no i won’t trust the current this isn’t a cleansing fuck noah and his diamond ark our roofs are sinking beneath the water silt-made stillness runs down undelivered I’m watching my body drown on instagram the messages switch to infection-green chin-high catastrophe web-cams dark even the surveillance won’t hold news, curfew, shelter in place I know this place I am this place red shoveled samaritans won’t you answer me answer the lines down kicking out no one text me everyone comfort me, the animal trying to climb out and up my own shoulders like a powerline like the black bears who scrabbled fifty feet high in the oak before the clouds cracked sick, expectant there’s a sound a high flexing pitch my messages won’t deliver tell me you’re okay tell me you’re safe are you there are you here are you I can only watch the river eat my own face on twitter but this is what we get right this is what they say we deserve
after the storm
most losses I still want to talk about. I’m tempted by the tending— I can either bow down and blabber or enjoy another dream about drowning.
my accent comes crawling back mid-conversation, buckteeth bloody.
I spit recognition in the sink and leave dinner early, itching, pissed off over god and other betrayals.
before bed, I consider lowering my arms. I consider taking aim.
I consider planting both feet in both worlds.
then again, the water. cars filling up. memories of the storm i wasn’t home for.
each night the grief of a nightmare reveals itself— in waking, the pain is suddenly made fiction, my agony
unjustified.
Kelsey Day is a writer from southern Appalachia, writing about land and liberation. You can read more of their work at www.kelseydays.com.
But the scent of blood through denim is a thick perfume of need, slickening my other lips. I have no words to ask for what I want: to coat you with my filth, then lick it clean. My belly is bloated with excess ache, so hot it could melt the silicone between us. Let me wet your phantom limb and choke on my apology. Each touch is a soft error, a new stain on the comforter, another bullet point in my list of embarrassments, but my full mouth can’t stop begging even though I know it’s impolite. I’m sorry. My uterus is too heavy to move. Let’s just lie here instead.
Kissing the Rose
O dirty secret, puckered aperture, little well I have whispered my wishes into, you greet me clenched like a jawbone on a sleepless night. Quotidian embarrassment, asterisk to a forbidden paragraph, I lizard-tongue into your eager heat, tease the thin membrane between pleasure and disgust. O beads of sweat bedazzling your skin, I lap you up until you’re soaked in salt and brine. Outside, the envious night dulls its gleaming teeth. I heave my thighs over your greedy mouth and take my turn.
Ally Ang is a gaysian poet & editor based in Seattle. Their debut poetry collection, Let the Moon Wobble, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in November 2025. Find them at allysonang.com or @TheOceanIsGay.
I listened to the same song for 3 days feeling alone in the woods. On the fourth day the basement flooded. I lay towels in the opening but it’s useless. Everything rushes in. I watched your funeral on YouTube and didn’t cry once but I cry during Real Housewives of Salt Lake City when they cry. Lisa Barlow threw her husband’s rolex out of the car window and it happened to be by a Taco Bell. Grief is soft then hard. Without a smell or taste. I am craving a Crunchwrap Supreme with Diablo sauce. My shoulder and neck on the left side have started hurting, like someone pressing down and I wonder if that is you or if I have been carrying myself all wrong.
supreme
I 3 dagar lyssnade på samma sång och kände mig ensam i skogen. På den fjärde dagen översvämmade källaren. Jag lägger handdukar i öppningen men det är meningslöst. Allt rusar in. Jag kollade på din begravning på YouTube och grät inte ens en gång men jag gråter till Real Housewives of Salt Lake City när dom gråter. Lisa Barlow slängde sin mans Rolexklocka genom bilfönstret och det råkade va vid en Taco Bell. Sorgen är hård sen mjuk. Utan lukt eller smak. Jag vill ha en Crunchwrap Supreme med Diablosås. Min axel och nacke på vänstra sidan har börjat göra ont, som någon trycker ner och jag undrar om det är du eller om jag har hållit mig helt fel.
dandelions
The new cat climbs the window screen and peers inside. Little skywalker shitting on the steps. I move the litter box around all day but she’s not interested in my kind of society.
*
Dad wearing a bicycle helmet and backpack. We are going fast around a lake. Me on the seat behind him. Some kind of race. He hands me cold mamma scans meatballs, reaching behind to entertain me.
*
It’s easy to forget how to be a person. It’s easy to become someone else. I’m watching a man with face tattoos make a dandelion sandwich on my phone.
*
The summer was a blur and fall broke into many pieces. A song. Imperfect shards. Every time I blink it takes a screenshot and stores it, like now, like now
*
Did you know it is illegal in some states to collect rain without a permit? I confess, Mr Rain police. In my defense it was raining hard, so hard, all night. What was I supposed to do?
*
While I’m confessing: I’m jealous of the cats, even that one scratching up my arm when I pet wrong. The new one, the crooked old one, all of the past and present cats, their papers in order, their passion to nap the day away.
*
How much grief to fill a human body? How many birds? Blue herons or sparrows? Be specific. How many leaky rain barrels of moldy yesterday tears, approximately?
*
I like to think of him young at the racetrack, cool and in love, moving quickly with purpose, picking up cigarette butts and relighting them.
