The basement suite is leaking in my brain, connectors wet, though advertised brain-tight. My mentor, ice in her cup a rattling rain, from cancer-dark names me formidably brainy. I rustle into the paper bag of childhood, and touch the slick sweet jelly of sour brains. You take my photo on the...
I once thought of marriage as an exoplanet in the habitable zone of another star; I knew it was capable of sustaining life, I just didn’t want to live there. I’d taken astronomy lessons from my mom’s copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. How tidy the binary seemed back then, before...
I have seen Twin Peaks exactly once in my life, in an apparition of a sunroom. ◊ It was like watching dust settle, how bored I was, piecing together why I was here and what I wanted and what this would mean to me in the end. ◊ The hot itch of orange tweed against the backs of my legs, an irritating...
I am become my grandfather’s ghost: Crumbs over the kitchen sink into eternity The children of hunger, The Daughters Insomniac, Nobody ever loved you like a good pot of stew. My grandfather wore a messenger Hat, a black leather jacket. He is alive now, like a ghost; I, his cool fibers...
Angelic Goldsky (also known as angelic vers) is a queer/trans poet working at the crossroads of diasporic lineage repair, queer world-building, angel-wrestling and complex trauma timeline healing through musicality, rhythm, clown-foolery and playful devotion. Their poem Trans Scripts of Crisis is...
the walls are moving. tumbling walls falling. i undo the home. i break the skeleton, the back- bone. foundation alone could move mountains. i shake it up. take it apart. kiss a side, turn it inside out. plop it face down on the ground. lie on it. give it warmth. i loosen the screws of every single...
S.A. Leger is a writer and ornithologist from Newfoundland, Canada. Her poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from The Hopkins Review, SWWIM, The Los Angeles Review, Conduit, and The Malahat Review. She spends her days exploring the 47th parallel with her wife and dachshund.
i was a [servant-god] made for [you-me]— just more [water-fire] to pour down a throat, just another bushburn [sinking-rising] [down-up] the building’s spine,……back to mirror, a [child-adult] sleeping until 12 [pm-am]……woke till the lightest dark……until until until i could the...
Everything hurts. I engage muscles that have been single for so long they have cobwebs. For days, my hip twinges, my neck side-eyes me. I roll my shoulders in an attempt to calm them of their hysterics. I must say that not all fat bodies are out of shape, but this one is. And we’ve only learned 30...
Mistletoe ornaments a branch. the forever green of it, eaten out of season. here, birds wipe their beaks against pink sky, & the language adheres to trees. the sprigs flourish in their raging shoots. at a whim, I tapeline myself to a baobab trunk— reaching for the roundness of grapes to busy my...
When proto-lemurs were caught up in the graceless process of evolving into bats— when small trees bent under their oversized talons, & heavy bones— when their wings spanned almost enough length to catch wind currents, but not quite— they did not know they were a transitional species. Only knew...
The Jungian analyzes my bladed braids and lipsticked lips. What are you trying to prove? He asks as I kill our molly fish and sleep at the morgue as punishment. Disembodied sheets of centrifugal steel, I skate onto your onanism. From the bathtub I watch as holy rollers go catatonic on the lawn...
—after Arun Kolatkar You may not realize this, but I’m that famous dog, who after reaching heaven, with Yudhistira on my side, I was thrown back on earth—to live among the gods idling the streets of Kathmandu, leering at every passerby and their bulging ………crotches & coin purses. I stayed in...
MICHAEL CHANG (they/them) is the author of Toy Soldiers (Action, Spectacle, 2024) & Things A Bright Boy Can Do (Coach House Books, 2025). They edit poetry at Fence.
when we lay on the sand as a triangle trying to invoke some truthful looking, there’s much disturbance. might be the sky or the shadow of a leaf that distract us from actually staring at the upstairs’ void. we have the unrealized knowledge that Space is red. but whenever we look up we see a...
A tale of two weekends: a) Twists and turns like shimmer ….of gentle ocean, thirst ….in dreams and waking hours. ….Still, like blue ….at the pit of the morning sky ….—where do I turn? Forgive me. ….We had a good day. b) I can’t pretend I’m not wounded …...
i. Bottom Quark Top, bottom, up down, charm me into strange submission, Quark, just this one time we can poof away time like snaps leave no trace of feelings I once had. You top, I’ll bottom and one day you’ll decay become me. Then you can lean into my synaptic cleft, but don’t get too positive or...
