I treat Tuesday nights like free voice training, and Boy, do I practice– every week a new song, every month a new pitch, attempts to save a wasted gift. The next day, think of which way I’ll throwback to a supposed simpler time. My Escape is my studio my commute a family reunion: a karaoke room of my own. I drive My inner child, let the tomboy choose the track s/he wants to sing now that our cousins aren’t around. There’s a song in our heart that I need excised, cuz when I sing Reflection I can’t help but cry
Look at me– I will never pass
are just lyrics on my phone when I glance at a red light— as if the words weren’t waiting for me twenty years tucked away in a music box with who I am inside. As if Tita Lea isn’t singing to pogi bois who will never pass to secret first-born Sons seeking wisdom from Ancestors without a shrine. The Queen and I duet on a highway dotted with rain.
I wipe my eyes and fight The urge to cut my hair on stage.
Toni Garcia-Butler (he/they) is a poet and community artist. His work centers his people: Black, Filipino, southern, trans/queer, and everyone existing within their intersections. You can find them at tgbpoetry.com.
what I do, say, imagine, we are black, capital B, lowercase b, another name for a nigga which means: not to be that when a person doesn’t see a body– flesh stirs; spirit is exchanged on the market in a Shakespearean fourth act staring hell’s devils over them salty Atlantic waters waves green like dollar Bills with dead men’s posing on the front crashing against the shore as a ching-a-ling ring for every star that hasn’t fallen, proof the world is a plantation there will always be a first black from king’s dream to lead us out the hull though we already landed. because if i were not here my country would make me from scratch: bones thin, mud skin, hair so tight it don’t blow in the wind a delectable delight for all to hate, the sweet taste of modernity.
first, comes the first black, who used to be a slave? in fact, isn’t that the second black, secondly negro, then the third version: pro-black, joy black, magic black, afro-black which means: take what is given i do laugh more when i’m wrong than right, love my friends when death skips me over, i have a heart that beats throughout the day into the night. the mundane yields little to the debt assigned to an object trying to say: What is enough? when lack sits in the corner letting air out while being filled when i talk it always ruins the picture within the frame no matter the color of the blue sky, the green of the itchy blades of grass, the pink of your tongue matching the inside of me between the way we find to be fine is always fleeting from black to white, only gray in the moment never after.
what is left, i write as truth but understand it to be a lie; haven’t you heard, we free? they said we can be whatever we like.
Christian M. Ivey (he/they), is a black nonbinary trans writer, editor, and art director from Pontiac, Michigan. their work interrogates the mundane to illuminate how blackness is overdetermined by social death via kinships. Christian had edited issue NO. 28 themed on Belonging of FIYAH Literary Magazine and the forthcoming HEXAGON SF MYRIAD Zine themed on Kinship. Christian is also, the Art Director for FIYAH Literary Magazine, Associate Editor at Tenebrous Press’ Skull & Laurel, and the Digital Communications Specialist at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 1 Corinthians 13:12 ESV
All the words I’ve got unspecify. Misconstrue & misconstruct. Okay, she fucked me
until unlanguage, until all sorts of things sounded good, but to write it is another story:
you’ve already misunderstood. Well, what if I said perversion, genuine goddamn thrill of twist,
standards bunched up in my fists like sheets. Sundial sex: it’s all in the shadow. Earth-curl
dim me. Know me in part — in thigh & tongue, in ass & tit & lens — there’s just one act
on offer, her dream whatever. Stone hot bitch mirror. I’ve never read a poem
that fucked like us (underwear on) (her balls against my cunt) (in some phantom rhythm
spirit desperate pulse) (they used to call this dyking) (I think some mornings, an echo lurch
that never quite grasps) so if I said I subsist some nights off the dip of her hip like I could lap
water carefully from its curve, would it matter less how many verbs I reject for our failure to convey
the grace & grossness with which she again obscures me beyond any hope of disunion?
SEMIOLOGY: RESTLESSNESS
It’s probably a (sub)cultural trait, to be into people who’re hot for your nails. She calls the photo of me fully clothed and clawed a nude, and it’s like someone has spoken my name for the first time. My thoughts keep orbiting the interaction, less passive than predatorial, lithe and hungry in a way that’s at odds with the routine of my body.
Let’s not skirt around it: I am much more used to being hunted. I limp back from the appointment at which another doctor casts himself carnivore to my crying wolf and, when I have no howl left, turn instead to the bite of a new coffin on each finger, the first half of a ritual against dying.
The second, that there exists a body that will do as I ask. As much as I believe in and affirm meaningless sex, the truth is, it’s never not been important to me, and this is no different: the dagger of my nail against my clit and the way she begs for them both in her mouth, the sweat-sheened and trembling reminder of what it’s like to be listened to. My arm takes off on its own exorcism-resistant rhythm, embodied litany of I want, I want, I want—this meter that drew every eye in the waiting room, incessant no matter how my muscles ache, and one I no longer want to fight.
