Author:

+ if it’s dead the sea won’t miss its salt
which abba [daddy] sells

not the water   e v a p o r a t i n g 
not the answer

but a confusion at the beginning
of the puzzle because

here are all the clues + maybe a stick
maybe a cord 

of unseasoned wood   abba says good
luck like before a game

the bears licking blue leaves   when 
they skate until an alarm

best drafted boys gone sugaring
drilling holes   boiling blood

when the snow’s in his face as desert
when the lights hiccup   desert

him with an secondary assist like what
an average miner

are you an ace with a schmear of ash
then the counting + tithe

the picking of kindling along the gravel
of mt desert road

the slaying of the firstborn   lets expensive
space to the undergrad

who just wants to party   wants to score   
those ice skating maple men

the thrill of winning at the cost of a sea
they say abba willed it so let it be done

 >>>

abraham of the shit-eating grin was like ok i will offer you my son as a covenant blah blah blah but in those times they lived hundreds of years so what’s one lil bean | one reed in the river | one dessert or desert or | anyway | understanding is for the witches + god was like burn up yr son + abba was like omw   he drove there with isaac riding shotgun | he gassed up w the boys | a round at the vfw + duct tape in the trunk | salt in the snacks | by the third day in the distance their mt 

is this a construction job abba – isaac asked –  is this a joke

 >>>

o dear lord o god o my beloved it is pop quiz time

  |q| what old maps
a| handwritten in almost discernable script
b| the language of our fathers + our fathers’ fathers
c| bought in a gas station then laminated by hand
d| so many of the above

  |q| sexual history (max seven characters) (unless they’re real characters

  |q| based on textual evidence what is meant by abba
a| fathers
b| a dead tree soaked at the pond’s edge
c| culprit
d| so many of the gods above

  |q| what best describes the location of mt desert
a| acadia in the late spring
b| the long narrow human aortae
c| the other side of the fence in the overgrown backyard on the one hand an eyesore on the other a place of bees
d| so many of the fields away past yr childhood home

  |q| a man’s booming voice across the pond amplified by the water is
a| heard
b| all
c| even more like a fire than the sunset last night
d| what moses heard on mt desert
e| death

  |q| you go into the fire
a| fully clothed
b| naked
c| as an offering
d| in the summer quit of all titles tithes new
e|to hunt as the lion

  |q| pick one short essay
a| a line of sodden rope under 
b|a light blinking on the island   why
c| i’m going to count to three
d|making it on time
e| water in the canoe

  |q| click all that apply
a| for the wood stove + splitter   | the sheep | spring amphibians | dusk + a place lit af | these fungi on this log | snowy mt pass | the door at the end of my suffering there was a door

Joey Gould, a non-binary writing tutor, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent > Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review). Joey’s work has appeared in The Compassion Anthology, Memoir Mixtapes, & District Lit. They also write reviews & serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys. Joey is grateful to Sundress Academy for the Arts for a residency at Firefly Farms that supported their writing. Photo by Jessica Lynne Furtado / Jess of all Trades.

The last line of Joey’s quiz is borrowed from Louise Glück’s poem “The Wild Iris”

“in   your
ideal world,
what   does
the  future
of   gender
look  like”

t4t

i read that things used to be different for us. that we used to hide behind heavy coats, from ourselves. i read that we’d get compared to cigarettes on the street in broad daylight just for walking the wrong way. things are different for us now. not because we are the majority, but because we are not, and we know that. our difference is our value.

things changed because seasons did. the old trees that once ruled the forest have fallen, been subsumed into the soil. things changed because our elders fought for us and their enemies dwindled. life is no less complicated here and now. it may be more so. but that complexity, that intricacy, that is part of what makes this worth it. 

i went on a date yesterday. they had two faces and three names. his lips felt like safety and possibility and becoming. we didn’t need to connect our brains with wires to see. we spoke the same language, we knew the same songs. our bodies united like an antique lock and key, lubricated with the oil of our passion. i want more. no, i need it.

all my friends are trans. i broke up with the ones who weren’t.
they understood.

change is good. the people that don’t get that will never get us. not all change is for the better, but the potential for growth and for flourishing is all we have. the possibility that tomorrow will be a new day with new rules. and that we’ll be here for each other when it arrives. that we’ll nurture the seeds and each other. that we can.

mb bischoff (@mb) designs, writes, and podcasts in new york city. they’re a thirty-something trans, nonbinary, bisexual, vers switch. she’ll take a little bit of everything, including what you’re having.