ACT 1: Will the Real Billy Bard Please Stand Up? A lady told me the other day that Shakespeare was really a man by the name of Edward de Vere—an earl, or a count, or a royal gondolier from Oxford or Downtown Abbey or something— and expected me to fall over aft-ways at the prospect of such...
they call the phenomenon “the brain zaps.” …………I call it the air before a thunderstorm. ……………………metal on your tongue. scent more ………………………………ozone than petrichor. harsher. …………………………………………you’re all sweat and dizzy ………………………………from the buzz, the crackle of it ……………………reverberating in your head:...
the chevron has rubbed off my anchor ring tattoo chain and rod swim rootless in finger flesh book re-ink appointment on the to-do list—ten years and counting you and I sleep in separate rooms one of us may as well get a good sleep new parents—temporary measure—eight years and counting coral reef...
The turtle sheds his shell and smashes it upon the rocks. While I, a hobbled ape, cough up my skeleton like jumbled driftwood. …..Quivering like jellyfish, …..we seem surprised that we …..cannot walk away. So we painfully gather our fragments and try to reassemble ourselves upon the sand. …..The...
I. Vilnius / destination a black grape hovers in the face of heavenly darkness before falling back down towards the streets of the capital straight into your wide open mouth like a warm trap. my eyes don’t follow the descent but I join the applause of our new-found friends nonetheless, my...
I almost got the certificate before the paperwork passed away. You used to wear confidence in every button of your shirt before the suitcase rolled away with your buttons and the students filed into other rooms. We’ve fallen between the desk and the wall. They listened to you, I know that...
1. Imagine the poem: something about clothes and makeup, probably fingernails— the pains of paints: ochre, pink, yellow. Or of breasts and tits and dicks and cunts of bodies, (always) bodies. 2. 40% of trans people snort milk from their nose. 30% wake up crying in joy. 75% sweat at the sound of a...
From India’s dirt forests, into the elephant chest of the West we brought a child. Years erupt on skin. You are larger than Canada!—you are not a child. We all see things we do not want to see. In a white world, my father left my mother—she knew she would be a prisoner as soon as she got a child...
You are ninety-eight and blind and nearly deaf and can hardly walk and live mostly in another world now, a world in which dolls can talk and each person appears twice, and in this other world, I like girls, or so you tell my mum matter-of-factly one afternoon as she sits with you in the care home...
Liquid dark slides down our throats, sloshing against curved glass. I place my goblet back on the dash. The evening air shifts, a mineral of many disguises. Body twines within itself. Groaning from the cold, the liver and the heart sit — at the centre of our existence. † A deep and pulsating gloomp...
And while I may look like a prophecy-monger, we shall confine our attention to the clump of houses in a seaport subdivision, home to Lancelotti the Italian abbot, a respectable and veracious man save for his tentacle suckers, big as saucer lids. Absolutely I am governed by sunbeams. When death...
I look no further than the edge of my body my map to gather you oh brother my brother my brown skinned brethren my kin and distant loves my turbaned uncles my unclejis crowned like kings backs alder straight I gather you from the bastion of a ship a ship that sat ashore my uncles whose feet did not...
I don’t mind you’ve put on a little actually I’m attracted to boys do we deserve a snack tonight? what you eat really isn’t that healthy we should exercise more I can police your food if you’d like you shouldn’t wear a shirt that...
Mother, then setting off— I see the world in which you inhabited sand breaching between land and seafoam you left clues, spinning sagas in my all too Canadian body of a place so delicious in warmth, the providence of natural resources prone to warships and the occasional genocide. Mother, on the...
after “Dick from a Girl with Autism” I love autistic gay trans queens Us sensual sensory gals Euphoric smut and top-shelf memes From squishy a-spec pals High-stim, low-stim Not him, zmm zmm Tattoos, role play Bound by the High Fae Head pats for days and no more shame I hear you call my name I wanna...
My father told me he came from an island. A boat in the middle of the night took him and his brothers to the city. They would grow into men, become part of another land to tell stories from, be named in— no longer speaking ways of the water. When my father became a settler on the prairies, I came...
I am writing you this letter from the bottom of the ocean where my eyelids are bottle caps and my stomach turns burnished copper. Maybe it is time for a new oral tradition. All day I flicker and sometimes I go out and leave in my wake the faintest trace of sweat and hibiscus. Maybe I am an embryo...
I removed my belly button and paid attention to the healing process. No one believed I could feel the hole closing over, that it reminded me of being born. My mother was laid out on the kitchen table for a week. Formaldehyde high, you never noticed when my skin blackened. I felt undesirable. You...
Her body was part-whale, part-mouse—behold the lie! It lives in your belly. Like an unborn baby you mould the lie. Slice my ears with the jagged stars. What did you ever do with the gift of music? I buried the violin and told the lie. This lamp in the ocean. A wolf with feathers for fangs. The...
