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.
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.
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.
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.
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 somethingdisgusting 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.
CONGRESSIONAL INCEPTION MEETS TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS
1.
kiss vampire red lips on the back of the bus nyx shade copenhagen
elegantly discuss DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING & tell the boy you love him right when he looks up the Washington Post. quote “democracy dies in darkness” against the expanse of his skin. kiss his neck. fall in love. wear a suit to
WAKE UP at six in the morning & trauma dump for a ballot
[HIGH SCHOOL SPEECH AND DEBATE is an academic activity typically available to students. Similar to athletic sports, speech and debate activities are challenging, competitive in nature, and require regular practice, coaching, dedication, and hard work.]
WAIT. tell me again baby what does it mean to be human & i am kissing you on the back of the bus (kissing like a prayer :: hope for a better time) WE WIN the tournament we win the war we win what it means
WAKE UP at seven in the morning & roleplay congressional speakers
pretend they don’t make your life a living hell (you are queer & brown & chronically-in-pain & this doesn’t matter at AIA ARIZONA STATE TOURNAMENT but it does in the real world where your competitors turn against you the minute the round is over & bite down into your insecurities)
WAIT. tell me again baby what does it mean to lose & i am kissing my own tournament lipstick of your cracked lips & praying to gods i don’t believe in to make this work &
WAIT. tell me again about SOKO NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION baby tell me the world’s ending when we’re stuck in highschool i want to annotate books in the margins of what it means to love & WAIT. tell me again about HARVARD NATIONAL DEBATE TOURNAMENT where i kissed you until i couldn’t breathe & i became the monster congressional debater i feared i’d become
WAIT. tell me again baby when you realized this was it & i am kissing you across the knowingness that we are going to be nothing // be swallowheart swallowtail & blood across my body & a COUNTERPLAN for a policy we can’t endorse because it’ll kill us all.
2.
[welcome to WINTER TROPHY DIVISION ONE where i watch you win congressional debate. monster. my love]
WAIT. remember when i told you what happened the last time this happened. congressional inception. congressional debate meets child predator meets i’m fucking sorry you’re banned from the TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS
WAIT. baby i don’t want to become that monster (lines of coke running down my nose. i debate college policy. i follow the pipeline)
WAIT. baby i’m begging you to stay here. stay mine baby i remember when Vedh Shetty pretended they were queer so that they could take advantage of the circuit i remember when Jay Shapiro was banned from the tournament of champions because he stalked a freshman i remember when my debate captain told me that my gender would never be valid unless i was a good debater
WAIT. come on baby remember that time i saw you in ARIZONA DISTRICT QUALIFIER winning extemporaneous speaking you looked beautiful under that light you looked like the monster we both knew we were
[WELCOME to high school speech & debate, where all kids go to die & drown & where i face sexism comments like THE LENGTH OF YOUR BLAZER DISTRACTS FROM YOUR ARGUMENTATION & i’m sorry but your voice is too shrill for debate. maybe try dying instead.]
WAIT. maybe this is the end of the story. maybe we repeat over & over again. maybe we pretend we’re not the monster this time. maybe we do lines & take shots & pretend we’re good enough. maybe HIGH SCHOOL SPEECH & DEBATE rots us whole & spits us back out
arushi (aera) rege is a queer, chronically in pain, Indian-American poet in senior year in high school. They tweet occasionally @academic_core and face the perils of instagram @aeranem_26. Their chapbooks, exit wounds (no point of entry), and BROWN GIRL EPIPHANY, are forthcoming with Kith Books and fifth wheel press. They are the EIC of nightshade lit, Bus Talk, and Draupadi Interviews. You can find their website at arushiaerarege.carrd.co.
¹ the same structure, project & projected. every fault needed a name, a treat[ise], in/corporation. we learned what makes the body a lie & not a body, recognized their gaze staring out of us, & it was the first time we realized we [were] wanted.
² we built a new language from dial-tones, we held each other to our ears & laughed & laughed & answered, our voices mistaken for silence by everybody except us.
³ our bodies were born[e] in[to] exile, our mothers’ daughters.
4 weathering their ord[i]nances, we ached for lexicons free[d] of hurt, we carved bombshells into calling- bells, prayer-flags, wind-chimes that caught the breeze & brought it to us as sutras, we listened, we built, we failed & failed & failed.