*
She’s resting now on both paws in the small cake-slice window of wild sunlight.
maskroser
Den nya katten klättrar på fönsterskyddet och tittar in. Lilla skywalker skiter på trappan. Jag flyttar runt kattlådan hela dagen men hon är inte intresserad av min typ av samhälle.
*
Pappa har cykelhjälm och ryggsäck. Vi åker fort kring en sjö. Jag i sätet bakom. Nåt sorts lopp. Han ger mig kalla mamma scans köttbullar, sträcker sig tillbaka för att underhålla mig.
*
Det är lätt att glömma hur man ska va en person. Det är lätt att bli nån annan. Jag kollar på en man med ansiktstatueringar som gör en maskrosmacka på min telefon.
*
Sommaren var suddig och hösten brast i många bitar. En sång. Operfekta skärvor. Varje gång jag blinkar tar den en skärmdump och sparar den, som nu, som nu
*
Visste du att det är olagligt i vissa stater att samla regnvatten utan tillstånd? Jag erkänner, herr regnpolis. I mitt försvar: det regnade så hårt, så hårt, hela natten. Vad skulle jag göra?
*
Medans jag erkänner: Jag är avundsjuk på katterna, till och med den som river upp min arm när jag stryker fel. Den nya, den gamla krokiga, alla katter från förr och nu, deras papper i ordning, deras passion for att sova dagen bort.
*
Hur mycket sorg för att fylla en människokropp? Hur många fåglar? Blåhäger eller sparvar? Va exakt. Hur många läckande regntunnor med möglig igårgråt, ungefär?
*
Jag gillar att tänka på honom ung, på travet, cool och kär, snabba och meningsfulla rörelser, plockar upp cigarettfimpar och tänder igen.
*
Nu sover na på båda tassarna i det lilla tårtbitsfönstret av vilt solsken.
Kim Göransson (they) is from Sweden but live in VA with their family. They like to bake, make playlists, and get lost in nature. They like tinned fish, brie, sad movies, and pro wrestling. Shinsuke Nakamura fan. Editing for Superfan Zine and Meow Meow Pow Pow lit. You can find them @sonofgore on instagram.
making hot tea; gone cold. Copter sounds circle the city, buzzards soaring around the wildebeest, faltering. Stuck on the train for hours as the rain drowns down. yet another beautiful day. Not picking up the phone because I know what it will say. It tells me you got too high and it was all resting on a pinpoint, balancing on your brilliance, which cannot last. I don’t even believe this yet wormholes in the wood weaving wandering ways through the rain. a white shopping bag drifts through an azure so pure it might be water, an aeronautic cnidarian like my boyfriend’s dad believes drift above us, bioluminescent, getting caught in spyplane photographs. it would be easy and simple to become convinced of something wrong and maybe I’ve given myself brain damage permanently. maybe the trains will never run again and maybe they’ll poison the water.
endwell is an androgyne writer, composer, artist, and researcher originally hailing from unceded Onondaga territory (Central New York). Their poetry has been published previously in As It Ought To Be Magazine and Angel Rust Mag. They are also the author of four poetry zines, which can be found at endwell.itch.io. Find their other work at virgilsbirds.wordpress.com.
Exhibition Notes: Portrait of Arapaima at the All-Night Diner
Oil upon oil. The arapaima is dressed for a night on the town: spangled slab of muscle, scales laced with neon. A fry cook is hollering Drown the kids! meaning two boiled eggs because all children can be made to order. The arapaima already carries eggs in its mouth, which is labyrinth-shaped, strung with possible selves like rivers of white thread.Alternative title: The future you pretended not to hear cracks against your teeth, a hailstone caged in glass. Last call now, when the dinosaurs take off their feathers and become bones. When the mammoths fold themselves into amber and fuel pumps. When the moon empties out like a packet of sugar and the arapaima is left alone with its own hard skin, hard tongue. Alternative title: When you are alone, you surface within your armor and find it has not protected but drowned you. Faces shove against the diner window. They want to take pictures with a body around their necks, draped so both ends point away from heaven. An article says the arapaima is invading Florida, meaning its corpse has been found there. The author emphasizes the ugliness of the species, its appetite. Alternative title: You become a queer elder by accident, not because you are good at living but because you are slow at dying. The arapaima orders the whole menu but finds it cannot swallow, its jaws too full of hallways, of corridors, of children’s names. Perhaps another word for armor is curse: to wander until you find the end of your own hungers. To be slow at dying. To be gripped by the world’s fist like a grease stain, blemish against blemish, oil upon oil.
Loren Maria Guay is a genderqueer Latine poet and speculative fiction writer. Their poems have been published in ANMLY, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Breakwater Review, West Trade Review, and elsewhere; they have been a finalist for the 2022 Peseroff Prize in Poetry, a Best of the Net nominee, and a 2024 Periplus Fellow. Born in Asunción, Paraguay and raised in Brooklyn, they currently spend their time between Chicago and Ann Arbor, where they are pursuing a PhD in English and Education at the University of Michigan.
