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The night death was let into the world
we were playing faro with no aces,
the silver had run out of all the mirrors,
the second hands of the clocks had been removed.
Nothing I could drink
filled the glass fast enough, emptied my heart
with the absence of every tick.
The night death was let into the world
you had your ear to the radio in the root cellar,
transcribing the tickets of every suitcase
in the ghost stations still left unclaimed.
The last of the red-hot love-suicides
was leaning over my shoulder, murmuring
numbers that never added up.



Sonya Taaffe reads dead languages and tells living stories. Her short fiction and poetry have been collected most recently in As the Tide Came Flowing In (Nekyia Press) and previously in Singing Innocence and Experience, Postcards from the Province of HyphensA Mayse-Bikhl, Ghost Signs, and the Lambda-nominated Forget the Sleepless Shores. She lives with one of her husbands and both of her cats in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she writes about film for Patreon and remains proud of naming a Kuiper Belt object.
Current Issue
8 Jun 2026

But I am no king, no man. It is a role I assumed in serving, with perfect order, those who scarcely saw fit to name me. Wild and shimmering, I hide from myself no longer. I was born twice from death. It is time to mend what was broken, even if they will not.
i am learning my new friend’s language / she said do you want to look for frogs sometime
They took the verse... and translated its grief into a new alphabet.
Friday: Hermits Die on Thursday: Stories of Appalachia and the Dark Ages by Gregory Ariail 
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
Issue 20 Apr 2026
By: Athar Fikry
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 13 Apr 2026
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Issue 30 Mar 2026
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