Size / / /

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Here it is, this haunted house, smaller than my thumb. As I press my eye to it, I perceive in this order: a window, a rose bush, a fish, a belly, a thorn. Here is the path that leads to the house. Nails are buried under it. Black pepper is sprinkled over it. Here is the door. It looks like a tooth. It smells like a frog. Surrounding the house is a silence. It is larger than the house. Mid-sized, in fact. It folds over itself in layers of stillness, layers which absorb all movement into themselves. I am not certain of their origin — this silence and this stillness. Whenever I have been still, I have not been silent. Whenever I have been silent, I have not been still. Like a clash of cymbals, my mind and my skin have often been at the same time roiling and blaring. But inside the haunted house, I am silent. Perhaps this is a side-effect of the shrinking. I would not be surprised. Death is only called death when it is all-encompassing. Now my mind is smaller than my body, the way it was supposed to be. When I press my eye to the window again I see: a fin, a petal, my brain, my sky and my sea.



Portia Yu is a poet from Hong Kong. Her poems can be found in literary journals including Worm Moon Archive, celestite poetry, and Crow & Cross Keys. In addition, her work has appeared in Where Else: An Anthology of Hong Kong Poetry.
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14 Jul 2025

This exhibition presents pieces from our permanent collection that are rarely displayed together, in order to illuminate the life of one of our most celebrated early rulers, Nizararuddin Zafer Abu Hassan Mohammed, better known as Prince Nizar.
There’s a ghost stuck up my nose. Has to be.
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One of the recent bright spots in the world of speculative short fiction publishing is the rebirth of Fantasy Magazine. Yes, Fantasy is back, published under the Psychopomp umbrella with co-editors Arley Sorg and Shingai Njeri Kagunda at the helm. (You can read more about how this all came about at Psychopomp and support the zine by signing up for a subscription.)  “Silence Starved and Swallowed” by Sydney Paige Guerrero from Fantasy 97, the first issue of Fantasy in this incarnation, is a devastating, darkly gleaming story about grief and sadness. Guerrero describes how our inability to put our emotions
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