Robert Carr The power of a woman’s secret is sometimes found in light through a small glass of orange juice. Breakfast on the table long after she’s dead. Sitting at the Formica nook, papers strewn from 23andMe, I wipe strayed fruit pulp from my beard. On the pie chart of family history –...
Sadie McCarney and this airplane’s the size of an aphid who’ll prey on the fresh condos of suburban Boston; 13 and I’m wearing my too-big jeans, stinky and inked over in ballpoint pen; 13 and my suitcase is packed with Nair and tarot I pretend I can use; 13 and I predict her hair will...
Joe Bishop I haul on his rubber boots, pack tackle box aboard, part glinting pond on which my old man taught me how to skate. My grown hands recoil, recalling numb, small fingers tighten laces to his standard. This morning suns knuckles. I bait hook, cast lured line, scratch what will be beard...
Roxanna Bennett My father sticks in my throat a black clot I won’t swallow a stone swan sycamore My father is a story I am stuck in to rot a weather worn red boat on a rough river My father stones the moat w lapis lazuli drowns my medicine Buddha in red river My father is a...
Rachael Jordan 1. She bleeds scents and shows me with a knife. She scrapes the blade down the inside of her arm, a single red line sprouting from the touch. After a moment, burnt orange surrounds, creeps into the pores of my body. Lifting her shirt, she takes the knife and draws a triangle...
Tiana Lavrova Intracortical robed gymnosperm’s with the pH balanced mereology of a lobular, meta-magical gardener snake flaring like a brazen-bull in a bleached, patternless (no arithmetic progression), Starry Night tuxedo with the fabric of a Granny Smith fruit pouring its xylem in...
C. E. Gatchalian In short, I woke up and began feeling, if not yet living, outside my head. That’s what happened when I first encountered A Streetcar Named Desire. May 5, 1987 Spent seven hours again today practising. After not a single first-place finish at the festival I must do everything to...
Lindsay Miles One hundred percent recycled material. Conversations about purity. My god you are beautiful. A copy of a copy of a copy of a. Family receives a shipment of fruit and other things that have to happen now. Today is suitably warm. In the beginning there were multiple trees. It’s...
Anthony DiPietro If a user asks what clothes and pose you want him ready in when you step across his threshold— ass up, naked, like his photo?—do not mistake his kindness for philanthropy. You may, on recognition of false statements or visual representations— his profile pic’s not him, or...
Sara Bess I am the only one here with all my fingers. My boss is impressed with this and the fact that I have never shot myself with a nail gun, though I am afraid of the loud noises of the air compressor of the dust and the splinters. I am careful with my hands. By Friday my mucus is dark...
mwpm the first sets the standard & everything that follows can only hope to be an approximation ◊ ◊ ◊ the sun off the mirror looked like a butterfly aflame i wanted to put out the flame & the sun with it ◊ ◊ ◊ you lit you r cigar ette i got burnt in the bargain ◊ ◊ ◊ all i ask is you...
Amy LeBlanc Twenty minutes ago he slipped on ice, cracked his head open and fell asleep in my lap. He used to help me scrub the dryer lint off my palms and scrape the freezer burn from my forehead. He pulled at his milk teeth while we watched figure skaters without the volume on. He said...
Matt Broomfield Q: have you had unprotected anal sex with a man in the last 72 hours? A: i have fed a dying gorilla peanut butter in a strip-lit hallway. Q: were you the receptive partner? now he is suspended between us. technicians dress and jug him, though he is still living...
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...
