Author:

Creation Story

bury your girlhood in the backyard,
underneath the lilacs and 
snap peas. say no prayers for it,
hope it is laid to rest and will
not follow you home. build the memory 
of your father teaching 
you how to shave on a sunday
morning, the way the sun filtered 
through the blinds and dust. stroke
the razor down a smooth cheek
and do not cry. do not stop
to mourn your stillborn boyhood,
you have missed enough.
walk home alone at night,
avoid the hovering streetlights,
leave the pepper spray unopened, 
laugh off the worried phone calls.
you—a boy,
impenetrable as an era,
stalking home defiantly,
will cause your own trauma 
this time. check the spread 
of your legs on buses, the
bristles of hair on your legs
and chin. when the
whitegirl on the street runs 
when you ask for directions,
say nothing. dig up the memory
of your mother showing you 
how to thread a needle and sew
your lips shut before the 
hurt escapes. re-form your body 
as a fist. re-form the part of
you that aches and cover it
with spit and menthols.
when your father says
he has never known a boy
like you, tell him you learned
your own creation myth. tell him
you cannot pull from dust 
so you have to make due with
what is leftover—the burned
easter dresses, the mustache
left in its infancy, the layers of
flannel baptized in sweat
year-around. from this you emerge 
stumbling, not a not as a man
but a mimic malformed, 
composed of pink ribs and 
plastic sinew, half-boy,
half-girl, all of you 
new and raw around
the edges, hurtling towards
whatever will have you
whatever looks like home
when you’re beaten enough
to squint.

 

Levi Cain is a gay Black poet who was born in California, raised in Connecticut, and currently lives in Massachusetts. Their work has been shortlisted for Brain Mill Press’ 2019 National Poetry Month contest, as well as nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Their first chapbook, dogteeth. will be available from Ursus Americanus Press in 2020. You can find them on Instagram and Twitter @honestlyliketbh.

TELL MY MOTHER I NEED A NEW NAME

Once, she told me that I came gliding in like a summoned spirit from the pit of prophecy, black-eyed, skin the color of burning bark, born to the depth of winter, at the dying of the light, born to the in-between, part exit and part entrance, pain wider than the hollow moon, breath as warm as fury, blood rich with poison. 

She called me half-dead.
That’s the miracle, she said. 

I’m aware I’m a palimpsest; destruction is tethered to my paltry DNA. 

She wants solid print to skim over but I have only traces. 

Once I was whole and perfect, entirely tangible and real.  Now I’m a mix of rumor and myth, practically unseen. Most of me has been redacted. And I can’t pronounce what was lost. But I feel the emptiness between things, between then and now, between her and I.

I reach for something in her silence and her silence reaches back.  

I know she wants to hear a story made up of graceful curves and smooth transitions but I can’t do tidy storytelling with so many potholes wrecking my body. 

I have only the name my rejection has given me and when the vowels of my name come crawling out of her mouth, I want to flinch. I remember the first time I picked up a pair of scissors and decided to cut myself free. I remember the first time I tried to lay down inside a new pronoun. 

I never felt that stark line of liberation press so close to my throat.

 

Jaisha Jansena is a writer, multimedia artist, and Academy of American Poets college prize-winner from Cincinnati, Ohio. Find their work in Luna Luna Magazine, Burning House Press, and at jaishajansena.com.

AMADEUS VU

               Who are you, who are you,
                            I am a man who will become God.
                                           No, not Christ—who is Christ to a man raised Buddhist? 
                                           God, 

                             God, I say, in the same way some people say Human,
                                           it is a species; some people become Human,
               I will become God.

                                                                                                     I am a learned man,
                                                                                                                                   (or mostly a man),
                                                                                    but there are things even I disdain to know.

A snake once said,
            The kingdom of god is within you
because you ate it.^*

                                                                                                                So I’ll eat the kingdom of god.
             What else could you call the folk who live on this earth?

    

CELESTIAL MACHINA:
A LOVE LETTER FROM AMADEUS VU

I. FULL FATHOM FIVE,
             six feet under,
                             I wonder, I wonder what I would’ve turned out like,
                                           had my parents’ hearts been full of spite,
                                                          instead of nothing for me, nothing. 

