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.
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.
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 2018Lascaux 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.
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.
WE’VE ALL DONE THINGS WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO WITH OUR BODIES
were i to subject my brain to confession the way i do to therapy, perhaps i would begin & end with each of your names the way i know my name has also bookended the list of sins the confessor & i had demanded of our bodies, so i am considering your conflicting doctrine, & how little i know of you except what my hands remember. i’ve been having dreams about you again. in them i consented in your hometown, we ate local berries, i checked a state off my list. but instead i’m hollowed out in the most peculiar sense: filling someone else. i mean i’m having a hard time not leaving (again). i’m eating until we’re both crying. i’m sober until i’m not. my symptoms are more honest than i am: stress- related paranoia ongoing feelings of emptiness impulsive behavior risky behavior success sabotaging behavior: most of the time before people know me the way i need them to, they G–gle me, & i mean they can: my mug- shot(s) my legal name my lovers who oscillate between prose, who disappear vilified & are brought back to my mouth with docu- mented [redacted] admissions. forgive me, g_d of a war that was supposed to make sense. you & someone you hate say y’all share the same origin myths so i don’t know if i believe in your bed- room anymore. i watched you undo the decorations. how you walked out of yourself & into some- one’s bad archetype. O, g_d of giving up the punchline: send someone else to hol[y/d] me. give me law & liquor: a fifth of each: with which to confess where i hid the rest of the ________.
GOOD MORNING DELAWARE VALLEY METROPOLITAN AREA I’M CRYING ABOUT BEING DISABLED AGAIN
i name each ailment after a cryptid because i like the idea of my limbs given excuses for their magic acts: finally reasons for immobility: a defiant belief against my body’s traditional connotation: how i used to split night-pavement in combat boots: before i forgot how to hold my breath: i swam a mile every other day: now my nerves bulge: my hip disappears: a pain accused of being imagined: an improbable monster: there is no science to explain why my skin bloats: like that: as a child my spine was scrutinized for a scoliosis experiment: i expected to hold a booking number during my mugshot(s) i mean: let me blister into a joke but no, now, every doctor’s measurement feels like a driver’s license seance: pull whoever my bones belonged to before all this shit happened out of my phlemed-up throat and ask them to state their age and address for the camera: i promise i am still angry about how much childhood i lost to doctors’ disappointing hands and still, now, when i wake up surgery after surgery in only more debt not less pain: i can remember not being disabled the way i remember being happy– i’m not sure i could tell you— but i must have felt it: the root word of “cryptid” is “hidden”: so that’s what i call this invisibility: how last month the stairs didn’t matter and now i am crying: at the top of them separated from something i need, again: or an amorphous mythology: how can i expect anyone to believe me: amateur cryptozoologist of my own body: when i can’t tell you how i got here: when science can’t either: when all i know is one day i woke up knowing: something had gotten lost: inside of me–
L. R. Bird is a disabled transsexual cryptid from the Jersey Shore. As a slam poet they toured and competed internationally and hosted prelim/final stages and open mics. They have work in the 2017 Bettering American Poetry anthology and pieces from their most recent chapbook INVENTION OF THE MOUTH (Dream Pop Press, 2019) have been nominated for multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. They want to hear about your favorite bridge. birdpoet.github.io
i wear the name you give me for / three years before it thins out threadbare / which is to say for three years / i let you call me a moonshard / a toxin-bright bloom / forktongued and lovely / poison-flowering snakeplant / jade slipped cold into a colourless throat / lined by ghosts with ink-stamped faces / smiling tight-lipped to hide the teeth / call me sovereign of little sorrows / time-lapse of ungrowth / call me anything / but a treasure again / i stole the jadestone from my name and / sold it for gold / melted it down into rivers / and like the drip of mountaintop snow / one day it will all be swallowed / by the ocean / all of its mouths opening and closing fishlike / around their own once-names / forgotten —
ghost-town girl
bright in the way of cerussite: too soft to be metal-touched. all flash & glimmer, saying goodbye once every year you’ve known her, the routine of the runaway act something safer to measure by than a nebulous new year. don’t worry what my hands will do. in every story i’m the only one who winds up with an open throat.
one time a girl with signal-fire hair knelt over me on slick-glowing floor, laced me back up & promised to do it again long as i needed it. & next time her back was turned i asked someone to burn down the building.
this is the damnation of the rabbit-heart. i don’t know if those ever want anything more than to see the warmth of home last beyond your own meaning, to live a little longer, to not freeze in the field as the shadow of death falls from above. it’s not that i think i had wings in the womb, or that they snapped off at the first touch of this world’s air but i should’ve come out something that makes its home high instead of tied landbound, left lovesick for flight.
don’t you dare give me to the ground. i’ll come back just to tell you you’ll never be forgiven.
Quinn Lui is a Chinese-Canadian student who has been described as 1) mostly made up of caffeine and bees and 2) dedicated to being a menace. Their work has appeared in Occulum, Synaesthesia Magazine, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere, and they are the author of the micro-chapbook teething season for new skin (L’Éphémère Review, 2018). You can find them @flowercryptid on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, or sharing a fire escape with raccoons.
I think the worst kind of suffering is the kind that can’t be named. Not that I’m looking for a term to put parameters around the feeling. No—I’m saying that it seems like adding any existing name onto it simply diminishes how pervasively I feel it. After all, who would believe me if I tell them there’s a force even stronger than myself that’s controlling me and limiting my lifestyle? I’m sure people would be quick to brush that away as victim mentality, because they’d be scared of confronting the possibility that they might be similarly conditioned/controlled. When they see me seemingly “surrendering” “autonomy” when I declare it’s something more complicated than pure choice—they want to make up things like—I’d die sooner, I’m mad and I deserve to be sent away, I’d never survive reality. Even the ones who idealize me would probably say something like “she was never meant for this world….” And yes, with the misgendering in their eulogy, because somehow if I’m the ‘muse’ which has inspired them to rethink what art means, I’m surely ‘womanly’ and ‘submissive’ and ‘motherly’ and ‘nurturing.’ Well tell you what—you’re just not going to find that long-lost mother you’ve been looking for when you look into my eyes.
Just let me describe my ideal holiday, I wake up, getting to contemplate for hours in bed, splash water onto my face, scrub a little too much soap all around the corners of my face (wiping all the marks of yesterday away). If my hair feels sticky, I’d tie it backwards, so none of it touches my face. I’d stare into the mirror and try looking into my own eyes (yep, that one time—somebody told me my eyes seemed bottomless. Till this day, I wonder if it’s a compliment or curse). And this whole time, I’d be naked. And I’d pass by my wardrobe, and I’ll look at all my available, clean clothes to wear. And I’ll lie down on my sofa, still naked. And I’d contemplate there for another few hours, before I go back to bed, and lie down there naked contemplating till night falls.
I cannot tell you, how good it feels, to be absolutely naked the whole day.
It’s a pity that I’m naturally distrusting of other human beings, especially afraid of what might happen when people see each other naked, I don’t want to be on the playing field of intentions. I want to just lie down, naked, knowing for sure the next second I could still lie down there, untouched by anyone else. This doesn’t mean that I hate the company of others, it just means that I enjoy being naked alone more, and that is when I am completely free from being gendered.
I would put on dark-colored baggy clothes, flip-flops, and let the whole world witness my bare forehead as I walk down the stairs to pick up delivered food, and I wouldn’t have to care what the delivery people might think of me. All they care for would be my money, all I care for would be my food. No harm done in the process, I wouldn’t miss a tip, they wouldn’t call me Miss or Missus, or even think about going to bed with me.
I’d sit on my bed, get a pair of chopsticks, and eat, naked, sitting on my bed like some raw animal living in a cave, and I wouldn’t have to worry about being seen by anyone. I can still head out the door next day, and nobody would think I’d be performing like an utter animal at home, as long as I try to guess what they’d like. Dress and talk in a way that seems scholarly, they won’t care about how naked and wordless I’d like to spend my days. It’s like I’m paying a fine to society to allow me to be an animal again. It’s like I’m paying for protection so no other animal could theoretically come by and hump me without my consent. It’s like I’m playing a huge game, being tested on how much I could deviate from my natural senses, so that I could “prove my worth.” For a while, the games might be tolerable, but I’d never let it get to a point where they can make me forget that I’m priceless, to begin with. Hey, I’m a lab rat with standards.
If I told you this is the level of comfort, the kind of home that I’m looking for, the type of acceptance I need from you, would you be willing to take me as I am? My definition of love doesn’t require you to look at me like this every second. Hell, you could simply love me for the way I am when I’m out on the streets. But if I told you I need solitary spaces where I can be totally naked and sleeping, as much as I can, to recharge myself from the rest of the world’s activities, can you bear with me? Would you be so sure when you declare love for me? Or would you still find it necessary to penetrate through me approximately two times a week, to sustain your definition of love? What other conditions might you have? Determining the shape of my fringe, or how much I talk about politics, or if I’m wearing enough floral patterns to keep your friends from calling you gay? But if I make you feel so ashamed, why would you even want anything to do with me in the first place? Anybody’s first instinct to touch the rebellious is definitely sparked by the hunger for freedom. You can lie to me, but you can’t lie to yourself.
And I sincerely invite you to come by naked and cuddle with me, because somehow with you, I’d actually be interested to know what kind of natural chemistry could be, or just how specialized human anatomy could get. If I touch you here and there, without having any taboos governing which parts of you are to be compared with any other type of bodies. I’ll play with you like you’re the most unique bunch of radical particulars I’ve ever seen, because the way you are arranged is definitely irreplaceable, a work of art you’ve groomed ever since the moment you were born. And I’m all eyes for it.
I just hope you’d have your eyes locked with mine, too.
許清 is a puzzle trying to solve itself. A Jade Greenstone, 口水多過浪花 (saliva and speeches thick like ocean waves), craving for clarity and fluidity. This Buddhist/Taoist nonbinary creature’s moon is in Gemini and is usually spot active after midnight. Either lying in bed meditating and quantum-leaping for days as self-care or going ALL THE WAY e.g. currently writing an original collection of trilingual sound poems with self-drawn illustrations, self-composed music, which will be self-published. Instagram: @jadeandwaves.
01. mother mary’s yonder light breaks through closed lips, closed door policy to your aching betrayal you cast me up upon scathing religion an idol to the glory of your own recognition
underfoot, seize my consumption and supposed conformity. a fever scrambling to take hold, a scourge that passes over your already martyred body, marked for preemptive death. —
02. encountering you in the deadest of nights spun my control far away and so in return vision red i bound myself to the legion of your indecision. in light of your neglect chosen preference became all i had to combat your misdemeanors are you aware? at the way your sickness spreads, infiltrates me, my darkest night hovering over you. dark heart of exclamation in the way you relive my own reviled actions in the raise of your palm to caress the spot i struck against your cheek …
what am i supposed to do about your aching body upon mine and aching soul leaving – once again i won’t tolerate you —
03. it seems we are covered in love it seems we are hesitant with love we are crafted of such flesh that we sway with the moon, seek from atop highest being true belief. sentience. i meditate upon an oral fixation and sob my holy words into your bust, sanctified crucifixiones padre de mis oraciones, amor de los santos, muerte de mi corazón.
i forgive you, my highest honor in lieu of sanctified admiration that i can’t ordain. —
04. thrash and shake through envious eyes, another notch upon the wall says you’ve found a kind not unlike your worst moment ilk of age. shown your latest am i supposed to be impressed? is it impressive that i am, an admission received by the inside of myself where all good opinions go to rest? —
05. tired of your loaded questions, tired of the forced assumption, the late nights i never tire of enough to admit burning a hole in the cosmic pocket of your desire, wondering how much of a candle you can burn when it comes down to ascetic derivatives of pleasure and self-loathing, a double sided coin quite unfamiliar to you, shocking, that you wouldn’t see —
06. am i supposed to die here and just take it ripping my hair out of my scalp for you you always wanted more than you had so i learned to adapt and take it.
toast to cliches and a dark past
part one.
you lock eyes across a room and lightning strikes, where have i seen you before, what will we do to each other unspool your brain segments of film scratched under a microscope in hopes of finding common ground amongst the assemblage, wreckages of our self-desecrated bodies alaid with treasure, deceit. hoarding our own illness, mechanisms to shape oneself into an appropriate vessel
my soft skin meets yours and under my calluses i feel your skin prickle, peach fuzz rising to greet me nervous habits expelling themselves a dam breaks. a crack in the structure that never claimed to be secure
peach fuzz of your hands that touch my back so softly i cannot feel just you, small against me, scared like i am an encouragement to be brave
it hurts to look at you in the same sense that it burns the stone column of my throat to lose my breath in your presence.
it scares me to feel, —after growing cold, becoming a pillar of salt so that no one may touch me without losing their grip i want someone to sweep me up so love can destroy me.
// what is unhealthier idealization: an exaltation or obsession: domination both fantasies, one real and one fake and both obscene, potential to fail just as there’s potential to thrive.
in purgatory, paradiso seems sweet enough, like icarus flight capacity wavering. avoiding the screams of the inferno, a way to avoid the memories of past wounds. (skin doesn’t forget so soon. my veins bleed with rage i won’t speak of) maybe this time wings won’t rid themselves of my sallow skin so soon.
part two.
fine tendrils of muscles that keep my neck together still ache from the way i craned over your back as my hands reached for nothingness.
sleeping beside you is a curse when we cannot clasp hands
once is when we are leveled out, sprung from our choices and facing each other. my hand finds yours and you allow me brief respite.
twice is unheard of. disallowed. a black mark on my palm. trouble.
perhaps your lips burn with the curse of my name, perhaps you’re the sort to rue the day of your first bee sting. you don’t look at me, and i can’t blame you. maybe i am the next in the cycle, another obsessive beast, caught in a whirlpool. jaws snapping.
i can only hope you dream of such ultraviolence.
Milena Bee is a gender-fluid chicana poet, artist, and mythologist whose work can be found in publications such as One Report, Truly U Review, and Sad Girl Review. They are the co-founder of All Guts No Glory, a zine-style newsletter. They live in Los Angeles alongside their cat Tangerine, and a number of houseplants. Find them on Instagram @beenymph.
If I was a betting woman I’d lay my money down that you are the kind of boy with a syringe and knife emoji in his Instagram bio trailing numeric string, but I’m not a woman and I’m too broke to bet a goddamn thing, yet certainty is a crop you can sow and reap and savor like the distance from face to fingertip or widow’s peak to the state line or roman candle to patron saint, and I am content for now with the residue of canned rosé and a good water-based lube drying on my bedsheets. Maybe no man is an island, but some queers are peninsulas.
Afterdamp
“When the revolution comes, ur first on guillotine duty,” she texts me in jest, and I am no pacifist, but I do not have the stomach for decapitation, can barely watch when they skin the cadaver in anatomy lab, can only stand to look once mountaintop has been bulldozed off into uncanny valley, overburden now a pink expanse of muscle and nerve hills rolling gentle over organs below. I do not know what this says about me besides that I am capable of misjudging value beyond what I can strip like coal from a seam or coins from empty pockets.
Moonlight Wasting Syndrome
It rains for days, frigid, umbrella-inverting nonsense, and all I can think about is how I want a honeymoon palsy. I want my cuffs so tight they give me a wrist drop. I want to put my queer shoulder to the wheel until it pops from its hull like a black walnut under a truck tire. I want to be something interesting to look at. When the pansies withdraw into the earth I want to go too, want their stems to braid into my brachial plexus. I want the neophyte physicians to look at the fibrous semilunes on my chest and the mercury glass shells around my muscles, and I want to be already dead when the anatomist says “In a real body, everything is softer.” I want to be dead when they call my skinned and gutted remains “she” anyway, toss handfuls of fat into the tissue bin, discuss whether, knowing what they know, they would donate their bodies. And when they are done, they’ll have to give me back, deliver me belly up on a river bed, drunk on formalin and choking on pomegranate seeds. “See you next fall.”
Jasper Kennedy is a medical student by day. Their work has been published in Screen Door Review, Rogue Agent, The New Southern Fugitives, and others. You can find them any given morning snuggling their cats in a blanket cocoon.
recites desire: runic frame (as of trees)—raw bead rhymes their teeth—bone tug, ivy tear— chamber he beauteously / dress it tepid to see they shimmer, hiding her / ram rib tits—heterocountry—hag-cub—bitchwood tune bent weightless—us: fun filth / flat amethyst battlefield— i am manic / naked / answerable—feign hue to yellow cyst / housefly thefts—tree heft warms heart—wrathful thorn neons to dot the god or ash—tin daughter, lend any ply bow / bend it to hunt—(hit)—new, synthetic ruin— an unrewarding calm stings a knighted deer— brittle pewter, holy stone, i gold shut and throw these teeth—a duet—gravel—boyed.
[When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,]
gowns web—herb hysteria—let’s thin flowery then—gaudy bicep—insistent herd—leaf dyed to holy doorway—hunt syrups—doze—given that i swallow debt, let me whorl—feed lard ill breath—they get eye winks—ale husband, why taste harder (fault)—your sheets yell, tan—(nude hyphen)—i knot woe; sinewy, it sees fingernails (limp waters / a hand sea), leather sets, meshes—hewed out virus—debauchery: try a mop or a match—i hot—i lucid—i wonderflush—stiffens: exoskeleton / cum—cuddly human mass—la, sings a boyish brute in his coven—cut—yep, hood him—we want a wren duet / to be shelter / a trans thud / sob / melt—oh, welt / honeyed wife.
[Those hours, that with gentle work did frame]
shadow growth—softer hilt (kneed) / it hurt— the reedy gazelle wove her vow—they eyed me / ate salt—shy i try valley / wept thorn / hid hardware—chiffon, latex, a lacy hurt— in (re)forming i elm—nude—meat: rots / severs— fruited machines—noon herds—hit to wound / hunt / feed—wolves shred / squat—a clay tip— a strawberry—boy head—we seed—even nouns tire—metal tit / sin helmet—no furled snows / no sprawled frills—a lisp / a questioning— eyeteeth wet by a sweatier ebb—cuff turf: name it marrowbone—no errant switch— i fold two twilights: dewy hush / belt hurt— hues—resistible cloths—he wants bitter use.
Artist’s Note:
HUNT: The Anagram Sonnets is a series of sonnets created using an anagramming tool and the source text of Shakespeare’s sonnets to explore the violence and tenderness of kink and queer desire, especially trans and nonbinary desire, as well as the resonance many feel between queerness and the occult/pagan practice and symbolism. The rule I set for myself is that I anagram line-by-line, so each line of my conversion will have the same letters as the same line in the original Shakespearean sonnet.
Trevor Ketner is the author of White Combine: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (The Atlas Review, 2019), Negative of a Photo of Fire (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), and Major Arcana: Minneapolis, winner of the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest judged by Diane Seuss. They have been or will be published in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Best New Poets, New England Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch, Pleiades, Diagram, Memorious, and elsewhere. Their essays and reviews can be found in The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. They hold an MFA from the University of Minnesota and have been awarded fellowships from Poets House and Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. They live in Manhattan with their husband and are the publisher and founder of Skull + Wind Press.
