Author:

I think there’s a ghost in my spirits. 

My whisky, my wine, my gin, my scotch. 

There is a ghost in my spirits and I think I drank part of its finger the other night when I poured myself a glass of Merlot and sat on my couch and stared at my ceiling from 11:37pm to 1:11am. I don’t really know if ghosts can have fingers. I don’t even know if ghosts are in the shape of human beings or if they’re shapeless masses or if they’re even real. I didn’t believe in ghosts until now. If I even believe in them. But I think I do because the ghost in my spirits was inhabiting the bottle of Merlot I poured myself a glass from, and I think it’s finger was poured into my glass because as I sipped and stared I felt a tickle in my throat that I’d never felt before.

There’s the tickle in your throat that arises when you have to cough. That’s a simple feeling and one that’s easily identifiable.

There’s the tickle in your throat that arises when you’re about to let out a sob. That’s a gruesome feeling and one you try to swallow down.

There’s the tickle in your throat that arises when you are at a loss for words. That’s a breathless feeling and one more complex than coughing.

Then there’s this tickle. The tickle of swallowing a ghost’s finger. It’s a mix of all three of the previously mentioned tickles with a dash of burning. It also sticks. Coughing and sobbing and breathlessness can eventually be expelled from your body. This tickle, however, would not leave. It felt like an insect had lodged in my larynx and was not obstructing my breathing, but was wriggling with a vengeance. I tried to ignore it as I finished the glass, but I couldn’t shake it until the next afternoon.

Tonight I’m drinking a gin and tonic and watching a television show where a girl wants to find a guy but she has a secret and I wish I could tell you more but honestly I just put this on to have some background noise. This gin and tonic is fine but I think now I’ve gotten the ghost’s ear. I feel like I’m hearing more than usual within my house. Not just the random show but also the house settling and the carpet fibers on the rug being rustled in a high definition way. I hear a spider that has just caught my eye walking across my coffee table. Each of its legs are tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tapping across the wood. Normally any sight of a spider is enough to launch me towards the closest tissue or towel so I can squash the fucker, but I can’t help but stare at it and listen to it’s legs tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

I wonder if this ghost cares that I have accidentally consumed part of its being. I don’t know if I would care if I was a ghost and someone was consuming me. Then again, it’s the ghost’s fault for deciding to camp out in my spirits. It is free to roam around the house if it really wants to.

I think my phone just buzzed. 

I’m checking it and it looks like I have a couple of messages. Nothing special, just a text from my mom telling me she has some sprouts growing in her vegetable garden and a picture from Hannah of her kitten playing with yarn. Hannah has never had a maternal instinct, but all of a sudden this kitten has turned her into the most protective parent I’ve ever met. The kitten wandered out the other day somehow and decided to take a nap on the front steps of her house in the sun, and when Hannah discovered the cat wasn’t in the house she called me hysterically sobbing and continued to sob for an hour until her boyfriend came home with the kitten under arm and asked how it had gotten out of the house.

I think the gin is finally fogging my vision and clouding my mind. I feel myself mentally wandering. I feel my ears becoming more and more overwhelmed as I hear far too much for my own good. I think I need to lie down. I should go lie down.

My stairs are rickety and basically broken. The apartment I rent sounds fancy on paper: loft apartment. Loft. What a seductive word. You know what’s not seductive? Stairs that creak even when nobody’s walking on them. A ceiling above my bed that’s sprung numerous leaks. Wallpaper so cracked and torn it’s scratched up your arms on multiple occasions. My apartment is essentially just a series of shambles constructed in a way that resembles shelter. I’ve scraped enough together over the years to pay rent and consume what some may constitute enough food to survive and of course buy liquor. I really don’t need luxury, liabilities can serve a similar purpose.

My mom hates this place. She’s visited twice, and the second time she broke the fourth toe on her left foot on a loose tile in the kitchen floor and proceeded to weep, not because of the pain, but because she didn’t understand why I had moved out into such a shitty place. She kept saying, “I don’t understand, you’d be safer with me. Come back and live with me, Carson” It’s a nice enough sentiment but since May got in that car accident in June I haven’t had a reason to stay there. 

Besides, I think mom’s losing it. My name’s not Carson.

