there is no time not in an urgent sense there is no time meaning time is not a force at play here time-less as in without time something like longing your music fulls the space between my ears like a sadness years into mourning you i learn ashes can be pressed into vinyl wonder what song i would be materially choose between two both feature the sound of a record crackling maybe i like my texts like i like my people self-reflexive the bridge is the section of a composition that contrasts with the rest creates a moment between returning verse or chorus a bridge can be a way out or a way in & you are in me my body painted a different shade soundwaves reverberate repeat i want to live here always repeat & now that i left there is record of me repeat i will be with you forever in the sound from a needle gliding on my grooves to echo in someone’s head like a sadness
& i could take you there
soundtrack: climax, slum village
the only measure is heart what makes it pulse faster no constant metre marks mood
how breath becomes breathless everyone a compass each body its own
internal tempo means i’m always on time improvise respond
a way of moving through it to speed it & i exist in a stopped time
& every time at the same time tell me what it means to record a beat & play & replay
record grooves pressed to vinyl & the soundthe sound listen to this d u s t between us
can’t say where i am it’s its own place maybe the only real place i know
Tina Zafreen Alam is a diasporic Bangladeshi poet who does not believe in space, time, or borders. She is calling on you to commit your heart, body, and soul to fighting for the liberation of Palestine and of all oppressed people around the globe. We owe it to ourselves, and to one another. Revolution until complete liberation for all of us, all together.
dear diary, it turns out i can attach a lot of antics to the age of nineteen, not the least of which was having thick black paint marker x’s drawn on my hands upon entering a bar and getting kicked out within fifteen minutes for washing them off. there was an era where nat raum wasn’t allowed to do shit, but their floridian counterpart natalie ann stevens was the toast of baltimore, queen of tequila soda, roused each day at sunset to raise hell and like it before diving into a stranger’s bed to pass out—do not resuscitate, at least not like this, while vena cava couriers coconut rum and i pawn the worst of my habits off onto another name. dear diary, don’t ask me why i stopped drinking down the line. don’t flood my ears with whys, because i don’t have answers, only stories and fleetwood mac songs and a scoff: why the hell not?
nat raum (b. 1996) is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of this book will not save you, the abyss is staring back, random access memory, and others. Past and upcoming publishers of their writing include Gone Lawn, Split Lip Magazine, Allium, and BRUISER. Find them online at natraum.com.
From a thousand miles away my eye travels the slick roads of your limbs glistening from the waters reflecting the richness of the land
my fingers ache to grip hard or gently at the crown of your hair see the blades of your eyes flutter closed, the wing pointing to heaven
Witness the black pointed nails reveal furrows in my back the earth reclaimed in the song of your name
I want to refill you with all of the land I can return and all of the water I can carry just to witness the lift of your lips
knowing smirk wrapped around a cigarette undoing me, unknowing perhaps unwanted
Erika Gill (they/them) lives on unceded Tséstho’e (Cheyenne), Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, hinono’eino’ biito’owu’ (Arapaho), and Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute) land in Denver. Erika is Editor in Chief of Alternative Milk Magazine. Their poetry appears in fifth wheel press, MORIA,Birdy, and others. Their collection, Lone Yellow Flower, is forthcoming from Querencia Press. Socials are at @invariablyso.
She’s unsmudging the mascara on her face and the poltergeist is dangling from the ceiling in the bathroom mirror. It’s being very well-behaved this evening, all things considered. Never can be sure with this bitch. The cubicle behind her flushes and she skirts out, lipstick print still on her teeth, from the tiny single sink and its mirror. The poltergeist clatters across the florescent light above, reaches for the top of the door, propped open by the endless queue as she pushes through. No one looks up. The floor opens and swallows her. She had a drink, somewhere, or maybe she’d finished it before she went for a piss. Maybe the poltergeist slapped it to the floor when she put it down. Days gone by girls would fix each other’s mascara in club bathrooms, fix each other, pints deep, gin deep, but she’s never actually experienced this. Was this particular bathroom too small? Is it another impression left by the American nostalgia machine, churning out universal personal histories like red solo cups? Have things changed? She’s not been a girl long enough to know. The days gone by girls remain sun-blushed in their vain fantasies. And the door just says ‘stalls’. Clear plastic cups litter the high blocks segmenting the floor, empty and sticky and cold, refilling themselves with melting ice, she’ll have to go back to the bar and scramble through the crowd, the people, stop dancing and get another drink. Or go outside and press someone for a smoke. She’d been draped over a t-boy in a leather harness who smelled like a bonfire. The