Welcome to Issue #28, the Pleasure Issue. I do not take for granted each reader and writer that believes in the power and utility of art. Thank you to everyone who supported this idea and championed it forward. My name is the guest editor, but I am never alone on the journey. Special shout out to Sarah at beestung, K Anderson, Toyota, and the Carbon Collective.
One of the ways I approached the theme of pleasure with this volume is with what is the difference between the pornographic and the erotic. Each of these talented writers tug at the undercurrent of their desire by naming objects that drive them forward despite the chaos of the everyday capitalistic world. It is my utmost goal to help more folks discuss what they love and hate to contend with the cultural lies regarding sexuality and gender.
Donnie Moreland’s “BET Uncut” and “dogfart network” interrogate the risk in sexuality and how language influences the speaker’s attractions via technology such as television and music. While Harri Chan’s “emotion saw traps” is a captivating image poem that doesn’t allow want to be simple and Sheema Holmes’ “Hey, Love” is a sapphic musing on a night out which succumbs to the funny, naughty, and dorky George Violet Parker’s “Space Fuckin.’“
Emily Holland’s“Out of Focus” is our sole flash fiction that tinkers with how time can fluctuate desire. Liu’s “Nowaki” explores longing not just through words but intentionally with form while Poole’s “Midday, my lover brings home groceries” reminds us that it is the little things that matter in love. Darius Phelps’ “HONEY-COATED SKIN.” sucks us into a world where we can just about taste the lover of the speaker. Cordera’s poem, “Bruises,” tantalizes from beginning to end and then we close out with Cai Sherley’s poem, “Afro Pick Elegy” showing that us humans can care for objects just as much as people.
I know this issue will not just turn you all on but turn you all out to something or someone new. Be sure to be on the lookout for the sister issue this fall.
In the shower, we compare her eating disorder to my gender dysphoria. We’re running low on food stamps but her pockets can fit three or four energy bars. I think, here is a woman who would meddle with a self-checkout just for me. Later we make porn because I’m saving up for top surgery. She tells me I’m beautiful but in a boy way. We’ve sloughed off our clothes so many times, leaving long trails down the hall so we can find our way back to the TV. Outside, the dog-days roar. We keep the blinds shut, the windows open like a wound.
Madeleine Poole is a genderqueer poet and educator. They hold an MFA from the University of North Carolina—Greensboro, and they are an incoming Writing Studies Professor at Tacoma Community College. Their work is featured or forthcoming in Harbor Review, Third Coast Magazine, The 2River View, Gasher Journal, AntiTHESIS, and The Greensboro Review.
All the weeping willow girls, with bent backs like cursive have all slipped away for the night
fading into the upholstery of unfamiliar cars
as the erratic stutter of a drill beat mellows to an oldie
It’s not quite last call
the girl at the end of the bar
making eyes is not a cottonwood
but built wide like an oak cut down and sawed into a chest of drawers
just my type with a spiral of waterrings splayed across her chest one hairline crack camouflaged in the grain
and I like the way she’d look in my empty room
Sheema Holmes (She/They) tells speculative stories, always questioning whether the present truly exists and to what extent it can be trusted. They often draw inspiration from Black Americana and their ties to the Chesapeake Bay region.
I want to see Jean-Luc Picard get sweaty with a Ferengi. I wanna go to SPACE but not as we know it. Pass by that final frontier, get cheeky with a Vulcan and make Pon Farr in front of Quark’s bar, eat lokar beans – post-coitus – remind myself I’m stardust, bitch. Pick a fight with a Klingon, just so we can fuck it better. Get fucking meta. Have a rave on the holodeck and dick down next to the warp core. Hardcore, soft porn. And speaking of laws unto their self, Do you think Janeway would strap me? Oh, Kathryn, my Captain, I’m locked in your quadrant. And no, Neelix, you can’t watch.
George Violet Parker is a Pushcart, Best of the Net, Diversity Awards, and Space Crone Prize-nominated queer disabled writer and facilitator. Publications include Not Your Orlando (Punk Dust), Twisted Roots (Reconnecting Rainbows), Gynandromorph (Written Off), and ACE-funded anthology eff-able (fourteen poems). Other publications include Mslexia, Financial Times, Arachne Press, and Bi+ Lines. They were selected for an ACE-funded place on TLC’s Chapter and Verse Mentoring scheme, and in 2022 received DYCP to write their second novel.
I fight the urge to rub my tongue against the sweetness of you, to test the rumor my mouth keeps telling my body— that devotion can taste like this.
I crave to love you out loud, the way you deserve, without whispering my want into corners, without shrinking my hunger to fit inside somebody else’s gospel.
I memorize every line of your love languages like psalms from the Bible— recite them when I’m alone, murmur them when my faith gets shaky.
Your presence teaches me patience & undoes it at the same time. You are the ache I don’t pray away, the blessing I let linger on my lips.
I want to learn the geography of you slowly— the pauses, the soft places, the way your breath changes when you feel seen. I want to stay there.
Let my desire be careful & bold. Let it kneel without shrinking. Let it speak your name like a vow my body has already made.
I don’t want restraint if it means silence. I don’t want holiness without heat.
If loving you is a form of worship, then let me do it honestly— with my mouth full of praise, with my hands learning what reverence feels like, with honey still clinging to every part of you that I touch…
Dr. Darius Phelps is the author of My God’s Been Silent (Writ Large Press, 2026) and The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh (Kith Books, 2026). A poet before anything else, his work bears witness to grief, faith, and the act of becoming—offering language as a form of liberation and light. Through the lens of poetic inquiry, Dr. Phelps explores how verse can function as pedagogy, healing and survival. Rooted in Black literary traditions and personal testimony, his work has been featured or is forthcoming in Frozen Sea, wildness, Diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Matter Monthly, Cultural Daily, Een Magazine, School Library Journal, and many more. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
I and my dead have lived to dirge another day, still missing her beloved teeth. My oiled palms quaff coral fields without the care of polymer & steel, the till-less aftermath a study in grief, the fly away nature of absence. I am a headful of detritus with a tank full of gas and no will, survival a Black beauty supply two miles too far from here & now. In absentia I walk without my beauty, knowing the white world cannot see, cares nothing about this kind of loss.
Cai Sherley (he/him) is a Black trans poet-educator with roots in Boston, MA. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems can be found in Best New Poets, swamp pink, and Peach Mag, among others. His work centers Black transmasculine life, past and present, in the United States. He has found homes at The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, Tin House, and Lambda, and is a member of the Crossroads Writers Collective and Trans Corner Poets. His debut chapbook, Out of Yearning, is set to be released in October 2026 by Sibling Rivalry Press. You can find him on the internet @crsed_poet.
It is the bygone summer sea that dissipated the memories
Of the stars in your auburn eyes
– the typhoon in the
early autumn
is
my agony of longing.
Liu Yuniang (they/them) is a Chinese-Indonesian student, poet, and writer currently based in Tokyo. They like to read queer literature, take walks in small alleys, and write about strange things in hopes that something cool happens in the small neighborhood they live in where nothing ever happens.
Who knew what it was, but it was brown & slick geysers of water, stickier than water but brown like Momma, who Daddy said was “fine”.
or the girls who bruised their knees at recess, beating us at foot races not like them their sisters, maybe, their mothers, maybe.
Naked, I think. Strings, I think.
Who knew hair like like frost and back dimples that worked long after the next video ended.
Who knew what it was.
Still Tippin’ Tip Drill Pussy Poppin’ My Neck, My Back
I hadn’t spelled breast yet,
or nipples, shoulders that had other purposes than sports. Teeth without braces & smiles that had fewer gaps than the girl whose sister pummeled me for pulling on her pigtails after the lunch hour.
Who knew about money showers and silver poles, tires the size of nothing we owned. I never asked Momma if Daddy fed her dollar bills like that. (seemed to be the diet of “fine” women on TV)
Who knew what it was to be a man in a boy body, under the blankets, one hand on my penis and another on the back button of the remote control.
