Selected Works

Pieces marked with an asterisk (*) are available online to read for free.

Poetry

* Creature with the Ticking Heart (18 lines, dark fantasy). Published in Strange Horizons (January 2026).

When you falter, recall that age
is not your master.

* To Be the Change (43 lines, fantasy). Published in Strange Horizons, March 10 2025.
2026 Rhysling Award nominee!
2026 Nebula Award for Poetry finalist!
Reviewed by Charles Payseur in Locus Magazine #773 as "a piece that challenges those who believe their power and corruption to be eternal, recognizing that no amount of power or control can prevent people from knowing and follow­ing their hearts and being themselves. Nocito does a beautiful job bringing the prophecy, and its fulfillment, to vivid life."

My father’s least favorite prophecy
has been reviewed by five generations of scholars
and soundly dismissed by them all.

When the heir becomes a daughter …

* Eagle-Eyed (46 lines, slipstream/fantasy). Published in Eye to the Telescope Issue 57: Birds.
2026 Rhysling Award nominee!

The doctors had no explanation
   for the bird’s eyes set into
   my flawed and human head.

Gretel (111 lines, dark fantasy). Published in Grimm Retold (Speculation Publications), September 24 2025.
2025 Rhysling Award nominee!

The next day, when she opens her oven to bake
another loaf of bread, Hansel pushes her in.

* Whittled and Burned (16 lines, dark fantasy). Published in Trollbreath Magazine (December 2025).

We say that time can be burned, and so
we gather wood scraps from its ashes.

* What the Birds Taught Me (16 lines, speculative fiction/solarpunk). Published in Heartlines Spec Issue 8, July 31 2025.

I learned gentleness from beneath a vulture’s wing,
my cotton pad daubing at blood and scratches
left by a fox’s enterprising claws.

them // us (46 lines, science fiction). Published in Utopia Science Fiction, March 2025.
Note: Available to subscribers only.

They
drop from the sky at moonrise
when silver beams twist around their silver capsule.

Short Fiction

* A Single Song (750 words, dark fantasy). Published in Factor Four Magazine Issue 48 (July 2025).

A harp made of bones, they say, will only ever play a single song.

An Unexpected Wombat (500 words, fantasy). Published in Worlds of Possibility, June 2025.

Described by editor Julia Rios as a story that "shows us another kind of coming of age vision as a trans person finds hope and comfort amidst inner chaos."
Note: Currently free to read for subscribers only.

I hold absolutely still, motionlessness morphing into illusion. When I finally stir, I become my mind’s self, standing knee-deep in snowflakes containing my memories.

To Catch A Name (3900 words, fantasy). Published in Morgana le Fay anthology (Flame Tree Press), March 31 2025 (UK)/April 15, 2025 (US).

Trans take on Morgana's mythos / choosing (or finding) your name

I cobble him together, that imagined nighttime boy, out of hawthorn boughs and apple blossoms and the gentle, thumping rhythm of my own heartbeat.
Then I hide him in my garden.

The Science of Transient Cartography (2100 words, science fiction). Published in The Daily Tomorrow, February 2025.
Note: Available to subscribers only.

Solarpunk future / maps and mapmaking / the place of art in an ever-changing world

My pa likes to say, his curmudgeonly jaw working at the spoon he often inserts between his lips when he’s trying to suck the last vestiges of honey from the well-worn metal ornamentation, that when he was a boy, maps were static things, only changing when wars were fought and lost and won.
I usually like to remind him that we don’t have wars anymore.