on Alan Turing as we meet in quarantine again and again
what looks back at me from the mirror is the guardian of my memory. what we really are is just a river of what we will never forget.
morning presents herself and my reflection notices it first. I hover next to the machine of my body or maybe my body loiters next to Me. finds meaning in braiding together the ocean of my computer.
I crave meat and blood. I rush to the graveyard underneath my bed. the soil is warm and i am again organic.
what stays human in me if my soul stares from across the room inside the mirror next to me when I sleep?
I have buried here my most human cadavers. every father i’ve ever made myself every woman i have ever been the selves i have slaughtered in my making.
it is wormy and rich. more fertile than i will ever consent to. less chemical than i have become. i can lie in the wet mattress of my spirit.
if what stares from the mirror and lingers in the corner of my room shovels dirt over my body with its hands— i will stare back and be content with my ghosts.
Tori Ashley Matos is a poet and performer based in New York City. They’re non-binary, Afro-Taino, and queer. Their work is evolving, searching, muddy, and filled with ghosts, liberation, and freedom. They graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and they’ve been published in Curlew Quarterly, Besting, Perhappened Mag, No, Dear Magazine, and more. They are a Gaze Journal Loving Gaze Poetry Prize winner, a Brooklyn Poets and Lit Fest Fellowship finalist, and a two time DreamYard poetry fellow. They have their first chapbook publishing in late 2021. Follow them on Instagram @ToriAshleyMatos!
In another timeline, your tongue is murder weapon. Perhaps mine too. My body is crime scene was it the night who cordons us? & you carve chalk into silhouette. You always leave rust behind on the edges. Your moment is structured that way, like the shadow climbing out of my single exit wound.
In this timeline, you cut your hair & I do not notice. You cordon me with a smile. My chest wound serrate. I develop a taste for metal teething into wrist for skin scales mixing with rust for fringe growing into my eyes. You look the same to me always. Your image is structured that way.
In another timeline, I dislike your new haircut the freed forehead the same pair of shoes you always wear. In this timeline, we quarrel. You fuck me after we make up. In red- taped night, I caress tossed waves of your hair after sex how it looks like an oil spill smells like seaweed how your body stretches a horizonless blue against mine. A creature wriggles its way into my shipwreck chest. In this timeline, I feel full. My body is structured that way. Perhaps yours too.
In another timeline, we never meet. You cut your hair next to me in the salon. I look at a pair of scissors. Imagine your body sliced like sashimi you swimming inside me. In this timeline I cut a strip of Time coil it around you like fishing rod reel us in. Time snags taut like a muscle you would use to fuck me in another timeline & snaps. We sit in opposite corners of the room. Our fates are structured that way. Or not. Perhaps there is another time line where I cut your hair & you talk Time into strips & feed them to Me. & a tentacle to a machine that beats inside my chest out images, I can’t recognise loops around your silhouette. & I am your friend or not. We study together. I take your picture. What cordons a friend from a lover? A snapshot of how Timeis your hair is not structured that way.
melusine
every night / i peel my heels off / watch the pain melt / away into a tail / every night / i swab my face / feel the burn of / scales rippling across skin / my lipstick smudges / into a hue of / sailors’ warning / every night i shampoo my hair / the tub is a purple pool / kelp plasters the walls / every night my mirror / is a black pearl / humming stereo / of an eclipsed ocean / every day i swallow sand / every night i spit / out oily scabs / every day / i slide shells into sclerae / every day i am painfully / in human / every day my tongue ebbs & flows with bottled words / every night the tides wash / the wrecks of my name ashore
kitsune
half fox / half faggot / the men never get my name right / all that glitters / is lip gloss / gold is false lashes / is orb of sequin skin / fairy tail is lace front wig / half flamboyant / half femme / is hands off no touching / is bulging panties / an untucked vixen / half fatale / the men always say i’m trying to trick them / but they find me at twilight / half feral / dance in alpenglow of amber eyes / fingers lost / in shifting fur / seeking dreams of sake / bosom to nestle their heads / to forget moon & meat / to taste cinder & tongue / they come to my shrine / half flesh & begging / to learn how to tame / the beasts
Winter A. Chen is a transgender Singaporean Chinese poet, performer, and artist based in London. She loves learning K-Pop choreography and playing an unhealthy amount of League of Legends. Her words can be found at whispersinwinter.wordpress.com.