II. I want to be honest with you, Severin, can we be honest?
            If you can tell me the truth. Plain and simple.
I am not plain, and I am not simple, and–
            You are not honest. Try for me, just try. 
                        Just once.

III. I never had the chance to be honest.
                                                                                                                   IV. I was fed and watered until
                                                                                                                   the fathomless age of five, at which
                                                                                                                   I had a bag of raw potato, a single 
                                                                                                                   tomato, and flour from the mill.

                                                               If I couldn’t figure out how to eat that, I wouldn’t eat at all.
                                               I was not alone, but I would be the only one to take the fall.

Even still, even still,
               I wonder what it would’ve been like,
                                              had I not been a knife
who developed a taste for–
                                                                                           Meet me for dinner dear, the usual place?
                                                                                                         Never fear–you need not worry about what 
                                                                                                                        that bitch said about you.

                                                                                           Except it was true, it was always true.
And it was always being said.

Of course we won’t take a child to a restaurant.
No, no, not even a child we want,
And I was not that child. 

My sister was.
                             My sister was cherubic, 
                                                           and I wanted to love her,
                                                                                        I wanted to love her more than I loved myself,
so I could see what my parents saw,
instead of something I wanted
to rip red, raw,
                                                              but of course, I didn’t.
                                                                             LOVING WAS A SONG I NEVER LEARNED,
                                                                                   loving was a task I felt unearned.

V. And I never knew it until I met you, Severin Lacandola.
My lingering fetter, this is my love letter:
                                                                                                                                               I See you.

   

A FAIRY ETHERIZED UPON A TABLE

[CN: Suicide attempt]

I. Medicine is not a place where the ill can thrive.

              Only the strong survive. 

                             Pity he couldn’t meet the demands.
                                                          That man had the Lord’s hands.
(Lord, what Lord—
               I am my own,
                              and any Lord of yours,
                                            means little much,
And it is such 
that I am: 
                             Lord of the Butterflies, 
                                           Lord of the Moths-Who-Have-Eyes,
                                                                        I am WEAK+DIVINE.
                                                                                                                                    Believe it or not,
                                                                                                                     I will take what is mine.

II. I died once in the hospital.

They cut inside of me,
Just to see.

Something kept blurring their imaging, they’d still  
                       not gotten used to medicine without machine, 
                                                                              instead being forced to rely
                                              on Celestial 
                                                               Machina,
                                                                            Amadeus Ex, 
                                                                                                           They liked to say in medical school.

I would date: Ravens, Stags, Beetles, 
               really anyone that could wheedle
their way into my eye.

I would be perfectly kind,
but I couldn’t conceal
               which part deigned to dine

on the most forbidden fruit.

They knew better not to root
                              inside the sublime.

III. Hands sloshing through 
            milkliver,
                           goldgut,
                                         silkstomach,

all of it a liquid,
               shining like mercury,

Couldn’t help but to take it.
How were they supposed to know 
I wouldn’t make it?
                                           The lovers knew.
Unlike the surgeons on the operating table. 
My death, they’d say, was just a fable.

IV. Do not presume to ask me why.
              Like the cat, I have nine times to die.

            I had used one already, as a boyling,
strange thing,
            Oh, he will only misfortune bring.
                           And once declared, so I brought it.
            Foolish of my parents,
                                         to ever have fought it.
Unlike my parents,
My sister loved me.
                No matter how many times I led her into the woods–
more than nine, let’s leave it at that–
                she would never cry, and she would always come back.

                              The woods behind the house,
                                                                               little her, like a louse,
                                                                                             were ever-blooming
                              in shades of rose, forget-me-not, and lavender,
                                                and I would tell her, Let’s pick some bluebell,
                                                                                             Let’s see what the fairies sell,
                                                                                             but in her life, she never saw a fairy.
                                                Am I the fortunate creature,
                                                                                           or is she?
                              Me, oh my, oh me.      

              Just as I was determined to leave her behind,
                             Mother and I would always find
                             her in the same ring of iridescent mushrooms,
                                                                             in front of the same luminescent tree,
                                            that was never the same tree,
                                            but she and I were not you and me,

Severin Lacandola,
Neither of us then could See. 

