Size / / /

When I saw your boot-print
glazed into my snowy stoop,
I thought, There’s a trick to this,
finding your lover
in the record of his step,
the bite wound
of treads.

Like a cartographer
pulling the brow of a mountain
up through her map,
or a paper-folder
creasing cranes in the
unhatched dimensions of the page,
I’ll unfold you
from the floor-plan of your feet,
see how you’ve thinned
like February’s clouds,
collapsing into
a single sheet
of sky.

Your body is a track
pressed into winter’s crisp vinyl.
I can’t hear you
in those grooves
even as I spin their dizzy
vector, trying to make them point
home.




Peter Chiykowski spends his nights jotting down stories, poems, and a silly webcomic called Rock, Paper, Cynic (which George Takei and Nathan Fillion once shared). His writing’s appeared in The Seattle Times, Asimov's Science Fiction, and a few "best Canadian" anthologies. Once, in 1988, he was the planet's youngest living person.
Current Issue
5 Oct 2026

In time, the entire shift’s 138 Express inbound transfers are processed, and I’m free to service passengers from other lines. These transfers are unremarkable. These passengers aren’t refugees.
Forgive me, someone.
Turn on the stove. See it startle.
In this episode of Critical Friends , the Strange Horizons criticism podcast, Dan Hartland is joined by Ryan Elliot and Rosanna Pendlebury, to ask questions about literary SFF. What is it? How do we know it when we see it? And what’s it good for?
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