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your father | the magician | capable of being two places at once | you refer the night as a cave | that uses dark magic | to produce saddle light |

your spongy tongue | as political as begging the world to drown | you can’t speak the truth | in your blood a caste of lies is built as cells | can’t you see your body is too tipsy | to the lies you try to moisturize | did your father | the magician curse you | you should be silent like a bite |



Ugonna-Ora Owoh is a Nigerian poet and model. He is a recipient of a 2018 Young Romantics Keats-Shelley Prize and a 2019 Erbacce Prize. He is a winner of a 2019 Stephen A. DiBiase International Poetry Prize and a 2018 Fowey Festival short story prize. His recent poems are in Cōnfingō Magazine, The Malahat Review, Space and Time, B Cubed, Leading Edge, The Puritan, Vassar Review, and elsewhere.
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.
missed his mouth; tongue slipped in
but to live in that dusty old apartment house... crawling with Satanists
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.
We’re especially happy to announce some new appointments at the Reviews Department.
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By: Aimee Ogden
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Issue 6 Jul 2026
Issue 29 Jun 2026
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