America is born on an ancient Indian burial mound. Aren’t we all?
Young lady on a bus reading popcorn, like cornbread and eating corn was invented by white people when they discovered Indians didn’t know what to do with it.
In mysteriously cultivated gardens – you might think someone turned this soil – the bus goes down, downtown, sad.
Aren’t we all?
“There’s a green one,” someone says dun dun dundundun and someone else takes a puff hidden in their cupped palms, and says, “When did all our moms start working?” like this is new.
But our lady on the bus – how’s that? – easy as a ten year thing going out of bounds and heading out of town as fast as the bus seat will take her is farther away any time.
Aren’t we all?
“Send tits!” somebody says from the cab of a truck going the other way slow back into America.
Give it this: What America can’t sex up it will parcel and sell or haven’t you noticed what you pay now, someone will ask you to pay on again tomorrow?
Aren’t we all?
The Purple Manner
Have you seen the well-designed door fob of the purple manner in a thousand and four fractures of showy facet, hidden in eleven countries of men’s men and lady’s women Until it stops?
Hey cos hey cos Hey cos you only gave us rights cos
Queer bars tend to the side entrance Either by design of luck
Have you opened a door with the back of your shoulder turned away to open and enter, kept your back to the door your eye to the cautious street that clearly doubts you and Given it all? I
either by luck of design more hungry babies dance across these floors every night
And to see it all sedated now erased how they do when they erase everything you well someone worked for isn’t what is important not who worked what but someone Some someone did?
Hey cos hey cos Dancing up these floors every night
In eleven cautious countries of worker’s rights In eleven cautious countries of worker’s rights In eleven other countries in event nights In a thousand and four hidden fractures of showy facet
Travis Hedge Coke is a writer, editor, and teacher, working with Along the Chaparral to story interred veterans at the Riverside National Cemetery. The former writer of the Hugo-longlisted Pop Medicine column, they currently write for the weekly Patricia Highsmash, for Comic Watch.
what can fire do to brick sesame oil? cave paintings sculptures altars our sleeping bags chrysalides unzipped to touch skin rock simultaneous
“what do you know about a U-Haul?” you ask “I don’t I’m thinking about urges”
denoting a specific type of scene urge to rush to unbutton to sever to stay
“come back, I want to live together” can it be earnest? “can I still hit?”
hollow witch square pages against my better judgement
what if these two lovers are new to each other?
this is what a breast tastes like face of a waterfall wet with algal networking this is what a breast tastes like I find you in the world music section release another record that crosses a mountain
every bound body unbound sweaty worker woven basket of sorghum (radish/reddish)
it is an opening
the row
a thread runs through yanking westward
this is the territory of the creek
topography of a forest appropriated
(name/remembrance)
I am from the middle
you are from the middle
many acres away and years
there must be imagination in bondage
the way a tooth might be holed from gum paper stuffed in the gaping place
love notes receipt of fare a bill
you sing to me after the sex
Jaye Elizabeth Elijah is a visual artist, writer, orbweaver, and the Nightboat Books Fellow. Their words and images have appeared in Polly Magazine and Rookie Magazine, and were recognized by the Cincinnati Arts Overture Awards. Jaye Elizabeth is pursuing a BA in Literary Studies at The New School, and lives in Brooklyn.
This poem is a collaboration between the author and eir computer; a Markov chain process run on the author’s previous poetry manuscripts and the outputs manually sorted and handpicked. It is thus an interaction between two stochastic processes: one on the author’s hard disk and one in the author’s brain.
The author confesses having used this technique in previously published poems. Speculation is welcome and endorsed.
II.
Never veins.
You need the simple, curled up insects your words await in the vehicle I would watch for heat, leaving who I am —
I cause pebbles Please describe thwarted Do not lore.
They ask me if I am turning increasing everything.
You can cry help; living weapon, alas, it is! all right to see flowers are possible; edifices in the entrance of your body, and the Academy.