MICHAEL CHANG (they/them) is the author of many volumes of poetry, including TOY SOLDIERS (Action, Spectacle, 2024), THINGS A BRIGHT BOY CAN DO (Coach House Books, 2025), & HEROES (845 Press, 2025).
sticking the psych ward oral thermometer under my tongue in its single use plastic sheathing, i suddenly think about sucking my ex’s strap. i wrote about them a lot when i psych- warded myself a year ago, right before we started dating. last time i mentioned them in a poem i compared them to cat shit— something i’ve never put in my mouth, never let inside of me.
my bisexual autofiction fantasy
getting kicked out of the mental health hospital because i got caught letting the two cute bisexual cis girlies eiffel tower me with my electric toothbrush and their fists in the tv room at 1 am, on a mattress i pulled out of an unlocked closet. the tv room was also supposed to be locked. we got caught because i had turned the news on to muffle my noises, but the light in the dark room attracted the tech doing rounds to the window, which we couldn’t get away from, even in the corner of the room. i admitted to the psych ward because it seemed like my cis friends back home were not going to do their part of the group project of keeping me alive, and now i’ve been discharged, just because i believe sex is a form of care! so i’m here, standing under a tree in the rain in belmont massachusetts, waiting for a bus to take me to south station so i can get back to my phd program in new haven. the rain running down my face is reminding me of the strings of spit leaking out of my mouth from around the beautiful bisexual’s fist last night. the easy breezy beautiful bisexuals didn’t get discharged because they were both bipolar and dealing with manic episodes. i was only on the ward for saturday and sunday nights, so never got to meet with a psychiatrist or social worker because i was deemed a “nuisance transsexual” monday morning and removed by security, who unfortunately looked very straight. still, insurance covered my stay, so it only cost me a $150 emergency room copay to fulfill my most bisexual lesbian fantasy. maybe my mental health. one of my beautiful, beautiful manic pixie dream cis bisexual two-day girlfriends managed to slip a note with both their phone numbers on the back of a piece of admissions paperwork into my bag before the neurotypical cis-het security guards escorted me out.
or a phalloplasty
still horny in the mental hospital. shout out to women. the new porn star i follow posts several bikini clips every day. i jerk off mostly to cisgender power swaps: femmedom, pegging, bondage— big titties in a bikini turn me on but don’t get me off. lesbian porn typically doesn’t make me cum. i need a real penis on one of them, who gets fingered, fucked in her real ass with a strap. there’s many more cis pegging clips than real lesbian vids with trans women. the only other bisexual here on the ward discharged after three days. her tigger t-shirt inspired me to think about bouncing on it, but hard to say if she owned a strap. she only mentioned a boyfriend and most cis people will trip and fall over themselves to tell me their partner’s trans, and even if her boyfriend wasn’t cis, he may have been the one with the strap or phalloplasty. i tweet “cis girl with a phalloplasty” and get three likes. i open instagram and the new porn star is there jiggling up and down. someone get this woman a strap!
sterling-elizabeth arcadia (she/they) is a Best of the Net winning disabled trans writer and lover of birds, cats, movies, and her friends.
The Body is still warm and It’s up against the wall for a stick up It’s peeled fresh and ripe for artmaking It’s stiff and positioned towards Orion’s Belt It’s bloated, sewn shut, and full of empty policy Its blood smeared on the floor in the shape of an ankh
The Body is still warm and the poets grow wings to circle it Squawk at it until the sound echos back familiar, picking at the remains To smear onto fellowship applications For residencies in its bone marrow The presses clip the fingernails for prize money
The Body is still warm and the news trucks are parallel parking But one of the tires is still stuck in its eye socket The colleges are inviting unbiased professors of murder To analyze the legitimacy of its last breaths On panels about the restorative effects of embalming
The Body is still warm and I, standing across the street from it Am making sure the seal on my mask has not been broken
Later tonight there will be a vigil/fundraiser For families of those who happened to witness The Body Lying there in the street Who may have been affected by the open eyes No one thought to close
The Body is still warm and I will be forced to study it while it leaks Dip my fingers into the fluid and Write about how it tastes like Grandma’s collard greens Pinch the skin and say its made of cobalt Pry open the mouth Identify the open wound as my own Write from the pew of a funeral I’ve never been to
The Body is still warm and I, too, am Motionless…praying the pandemonium will cease Praying the wet and sticky on my fingers Has not been mine the whole time
Jay Délise (they/them) (official jester of Sugar Hill) is a writer, performance artist, and eater of grapes, based in Harlem, New York. They have performed at the United Nations, the Schomburg Center, Judson Church, the Pulitzer Center, and Roundhouse. Their 2020 self-published poetry collection, tenderhead. debuted at #1 in the poetry audiobook category on Libro.fm, and their work has been featured in publications including Glass Poetry Press, the Huffington Post, Lucky Jefferson, AFROPUNK, Brooklyn Poets, Vagabond City, and Triangle House. Jay has been a teacher and clown consultant/director for almost a decade (old), and their work smells of mischief, church giggles, and being barefoot on unfinished hardwood floors. They enjoy stealing from white people, bad wigs, being gay, fart jokes, jazz music, free art, and assuming their mother/father wounds are undetectable, but writing poems about them anyway.