lights flash blue and pink and yellow as the body of the poltergeist slithers over them, grasps for the plastic cups with flat brown inches left, tips them. Nice sticky floor under her chunky heels. It reaches for her shoulder as she turns, unready. Her backless one-piece leaves her puncture-wound bruises on display, but everyone’s purple as the lights cross and spin, and the one-piece clings to her tits and thighs and flares out at her shins. She’s hot. Poltergeist or fucking not. Sweat collecting at the small of her back, collected by wandering hands, she gets to the bar, and there’s always a shitty smudged mirror behind the bars in these places. She doesn’t see herself. She sees the unhinged maw of the poltergeist and watches its throat rattle as it howls at her. The noise is lost to the bass. Ice-chill threads down her palm all the way up to her elbow as she wraps her hand around the little cup of vodka and lemonade. The pinpoint claws of the poltergeist sneak into her skin and she gasps down the cheap shit vodka and the cheap shit lemonade but the blood is not permitted to bother her. She’s on the floor. She will remain on the floor. It’s almost loud enough in here, but she wants to turn the base up. Wants to feel the ringing in her ears, or the promise of it. Skin glitters, she’s whipped with sprays of ragged, half-shaved hair, and between these reckless bodies there’s a harness she recognises. She gets her hands on his hips this time, cuts straight to the chase, digs her fingers into his fat hips and suppresses the urge to lick his t-bone scars. His hands run over her shoulders and he doesn’t seem to notice that one comes away sticky with blood. The poltergeist runs a finger over her scalp, its gangled body stretched from the ceiling, needle-tooth grin submerged in the murk. Already the boy’s tongue is in her mouth. She’s half-hard. He tastes like rollies and she roams her hands over his jeans and lands on the pouch of tobacco in his front pocket.
#
Outside, the poltergeist sits on the railings around the smoking area and chitters like a monkey. The ice has melted but her vodka lemonade doesn’t taste any worse.
“You ever use it as a packer?”
He laughs as he takes back the baccy, swaps it for his light. “No.”
“I think it could work.”
“It would be so inconvenient.”
“At the club? It would be fucking hot.”
Again, he laughs.
“I’d be on my knees to help you put it back.”
“Forward,” he says. It’s a compliment. A cloud of smoke escapes them both.
“No, it’s not,” she says. She pulls on her fag, on the cigarette, deep and focused, showing off. “I want to suck your cock. That’s forward.”
“Alright, yeah, that’s forward.” He’s drinking beer. She wants to take it off him. She wants to take a slow, deliberate sip and hand it back. She wants to chug it and vomit on his platforms. She wants to throw it in his face. She wants to shower in it. She wants him to throw it in her face. She wants him to chug it then piss it on her. Clattering from behind her distils into a mental image of the poltergeist, its weird tangled shape on the railings. She could finish her drink and drag him into an alley and get arrested. There’s always a secret stall in the bathroom labelled ‘urinals’, there’s less of a queue, they’d work out the logistics inside but she could almost certainly fuck him in there. She doesn’t even need to cum, she just wants to work out how to make him cum, and she’d have to do it before they got kicked out, then they could exchange numbers and never speak to each other again. Behind her, the poltergeist scratches the railing and the sound exists now in her spine. She needs the bass back. She needs the bodies. She needs the floor to eat her. He’s asking her where she’s based. If she’s lived there long. Her accent — where is she from originally? Does she get back there much?
“No.”
She finishes her fag and steps back towards the club door, one finger hooked around his wrist like a talon, or a claw. As she moves past him-
“What the fuck is that?”
The music thuds through the door as she drags him back, the poltergeist drags itself along the tarmac under the cloudless and starless night sky.
#
She’s on a bus. Top deck, right at the front. She reeks of sweat but not like the t-boy, not like his bottled boy smell, she could have climbed into his armpit and slept there, slept off the hangover. It’ll bloom from the front, right between her eyebrows, and it won’t have been worth it. A few stray moments. Nice bit of skin-on-skin. In the seat to her left, the poltergeist perches, feet on the upholstery, hands dangling to the floor between its legs. It watches the sparse traffic, the pool of drivers and dancers and drunks outside the kebab shop, the tents on the roundabout, the ghosts in the windows. Deep, deep, deep within the pit of her, the tobacco smoke still burns and burns her insides away. For all her crying, she can’t put it out. The poltergeist climbs into her lap like a young cat, claws out, rumbling in its throat the same pitch as the bus engine. It rubs its head against her sore chest. Wraps its arms about her. And though these aren’t the arms she longs for, she embraces it as it burrows under her skin.
Kit McGuire is a writer and actor based in London. As a gay trans creative, they’re compelled by how visibly queer bodies navigate and are navigated in public spaces, and the idiosyncrasies of queer time. Their work includes fiction, poetry, and essays, and has previously been published and produced by Olit, SCAB, Queerlings, and elsewhere.