Call it dystonia or chorea or hysteria, call it cockblock, call it getting creative. Sex on my terms is so full of her stillness I forget to swallow, but not to breathe, and that’s the difference between this co-constructed power and that all too real one. I’ve got nothing but awe when she says she needs the imprint of my teeth in her throat—our mockery of nature, our mutual subversion of the cripple who simply takes what they are given. Give me a bear-trap body and a lover who knows exactly what they’re getting into. Give me a lover who longs to serve as a scratching post and a sound effect as I unsheath my index finger. Give me a couple hours and an internet connection and I’ll finally eat my fill.
Mac Wilder (ze/zem/zyrs or any pronouns) is a homebound high femme whose work explores queercrip sexuality, high-control Christianity, & their intersection. Zyr work is forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, manywor(l)ds.place, and Corporeal. Zyr self-published chapbooks and zines can be found at justfor.fans/assonance.
Love, our bigness is a gift. We are massively magnificent as we are. Told to exercise our bodies as if demons & I am so tired of running to lose myself. There will be no more dying to diet. I do not desire chasers & am no longer chasing after silhouettes nor wild fowl nor paper-thin nor rainbows-end. Forever yes fats yes fems yes queer yes trans! We reclaim any shame from the names obese & overweight. Yes chunky & chubby! Yes portly & pudgy! Yes heavy & husky! Yes yes yes! Our corpulence is elegant. We bask in the auras of our largeness. Come & sit. Grab a handful of ass & yes there’s much more to handle. Titty in your mouth is a sweet word, never pejorative. I find in you so many good words: handsome, stunning, wonderful, cute, pretty, hot, gorgeous– Love, you extend my vocabulary with your expansiveness. We’ve been force fed falsehoods about shrinking & smallness, yet we contain such abounding abundance. Attractiveness is your body, yes, as well as your caring kindness, careful consideration. There will be no more sighs upon our size, only our own honor upon our release & reveal, yes! Yes & fat phobias too. So much yes & no felt in the body, it is okay to be scared & sad & mad at these systems that dismiss our pains & hold us under the knife. We are still here, still holding each other– not cropped out, no, more crop tops & muffin tops, bikini bottoms & bottoms up, yes in any season we please! Love, we have beautiful bodies. We are more than our bodies & our bodies are more to love. We sit naked in front of each other, belly to belly, thunder thighs & lightning strikes. We make our own sky of stretch mark constellations & starry eyes full of moon. Love, we are so much yes, why would we want to be any less?
Aerik Francis (they/them) is a Queer Black & Latinx poet & teaching artist born & based in Denver, CO. Aerik is the author of the poetry chapbook, BODYELECTRONIC (Trouble Department 2022). Their second chapbook MISEDUCATION was named as the winner for the 2022 New Delta Review Chapbook Contest and was published in May 2023. Aerik has released an experimental audiobook project for their chapbook BODYELECTRONIC under their artist name phaentom[poet] that is available on all streaming platforms. Find more of their work on their website phaentompoet.com and find them on social media @phaentompoet.
Before I was a baby, I was a beautiful idea. The salvation of a Jersey girl whose limbs hung grotesquely draped in berry-blue defiance whipped in all white till her dress frayed and fell cherry-stained on the long walk home. A Brooklyn boy’s respectable manifest destiny as he sprouted upwards toward the heavens from a roach-infested tinsel tower varnished in my grandfather’s secrets. I was part and parcel, the means of production. I could make a dream so American it’d twinkle like onyx buffed and chiseled into a vanity so reflective, they could almost see themselves in me. & then I was ugly.
One does not become ugly overnight, there is a context for such monsterfication; it takes a learned imperfection. Cracked teeth in a mouth that insists upon staying open and so much self you spill out of yourself. You become the answer to questions no one ever planned on asking like: How are you yo daddy’s son when you’supposed to be a daughter? Couldn’t you color yourself lighter in every hue? Couldn’t you walk lighter than a feather, instead of this hulking beast, a blight, refusing to be the beautiful through-thread of this story? And who the fuck do you think you are being this ugly and unabashed?
And then I was hands and snap and sparkle puppeteering in the morning light. And then I was boy, embodied and benevolent. And then I was handsome, hanging on your every word. And then I was gravel voice and gray-evening-haloed in tobacco & then I was beautiful again.
I couldn’t keep pretending I wasn’t. Lips berried with vulgar smarts. A fifth of whiskey easy on the way down. A baby-eyed big talker. One does not become beautiful overnight. There is a ceremony in this release. There is grief in the cutting away of flesh. In the leap from the jetty. It is an ugly feeling, truly, to touch your own beauty for the first time and realize how many years you denied yourself to yourself. How you foraged and flailed and reached for the things furthest from your own face, catching fistfuls of nothing but the quiet. How you believed in a god not strong enough to see themselves in you.
