KJ Cerankowski is a queer writer based in Cleveland, OH. His poetry and prose appear or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Gordon Square Review, and Sinister Wisdom, among others. He is the author of Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming, a critical lyric memoir published by punctum books.
June Vellequette is a loud transexual woman based in Brooklyn, NY.
The thing is, I expected to start at the beginning and go to the end, but that wasn’t the way it worked out at all. As it happened, I woke up under a bush about a third of the way through events. The inciting incident was over. How had I arrived at this point in the timeline?
The desert stretched out for miles in every direction. I stood up, brushed myself off, and looked for the future. I stared off into the distance, thinking maybe I would find it past the horizon. I had forgotten that the future is simply a conjugation of being.
I had read stories of my mythical ancestors wandering the desert along time, but I didn’t expect that I would wind up there myself. I had believed this sort of thing was behind us—the excess of hours, the sand scrubbing everything smooth, the hermaphroditic flowers (Tamarix gallica) falling from the sky at regular intervals. Manna sounds an awful lot like “man up”.
I vagabonded, peering at the few birds flying overhead to see if their auguries were good.
One morning, splayed out on the sand dune, gasping for breath, I realized what it was that held me there—the misconception that one goes ahead to the future. Bearded vultures circled while the sun hit me with a slow, steady rhythm. The star and the sand had much to say to one another. I screamed at the rocks, “The future is only a movement toward existence!”
The cries of a hoopoe and a crow cracked the silence from the west. A woodpecker and a magpie echoed from the east. Thus, the word went out, and I went for a walk, tracking the signs. I found the muddy, looping creeks and followed them to the past, to the present, and back again, as more birds gathered overhead.
I think I almost see the outline of the future. Mirage or not, the being that is to come shimmers in the heat, waves.
Now, I throw out chicken feed and watch the hens dance so hard grass cuttings fall to the ground in sheaves. I push my sandals into hot sand. It’s only a matter of time.
Min Straussman is an essayist, poet, translator, and educator living in Paris. Since 2017, he has been a regular contributor to Dictionary[dot]com where he writes about etymology and language. His work has also been published in Impossible Worlds, Hey Alma, and beestung, and he has a book forthcoming on Paris, Walter Benjamin, and the connections between kabbalah and the urban environment. He is fascinated by the fragmented, the esoteric, and all things related to his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can find his work at mintherose.com or on Twitter @mintherose.
As trans people, we have long been known for our distinctive, self-selected names. But until last week, we had no idea just how far back this tradition went. In their new book, Tales from a Lost City, a team of archaeologists from the Coastal School describe what they have learned from a decade of studying remnants of an ancient city. At first, the sunken site, located about ten miles off the coast of Lupine, was simply termed #01053. More recently, the team has discovered the city was once known as Seattle.
The book’s third chapter is dedicated to the stories of transgender residents. Merging conclusions drawn from classical transgender studies with new information gleaned from notes taken during Seattle meetings, scholar Nimelua +@ gives new life to the struggles and joys experienced by the attendees. You can order or download Tales from a Lost City at your nearest salon. But, before you dive in, you may want to prepare yourself for some of the… unique names used by our Seattle ancestors. Just think, if you had lived way back when, you probably would have called yourself something equally ridiculous. Find out which moniker would have suited you best using this handy quiz!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
How to convert your answers to points:
a=1
b=2
c=3
d=4
Total points for questions 1 and 2: ______. Circle LOW for 4 or lower. HIGH for 5 or higher.
Total points for questions 3 and 4: ______. Circle LOW for 4 or lower. HIGH for 5 or higher.
Total points for questions 5 and 6: ______. Circle LOW for 4 or lower. HIGH for 5 or higher.
YOUR RESULTS:
LowLowLow: You’re a veritable Kat! Always one to tag along when asked, you rarely behave in an expected or socially acceptable manner. Put in the context of a 21st century university student, for example, you often spent afternoons at raging backyard parties surrounded by your classmates. While your peers chugged warm, tasteless alcohol as part of their masochistic games, you sipped at yours as you turned the pages of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, not because it was assigned reading (you rarely completed any of that junk), but because it personally, and spiritually, interested you.
