Jim Nason And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the noise! Noise! Noise! Noise! The Whos would start singing! They’d sing! And they’d sing! And they’d SING! —Doctor Seuss From balcony and rooftop, from sidewalks and cars— bicycle and dinner bells, pot against pan, spoon against glass, clapping and whistles...
Katherine Abbass My roommate is a pilot; we watch the sky for signs of life. On warm days we sit out on the patio and stare at the stucco building beside us, our neighbour walking her iguana on the handrail, giving us a wave, a cigarette dangling from her winter lips, dry and scaly as her pet. My...
For mobile devices, this poem is best read in landscape orientation mode. Cecilia Stuart I put something down, you pick it up. I write theletter e and you pick it up. You go on waiting,waiting. I draw a barrier around myself. Closeenough for you to graze...
Lucas Crawford The swab isn’t sublingual after-all so for now my secret cure remains safe. He counted to three and went up my nose with a stick longer than the smallest dildo that my Montreal landlord stole. Great. Now I have a nasal fetish. Dare you to dig deeper than him and risk reaching the...
Tawahum Bige after Eve Joseph nipawatan wecîpweyânâhk nipihtos-mihko ewîkiyân tahtwayak ekwa âyiman I’m used to battlefield the way cannons fire and ancestors’ bones gather, just to shatter again. Dene rising are more story than poem— our throats carry cargo, long thought sunken...
Grace When my succulent began turning yellow, it dropped one fleshy leaf every day, indifferent to my panic until only the stem remained naked and alone. You could still see the hollows that were homes for phantomed limbs, where love [was] tried. * I call my plants my children and give them either...
Rob Colgate Staring out the drippy window. Wanna go to the top of the rock. So happy up there boy so happy so happy. Want the river up there with me. Wanna be alone. Not my boyfriend. Covered in slimy nacre so the dirt is worth it. All of this used to be colder. Rain on the fire escape, street...
Leslie Joy Ahenda the nice ones all got shot. a woman knots her fists & disregards her joints—swelling means her blood is not yet on pavement. in sleep a woman majesticizes a man unshackled. wakes to a man praying only for his brothers. please. nigga fronts like the lust in his eyes is a yellow...
James Collier cloud unsettling little winter, in April it is all local, grappling with small stakes and nothing real, Caeneus unknowable to the body I feel, glance down, glazed and terrible it is all so apathetic, the snow smothers what is not already home, and Caeneus, I am sorry, but the crush is...
Roxanna Bennett after “Bilingual Pathways” by Dominik Parisien In Paris the air tastes like pain, ancient, golden, Gauloises, Gitanes, paint the skin with guttersweat grease. I learn to limp through the Louvre, loving the Winged Victory of Samothrace...
Michael Russell I hold the last picture of you fold it into the pocket of my mouth, chew. Daddy, you taste like love and devastation. My teeth rip you the way you ripped yourself from me. In front of the bathroom mirror I ask Where is Stephen? The steam lifts like a bridal veil and I vomit the wolf...
Abryna Bulford Nigankwam held my hand When spring blues hit me. Sometimes things don’t disappear, But change into something better. And here I am, whole, as I always was. What gift was I to give you, I ask myself, besides healing? I could not do it all, but only enough. And that is enough, is it...
Joelle Barron “These Texas gals are passionate about God’s beautiful design for womanhood…” – Girldefined.com Blonde godheads, god girls, proselytizing YouTube doll babies. Their blog favicon a white-panty period stain. Sweet girls, what do they desire? Girldefined, ecstatic girl-tongue. Girl is...
Kyeren Regehr granting of a penny wish druthers something beloved Am truly all those hackneyed phrases shopworn and cloying unbelieving Am madly tripping light-headed fantastically smouldering the grass with each step...
Isabel Yang On our first date, I throw crumbs to water- fowl. She says bread makes birds sick, It’s like junk food for them. Don’t let them eat the crust. On our second date, he pushed fingers in, and I opened up, thinking it was the same anodyne reflection on...
Jade Wallace after Jean Day Ours is a generation of wistful and somewhat attractive humans, wanderers in a bad and beautiful slough. We say that all we want are convincingly unisex jackets but what we mean is that we are tired of bitter butterfinger metaphysics, bored of biding our time in the...
Karine Hack Mashup of Ocean Vuong’s “homewrecker” & Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler” when we swam once, white dresses spilling from our feet / in water, late August our mothers / left with no trace your father’s tantrum turned, turning our hands dark red as if wounded: a wildfire we...
David Ly Too many men are too afraid to be tender, too raw. My love makes me fearless with fangs and a flickering tongue plucked from a king cobra. I match the wildness someone else wished into you until you were abandoned. Nothing between us is forbidden, too much, too scary. Your harpy talons...
