Rachel Lallouz Falling in love with women taught me how to read poetry [properly]. I was trying to explain to a questioning friend what making love with a woman was like. She had inquired. I was also trying to convince her to sleep with me. “I could show you beautiful things,” I said. I...
Hong Nguyen-Sears Under the man’s face is a second face, but he will never let you see it. While he’s asleep you could find the flap on the side of his jaw with your fingernails. You could peel it back, this other face, this outside face—if you were brave and quick. He wouldn’t stay asleep...
Ryan Dzelzkalns We prefer the throbbing rib—your desire where your sense used to be. It’s easy to see us and forget all decency...
Evelyn Deshane 1. The first time it happened, my best friend was there. I was first under the needle since my design would need more time. I asked for a custom job; she went for flash. The buzz of the machine thrilled me, and though I made a face as the needle pricked my skin, the pain of the...
Savannah Oliker I am five rows behind a pair of lovers, their heads bowed toward one another like white doves. Someone enters from the street— in a cobalt poncho and a big red hat. I cannot see her face— but I know she is a woman by the smallness of her and the shifty movement of her feet...
T. Liem Men yell at each other at the fish market in Tokyo or so I’m told. I want to be a respectable monger like them. Instead I peddle analogies in which I am a whole catch of Alaskan crabs, creatures susceptible to sea sickness. I live on the floor not in the waves. Meanwhile, men make money...
Ron Schafrick [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]I[/mks_dropcap]t’s June again, which means another Pride, only this year it’s raining, and I’m glad. I’m with my friend Glace and we’re sitting in a...
Jake Byrne I got into inpatient She smiles bone-dry Caliper the fat on my hard palate Her skeleton grimaces I scrape a little mould off some cheddar with the blunt edge of a butter knife So happy in uncomplicated ways these days A sun salutation expels exactly sixteen calories The goose’s...
Casey Plett [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]T[/mks_dropcap]he night Wendy’s Oma died, she had sex dreams. Only sometimes did she have sex dreams—usually Wendy had nightmares and usually she was...
Sadie McCarney I had to go and shear those craters in my hair, locked in my bucolic boarding school dorm room with sewing scissors and an androgynous ache. I was fifteen. The local “walk-ins welcome” didn’t know what to make of my head like the moon, so they buzzed the whole thing except a...
Jasper Sanchez You’re in an art store, halfway down the paint aisle. You’re thumbing tubes of acrylic, the aluminum casing cold against your skin. You’ve got iridescent gold in one fist, and you’re debating the merits of five shades of blue with your free hand. What’s the difference, you...
Dani Couture “De proche en proche, votre science mettra notre espèce à l’abri…” — J.-H. Rosny aîné (Joseph Henri Honoré Boex), Les Navigateurs de l’infini Witness to a bloom of false jellies that alternate between yellow smiley face Thank Yous and black Come Agains. Moulds’ positives released...
Li Charmaine Anne [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]T[/mks_dropcap]he movers had long left the new neighbours’ house, and for the last few days, silence had rushed into the space they’d carved out...
Gwen Benaway my chances dissolve like ice flows on the river. everyone is already found, I’m the only girl left. I watch them cross streets, move like sparrows home trail voices across the city to cornerstores at 4 am, I waited too long to be, I can give her nothing she wants or needs, just...
Maureen Hynes The river was sour then, not yet sweetened by soda effluent or her declarations. We were searching for a double bed over the frothing gorge in a town full of strangers who knew. A few years ago, you might have been beaten up, said a friend. Something witchlike in us though we...
Patri Wright All the years gone wrong, in a blindfold pin-in-the-map sort of place. No day trip or retreat, more like a sun-drenched fire escape. First an Italian ice cream parlour, let time circle a while, peer down pipe-smoke boulevards, let the seafronts blend into one another. The lives...
Allyson McOuat I am femme. I know this because my feet hurt. All the time. And I like it. I gain my strength from the power that emanates from my stiletto heels. If my bra is not both itching me and poking me in the heart with a loose sharp metal underwire, then I am not complete. If my panties do...
Raven Davis Love (1) How can I set you free my love? a kind of free your scalp feels when you take out your braids each thick black strand of kinked hair dancing amongst wandering white birches it seems like it’s taken you a lifetime to even begin to question why you have never been...
Michael V. Smith Strategy 1: Stand in a group on the street corner downtown with a sign: Gay Hugs. Give hugs. Strategy 2: Make more space for outsiders more outside than you. Strategy 3: Love our gay kids. Be kind- ly queer to parents in front of their children. Strategy 4: Organize more gay...
Nikki Donadio [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]I[/mks_dropcap]t was a girl who collapsed on the soccer field. Girl, I kept calling her, with her pink headband and red soccer uniform. Dead at thirty...