How you let them make you into a monster, or a fantasy, or salvation like you weren’t an offering. Like you weren’t conjured from the people in every corner of the planet. Like you might spend your whole life apologizing for the things they could not hold, for all of the ways in which you are wayward.
But mostly, for making them into lies–liars. How you never saw what they saw when they saw you. How you never defined the sun by the way it looks dipping below the horizon, never allowed the thunderclap to scare you from summer rains. How you gave up being someone’s idea of ugly. How maybe you were never good at pretending.
Kelsey L. Smoot (they/them/he/his) is a gender theorist, a committed Southerner, a writer, and a poet. Their work and writings explore the process of identity formation at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. Selfhood and cultural constraints—such as masculinity and its associated expectations—coalesce in their writing. Their autoethnographic style has become a lens through which they understand their personal experience traversing the US sociopolitical landscape. Having grown up bicoastal and spending the majority of their adult life in a state of transience, Kels draws from his eclectic life experiences both deep fear and great optimism regarding what people are capable of. This tension is reflected in his published writing which can be found in Barely South Review, The Guardian, HuffPost, Voicemail Poems, The Amistad, and at their website, queerinsomniac.me When not writing, Kels can be found performing at The Space (a premiere open-mic based in Kennesaw, Georgia), perusing an antique store, or running the streets with their bois.
Mads Lupold is a nonbinary collage artist, production designer, and writer based in Austin, Texas. When they aren’t giving themselves paper cuts, they work with children at spilled milk social club and create flowers out of scrap records for Gold Rush Vinyl. Mads also works on local film sets creating environments out of props, set design/decorating, and costuming. They write anything from children’s cooking shows to apocalyptic body horror in their free time. Their art centers around whimsy, discomfort, childhood, lack of bodily control, and whatever else they are feeling in the moment. Mads can be found on instagram at @madjoy42.
Being the more interesting half of your conversations.
They have a lot going on*
*note: anything that requires clarification can be considered a lot going on.
Intimacy beginning and ending at the closeness of your skin.
. I should get this for them!
I love you before the first argument.
Speaking honestly only after you’ve swallowed spirits braver than you.
Butterflies! or Anxiety!
Checking your phone every two minutes for a text you won’t receive for two hours or two days.
They’re soo cute!
(true)
Free Space! For your childhood.
Covertly checking their instagram.
Underestimating your self worth.
Random bouts of jealousy.
Making them a playlist.
Sex Fantasies.
They’re not into labels
Intense fear of dying alone.
Wanting. Wanting more.
Wishing you were enough.
Thriving on Praise.
Hey Siri, play Why Don’t You Love Me by Beyoncé.
Always texting first.
Canceling plans to make time for them. Time for them becoming Time.
Nnenna Loveth Umelo Uzoma Nwafor (they/she) is an Igbo lesbian poet, performer, and facilitator. Their work explores Black g*rlhood, Black queerness, Igbo Cosmology, Sensual play and rituals of healing. Nnenna published their debut chapbook, Already Knew You Were Coming, with Game Over Books in January of 2022 and has also been featured on Button Poetry, WBUR’s ARTery, VIBEs Magazine, and Ujima #Wire. When they speak, their ancestors are pleased. Please follow their work on IG @pleasure.as.compass or at pleasurearthealing.com
And on the twelfth night, they said watch out we’ve got a biter. And so I woke up on my twentieth birthday in no one’s bed but my own and I’m certain it’s because of who I was when I was blonde. I think your dad caught me trying to exorcize hindsight last time I was over at your house because nothing haunts me more than knowing the things I could have done differently if only I had 20/20 vision. I think that freaked your dad out and not just because he’s walking McCarthyism and I’m gayer than the literary canon. I’ve always had a sweet tooth for libel within reason and a heart made of biodegradable straws now and then and now you’re all fascists but I can’t say that you are because that’s not polite and I’ve been trying my best to be polite since I started wearing that God damn cone-like someone’s ball-less dog. You’d hate to feel like that, wouldn’t you? I don’t think you could pull it off, not like I can. When you can pull off calves that aren’t pretty enough to be saved from becoming a half-eaten burger you can pull off anything. When I drive with you in shotgun, I can see you pull on the grab handle when it’s my mom’s red minivan. you laugh at me when I say even that’s political. Similar to how America is the best country in the world like how the used car dealership off Calle Rojo has the best Hondas. If you had it your way I would have become normal the minute I walked out of that bathroom stall. The one where you wrote your phone number when we were freshmen in spirit. And I knew then that I had no intention of ruining your life but Then again…when in Rome.
Merlin June Mack (they/them) is a hemiplegic writer from Southern California. When they aren’t writing they can be found reading a book with at least one good literary motif in it. Merlin has been previously published in magazines such as The Lavender Review and Does It Have Pockets Magazine. Their work has also been Best of Net nominated. Merlin is currently working towards a BFA in creative writing at Southern Oregon University. You can find more of them @ merlin_june_is_a_lover on Instagram.
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.
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.
