brick church
where we lowered our heads
and pretended to be saved for a free meal.

Two decades ago,
I sat on a plastic crate in front of a mirror
and saw the vulture for the first time
as you combed through the knots in my hair
and told me about a home I’d never know:
the boot prints on your father’s
back, the broken ribs and red books,
the woman in the red dress
purple-faced in the river,
the dogs,
the teeth,
the hunger,
splintery shovels and
midnight gunshots,
inky hands never clean
shaking under paper-thin sheets
a baby, not me, crying for milk
its tiny mouth swallowing gulps of
hot air as the flies circled over the dirt, waiting

Ma, you asked me then
if I was happy
the vulture’s claw to your throat,
eyes the green of kerosene burns

You already knew then, didn’t you?
When the magician combs his hair and
asks his reflection to pick a card
he’s practicing how to fool himself
A person could spend a lifetime
trying to figure out what the final trick is.



Angela Liu is a Nebula-, Ignyte-, and Rhysling-nominated writer/poet from NYC who writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. She formerly researched mixed reality storytelling at Keio University in Japan. Her stories and poetry are published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, The Dark, Interzone Digital, Lightspeed, khōréō, Uncanny, and Logic(s), among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela.
Current Issue
28 Oct 2024

By: Anna Martino
Translated by: Anna Martino
The truth is that I don’t know how much of my life was a dream and how much was reality. Does it matter in the end?
(...) A verdade é que não sei o quanto de minha vida foi sonho e quanto foi realidade. Faz diferença, no fim das contas?
By: Bindu Tiji
Translated by: Lakshmy Nair
Now, my passion is only for deserts.
എനിക്കിനി  ആസക്തി മരുഭൂമികളോടാണ്
By: Nanpai Sanshu
Translated by: Xueting C. Ni
PX9345 is a solar system situated on the outer edge of the Milky Way. It has one star, seventeen planets, three of which are located in a habitable zone, where water is not only present, but present in large amounts.
px9345是一个处于银河系边缘的星系,它有一颗恒星,十七颗行星,其中有三颗都处在宜居带上,不仅有水,而且是大量的水。
Issue 28 Oct 2024
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By: KT Bryski
Podcast read by: Devin Martin
Issue 14 Oct 2024
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By: Christopher Blake
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 30 Sep 2024
Issue 23 Sep 2024
By: LeeAnn Perry
Art by: nino
Issue 16 Sep 2024
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Issue 2 Sep 2024
Issue 26 Aug 2024
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