You know some people never make it out of this scene
And I’m still in love with Billy Idol, though Billy Idol isn’t Billy Idol anymore, is Angel cosplaying as Spike in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that Joss Whedon didn’t write because we all know he didn’t have the balls, couldn’t imagine love outside of who could hurt the worst, so irreparable they still woke cold sweat, still feeling hands, eyes. And Buffy the Vampire Slayer was never about Buffy the Vampire Slayer at all, it was about redeeming Giles. Redeeming Angel. Proving the thesis that the good guy got the girl in the end and when that didn’t sell cancelling the show. Hiring the Nice Guy to rewrite the story. Correct all the things that went wrong, there was no other choice.
And I’m still in love with Billy Idol because Billy Idol isn’t Billy Idol anymore, Billy Idol is William Michael Albert Broad an Englishman who exists still, Peter Pan playing old favorites for those who still believe. I choose not to believe. Leave him frozen in 1982 and don’t look too close knowing he was a rockstar in 1982 and if I looked there’s bound to be plenty I can’t love him for. Leave him the last note of “White Wedding” hanging in the air and laugh at how nothing’s changed, he’s just the same as Greensleeves’ anonymous/lost/forgotten author, filled with rumors it was written by King Henry, the one with all the wives, for his second wife, a hard fought seduction. The original fuck boy anthem.
And I’m still in love with Billy Idol, though Billy Idol isn’t Billy Idol literally speaking. I mean I love Billy Idol meaning every boy/girl/gender binary rejecting person in split kneed jeans and too many piercings, maybe an enviable bounty of tattoos, by which I mean more than the zero I, needle-phobic, can handle scratched into my skin. I love loud music echoing in my bones long after someone’s finally made me turn it down, kicked the old stereo’s cord out of it’s socket. My own small time rebellions, the ones some days I wish I wasn’t too afraid to try on my own skin. Or maybe I mean Billy Idol; as in I like to imagine he was the one my mother watched secretly on MTV, her own small rebellion, that she had small rebellions once. She enjoyed watching a man in eyeliner, leather growl something that could only charitably be called a love song.
And I’m still in love with Billy Idol, though Billy Idol isn’t Billy Idol, by which I mean I envy Billy Idol the way everyone knew his name, his every Friday night hook-up, and now the top google hits for “Billy Idol” include “Whatever Happed To” and I too would like to vanish like that.
E.B. Schnepp is a poet currently residing in Chicago. Their work has been featured in Poetry Daily and can be found in Gulf Coast, Nat. Brut, and Iron Horse Review, among others.
A month before we lost him, I remember Bram said, “I wish bees were immortal.”
It was a sigh from the bed, a sign Bram “Bird Boy” Ramirez was waking from his noontime gloom. Lunch always made his stomach hurt, as he had a million dietary restrictions and was careless about following them.
I was sitting at Bram’s mother’s vanity, in one of his mother’s old hippy dresses with the leather fringe, spreading foundation over my acne and sucking on his mom’s billiard pipe like a stagecoach driver from a cowboy film. In the mirror I could see Bram curled around a hot water bottle like a bird in a nest, a mirror balanced on his pillow, lipstick and a lip-brush in either hand.
“Why’s that?” I prodded. “What’s with bees all of a sudden?”
“I was just thinking…” he said and paused to rub his lips together, then touch up the cupid’s bow. He had shiny black lips, shiny black-lined eyes. Even lying sideways, he was the best fourteen-year-old makeup artist I knew who wasn’t a Youtube star. “Oh God, stomach! Stop.”
“Maybe you should take the binder off.”
“Nooooo.”
“You said it’s hard to breathe with the binder on.”
“Oh my God, shut up and stop being logical, Melissa.”
“Okay. Tell me something stupid then, Bird Boy. Tell me about the bees.”
“The bees…” he said, and sat up, crispy fried hair sticking in odd directions. His eyes were bright with the start of a classic Bram rant (“Brant”).
“Nectar,” Bram said, spreading his arms like a diminutive professor. “Nectar of the gods. It’s a food that grants immortality. In the Greek legends, if you eat ambrosia or drink nectar, you become immortal like a god.”
“I follow, I follow,” I said. I took the pipe out of my mouth and bared my teeth at my reflection, touching the place I’d chipped my incisor with the tip of my tongue. Skateboarding screw up.
Bram snickered. He pulled his chest-binder down around his tummy like a belly warmer, stuck the hot water bottle in the elastic, and hopped out of bed. He started pacing back and forth. He looked like some kind of deranged pregnant teen—his small brown breasts, barely more than pecs even without the binder, drooping above the band like two surly eyes.
“Okay, so there are three kinds of immortality: there’s godlike immortality, attained by drinking nectar and eating ambrosia. There’s immortality through legend, having people remember your story. And last of all there’s biological immortality, having kids and descendants.” He patted the hot water bottle, making it slosh.
“How’s your stomach?”
“Better every second. So you have these three kinds of immortality. And every single living thing craves immortality and wants to flee death. Or they should, anyway. It’s the natural order. You either want to be a god, you want to be a legend, or you want to have babies so that some piece of you remains.” He held up a finger. “Except bees.”
“What about bees?”
“They have the shittiest lives. They get cheated out of everything. They drink nectar, the same nectar as gods, but they aren’t immortal. 99.9999% of them are sterile, they’re basically slaves, they live like one week and then they die. Or, if they ever have a moment of heroism and go ‘bzzzz! Defend the hive! Defend the hive!’ then their butts break off and they die.”
“Warrior’s death?”