LLH: Hi, Kai! You haven’t met many people in your town, but a lot of people seem to know about you. Back in your 21st century life, you didn’t typically spend your free evenings hanging out with your small group of friends. Instead, when 11:00pm struck, you left your house fueled only by caffeine and a bowl of dry cereal. You rode transport across town, listening for the club that was playing their music the loudest. When you found it, you flirted your way inside without paying, wiggled to the center of the dance floor, closed your eyes, and gave yourself up to the bass. You never wondered who was watching, or whose hips were grinding against yours.
LHL: You’re certainly a River! A maker and shaker, within the comforts of your own head, that is. During your 21st century existence, your most vivid dream had you working as an airplane pilot, experiencing a rush of blood to the head as you pointed the nose of the propeller plane into the sky for takeoff. That morning, you brewed your tea as you watched your neighbor weed the garden. Then, you sat down to research how to acquire a pilot’s license. But the license wasn’t for you. No, your stomach could hardly stand being a passenger on a large commercial jet. You were a songwriter working on a concept album, and the narrator of your in-progress song was going to make a great pilot.
LHH: In this case, your name is Case! You love to dig your fingers into a new project, don’t you? In the 21st century, you could’ve been a mechanical engineer with a hankering for a private woodshop. But your home didn’t have a garage, or much of a yard either. You took to using the front stoop, sawing and sanding away until the entrance had been blocked with wood scraps and sawdust. Your entire household switched to using the back entrance until your roommate’s date took it upon themself to give you a lesson on responsibility. After that, you dutifully swept up after each session, though you couldn’t help from continuing to make loud noises at odd hours.
HHH: Hello, Ash. Nice to meet you! Sorry to say that in the 21st century, you were one of the least capable pillow talkers alive. It’s not even that you were a poor conversationalist. No, the simple fact is you fell asleep before your head hit the pillow, no matter who was in bed with you. You spent your days throwing your energy in so many directions—volunteering to weed and water your neighbor’s entire vegetable garden, painting unauthorized forest murals on abandoned train cars, burning down the dance floor (as they used to say)—that by the end of the day your body couldn’t bear to wait any longer to recharge.
HHL: Good to know you, Fox! If your friends were honest, they’d tell us they fear and love you in equal measure. In way-back-when Seattle, you dated a lovely, though passive, partner with a woodworker for a roommate. This person even had the gall to set up shop right outside the front door. The sawdust itching at your ankles was bad enough, but when the entrance became entirely blocked, you had no choice but to intervene. One afternoon, you walked up the porch steps, unplugged the table saw, grabbed the plank from the woodworker’s hands, and snapped it in half over your knee. You tossed the halves down onto the sidewalk without saying a word. The next time you came over, the front entrance was clear.
HLH: You’re no one but Dylan! And you just want everyone to have a good time, often to your own detriment. In one infamous (at least to you and your therapist) example, your 21st century alter-ego spotted an isolated individual at a summer party. You were about four beverages deep, yet you stepped aside from the game you’d been playing to approach the stranger. You walked just close enough to make out the title of the book they were reading, then veered away to acquire some relevant information from the Web. Though the book was of a dense philosophical sort and you were a math major, you weren’t deterred. Five minutes of researching later, you sat down beside the stranger on the lawn chair and asked why 999 plateaus wasn’t enough.
HLL: Hey, Maddie! As your friends’ favorite confidant, you have access to rare and valuable knowledge. In 21st century Seattle, you had dated everyone in the trans scene, whether personally or vicariously. One night, your friend divulged he was planning to reveal his feelings to his crush, who you soon deduced was none other than the Extrema Ballerina, known for their years of sweaty solo club dancing. This same dancer had spent four years shacking up with your best friend, and there was no end to the scintillating sexual stories you had heard. Your poor enamored friend, the ingenue, couldn’t know what he was in for. And yet, isn’t the mark of a truly great confidant is knowing when to keep one’s mouth shut?