The fairies tried to eat her once.
               It was their gift. It was their Hunt.
               And every time they fattened her on
                             goblin fruit, they gave her the gift
                                             of haruspicy, a better gift
                                                                                                                                                    than you or we
                                                                                                                                     could fathom. The gift
                                                                                                                                     of divinity.

IV. Diviner Lacondola,
             Tell me:
                            Do you see where this is going?                    
Amadeus, you don’t have to–

              I say they tried,
                            because they didn’t.

                             V. After the Wild Hunt, 
                                                         it’s a celebration.
But the killing blow
               is a cessation
of sound.

                When I reached the fairy mound,
I’d caught a breath of silence,
and a spray of blood–

               It was everywhere, the flood
of it covering cheek and face,
gown and lace,

                               And even the leaves alone,
             they were not spared this own
Horror, I thought then.

                                           I wouldn’t, now.
Amadeus, don’t–

                                                                                    I SAW THE FAIRY PUT HER LIVER
                                                                                                 INSIDE OF HIS MOUTH,
                                                                                                              AND THEN WITH A SHOUT,

I ate it.

VI. I ate nothing she could live without.
                            and I died for the first time that night.
                                                                                                                                      If it had taken,
                                                                                                       it would have been without
                                                                                        The Fairy Sight.
I wouldn’t have seen what it’s like
to find the green.
                                                                                        I wouldn’t have seen the world or its wonders,
                                                                                        eyemoth, 
                                                                                                       mothlily, 
                                                                                                                        lilyhound,
                                                                                           my flesh sundered 
                                                                                                                        in two, for this,
for you.

VII. The time on the table had been
                                             Time Three.

                                                                                                            The second time was me.
VIII. DO NOT FORGIVE ME THIS.
             DO NOT FORGIVE ME FOR WHAT I’VE DONE SINCE.
                                                                                                                       I DO NOT REGRET 
                                                                                                                                     TAKING POWER.
I DO NOT REGRET 
              THE WAY I DEVOUR
                            THE NEWLY DEAD,
                                         THE DEAD WITH HEADS,

                                                                                               THE DEAD WHO FOUGHT TO LAUGH
                                                                                                                                              IN MY STEAD.
I DO NOT REGRET TAKING POWER.
                                                                                                                   I regret only that you had to see it.

IX. A bird is a bird is a worm,
                                           upon the firmament of the kingdom of heaven.
I hold heavenfirm. 
                                                                     And I will not be the worm.

So you see, Severin, lilylove,
If you’re going to kill me,

Remember that you are the hound:

AND IN ME, REDEMPTION CANNOT BE FOUND.

---

^* “Love is choosing, the snake said. /
The kingdom of god is within you / because you ate it.”
— Margaret Atwood, “Quattrocento”

         

Xuan Nguyen is a writer and artist who does music as FEYXUAN. They focus on the intersections between transgender identity, divinity + monstrosity, and stigmatized mental and physical health. They consider the creative process to be one of making mirrors. When not writing, drawing, or producing music, they can be found hanging out with their princess of a Siamese cat, drinking cold Viet coffee, or wondering what it would take to make a work like Revolutionary Girl Utena. They can be reached through their website at feyxuan.com or on Twitter @feyxuan.

Different Nourishment
01
ritual ritual ritual

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Lichen is a Cherokee artist from California that identifies as ᎠᏎᎩ ᎠᏓᏅᏙ (twospirit). Straddling a line strung between magical realism and weird fiction, Lichen operates in the realms of comics, audio engineering, and videogame design, working to inspire a decolonized future. They are on Twitter at @ritualdumpster, and their projects can be found at ritualdumpster.tumblr.com.

state of the union

like any good American, I pull my tattoos on each morning
and double knot my neckties. chew chipped paint from the walls.
chant curses for the landlord two cities over. I’ve been working
on a manuscript. it’s a living art piece where I scream my name
into a shoebox until my throat gives out. so far, it’s a hit.
I’m pouring the news out from the bottom of my cereal bowls.
can somebody please turn down the brightness? can someone please
focus the spotlight? I’m mulling over my own syllables again.
if William means protector, is to go by Bill a cowardly act?
I, most certainly, am not Spartacus. turn your attention elsewhere.
retune your channels. if my phone’s really been listening
this whole time then where’s my applause? I’m not in the business
of giving good advice, but blink once if you can hear me.
blink twice if you can’t.