I pawned a summer because I couldn’t afford to be happy. What I wanted from life was out of season. What makes a mistake verifiable? Is it the moment sun detaches it from the stem, letting it fall through the fingers of the branch? I need a compass to tell you things. My horoscope translates the directions of light to freak us out. Once, I was a child changing the positions of the stars on a glow in the dark ceiling, & the part of me that wonders: if I’d arranged them differently would our love have fallen through their golden scaffolding? becomes the yellow crime scene tape of: if we fall asleep to the right cosmic conditions, we could wake up together / if we fall asleep together, we could wake up under the right pattern of stars.
Eva Lewis is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Their work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies including: Broken Sleep Books, The Poetry Business, Aster Lit, A Velvet Giant, and others. They are an editor of SINK Magazine, and a submissions reader for The Selkie.
And on the twelfth night, they said watch out we’ve got a biter. And so I woke up on my twentieth birthday in no one’s bed but my own and I’m certain it’s because of who I was when I was blonde. I think your dad caught me trying to exorcize hindsight last time I was over at your house because nothing haunts me more than knowing the things I could have done differently if only I had 20/20 vision. I think that freaked your dad out and not just because he’s walking McCarthyism and I’m gayer than the literary canon. I’ve always had a sweet tooth for libel within reason and a heart made of biodegradable straws now and then and now you’re all fascists but I can’t say that you are because that’s not polite and I’ve been trying my best to be polite since I started wearing that God damn cone-like someone’s ball-less dog. You’d hate to feel like that, wouldn’t you? I don’t think you could pull it off, not like I can. When you can pull off calves that aren’t pretty enough to be saved from becoming a half-eaten burger you can pull off anything. When I drive with you in shotgun, I can see you pull on the grab handle when it’s my mom’s red minivan. you laugh at me when I say even that’s political. Similar to how America is the best country in the world like how the used car dealership off Calle Rojo has the best Hondas. If you had it your way I would have become normal the minute I walked out of that bathroom stall. The one where you wrote your phone number when we were freshmen in spirit. And I knew then that I had no intention of ruining your life but Then again…when in Rome.
Merlin June Mack (they/them) is a hemiplegic writer from Southern California. When they aren’t writing they can be found reading a book with at least one good literary motif in it. Merlin has been previously published in magazines such as The Lavender Review and Does It Have Pockets Magazine. Their work has also been Best of Net nominated. Merlin is currently working towards a BFA in creative writing at Southern Oregon University. You can find more of them @ merlin_june_is_a_lover on Instagram.
Being the more interesting half of your conversations.
They have a lot going on*
*note: anything that requires clarification can be considered a lot going on.
Intimacy beginning and ending at the closeness of your skin.
. I should get this for them!
I love you before the first argument.
Speaking honestly only after you’ve swallowed spirits braver than you.
Butterflies! or Anxiety!
Checking your phone every two minutes for a text you won’t receive for two hours or two days.
They’re soo cute!
(true)
Free Space! For your childhood.
Covertly checking their instagram.
Underestimating your self worth.
Random bouts of jealousy.
Making them a playlist.
Sex Fantasies.
They’re not into labels
Intense fear of dying alone.
Wanting. Wanting more.
Wishing you were enough.
Thriving on Praise.
Hey Siri, play Why Don’t You Love Me by Beyoncé.
Always texting first.
Canceling plans to make time for them. Time for them becoming Time.
Nnenna Loveth Umelo Uzoma Nwafor (they/she) is an Igbo lesbian poet, performer, and facilitator. Their work explores Black g*rlhood, Black queerness, Igbo Cosmology, Sensual play and rituals of healing. Nnenna published their debut chapbook, Already Knew You Were Coming, with Game Over Books in January of 2022 and has also been featured on Button Poetry, WBUR’s ARTery, VIBEs Magazine, and Ujima #Wire. When they speak, their ancestors are pleased. Please follow their work on IG @pleasure.as.compass or at pleasurearthealing.com
Mads Lupold is a nonbinary collage artist, production designer, and writer based in Austin, Texas. When they aren’t giving themselves paper cuts, they work with children at spilled milk social club and create flowers out of scrap records for Gold Rush Vinyl. Mads also works on local film sets creating environments out of props, set design/decorating, and costuming. They write anything from children’s cooking shows to apocalyptic body horror in their free time. Their art centers around whimsy, discomfort, childhood, lack of bodily control, and whatever else they are feeling in the moment. Mads can be found on instagram at @madjoy42.
Before I was a baby, I was a beautiful idea. The salvation of a Jersey girl whose limbs hung grotesquely draped in berry-blue defiance whipped in all white till her dress frayed and fell cherry-stained on the long walk home. A Brooklyn boy’s respectable manifest destiny as he sprouted upwards toward the heavens from a roach-infested tinsel tower varnished in my grandfather’s secrets. I was part and parcel, the means of production. I could make a dream so American it’d twinkle like onyx buffed and chiseled into a vanity so reflective, they could almost see themselves in me. & then I was ugly.