Alix Perry is a trans writer living in Western Oregon. Their work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and can be found in Kissing Dynamite, The B’K, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. Their chapbook, Tomatoes Beverly, is due out in May 2024. More at alixperrywriting.com.
Hand sanitize my image in the bright screen of yr phone
X: Are you up?? Manic again??
Y: I just want to know yr ok
Z: How is it that you do that thing with your tongue??
Take the laces out my bookbind. Note the taste asymmetry.
A floral note of weeds in every garden.
Guard the door: [closed-inclosed-mouth-closedin-shutclosed]
Parenthetical bracket jam of doubt & oven
Catch the door on fire
When the smoke gets in your eyes, the toast will burn,
CHEERS TO YOUR REMEDY!
I toasted every specimen, poured out another storm, a cup, a bralette for infectious coin of mirror
in my pocket—turned out, empty, house of straws & shoe lace cut
Another empty metaphor for house: I saw the body burst.
Glass ceiling in the microscopic hand. Hand me down letters.
Dear sir, you owe us $3000 after copay for your jailing fee. Please write the insurance off with my left hand,
A DSM approaches you upon the sidewalk. When you cross the street, it’s god in your left shin
A crick and groan.
Another day we wasted on the hospital for dinner.
In the cafeteria, I flail another brand: queer coded miracle.
A tampon without strings is not a cost, is not a spectacle.
A body with germ plasm in the brand. A little tag inside the sweater itch.
A skill cell breeding skin cell in the cells and cellulite of hospital.
A fat thigh on the left eye in the drain, another toothpaste that I dreamed of.
The little cupped shampoo under your hand, a cheap pill bottle.
Take my body breaking off this land, another dandy root.
I took you up to every kitchen counter—tasteless, water comes.
Drink drank drunk as fuck along the river, I am swimming in
the days & hours coating every strand. A hairy root.
When I burn the bread like straw, the names come down on me like rain.
A Rumplestiltskin slurs along the current, names the shimmer.
Every orb you wept into the second hand—a tiny specimen.
A tearjerk of a film is not a scummy manifesto.
I taste the germ & plasm in my brand, an off beat miracle.
I know my body as a body once the lightswitchmoth.
When lightswitchoff, I am a lights out check along the door jamb.
Every hinge as color coded as my mouth. This asterisk.
An aster wrist to taste the constellations.
Star stuck to assigned, we meant the risk. We knew it well.
Anomaly of batter in the brain, a second miracle.
A Cake somebody left into the storm, a disco hymn & drum.
My ear is never listening for breakfast—only specimen.
An insect on the windowsill & tongue, a bug leaked in the skin, a transmitter & transplant of the ward-theward-theward
The Word. The Ward. The Wyrd.
WYRD?? ARE YOU OK??? TEXT ME BACK ASAP!!
I am writing, mother.
I am writing out the history of words, of cheap bait articles.
I click the smoke screen open with my tongue, I pop one button off.
My collar melts to candy in the glass of every church window.
A picture show of Jesus on the merry-go-round ride.
Mother Mary was a horse beat to the hoofs with every vacant inn.
A vacancy behind my click bait eyes. A eunuch’s burst.
I cut my body off mid sentence for the word, another label’s scrap.
I fed the dog my business in the mirror, caught a violent charge.
I unleashed each electron in my hand—nobody talked, just static.
A static image of another man, another woman, GIRL!
I know you didn’t say that over dinner.
Who gave you the right?
The upbringing of clavicle since birth, another bone to pick>>>>>>>
I less than three the trinity of verse, emoji’s fire risk.
I dropped a selfie in someone’s night stand. I break the curse words off.
I star the passage from my mouth that runs into the atmosphere.
I folded every heaven in my hand. A ginsberg’s angel dust.
A powdered sugar sentiment of south along the café’s crumb.
Do you know just what it means to leave like us? A turn the beat around.