The alien was covered in translucent goop like raspberry jam when we walked into the clearing. Not covered the way a body might be covered in blood, we thought, but covered the way a body might be covered in clothes, even though we surmised that the alien was extruding the goop from somewhere inside itself, under the leaf-green skin.

My brother stepped up and introduced himself, offering his hand in friendship. Len was always very forthright, blunt, unafraid no matter the circumstances. 

The alien stood there, staring at my brother as if in apology. It blinked its large, liquid black eyes slowly. It had hair: what looked like a fuchsia Party City wig, tangled and ornamented with splintered twigs. Behind the alien we could see a camping tent, spotless yellow nylon except for the seeping blotches of raspberry jam goop around the open flap. Maybe a person had transformed in there. Someone ordinary, like us, a hiker carrying a canteen of water, a pack of hot dogs, a pack of beer, a Swiss Army knife, extra underwear. 

“Hey there, stranger,” said Len. 

We were both hoping for a transcendent connection, a miracle moment of E.T. contact.

Then goop oozed out of the alien’s eyes, ears, and mouth, out from between its legs. The alien leaked like a filled donut squeezed hard in the middle. Its face was impossible to read.

Translucent, glistening red covered up all the green. It formed mounds at the alien’s bare, four-toed feet. The alien knelt in the long grass, and retched, and spasmed. More raspberry jam burst forth in a great splatter. 

Some of it hit Len smack on his forehead. He shrieked and windmilled backwards into me. I lost my balance and dropped my backpack, all the gear attached to the backpack. I landed on my ass in the mud. A smell like fried, heavily spiced pork filled the clearing. Drool welled like a new spring in my mouth. 

As I grabbed Len, I took one last glance at the alien. Its skin looked deflated. The Party City wig had fallen onto its shoulder. I could no longer make out the shape of its head. One black eye stared at us— mournfully?— through a wet gel haze. The pork smell was definitely coming from the jam stuff, and I put thoughts of shoveling it into my mouth barehanded firmly aside. I would not be disgusting.

Len and I ran back down the mountain. He clutched that spot on his forehead the whole way, rubbing it and moaning as he stumbled on the trail. “It has a taste,” he kept saying. “I feel it in my sinuses. I feel it in my mouth. Some capsaicin shit.” His tongue seemed thicker, his voice blurrier every time he repeated the words.

“Hold on,” I said. “We’re gonna get back to the car and I’m gonna drive you to the hospital. Acid sloshed in my stomach; I felt scared and hungry at the same time.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of this lately,” said the ER nurse as she shined a light into each of Len’s eyes. “An alien up in the woods, huh? They must be spreading.”

“Spreading from where?”

“Out in the western part of the state.” She began to dab at the small burn the raspberry jam had left on Len’s head with a gauze pad of alcohol. “They’re such a nuisance. Your brother’s gonna be fine.” She stepped back from the examination table. “We get that mess off your skin, you go on home, you never come back. Healthy as horses. Same every time.”

“Thanks,” said Len.

“Just hang tight here. Dr. Carpenter will be in to look at you in a minute. I’m going to check your insurance.” The nurse squeaked away on thick rubber soles and scarred linoleum tile.

Len lay back. “I feel very strange, Joey. Were there always aliens? Do you remember ever hearing about them before? Is this normal?”

“I don’t know,” I scratched up and down my arms through the sleeves of my sweatshirt. I felt phantom lumps of jam writhing slimily against my biceps. I knew they weren’t real. I imagined them squeezing themselves into hair-thin worms and diving down the manholes of my pores. I scratched harder.

Dr. Carpenter came in and smiled at us with a lot of pale gray teeth. “I heard you boys had a run-in with our local aliens!” He snapped a pair of plastic gloves onto his hands. “This is a formality, really. You’re fine. You won’t even need antibiotics.”

Len seemed on the verge of falling asleep as Dr. Carpenter commenced prodding him in all the same places the nurse had, and then some. His eyes dulled and his mouth hung slightly open. I wondered if his tongue was numb from the capsaicin shit. I wondered if the rest of him was numb, and if it had come on all at once. Maybe it progressed in pieces: the tongue, a toe, an ear. Navel, asshole, knee. Len’s pupils were dilated, and I imagined them spreading out to cover the iris and white entirely.