“That’s a stupid way to go, having your butt break off. Death by butt!” He made an attempt at twerking with his small posterior while I chuckled. No one was going to be slain by that butt.
“You get the idea,” he huffed. “So bees don’t have the immortality of the gods. They don’t have the immortality of offspring. They don’t have the immortality of legend after they’re dead—I mean, no one goes around telling the tale of ‘heroic Bee Number 36624;’ they’re completely anonymous. Even a fly—even a mosquito—has more richness and reward for its life than a bee does. And all that from these holy fucking bees that eat the food of the gods.”
The hot water bottle slipped out of his chest-binder and thumped on the floor. I watched him for a moment, his slight frame and bony shoulders. He looked so small and sticklike without the bottle.
“By the way, you should try cat-eye makeup,” he said.
“I’m not the makeup type,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I barely understand foundation. Plus my eyelid folds aren’t the right type. Eyeliner never looks good.”
“I can get them looking right—just let me try something.”
“It’s not going to work,” I said.
“Please let me try,” he insisted.
I agreed and sat very still while he came close and rested one hand on my cheek, pen etching a trail along my eyelashes. It was incredibly—shockingly—intimate to have another person do my makeup. I could feel his breath tickle my face; he could feel mine. I could see the vellus hairs on his skin—his healthy, living skin, with all this microscopic capillaries of oxygenated blood pushing through it—the sleepy smudges under his eyes, the faint crow’s feet even a kid gets. We were almost halfway through our freshman year, but his face had already started shedding its baby fat.
“Please don’t stab my eye,” I begged as he went back over the line to thicken it.
“Just keep your eyes open,” he said. “It’s the key with hooded eyelids. If you close your eyes when drawing, the line will be too thick. I don’t want to… I don’t want to fill up… your crease-space… thin line… then I draw the wing—like this—and you can see it makes a little barb shape above the crease. That’s perfect.”
On to the other eye. The pen tickled. I fought the urge to sneeze.
“So bees.”
“I just think bees are sad,” he sighed, his Brant running out of steam. “Their lives are short, and their lives are sad. By human standards, anyway. I guess, from a bee’s perspective, they’re a part of a collective. Oh, but what I was also meaning to say—why I started thinking about bees—Melissameans ‘bee’. It comes from a Greek word. You were a nymph who fed Zeus honey, and all the Olympian gods honored bees ever after. I thought that was dope. Bees have sucky lives, but they have a special god looking after them.”
He dropped the eyeliner pen and spun me around, until we were both looking in his mother’s mirror. I peered closely. My eyes looked elongated and bold and slightly cynical. Tiger eyes. Probably the most elegant and femme I’d ever looked, and ever would look.
He sighed. “Bad girls have to have proper eye makeup.”
“I’m not a real ‘bad girl,’ I’m a sad lump on too many antidepressants.” I’d been on them since I was nine.
“You’re a fabulous skateboarding chain-smoking vampire chick brought to life in a lab, and once you fix your tooth you’re going to have all the cute boys bringing you blood sacrifices, Bee.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Bird Boy.” I stuck the pipe between my lips and fluffed my hair. “I look like Nina Hagen.”
“You look fucking gorgeous,” Bram said, pulling his binder back up and digging a tie-dye tank top from his closet. “Now I have to make myself look as good as you. It’s impossible. You’re too pretty.”
“I am not,” I said. “My nose is too big. And my acne’s shit.”
“Well, I look like a Christmas elf and I’ll never be tall enough to get a date. Fetch me my platform boots.”
I laughed. Bram always looked stupid clomping around in those cinderblock shoes. High school was its own mini ecosystem of fashions and fashion shows, and we had to be perfect. We were going to be ready.
That was how we spent every Saturday and Sunday that fall semester. Cartoons in the mornings, horror movies at night. Bram sick in bed. This was the pattern; this was the way. Bram would be Bram—multi-faceted, rainbow, chameleon. And Melissa would be Melissa—tomboy, plain-faced, cracked-tooth Melissa.
Every day we’d take English, Spanish, and math. We’d fall in love with their PE teacher, the “dyke queen,” over and over again. We’d suffer through health class, make dirty jokes behind our books in social studies, lounge around the steps of the library. I’d master the kick flip and the dark slide, imagining myself a young ‘Antoinette’ Hawke pro-skater. Bram would be consumed with school politics, petitions to use the boys’ locker room. Things would change, little by little: freshman year would end, sophomore begin, we’d get older, we’d be upperclassmen, we’d go to prom, we’d be king and queen in our own heads, we’d go to college. We’d be friends forever and ever, and our lives would stretch out endlessly like a never-ending sitcom, weekends and weekdays and before schools and after schools. Me and Bram and our crew, always making plans for a weekend for which we just couldn’t wait.
2
Bram killed himself on the fourth day of February. It was a Monday, and he was tired of waiting for the weekend.
By Tuesday, we knew. My mom told me—I was one of the lucky ones that way. She rushed in with the landline held to her shoulder and said, “Honey, Bram passed away,” and I put my head down on my desk and cried. And then I started calling other people—whose parents weren’t on the phone tree—to tell them too.
“Don’t post anything online yet,” I said every time, but of course the feed was full of it by evening.
