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Any clot with a crossword
can break a greenshield.
The Admiralty never uses sea tar
except for the decoy of dirty tricks.
We curled to the tradecraft of such things
like wet oak and shoreline, the wind-sponged bricks of Block D.
The wireless crawled with morphogenesis.
Incredible that so much should be entangled
in the traffic of our both-ways world.
Queer lot that we were
with our notebooks crusted like churchyards,
did we breed in secret,
sleeves shedding a lecture of spores?
We found our code
between silence and symbiosis,
our maps and scripts, our audacious sunbursts.



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.
Issue 1 Jun 2026
Issue 25 May 2026
By: Louis Inglis Hall
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
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By: Athar Fikry
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
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