Size / / /

Tonight I turn sudden from sunset

for one trickster's glimpse: You,

     star-garlanded; clouds

your laughing breath.

Tonight I sing Meera's strength

     out of tune, hesitant

with too much knowing, love

Tomorrow I'll speak tuneless

in accents that laugh

at mine.

     (You know I've stolen butter,

     fresh-churned, to taste

     cream on your lips)

Tomorrow (with questions always questions

wheezed through breathless fingers) I'll know

     I'm no Meera; never find

her sure voice. Tonight, love,

I only know you.

     (my fickle tongue

     remembers only whey)

Tonight I dance peacock feathers

to flute song dark

as twilight skin. Tomorrow

     I'll know the lie: recordings, steps,

sounds I learned by rote. The empty sky.




Shweta Narayan was born in India and has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California. They feel kinship with shapeshifters and other liminal beings. Their short fiction and poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Mithila Review, Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology, An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassifiables, Lightspeed: Queers Destroy Fantasy, and Clockwork Phoenix 3, among others. Shweta was the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at Clarion 2007 and was shortlisted for the 2010 Nebula Awards.
Current Issue
4 Nov 2024

“Did you know,” the witch says, “that a witch has no heart of her own?”
Outsiders, Off-worlders {how quickly one carves out a corner of the cosmos, / claims a singular celestial body as [o u r s] in the scope of infinity}
Lunar enby folks across here
Wednesday: The 2024 Ignyte Award for Best Novel Shortlist, Part Two 
Friday: A Place Between Waking and Forgetting by Eugen Bacon 
Issue 28 Oct 2024
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By: KT Bryski
Podcast read by: Devin Martin
Issue 14 Oct 2024
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By: Christopher Blake
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
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By: LeeAnn Perry
Art by: nino
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