The most extreme sport. (I could never remember the score of what weighed more — my penis or the trembling stick)
I risked my life for every slowed craving in my flushed cheeks and legs, for all the parts Momma told me were secrets for little girls to keep, only for their mothers and then for Jesus.
Maybe she knew where to find Christ in the Firemen’s Azz Dance.
(she seemed to call out for the man quite often from the other side of their bedroom door)
Maybe on the floor where it seemed all the fun was being had.
I think I grew a crush on Melyssa Ford.
dogfart network
after Black Machismo by Essex Hemphill
king kong a’int got shit on the way i beat my meat on a talking drum making the ground swell like a dick print in the last high yellow bone i bum bum barumbum drum had her stretched wide wide like a cow fetus on the body of an instrument to receive my war pouring on her drum head punchin’ through her membrane signlin’ 1000 arrows to accompany my precum who said niggas didn’t have superpowers
CUT
am i still in character fragile bent my dick bends in the direction that the director follows me he holds my shit when i pee i told him again that i wasn’t a drum stick so give me better lines i almost got fired when he heard me try on lucille clifton’s god in wardrobe she said, “he is heavy and hard from creation” I assured him it wasn’t a rewrite but was my way out of this cock cage I’d say penis prison but that might be too on the nose in the noose on the nose no, that’s right
ACTION
king kong a’int got shit on my swollen balls cruisin’ up ahead like a death star diamond in the back sun roof close shave for a few more inches leave it in while you worship me varicose veins in a fat dick stroke left stroke right stroke kendrick lamar gave me permission to occupy a mud hut with my eiffel tower eye sore
CUT
who were the hands that led me out of master’s house the first time by my semen leaking lead me through the tool shed on top of lover’s lake hideaway
i smell like sweet-hay frolic hard from creation i cover me shy my legs is delicate rose pink blush brave in my arch and aching
find me & lead me to the the generosity of fingers that have no owners but give my mouth sovereignty i can no longer pretend
ACTION
i can no longer pretend take me limp i cover me shy soft the director threatens to fire me holding my dick while i die inside the high yellow sistah tossing up her fist and taking off the lips they gave her talkin’ bout fight the power fuck her tender till her run off is actually wet arousal is the first night knock to fugitivity bum bum barumbum the edge i see the edge
past snake skin black mask drum barrel i was so heavy, wasn’t i
king kong did compromise for a little dick word around town was that a Black man volunteered to wear that suit on set just for the free parking space a Black man wearing a little dick a’int it something It’s true king kong a’int got shit on me king kong only stopped at the tip i took it down to the base and balls reciting lucille clifton
while the producer cut my last check
Donnie Moreland is a Houston-based poet. Donnie has contributed to Black Youth Project, ColorBloc Magazine, FIYAH Literary Magazine, A Gathering of the Tribes, Scalawag, Seventh Wave, Pangyrus, Poda-Poda Literary Journal, RawHead Literary Journal, and more. Donnie is the co-founder of Fellowship of the Griots—an ecosystem of BIPOC voices working to amplify underserved narratives, while creating opportunities for professional success through creative programming and community building. Donnie is also the author of the poetry collection, my daddy never taught me how to write a love song (Genre Urban Arts).
The peaches on the kitchen counter are bruising. The bananas hanging from the fruit rack next to the wrinkling mango are bruising.
On our first night together I am bruising but nothing is getting eaten but me. Love bites of passion
your body demanding its darkness merge into my own marks left by your soft lips still have yet to disappear
my body’s desire keeping you closer, longer.
Britny Cordera (bee) is a queer, creole, nonbinary Cave Canem poet, writer, teacher, and artist based in Oklahoma City. They received their MFA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Cordera’s work can be found or is forthcoming from Purple Ink Press, Driftwood Press, Obsidian, Rhino, Narrative, Pank, Xavier Review, and other places. When they are not writing poetry or teaching, they love skating and watching anime in their free time.
Harri (they/them) is a Filipino writer and artist based in Boston. Harri’s work has appeared in TechRadar, Polygon, ANMLY and more! You can follow them and their battle with acid reflux on Bluesky or Instagram @heyriette, or check out their website: heyriette.neocities.org
