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they said the West was not for us
they said, go back
to your damp and your fog
and your cold, gray despair
the West is for desperados and bleached bones,
for hawk-eyed hunters of solace,
for cattle, staid peace-keeping gods
of the decades of dry winds that whisper once
into the heart of the agave, “bloom, bloom”
for the sun that still rises and the
dead that stay dead

but, we asked, do we not rise also?
do we not bloom after lying in wait,
forgotten for so many years?
are we not the pioneer seeking
and the cowboy outlasting
and the herd stampeding
and the old bones wasting?
if the West is for life and death and the brave who walk between,
then the West is for us,
we who shake off our fates
to grasp again
at life



Blaize Kelly Strothers is a writer, artist, and science fiction enthusiast from Inwood, Manhattan. Her poetry and artwork have appeared or are forthcoming in Apparition Literary MagazineScifaikuest, and Star*Line and can be found at blaizestrothers.com.
Current Issue
27 Mar 2023

close calls when / I’m with Thee / dressed to the nines
they took to their heels but the bird was faster.
In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Reviews Editors Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland talk to novelist, reviewer, and Strange Horizons’ Co-ordinating Editor, Gautam Bhatia, about how reviewing and criticism of all kinds align—and do not—with fiction-writing and the genre more widely.
If the future is here, but unevenly distributed, then so is the past.
He claims that Redlow used to be a swamp and he has now brought them into the future before the future. Yes he said that.
My previous Short Fiction Treasures column was all about science fiction, so it’s only fair that the theme this time around is fantasy.
I’ve come to think of trans-inclusive worldbuilding as an activist project in itself, or at least analogous to the work of activists. When we imagine other worlds, we have to observe what rules we are creating to govern the characters, institutions, and internal logic in our stories. This means looking at gender from the top down, as a regulatory system, and from the bottom up, at the people on the margins whose bodies and lives stand in some kind of inherent opposition to the system itself.
Wednesday: And Lately, The Sun edited by Calyx Create Group 
Friday: August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White 
Issue 20 Mar 2023
Issue 13 Mar 2023
Issue 6 Mar 2023
Issue 20 Feb 2023
Issue 13 Feb 2023
Issue 6 Feb 2023
Issue 30 Jan 2023
By: Catherine Rockwood
By: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Ciro Faienza
Podcast read by: Catherine Rockwood
Podcast read by: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Maureen Kincaid Speller
Issue 23 Jan 2023
Issue 16 Jan 2023
Issue 9 Jan 2023
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