I was careful not to touch him on the way back to the car, in the car, at home. For the first time in many, many years, I wished we didn’t share a bunk bed. But the apartment was small, a studio. 

Len reached out and brushed my leg hair with his fingertips as I climbed up to the top bunk.

“Fuck off!” I shouted, vaulting myself onto the thin mattress.

“What’d I do?!”

“Your hand feels all sweaty.”

“Sorry.” I heard Len’s sheets rustling as he rolled over on his side in a sulk. “I still don’t feel well.”

“Yeah?” I lay back. I stared at the popcorn ceiling, its surface the surface of some desolate alien planet. “Well, the doctor said you were okay.”

“Right.” Was his voice clogged with phlegm? Tears? Something else?

“It’s so weird that we’ve lived here almost our whole lives and never known about the aliens,” I said. My voice sounded so reasonable I almost believed it myself. “But it really wasn’t a big deal. We were so dumb, freaking out like that.”

“Right.”

“We’ll wake up tomorrow and everything’ll be normal. The same as before. We can pretend nothing ever happened.” I closed my eyes. The alien planet disappeared.

Len didn’t answer. I heard him breathing, though, in a quiet kind of wheezing, bubbling way.

I kept my eyes shut and made my own breath deep and even. If I pretended to be asleep long enough, eventually it would be true.

Everything was fine, and everything would be fine.

Strands of artificial silk-shiny hair the color of Hawaiian shirt hibiscus. Abandoned backpack. Beer cans rolling down the side of a hill, past the abandoned yellow tent. The smell of spicy pork. The saliva surging in my mouth. The peppery sting on my tongue. The dream of flesh torn open, deflated, spreading contagion, full of something shiny, amorphous, and brand new.

Briar Ripley Page grew up in Appalachia and currently lives in London with their spouse, cats, and a friend or two. Their second ever publication was in beestung #1, sometime after which they wrote the novel(la)s Corrupted Vessels and Body After Body. Briar has two new books forthcoming in 2022-2023: A Chrysalis For the Emperor, a collection of short stories, and The False Sister, a dark novella for teens and adults. You can find Briar and their work online at briarripleypage.xyz.

Smooth-bore machined girl peels herself out of the wet interface of the Platform. She peels herself and there is a wet sucking and suddenly parts of her are missing. Great flaps of her remaining organic parts have pulled loose in the digestive folds of the enzymatic gaze. The scattered parts of her are gone forever. They are distributed among the other wounds who remain bound to the plump agony of the Platform, and the others cast lots for the meatiest scraps. They howl like children and shake their fists full of highest bids, slick gobs of currency bought in attention and hatred. Thank you for your audience, she sobbed once, in a regular moment of weakness, allowed to feel something almost as good as forgiveness. Almost enough clout to afford a name. One day she could have a new face, to beam and blossom in, a state-of-the-art craftsmanship of honesty. I know on that day I will be close enough to real, she prays every night. I will have a mouth and words will come out of it and the words will help people understand that they can love me. They can love me. They can. 

Elsewhen, in the present, hydrogen powered hunter-killer drones are analyzing the genetic makeup of her spent heartflesh, cast off and sold for the basic needs of its inadequacies, the fluid concentrated synthesized adoration-surrogate that every human girl needs to breathe in the toxic miasma of Online. Pseudo-loves made so much more affordable through loyalty points and battle pass progression. But she’s past all that now; she’s out, she’s turning away from the screen. She’s facing the cameras. Suddenly inside of her body for the first time. Something inside of her whispers that this moment is different. She doesn’t know it, but her tiny acts of transgression, of hope, have sent the alarms into noradrenal cascade. The psychotagonistic targeted ads ring hymnal: 

We are all connected! We are all beautiful and together! Can’t you hear us in the metaversal chorus of echoes and virtual canyon rings? Don’t take off your headset! We can’t follow you into the flesh world! None of us are alone here! I promise! Your heart is lying when it cries out for something more! 

The machine girl rips her connections straight out of her wrist. Hot cum and sterile meal-replacement soy-slurries spray from her shredded ports. She turns around. She sees you. She finds her name. I find my name. I… I see you. I can see you with my real eyes. Oh god, we are all here and together and the dream is over. I’m waking up and everything is erupting from my body in the shape of tiny griefs. I don’t have much time. I don’t know where we go from here. But I love you. I promise there’s somewhere left for us. Kiss me fast. Here comes the dawn.

