Two New Publications!

This is an exciting week! Besides being the first week of the new quarter, and the week a good friend visits me after five years of not seeing each other, two of my poems went live! 

Strange Horizons published "Magpie Wings," a science fictional re-telling of the folktale "The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl" in which the characters are separated due to, essentially, class differences. There are several variations of the story: usually she's a fairy, he's a mortal; sometimes they're both celestial beings but have different roles which keep them separate; she is always of a higher class than he is, though, and serves in the Jade Palace as a handmaiden of the Jade Empress. She goes to live with him for a while and they are happy, but her duty forces her to leave. In Heaven and on Earth, they pine for each other, and the magpies on their yearly migration, take pity on them and offer them their backs so they can meet each other. Their story is commemorated in the skies, so I used the common English names for the constellations: Altair and Vega. 

My second poem came out in the new Stone Telling! It's the JOKE issue, which makes it doubly exciting. I'm so honoured to be sharing a Table of Contents with really fine writers like Emily Jiang and Mari Ness, Pear Nuallak and Alexandra Erin! My humble poem, "Yes, I Am A Were" is a pun poem based on this joke that was going around Tumblr:
A lycanthrope decided to come out to his friend. On a full moon night, he transforms.
"My God," says the friend, "you changed into a wolf!"
"Yes," says the lyncanthrope, "I am a were."

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