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is to be hungry like a boat; stomach stretching out
unto a wholesome waterflesh. is to gorge the ocean’s lilac

with the moon littered on its flesh. the throat erected
as an anthill. to smudge the body as a colony of disclosures

woven with footprints of all the ghosts sieved into the earth.
tell me how to eat a ghost till the mouth is full of peaches.

to disappear into a song wide enough to drown is to hold a light
to the chest and repeat a happy song till it becomes a blade

on the tongue. my chest is a sky-rack of immaculateness,
a cheesecloth adjusted to keep birds from nesting.

a child recognizes his parents by the hands that feed him,
I swear the first parent I ever knew was the absence of one.

my father was rafted over waters. my tears chart his body,
a sloppy dash, in the verbatim of the heart’s favourite expelling.

the best human conversation is the silence
that warms the heart. the latitude is measured out of grief.

the soft accentuation, music’s favourite threshold.

it is tough to remember my father because his face is a road
swallowed up by fog. I cast my emptiness with the song

cataloguing enough ash in my voice. my soul is the oasis
inside his eyes, an origami placed before a calcified wind.



Wale Ayinla is a Nigerian poet, essayist, and editor. His works recently appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Cultural Weekly, South Dakota Review, Rhino Poetry, UpTheStaircase Quarterly, The LitQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Slipstream, Ruminate Magazine, McNeese Review, Waccamaw, Poet Lore, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere.
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
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By: Natasha King
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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