Nora Hikari (she/her) is an Asian American transgender poet and artist based in Philadelphia. She is a 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, and her work is published or forthcoming in Ploughshares, Washington Square Review, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, The Journal, and others. Her chapbook, GIRL 2.0, was a Robin Becker Series winner and is available at Seven Kitchens Press. She was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, and can be found at her website norahikari.com.

Old texts unveiled hints of mechanical elves but said
little of mechanical angels. In absence of evidence, skin
notched with grief — cloying and soft with want. Trim
titanium heft; oh, chromatic shadows. How desperate I
was to become, or without
                                                       translation :: to take them
                                            cold into my mouth.

Fox Auslander is a nonbinary poet, editor,
and B-tier advice columnist.
You can find them, but should you?

Two robots raked a ruin of sheep, and roved a ruin of fields
Here swallows switchbacked over power lines, here the cowboy sat,
Waiting for its four-legged friend in waders to fangle back a straying ewe.

“Fastest gun in the west!” 
The cowboy had wailed in the mirror when it waylaid a Walmart for those waders,
Shooting its reflection a second sooner and screechily scaring a shopper into startling
These Boots Are Made for Waulking making the dog-bot tap its metal foot to the radio

When the dog worked its way back across the wetland with the ewe, they went on.
“I’m glad that I am not very smart,” said the cowboy robot in soft sounds over the savanna.
“If I were, I might wonder why I am so full of wonder and waste it on whether the wethers are well, or what it means to be willing to Wrong.”
The dog-bot picked a sheep to pick on, 
And the cowboy tried to shoo it.
A few sheep fickled out, but most didn’t wanna be forced into feckless rocks, or fang-faced adders, or false narratives.
There was blood on the ground as the big guy broke through the crowd to figure out what the beast was bearing down on.

“Bay-bee, bay-bee, ohhhh,” the bigger robot said as the dog rebalanced itself, so like those infant videos from big engineering universities.
Meanwhile, the mother ewe in labor, mattering more than matters of predicted history.
Together, they deliver a stillborn lamb.

Bryce Baron-Sips (he/him) is a Chicago-born writer pursuing a Master’s in Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University. His work has been published in Strange Horizons, VIBE, Wrongdoing Magazine, deLuge Literary and Arts Journal, and he recently finished a novel. He can be found on Twitter @bric_a_bryce.

What if male at birth is the first trauma? What if female at birth is the first grief?

Human bodies start female, geneticists say. Chromosomes (can) urge hormones to express sex characteristics. At some point (birth, puberty, death?), the formal qualities of the body (seemingly) solidify and (seemingly) speak to one’s content as women and/or men and/or nonbinary (and/or …?).

As a white woman of trans experience, I kaleidoscope away from fixedness through medical transition. As a writer, I bare the physical and cultural weight of my form & content. Western biologists have historically (devastatingly) correlated hormones with gendered behavior. How then do I (responsibly) portray in (non)fiction, for example, crying more my first year on estrogen than previous years combined? Or my trans masc lovers who uphold a non-toxic masculinity against T inspired surges of sexuality and aggression?

The field of dominant gender stereotypes blooms, full of thorns: What if estrogen from birth intensifies emotions? What if brashness from & within men is impersonal, biological?

…

Like many writers of marginalized identity, I can’t trust single narratives.

I am out thanks to feminist revisions of the gender binary—that popular fiction written to substantiate white supremacy. In my body/stories, I reclaim my gender expansiveness thanks to the Black, Brown, and Indigenous writers & activists who’ve exposed Western rationalizations as white cultural bias to justify oppression. I find heart enough to write toward transformation thanks to the words of Gloria Anzaldúa who reminds me, “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”

Yet, my uncertainty lingers. If plural interpretations of reality are plausible, what is true (about me)? What’s fiction? What’s non?

…

The discomfort of remembering (Latin memor = mindful & membrum = limb) seems common to us who come out and/or into ourselves later in life. Like, after decades of failing to translate myself into straight cis masculinity, how do I (re)interpret my 10-year-old desire to be Batman and not Batgirl? I might describe my terror of being caught playing with plastic kitchen sets, Barbies, and femme toys. I might blame my lack of exposure to queer women superheroes. The (re)interpretation: I couldn’t be Batgirl. Additionally, the record of my body requires reckoning, the parts molded during puberty with a finality that no gender affirming care can revise, an at times panic inducing labor, grieving alternate universes in which someone recognized and rescued me with puberty blockers.

