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its that scene at the end of fight club except we’re two queer bitches

pearly gates being blown up, scattering like frozen milk droplets
handel’s messiah is playing, of course, violas shatter halos scatter

     ⌈popsplatterdribblegoldliquidhallelujah⌉

who put a picture window in heaven//what is there to see if you’ve Arrived

when i was nine years old
i read about tornadoes picking up🐄
i always wondered which way the animal
would spin, hooves up or down
the answer is that when you put a grenade under the throne of god, jesus cartwheels*

*but poorly and he’s not wearing underwear under his robe

 

something we didn’t account for was where to house all the lions and lambs

we’re dressing them in please be my daddy kitty jumpers and you go
∴we should have gone with its raining men for the soundtrack∴ and im like
∴do u think cherub harpists have sheet music for the weather girls∴

ITS THE END OF THE WORLD, you hum to the lion cub squirming in your lap

its the end// i can’t scrub the taste of charred feathers from my tongue.
the lambs refuse to be pottytrained. jesus’ distended eyeball hangs
over the sky for the first month of spring and all the lilies of the valley
turn blood red //of the world

whenever the lions start fucking we put on the pixies

we pick bits of orange mane off the sofa
hold hands and wait
for the part about the little talking🐟, koi-koi

 

 

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Andrew Ward during our annual Kickstarter.]



Elena Sichrovsky (she/they) is a queer Austrian-Taiwanese writer currently living in the Netherlands. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Nightmare, Mythaxis, Baffling Magazine, The Deadlands, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and more. You can follow them on Twitter @ESichr or read more on their website. This poem was inspired by a conversation with fellow blasphemous writer @Axiopoetics.
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In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, we present a soundscaped reading of the poem, 'this tree is a eulogy', and afterward Kat Kourbeti chats to the author Jordan Kurella about his writing process, the wonders of New Weird fiction, and the magic of writer friendships.
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