Size / / /

Wish-wakened, wind-hastened
wisp-whim—
here I am.
For what dark conspiracies
have you conjured me?

Don't use me long,
expect too much,
for I'm light-of-mind,
a harum-scarum fellow,
dusty husk not much
more substantial
than a moonbeam, ma'am.

Oh, so it's for that, then,
that you bid me rise
from my soft bed of self-stuff
and shake a leg?

I comply,
press your hands
between these vacant gloves,
tousle your hefty hair,
confide almost-somethings
into your ear.
Just don't request a
candlelit romancing;
where flames flaunt their fervor
you'll never find me.

Alas, now I'm the worse for wear.
One o'clock shadow shades
my rag-bag cheek,
a button eye
has popped its thread,
my wheaten locks scatter

to the four corners of the air.
Breeze bows me, madame,
at my waist.
I bid adieu
before your ardor
has undone me quite.




Sandi Leibowitz has been, among other things, the Sands Point Hag, a psaltery player, a secretary at NY's Museum of Natural History, a fundraising associate, and a school librarian. Her speculative fiction and poetry may be found at Mythic Delirium, Goblin Fruit, Luna Station Quarterly, and other far-out places.
Current Issue
18 May 2026

Maybe we overestimated ourselves, I thought, watching the ferries hum against the wine-dark sea. Even if we floated above it, we were still bound to the ocean, engulfed in all its weight and inescapable history. To believe otherwise was a kind of hubris. But we had believed otherwise anyway, and so each of us had become something smaller, less human, suspended in a brittle net of want and memory. And then she appeared. At the wrong time, in the wrong place. My Scylla, my monstress, my deathless siren of anglerfish light. Longing, in that empty, unmoving ocean, for things that had not existed for centuries. How could anyone blame her? The only alternative was to grieve. 
My grandmother slit my father’s bones and let them fly with yeast.
the nightingale was caught in a net / and brought to a lab for further study.
Wednesday: Loss Protocol by Paul McAuley 
Friday: The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran, translated by Gene Png 
Issue 11 May 2026
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By: Athar Fikry
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
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Issue 16 Mar 2026
Issue 9 Mar 2026
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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