5 we knew we were kept things, learned how to pick our names like locks, held them as secrets meant to be shouted, treasured salvage, strange & idiosyncratic.
6 like every girl, we were sculpted hollow as any god. we followed hunger, daisy-chained into the sun -showers & pressed ourselves into each other’s hands, each lingering touch leaving fingerprints we took as permission we could never give ourselves to be changed, to become defaced monuments to our fathers.
7 the moment we entered their fantasies, we knew what they wanted, we gathered fabric, fashioned ourselves silhouettes from their narratives to survive. always we were craved, spent, discarded. we saw it then, mirror -close, their curiosity, soured.
8 we made camp in the diegetic ruins, listened to the brick’s murmurs rasp against our fingertips, tore every last syn- tactic structure into ribbons. we knit them into blankets, warded off the clinic’s lingering shadow. in the morning we were awake, unnamed, still allowed to be anything.
9 they too had poets, they twisted our forms into synecdoche, pulp, the first jokes to be cut into teeth; our first names were from their dialect[ics], our mother tongues.
10 some of us longed to be human, combed through manuals in hopes of becoming legible, let them write us into case studies & declare it medicine, claiming we could only ever be stitched things, dolled up for men who picked up scalpels and called themselves surgeons.
11 we severed the old logic, its unbroken lines, continued traditions without our mothers. they found the ruined terraces of our births and named us barren, not knowing we grew homes that weren’t farmlands, that we could raise daughters without asking them to wear our names.
iris nguyễn (they/she/chị/em) is a transfem poet living in New Brunswick. She found a loose thread on her body and hasn’t stopped pulling since. They can be found at ih-cn.carrd.co or @acensusofstars on Twitter.
(I.) One of those nights two of us walking back home so drunk from a party, a slurred chorus rolling off our twisted tongues as we rediscovered God. The laughter a wind roiling as you pointed how strange how funny it was. How did I not know it was the filter I was lighting up? The dried tobacco must have flaked in my mouth at least. How did I not know? Something is wrong with this cig I was saying. Why is it not lighting? I showed you. We were so drunk and the sky was an alien child’s strange wide many-eyed colossus face. God’s we thought. It was night and the face was watching us so of course we could see it. Those many eyes that watch us that never stop watching even as the farther watchgods switch places. Even as the cursed lovers that rarely ever touch (day and night) beyond a liminal exchange at the end of the shifts of their liege gods (moon and sun) flood one the other full force equal in revenge because of all they have endured keeping to themselves all that longing day long!
(Interlude) We look up the twinkling face and it stretched the heavens. We raise our hands to heaven Child we say your face is heaven.
(II.) Squinted twinkling bright we saw those tiny eyes of childhood. How ever would we not recognise it? We were so young again so happy again so drunk the alcohol a new love in our eyes a wonder a new joy in our mouths. We wanted to say it just how it was. We wanted to say we see you true god we hail you lonely child throwing tantrums. Would you like a hug? It was the mood and it was the weather. The night’s hand a cold palm warm in the core as it cupped us. Curious. So wonder lost could return? it asked. I thought you would never get it back. Embraced us the god. Pleased so so pleased it was. Bewondered by the quick flush of our fleeting lives—
(Outro) Us calloused new adults God was hugging us and we were so drunk and it was all love.
Egbiameje Omole is a poet, performance artist, and editor, working from Ibadan, Nigeria. Egbiameje serves as a poetry acquiring editor at FIYAH. They’ve had their poems published in ANMLY, Body Fluids, Delicate Friend, New Culture, Eye to the Telescope, and elsewhere. They choose laughter.