His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. (Mark 9:3)
It’s a recipe to bury a son’s face you’ve known for almost three decades:
First, he covers any reminder of how a mortal can hurt – every scar vanishes with the right shade –
& imagines your hand behind the brush as he beats blush onto the apples of his cheeks.
Then, he colors his eyelids with ash, lines them sharp & dark as the night that will take him in its bat wing.
He watches for the haunting of your gaze from the corner of the room before dabbing on phantom’s shimmer.
Next, he dyes his lips with a vampiric oath to suck the life & promise from a world outside bathed in neon.
Finally, he lets a dress hug him like a shroud & drapes it down, grazing the fang of a stiletto.
He peeks at the light escaping your bedroom, before disappearing out the door. She flies for the kingdom she was denied, but no longer tonight.
Jose Luis Pablo or “Nico” is a genderfluid poet and a communications manager for a non-profit. Their work has been published in Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, Cordite Poetry Review (Australia), My Gay Eye (Germany), 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine (Hong Kong), Busilak: New LGBTQ+ poetry from the Philippines (University of the Philippines Press), Breakwater Review(USA), and elsewhere, as detailed in joseluisbpablo.wordpress.com. Nico was awarded by the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature in 2018 and was a finalist for the 2020 Peseroff Poetry Prize. They are based in Rizal, Philippines.
i ghost on every party before i get there a bundle of frayed nerves beneath my skin i’ve picked up worrying i worry all the time broken thoughts on a loop
i stay busy so my mind doesn’t have time to kill me
these days i identify as something in-between i identify as anxiety attack a high-functioning breakdown a cat on its last life something i can’t yet articulate but my chest is full of doom
the death of the party can barely leave the house can barely watch the news
i am sick like the world is sick i miss people who have forgotten me myself most of all
sometimes i’m afraid maybe i’m the ghost & everybody [knows / is afraid to tell me]
courtney marie is a writer & artist based in denton, texas. they are the author of don’t get your hopes up (2018, Thoughtcrime Press) and have a forthcoming full-length poetry collection to-be-released in 2021 with Goliad Media. cm enjoys making weird & sentimental art with/for their community, exploring the world, and playing pinball. they live with two three cats, cry all the time, and are forever writing letters & sending snail mail in a desperate attempt to connect with the outside world. cm is the co-founder & director of the artist collective spiderweb salon.
Content warning: sexual assault, police interaction, violence
The Night My Rapist Dies in a Dream
In my dream, the detective is an old man from the bar I drink at in the early afternoon. The detective says, “It was only a matter of time before he blew his head off.” I drive by the house, and I see the shattered window, stained red around the jagged, the burst of brains on the sidewalk below. There is a boy, inside, his brother, his face a gift of shock.
I think in my dream, it is over. I did this. I will never listen to that album we both loved again even though I loved it first.
The brother begins to clean the blood up.
I think in my dream, he’s dead our mouths were pressed together I have held his body momentarily I don’t know what color his eyes are when the detective asks I say his beard is stupid I never traced his spine we mostly slept drunkenly in our clothes.
The blood is the color of the tulip that exploded from the ground this spring and fell under the late-season snows and sprang back up again without argument from anyone.
I move through a senseless night. In the distortionless day the victim advocate sat silently beside me. In the day I cried in the hallway before the detective appeared. In the day I said I don’t trust the system and the advocate touched her brown skin and said she didn’t either. In the day I said I fucked him for a year afterwards and watched the detective’s eyes dart away from me. In the day there are ten steps to reporting this kind of crime and I am so afraid.
