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The moon fell into my coffee
splashing dribbles down the sides.

Why was she out so late? I thought
as it was well past sunrise.

Sitting in the kitchen window
I stirred her into my tea

(celestials have a habit of changing
one thing to another).

Green paled to jade, woolly sage,
pastel olive crater-flecked.

I stood and sipped her, tasted midnights
and dawns, delayed twilight

cold, reflected light
just wishing to hang on.

She doesn’t float, but sinks
dissolving into dairy foam

—not gritty, not unpleasant at all—
I think, there’s no way I could’ve hoped to make anything

as precious
as this.



Marisca Pichette is a queer author based in Massachusetts, on Pocumtuck and Abenaki land. Her Bram Stoker and Elgin Award-nominated collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, is out now from Android Press. Find them on Twitter as @MariscaPichette, Instagram as @marisca_write, and BlueSky as @marisca.bsky.social.
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
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By: Alexandra Munck
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Issue 6 Jan 2025
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Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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