We talked. We talked so much. We messaged and texted and called and emailed. At some point I awoke with someone crying in my ear, and in a lull between sobs I whispered, “Who is this?”
We were in homeroom when the announcement came on the intercom; it was Spanish class, and our teacher was sitting tense and stone-faced at the front of the room while we all wept wordlessly, waiting for the band aid to come off so we could poke in a little salt and alcohol. The intercom crackled to life and she flinched. Bram’s counselor came on, reported the loss, called him “Sarah,” and urged us all to see the Friends for Health.
Big Brother or whomever was watching us—probably the teachers—had compiled a list of all of Bram’s close friends, and in second period the half dozen or so of us were sent to the principal’s office, where we continued the wordless weeping.
“We just want you to know,” said one of the counselors, looking concerned and matronly, “that Sarah’s death was not anyone’s fault. You were all good friends to her and—”
Brain static. Would anyone like to go home? Our parents were on standby. We could leave. It was all right. We wouldn’t get in trouble. One by one they trickled out, till only I was left.
Did I want to call home? Was there anyone to pick me up?
I shook my head. I always kind of liked school. Bram didn’t; Bram would milk an illness as long as he possibly could. But I liked it here. I liked the quiet somberness of class time, the squeak of markers on the board, the distractions of history quizzes and integer sets. I could keep to myself at school in a way that I couldn’t anywhere else. I could stay in my mind at school.
Then I was back in my second period, then in my third period, then sitting on the steps for lunch. Then fourth period, fifth period, sixth, my eyes red and overflowing. I guess I moved, but I don’t remember it—everything around me changed. All I remember is sitting at different times and in different places, and the world whirring around me. My friends were gone. The cold cement ate into my bottom. I was alone.
3
There was a time, when I was very, very little—still little enough to sit on my grandfather’s lap—that I thought dying was something that happened only to the old or sick, or possibly from accidents. I thought children were bulletproof and fireproof. Since then I’ve learned how very lucky any of us are to live to be parents or grandparents—how lucky to make it out of childhood even, with all its secret sadnesses and pains. I thought of my grandparents and elderly relatives who were gone, their private histories fading. My own brain was my greatest escape, a seemingly endless world where I could dive when reality was too harsh or too boring. Shocking to think of that vastness in each and every one of us, inevitably winking out.
I knew a bit of Bram’s interiority as his closest friend. I knew he was depressed—I saw it day to day chewing him up. Everything can go great in your life and it’ll still be there; everything can go to shit and there it’ll be, but bigger, stronger, with sharper teeth. I caught a glimpse of Bram’s gnawer every now and then.
But mostly, time with Bram was joy. He poured joy from every fiber. Even when apart, we had conversations that spanned days. We’d watch a movie and analyze every scene, drill holes with the intensity of our scrutiny, psychoanalyze lines of dialogue. We could have filled novels with our chats and emails and phone calls. We talked and we talked and we talked, and now there was silence.
There was a whole panel of our lives that Bram and I had built together, and that was now closed. And I thought, When I die, that all goes too. All the moments we had, all the talks, all the laughs. They’re sealed and they’re taped, and when I’m gone, they’ll be erased. I wondered when I would go, too.
Every place in our town held those secret memories.
I’d go into a Peet’s, and remember how he’d cupped his steaming coffee with the sleeves of his sweater. How he wore a beanie and round owl-glasses, and how the coffee fogged them up.
I’d go to the shore of the lake, and recall how on a hot day we’d all gone there and he’d spent the whole time playing guitar softly to himself, while we ran in the water and made angels in the pebbly wet sand.
At the lunch tables at our old middle school, I’d been harassed by a bug flying around my head all recess.
“Oh, it’s okay,” I preened. “It probably mistakes my head for a flower.”
“Well, it’s a fly,” he said, “so it probably mistakes your head for a piece of shit.”
School in particular was full of memories. They were so fresh, so new, only days or hours old. Sitting on the steps where we always ate lunch, I felt like I could reach back in time only forty-eight hours and touch him. Save him.
You never really think you’ll lose a person—not even your grandparents. Bram was depressed, and anxious, and terribly, terribly unhappy—we all knew that—but he was always that way, and the alarm bells just stopped going off. He would erupt on social media, begging, apologizing, raging, furious that his stepmother had used his dead name, that his dad was making him miserable, that the state of the world meant that a brown trans kid like him could never, ever, feel for one minute like the fighting would end, that he was ever truly safe or accepted.
And we were always rushing in, like tidal waves of soothing bath water, comforting, caressing, easing. We loved him so much and he loved us back with everything he had. I could only hope… truly… that his life wasn’t always so terrible.
In spite of it all, his last fall caught us unawares. He was always dancing on the edge and had never fallen over. He was a tight-rope walker, and he played the part so well we forgot about gravity. We thought his bones were hollow, that he would just float like a bird onto his perch again, laughing and happy once more. I wish we’d known.
His mother had been the gravity well. It was only later I realized Bram killed himself just a few days after the anniversary of his mom’s death. The change in month had thrown me, but later I realized how obviously, inextricably linked the two were. He’d missed his mother very, very much. She had been his safe haven, his warm, beatnik north. I’d like to think, when the moment came, she spread her arms and he came running.
4
“Are you all right, Melissa?”