Next to the blood on the sidewalk it is dawn. The brother has cleaned the room. He sits on the floor of the glistening world.
The Day My Father Speaks to My Sister’s Abusive Husband
In a picture, on her birthday, my sister’s face is blotched with tears and strikes when she blows out the candles. This is not that day.
On this day I am in their house and they begin to fight and my sister is on the floor and I picture his boot tracks down her body like in a cartoon I still watch cartoons and my father shows up to talk to him man to man.
I don’t know what my father can say, what her husband already knows.
They talk calmly like the cop who talks to my neighbor when I call them because my neighbor is about to beat his wife to death. Man to man.
I am thirteen. I am thirty-nine. I am five when my father knocks my mother down the stairs.
The Day I Read An Article About a Serial Rapist
She says he held her down she says there was little drinking involved she says she told her best friend it was rape the next day she says she agreed to keep it quiet and believed it was an accident and kept in touch with him. She was twelve the first time they met. He wrote ego-boosting notes on her middle school English papers.
My rapist teaches, too.
She holds onto these notes like I listen to the song that my rapist said reminded me of him over and over. She: that she can make it as a writer. Genius is always lonely. Me: T. Rex, glam rock, my projected image that I do not believe. Prince of players, pawn of none, born with steel reigns on the heart of the sun.
Our banes know our weaknesses.
The group of women who talked about it later broke their story to the New York Times because his coverage was relentless. My rapist is an adjunct who lives with his mother. It is still relentless.
My rapist contacts young women at four in the morning saying I can prove my innocence I have screenshots what a smear campaign.
There was never anything for any of us to gain.
ph. Christina Ramirez
Alex DiFrancesco is the author of Psychopomps, All City, and Transmutation.
The Night My Rapist Dies in a Dream was originally published in Monologging.
Do you know what I was, how I lived? —Louise Glück
I did not know what I was I refused to see how I lived I wanted to not know what despair was but now I see it has been all over my skin light rot spots portend time bruise I expected to survive at least until winter meaning snow drops signals natural end my life suppressed now I do not expect to survive I must wake to this fact dry earth
forgetting my body as a boy I was afraid yes I was among the unfamiliar stalks and grasses strange meadow I could not see I was a part of the expanse I said I refuse was mute my own hand covering melody heard it in the distance my head echoing concrete chutes now as not a boy I am among you a battered garden refusing to release but forced into stasis the harsh light changes it like it changes me makes my hair grow wild stubborn as it finds new beauty yes risk yes joy even in this evening wind raw final finally new
After Matins
Unreachable —Louise Glück
we keep ourselves unreachable exiled from the heaven on offer in its place replica of expansiveness less full of beauty without alternative flesh authors its own worship
nature returns what it takes only after having transformed it
Artist’s Statement
These poems are taken from my manuscript After the Wild Iris, a full-length response to Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris. I love Glück’s book, but as I’ve returned to it over the years, it’s begun to feel increasingly unconnected to the world I know. For one, it’s unreservedly straight and cis. For another, it operates under the assumption that the natural world will infinitely renew itself in the yearly cycle of seasons, a prospect that feels increasingly foreign as our environment spins towards catastrophe. I began to write, searching for a form that could hold my experience of multiplicity and reflect the often fragmented experience of living in the shadow of looming climate disaster. I wanted a form that could be read in multiple ways, that could hold a variety of meanings and realities within a single poem.
Each poem can be read top to bottom and left to right, but is also broken up into separate pathways, allowing fragments to cohere into new ideas, images, and narratives. The reader must navigate through these, triangulating various threads of meaning. To me, this is where the poem lives, not in any single strand of text, but in the action of holding various fragments together into a momentary and unstable whole.