I don’t really have a preference. Which name you use. The coffee beans. Fonts or flowers or flavors. Except when it comes to bubbles. Keep my water flat, I don’t need it to be interesting. I’d prefer not to say—that’s a preference. I’d prefer to stay—that’s a...
The Hunter’s Moon reaches bloody illumination tonight obliviously obscuring what would be my first glimpse of the Draconids. I’ve yet to witness a meteor shower which is to say my blood still burns from when I saw a star fall by chance years ago and didn’t make a wish— how dare the moon rise...
i think of myself in images: oranges split down the middle, pavement damp with rain. spring fields are the same as being under water and fill the hollow in my gut where a rib used to be. sometimes, i am a row of naked bodies on different planes, reaching out to touch fingertips that...
We buy a speckled ceramic vase for his mother and then we buy a new vase for ourselves. The vase we buy ourselves is glass, hand-blown, twisted and prismatic. There’s an Italian word for it, surely. Before this glass vase we had a ceramic vase: floral and millennial pink, yet vaguely 70s. We grew...
I try to end it the night we lunge lung first into the north country, the unappeasable shores of Lake Superior and me too unappeasable, restless and reckless, tensing the edges of the waves. We can’t tell if they’re advancing or receding. Gravity forgets us our measures of depth, the possibilities...
after Lisel Mueller How I would paint your future: A lush peach, full of juice and...
a speckled bloat of metal-ridged rooftops come to life from deep under the roots of blue grama grass stuck over a cast of wither-dry sun beams boredom is rampant plastered in checkered flannel top countertop stale coffee over a pot she is homegrown straight from chernozemic soil Moose Jaw is an...
d i m e n s i o n s w e c a n s c a r c e l y r e c o g n i z e. ever been. The balance of our faces will be alien— nostrils, our eyes round as planets, wide as they have ourselves going grey, left with only the twin slits of our move more swiftly toward our demise. Soon, we find human cells...
Not a pretty structure No beautiful content Ruthless Lots of typos Lots of mean adverbs Repetitive form Contrasting voices Yelling in Farsi Shouting in English Not pragmatic Just dark Stuffy, complex not like-me words Redundant Maddening Screaming in capitals Calling people that not who No clarity...
the world sleeps while i listen. the faucet sings frère jacques frère jacques dormez-vous dormez-vous. what language would i be dreaming if i were. i ask the pillow to consider how in its breaking legacy leads to sitting. leg assis. assis one of many words rooted in my tongue. the pillow says it...
Dogwood blossoms return men materialize down by the tracks one slumped over a shopping cart says he will make some graffiti drink some beer holds up a Bud can—cheers a guy in the alders with a flip phone gingerly raises his hand says hi hi hi by the flattened Coors cases Absolut bottles soot from...
I was as an orchid wearing nothing but the light. You hammered an I into me like a nail, taught me the language of glass as you forged my eyes from the surfaces of sight. You’ve seen it all: the feral child putting on his Halloween werewolf suit, the teenaged boy kissing his breath-fogged...
It’s 2:56 and you are awake. The pulse under your jaw throbs. Carotid arteries throng your brain. The senses reside here, below your jawline, so does speech. You say “service” aloud like a wish. Go to the road, again. Go. It’s 3:12 and you are awake. You paddle your feet under the covers. Your...
Begin by noting that there’s no path to the other side of rain.The only way is perpetually through. A bicycle on two wheels forthe first time. At the viewing, only the mourners keep the emptiness at bay. Before and after, a room of objects. If youreached across, it would...
seafoam sours beneath my tongue spills over in the speaking of a name a tide in my throat, a surge of syllables the gravity of the words i swallow turns my body inside out tears my teeth from my mouth. secrets dissolve in my mouth drops of nectar spear my tongue to my jaw, i speak without saying...
After the painting, The Juggler, by Spanish surrealist, Remedios Varo (1908-1963) Yesterday a great many pellets of graupel shot out of the low grey sky— bouncing ice-balls! Spring’s thunderous shout muffled by its cloudy facemask. We have been too knotted into death counts & pollen counts...
and aspire to something that looks like love. Or is it just the margarine version? Try to do all the things originally on your five-year plan. Pretend they are still achievable. Pretend they will make you happy since what makes you happy can change within a single unexpected glance. How what you...
Pear trees line the grove, netting the sun, sheltering the predators encroached behind the thick green leaves and bodies fat and round. You pass me a knife and ask if I would carve a feast for you, a garden under golden skies and pear skin peels as cries of insects pitch the air. Fireweed...
“The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?” “What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?” —Agha Shahid Ali (Ghazal) i dreamt of tulips today they opened their mouths in a yawn the kind that engulfs the sun in its vacuous mouth like a little hurricane; the sort of yawn that could...
