Welcome to this special guest-edited issue, featuring poetry recommendations by Loren Maria Guay!
I fell in love with Loren’s writing when I read “The Last Goodbye in the City of Electric Longing” in Small Wonders. I’ve continued to be wowed by their writing, and I appreciate their generosity in visiting the Electric Sheep group and participating in various literary readings.
Their debut poetry chapbook Living Fossils was awarded the 2025 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and published with Texas Review Press earlier this year.
Huge thanks to Loren for curating this amazing group of poems. These are glorious pieces. (And how cool that we both highlighted the raccoon poem; makes me happy.)
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by Gospel Chinedu in Otherside * 41 lines
I whisper love back to him. Sometimes,
I try to pass my forefinger through his pupil,
to touch the lights on his retina.
If you read one poem all summer, make it this queer-cyborg take on desire, artifice, the body, and catastrophe via the myth of Ganymede. The poet’s attention to both form & narrative in these tightly crafted, cleverly enjambed couplets is everything I want speculative poetry to do & be.
by B.B.P. Hosmillo in Reckoning * 31 lines
[…] their eyes the hours a ship sinks to the bottom. all day till midnight,
they cleaned the teeth of sharks, made a personal association with dirt
and lovelessness. and if they ate, they ate whatever was left.
What gratefulness means in a world we are forced to survive. I love this poem’s momentum, stringing together brief flashes of both terrible harm and natural beauty into a well-wrought whole.
post-interview poem or what i wrote after reading the news
by Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi in Reckoning * 22 lines
i know what it means to be plucked unripe two winters away from
blossoming hear me out please my country has grown into gunfire
I’ll read any poem that does interesting things with form, and this poem uses its spaces beautifully—fragmented, breathless, urgent—to make us readers witness the violence of the speaker’s home country. The last line is a punch in the gut.
by Geneva Toland in Reckoning * 17 lines
Several hundred wolves traded songs one winter, harmonizing upriver under frozen black fumes. The river was a halfway point between men and lives lost, steamboats stacked like carcasses upon each other.
An amazing concept handled with subtlety and restraint. I’m a fan of prose poems that have a good reason to be prose poems; here Toland rewrites historical markers from the colonization of the U.S. West into alternative, anticolonial possibilities.
by Hikari Leilani Miya in Strange Horizons * 32 lines
also, i’m haunting this home as a raccoon.
as a raccoon everything i perceive in that house is either food
or trash. my hands map the world, sense of touch heightened
by water.
The lines above delighted me, of course. But the poet travels beyond the gimmick in this fiercely clever, anticapitalist twist on the haunted house & what ownership means.
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Loren Maria Guay (they/them) is a poet and speculative fiction writer. Their poems have earned nominations for Best Microfictions, Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets (2026); most recently, their debut poetry chapbook Living Fossils was awarded the 2025 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and published with Texas Review Press (2026). Their short fiction (as L.M. Guay) appears in Flash Fiction Online, khōréō, and Small Wonders, among others. They are currently a PhD student in English and Education at the University of Michigan.
Find Loren at Bluesky and Instagram, or at their website.
Myna Chang 