Size / / /

ψεύσματα ποικίλα πιθανῶς τε καὶ ἐναλήθως ἐξενηνόχαμεν
—Lucian of Samosata

Both plausibly and persuasively
have I told artful lies.

Many thereafter
settled in truth's bones
inked line-drawings in ivory
—inclusions in vitrified sand
sketched fantastic in shadows:
here is a man with a jackal's face
a woman with sun-charred wings;
here ants scatter rivers of gold
out where the desert floods and burns.

One-eyed brother. The features change
down the years:
a stranger's mask-face kindred-charged
in a lip's curl—brow's lift, nostril-flare—
sear me strange
sister with the eye shot blind.
I never had a lover.

In the glacier-shivered north beyond north
the ice of her breath burning in my blood
his raven-feathered fingers bannered in my hair
beloved, honest: easy to fell.

You say all these lies are mine?
Tempt me to throat-aching truth, then.
You'll turn aside long before
I tell.




Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is published by Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, where she's been known to talk about even more books thanks to her Patreon supporters. Or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
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.
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