Size / / /

Byron, that pouting beast, he could take or leave.  
Wordsworth? He could only pronounce him worried.  
Too often the last part came out warts. And Keats, well,
who survives Keats? Now Coleridge on the other hand—
and though neither quite matched, he did have another—
Coleridge was chewy. At least as long as the poems
had demons, something likely, in them. Still, Shelley seemed
dead on—he had an eye for it, death, for knowing
what chains meant, and fairies, and fire. And the skylark,
so high, cold and far away—though he'd never seen
one—the skylark he knew he would know when he ate one,
slowly, sucking the soft parts clean from the spine.




Bryan D. Dietrich is the author of six books of poems: The MonstranceThe Assumption, Prime DirectiveLove CraftUniversal Monsters, and Krypton Nights. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Asimov's, Weird Tales, Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other journals. Winner of The Paris Review Prize and a Nation Award, Bryan is Professor of English at Newman University. He can be reached at kryptonnights@yahoo.com, and at his website, www.bryandietrich.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: