Category: Issue #25

I don’t know who to believe, you say, as I deflate

after Gala Mukomolova

I don’t know who to believe, you say, as I deflate a white hole / vortex and vomit space debris. I was a child who could not believe / mecha pilots can die inside these metallic shells. I thought snails die / only if they didn’t choose the right house. Snail slime trails and trickles / from my chin as the tube leaves me and I turn to Medusa. Do you know that / in Japanese, the first part of “consciousness”¹ is “stone”?² It doesn’t matter as / you care less about each word I say. The night is always longer and the grass greener / as we debate about my existence. When you tell me she (who? me?) is lying, I don’t disappear, I turn unenterable, a white hole vortex, still vomiting space debris.

¹意識 (Ishiki)
²石 (Ishi)

 

PTSD at an exhibition by over-enthusiastic people about mental illness

At an exhibition by over-enthusiastic people about mental illnesses you can call yourself. There is a plastic telephone mounted on the wall. Still. Find out what a mentally ill person is hearing. The phone was either broken or I heard my thoughts blare through the speakers. The rest of the exhibition is filled with descriptions of stuff I’d do and paintings I’d make and I wonder what is my place in the exhibition. They made me and dissected me and sold me for ¥68 a ticket to college girls who all come with best friends and cups of boba tea. I have you who laugh loudly in the exhibit of the crazy and listen to people rant about love and wavy arm hairs. “If you actually called your mental illness, what would it say?” If I should hold your hand, if I should have held my hand. 

 

Yufan (they/any) is an queer aro-spec ace-spec writer from Beijing, China. They recently graduated from Kenyon College and are currently studying English at the University of British Columbia. When not reading and writing, they volunteer at Out On the Shelves, Vancouver’s oldest queer library.

Become What You Are

Sharing my little, teal hormone tablets
with the trans girl who spent the night
was a communion infinitely more holy
than when I was bound to place
those stale, white wafers in the hands of hypocrites
on the other side of the altar rail.

 

Willow Sipling is a sociologist and professional manic pixie dream girl. Her hyperfixations and hobbies mostly have to do with attempting to avert dystopia through the power of social science and friendship.

when i feel like a girl

christening my new car by vomiting in a cvs bag on the side of the road swerving across the yellow lines to watch the deer graze in someone’s lawn     pulling my hands and the muzzle off the rottweiler who went for my neck and telling him he’s a good boy so brave       biting the inside of my cheek when the eye doctor fawns over my birth name yes it’s italian yes it’s so pretty for a pretty girl with pretty eyes reading the latest news that says the F on my birth certificate is now a tattoo on my body that i wasn’t numbed for and which will no doubt get infected    squatting in the vet hospital yard with the other kennel techs nearly in tears as the half-paralyzed doberman puppy tries to walk and almost succeeds       exchanging resigned glances between the all-girl tech staff as the man in charge berates us over the metzenbaum scissors he misplaced     touching up my mullet and thinking hoping nearly praying i’ll look like a guy this time if i fill in my eyebrows enough if i layer my chest enough if i break and bend and break enough               then getting my period

 

Izzy Peroni (he/they) is a poet, student, and veterinary assistant. He is earning his MFA in Creative Writing at Hood College, and is the former book review & assistant poetry editor of The Sock Drawer Literary Magazine. Their poems have appeared in Crow & Cross Keys. He believes in queer joy, TNR, & a free Palestine in our lifetime.

(Un)hidden Beauty

for Allison

I notice how you say “I love you too”
When I have written other words with my tongue

How you see the postscript held in my throat 
After each action and sound I make

A geode ( ) glittering with my unspoken words
Opened by knowledge and reception

I have brought you more tea
                 (& I love you)

I did the dishes 
                 (& I love you)

I wrote you a poem
                 (& I love you)

Every little thing followed with
                 (&…)
                 (&…)
                 (&…)

 

Witch, bitch, and full-time disaster Helen Robertson is a transsexual, bisexual, genderqueer dyke moving through the lifelong process of accepting how lucky they’ve been; using poetry to excise her ire and sorrow—hopefully turning it into something worthwhile. Their work has appeared in Canadian and American journals including This Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Poet Lore, and new words {press}. She was long listed for the 2019 Vallum Award for Poetry and her first chapbook (body of stone) was published via The Blasted Tree. They are a member of the poetry collective VII. helen-robertson.com.

just before Rafah

Saturday night sitting on a cliff
over the Schuykill, dark water, a corporate tower
flashing 52 DEGREES,  HAPPY BLACK HISTORY MONTH
and then the stock market ticker, a backed up highway:
I wonder is it the superbowl or are we finally being bombed
and everyone knows but us and is fleeing.
There is no place to flee. I am here for the duration
I say heart is heavy, angel of death all around
no wonder so many hearts just stopped this week
I don’t always care to talk about it but sometimes
I need to spend my tiny free time staring at dark water.
I can’t believe they don’t lock up this river
you say   the good thing about Philly is that it doesn’t have enough money
to lock everything away
Always the refuge of abandoned, one tiny silver.
Heart heavy, dark water full of mystery only thing that holds.
Dark water from my eyes, only a trickle.

 

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha  (they/them) is a nonbinary femme disabled writer/ poet disability and transformative justice movement worker and renowned  hot freak bitch forever 38 looking baby illder of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Ukrainian/Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is DIsabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. A Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building The Stacey Park MIlbern Liberation Arts Residency, as far as they know the only writers residency by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. Follow them at brownstargirl.org and llps.substack.com. Raised in Worcester, MA, they currently live in Lenapehoking/ Philly.

BIOLOGICAL CLOCK

I had no time for baby fever – this

body caught its flame, upward & licking

seared my haunches, hot coals beneath hoofed feet.

I was all mare, fawn, & galloped stallion

setting our fields ablaze, wild with want

beyond want, ached for life however halved.

I was no beacon in the night, just 

a brief flash, a shot star, wishing myself

sleepless, soft and unfolding then folding

our foal. I was all yearn. It burned through me.

I now walk upon two legs, nose to ground,

pluck this flame from my chest and bottle it.

All my drawn carriages, empty. Hollowed

out kerosene for someone else’s sky.

 

DEEPLY INFILTRATIVE

the woman you assumed is a woman 

drills holes into the side of your visage 

as you speak to the clerk at the counter

inside the gynecology clinic

you know, you are not supposed to be here

at the minimally invasive surgeon

bearded hardened muscled as you appear 

nothing of a girl or woman remains

never mind the war zone of your insides

never mind scarred & scorched earth of your womb

never mind your pain grows oceanic

never mind what you’ve suffered to be here

speaking to the clerk, voice strong tender but

grieving that your body won’t be a door

 

Michal ‘MJ’ Jones (they/he)  is a poet, parent, and editor living in Oakland, CA. Their poetry has appeared in the American Academy of Poets, Obsidian, Split This Rock, Muzzle Magazine, TriQuarterly Review, ANMLY, & elsewhere. Their debut collection of poetry, HOOD VACATIONS, won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. They are also the author of a chapbook, SOFT ARMOR (2023), from Black Lawrence Press.

Misinterpreting “All About My Mother” from the Closet

Nineteen and bent double with it—
Agrado, pleasure herself               hair the exact colour
Of trouble proclaiming                  We become more authentic
The more closely               we resemble
What we’ve dreamed of being—       Asked how am I       to become 
An upturned stool                behind the bar’s darkened window—

Endless fortune tellers’ cards         of the sea inverted
But didn’t guess             I was being tasked 
With changing the tides—
Sequins of air              rising off submerged 
Limbs, but no use in it, what we dreamed of seeing—

I cannibalized pleasure. Mylar desire      painted my 
Dark roots red and waited.        I persisted
In the angle between her lashes’ shadows
And the fading                 bruise underneath.  

Nineteen         a disastrous atrophy, I wanted
To flash so brightly       the too much of me 
Would leak light             all over the reel—
Would scorch somehow back to lightlessness. 

 

Dylan McNulty-Holmes (he/they) is a transmasculine poet and fiction writer. He is the author of the experimental poetry works Survivalism for Hedonists (Querencia Press, 2023) and Half a Million Mothers (shortlisted for the 2022 New Media Writing Prize). His words have been translated into five languages, and featured in ANMLY, Pilot Press, Puerto del Sol, Redivider, Split Lip, and elsewhere. Find him at dylanmcnultyholmes.com.