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In conversation with William Carlos Wiliams’s poem “This is Just to Say”

It was I who ate the plums in the icebox
and savored every second                          sickly sweet
nectar sluiced my tongue pregnant with want
for the welcome weight of                       hands holding
I won’t apologize for the                   grocery bag
shaped Rorschach blots bloated pits puncture
puce patchwork peach fuzz all
chapstick-slick sticker gun
i bet you would have liked them         the plums
all bruised-breast hand-picked 99-cents off
and yes the pomegranates were out of season
and yes the plums could have been         less bitter
because god knows the first
thing i want to do is clog my arteries with sweet nothings
and aren’t we a little too old to be
drinking from                 juice boxes you know
your mother called the other day she called you
bubelah and told me to tell you           we should eat
more i mean come on i could snap your birdbones
and toss them in the compost heap and so i let the static
swallow me whole till i’m nothing
more than plum pit



A performance artist, entrepreneur, and writer hailing from Staten Island, NY, Elizabeth is the 2022 NYC Youth Poet Laureate and the 2022 YPL Northeast Regional Ambassador/National Youth Poet Laureate Finalist. Her work is recognized by or featured at The New Yorker, PBS, the United Nations, the Apollo, Lincoln Center, NY1, Grist Magazine, the MacDowell Foundation, The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Alliance for Climate Education, and more. You can find her on Instagram @elizabeth.shvarts and on her website wordsofliz.com.
Current Issue
31 Mar 2025

We are delighted to present to you our second special issue of the year. This one is devoted to ageing and SFF, a theme that is ever-present (including in its absence) in the genre.
Gladys was approaching her first heat when she shed her fur and lost her tail. The transformation was unintentional, and unwanted. When she awoke in her new form, smelling of skin and sweat, she wailed for her pack in a voice that scraped her throat raw.
does the comb understand the vocabulary of hair. Or the not-so-close-pixels of desires even unjoined shape up to become a boat
The birds have flown long ago. But the body, the body is like this: it has swallowed the smaller moon and now it wants to keep it.
now, be-barked / I am finally enough
how you gazed on our red land beside me / then how you traveled it, your eyes gone silver
Here, I examine the roles of the crones of the Expanse space in Persepolis Rising, Tiamat’s Wrath, and Leviathan Falls as leaders and combatants in a fight for freedom that is always to some extent mediated by their reduced physical and mental capacity as older people. I consider how the Expanse foregrounds the value of their long lives and experience as they configure the resistance for their own and future generations’ freedom, as well as their mentorship of younger generations whose inexperience often puts the whole mission in danger.
In the second audio episode of Writing While Disabled, hosts Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston welcome Farah Mendlesohn, acclaimed SFF scholar and conrunner, to talk all things hearing, dyslexia, and more ADHD adjustments, as well as what fandom could and should be doing better for accessibility at conventions, for both volunteers and attendees.
Issue 24 Mar 2025
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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
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