Size / / /

Content warning:


On the night my father died,
My mother is caught hunting
Mosquitoes to protect our
Bodies from being stung
Like insects do to flowers.
Something visits the earth,
Forgets its beauty and casts
An alien glow over the lowering
Of my father into his grave.
I catch all the auroras before
They fall into my father’s grave
And this is the only thing whispering
Darkness into my mothers eyes.
I carry the pebbles and arrange
Them around my mother’s ache
I forget to glitter. Because I know
No other light than my mother’s.
I protect her from the world,
From the turmoil of loneliness
So when the wormhole eats
From our homes, I don’t see it
As madness since my people
Would go with my father.
The night begins to crack,
My mother’s body spreads
All the wrong ways till
All the rooms of warmth fill
With smoke.



Abdulrazaq Salihu, TPC I is a Nigerian poet and writer. He has works published and forthcoming in several notable magazines. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu.
Current Issue
6 Jul 2026

His app was called Promises Promises, and its download page was one of the last things in Ellie’s search history—behind two hundred chapters of Fruits Basket and six clickbait articles with titles all on the pattern of “17 Spectacular Strategies to Strengthen your Psychic Supremacy”.
the hero’s story is unforgiving to the likes of Worker Two
In this episode of Critical Friends , Dean Leetal and William Shaw join Dan Hartland to talk about reading queerly:
If all bodies, for that matter, / remember the carbon of their tissues
Issue 29 Jun 2026
Issue 22 Jun 2026
Issue 15 Jun 2026
Issue 14 Jun 2026
Not so domesticated: Fungal anxieties about hierarchies of power and labor in SFF 
Strange Horizons
Issue 8 Jun 2026
Issue 1 Jun 2026
Issue 25 May 2026
By: Louis Inglis Hall
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 18 May 2026
Issue 11 May 2026
Issue 4 May 2026
Load More