Poetry
Fairest One
by Sophia Zhao in Issue Twenty-Two, February 2026
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ar...
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...
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