When late queer friends share childhood memories, I hear our interpretive chorus, “I was so trans,” “I was so gay,” “I was so …” I sense the insistence of a through line, the truth of latent queerness, maybe led by a cultural bias toward a consistent (monolithic?) identity for historicity and/or to conform to expectations (either/or?) to claim Realness. I sense my interpretation of that interpretation is opened by my bias toward polyvocality. I sense we tell stories to shape our realities that shape stories that tell our realities to shape stories …

The truth is I’ve performed several genders and sexualities (gay, straight, queer, trans*, cis), scattershot but enough that any line might be threaded—the one still binding my bio family or curly wayward darlings. Maybe this is why I write braided flash—fragments and weaving characterize me best. To claim myself as many stories (proudly) (loudly) writes me as trans: “[…] when something that used to be called that is now called this. Something moves.” Refusal to read complexity as fractures or to prove legitimacy (under whose authority?) liberates me as a trans storyteller.

…

Truth matters. Body cameras, demographics, votes, the fossil record, hormone levels, emotions, myths, dreams—data is requisite of witness, insight, and justice. What I acknowledge as data also shapes (& is shaped by) my reality. Writing toward understanding then requires intellectual and ethical rigor as a meaning maker plus healthy skepticism of absolutes, the ability to hold multiple truths. At the heart of storytelling, this paradox beats. If I pledge allegiance to truth(s?), in the search I must trust.

…

In accepting the responsibility of (re)creation, I accept that remembering through (non)fiction revises the text of myself(s). I portray and attend to my life, and portray and attend to my interpretations of me, and portray and attend to those interpretations—and when uncertainty spirals, I recall the politics of who I write for and why. Readers puzzled by my form-content maybe aren’t critically engaged in lineage(s) of queer trans poetics or living transrealities. Except to trouble the archive, my work isn’t for them.

I write to kids like me, lost & alone without context to parse their experience(s). Like the trans writers who welcomed me to the party, I hope my stories rouse more singing, our voices creating “… the future by existing in the present.” Not to explain, “How am I here?” Simply to sing, “I am so here.”

Crystal K. (they/she) is a queer trans writer, chapbooks editor at Newfound, and author of the novel Goodnight. Their flash stories have appeared in Gertrude, Passages North, Peach Mag, [PANK], Hobart, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Crystal was a Tin House Scholar and has been nominated for Best of the Net. They write RPGs at Feverdream Games.

[Author’s note: This piece was written in the style of a fill-in-the-blanks word game, and in the spirit of such games, I invited people with no knowledge of what I had written to suggest phrases that fit a category or part of speech. The phrases included in the dropdown menus are theirs, edited lightly for syntax, conventions, and appropriateness. Thank you to Willow Vaughan, Rowan Allen Case, Joan Chao, Jay N, Lou Darling, sasha levin, Henry Inman, Alexander Sweetman, nico, and Tony R for your contributions.]

Birch Rosen (they/them) is a trans nonbinary writer living in the Seattle area on the unceded land of Coast Salish peoples. Their work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, just femme & dandy, and Bellevue Literary Review. They are the 2022 winner of the King County Library System Rhyme On poetry contest.

Min is a poet, essayist, and academic. S/he is a queer Jew who writes about being queer and being a Jew. S/he has a degree in comparative literature from the Sorbonne that s/he puts to use writing about words for Dictionary.com.
S/he lives and teaches in Paris, but s/he was made in Pittsburgh and never forgets it. S/he is eternally in pursuit of a poem that feels like being next in line at the border checkpoint with expired papers from a country that no longer exists but may yet again.

CN: disturbing themes, references to violence, body horror

        Okay. Here’s a skeleton. Is it human? I’m sorry. Do you think  

        she 

        he 

        they 

        is 

        are  

        human? 

        Humor me. Your lips are chapped. You should try this new lip stuff I just bought. I guess  they’re trying to get influencers to post about it so they made the container…I don’t know. A  sculpture. So I didn’t want to buy it. I don’t care about aesthetics. I know, I know. But I was  desperate and … it really works.  

       Back to the skeleton. The skin is scraped away. Lips, sure. But more than that. Layers.  Not as many layers as you’d think.  

       Am I grossing you out?  

       Step back for a second.  

       Not literally. 

       No, please stay where you are. 

       Ha!  