Iris McCloughan is a nonbinary trans* writer and artist in New York. They were the winner of the 2018 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review, and are the author of three chapbooks, including Triptych (2021, Greying Ghost) and Bones To Peaches, selected for the 2021 Robin Becker Series by Seven Kitchens Press. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in juked, jubilat, American Poetry Review, and ANMLY, among others.
This has never been my america, but me stating this again does nothing to add to this conversation for my blood, its worth. I could talk about every video clip of bodies rolling on pavement, skin smeared sidewalks, the hopscotch of our bones. But what would it do, other than incite a riot in my stomach? I cannot claim to be a freedom fighter, a revolutionary; but I cling to their cause. I do believe in abolition yet have never been a fan of sticking my own hands in their mud. Does this make me a bad Black, the type soft white palms do not have to warn their children about? All of my (white) partners’ parents loved me, even some far after our parting. Which really just means none of them feared my skin, the Jupiter in my throat; a gas only poisoning me. They say every time, it’s so sad what happened to that boy, just do you all have to keep looting? And all I could offer was a concerning grin, ministerial toothed and tame, awaiting a meal. And I don’t really know what I am really waiting for other than what I never could recall being mine to begin with. A free, borderless land? No guns? Housing and Healthcare for all? A space for all my niggas to be niggas? I’m sure on top of a mountain somewhere there are collections of us made god and may I be so bold to say, that there their black is allowed to crack in peace⸺in pieces into the hands of their own loved ones who gust into a darkening red sky and they all rest as stars; by this I mean they all get to rest: the living, the dead, their names never swirled on a baton of tongues, I might just be optimistic about what it could look like if we didn’t know anything but the dark, didn’t know why we reach for the light.
This has never been my america, but me stating this again does nothing to add to this conversation for my blood, its worth. I could talk about every video clip of bodies rolling on pavement, skin smeared sidewalks, the hopscotch of our bones. But what would it do, other than incite a riot in my stomach?Icannot claim to be a freedom fighter, a revolutionary; but I cling to their cause. I do believe in abolition yet have never been a fan of sticking my own hands in their mud. Does this make me a bad Black, the type soft white palms do not have to warn their children about? All of my (white) partners’ parents loved me, even some far after our parting. Which really just means none of them feared my skin, the Jupiter in my throat; a gas only poisoning me. They say every time, it’s sosad what happened to that boy, just do you all have tokeep looting? And all I could offer was a concerning grin, ministerial toothed and tame, awaiting a meal. And I don’t really know what I am really waiting for other than what I never could recall being mine to begin with. A free, borderless land? No guns? Housing and Healthcare for all? A space for all my niggas to be niggas? I’m sure on top of a mountain somewhere there are collections of us made god and may I be so bold to say, that there their black is allowed to crack in peace⸺in pieces into the hands of their own loved ones who gust into a darkening red sky and they all rest as stars; by this I mean they all get to rest: the living, the dead, their names never swirled on a baton of tongues, I might just be optimistic about what it could look like if we didn’t know anything but the dark, didn’t know how to reach for the light.
This has never been my america, but me stating this again does nothing to add to this conversation about my blood, its worth. I could talk about every video clip of bodies rolling on pavement, skin smeared sidewalks, the hopscotch of our bones. But what would it do, other than incite a riot in my stomach?Icannot claim to be a freedom fighter, a revolutionary; but I cling to their cause. I do believe in abolition yet have never been a fan of sticking my own hands in their mud. Does this make me a bad Black, the type soft white palms do not have to warned their children about? All of my (white) partners’ parents loved me, even some far after our parting. Which really just means none of them feared my skin, the Jupiter in my throat; a gas only poisoning me. They say every time, it’s so sad what happened to that boy, just do youall have to keep looting? And all I could offer was a concerning grin, ministerial toothed and tame, awaiting a meal. And I don’t really know what I am really waiting for other than what I never could recall being mine to begin with. A free, borderless land? No guns? Housing and Healthcare for all? A space for all my niggas to be niggas? I’m sure on top of a mountain somewhere there is a collection of us made god and may I be so bold to say, there their black is allowed to crack in peace⸺in pieces into the hands of their own loved ones who gust into a darkening red sky and they all rest as stars; by this I mean they all get to rest: the living, the dead, their names never swirled on a baton of tongues, I might just be optimistic about what it could look like if we didn’t know anything but the dark, didn’t know why we reach for the light.
