Rainmaker

by Olumide Manuel in Issue Twenty-One, January 2026

Rivers above and below, hear my voice. A ripple is how you speak. A pour is how you sing. I sing with both feet in vestigial bodies. By the stitch of the skies in me, I call you forth to this dance. In the epigenesis of silence, you forged the ways. The womb of the world was sedentary until you fed its first seed, broke it to light with your wet voice. You raised the first song to the dawns. The thunderbirds harvested it from there. The winds scrapped their leftover screams. The trees mothered the first mother—clay-skinned, sea-eyed. She disgarnished the grief from the magic, and passed it... Continue →

last psalm

by P. H. Low in Issue Twenty-One, January 2026

that you might be appeased by one such as me.
that, smug on your garnet altar,
you would unhinge your jaws
and drink wetly of my fear,
as a thousand mahogany harps
tremble beneath your altar
and ten thousand haunted skeletons
writhe your praise.

yes, my cuffed hands clench;
there’s a clockwise twist in my depths.
so what? I played for you, once,
in the chief rector’s bone halls.
do you remember? were you pleased?
is that what caught your attention—
a joy so bright and sweet
you longed to cut it... Continue →

Queercoded Villanelle

by anaum sajanlal in Issue Twenty-One, January 2026

Build an altar to memory. Do not forget.
Dot ancestors all over, then kneel down and pray<
to all the joys you do not think possible, yet.

And once you have swallowed the moon of your grief, get
up and run. Leave your eye-silver flowing. Though they
burn altars to memory, we do not forget.

Even when bones bend under strain, keep running. It
has been so long and no time at all since we shaped
creation to be what was not possible yet.

Dear one, they kill us only because we have met
the source of all being, godparent of all... Continue →

A Party, A Party!

by Faith Allington in Issue Twenty-One, January 2026

You don’t choose vampires
and ghouls any more than they
choose you, but you find consolation
in each other, all the unloved
and objectified strata of myth.

Everybody wants to fear you
or fight you, they never approach
a werewolf to ask what you thought
of that action movie or that romance book.

Your gatherings are legend though—
you have all the best mad-cap musicians
strumming and harping.
Orpheus with his lyre,
a chorus line of sirens,
they sing and break all our hearts
till well after... Continue →

she brings me waves, she brings me wind

by Angel Leal in Issue Twenty, July 2025

          i know her because her hair drags with homesick stars
& her hands are rough like a sailor's.

          i know her loneliness looks like a fish struggling
in a man's net & her freedom

          looks like a stormy night, two girls holding shells
to their ears, hearing wonders

          echoes of drowned lovers. they kiss & i know her
by... Continue →

Cryptid Sister

by H.V. Patterson in Issue Twenty, July 2025

The summer Mom died,
I summoned you
From vulture feathers,
From discarded cicada husks,
From car-wrecked armadillos,
Legs surrendered to the eternal, burning sky.
I summoned you from the hole in my gut
Where my longing leaked out,
Where heat and humidity seeped in.

And you came,
You with legs of the maimed and discarded
You with insect song thrumming in your thorax
You with wings of oiled midnight.
You smelled of my decaying despair,
Of the unbearable weight of summer
The heaviness of air which... Continue →

Anchor Spindrift

by Elizabeth R McClellan in Issue Twenty, July 2025

for Seanan & Mira

When they carved the desk, a necessary place
to keep paper from molding and aging,
they cried as they stripped curves

from the world. Flat surfaces repelled
their sodden flesh like oil vomiting out
water. A necessary compromise with

land and light. To touch it was pain,
so one with clever claws whittled
whalebone with webbed fingers, forming

the creatures of the depths, all soft swirls
and terrible teeth, simple pulls for
small drawers,... Continue →

What Does Your Revolution Look Like?

by Ewen Ma in Issue Nineteen, March 2025

(or, A Dragon Crawls Across the Moon: A Movie in Two Acts)

1.

My cousin invites me over for dinner the evening before my flight. While he and his wife set the table, their daughter lifts a lizard out of its vivarium, cradles it in her small hands, places the creature gently upon my outstretched arm. Claws dig soft craters into the inked planets beneath my skin as the chameleon climbs up to my shoulder and drapes its tail around my neck, swivels its beady eyes towards me.

Tonight’s meal: Swiss-sauce chicken and... Continue →

Hermit of the Crossroads

by Marie Brennan in Issue Nineteen, March 2025

The hermit kneels inside his cell and prays.
Here two roads meet: and at their crossing stands
a sacred guard for all the kingdom’s ways.

This cell, four paces square, is all his lands;
four windows glimpse the freedom of the sky;
four prisoning doors, he closed with his own hands.

For water and for food he must rely
on charity from those who walk the road.
In advent of his blessing, they supply

not only those few alms that he is owed,
but conversation, company, and news
of incidents beyond his small... Continue →

Dawn Witching with Crows

by Devin Miller in Issue Nineteen, March 2025

Softly lift the tools of your secret witching.
Make no noise your mothers will hear, no telltale
scrape of knife on stone; keep your setup silent.
Answer no questions.

Birds will sing these songs with you–meet them, trill for
cry. Then, under daybreak blue morning quiet,
hand your tools to birds. See how quickly crows learn
witching with women.

Knives in birds' claws, knives scraping sharp-edged secrets–
feel the heavy pleasure of being tied to
crows, who know more witchcraft than humans; still they
wait for us,... Continue →