Size / / /

Content warning:


Mannequin legs lined up along the walls
Flowers the shape of organs

When the men came, their boots stained the children’s playmat
We remembered to offer them tea
and to unzip our bodies from our shame

The feast begins before the guests arrive
the table ripe with fruits and metal parts

Their eyes trace the curves of our gears
like birds eyeing the shoreline and we
recite the songs our makers wrote

like the name of a mother that exists
only in user manuals

We wait for their hands
to cleave open the sheets of steel, pull them back
to show the guests that memory of the sea

that latest add-on that renders happiness
into a series of unbreakable binary.



Angela Liu is a Nebula-, Ignyte-, and Rhysling-nominated writer/poet from NYC who writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. She formerly researched mixed reality storytelling at Keio University in Japan. Her stories and poetry are published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, The Dark, Interzone Digital, Lightspeed, khōréō, Uncanny, and Logic(s), among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela and on Bluesky @angelaliu.bsky.social.
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.
In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, editor Kat Kourbeti talks to Charlie Jane Anders about her Strange Horizons publications dating all the way back to 2002, charting her journey as a writer and her experience with the magazine over 20 years, as well as her love for community events and bringing people together.
Issue 7 Apr 2025
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Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
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Issue 10 Mar 2025
By: Holli Mintzer
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 3 Mar 2025
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Issue 10 Feb 2025
By: Alexandra Munck
Podcast read by: Claire McNerney
Issue 27 Jan 2025
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