Annick MacAskill The universe gets a little heavy-handed when you’re around—the Bow still green all these kilometers down river; two geese and their tuft of fledgling: proof that the universe was once the size of a gumball. Time is a rubber band, we joke. Nothing like looking over and seeing you...
For mobile devices, this poem is best read in landscape orientation mode. James Collier anonymous bumps in the darkwe body and couple and bodywestrict structures just too tired forwe send lovlies thatwe wont see spoken heardwe dig our hands into groinwe find ...
Zoë Johnson I dunno When I talk about my gender, I always end up leaning s i d e w a y s My vertebrae begin to bend into the shape of the word sorta See, I’ve been trying to solve the equation Of internal chickness and dude-ittude for years But when I try plotting the data points the...
A. Light Zachary A movie called Alien vs. Predator in which we go back in time to fight everyone who hurt us when we were young. A movie called Cowboys vs. Aliens about watching our backs at the club. A movie called Village of the Damned about our neighbourhood. A version of Invasion of the Body...
D. Simon Turner The scariest part was that they liked you, making jokes about the dick you don’t have. And there were some days you’d rather not sit with them at 9am “lunch,” congregating with the regularity of high-school cafeterias. Like the day when, each time you stood, you glanced at your...
Matthew Walsh Still feel the nerve in my neck snap back at me, injury from when I fell down the stairs of the Embassy, stairs now vibrant with exes orange and aquarium light. If I was floating in the galaxy with fresh new stars when they put me in the tube shoot me to the moon my brain will appear...
Griffin Epstein my advice to future parents is be careful when you turn the bed notice who hears the argument...
Alix Wood For months, we’ve planned to visit the New England Aquarium, where a new shark exhibit has opened. An open tank allows me to stick my hand in cold water and let it float, waiting for sharks the length of thigh bone to emerge from faux coral and swim. You watch me as a thin body crowds my...
Dominik Parisien My body is a spaceship designed to optimize the proliferation and growth of its microbial cosmonauts. -Adam Dickinson The myth of body is this impermeable place this state of being never porous when the...
Tracy Wai de Boer if we’re counting i’d count for half they tell me what i am basically white basically meaning, not quite but almost close they tell me what i am does not exist because there’s no such thing as what i am they say, if they believed in gay or straight then i’d be just...
Sophie Crocker slim and strong as a samurai, you wash socks in our frequently broken kitchen sink. you say, as if citing the weather, murder rate escalating – must be the summer heat. i hold your hips between my hands. you feel so narrow and brief i ache when i touch you, ache when i don’t...
Aris Keshav Lines of sun-bright lesbians perched in café windows follow me with glint-glint eyes making smooth supervision of Saint-Viateur. I bask then traipse the corner, waverly with happiness. Here are black-pants men all elegance as they maneuver violin cases from a pick-up truck (everything...
Annick MacAskill I like that pinot in your mouth. Are you sure you don’t want to play in the movies? I’d watch those movies. The geese love the nightlife here, shun the days. Over the same sink where we brush our teeth, rinse our coffee mugs, the wine glasses, I cut the tulip stems with your swiss...
Cara Nelissen on Fridays someone always wanted espresso right before closing I got so used to saying sorry I forgot what it felt like to mean it I always split our tips to the nickel I don’t believe in rounding down everything small becomes something if you hold it long enough we carried our vodka...
Daniel Karasik I think a lot of straight people don’t realize how closets work. They picture you malingering in a darkened chamber, clarities about yourself wrapped round your skin like leopard print, self-knowledge self-available, your only real deficiency the courage to— deep breath...
Nisa Malli Everyone tells me it’s not hard. The processes are material sciences done in the correct order of operations. Cooking is just heat, water, salt, sugar and the naming of things. Still there are days when I forget anything but the most shorthand of meals. Daunted by the impossible magic of...
Sugar le Fae —for Keith Maillard Backing under the shower’s hot spittle, a metal knuckle knocks and settles on the bathtub floor. A loonie? Must’ve swam up my pajama pants and stuck to my butt. What booty to excavate from one’s own bathtub, stamped with a bust of the queen mum! What strange...
Mónica Gomery Baby, I went to seminary for theology. They taught me every Thou is a funnel for the big bright You. They taught me God’s erotics would come to me in dreams. Put your queer shoulder to the wheel they said and push your palm into the centre of the earth, love dissolves us into people...
Prathna Lor There is a time for making and a time for snow. Thinking. No one is there to hear the thinking. Staring out across river, the brownness drinks. Feeling vertiginous, candy. Slender in calling. Down out at the bottom, reeling and laughing. The fishermen float over. Cast down a...
