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I suppose you want my wallet. No? My body then. Centuries of splintered glass went into these cheekbones. I see something in the curve of your aura that reminds me of someone I once knew. Can you step into my light? Reputations are made and broken in such places as this. If you say there are rats, I will believe you, though I don’t hear or see them. There is always a gnawing hunger driving them from dark corners. I used to fear them, before I felt their hunger. I can’t remember when I first saw you stepping into my shadow, biting the back of my heels. You were younger then and I was a body of water caught beneath winter’s ice. You know that feeling? Where limitation meets longing? So much of you remains in these doggy bagged bins. There is still starvation, even in this excess, saturation that can be held but not consumed. There is a dare beneath the lid, if you can stand the smell of it. Look closely. The contents change but the picture stays the same. You digest truth like last night’s dinner rush. Taste consequences like the rotting corpse posing as nourishment. Is every meaning cut as kaleidoscope prisms? You see my face in the slop of life’s leftovers but never recognize it. Everything you create is just me with soft filters, me with twelve fingers, me in all caps, in all language, all gods. My reflection is captured in blurred outlines and sharp corners, the angular intersection of humanity, gorging on what they can never admit was a beggar’s meal dug in fistfuls from rotten excess by a dumpster diver. But at least, I still see myself clearly. At least, I still look beautiful covered in your digital rot.



Lesley Hart Gunn is originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, but teaches college writing at Utah Valley University where she lives with her partner and three children. She is the winner of the Fall 2022 F(r)iction poetry contest and has publications in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and others.
Current Issue
16 Mar 2026

The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate.
If you say there are rats, I will believe you, though I don’t hear or see them.
A ruffling of branches as they resettle for the night. We dare not ask why they are here.
Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity 
As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 
Friday: When Among Crows and To Clutch a Razor by Veronica Roth 
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
Issue 9 Feb 2026
Issue 2 Feb 2026
By: Natasha King
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Issue 26 Jan 2026
Issue 19 Jan 2026
Issue 12 Jan 2026
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