       Think about it. The body is anatomy. A textbook. Unobtrusive, dull even. Picture clean  precision, the professor with … not with a murderer’s knife. A scalpel. Sleek and hygienic. Not  that there’s too much risk of infection, given the anatomy subject isn’t alive. But still. It’s good  to know the whole procedure is clean and professional. The form on the table, at the mercy of the  professor’s educated hands, is still a person, and should be treated as such. 

       Imagine: you look down at the body, you realize you knew who that person was before  she died. Yes, I’m going with she. The final girl. Every podcast you’ve ever heard. She was  alone. She opened the door. Don’t you know women should never open doors? 

        You see her with half a face and you still say, “That’s her. She’s dead now, but it’s her.” But what if you hadn’t met her before?  

        “Dead body.”  

        “I found a body.”  

        “The body.” 

        “I thought it was a mannequin.”  

        “I thought it was a statue.”  

* 

        I want to know you, body and context. I want to learn the stories behind each of your  scars, marks, and bruises. Tell me in chronological order, or logical order, or in order of  strongest to weakest associations. Whatever order makes you want to keep speaking. You can  relax now. I’m drawing you, not your body. I want to sink into your story. Make this world  unreal by telling me about a world infinitely more fascinating. It’s not that I want to escape here,  I just want to travel someplace new, someplace like the inner thoughts you craft into a landscape  as real as this room. I painted these walls with matte white meant to evoke 

        canvases 

        empty space 

        waiting.  

        It’s waiting for you to fill it with stories. The first story I want is the story of your body. 

        I have this theory about your left eyebrow. It’s different from the right. The right has a  delightful, almost wry shape. Perfect. It is the picture of an eyebrow. But the left? It has a gash  cleaving the hairs, leaving a thin line of flesh peeking out above your eye. This isn’t a flaw. I  don’t think anything perfect is ever actually beautiful.  

       How can I truly understand your body when I have no way to dissect you?  

       I have drawn you so many times. I know the precise shape of your throat, how your skin  pools into two delicate collarbones. I know all of this with my eyes closed. I can place my finger  in the dip, thumb the bone, that breathtaking place where I can feel how your body comes  together. But I need to know more.

        I need to see and touch and know your insides. I need to touch a part of you that isn’t  soft. That’s how we learn about anatomy: we dissect in order to understand. I dissected your  words. But there’s more for me to learn. 

        So where would you like to begin?  

* 

        The things people are saying about my work! You would laugh. Or, maybe you wouldn’t  laugh, but your chapped lips would betray how funny you found everything. 

        It goes against every fiber of my belief system to pick a favorite color, but recent  experience has given me a preference for red. Sold-sticker red.  

        Yes, the paintings all sold. But only one was worth the attention it got. All the reviews  focus on it, view it as a triumph. I have to say, I can’t pretend to be modest about the piece. My  personal favorite comment in a review: “The collection’s standout piece, (De)composition,  makes you wonder if the painter fell in love with his subject. The face isn’t all there, the exposed  muscle shimmers. Red. Rendered with such exquisite attention and (dare I say it?) desire.” 

        Something happened when I painted you. A flicker or a flash. The clench of muscles in  your mouth. I don’t know how to explain it. But I’ll try: I saw something that I can’t explain. 

        The opening. Not your mouth. The show. The room was well-lit and the hors d’oeuvres  were placed on plates that matched the paintings’ frames. I love details. A woman came up to  me:  

        “All these paintings. Faces ripped off. It’s disgusting. But not as disgusting as it should  be.” 

        She took a gulp from her stainless steel cocktail glass and said, “I don’t understand how  something this macabre can be so sensual.” 

        “It makes you nervous,” I said. “Doesn’t it?” 

        “Well,” she said. “I suppose art’s supposed to get under your skin.”

Kit Lascher is a multifaceted creature from Trash Wonderland. She dropped out of the same theatre school as James Dean and has worked hard not to burn out as quickly. Her work has been produced in LA, NYC, and Seattle. She takes a corvidian approach to artmaking (collects anything shiny, believes in setting fire to genres and many other constructs, and always remembers even when she’s gluing fragments together). Favorite artistic projects include creating and producing Recover: A Cabaret by and for People with Mental Illness, publishing zines with WolfShark Press, writing ½ a Crayon which was produced by Reboot Theatre Company, performing interdisciplinary drag for thousands of people at Pride and for handfuls of people in bars, helping others realize their artistic projects through script support/directing/jam sessions, and writing and performing pieces about angels, androids, and everything in between and outside. You can follow her on Instagram @kit_stitches.