 

despite my best efforts I remain painfully domestic

what’s new in biology? mostly, I’m doing everything I can to not appear heterosexual. but yes, for the record, I could fit a full Barbie up my vagina if I found the right angle. like a vodka-soaked tampon. like, if I wished hard enough, Barbara would slip into my bloodstream and we could forget about this whole genderqueer thing. I’ve never seen Teeth, but someone somewhere did and thought you know, not a bad way to go. is that problematic? my body’s no powerhouse I just chew on glow sticks and talk a big game. I break things but don’t get sentimental. nobody wants to know how the blizzard feels but the power lines, but I’ve got my tongue on your wrist to check your pulse, just in case.

 

Emma William-Margaret Rebholz aka Billy is a nonbinary poet living in Boston. Their work has been recently published by or is forthcoming from Sixth Finch, Glass: a journal of poetry, and Gigantic Sequins. They read for the poetry journal Underblong.

Young Lady on a Bus

America is born on an ancient Indian burial mound.
Aren’t we all?

Young lady on a bus reading
popcorn, like cornbread and eating corn
was invented by white people when they discovered Indians
didn’t know what to do with it.

In mysteriously cultivated gardens
– you might think someone turned this soil – 
the bus goes down, downtown, sad.

Aren’t we all?

“There’s a green one,” someone says
dun dun dundundun and someone else
takes a puff hidden in their cupped palms,
and says, “When did all our moms start working?” like this is new.

But our lady on the bus
– how’s that? –
easy as a ten year thing going
out of bounds and heading out of town as fast as the bus seat will take her
is farther away any time.

Aren’t we all?

“Send tits!” somebody says
from the cab of a truck going the other way
slow back into America.

Give it this: What America can’t sex up it will parcel
and sell
or haven’t you noticed what you pay now, someone will ask you to pay on again tomorrow?

Aren’t we all?

 

The Purple Manner

Have you seen the well-designed door fob of the purple manner
in a thousand and four fractures of showy facet, hidden
in eleven countries of men’s men and lady’s women
Until it stops?

Hey cos hey cos
Hey cos you only gave us rights cos

Queer bars tend to the side entrance
Either by design of luck

Have you opened a door with the back of your shoulder
turned away to open and enter, kept your back to the door
your eye to the cautious street that clearly doubts you and
Given it all? I

either by luck of design
more hungry babies
dance across these floors every night

And to see it all sedated now erased how they do when they
erase everything you well someone worked for isn’t
what is important not who worked what but someone
Some someone did?

Hey cos hey cos
Dancing up these floors every night

In eleven cautious countries of worker’s rights
In eleven cautious countries of worker’s rights
In eleven other countries in event nights
In a thousand and four hidden fractures of showy facet

 

Travis Hedge Coke is a writer, editor, and teacher, working with Along the Chaparral to story interred veterans at the Riverside National Cemetery. The former writer of the Hugo-longlisted Pop Medicine column, they currently write for the weekly Patricia Highsmash, for Comic Watch.

ana-    or up against

cages are not useful      whereas caves are
or crates

                Weimaraner 
                                curls

                                her long



                                body
into the plastic    it might be a womb

                                                                a dream    scape


what can fire do to brick    sesame 
                                                                oil?
                                               cave paintings    sculptures altars
              our sleeping bags    chrysalides
unzipped    
to touch skin    rock    simultaneous

“what do you know about a U-Haul?” you ask
              “I don’t
              I’m thinking about urges”

                                denoting a specific type of scene
urge to rush    to unbutton to sever    to stay

“come back, I want to live together”
can it be earnest?    “can I still hit?”


hollow witch
square pages    against my better judgement

what if these two lovers are new to each other?

this is what a breast tastes like                face of a waterfall
                                wet with algal networking
this is what a breast tastes like
              I find you in the world music section
              release another record that crosses a mountain

every bound body unbound
sweaty worker    woven basket of sorghum
                                (radish/reddish)


                                                                   it is an opening


              the row


              a thread runs through
yanking westward

                                            this is the territory of the creek

topography of a forest             appropriated

                                            (name/remembrance)