I like the way gin makes my face flush. If you can follow this thought, wine makes the apples of your cheeks flush. But gin makes my whole face flush, with a pink strike extending across the bridge of my nose and dabbling my forehead with small specks. It makes me feel like a feather whereas wine makes me feel like a fiend. You’d think it’d be the other way around, but I don’t know. I’m just telling it how I feel it. I like feeling how May felt the night before graduation when she drank half a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and then forgot she’d drank half a bottle of Bombay Sapphire when I’d called crying after I found out dad had discovered I was back home for summer break and had come back just to burn all my clothes and try to threaten mom into letting him come back. She must have felt so fuzzy and light as her front bumper wrapped around that tree.

I’m crawling into bed and I hear the dust molecules whirring around the floor. I kind of feel sorry for the ghost, and wonder if it’s both annoyed that I drank its ear and grateful I’ve relieved it of half of it’s loud existence. I would hate to be both dead and stuck with perpetual HD hearing.

I wonder why a ghost would take up company with me. Sure, this house is creepy and run-down but other than that it’s not exactly a fun apartment to haunt. It’s not May, either, don’t be basic. I would know if it was May. May would leave little signs or something. She used to leave me little presents in my room when I’d had a bad day. I would never tell her, she would just guess. And she was always right. I had a lot of shitty days as a kid. And a teenager. And as a twenty-something. My existence is shitty? Maybe that’s why there’s a ghost lurking in my household, hiding in my spirits. Why a ghost has any interest in alcohol is beyond me. Can a ghost get drunk? Maybe. Maybe it’s just nice to be in a confined little space. Less nice when someone drinks part of you, but, you should figure it comes with the territory. 

May hated confined spaces. That’s another reason I know this isn’t her. She loved open fields and gloated over having the biggest room which she knew she only got because she was the baby.

May bought me the first piece of clothing that I actually liked. My parents always got the cut and color of my clothes wrong. And by parents I mean mom. Dad was kicked out when May was a senior in high school and I was a freshman in college. Not that that stopped him from coming to the house and burning the clothes May got me. Still, he was kicked out. He wasn’t supposed to be there.

There’s this weird rustling under my bed. Not the dust, that’s a different rustling. That rustling is like a shhhhshshshshshshhh.

This is more like a crchshcruchs.

What is that.

Wait.

What is that?

There’s a child under my bed now. There are ghosts in my spirits and now there’s a child under my bed. I see a small fists curled up and tiny beady eyes peeking out back from the darkness and peering into mine.

“Hey.”

The child is still staring at me. A curl falls into its eyes. I think I recognize that curl, but I don’t know why.

“Hey, you don’t have to hide under there if you don’t want.”

I have no experience with the supernatural so if this is some demon and I’m inviting into my home well, then, oops I guess. I just need this rustling to stop, it’s getting loud. There’s also this clicking noise now. I haven’t heard that since my dad would clip his nails in the bathroom and then grab my hands and clip my nails and tell me they were unkempt and no one likes someone with unkempt nails. I think this child is making that noise. I notice one hand is retracted and after every click there is now the sound of a soft spit and from that spit a nail appears. 

“You shouldn’t bite your nails. No one is going to make you clip them if you want to let them grow.”

The child stops. The child inches forward.

“Can I get you a snack?”

No movement.

“Do you want water?”

Nothing.

“Want to see a cool rock?”

That’s fucking silly I know that’s fucking silly but that gets the child to come out. I’ve had this rock that May picked up from the beach one summer and gave to me because it had tiny little glittery bits. I’ve brought that rock with me everywhere I’ve ever lived. The child walks towards it slowly, but looks impressed with the glitter when I pick up the rock and move it around.

“Wanna hold it?”

It nods. I hold it out, and the child takes it.

I notice there is a finger missing from a finger.

I stare. And stare. And stare. And then look closer. And closer. And closer. And then, finally, I recognize the hair and eyes and freckles on the bridge of the nose and the overalls I loved so much when he was six because it was the only clothing item I owned that didn’t make me feel weird.

“Oh.”

I brush the child’s hair back and notice it’s ear is gone.

“What were you doing hiding in the wine and gin?”

The child shrugs. “You weren’t looking anywhere else.”

“It’s been hard to focus on anything else.”

“I didn’t like it there.”

I laugh. Of course he didn’t.

