Size / / /

grief wakes the nucleus

of the whole atom

wavers the line of stopped ambulances

alongside the freeway

swivels like a swung shovel

coming at you in a yard full of wreckage

you snap one of those plastic

produce tabs on it, saying

this is something I did

this is something I will not do

then in the arbor of sudden light

time, collapsar, dissolves in it

a telephone, like the arm moving to answer its ring,

wakes up

wakes, this time

the whole atom




Lee Ballentine edits Ur-Vox, a yearbook of new surrealism. His poems have appeared in Abraxas, Caliban, Exquisite Corpse, Mississippi Mud, and many other places in the twenty years since James Laughlin wrote Lee was "pushing up into the Amazon of the new poetry." You can see more of Lee's work in his publications Dream Protocols,, Phase Language, and POLY: New Speculative Writing, and also in our archives.
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: