Author:

i ask when trans day of remembrance is and siri says i don’t know what that is
but i guess i’m the one who 
forgot first. i always hold on a bit 
longer before we all drive home.
in the space between embrace and the 
got home safe! text, i try not to 
remember. i may tempt fate into premature 
loss. 
i nag my love into writing a 
will. i fear if they die before i do i’ll have to pry 
their good name from a mother’s misgenderings. 
i think i am sometimes afraid of how well we
mourn. i lit a candle when every part of me transitioned
from the dead. don’t you know candles can be 
portals? sometimes, i swear 
a funeral flickers in the warm.

 

Jazz Bell (they/ them) is a multimedia artist based in Texas. Their poetry has been published in Muzzle Magazine, Nat. Brut, The Dialogist, just femme & dandy, and elsewhere. Jazz has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. They are a Pink Door alum and Write Bloody Chapbook contest finalist. Learn more about Jazz at jazzbell.me.

says a curly haired young man on the B line to Boston College on the eve
of trans day of remembrance. I am trying
to get to Brighton where my beloved waits, but the train keeps skipping

and the lights blinking out. “Major moves,” he repeats as the brakes
cry for help. I imagine every person I see on the train
could be trans. I imagine they could be harboring this same fear.

So many lost. So many killed. So many misknown.
Now he talks about artificial intelligence. The selfmade intelligence
of every trans person claiming their own right to be

what they are compels me more. 
“I don’t want to wait fifteen years to get there,” he says. I don’t want to wait
fifteen years for an affirmation of life. Fifteen years from now,

will I still hold my beloved all night? The train stops again. The train and I,
we know what it means to falter. To wish the tracks were kinder. “All the people
I gravitate towards are older.” Every trans person who is older than me

is a treasure. I get off the train a stop early because I am afraid of derailment.

 

C.M. Green is a Boston-based writer with a focus on history, memory, gender, and religion. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Full House Literary, Southeast Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Their debut hybrid chapbook, I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg, is out with fifth wheel press in February 2025, and their poetry chapbook Without Instruction is forthcoming from JAKE in 2025. They stand for a free Palestine and encourage you to find tangible ways to do the same. You can find their work at cmgreenwrites.com.

beginning with a line from Megan Fernandes

Every poet has a love affair with a bridge.
Mine was the Brooklyn—of course,

though it wasn’t for anyone’s ghost who floated across
then seemed to wave goodbye as they drowned.

I was in love with the drive to a cramped room 
in the attic floor of a Fort Greene brownstone.

The tin ceiling shimmered with heat as we laid 
naked under her bedsheets, talking, then

not, as the hours deepened. The drive to her
was always calm: after three hours on the highway,

parting Merritt Parkway’s darkness
with my headlights, I’d slide down the side 

of Manhattan by midnight. Mileage mounting
on my dash—hundreds, thousands of miles

covered by a car with a flickering headlight—
I’d glance at the silhouettes of skyscrapers,

the river dotted by ships, lamps on in offices,
bedrooms rented, owned, or borrowed.

In the cool rush of the midnight 
highway, I had the city to myself.

I could have pulled off FDR Drive
and rented one of those rooms. Or

I could have pulled over. I could have
sat in that darkness, my car rocking side 

to side as each truck and semi hissed by.
I could have gotten out and climbed

between the diagonal beams, balanced
on the edge of the bridge and let 

a sea breeze sweep my back. I listened
to the rhythmic thumping of my wheels

rocking each concrete plate as I hurtled
down the highway. I thought of us, still 

breathless, lighting a joint on the windowsill
and sharing it in the dark. I watched the reflections

of the beams rise and fall across the gloss
of my hood. I glanced at the water.

Its countless, shimmering stars. I couldn’t stop 
watching that famous, repeated plunge

into the river. I wanted her. Because I did,
I always will. Every poet has a love affair

with a bridge. I was in love with the drive
across mine to midnight’s other shore.

 

Robin’s poems have appeared in beestung, Impossible Task, Midway Journal, Poetry Online, and Quarter After Eight, among others. She studied literature and creative writing at Hampshire College and works as a substitute teacher in Holyoke, where she grew up. https://linktr.ee/arblerobin.

for a

remember: all the bike lanes end in Roxbury. when that one cop fell down the slide, we expected him to shoot the whole damn playground. WholeFoods only farms data now but the landlord had blue hair and pronouns so we forgot that Monopoly was a threat. the world dropped its laundry to look for those billionaires when the Ocean was a comrade and in the horror movie no one was shocked that we died first. the past tense wants us gone, after all. when the surprise guest at the DNC was COVID no one was actually surprised, just coughed a laugh and made us tinfoil hats. i used to think Brad Pitt was a bad choice in that zombie film until we saw who survives and you said we must expect to fail so that we keep trying. hope never fit well between our rough shoulders, beloved. again i say: how could i blame you, beloved?

 

Em Roth (they) is a mad educator and organizer based in Boston. They believe in the promise of liberation and are enamored with the way goats look in the sunset. They have been previously published in BRAWL Lit and Libre, and have work forthcoming in The B’K.

A Diner’s Guide to Avoiding Paradox

Everyone wants the keys to a time machine;
no one wants butterflies stumbling up,
historical right angles marching.
I couldn’t reverse engineer the art of eating soup 

much less kill little Hitler without a spill,
a waterfall effect. But that toasted chicken sandwich 
at the long gone bar and grill where Gay kissed Church 
that tasted like making it back to myself

would make me spin the wheel, try a quaalude out of time,
get potato church back, before you ODed.
I want the 80s McNugget I peeled carefully, 
age 4 in the backseat of a maroon Lincoln Town Car.

My pleasure dome smells like the pulled pork
from the deli slash convenience store slash
BBQ pit slash video rental and gun repair
where two highways to nowhere special met.

Sneak my Nanny’s banana pudding out of a potluck
before I was born; go bowling at the green milkshake 
machine, knowing I’m safely without a license 
learning algebra a second time across town.

Take my first campus diner’s cheez fries
to go; wash them down with a vanilla Coke
pulled in a 1996 Waffle House, when everyone
still smokes inside and it’s not fine, but

I haven’t seen bad yet. Call them my madeleines,
these remembrances of shepherd’s pies past;
if I can have what we used to order,
I won’t be tempted to find the ones not joining me.

With my bespoke time machine, I will find a
pink and purple and teal Taco Bell, trade 
date checked bills and coins for ten
chicken soft tacos, the old way, when

I was eleven and my sister was sixteen, the meat
just meat, just cubes of barely chicken,
no lettuce, ninety-nine cents each,
small town teens cruising the parking lot,

me eating my always safe food
in the green T-top Camaro, humid summer
and the shine  of a golden child 
reflecting on her loyal moon-alibi.

Every good thing ends. One night, what had
been cubed and plain and pure was suddenly 
shredded and runny and sauced with 
something unsafe. She was off to college,

about to leave me in the house no one 
knew was catching fire yet; I can’t 
remember the last time, can’t place when
the recipe and the relationship went wrong.

What I wanted didn’t belong to me, so
I got no say when it changed
forever. Everyone who ever wrote
a sad song’s thesis knows the tune. 

Even though she didn’t call me on my birthday,
which is fair enough considering how many years
I had hers in my calendar wrong, when 
I’ve got those keys in hand, I’ll say,

you bored? and this time I’ll drive
two new people back to the future.
This time we can play my copy of License to Ill. 
This time the formula will deliver – just right,

past tense chicken with just enough
fake cheese, perfect sister grown into empty
nester, little sister grown into gendersplat
poet. Same moon. Same stars.

 

Elizabeth R. McClellan is a white disabled gender/queer neurospicy demisexual lesbian poet writing on unceded Quapaw and Chikshaka Yaki land. Kan work has appeared in many venues since 2009? including Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Kaleidotrope, and most recently the light ’em up anthology available now from fifth wheel press. Kan work is forthcoming in Utopia Science Fiction.  In kan other life, ka is an attorney and the creator of the Lou Swain Memorial Fund for Mid-South Immigration Advocates to assist immigrant and refugees experiencing domestic and sexual violence or family separation. Find ka on social media as @popelizbet and visit miamemphis.org to assist in the work.

DEFLOWERING

after Ocean Vuong

Is the pressure okay?/ does a Vietnamese woman know what to do with this blackbody?/back facing up/scarred skin greeting whispering waterfalls/quaint bird chatter/she gasps at the sticky cotton bulbs flowering from beneath muscle/be gentle i tell her/they were my great great grandmother’s/callused knuckles dig/grinding into my mama’s lovehandles/affirming my less than manly, curvy stature/i squirm at her touch/is the pressure okay?/i make it so/peeling thumbs in the lowest of my spine/she wants to unbend our rounded back/willow leaves unfurl/their tears hiss when meeting burned skin/chainlink printed ankles/my feet smell of rust/highway stink/imprinted maps from cracked heel to callus/Sweden becomes Louise, Mississippi/is Chicago, is Jackson/poor lady/i know she ain’t plan on migrating today/flip over she says/i turn us over slowly/i wait for the wince/the quiet step back/the short take in of air/dirty-handed realization/prepare to gather our bags/she caresses the two buck moth caterpillars laid across my chest/is the pressure okay?/i must make it so/since the fatty masses are no longer there/grandfather’s clay ditch runs from liver to left center of daddy’s heart/glass bottles now row crops/burrowed and budding/a smell of ferment/she works around it/knows not to fill it/i don’t dare open my eyes/i talk back to the birds instead/it is so tight here/she wrestles my shoulders from ears to neck/have you tried cupping?/i steal a look between grunts/poor lady/red stained milkflower petals peek out from under her scrubs/faded scar branches/leaking bomb craters for pores/the skin around it rubbed red raw/it is no wonder that she knows how to soothe this blackbody/for we are watered by the saliva of the same beast.

 

Amari Amai is a black transmasculine poet, actor, and educator, born and raised in Chicago. They have been a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center, a Watering Hole ‘23 fellow, and a Periplus Collective ’24 fellow. Their work has received support and fellowships from Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. As a Great Migration baby with roots in Jackson, Mississippi, their work can be described as “queer Southern Gothic” with Afrofuturist influence. They are currently at work on their debut poetry collection, with poems forthcoming in Callaloo. You can find out more about the multidisciplinary artist at amariamai.com.

the hookah

I thought it was a vase—
towering red glass, ornate as a trophy,
snaking tubes to control the water level.
The tapered piece on the end of the pipe— 
to drain the vase, obviously. 
What child hasn’t seen one thing
& thought it simpler.
* * *
Sedo & Teta never smoked
(not that they let us grandchildren see).
So picture me at 22 visiting for the first time in a decade, seeing anew:
Sedo! You smoke hookah?
* * *
I imagine sedo & teta 
before they were grandparents, 
young in The Old Country, 
packing for the new—
wrapping the glass 
in the handwoven fabrics 
of Ramallah,
tying the sleeves of thobes
secure around the hookah’s fragile curves—
hoping, praying, it would
survive the suitcase & continents.
* * *
He demurs: 
On special occasions… 
& I laugh.
It’s okay, Sedo. I smoke too.
He fiddles his worry beads.
No, no, habibti, 
women do not smoke.
What he meant was:
Women smoking isn’t proper.
What I heard was:
You’re no woman.
* * *
& truly, he could see, I’m no woman—
not متحول جنسيا or متحولة جنسيا; not مُخَنَّث or خنيث—
but something else: جنس ثالث a third gender. Maybe هما & انتما or هو/هي or هما/انتما.
Maybe I’m a being neither of us have vocabulary for. Whatever I am, I know
I’m not so fragile as the antique hookah. I will not disappear on puffs of smoke
or breaths of word. I can survive longer journeys to find my home.

 

Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer who calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. They are the winner of the Porter House Review 2024 Editor’s Prize in Poetry and are supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in July 2024 from Belt Publishing. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.

Not Gay As In Happy–

Queer as in death to cops and politicians!
May they live their every waking moment 
afraid of what the people will do to them. 
Not queer like a rainbow slapped
onto a Wells Fargo debit card, gay as in
let’s hurl a Molotov cocktail thru the window
of the bank at nightfall and kiss while we watch
the glass shatter like a supernova. Not gay 
as in pride flags, queer as in flagging, 
as in leatherdykes and deviance, as in the way 
my fist fits perfectly inside my lover, 
the way their name in my notifications 
makes my clit quiver, the way their mouth 
makes me melt as sticky as ice cream during 
a heat wave. Queer like I’m so fruity, I may as well 
be a smoothie. I’m as flamboyant as a flamingo 
and as buoyant as a bumblebee blowing
bubbles behind a bounce house. Gay like
the ex-girlfriend of my ex-girlfriend is my
ex-girlfriend and we’re all going dancing
in matching pleather pants. This pride month,
I’m partnering with the freaks and the fairies 
to strike fear into the hearts of fascists. Let’s
untether our shame and toss it in the dumpster,
let’s shout this prayer so loud our lungs
collapse: Dear God, dear Bjork, dear 
Everything, may the fruits inherit the earth. 
May the future we deserve spring into being 
with a swish of our limp wrists.

 

The Love Museum Is Offering Free Admission

plus a 20% discount at the gift shop for anyone
on the precipice of heartbreak. I’ve been
meaning to go for over a year, but I was too busy
holding hands and staring into my lover’s

butthole and other things that people do 
when they’re in love. Today, I lint roll 
the cat hair off my flannel and take endless
selfies at the museum’s marble steps, until

I get one where the light hits my teeth 
just right and each nostril hair is in 
its proper place. The main exhibit demonstrates 
the history of kissing using state-of-the-art 

androids with anatomically correct tongues
that undulate like mating slugs. I glide 
through hallways lined with artifacts—the purple 
plastic vibrator my first love gave me 

for Christmas, the L Word DVD box set 
I watched religiously in secret—and peruse
the archives of late-night texts from lovers
whose birthmarks I’ve willed myself to forget.

