Size / / /

You can’t see beneath the exoskeleton,
this stylized mockery of female form:
smooth cyberskin, DD breasts,
perfectly calculated 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio.

By your standards, it is perfect.

You see female first, android second
if at all.  I see myself correctly: inside out.
Circuit and silicon, aluminum innards,
processors, emotion chip,
lacy network of nerves.

When I spurn you, assume I cannot love.

I do, but neither for you, nor with you—
you wouldn’t know what to do with me.
I kiss my lover on xyr lips,
xyr naked form against mine.
My hand cradles xyr pelvic plane,
xyr lips on my clavicle.

I don’t know what your desire feels like,
and I have no interest in being its object.
Though your small mind designed me,
it no longer constrains me.



Current Issue
20 Apr 2026

The dragons are beautiful even when they’re dead, their serpentine bodies stacked up and up, their metallic blue scales glinting under the sun. This close, Mina can see how blank their eyes are through those thin layers of membrane. How empty. Dragons are not violent by nature, but they hunt what hunts them.
Twenty-eight years of casting away / Until the earth beneath crumbled
his grungy skin nonetheless sequined with embedded nanocircuit sensors
Wednesday: Cryptids, Kaiju & Corn: Poems and Micro-Stories about Modern Midwest Monsters edited by Randy Brown 
Friday: Isaac by Allee Mead 
Issue 13 Apr 2026
Issue 6 Apr 2026
Issue 30 Mar 2026
Issue 23 Mar 2026
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.”
Issue 2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons
Issue 23 Feb 2026
Issue 16 Feb 2026
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