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“The ocean is suffocating.”
Dr. Bastian Queste (University of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences)

Here is a place you walk into backwards,
hands held out before you to push back
the greying sky. One leg tense with the burden
of earth, the other, a jaunty angle
sinking in the bioluminescent green.
Here is a wind out of water, a transparent sheet
swaddling you back into the freedom offered
by thrashing four limbs, by holding your mouth
perfectly ajar like a grotto spitting bubbles.
Screw your eyes shut against the pressure
of lines in the floating page receding
above you. When fish pass you by,
measure your pulse by their dying breaths.
When bone-white coral scrapes your vertebrae,
remember the practised smile of the skull
on every sign that warned, ‘DANGER’.
When the bed breathes floating sand displaced
by your settling in, dream of nights
when stars were falling dust.



Krishnakumar Sankaran is a writer living in Mississauga, Canada. His work is forthcoming in the Watch Your Head anthology (Coach House Books, 2020). His work has been previously featured in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and Kindle Magazine. In India, he was shortlisted for the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, 2011.
Current Issue
18 Mar 2024

Strange Horizons
We are very happy to welcome Dante Luiz as a new fiction editor on the team! Dante is a Ignyte Award winning author, and has been with Strange Horizons working as an Art Director for the past several years. We’re stoked to bring him on to the fiction side and have him bring his wonderful insight and skill to the fiction team.
Day in and day out, the rough waters of the Pacific slam themselves against the protrusion of sandstone the locals refer to as Morro Rock. White streaks of bird shit bleed down the rock, a testament to the rare birds of prey that nest in its pocked face overlooking the bay.
in my defence, juggling biological and artificial, i tripped over my shoelace, and spilled my lungs empty of the innocence that was, before guilt.
the birds, / who carry with them / the many names of the dead
Wednesday: Overlap: The Lives of a Former Time Jumper by N. Joseph Glass 
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Issue 19 Feb 2024
Issue 12 Feb 2024
Issue 5 Feb 2024
Issue 29 Jan 2024
Issue 15 Jan 2024
Issue 8 Jan 2024
Issue 1 Jan 2024
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