One does not become ugly overnight, there is a context for such monsterfication; it takes a learned imperfection. Cracked teeth in a mouth that insists upon staying open and so much self you spill out of yourself. You become the answer to questions no one ever planned on asking like: How are you yo daddy’s son when you’supposed to be a daughter? Couldn’t you color yourself lighter in every hue? Couldn’t you walk lighter than a feather, instead of this hulking beast, a blight, refusing to be the beautiful through-thread of this story? And who the fuck do you think you are being this ugly and unabashed?
And then I was hands and snap and sparkle puppeteering in the morning light. And then I was boy, embodied and benevolent. And then I was handsome, hanging on your every word. And then I was gravel voice and gray-evening-haloed in tobacco & then I was beautiful again.
I couldn’t keep pretending I wasn’t. Lips berried with vulgar smarts. A fifth of whiskey easy on the way down. A baby-eyed big talker. One does not become beautiful overnight. There is a ceremony in this release. There is grief in the cutting away of flesh. In the leap from the jetty. It is an ugly feeling, truly, to touch your own beauty for the first time and realize how many years you denied yourself to yourself. How you foraged and flailed and reached for the things furthest from your own face, catching fistfuls of nothing but the quiet. How you believed in a god not strong enough to see themselves in you.
How you let them make you into a monster, or a fantasy, or salvation like you weren’t an offering. Like you weren’t conjured from the people in every corner of the planet. Like you might spend your whole life apologizing for the things they could not hold, for all of the ways in which you are wayward.
But mostly, for making them into lies–liars. How you never saw what they saw when they saw you. How you never defined the sun by the way it looks dipping below the horizon, never allowed the thunderclap to scare you from summer rains. How you gave up being someone’s idea of ugly. How maybe you were never good at pretending.
Kelsey L. Smoot (they/them/he/his) is a gender theorist, a committed Southerner, a writer, and a poet. Their work and writings explore the process of identity formation at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. Selfhood and cultural constraints—such as masculinity and its associated expectations—coalesce in their writing. Their autoethnographic style has become a lens through which they understand their personal experience traversing the US sociopolitical landscape. Having grown up bicoastal and spending the majority of their adult life in a state of transience, Kels draws from his eclectic life experiences both deep fear and great optimism regarding what people are capable of. This tension is reflected in his published writing which can be found in Barely South Review, The Guardian, HuffPost, Voicemail Poems, The Amistad, and at their website, queerinsomniac.me When not writing, Kels can be found performing at The Space (a premiere open-mic based in Kennesaw, Georgia), perusing an antique store, or running the streets with their bois.
Love, our bigness is a gift. We are massively magnificent as we are. Told to exercise our bodies as if demons & I am so tired of running to lose myself. There will be no more dying to diet. I do not desire chasers & am no longer chasing after silhouettes nor wild fowl nor paper-thin nor rainbows-end. Forever yes fats yes fems yes queer yes trans! We reclaim any shame from the names obese & overweight. Yes chunky & chubby! Yes portly & pudgy! Yes heavy & husky! Yes yes yes! Our corpulence is elegant. We bask in the auras of our largeness. Come & sit. Grab a handful of ass & yes there’s much more to handle. Titty in your mouth is a sweet word, never pejorative. I find in you so many good words: handsome, stunning, wonderful, cute, pretty, hot, gorgeous– Love, you extend my vocabulary with your expansiveness. We’ve been force fed falsehoods about shrinking & smallness, yet we contain such abounding abundance. Attractiveness is your body, yes, as well as your caring kindness, careful consideration. There will be no more sighs upon our size, only our own honor upon our release & reveal, yes! Yes & fat phobias too. So much yes & no felt in the body, it is okay to be scared & sad & mad at these systems that dismiss our pains & hold us under the knife. We are still here, still holding each other– not cropped out, no, more crop tops & muffin tops, bikini bottoms & bottoms up, yes in any season we please! Love, we have beautiful bodies. We are more than our bodies & our bodies are more to love. We sit naked in front of each other, belly to belly, thunder thighs & lightning strikes. We make our own sky of stretch mark constellations & starry eyes full of moon. Love, we are so much yes, why would we want to be any less?
Aerik Francis (they/them) is a Queer Black & Latinx poet & teaching artist born & based in Denver, CO. Aerik is the author of the poetry chapbook, BODYELECTRONIC (Trouble Department 2022). Their second chapbook MISEDUCATION was named as the winner for the 2022 New Delta Review Chapbook Contest and was published in May 2023. Aerik has released an experimental audiobook project for their chapbook BODYELECTRONIC under their artist name phaentom[poet] that is available on all streaming platforms. Find more of their work on their website phaentompoet.com and find them on social media @phaentompoet.
