Size / / /

Content warning:



is licking the translucent mirror; reflection of nodules
on my post-menstrual face. A Pan-Asian queen’s voice
of profanity and agony with no makeup on, rubbing
the guitar fret with her fake Manchurian fingernails,
like I’d imagined a voluptuous blonde fingertips sliding
on my Best Friend’s naked torso down to his swollen member.
The night before my Best Friend and I are about to fuck,
his queen-sized bed splits into halve due to wear & tear
just like my mother’s tear duct flushed to dryness,
forcing me to finish a plate of fish n’chips, while
the nurse wheels my father’s body into the elevator;
a new mother stood beside me, breastfeeding her newborn,
demanding for words of congrats. Her expression changed
when I showed her my father’s rigor mortis posture.

I ask my Best Friend to bury my alter-egoistic heart
after each beautiful fuck. He kisses my third-eye,
my brain’s heavily pumped by the balance of Tao,
the living and the dead, the fluidity mass of Adam & Eve.
Tonight we cook blood curry & dead white potatoes,
baking marmalade cakes, overloaded with poppy seeds.
His family’s prayer unable to cure their insomniac slumber,
by the time he’s sowing horny seeds into yours truly
under the papaya tree of futile pistil, stamen and leaves,
the twin-flame ashes succumb to the danger of self-love.
At the stroke of midnight, my Best Friend exhumes
glowing seeds and my fluids inside a banana tree flower,
burying right next to the adolescent papaya tree,
I named the spawning experiment Bianca Jayne,
after the initials of our favourite foreplay.



Deborah Wong was born in Kuala Lumpur and raised in Subang Jaya, Malaysia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crack The Spine, East Jasmine Review, Streetcake Magazine, The Stray Branch, Eksentrika, Thought Catalog, Ricepaper Magazine, Rat's Ass Review, Seagery Zine, Liquid Imagination, and other publications. While working on a fictionalised memoir and revising a stack of stories, she also collaborates with an emerging Australian artist in an artwork-poetry crossover project on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @PetiteDeborah, or on Instagram @deborahbie.
Current Issue
14 Apr 2025

back-legg-ed, puppy shaped and squirmy
the pastor is a woman / with small birds living in the hollows of her eyes.
Strange Horizons
On June 4th, we will be opening for speculative fiction novelette submissions between the word count of 10,000 and 18,000 words. We will cap submissions at 300.
Strange Horizons
On November 3rd, we will be opening for speculative fiction stories written by Indigenous authors. We will be capping submissions at 500.
The formula for how to end the world got published the same day I married the girl who used to bully me in middle school. We found out about it the morning after, on the first day of our honeymoon in Cozumel. I got out of the shower in our small bungalow and Minju was sitting in bed, staring at her laptop.
Wednesday: Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton 
Friday: She Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor 
Issue 7 Apr 2025
By: Lowry Poletti
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 31 Mar 2025
Issue 24 Mar 2025
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
Load More