Jason B. Crawford (They/He)was born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine is out through Variant Lit. Their second chapbook Twerkable Moments is due from Paper Nautilus Press in 2021. Their debut Full Length Year of the Unicorn Kidz will be out in 2022 from Sundress Publications.
Sara’s mouth had hair growing out of the inside. It grew out of her throat and organs and sprouted into a beard or braid (when she braided it) that never let her lips touch. Her breathing was muffled and eating was impossible. She made the decision to cut it when she got very very hungry. After she did she had to continue cutting and shaving her mouth and tongue every day. Deep in her throat it still grew and eating was still so, so difficult. One of Sara’s lovers told her that she gave the best head they had ever encountered. Sara always liked that.
Never Angeline North is an author, artist, and bisexual jew living in Olympia, Washington. She is the author of a number of creative works that are available in book form, such as Sea Witch (published in 2020 by Inside the Castle Press), Careful Mountain (2016 by Civil Coping Mechanisms Press), Sara or the Existence of Fire (2014, Horse Less Press), and Wolf Doctors (2014, Artifice Books). Many of her various projects are collected at her website undying.club and the rest are lost to time, and that’s okay.
We open at sunrise. The stage is set under flashing lights. A theatre where the convict always dies. The intercom buzzes, spastic: surrender & you’re lurching within the construct, flesh bruised by the white bars.
Soon, the hourglass will crack. Patiently, I teeth this cardboard street. On cue,
I explode into one million tremolos.
I burn the walls
with my fingertips.
I raid the Capitol.
The puppets flail on their axes,
their strings caught in the machinery.
They jerk, spitting out
rubber bullets and paint bullets and
real bullets and splaying open their wooden mouths.
It starts to snow.
My eyes burn, because it is ash.
Applause flutters through the darkened room. On the stage,
the bones are all the same colour.
The crowd calls: Give us more
Emma Miao is a 16-year-old poet from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is a commended Foyle Young Poet of the Year 2019, and her work appears in Atlanta Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and The Emerson Review, among others. She is the winner of the F(r)iction Poetry Contest 2020, and a finalist for the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize 2020.
In the night, our stepfather has us line up on the patio. Barefoot on the cold concrete, we are here to see him kill a chicken. This will mature us into adults. It’s good for us to know about death, he told our mother, and so she does not stop him.
He wrings the chicken’s neck to teach us how we will one day twist the necks of our enemies, or our children. Then he cleaves the head from the body. He looks at us meaningfully, although—meaning what?
I am standing on a rock almost small enough to be inconspicuous. I’m afraid to shift, so I continue to smother the pebble with my big toe, and it bites me back in self-defense. Now our stepfather has begun roughly plucking the bird, tearing out handfuls of feathers at random, action uninhibited by strategy. He throws them everywhere. Blood droplets fly with them and land on the white outdoor furniture. Two drops land by my sister’s foot. A feather sticks in my brother’s hair.
We will not eat the chicken. Later we will go inside, and our stepfather will light the corpse on fire in a child-grave-sized hole he dug in the backyard. We, the children, will go to bed. We will sleep and wake up and eat something that is not the bird, and so on, and so forth, and on and on, etc.
Morgan Bennett is currently based in Austin, Texas, where they spend their time writing and studying film. Their work has appeared in, or will soon appear in, YA Review Network, gloworm press, and Black Ink Fiction. Their work has previously been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