Anna Navarro Think of the word the one that smothers your tongue on blistering days in July, is cool and sweet about it, lazes on your slack pink muscle, knows it belongs there. Think of the word and bite down on it, crush the figure of it like finger bones, force a grimace onto it until...
Nolan Natasha the word carries more in its belly than I can make you understand. that’s why I want to talk about it. it’s not just that it means one thing written in heavy books from the university press and another in your mouth as an answer and another on the stall door and another hurled from...
Lynne Sargent I grind your cum into the corner of the mattress before sealing my whole sodden thing with my underwear. Grind because my body remembers yours beneath it. It is still primed for pleasure. Cum because it is the orgasmic that is of importance. Not reproduction, not shame. Into...
N. Page Shear my hair to its roots, ‘til I’m bare. I’m ready to reset, to begin again as whoever I was three years before. Shampoo intruded on my eyes too often anyway, and pomade was stubborn, took hours to wash away. My clothes started to bully me. My kicks kicked back. The jewellery...
Minying Huang lăo lao sits in lotus position on the bed, the end of the world in her belly. she is curiously absent in the room, looks the eternal to my fidget. Yíng Yíng twiddles her thumbs to shake the absence off the covers but still she will not budge. listen, kid, to time as it...
Maggie Burton Through hinged-open double hung windows, the house winked at us, saw us holding hands when no one was allowed to see. Keeping our secrets, they kept out nothing else. The wind knew no limits. Would’ve been easy, you supposed, to figure out insulation, to heat tall ceilings...
Isabella Wang It’s been weeks without a poem and you wonder how you are still getting invited to readings. Haven’t they figured you out by now? You bring the same year-old poems and read until words that hurt like the thorns of a blackberry bush lose meaning. Outside, sunflowers bobble...
Cat Friesen Found poem using an interview with Trump If you remember, you were going down, choking on control like never before; it was only going to get worse. You announced the building of walls, cutting all the things you’ve done into thousands of neat negotiations. You were strangled by...
Kegan McFadden he got a nosebleed , and as a counter- measure sneezed onto the bouquet of white daisies he’d bought on his walk to the Italian restaurant , confusing the real point of the story— spring was in the air. Originally from Winnipeg, writer/curator/artist Kegan McFadden now...
Triny Finlay You should relax. Come back to my hive. I’ll make us some toast. Ignore the droning around you— those losers don’t know what they’re missing. Don’t worry, I’ve been there too. Once. I was seventeen—young and gorgeous—but no one believed I could be Queen. It sent me to a dark place. Lie...
Sugar le Fae I’m too many men’s maybe if their girlfriend leaves them. I look like a man. By every metric, I am. I never thought I wasn’t, but I’m not. Everybody knows, who talks to or watches me walk or gesture. Even in my boy clothes. So, I’m genderqueer. Because trans-feminine with no...
Jennie Chantal Duguay The crows have their routine, I have mine. For five hundred days they cross the path of my body. Horizontal in bed I watch dusk drape a thousand black wings in threads of gold or silver. How high or low they fly, how playful or solemn, the volume of their company all...
Kyla Jamieson In all my nightmares I’m a model again, on set trying not to eat or lose my mind. When my body was my product I always felt almost run out, like one day I’d wake up and none of me would be left. At eighteen my agent told me vodka shots and splenda and sent me to Sydney to turn...
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch i. yt ppl think i’m yt like it’s a compliment brown ppl think i’m yt as though it’s a shame i didn’t turn out less gay tackled on both ends when the yt woman on the metro stares at me with plz die eyes before she gets off at laurier while brown ppl in the middle east...
Jory Mickelson Often, day goes sweetly as a bird returning to the branch it loves most to watch the waters of the lake on lazy afternoons. Say the tree is a shade oak. Say the bird’s not a bird at all, but a boy who’s learned to keep his wings. He spends his few hours crossing water from one...
Dominik Parisien I learned jealousy reading of a boy who kissed a wall. Oliver kissed here scribbled on the brick. I knew, then, love was breathing yourself into another; how boys feared getting caught losing themselves through their lips. And here was Oliver, who could have carried me with...
Sara Patterson You tell me to wash. We fuck the bathroom raw. Elizabeth Bathory, I bathe for you. If I deep clean my face with uterine lining will I be young enough? Blonde enough? I drink Diet Coke. Like horse piss, it removes blood stains. Mary Tudor, that rust haired cancer ridden monarch...
Erin Vance The blackened ear is the third fantastical bit the turpentine bark and the spritz, the oil drip ache to sit on the crumbling steps of the ruined pitch hidden slick, fallen sick, skin flakes black, like the ear scraped into the lichenous foot of the Styrofoam forest floor not the...
