If I am Hades, my char’iot splintered When I met you; my cold bones ignited With heat, bright, that in my chest had wintered Through storms of cities, my own heart blighted. Your fingers’ warmth, your sighs, I’d sew them here— Imprinting flesh and bone with golden thread, So they might linger beyond half the […]
A hundred maps line the walls, but scale representations of cities, mountains, rivers, roads, castles, museums, dramatic views never show the secret places, the precious depths and heights to which humans fly in dream. Careful pens draw the boundaries of the living, but the dead walk paths unseen, to places our waking hearts forget. If […]
For Miriam Mikiel (Editors’ Note: “Deep Bitch” is read by C.S.E. Cooney in The Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 3A, and is interviewed by Deborah Stanish in this issue.)
for Marcell Géza Takács they called me elder / now that I am [—by ISMMG Corporation. During this mandatory orientation and training, we will supply you with basic mining gear, as well as information about the latest—] useless scrap metal / now folded under shale, trapped in pockets of compressed ground. I exhaled gas, exhaled […]
We don’t talk about the ninth, the quiet one, who followed us down the slick dark steps, who always drank the silver wine. We don’t talk about the men of how they held her in cold cold hands. We don’t talk about the blood that dried in patterns on her skin. We don’t talk about […]
We walk around our house for days with an emptiness that sings in our bones. Otousan gathers the pale feathers she discarded and we weep over them at dinner, rice too wet in our dry mouths. I spread my hands over her silk robe and remember the same strange ache I felt, hefting her naked […]
Fathoms I voyage below you, my hair the ship–snarling reach of sargasso, my flukes speeding the moon’s rise to the shore. Would you have me hooked from the water like mackerel, light as krill and cold as whiting to warm in a sailor’s arms? I sing the depths and soundings, the lightless stacks and the […]
The old ways were lost on a dusty road between Orion and Abora, sewn with the splintered skins of stars, tracked in spirals, where once a small boy fit Jupiter in his eye. It became a habit with him, the vast—an ocean fell out of his mouth, and in it he rolled the planets up […]