What is it about watching white women teach me to cook? On nights while Anna works I watch them. Alison Roman makes a chicken caesar wrap. Carla Lalli Music makes a chicken caesar wrap. Molly Baz makes a chicken caesar sandwich. I’m probably never going to make any of these elaborate hand-held foods, but I watch standing at the counter doing mundane chores, wiping things, drying things, and I watch standing at the dining room table folding load after load after load of laundry. Two enormous stacks of dishtowels, a number of piles for each person in the house: one for pants, one for shirts, one for underwear. The eight-seater table has become a landscape of stacks. Anna likes to work nights. She started when she was pregnant with our first, and it’s how we learned to co-exist, all that space. When she is on nights I sleep propped up by all four of our pillows. As a kid, I watched women cook, too. I liked Rachael Ray, her earnestness, the way the ingredients were things my mother would have had in the house. 30 Minute Meals, which aired the year I was in the eighth grade, featured a frenzied series of actions: running to the cupboard for bags of pasta or grains, patting dry meat, opening giant cans. She talked fast, too, in an almost pressured way, but friendly, too. She reminded me of a younger, kinder version of my mother making dinner. I liked that my mother, who grew up in a home with no good cooks and not enough money, could carry on a lively conversation while performing all of the kitchen’s actions. Making dinner every day for so many people had made a cook out of her. She poured vegetable oil and vinegar and a packet of dressing mix into a little bottle and shook it vigorously. She cut onion into bits with a little steak knife. She breaded chicken cutlet after chicken cutlet after chicken cutlet and the whole time, she talked.
As a teenager, I watched Sara Moulton because she was so smart about food, and even though she often made accessible dishes on her shows, especially on Sara’s Secrets, she had worked in restaurants and as a recipe developer and editor for Gourmet, so she could explain why she did the things she did, and what was important to spend time and money on. My mother treated food television as background fodder, something that was on but only half paid attention to. I learned from her that when you do the work of the home, you listen to the work of the home.
The house in which I grew up was impossibly loud: my mother was loud, my five siblings were loud, our dogs were loud. First we were in a very small home, the downstairs of a duplex in which our bodies were always on top of each other, sitting in front of the window A/C in the living room eating firecracker popsicles, and then we were in a much larger, more echoey home, my mother’s yelling reverberating off every wall. She would yell between two and four names, on average, before saying the one she’d originally meant to shout.
I liked that the women on television, the women teaching us to cook, talking to us while we did chores, were not yelling. They never cursed or demanded anything of me. Their gentle suggestions were offered with something I suppose I mistook for love.
I love my mother, and as I’ve gotten older and had my own family I understand her so much more, but I admittedly spent my youth looking for other mothers, for women who would talk calmly to me, who had warm faces.
I spend a good deal of time trying to remember if wanted children when I was a young child. I can’t figure it out. When did that desire come in? There is no remembered time in which my mother wasn’t mothering at least one child other than me. Feeding us took up an enormous amount of her time. My mother did not work outside the home, and so we were the work of her life. She never pressured me to have children. Nobody wants or expects queers to do it. I didn’t know I was a queer child. I didn’t know what that was. All I knew was, whatever my mother had, this life of cooking and cleaning, it didn’t seem like something I was supposed to want, supposed to get.
Sara Moulton’s debut cookbook is the first one I remember seeing on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. On the cover of Sara Moulton Cooks at Home she wears a modest blue scoop-neck shirt and an orange apron.
The apron is emblazoned with the logo for her show: sara’s secrets, it says, humbly, in lowercase blocky print.
On Cooking Live, Sara Moulton wears chef’s coats. They look trim and professional on her small, blond body: she looks like a seasoned athlete, the kitchen her playing field. Her moves are planned out. She has great bangs. Not many clips from this show remain on the internet, but when I watch them as a thirty-six year old man, I notice things I didn’t remember but am certain I observed, integrated, as a child: the big rolled up sleeves on her blue chef’s coat, her sporty ponytail, the natural, if present at all, makeup on her face.
I didn’t know people could transition until I was seventeen years old. I know it’s weird, because I grew up in New Jersey, and could see the New York City skyline on my way to high school, down Route 17, but it just wasn’t something I’d ever heard of until I was getting ready to go to college. Lesbian was as far as queer went in my parochial high school. So when I looked for models of what kind of adult I could be, I looked for women with haircuts like Moulton, women who, because of their professions, had to wear sensible shoes at all times.
Whether someone was, or is, actually gay, that doesn’t matter. It was about finding models of success whose costumes looked like something I wouldn’t rather die than wear.
In her Cooking Live episode Burgers, Moulton speaks authoritatively but casually about ground lamb, an ingredient many American home cooks twenty years ago might have found unusual. She explains how to ask a butcher for a better grind, but acknowledges that interacting with a butcher isn’t something most of us can do, bound to the supermarket as we are.
She speaks in relatable aphorisms. Takeithome,seasonit,cookitright up, you’re in business.