A locomotive running in my hand, a train of thought announced
another train of stationary pad—a pen to write along.
A black ink in the shimmer in my figure of my burn & which
will I become from writing down
A spell of articles
Another omen rooting through the tongue
To find a cell in there
No sound alike the cover of a song
Another bedframe off
I taste the objectivity of mirror in the swarm
I taste the gentle kindness of the river in my mouth
A spit wad for the teacher on my tongue
I told you off again
And off again, I flicked another spite. Another sprite. A word
with you & you, the nameless vers—the unknown fire risk—
Germ plasm is my gender & my brand.
Brody Parrish Craig (they/them) is the author of the chapbook Boyish (Omnidawn 2021) and edited TWANG, a regional anthology of TGNC+ creators in the south/midwest. Their first book, The Patient is an Unreliable Historian, is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing in 2024.
Can you speak?
Can I pretend?
only if you do it kindly
Tell me about your childhood
the silvery lining between living muscles pulled taught and tighter
and tighter
and just as it comes apart
it reflects your face like that
except it’s your mother
Do you love your mother?
i am my mother
Do you hate your mother?
there is a softness in it rotten, then sweet
Tell me about your political views
like anyone else, really
i am an honest american
the blossoming democracy of cause and effect and its feuding monarchies
Does it hurt when you die?
i beg your pardon?
When we step on you?
Harootunian 5
oh, death
the smaller you get
the more the grass looks like the trees the more the blue looks like the sky death is so far above
there is a softness in it
bubbles on the wind through a child’s wand splitting and merging and popping
drifting off
like that
except it’s your mother
does it hurt when You die?
oh
have You done it before?
I’m not sure
then pretend like me
There is a softness in it
sleep, then sunrise
Vartouhi Harootunian (they/them) is a nonbinary librarian living in the American southeast. Their work is upcoming in Screen Door Review, Dear Politicians, and appears in other publications. They enjoy writing about humans, nonhumans, and the weird tragedies that happen in the borderlands between the two.
for Moon
Smoke filled the sky. Heat waves
in the middle of October in Oakland, California. The light was volcanic-ash-orange
all day. Indoors, windows closed, the temperature was rising.
100+ degrees. The smell of mold and decaying carpet
suffocating. We fade out of consciousness, overtaken by heat sickness. You bring
drip wet scarves. Ice packs. Box fans.
How long did you watch
our comatose body? Why didn’t you call
for an ambulance? Did you know we would run
from that coffin trap if we could? How many times
have you sat with us? Our personal Emergency Room
partner. You are a medicine cabinet bursting with rescue
remedies. Always equipped with high potency Cannabis oil, the only
anti-seizure medicine we could access. You watched EMT’s
wrench our locked shoulder to pick us up after an hour of convulsing.
You vowed to keep us
safer. We look to you because you are a fortress. Our hide-out
in the drought. You are the fire retardant dropped from the bosom
of an airplane. We were a beetle colony and you a forest of evergreen trees.
We gave you our body and you kept us here, even when it cost
your ability to walk. Remember how we raced our two Jazzy powered
wheelchairs; yours named Satan and ours the Devil?
Your sweet head was a dandelion
puff in our wind. You lost your birds-nest sense
of self to the pressure of caregiving.
Your broad hands trembled with burdens the size of planets. You risked it all
to wrap around our cactus soul and anchor us in the flash flood.
Without you
we became a poor wilted flower shop.
Motionless on the floor. On the bed. At the park.
Even in the coolness of the closet where we could capture the night
if we didn’t open the door. Our body
taken by fatigue or heat or seizures. We collapsed,
a claustrophobic diamond mine breaking. Searching for your rescue.
Our land lady wouldn’t allow
the freedom of an air conditioner. The neurologist wouldn’t
prescribe anti-seizure medicine. No one else
would house us. You and us without any chosen
family. No respite. Not a moment away from the horror of
medical emergencies.
You stuck by us. Even when we didn’t want your partnership.
