Size / / /

The needle inked the shapes of feathers—

wings folded, carved into the skin of his back.

He stretched, rolling his shoulders

as the tattooist paused, rested.

He felt the dual pink scars wrinkle then stretch.

There was an absence, an ache

between his shoulder blades he knew

ink could never fill. But for a moment

he pretended they were real, those strong black wings

peeling from his flesh, reaching up, tips pointed skyward.

Then, the tattooist resumed and the needle

was biting, biting, biting.

It was not God he missed, not Heaven.

It was the act of flight itself:

the taste of wind, the feel of freedom,

the near solidity of air cradled beneath his wings,

and far, far below, His most loved

children building castles of sand,

so small, so small.




Andrea Blythe lives in Los Gatos, California, where she writes poetry and fiction. Her poetry has appeared in several publications, including Chiaroscuro (ChiZine), Perigee, Bear Creek Haiku, and Chinquapin. If you would like to learn more, you can visit her webpage: www.andreablythe.com. You can also see her previous work in our archives.
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.
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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.
Wednesday: And Lately, The Sun edited by Calyx Create Group 
Friday: August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White 
Issue 20 Mar 2023
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Issue 20 Feb 2023
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