I blinked. It was my teacher asking.
It was a sunny day. English class. Crime and Punishment, the punishment being we had to read that book. I thought for a moment she was telling me off for spacing, but my book was open like everyone else’s. She said it again, and I realized her voice was quite low and quiet, and her brow furrowed.
“If you ever want to stay after class,” she barely breathed. “My door is always open, you know.” I shrugged and nodded, and she touched my arm and gave my shoulder a squeeze and moved on. I tried refocusing on the page, dredging up where in the story we were again. There was a crisp, cold waft of air radiating from the window nearby, and I wondered how much colder it was in Russia.
Outside, dewy autumn lawn. Patchy white, silver, and tan like vitiligo, or how I imagined vitiligo to be. A bird hopping up and down, bouncing farther and farther from the grass’s edge. Bounce bounce. Head down. A worm comes up. Almost a perfect sphere—a ball-bird.
I turned my head and watched it more intently, the cheeky and self-assured way its head flicked from side to side. Drab feathers, but its chest was orange and red like a coal popped out of the fire. And that made me think of Bram’s chest binder, and how proud he was of that bright red half-binder he’d bought and how he used to strut around with it. It hit me like a brick in the head, and it broke the funk I’d sealed myself in.
I stood up and gasped, “Bird Boy!” and went tearing out of the room to chase down the holy ghost which had come to find me. The robin took off the moment the door opened and I ran after it.
I chased it and I chased it, and finally I climbed twenty-five feet up a pine tree while the stupid bird bopped from branch to branch, glancing back as if to say, “Ah, how tragic.” Finally I got to the point where my body simply refused to budge any further, and clung like a scared cat to the tree boughs.
The bird—just a foot above me—gave me a sharp up-and-down look, chirped like a jackass, and shot into the clear blue sky. Then I knew—I knew—that fucker was my Bird Boy, always getting me into all sorts of scrapes and then zipping away and leave me in the lurch, all alone; I knew that was Bram coming to pick on me one last time.
“Fuck you, Bird Boy!” I screamed, and the sassy fuck shat a glob on the lawn and disappeared over the school roof. It was so like him.
A firetruck had to come to get me down—by then I was sobbing and laughing , from vertigo or shock or the hilarity of it all. The fireman carried me down the ladder in his arms like I was The Princess Bride or some fainting damsel.
We all got up to weird shit in the month after he died. Mine wasn’t the only crazy breakthrough story. Someone spoke to a psychic who told her Bram had reincarnated as a peanut. We all smoked a joint of weed and found that hilarious. In the days following, we swung wildly between grief and hilarity. Sometimes we cried. Sometimes we laughed.
There was a part of us that wanted to stay sad, to keep it all fresh and our loved one close. But the world outside kept calling, and it was a fantastic and ridiculous place. People are strange and wonderful. There are days when I think, “God, I’m so glad I chose to stay. I wish you had too.”
5
It took a while, but Bram’s friends, family, and step mom finally managed to pull it together and plan a memorial for the guy. They set the date for March 10th, a few days after the start of spring break, because it seemed fitting to remember him when everything else was waking up from winter.
There were over two hundred people there to send off my Bird Boy. You wouldn’t have thought a fourteen-year-old would know so many people. My friends were there, and we squeezed hands and cried a little in the foyer and I thought, “We’re all a little older now.”
I was on a healthy cocktail of antidepressants—I mean, I’m always on antidepressants, but they’d upped the dose by a few milligrams—and I could feel the drugs propelling my spirits, as if a little ball of helium was stirring in me, making me jittery, nervous, excited, a little anxious. But I would be well-behaved. I would be well-combed, pure, simple, like a child in Sunday school. Nervous but happy to be there.
The local lodge was a pleasant, airy building with knotty pine and bright lighting—a kind of contemporary craftsman style that was sure to offend no one, but also left much to be desired personality-wise. Oh well. That was what we were here for. The weird squad. Our band of brothers.
The crowds were settling in the rows of folding white chairs, middle school and high school acquaintances of Bram’s. The weirdo cohort took up its own little spot in the very middle of the room. There were huge bouquets of flowers all around the room, and a large sandwich board at the front with an old photo of Bram sitting in his backyard with light shining through his fried hair like honey and butter, a t-shirt that said “BE GAY DO CRIME” half-cropped from the frame. Smiling more openly than I’d seen in almost a year.
Bram’s family’s priest stood first, and began his speech, “Sarah was a bright spark in our community—,”
Oh God, I thought. We all slumped in our seats and rolled our eyes to heaven. The poor priest stopped, squinted at a note he must have scribbled on the page, and began again. “Sarah—or Abraham as some here knew them—was a bright spark in our community, and a beloved child to their family.”
Bram’s dad, Mr. Ramirez, didn’t go up. He looked inconsolable on the far side of the room. But Bram’s cousin went up and talked about knowing him from diapers and knowing his mom. Bram’s life to her was like an accordion—a series of snapshots from the Christmases and other holidays when their families met. She’d seen him grow up in rapid time.
“We love you, Sarah-Bram,” she said, combining his names. “Thank you for being my cousin, my dress-up playmate, my sous chef. My friend.”