We hid between the dresses on the hangers. Hated you when you pulled us
away from our shallow breathing, high blood pressure, pulsing fever,
out-of-body swimming towards the end. We dropped
all of our petals. And because of you we had to find a way
to bloom again. We couldn’t breathe until the sun went
down. Depression refused to levitate
from our heart. Defeat was knocking
on our suicidal soul but we couldn’t cross the threshold. We crumbled
around our intestines, ashamed of our coming-back to consciousness.
Please leave us. Awareness is a double edged
butterknife. We want to vomit up our
dependency and get away from your electrical outlets. We’ll punch the alarm
out of our joint sockets alone. Heavy-hearted,
we haunt just outside of a living room relationship. We have this conviction
that we must fake we’re stronger in order to be your family member.
You were responsible for our food and hygiene. You made
all our phone calls. We would brainfog out and yell
at you for reasons we forget. We still run
every decision by your exhausted brain. Can’t get through a day
without looking to you for orientation.
Constant Moon.
Soothe us like the perspiration on the cup of Christ. Calm.
Give us rest. Just like the ice packs
you got from the freezer. Lay them on our dying body.
Turn back the hands of heat.
You say “Not today. Not my baby. Not while I have ice left in my chest
freezer.” You stay like a hive of honey bees.
Close to your chosen Love with those open wings.
You regulate the happiness in our chest cavity.
You, pendulum swinging relief. You pulled our panic into the water
like Jesus calmed the storm and saved his 12 lovers.
You gave us a route to life. Your compassion
hugs our cheekbones. You poured into us, Love.
Love, made from ice
packs, held our sweaty hands. Prevented suffocation of heat. Rubbed
cannabis oil on the soles of our feet, you stopped
hundreds of seizures. Stopped the reach of all our chronic
conditions. Covered the house with foraged
bouquets when we couldn’t go outside. Filled our life
with kisses and “I love you”
even when we couldn’t answer back. Gave us the whole bedroom
when we couldn’t love you back. Brought us hand-carved
fruit platters and home-stewed curries when we couldn’t look
you in your spirograph planetary nebula eyes.
Said goodbye to us
with rivers of tears. We moved away for better
medical care and a solitary Seattle studio. Even now
we call each other every day. You fly here
every time we need your full moon in our bed. Is distance
what brought us back together, Love? Filled
our bosom with heart-shaped boxes of surprise-filled
chocolates. All for you. We are bursting with love that surpasses
titles. We choose you, Love, for our forever family.
Proginoskes (they/them, we/us) is a Disabled White Trans Nonbinary poet and fiction writer based in Seattle. They are also a Dissociative Identity System. They enjoy being outside and spending time with their two dogs, one cat, and three snakes. This poem was created at a workshop taught by Megan Falley called Poems That Don’t Suck.
starring / Octavia Spencer and me both / we ride
down I-75 in a drop / top Jeep / she ain’t no mammy /
Nah / she a natural / siren / and I’m only / half girl
her lipstick / magenta / mine the color / of the moon
this a movie we // don’t die // in or escape
a plantation / in or watch someone else fall
in love / in / we both get the girl / we both the eye
candy / we both natural / sirens / and I’m only / half girl
/ Octavia ain’t worried / ‘bout the patriarchy
Nah / the music cues / she just take off / gold bars
in our backseat / yeah I said gold / bars / who
said we / wanted to be / some bankrupt / hero?
first of all, yassss queen. can’t nobody
say you don’t look like you burned a pyre
or two. like you our only president. this is a black
woman with the confidence of an average white man.
We always gotta hold our breath. Wait
our turn. Lift somebody’s broke son up to our level.
Be like God [the invisible version] – but you more like Goddess
[the run up a check version]. Remember when you bludgeoned
a man with bare hands? Boss shit. You decide fate
in a cape and heels. Use men and trust no one.
And these niggas BIG MAD. Tell ‘em fuck the white
hat. I do it better than all you niggas. Be selfish.
