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...
Erin Kirsh Everyone’s a philosopher and I miss comedians. Everyone’s got a theory and I got a headache. The selected world lives in a device that lives in my pocket with all the other change. It’s gathering lint. It’s tearing my jeans. It’s cutting my hand when I try to tuck one in for...
Ian Martin that i will die better than i exist that i cannot own desire as i exude it, let it go unabated into excess that my entrails interpreted will be used against me, someone else that i was defined against the sky tonight, nothing more Ian Martin is an inimitable buffoon and...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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:...
Kai Cheng Thom even if he loves you, even if he knows how to love you well, your white cisgender boyfriend can’t save you: for all the strength you imagine into the curves of his arms, no matter how tightly you have taught him to hold you, the circle of his embrace is not a fortress, cannot...
Kay Gabriel i. Swam in a lake of it, got typically fucked Took stock of bathing coupons: half a chunk of trophy on display, the marble auction, from where the guests come in. On the right side the cradle of her thigh a mini world limned in that slit rounded, undraped, but fuller in the...
John Elizabeth Stintzi Now— Winnipeg, MB. Near Confusion Corner Winnipeg was once a wide world. Now wider than it seems, it is a cool spread thin. Now it is a hill of small favours, of small livings and hush nights and hard windows we view through. A city of voyeuristic perches perennial...
Nat Marshik 1. I took an heirloom sip in thick pine needles, feet sunk in forest hands cool around the blue bottle with its flip top and old timey label and tasted with my twelve years the sweetsap pioneer story—fascinated by that emaciated winter, death in the high snows the icy unsympathy...
Shelley Marie Motz I have been dreaming of bread. Warm and round. Buttered. Dripping. Dreaming of braided bread Sweetened with honey. My Greek neighbour Maria’s kitchen Steaming with daughters and laughter. I prepare the dough: Water. Salt. Yeast. One bowl. Two hands. Desire. I pour and...
Kayla Czaga Do you remember the baseball diamond beside which we ate naanwich, Liz? It tasted nothing like butter chicken. We’d wandered all morning without eating and hunger revealed to us the aggression in nearby seagulls. I loved your light lisp, how softly you smelled of vegetable broth. I...
Meaghan Rondeau 1999 I announce that I don’t want kids. My mom’s reply: “You’ll change your mind when you’re older. Life is meaningless—” She actually says this! I shit you not! Meaningless! “—without children.” Years later, I tell her that remark still bothers me. She says, “I never said that.”...
Julian Paquette My masculinity is red and hot, excited and vibrant—a body that’s been too long ignored. An acutely sensitive organ of denial. My masculinity is tight and wants to loosen. I can feel the tension of repression against it. I can feel myself opening to my man. My voice lowering; my...
Esther McPhee i. It’s not spring weather yet but I want it to be. Winter’s lasted too long—I’m still not accustomed to the strength of east coast snow and I miss the rain, how February at home marks the first of spring, thaw of green frost and the crocus beginning. But here Joel starts...
Erin McIntosh they told me i would be like jonah, minus the comfort of speaking directly to god. i told them alright. all is well. stuck swimming in my own little world, waiting for the whale my saviour to scoop me up in his jaws, some man who could carry me to where i needed to be. i want...
Lucas Crawford I. I never went to the High Line or sucked transgender clit or dick. I never asked for three free samples at Milk Bar’s lower eastside locale; it’s just that I never find enough to lick. I never asked a stranger to pull over his car so I could take a hot dump in the woods. I...
Julian Gunn Lemon drops. Bitter torque. Al Pacino cruising for watersports. Born again by stoma, your new topology. A hole as always the gap of meaning. In medias res: Seattle. Nephrophilia. The scene in the basement. The old boyfriend pissing on the floor. A student of the body on hands and...
Billeh Nickerson When my friend challenged me to write a poem about the Winnipeg police who accidentally turned on the speakers to their taxpayer-funded helicopter only to broadcast a lurid tale of blowjobbery and oral salaciousness to the communities below I was momentarily titillated as...
after Frank O’Hara Adam Meisner I’m leaving New York, again. Under swept trusses & skirting Harlem at the early hours of Columbia’s Sunday young. The drive piddles over the Washington & under another flag– the progeny of powdered wigs held higher ten years after I watched a...
