Size / / /

I wrought the nets that cage the finflicks of strange attractors,

incite the end of all scattered planets, fireflung into frost:

this rime that rims the outer worlds

owes all care to all my computation; the more bodies I add the better

though always it lacks neatly-nailed resolution.

The bounds to every problem last a star's lifetime.

Once in quickflicker kindness I might be inclined to exchange my eccentricity,

be governed in slow tides:

gravity's rule, stretched branch-wide, encompasses all my arguments—

No. Better, to watch all the worlds burn

sent slow into the sun:

there is such glory in every grain of darkness.




Michele Bannister has an uncommon fondness for distant worlds both small and icy. She lives in Australia, where she is working towards her doctorate in astronomy. Her poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Ideomancer, Stone Telling and other venues, in the Here, We Cross anthology (Stone Bird Press, 2012), and is forthcoming in inkscrawl and Goblin Fruit.
Current Issue
20 Apr 2026

The dragons are beautiful even when they’re dead, their serpentine bodies stacked up and up, their metallic blue scales glinting under the sun. This close, Mina can see how blank their eyes are through those thin layers of membrane. How empty. Dragons are not violent by nature, but they hunt what hunts them.
Twenty-eight years of casting away / Until the earth beneath crumbled
his grungy skin nonetheless sequined with embedded nanocircuit sensors
Wednesday: Cryptids, Kaiju & Corn: Poems and Micro-Stories about Modern Midwest Monsters edited by Randy Brown 
Friday: Isaac by Allee Mead 
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By: Lio Abendan
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Strange Horizons
2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
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Strange Horizons
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