Size / / /

By tomorrow I'll be rewritten,
a better me will be here,
one that will forget to mourn
the absence of this stinking fear.

Every movement will be reset,
run not too fast nor too slow.
They'll check for leaks, dry the wet
patches, plug every numeric overflow.

They say that it's just a tweak,
like my frontal lobe's a baby's cheek.
The strong always devour the weak,
and swallow, grow hard and sleek.

And yet,

down in my sub sub sub
conscious,
down in the pit that watches
with its wounded black eyes,
its mouth cringed in resentment.
It extends its snake like fingers
across my cheek—
a ghoul's version of a caress.
I'll take care of you
it says.
There's an undying you inside me
that burns burns burns,
and when I finally set you free— 
you'll run riot among your enemies,
walk down dimensions that their flesh
can't even feel,
toss the bullying sun back at itself
from those bright metal eyes,
and swim home to me across the void
like the first salmon spawning.




Rohinton Daruwala lives and works in Pune, India. He tweets as @wordbandar and blogs at https://wordbandar.wordpress.com/. His first collection of poems is The Sand Libraries of Timbuktu (Speaking Tiger 2016). His work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons, New Myths, Star*Line, Liminality, Through the Gate, and Silver Blade.
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: