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They say she flew.
I say she was flung.

A woman drinks what was never hers.
The sky remembers theft like scripture.

The moon was not her destination.
It was a sentence.

She landed with her hair aflame, mouth full of names
no one asked her to keep.

No one tells you the elixir tastes like metal,
or that godhood burns going down.

She does not miss the archer.
She misses hunger, noise, the heat of being wrong.

Up here, everything glows—sterile.
Even silence grows a spine.

When she walks, the dust remembers.
When she speaks, the craters shudder.

Some nights, she carves her name into the dust
just to watch it vanish again.

Tell the children: she is lonely.
Tell them: she would do it again.



Allison Zhang is a poet and writer based in Los Angeles. An immigrant and bilingual speaker of English and Mandarin, she writes about inheritance, memory, and the quiet ruptures of daily life. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, Sky Island Journal, and more.
Current Issue
7 Sep 2026

Strange Horizons
Strange Horizons will open to general fiction submissions on October 1, 2026, at 3 p.m. UTC! This window will remain open until we hit our submission cap of 1,000 stories. Our maximum word count for this window will be 5,000 words. We offer payment of 9¢/word USD. We do not read simultaneous or multiple submissions. Response time: Our goal is to respond to all submissions with either a hold notice or rejection within eight weeks. We hope to send acceptances or rejections within one month of hold notices. This is ambitious, and we might fall behind schedule. Please be patient
iii. There are no protocols for plotting to kill the King, so Alise talks about killing the King, whispers her plan in the Queen’s ear while they lie tangled in the Queen’s marital bed, Alise’s fingers tracing bruises that should not be there.
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In this episode of Critical Friends , the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, AJ Odasso and Electra Pritchett join Dan Hartland to talk about popular fiction.
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