Overhead it uncoils to Talmud, transition.
We live and the fatigue inside this is marking a home.
III.
Covered outputs creak.
I paint the luminous shame — can you react and whisper with a knife in hand?
I wonderstand — you don’t know our mindset and if I could, I would —
why, come! I am unknown. All tears for the magic; and for I am you, would you do it?
IV.
We are still material, it’s par for the course.
Suppose it’s for the recognition; I am an invision display, I am what a jellyfish is producing and some kind of dimension gate blessing you with words of speech.
We are less, we are real, we constantly move away from pain.
Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns), טומטום, and an immigrant to the US. E is a winner of the Lambda award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, and a finalist for the Hugo and Locus awards. Eir debut poetry collection Algorithmic Shapeshifting was published by Aqueduct, and eir debut short story collection The Trans Space Octopus Congregation—currently a Lambda award finalist—was published by Lethe Press, both in 2019. You can find Bogi talking about books at bogireadstheworld.com, and on various social media as @bogiperson.
It’s late October at the house just outside of campus. From where you’re lying on the couch, the party is loud, the room is soft around the edges, and you haven’t felt this okay in weeks. Only one person called you “she” today and there’s banana-flavored Laffy-Taffy on the table by the drinks. No one else likes banana-flavored Laffy-Taffy so you get to have as many as you want.
“Being mentally ill fucking sucks,” your friend complains from a nearby beanbag chair, drunk.
“For real,” you agree, because being mentally ill fucking sucks.
“Fuck the establishment, maaaan!” someone ends up saying, sing-song giggling, because it’s easier to manage than: higher education doesn’t give a fuck about us, huh?
It makes you smile. Most things people like you are scared about turn into jokes. They kind of have to.
You’re tired of being scared all the time.
See, you’re someone who tends to notice things—lots of things. More things than most.
They’re things worth being scared of and not worth being scared of, alike. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which with all the things you notice. Things like the way she’s looked at you since you made out at the party last New Year’s Eve.
It’s nice, being wanted. Nice but dangerous. Like making a drink to taste after you’ve already had a few. You don’t exactly trust yourself.
You’re too sad and scared and lonely to trust yourself with things that make you feel good.
She’s sitting on the couch across from you and you are falling sideways into the cushions, snickering. You’re doing that thing again; you’re letting too much slip. You wonder how many jokes you can make about handcuffs and riding crops before she realizes it’s one of those things. Something serious that you joke about to make it less powerful. Less important.
It occurs to you, drunk with a face full of couch, just how much you are always holding back because of fear. And it’s stupid, you think. You know her. She listens with tilted-head interest, is so considerate it makes you ache, but your biology has you hardwired for terror at every turn.
Later, in the dark after more people have left, you slur an apology—a confession—into the soft shoulder of her sweater.
“Sorry ‘m not more, like, physically affectionate when ‘m sober.” You’re holding her hand and it feels wonderful. Dangerous. “Just nervous all the time. Doesn’t mean I don’ like you.”
Affection is something that enters and exits you in corkscrews.
You want her to touch your cheek, to stroke (maybe pull) your hair. To tell you that you are good. You don’t trust yourself to believe it on your own. She has never called you by a word or pronoun you haven’t asked her to, and that kind of trust is a rare commodity for someone like you.
You feel small with her hand on your knee. It’s a good kind of small. A safe kind of small.
“That’s okay,” she says.
You’re not sure how to do anything besides want from inside your own head. If you try to tell her any of this you fear it might all come rushing out at once: your selfishness, your off-center desires, your need, your need.
There’s so much you want. There is so much you don’t trust yourself to have.
Fuck. Most people probably don’t engage in this level of self-sabotage.
The two of you go out into the backyard and join the lazy, wobbling circle of people passing around a joint. It’s cold enough that your left hand ends up inside her right coat pocket. A handful of minutes later you hear yourself, clumsy, rambling out your entire worldview, zig-zagging around stories you’re not allowed to tell until there is snow on the ground. Listen to yourself, you think. You knew you would say too much.