Sara Moulton is a good teacher. She knows how to explain techniques and ingredients in a way that beginners and more seasoned cooks would understand. If she thinks an ingredient might not be at a supermarket, she tells you where to get it. In a 55 minute episode, she makes three different burgers: a lamb burger served in a pita, a chili cheeseburger, and a tuna burger.
Like my mother, I have learned that the most likely successes in the kitchen, when you’re cooking for your family, are slight variations on things they already like. Thus, something that looks like a beef cheeseburger, that is called a burger, is almost guaranteed to work.
Sitting at a table with three gigantic dressed burgers and a modest glass of wine, Sara Moulton concludes the episode by answering questions from fans.
This is where Moulton, like any great teacher, shines: responding to these inquiries with care and automaticity. She still does this today: on Christopher Kimball’s podcast Milk Street Radio, Moulton joins Kimball in a weekly Q&A segments. Listeners call in with all kinds of questions, but the ones I like best are from people trying to reconstruct family recipes. The callers described what a cake looked and tasted like, and Moulton and Kimball offer advice on resurrecting a dormant, grandmotherly joy.
In one episode, a caller named Jerry from Vermont describes his family’s annual viewing of the 1983 made for TV holiday film The Gift of Love. In one scene, Jerry relates, Angela Lansbury’s character proclaims that she is going to make her famous burnt orange cake. What could that be?
Wow, Moulton says. I’ve never heard of this before, though it sounds absolutelywonderful.Though Christopher Kimball says he believes the burnt orange refers to the color, and he may be actively googling while he relates this fact, Moulton seems delighted by the question and its ascendant possibilities, and on the spot invents a dreamed-up treat: Ienvision,she says, awonderfulorangecakethatyou then pour a dark caramel syrup over, and just let it infuse.
Jerry likes that idea, he says.
Nobody transcribes these episodes, so I don’t know how to spell the question-asker’s name. I suppose I’ve chosen Jerry with a J to distance him from Gerry with a G, my father, who rarely prepared food for the family, though, on the rare occasions he did, he was quite skilled in the kitchen.
In a 2022 interview with Benjamin Kemper, Moulton is asked about the gender divide in cooking—those who light things on fire (Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay), vs. those who help Mom get dinner on the table, Moulton answers flatly on the dynamics of early cable food television:
Theydidn’treallywantwomenatFoodNetwork.
Cooking Live ran for over 1,200 episodes. In her next show, Sara’s Secrets, which ran for just three years, Moulton dresses differently. She wears what my stay-at-home mother wore: basic slacks and workmanlike long-sleeve tee shirts, tight on the whole body, covered by a plain aprons. She is presented, then, as a regular person, not a professional, cooking on a homey set in front of some windows. There’s something more feminine about her presentation here, though I am not sure feminine is the right word, and I don’t consider Moulton to be in a certain category among hot white woman television chefs—Claire Robinson of 5 Ingredient Fix, Katie Lee of The Kitchen and Beach Bites with Katie Lee—all, perhaps, Nigella Lawson derivatives in their own ways. The long-sleeve tees, though, lack the gender ambiguity of a loose-fitting chef’s apron. Of all the items of clothing in the world, it was a tight girls’/women’s tee shirt that gave me the most trouble growing up.
In the Kemper interview, Moulton recalls cooking her first meal on a solo television spot. Cooking on one’s own is markedly different from cooking with a host, she tells Kemper.
Don’tsmileuntilChristmas,the popular teaching adage goes.
Hi,I said on my first day teaching high school. I’mMs.McIlraith.
Of course I could not help it—I smiled at my students.
We’llhaveyououtbyNovember,someone said from the back of the room.
Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (Counterpoint 2021) and the flash essay collection In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet). He is the memoir editor of Split Lip Magazine and the Edelstein-Keller Writer-in-Residence at the University of Minnesota. Krys lives in St. Paul with his partner and their four young children and is working on a very, very long essay about food.
Noona, sister, wake up, it’s so early this morning, look how I got too caught up in my own shit to get to sleep. I had that dream again, where all your friends were there and we made our way home. Now we awake, and now we are home, Buffalo Grove, Illinois, 2011, timestamp the letters and internet IM’s sailing across the flat midwest. Our house overlooks a major local highway, and all I see are white walls and green and coyotes, snow and the orthogonal road. I wish I could run away, but I know you’ll always love me, you tell me don’t, please, stay here. I sleep upstairs, and downstairs, you seem, to me, as unhappy as ever that I have decided to remain, shouting at our father, and our mother shuts the new white cabinets and hits my hands and tells me to stop my own complaints.