In the gift shop, I buy a souvenir: an exact replica 
of the moon from the day we met, as round and shiny
as a fish egg. While I wait for the bus, I release
the moon from its box and watch it float away, 

blooming like a flour tortilla in the cast iron sky.

 

Ally Ang is a gaysian poet & editor based in Seattle. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, Muzzle Magazine, Poets.org, and elsewhere. Ally is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts fellow and MacDowell fellow. Their debut poetry collection, Let the Moon Wobble, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2025. Find them at allysonang.com or on Twitter and Instagram @TheOceanIsGay.

THEY DON’T KNOW I’M A GEMINI MOON

I keep forgetting it’s Leo season
I used to keep a log—Sun in Leo, Moon in Taurus—in my journals
I used to keep journals regularly

People love to say, What even is a sun sign?
And I say, well you know the sun? 
And they say yes
But I don’t think they actually know

Today I look like a total fortune teller
I become frantic and naked often, looking for clothes
That will accurately represent me

Often it’s a silk scarf, a linen dress, huaraches
Other times it’s my triple XL HECHO EN MEXICO t-shirt
Paired with Air Forces and baggy jeans

Once in Berlin, a stupid boy was being read his chart
The girls around the table announced, Ooof, an Aries moon?

What even is a moon? is the question he asked
I was in the mood to make him look stupider—

Well, you know the moon, right? It’s in the sky?

Yeah, he chuckled

And you know, I continued
How the moon orbits the earth? And the earth orbits the sun?

Uhhhh

And you know there are more planets, and there are stars, and the stars become constellations?
The girls are laughing. The boy commits to his idiocy, while I commit to my domineering

My mother does not like that people think I’m aggressive
My cat watches me cross the room in only my boxers

My sisters don’t believe in brujeria, but when I visit home they ask,
Can you throw my cards?

I shuffle them, deal them out: the Moon, the Seven of Swords, Temperance

You’re gonna have a baby, I say
And they always do

People love to ask if I’ll have kids of my own
They think I’m a woman, they all do 

 

juj e lepe was born and raised in Stockton, California. Their poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Pile Press, The Acentos Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Rumpus. juj is a poet, an educator, and an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You can find them by the nearest body of water. 

ON MOVING OUT, AND LIFE BEING LONG

You peel the stickers you got at pride off your bathroom mirror. No one buys your bedframe from you off Facebook Marketplace so your childhood friends carry it out of the apartment for you. You say life is long as you hold a lover in their bed during a bittersweet moment because goodbye seems too permanent a motion to trust. You return your friend’s book of short stories at Center City so you don’t forget. You take the hooks off your walls and give your unused toiletries to friends who sit on your bed and talk about Italy, and summer, and next year. And then you leave, early in the morning, with someone else’s suitcase stowed overhead because you forgot yours at your aunt’s. You cry the entire sixteen hour flight. Life is long, you insist. We will meet again.

 

The ground opens up to swallow me whole but not before I send in my bio for work

I think the soy milk has gone bad.
My breakfast tasted bitter and now my stomach hurts.
The monsoon has arrived but the dust hasn’t settled and

I am grasping at straws
to convince myself to be happy.

I blame myself
for jinxing the job I wanted. It’s my own fault,
somehow, and

I need a doctor to diagnose me
with something              disgusting
like self-sabotage, or burnout.

The pulmonologist says my lungs won’t heal,
at least not any time soon.
He prescribes me my medications and places his stethoscope on my chest.

I am lightheaded by the time he stops
asking me to breathe deep.

He says this is                 permanent.

There was a July day we went into the city to get a roll of film developed and the man at the
store asked us if we were childhood friends,               or sisters.
                                                                       It seemed to him that we had known each other
                                                                       for ever, for life.

I think my friends are better at love than I am.
At knowing how to feel good, and how to leave.
              How to stay, and how to be loved forever.

Everything is either a joke or a poem to me.

I keep asking questions no one else asks
and then I am bent over at my desk worried about their answers.
                                             Does my medicine save my life or does it merely protect me from discomfort?

I wonder if the pulmonologist will ask for a lung x-ray.

Will I joke about it?

When they scan my chest, will they see a broken heart?

Will they call me pathetic for never mending it?

I think my friends are better at love than I am.
They would not need years for this.

Perhaps the aftertaste of it all is bitter anyway,
and it’s my own fault,
somehow.

When the rheumatologist looks at my bones, will she call me weak?
Would that be prophecy or comedy? Will she laugh?

I would not blame her. I know now what the pulmonologist won’t say out loud;
                                                             that there is no for life, for ever.

                                                             My lungs are momentary, and the bitter truth is
that our childhoods never touched.

 

Mekhala is an actor, artist and writer from Mumbai. They spend their spare time baking, reading, or watching movies. They hope to someday earn the title of ‘storyteller.’ Mekhala can be found on Instagram at @meksnosense.