I am from the middle


                                                                            you are from the middle



                                            many acres away
and years

there must be imagination in bondage

the way a tooth might be holed from gum    paper stuffed
                in the gaping place

                                            love notes    receipt of fare a bill

you sing to me after the sex

 

Jaye Elizabeth Elijah is a visual artist, writer, orbweaver, and the Nightboat Books Fellow. Their words and images have appeared in Polly Magazine and Rookie Magazine, and were recognized by the Cincinnati Arts Overture Awards. Jaye Elizabeth is pursuing a BA in Literary Studies at The New School, and lives in Brooklyn.

Refraction, Also Berries

 

I.

This poem is a collaboration between the author and eir computer; a Markov chain process run on the author’s previous poetry manuscripts and the outputs manually sorted and handpicked. It is thus an interaction between two stochastic processes: one on the author’s hard disk and one in the author’s brain.

The author confesses having used this technique in previously published poems. Speculation is welcome and endorsed.

II.

Never veins.

You need the simple, curled up insects
  your words await
in the vehicle 
I would watch for heat, leaving who I am —

I cause pebbles
Please describe thwarted
Do not lore.

They ask me if I am turning
   increasing everything.

You can cry
    help;
      living weapon,
         alas, it is! all right to see flowers are possible;
edifices
in the entrance of your body, and the Academy.

Overhead
   it uncoils
to Talmud, transition.

We live and the fatigue inside this
is marking a home.

III.

Covered outputs creak.

I paint the luminous shame —
can you react
and whisper with a knife in hand?

I wonderstand — you don’t know our mindset
    and if I could, I would —

why, come!
I am unknown.
All tears for the magic;
and for I am you,
would you do it?

IV.

We are still material,
it’s par for the course.

Suppose it’s for the recognition;
I am an invision display,
I am what a jellyfish is producing
and some kind of dimension gate
blessing you with words of speech.

                We are less, we are real,
                               we constantly move away from pain.

 

Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns), טומטום, and an immigrant to the US. E is a winner of the Lambda award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, and a finalist for the Hugo and Locus awards. Eir debut poetry collection Algorithmic Shapeshifting was published by Aqueduct, and eir debut short story collection The Trans Space Octopus Congregation—currently a Lambda award finalist—was published by Lethe Press, both in 2019. You can find Bogi talking about books at bogireadstheworld.com, and on various social media as @bogiperson.

Making It To Taste

It’s late October at the house just outside of campus. From where you’re lying on the couch, the party is loud, the room is soft around the edges, and you haven’t felt this okay in weeks. Only one person called you “she” today and there’s banana-flavored Laffy-Taffy on the table by the drinks. No one else likes banana-flavored Laffy-Taffy so you get to have as many as you want.

“Being mentally ill fucking sucks,” your friend complains from a nearby beanbag chair, drunk.

“For real,” you agree, because being mentally ill fucking sucks.

“Fuck the establishment, maaaan!” someone ends up saying, sing-song giggling, because it’s easier to manage than: ​higher education doesn’t give a fuck about us, huh?

It makes you smile. Most things people like you are scared about turn into jokes. They kind of have to.

You’re tired of being scared all the time.

See, you’re someone who tends to notice things—lots of things. More things than most.

They’re things worth being scared of and not worth being scared of, alike. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which with all the things you notice. Things like the way she’s looked at you since you made out at the party last New Year’s Eve.

It’s nice, being wanted. Nice but dangerous. Like making a drink to taste after you’ve already had a few. You don’t exactly trust yourself.

You’re too sad and scared and lonely to trust yourself with things that make you feel good.

She’s sitting on the couch across from you and you are falling sideways into the cushions, snickering. You’re doing that thing again; you’re letting too much slip. You wonder how many jokes you can make about handcuffs and riding crops before she realizes it’s one of those ​things​. Something serious that you joke about to make it less powerful. Less important.

It occurs to you, drunk with a face full of couch, just how much you are always holding back because of fear. And it’s ​stupid,​ you think. You know her. She listens with tilted-head interest, is so considerate it makes you ache, but your biology has you hardwired for terror at every turn.

