Size / / /

Content warning:



“What is the heart’s shape?” one girl asks.
They have only known love
at its most Janus-faced, joy and pain,
and know nothing of the in-between.

Their mopey lyrics and sighing doodles
make the heart seem flat, cut out of
paper. So I take them to the prosectorium
and dare them. “See a real heart.”

They are shy, wise as brides
in veils of eyelet lace. What they know
peeks through. In the cadaver, they see finally
that the heart is not a delicate thing,

a foldable, burnable thing
but strong. A muscle. A fist of blood.
A spelunker’s cave where the
Minotaur roams.

Then a curtain is drawn
on the corpse’s face, a shiny, waxy thing.
Behind the eyes, the brain,
two lobes of it, looking lumpen in its labyrinth.

“Where is the seat of the soul?” I ask them.
Around the table, they look up, my girls,
faces corona-bright.
The answers are somewhere borne up

on the palanquin of their girlhood. In the arms
of lovers, over the corpse of tamed bulls,
or even alone, perhaps they will think on
the heart’s irregular shape, the brain’s symmetry—

and know the true form of things.



Genevieve DeGuzman was born in the Philippines, raised in Southern California, and graduated from Columbia University. Her fiction and poetry appear or are forthcoming in Indigo Lit, LONTAR, Liminality, Rising Phoenix Review, and AJ (now Tablet), among others. She is a winner of the Oregon Poetry Association New Poets Contest and has been awarded a residency at Can Serrat. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Learn more at: about.me/genevievedeguzman
Current Issue
18 Nov 2024

Your distress signals are understood
Somehow we’re now Harold Lloyd/Jackie Chan, letting go of the minute hand
It was always a beautiful day on April 22, 1952.
By: Susannah Rand
Podcast read by: Claire McNerney
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Little Lila by Susannah Rand, read by Claire McNerney. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
Friday: The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen 
Issue 11 Nov 2024
Issue 4 Nov 2024
Issue 28 Oct 2024
Issue 21 Oct 2024
By: KT Bryski
Podcast read by: Devin Martin
Issue 14 Oct 2024
Issue 7 Oct 2024
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
Issue 9 Sep 2024
Load More