Ben Rawluk Some days, the sky running pink and orange like powder paint hit sharply with water, I perch on the balcony. I used to think about skinning myself, about there being something underneath, about all the ways my body could be modified or cut or altered. Now I think of dress-up, of...
Nick Comilla [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]T[/mks_dropcap]his is what it’s like: I never know what day of the week it is. I get so down I drift through and feel up. We get so high we forget it...
Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt The Gardener Below, leaves rustle and swish. The sound reminds me of an ocean, makes me crave a body of water that’s not a city pool packed with bobbing children. It takes looking at a map to realize Montréal is an island. Pinning my phone to my shoulder, I grip...
Emily Sanford This dance is not optional nor occasional: it is a rifle at the knees with a rattlesnake beat at high noon sometimes a precipice leap and sometimes a slow and sure-footed sway widdershins on sacred air— it is unending, blood pooled from a pebble in the insole, a fast turn about...
Brett Josef Grubisic 1. “Nothing.” In answer to my father’s “What are you two doing upstairs?” (Simultaneously, my sister and I had the experience-based intuition that accurate replies—“Reading Vogue,” “Pretending to be Vogue reporters covering catwalk shows,” or “Designing and sewing gowns to...
Penelope Evans [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]S[/mks_dropcap]ome kid thinks he saw poison hemlock up the trail, a good twenty-minute hike from the cabins. So I’m up there looking, even though...
Anna Swanson First glass The world was a gala in its first pair of high-heeled shoes. A spin of sweat softball hair and twenty-year-old tuxedos. Miraculous older couples who appeared once a year. The world was two hundred lesbians in a rented hall and we were our first pair of shoes and this...
Reece Cochrane [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]D[/mks_dropcap]ad hauled the family from Chandler to Baie Comeau the day after Duplessis finally died. Good riddance, Dad had said, reading the...
Carter Vance Coming down with something’s case, fever flush of card suits taken too literal, whiskey-faced haggling with diner shop case radio dials, dusty countertop linoleum for a place to rest comforted hands; I am no longer in darkened rooms with chalk sketches or star charts searching...
Lisa Baird The bleeding is supposed to stop once he goes on hormones, but it just gets worse. One doctor tells him, It’s like estrogen and testosterone are fighting inside you. He twists and spasms, medicates far over the recommended dose, soaks every towel in the house each month. You...
Andréa Raymond [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]W[/mks_dropcap]ith studied slowness, Danny pulls our beat-up white van into the parking lot of Cullards’s Diner, another dubious stop on the Folk Music...
after Roberto Matta Trenton Pollard I left the bed of another, did not make it back to yours. Jettisoned in flight from the tip of the dragonfly’s wing I drowned in flame-ripples. Searched for you in black boxes & floating pearls. You did not forgive...
Sarah Thankam Mathews [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]V[/mks_dropcap]ic wants to make brownies but first needs a smoke. You stare up at the bright cliffs of books lining her walls. The ones she’s...
Nolan Natasha Pike The motorcycle jacket my mom brought home from Denmark, small enough for my niece now. Around the house mostly, never to school. Cindy and me punching each other on the hide—against our fists, the sound thick— and smoking too, in the backs of...
Betsy Warland on the nipple of the city we watch clouds life off mountains slow motion bedsheet lovers barely breathing as the lips of night close the Henry Moore gleams cold and bronze pelvic bone maze we enter, lose one another in magenta murmuring we throb, sense each other rapping knuckles on...
Fawn Parker I should’ve stayed there in the halo of your gleaming macbook pro, your chastity plate, your voodoo object. But I got distracted, wondering how many times this has been done better to you before. Hard to believe just yesterday I was in the bathroom, my face smothered in rose clay...
Mitchell King I draw myself with smearing wrists unlifting and end up with three charcoal mouths talking into each other, leaving my body to her own devices; counting the brown hair on his forearm, counting the gray fuzz on his puppy-tongue, wishing to dissolve my identity in glitter and...
Suzette Mayr This story is an excerpt from “Five Floors of Basement” (working title), a quasi-haunted-house novel that centres on a university professor named Edith who works at the fictional University of Inivea. Her office is in Crawley Hall, a building that produces “sick...
Adèle Barclay I forgot about my necklace in your mouth but then we spoke so easily on a heated patio in the brightest dying light of the newest year. I was busy casting you as a sorry Justin Bieber but really you’re as handsome and persistent as a meme and I’m a soft space for your sad...
Jane Byers A phys-ed teacher in Belleville, Ontario, who can’t come out invites me to do a lesbian “show and tell” in health class. The girls are quiet but fidgety while she introduces me, a picture of normal—chinos, pastel cardigan, Birkenstocks. Portray a boring life that is anything but:...
