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Imagine an alien invasion. I'm talking about the mother
of all motherships. Oozing dripping grey tentacles
maim & rip open everyone at the party while you & I keep
vaping out here by the garage. Mango-flavored puffs just
thick enough to mask screams, to see in the night, dark & thin.
I watch your ass sway its way to the house for two more beers,
hear you shout, & run up the sidewalk to be by your side.
Endless suffering in the living room. Slippery viscera hide
behind a red couch that shouldn't be. An extraterrestrial near-
by has you in its grip, crushes your sweet skull that had been
so happy an hour ago. How I feel now is the exact color of the rusty
blood, the limbs that can't dance anymore. It's not new to say, or deep,
but out here, laughing with you, I'd destroy every unearthly ventricle
for one more puff, another minute, another, another, another.



Weston Richey is a poet, writer, and hopeful academic originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Weston received a BA in philosophy and English from New York University, and is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at Rutgers University–Newark. Their work has appeared in FreezeRay Poetry.
Current Issue
24 Mar 2025

The winner is the one with the most living wasps
Every insect was a chalk outline of agony / defined, evaluated, ranked / by how much it hurt
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Reprise by Samantha Lane Murphy, read by Emmie Christie. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
Black speculative poetry works this way too. It’s text that is flexible and immediate. It’s a safe space to explore Afrocentric text rooted in story, song, dance, rhythm that natural flows from my intrinsic self. It’s text that has a lot of hurt, as in pain, and a lot of healing—an acceptance of self, black is beauty, despite what the slave trade, colonialism, racism, social injustice might tell us.
It’s not that I never read realistic fiction and not that I don’t like it. It’s just that sometimes I don’t get it. I know realistic fiction, speculative fiction, and genre fiction are just terms we made up to sell more narrative, but I’m skeptical of how the expectations and norms of realism lurk, largely uninterrogated or even fully articulated, in the way readers, editors, and publishers interact with work that purports to depict quote unquote real life.  Most broadly defined, realistic stories depict the quotidian and accurately reproduce the daily events, characters, and settings of the world we live
Friday: Adam and Eve in Paradise by José Maria de Eça de Queirós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa 
Issue 17 Mar 2025
Issue 10 Mar 2025
By: Holli Mintzer
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 3 Mar 2025
Issue 24 Feb 2025
Issue 17 Feb 2025
Issue 10 Feb 2025
By: Alexandra Munck
Podcast read by: Claire McNerney
Issue 27 Jan 2025
By: River
Issue 20 Jan 2025
Strange Horizons
By: Michelle Kulwicki
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 13 Jan 2025
Issue 6 Jan 2025
By: Samantha Murray
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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