“I’m sorry I drank your finger and ear.”

“It’s okay. I won’t need them much longer.”

“Oh?”

The child sits down criss-cross. It tosses the rock back and forth between it’s palms.

“Why do you keep remembering me?”

Jesus. What kind of question is that. “Um…because sometimes I wonder what would happen if you had never been born. And sometimes I wonder what would have happened if you had never changed. And I wonder if you ever could have done something to save May.”

I was wearing a dress the night May died. The first dress I had ever received. And that night my father showed up because he heard I was back home and that was the first time I’d been back home since I told him I wasn’t his son anymore and that if he couldn’t accept me as his daughter he couldn’t be part of my life and he spit at me and called me names that blurred together and I left before he was finished because I wasn’t going to take that. Mom said that I didn’t have to take it. May said I didn’t have to take it.

Maybe I should have taken it.

I didn’t realize I had been speaking this out loud.

I feel a hand on my leg.

“It’s okay.”

“Could I have stopped it?”

“You?”

“…We? Could we have stopped it?”

“No. But I don’t think we were supposed to.”

I feel a tickle in my throat and the moon streaming into my room makes a searing sound as it hits my bedspread. I don’t know what’s going on anymore. I’ve been in this shitty apartment for too long. “Is this actually happening?”

“I think so.”

“You do?”

“Don’t you?”

“No, I hope it’s not.”

“Then we probably think it is.”

We.

We.

I’m looking at myself before I came to May heartfelt one night and told her I thought I was someone else but I didn’t have the language to articulate so instead she just let me cry on her shoulder and bought me a dress and after that we didn’t have to speak about it because we knew and my mother had silently always known so my hair and nails grew and I wore more and more dresses until my father came and burned them all and –

“I miss May.”

“Yes.”

“I miss her.”

“I know.”

“You don’t speak like a child.”

“I speak however you think I speak.”

“I think you speak like me.”

“Then I speak like you.”

“I’m sorry I’ve dragged you along for so long.”

The child nods. “It’s okay. But sooner or later I’ll have to leave.”

“When?”

“When can you forget her and forgive him?”

I stare at the fingerless earless former version of myself and stare and stare and hear the moonlight sear and feel my throat constrict and expand and stare and stare and don’t know.

“What are you thinking about?”

“How you shouldn’t hide in my liquor cabinet”

“Okay. I won’t anymore.”

“Okay.”

“I like your dress, by the way, Connie. I like that we’re wearing those now.”

“Thank you.”

The next morning I wake up, hungover and looking ghostly. I don’t think I’m going to drink tonight. Just in case the ghost ends up in my spirits again by accident. 

 

Lizz Mangan (they/them) is a playwright, dramaturg, and educator who focuses on queering theater in subject and structure. Lizz’s work has been produced by companies such as The Tank, Gadfly Theatre, American Stage Theatre Company, and more across the country. Lizz’s Play Strike/Out will be published by 1319 press in 2025. When not writing, Lizz can be found bowling or falling into various internet rabbit holes. lizzmangan.com.

I pull tee-shirts
off my skin. A woman looks
at me the way the angled mirrors fracture
my body into a thousand kaleidoscopic
petals. I never found desire
hiding under rows
of dresses. My mind wanders
back to a time when I etched stick figures
into worn school desks. Stiff bodies, lines
for clothing, ungendered. I don’t mean
to philosophize at you—

but a sneer follows
the woman’s voice
in Alexander’s department store
when she questions
me     Are you in the right
dressing room      trying to size up
my body parts under a winter jacket
and loose jeans. Out of style, I’d like to pass
over this life as a sparrow, blending in
with grasses & weeds. If a sparrow is confused
by its reflections, staring at a prism
with distorted images, would it believe
it shouldn’t exist or that it has another
self, hidden beneath its feathers?

 

Carla S. Schick is a queer, nonbinary social justice activist. Their writings are inspired by the complexities of jazz to get at emotions in the intersections of political and personal events. They stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their anti-colonial struggle. Their writings can be found in Sinister Wisdom, Fourteen Hills, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Qu, Querencia Press, and anthologized in Colossus: Body. They are a 2023 recipient of a SF Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award. They are forever grateful to the professors at Berkeley City College with whom they studied, earning a Certificate in Poetry.

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.