Size / / /

A universe collided
headlong with ours
and was unintentionally
bruised; such play as
spawn or beer on working
days, or mouth to mouth
with the neighbor boy
ashen gray. Nine months
of pregnancy is ladled
by heaven into flames and
these anticipate street lamps,
and are cannily beautiful and
afraid. They flee at larger light
and we wake and
motion them away, your
feet lifted and I feeding
your beak. What is
the significance, the
use of being sparrows
trapped in passageways?




Charles Bane, Jr. is the American author of The Chapbook (Curbside Splendor, 2011) and Love Poems (Aldrich Press, 2014). The Huffington Post described his work as "not only standing on the shoulders of giants, but shrinking them." The creator of the Meaning Of Poetry Series for The Project Gutenberg Project, he is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida. His website is www.charlesbanejr.com.
Current Issue
3 Aug 2026

I had a daughter and then I didn’t. I woke in the cradle of midnight, shivering from a supernatural cold. I thought at first that she was crying, that she had woken me, like so many midnights before. But there was silence all around me. I sat up on one arm and peered into her crib. She was gone. In her place was wrapped a sallow, horned little boy. His eyes blinked open. I look at him. He looked at me. Changeling, I thought. Then he started to scream. “Why weren’t the windows
The deads are punctual. They arrive exactly when there is nothing left to distract us.
survival is a fungus
In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Amritesh Mukherjee and Abigail Nussbaum join Dan Hartland to talk about literary awards.
Issue 27 Jul 2026
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Issue 13 Jul 2026
By: Aimee Ogden
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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