High and a little drunk and you still can’t stop cringing at your constantly leaking edges. You hate yourself for being so much sometimes. Here, you want say—want to offer her the loose ends of your marionette strings—let me not be a person for a little while.
She is soft in her words and her eyes and it makes you hope so much that it aches.
You have a theory that maybe this is why so many people like you are into BDSM. Maybe they don’t want to be scared of feeling good. Maybe they just want to be able to trust other people for a change.
The two of you head back into the house where almost every room is dark now. You stumble, laughing, and follow her like a lost puppy. She invites you to sleep in her bed instead of on the couch. It’s so much easier to just say “yes” than to have asked. You wish she would ask you other things you would say “yes” to.
That night you dream of autumn leaves. Of banana Laffy-Taffys and pot smoke. Of leather cuffs around your wrists. When you wake, it is to find her asleep beside you with a hand on your stomach and a leg over yours.
You don’t trust yourself to do anything but take her hand.
Zoë Johnson is a queer transgender non-binary writer living in mid-Michigan. They are an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and a creative writing MFA candidate at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Their fiction has been shortlisted for PRISM International‘s 2019 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the 2018Lascaux Review Prize for Short Fiction. Work of theirs has been published in PULP Literature, Eastern Iowa Review, Plentitude Magazine, Sonora Review Online, and been anthologized in the Lascaux Prize Vol. 6, as well as Public Poetry‘s 2019 contest finalist anthology “ENOUGH.” Their work is forthcoming bilingually in The Polyglot #6, and as part of “Trans Bodies, Trans Selves” from Oxford University Press in 2021. When not writing, Zoë spends their time doting on their cat Strawberry, learning their tribal language of Anishinaabemowin, and getting far too invested in podcasts.
for all i know, i am a museum of vacant stares i pronounce myself little nigga of the void
a they fulla sockets— more holes than i know what to do with. find a bitch slipping in + out theyself for all i know i am a mumble rap i study any
skt skt
for evidence i allegedly was once here in a body so far removed from diaspora i almost forgot that it is there a theoretical mass i have yet to witness i was not made for the eye to capture nor the tongue to comprehend for the roof of the mouth assigned mouth at birth
at night i crawl in through my lips
+ swallow thousands of me
kiki nicole is a Black, Queer, and Non-binary multimedia artist and poet. They’ve received invitations to fellowships such as Pink Door Writing Retreat, The Watering Hole, and Winter Tangerine. kiki hopes to lend a voice for the void in which Black femmes not only exist in plain view, but thrive. Find them at kikinicole.com.
WE’VE ALL DONE THINGS WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO WITH OUR BODIES
were i to subject my brain to confession the way i do to therapy, perhaps i would begin & end with each of your names the way i know my name has also bookended the list of sins the confessor & i had demanded of our bodies, so i am considering your conflicting doctrine, & how little i know of you except what my hands remember. i’ve been having dreams about you again. in them i consented in your hometown, we ate local berries, i checked a state off my list. but instead i’m hollowed out in the most peculiar sense: filling someone else. i mean i’m having a hard time not leaving (again). i’m eating until we’re both crying. i’m sober until i’m not. my symptoms are more honest than i am: stress- related paranoia ongoing feelings of emptiness impulsive behavior risky behavior success sabotaging behavior: most of the time before people know me the way i need them to, they G–gle me, & i mean they can: my mug- shot(s) my legal name my lovers who oscillate between prose, who disappear vilified & are brought back to my mouth with docu- mented [redacted] admissions. forgive me, g_d of a war that was supposed to make sense. you & someone you hate say y’all share the same origin myths so i don’t know if i believe in your bed- room anymore. i watched you undo the decorations. how you walked out of yourself & into some- one’s bad archetype. O, g_d of giving up the punchline: send someone else to hol[y/d] me. give me law & liquor: a fifth of each: with which to confess where i hid the rest of the ________.
