Category: Issue #21

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.

concertina

after the time
some are renewing passports 
   stockpiling meds
expendables left to burn
vice to clamp my thoughts 
before slippage           old dog sees it 
despite blind eye             inability to endure
a wail                                  no longer contained 

some just part time just passing through
just working class parents     earning some authenticity 
dissonance of memory  bound as we are
by the smell and taste of it
show me is another demand of the functional 
neurotypicals urge you to keep trying 
deriving pleasure from struggle 
privilege consolidates protects its own
visualization part of the kink
vanilla as a fully embodied flavor carrier 
sparkling dank carbonation effervescent personal 
connections another iteration 
multilayered ableist trifle

learned to live without photographs 
or place or objects externalities stripped 
sadness of vigilance distrust necessity 
yesterday shuts door there can be no
expectations      crossed the river
ate what was displayed 
tomorrow arrives empty-handed  
          expect no mercy from armed men
or their spiritual leaders

the elect the chosen the few the beloved
the pure the cadre
of opportunity for some dream is an abattoir
not as if there was no warning
chickens come home to roost
mercenaries eye strongbox
someone always wants to own river 
and rain that falls grifters invest in better suits
get some scripture alternative narcotics
some just long to wield the pliers  
best to keep that hurricane box year round 
gas in the car even without a safe destination
even without a clearing forecast it gets better
      for some it gets and gets some more

      from the beginning 
the first obstacle to  overcome 
all we were taught  dependency 
on good intentions 
it gets as it always has better just round
another corner sly diminishing 
if you’ve never been behind the wire
how can you know the taste
of what lies beyond 
the rainbow served up daily
hot and fresh

 

investment potential-

community  just across the river
fluid always out of reach     gators
basking
turkey buzzards climb thermals 
someone turning water
into some other spirit claims to transform
violence as if it isn’t the thing itself
another principality of sky

 【taste
    metallic tropical a long sour poured 
     into a mug broken handle smoothed
       to an anguish
          fatigue is a luxury】

           curvature 
of shell horizon empty             wind in cabbage palms 
endless motion                     light pierced waves
Gulf in all its immensity          fragrant with unseen 
most of what we’ve known       of this life
binds us here                              one to another 
wave to shore                              spoonbill to conch 
we always asked                          too many difficulties 
nothing so empty                         as the departing
we remain unwilling                     to leave our own

revealing interior 
                         peeling onions
someone must weep 
       we are not useful creatures 
beyond river behind gates
 calendars marked            our days
    numbered 
seasonal tradition     permits 
not required               heritage demands sacrifice 
a harvest of those that will not graze
content behind the wire

we cannot acknowledge unseen uncontained 
unsaid only the lie remains burnished 
a different glittering truth divergent text
worked into flesh a weary litany 
relentless as tide hammock elevation 
dank fragrance fern
mangrove rooted in the only certainty 
of ink or word

some mornings 
we see what we have eyes for
reading glasses broke a month ago 
        balance with a tweak and a squeeze 
demanding stillness for focus 
no way to untangle thoughts
                               left to celebrate 
degradation or arrival
 of sweet potatoes 
words crisper than pork rinds       stepping off scratch        
 another
meridian crossed             another boundary 
that will not contain           curvature 
of shell horizon empty             wind in cabbage palms 
stars struck from old currency    each wave 
a name                                once uttered redeemed 
                escaping tide
                 escaping hunger                  predation 
snapping at our backs

 

gulf work-

keeps singing 
shoes are for colder climates       flip-flops 
good enough here
                      simmering pole beans 
oil at temp for chicken wings                 saturation sky
wind off Gulf 
sparking underbellies                   clouds float rain 
past our dry sand patch of tomatoes 
                                        it’s fitting to run out and yell
              at the stately 
procession dumping rain in the bay

it was silly to think you could learn
all the words a key in one hand lamp
the other                           of shadow and thicket
a deep stillness where smallest 
mosquito thrums against ear eye pulse
points                                she said
                                     【what will you do when tomorrow 
                                         shows up empty-handed】           
definitions 
begin to grind
even seed corn
               by now you should know

cross river however you can        shave 
your consequences thin as possible
coming south sandbar welcomes all equally 
with indifference

             【you can leave
                  but it will not sever
                    this place has grown into through you 
                     feel the little tap dance in the skull】

swing that hoe grubbing out roots
centipede grass planting snap okra 
black amber sorghum conch cowpeas 
tomatoes chiles
we go on and on                【 sliding brokenness
                                                         into a back pocket 】
                   living off as little 
as possible smoothing such as we can
falling  teaches balance
time holding her hand
after digging out roots
pulling weeds it’s damp here 
       sand ridge ancient dune 
       falling is a flow a bleeding out
of time such as our kind taste
                                               each day
less sand more dirt 

when light encapsulates dust
       palm
fronds angular shadows               when all that was abandoned                                                                 
          is less than  
                                                     weight of love poured   
                                                     into our hands  
you become what was made of you
surprise all round  

【when you become 
          when you become 】

eye threads needle hand
fallen into fire lifts light
from ember          lifts word from tongue
lifts weight lifts light  
            【when you become 】
a door opens table
                       is set       candles 
are lit a box of matches 
                       in your hands 
when you become 
your dead lie down all their stories spent  
night blooming cactus unfolding
                  glyph is not entanglement of intent
we are what was carved in soft stone abandoned to weather
                      story known by touching our faces

                  【 singing
spinning in tall canopy an other we have become】

variable companion 
                                    moon sluiced light through high
window lifting weather out of the Gulf 
                                  we stand alone
tide comes       tongue of a different shore
  name no one uttered before 
              echo of place
light on waves warmth of hands
pine           slab barked   incipient 
with flame always heart
burning burning disembodied 
charcuterie 
                  coarse salt cracked 
black pepper 

 

Peach Delphine is a trans poet from Tampa, Florida.

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.

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.

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.

ON MOVING OUT, AND LIFE BEING LONG

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 something              disgusting
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.

THEY DON’T KNOW I’M A GEMINI MOON

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.