Be the villain. Tell Fitz you too busy for the sixth month straight. Take your fists
and stiletto nails and turn them into wolves.
dezireé a. brown is a Black queer nonbinary Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, scholar, and sjw, born and raised in Flint, MI. They are the winner of the Betty Stuart Smith award from the University of Illinois in Chicago, where they are currently a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English. They were a Quarterfinalist in the 5th Annual Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship, often claiming to have been born with a poem written across their chest. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, Hobart, ANMLY, Bayou Magazine, and the anthology A Garden of Black Joy, among others.
“Women in labor can’t be laborers.” – Capitalist Proverb
It takes me a moment to realize that the doctor thinks dolor is pronounced like dollar, piece together that his thick mouth isn’t asking me for money but assuring me I will feel no pain. When money is mentioned, it is the promise of post-procedure prosperity. There is a tray of tools in the room, and when the doctor steps out, I hold up a scalpel, see myself reflected in its silver, and wonder how cleanly it cuts. My sisters work in la fabrica. They have better hands than I do. Delicate: both the bones of their fingers and the things they sew. They make bras with little bows where the cups meet. How many American women have had their breasts indirectly fondled by my sisters’ Black hands? I work in the fields like my parents and brothers. When I cut caña, I use a big and curved machete. Grasp the woody stalk with one hand and slice with the other. There is no art to it. Don’t go too low, not too sloppy, and not too slow. I can knock down five stalks with a single swing, and each will grow back stronger. But this tiny blade knows what to sever and its single cut takes out the root that should have branched out from me.
Jess Silfa is an Afro-Latinx, disabled, nonbinary writer from the South Bronx currently living in Nashville. They have received a Displaced Artist Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Ricardo Salinas Scholarship. They are working on a novel about a community rocked by the war on drugs and a chapbook about the sterilization of Puerto Rican women and infertility.
the young make the best revolutionaries, minds clear
as sapphire, hearts scythed, with diamond-dusted blades
they reap their elders’ retreats.
round faces whose gaze empties everything of intent,
leaving it naked as it is. There is no I meant.
Trust takes patience and they have none. Hesitation comes
from the past mistakes they have yet to make.
Their seeking will not hide you, or help you
out of this, your mess. Oh yes,
I sing the child insurgent who wakes up wanting,
for whom everything is first forbidden until permitted
or given an accomplice to drive the get-a-away.
If everything is placed beyond reach,
the impossible is not so far a leap.
They need wings to reach the smallest desire
and so practice flying, out of necessity.
I mourn the long cold war among the sexes:
how men talk to menfolk of manly things
leaving so much softness unsaid
and wound their hearts on hard expectation
surrender so much to cross that boundary
how the women speak of dark and daily magicks
only to their sisters, mothers, and daughters
fearing the men in their lives, hiding the smell
of blood, children and kitchens, of the ill and dying
how we who make the transit
unchoose sides, catch the scent of something farther away
and follow a pilgrimage past the edge of the fields
where once we wore uniforms and fought those wars.
hajji, we pass with the power
to decide what to show and what to hide
with a scarf, an earring or a spit-shined shoe.
some risk little and lose themselves
some risk everything and lose.
some make a zone of truce, give
medicine and shelter where they can,
however briefly, to those who find the village door,
and the same is true in every war.
Rasha Abdulhadi is a queer Palestinian Southerner disabled by Long Covid. They grew up between Damascus and rural Georgia and cut their teeth organizing on the southsides of Chicago and Atlanta. Rasha’s writing has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Electric Lit, carte blanche, Anathema, Shade Journal, FIYAH, Mizna, ROOM, and Lambda Literary. Their work is anthologized in Mid/South Sonnets, Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology, Snaring New Suns, Unfettered Hexes, Halal if You Hear Me, and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler. A poet, and speculative fiction writer and editor, Rasha is a member of Muslims for Just Futures, the Radius of Arab American Writers, and Alternate ROOTS. Their new chapbook is who is owed springtime. Portrait by JJ Dumont.