Later, in the dark after more people have left, you slur an apology—a confession—into the soft shoulder of her sweater.

“Sorry ‘m not more, like, physically affectionate when ‘m sober.” You’re holding her hand and it feels wonderful. Dangerous. “Just nervous all the time. Doesn’t mean I don’ like you.”

Affection is something that enters and exits you in corkscrews.

You want her to touch your cheek, to stroke (maybe pull) your hair. To tell you that you are good. You don’t trust yourself to believe it on your own. She has never called you by a word or pronoun you haven’t asked her to, and that kind of trust is a rare commodity for someone like you.

You feel small with her hand on your knee. It’s a good kind of small. A safe kind of small.

“That’s okay,” she says.

You’re not sure how to do anything besides want from inside your own head. If you try to tell her any of this you fear it might all come rushing out at once: your selfishness, your off-center desires, your need, your ​need​.

There’s so much you want. There is so much you don’t trust yourself to have.

Fuck. Most people probably don’t engage in this level of self-sabotage​.

The two of you go out into the backyard and join the lazy, wobbling circle of people passing around a joint. It’s cold enough that your left hand ends up inside her right coat pocket. A handful of minutes later you hear yourself, clumsy, rambling out your entire worldview, zig-zagging around stories you’re not allowed to tell until there is snow on the ground. ​Listen to yourself​, you think. ​You ​knew​ you would say too much​. 

High and a little drunk and you still can’t stop cringing at your constantly leaking edges. You hate yourself for being so ​much​ sometimes. ​Here​, you want say—want to offer her the loose ends of your marionette strings—​let me not be a person for a little while​.

She is soft in her words and her eyes and it makes you hope so much that it aches.

You have a theory that maybe this is why so many people like you are into BDSM. Maybe they don’t want to be scared of feeling good. Maybe they just want to be able to trust other people for a change.

The two of you head back into the house where almost every room is dark now. You stumble, laughing, and follow her like a lost puppy. She invites you to sleep in her bed instead of on the couch. It’s so much easier to just say “yes” than to have asked. You wish she would ask you other things you would say “yes” to.

That night you dream of autumn leaves. Of banana Laffy-Taffys and pot smoke. Of leather cuffs around your wrists. When you wake, it is to find her asleep beside you with a hand on your stomach and a leg over yours.

You don’t trust yourself to do anything but take her hand.

 

Zoë Johnson is a queer transgender non-binary writer living in mid-Michigan. They are an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and a creative writing MFA candidate at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Their fiction has been shortlisted for PRISM International‘s 2019 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the 2018 Lascaux Review Prize for Short Fiction. Work of theirs has been published in PULP Literature, Eastern Iowa Review, Plentitude Magazine, Sonora Review Online, and been anthologized in the Lascaux Prize Vol. 6, as well as Public Poetry‘s 2019 contest finalist anthology “ENOUGH.” Their work is forthcoming bilingually in The Polyglot #6, and as part of “Trans Bodies, Trans Selves” from Oxford University Press in 2021. When not writing, Zoë spends their time doting on their cat Strawberry, learning their tribal language of Anishinaabemowin, and getting far too invested in podcasts.

I’M GONNA LOOK FOR MY BODY, YEAH

for all i know, i am
a museum of vacant stares
i pronounce myself                         little nigga of the void

a they fulla    sockets—
more    holes    than i know what to do
with.                                    find a bitch
slipping in                        + out    theyself                         for
all            i know                       i am a mumble rap
i study any

skt skt

for evidence       i allegedly     was once here
in a          body                                so far removed
from diaspora    i almost      forgot    that it       is there                                 a  theoretical    mass
        i have      yet    to    witness             i    was      not    made
for    the    eye                                  to capture             nor the tongue to
      comprehend    for    the    roof    of    the
                               mouth assigned                         mouth                                       at                          birth

at    night    i      crawl      in    through      my      lips

                                              +     swallow thousands of me

 

kiki nicole is a Black, Queer, and Non-binary multimedia artist and poet. They’ve received invitations to fellowships such as Pink Door Writing Retreat, The Watering Hole, and Winter Tangerine. kiki hopes to lend a voice for the void in which Black femmes not only exist in plain view, but thrive. Find them at kikinicole.com.