Another friend went up to the mic. “Thank you for making me feel like part of the group. I never felt awkward, because I knew you were awkward too. Thank you for making me weirder, for making me laugh every day.”
They all went up, one by one.
“Thank you for telling me I sang all right and teaching me to play the recorder.”
“Thank you for sitting next to me in geometry and algebra and drawing a dick and balls on my test.”
“Thank you for eating lunch with me every day, and walking me to school.”
“Thank you for the random trivia. For being the most studious slacker in school.”
Thank you, thank you. I loved you so much. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you more, but I’ll tell you now. We’ve built a secret world together. I’ll keep it as long as I can.
I stood.
“Thank you for being my Bird Boy,” I said. “Thank you for calling me your Bee.”
The memorial ended.
We ended up milling around in the foyer again, just like we had before the memorial began. But our voices were louder—before we had spoken so quietly, as if we were afraid our throats would break, or Bram would hear how sad we all were. Now our throats were looser.
People were trickling away, and soon we were dispersing all at once, like a bell had rung and someone said, “Okay, it’s time for you all to leave and go back to pretending to be children again.”
“A few of us are going to the lake,” someone said. “To the beach with the rusty boat. Just to sit around and listen to music I guess. Do you want to come?”
No, not yet, I said. I needed more time.
They nodded, and we all exchanged hugs. Next time then. I love you. I love you too. I’ll meet you to cram for the history final.
God, the history final. I forgot about mundane, shallow things like tests and finals.
At some point I was just standing in the parking lot, waving at the last knot of friends as they trotted down the sidewalk like escaped convicts. There were a few adults here and there speaking in soft voices, and the chairs and flowers were getting taken down.
The parking lot was all dappled in shadow with the white-black birch trees wafting overhead, cold and wispy and somewhat otherworldly. Orange pine needles and brown leaves on the blacktop, soft yellow grass shooting up in the cracks, and I thought of Bram and his fried blonde hair.
“Melissa? Hey there. Thank you for coming.” It was his dad. I was surprised to still see him around and to see him alone. He came over and we hugged—something that would have made me feel awkward normally, but I’d already hugged so many people that day my arms were practically shoulder-shaped.
All of us considered ourselves Bram’s family. But Mr. Ramirez was the family within the family, the middle of the middle, the one who must have known and loved Bram in ways we could not yet know. I looked at him and I thought, damn, but we were lucky to have had Bram in our lives. And I felt as though a finger had touched my head and told me, you’re special. You’re loved. And I almost wanted to tell that sagging middle-aged man this revelation, that we’d have that one, wonderful thing to share between us. I might have, too, if I’d known Mr. Ramirez better. If I wasn’t so shy.
“I remember you coming to the house a lot last summer. I know he appreciated you.”
“Bram was really special. Everyone loved him.”
“It means a lot,” he said, and then: “I have something to give you. It belonged to Sarah. I was meaning to give it to one of you as a keepsake, but I guess you’re the only one left so… well, you seemed to know him better than the others anyway.”
He reached into his man-bag and pulled out Bram’s chest binder. A rush of old memories went through me: Bram lounging around on the bed, looking at the shape of his pecs in the mirror, Bram sticking a dildo in his shorts and running around the house trying to bone me, Bram stuffing valentines down his shirt in the middle of class, until the teacher sent him to the principal’s office, Bram laughing, dancing, twisting his hips, nerding it up and drawing flowers on his forehead and cheeks.
I took the stretchy and slightly sweat-smelling piece of red clothing, and raised a hand while Mr. Ramirez drove away. I peeked around a little—barely anyone was left, mostly staff cleaning the building. I slipped a hand up my shirt and undid my bra, wiggling around until I could fish it out through my arm hole. Then I hooked the binder around my midriff, just like I’d seen Bram do a thousand times, and with difficulty pulled it up around my chest.
I’d never worn a binder before. It felt awful. Bram was such a tiny thing and the binder had to be size XXS. I could barely breathe with it pulling my chest tight, molding it, making me feel smooth and compact. But then—oh, I closed my eyes and I felt like his arms were around me, squeezing me tight just like he used to, as though he hadn’t seen me in years even if it had only been a day.
I wondered if Bram ever imagined that—that it was his mother’s flaming wings wrapped tight around him. That someone was hugging him too.
I spun around on the lawn, feeling vaguely light-headed, my chest burning like fire, like burning love. I ran around and around, my arms stretched out, an airplane wheeling and spinning, and suddenly I felt that I must know how he had felt all those years, that I could see into his little brain and all its clicking gears and brightly jeweled facets, that we really weren’t so different, him and me: the boy who became a bird, and the bee who stayed among the mortals. I was wrapped, swaddled, enveloped by the knowledge that Bram had been, and that I had known him. Bram had existed, he was—exquisitely, strangely, heartbreakingly. I’d had a friend, and his name was Bram.
Kat Joplin (they/them) is a Vietnamese American writer and journalist based in Tokyo, Japan. Their work explores queer sexuality and gender, as well as themes of foreignness and belonging. They have written articles for platforms such as Gay Times and The Japan Times; have published creative pieces with The Wise Owl, Bloodletter Magazine, and The Examined Life Journal; and are contributing author to Quarto Publishing’s Planet Drag. As a drag queen, they can be found performing throughout Japan under the stage name Le Horla.
