Size / / /

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“They are the world’s largest boney fish, weighing up to 5,000 pounds … They are so completely useless that scientists even debate about how they move.” — User on r/copypasta

Don’t know what I am. Don’t know
what is large. Don’t know pancake, don’t
know Ferris wheel. Know the drift. The cut-star glow.
Like it pelagic. Don’t know seaweed stinks. Love soft ooh
of eel larvae. Don’t know maggy craw of mouth. Don’t know
fearful keratin. Bright beak smack. Love all is mine,
love my clavus fin. Don’t know why they
bob? In blue death boxes? Sunless wreck.
Ozempic and Brylcreem. Their blue—
my blue. Beautiful me.



Alison Clara Tan is a Southeast Asian writer based in London. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in fourteen poems, wildness, The Kenyon Review, Gutter Magazine, and Washington Square Review, among others. She is a Barbican Young Poet, a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and a member of Spread the Word’s Poetics Lab 2025.
Current Issue
16 Feb 2026

Water is life here, and it's evident in that if you stray too far off the beaten path and away from water, you will get lost and you’ll be lucky if anyone sees you again before sundown. My village is settled neatly between two gentle rolling mesas and along a thin river in a sparsely populated community lovingly called ‘the valley’.
In the beginning, the ocean was lonely / and so she created a fifteen-year-old girl / (or was it the other way around?)
It’s me not you, and the / Hole in the sky still weeps sticky tears.
Wednesday: Lies Weeping by Glen Cook 
Friday: Slow Gods by Claire North 
Issue 9 Feb 2026
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By: Natasha King
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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Strange Horizons
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Strange Horizons
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