GOOD MORNING DELAWARE VALLEY METROPOLITAN AREA I’M CRYING ABOUT BEING DISABLED AGAIN
i name each ailment after a cryptid because i like the idea of my limbs given excuses for their magic acts: finally reasons for immobility: a defiant belief against my body’s traditional connotation: how i used to split night-pavement in combat boots: before i forgot how to hold my breath: i swam a mile every other day: now my nerves bulge: my hip disappears: a pain accused of being imagined: an improbable monster: there is no science to explain why my skin bloats: like that: as a child my spine was scrutinized for a scoliosis experiment: i expected to hold a booking number during my mugshot(s) i mean: let me blister into a joke but no, now, every doctor’s measurement feels like a driver’s license seance: pull whoever my bones belonged to before all this shit happened out of my phlemed-up throat and ask them to state their age and address for the camera: i promise i am still angry about how much childhood i lost to doctors’ disappointing hands and still, now, when i wake up surgery after surgery in only more debt not less pain: i can remember not being disabled the way i remember being happy– i’m not sure i could tell you— but i must have felt it: the root word of “cryptid” is “hidden”: so that’s what i call this invisibility: how last month the stairs didn’t matter and now i am crying: at the top of them separated from something i need, again: or an amorphous mythology: how can i expect anyone to believe me: amateur cryptozoologist of my own body: when i can’t tell you how i got here: when science can’t either: when all i know is one day i woke up knowing: something had gotten lost: inside of me–
L. R. Bird is a disabled transsexual cryptid from the Jersey Shore. As a slam poet they toured and competed internationally and hosted prelim/final stages and open mics. They have work in the 2017 Bettering American Poetry anthology and pieces from their most recent chapbook INVENTION OF THE MOUTH (Dream Pop Press, 2019) have been nominated for multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. They want to hear about your favorite bridge. birdpoet.github.io
i wear the name you give me for / three years before it thins out threadbare / which is to say for three years / i let you call me a moonshard / a toxin-bright bloom / forktongued and lovely / poison-flowering snakeplant / jade slipped cold into a colourless throat / lined by ghosts with ink-stamped faces / smiling tight-lipped to hide the teeth / call me sovereign of little sorrows / time-lapse of ungrowth / call me anything / but a treasure again / i stole the jadestone from my name and / sold it for gold / melted it down into rivers / and like the drip of mountaintop snow / one day it will all be swallowed / by the ocean / all of its mouths opening and closing fishlike / around their own once-names / forgotten —
ghost-town girl
bright in the way of cerussite: too soft to be metal-touched. all flash & glimmer, saying goodbye once every year you’ve known her, the routine of the runaway act something safer to measure by than a nebulous new year. don’t worry what my hands will do. in every story i’m the only one who winds up with an open throat.
one time a girl with signal-fire hair knelt over me on slick-glowing floor, laced me back up & promised to do it again long as i needed it. & next time her back was turned i asked someone to burn down the building.
this is the damnation of the rabbit-heart. i don’t know if those ever want anything more than to see the warmth of home last beyond your own meaning, to live a little longer, to not freeze in the field as the shadow of death falls from above. it’s not that i think i had wings in the womb, or that they snapped off at the first touch of this world’s air but i should’ve come out something that makes its home high instead of tied landbound, left lovesick for flight.
don’t you dare give me to the ground. i’ll come back just to tell you you’ll never be forgiven.
Quinn Lui is a Chinese-Canadian student who has been described as 1) mostly made up of caffeine and bees and 2) dedicated to being a menace. Their work has appeared in Occulum, Synaesthesia Magazine, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere, and they are the author of the micro-chapbook teething season for new skin (L’Éphémère Review, 2018). You can find them @flowercryptid on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, or sharing a fire escape with raccoons.