When I’m 19 years old, one day we’re in your apartment with the shades half-drawn, and you tell me that I shouldn’t call you noona anymore, it’s awkward, because we’re usually amongst her friends, they call her Ella, we’re not children anymore, we have our own names. You’re frowning, and I look out towards the train station, and it’s almost raining on those suitcases and umbrellas and jackets. When I’m on a walk later, a tiny bay unfurls beside me, Mission Bay, and last year, I passed San Francisco commuting to dates and sex at Berkeley from across the bay at Stanford time after time, but that hasn’t really been happening lately, well, so I avert my stride on a quick one and go back to your building and forget about it. It’s almost your 25th birthday, and your shoe rack tells me that your five additional years of age are hard won, but you triumph continually, school career and money, and when you ask me which photograph print should be hung up in your bedroom, I swipe through options and pick a rather tall and narrow picture, the haziest one with silhouettes and shadows and big splotches of colored lights, red and yellow, so you can just barely make out a protest slash riot, because I never want you to forget that life has only triumphed for a handspan’s width of time, maybe as thick as my thumb, and you never want me to forget the same thing. But the truth is, I’m busy carrying on in the complete un-empathy of blissful release, even more selfish than what these songs would have you believe: because it’s a pandemic, but I’m still endangering our family by sneaking out to have sex with queer strangers without masks in the cold hours of the night or morning while living in your apartment that summer. When I feel ill one day, I tell you the omitted truth, and you and your boyfriend are scared, angry, tearful, worried for our safety. We sleep and wait, hoping to test negative for the virus.
I keep breaking dad’s watches. Our parents still live in the same house we grew up in. He puts them each in my hand, a central quarterly fiscal event, and says that this one works fine, he’s worn it for a year, take care of it. I have squandered the second hand ticks and all the books I’ve bought that I know I’ll never read, I’ve probably read as many books as I’ve broken timepieces and told our father that the watches seem fragile, as he notes that I’m the only one breaking them. A year ago and you’re telling me that poetry doesn’t resonate with you, and I rush to think there must be some poem I must write, hearing those words, just those.
When I enter the afterlife, I’m a sophomore, it’s 2019, and I have never remembered the date. Mallory is the friend, a quasi-sibling, she grabs me outside her lab building after I call her and walk over and tell her that I fell from the ceiling as my belt broke in half. It’s dark, and I am transparent and the slim fabric next to the jacket zipper cauterizes some leftover chest pain as the forearm bones wrap around and beg me not to leave. She cries, but I can’t, and I think about how there’s someone out there asking where all the ducks in Central Park go in the winter.
While assembling friends, Mallory calls you. Your eyes look at me through swollen lids. Your boyfriend drove you all the way from SF to Stanford, it’s far to Palo Alto, and I wish that you didn’t have to go to all that trouble to witness my arrival into the afterlife. My freshman-year best friend Nate drives me to hospital. I enter with only one other person, so you come, and I decide to sleep in the emergency room for a while.
You and your boyfriend come to see me every day in the San Jose behavioral hospital. I almost would rather you didn’t, but visiting time is the only non-monotony, and I think standing here, in this concrete-laden courtyard, surrounded by all the reinforced glass windows and a psychiatrist explaining the new drug to your pursed lips, feels better but I suspect that this is wasting your time, that all our time can’t be given back,even if I want to make it up later, the time and place matters, like train track lights and sleep.
Once, I am almost ejected from Stanford campus because I represent a potential threat to myself, the residence dean tells me so from across a desk, I want to file down the wooden corners of his office and vandalize the walls in orange or warm blue. Noona makes her way to campus again, and we convene and throw our voices at each other about studying and schoolwork. I tell her I haven’t done shit this year, fuck, I haven’t done shit for the past few years, and if I don’t get shit done now, it doesn’t feel so different to me. Once, I stopped calling my sister that childhood Korean term for older sister, and ever since, it’s been easy to want to keep fighting, to preserve our childhood quibbles. I don’t like how things change, and I can’t figure out why I throw myself at breakneck speed at every potentiality, when I find myself missing every past, too, yearning for other lives, because I always compare the tragedies of midwest souls, each pair always somehow bound together. We are 5 and 10 years old, and Ella and I throw game controllers at each other in the car parked by the dry powdered ground, somewhere traveling far, never knowing where we were going, never needing to know anything at all.
