Size / / /

I think about a bumper sticker I once saw:

"Picture Whirled Peas."

Perhaps I am to think of an ocean

of green legumes joining hands;

this is hard to do,

so let's start small.

I'll visualize instead pea soup shoved out of a can,

no water added yet,

clinging together en masse

as it stands upright in the microwave bowl,

waiting for me to add tapwater

and three minutes of electromagnetic flux.

Now I'm ready to start seeing the world:

a blue green portion of space,

turning on its slightly askew axis

as it tries to come together

in some sort of unified mix

of greenery, gravity, and water.

There, I've got it,

something also like stone soup:

enough to magically feed

all its creatures and renew itself.

No harder to picture, really,

than the whole mystery

of why we're on this ride to begin with,

clinging to a stone in space.




Duane Ackerson's poetry has appeared in Rolling Stone, Yankee, Prairie Schooner, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Cloudbank, alba, Starline, Dreams & Nightmares, and several hundred other places. He has won two Rhysling awards and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Salem, Oregon. You can find more of his work in our archives.
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
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2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
Issue 2 Mar 2026
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By: Natasha King
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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