sovay | Give me a cipher, give me a lover, set me free

Current Music: Kele Fleming, "Turing Test"

Give me a cipher, give me a lover, set me free

My poem "The Cryptogamists" is now online at Strange Horizons.

I am honored to have it appear as part of the magazine's special issue on fungi in SFF, an entangled network of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art by Mary Soon Lee, Ruthanna Emrys, Romie Stott, Yri Hansen, and branching more.

Given an invitation to write about mushrooms, mosses, lichens, my brain responded, "But what if Geoffrey Tandy had been posted to Bletchley Park because they really did need specialists in cryptogams?" It was written almost entirely to a combination of Kele Fleming's "Turing Test" (2024) and Rabbitology's "The Bog Bodies" (2026) plus the occasional "Five Minutes of Pink Oyster Mushroom Playing Modular Synthesizer" (2020). It is the first poem I have been able to write all year.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Congratulations!

I love "crusted like churchyards" and "sleeves shedding a lecture of spores"

Here's to more audacious sunbursts.

Congratulations!

Thank you!

I love "crusted like churchyards" and "sleeves shedding a lecture of spores"

I'm so glad! Those were the second two images to show up after the poem's spark.

Here's to more audacious sunbursts.

Amen.