Place-Poem, Quasi-Sestina
after “Step” by Vampire Weekend
I once wrote a sestina in the peninsula, near San Francisco, to talk about impermanence and teenage relationships. The city wasn’t Berkeley, but it, too, was an ancient grave one digs up over again, near Palo Alto, on a day when it was too rainy to ride that shaky bicycle up Potrero Hill and the months when a loving hand was only offered from over in Sunnyvale — that time I knew I was in love with an ex-girlfriend from Fremont
and Oakland seemed like a far-off memory to me. It was the lonely island Alameda that made me think about Chicago, and then, I was suddenly there, in Hyde Park, in the Jay Som t-shirt, in the cloud-stuck afterlife. My hometown, Buffalo Grove, was only an hour away, and even though I hadn’t even met you yet, it was New York City that I was missing, I was in California but it was E 180th station and the Bronx Zoo that appeared in dreams, I’d wake up talking about a chain-link fence cast in Poughkeepsie
that told me of your future love, days after the uncaring ex-girlfriend from Oak Brook shrugged me off her shoulder for the last time. You were the future, somehow Illinois- bound, even though you’ve never even been there. Your spirit came to me from Rochester, haunted songs that arrived in our lives in tandem, and your family’s native Puerto Rico showed up at the bottom of the album cover for Red Burns, and suddenly, Seoul appeared before me, too, and reminded me I couldn’t be old after all, it was Suwon
that was my mother’s birth-city, and somewhere off in current-day North Korea was my father’s father’s birthplace. For my family, Chicago feels modern. How long have I really lived? I imagine taking you to see Wicker Park and pointing out all the uncaring hipsters I see my past selves in, and at Thalia Hall someday you could tell me you’d rather not make out while the band from Leesburg, Virginia played onstage. These days, we’re drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with Amsterdam
Shag tobacco, and I always wonder, what past lives did the moon dictate for you? Sagittarius could be a place/palace in your mind, and I could guess the coordinates — Prague, for my own topology, feels appropriate, and it’s where I think the astronomical clock tower would make a good place for us to sit nightly and point somewhere in the sky, call it Venus. And someday, we’d say goodnight and end up in Budapest in the morning, train-stopped, and we’d be just a little bit older. Heading off to the Danube,
I’d wonder if we have to wait so long to feel time complete its orbit around us. Brooklyn will have blessed us by then (Red Burns call the place Medina because it’s holy) and when we stay up late at night on the phone, the Hudson speaks through us, in harmony, two voices, miles apart in the same city. In Jerusalem next year, the secrets of the psalms will stay tongue-tied, but at the corner of Kosciuszko and Broadway, your poem will speak to me, remind me by the grace of San Jose
I’m still alive, loved by the lunar secrets you tell me you’re running out of. In Prague, I told the Vltava I was looking for a tender heart. I confessed my love to you in Brooklyn, watched you walk away to Kosciuszko station. You turned around and pointed to the moon.
Young Fenimore Lee (they/them) is a Korean-American kid, poet, and music journalist residing in Athens, OH whose work has appeared in DIALOGIST, Entropy, Existere, and filling Station. Indie rock, emo, post-hardcore, and other music genres are important influences in their writing. They received a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from The New School. They are currently pursuing a PhD at Ohio University.
![] type ] deliriant effect
] known only in cultivation1 as
] escapees2
] popular ornament
] exist wild outside their native range3 as introduced suspected
] some animal
] cult ensured continued survival [
4
] alternately arranged
] across, an entire coarse
] margin, of name5
] -shaped6
] opening.
] strong, pleasing7 noticeable
] shades of
] old,
] shredded forms8 Some
] only
] long to
] own orname9 contain
] naturalize in isolate10
] dispersal accomplished
] their fruits now
shrivel on the plants without progeny.
11 They have been maintained in cultivation as a source of [
] by humans.](https://beestungmag.com/wp-content/uploads/nguyen-2-poems-whale-fall-cultivar-2-967x1024.png)
