Issues

All this beauty around us. Whatare we to do with friendship? So easy-bodied, piled together on floor or couch, webend, bind, brace. Herbitten lip in mid thought. Theirbaggy legged short shorts,corduroy shirt stroke. Hiscollar bone become sweat slidedew skinned in low light. Kitchen-doorwaydialogue at the party. Goddamn.Elastic imprint on the wrist.Fold of skin, secret space.Guttural […]

but i wish myself intothe titanic’s turkish baths,2 – 6 p.m.: men only hours,not despite its sinking butto de-baptize our longing;give me that high-conceptlow-effort kind of fatality:two queer bodies buriedinto drowning loungers& let’s fallinto each other’s skinbecause i can no longer standthat every love song turnsinto a confession of hunger,at least a ship wrecks its […]

Teigan Lan is a queer Chinese writer, student, and community organizer. They write personal essays for their Substack, and have published op-eds with the Toronto Star and Melanin Base Camp. They are very fond of Mitski.

Love, I amkintsugi, shards and lacquer, I repairmyself  in gold. I am a mosaic Vesuvius cannot  erase. You willexcavate memories like fragments preserved in ash. I am Michelangelo, I make stone flow into silk. Cut me away  and I become a monument.  So hide from this collapse. Love, I am Chauvet Cave, full of art. You will miss the way I bent […]

Back then, a few bodies ago, you knew how to get your dreams delivered. You would sleep in the shape of a question mark and the empty side of the bed would be the silent answer. Now the silence is broken by you answering the door late, groggy. Now dreams are strangers’ hands, with covered […]

Addison Branson (she/they) is a poet, data analyst, and anthropologist from Winston-Salem, NC. As a queer writer, they explore themes of identity, broken connection, and the disaster of human experience. When she isn’t working, Addison can often be found at a local bar enjoying a white negroni, engrossed in a book, and enthusiastically playing cards, […]

It fidgetsforever restless, migrating through meby the minute, blooming like a bruise beneath my skinfrom a fall I don’t remember taking,its tendrils ticklingas it scrapes away the subcutaneous layer—It growsin my stomach like a watermelonfrom a seed I don’t remember swallowing,my chest is hollowing, if I tapthe points of my breaststhe echo bounces back—It stretchesmy […]

i want someone to fill my mouthwith marbles—the opaque kind, with milky swirls of blue. i’ve spent so long like this—saying everything to please everybody else— that i need to start over from a mumble. i havemouthfuls of shame stopped up inside my gut, piled like sludge in a barrel, like bile waitingfor my morning […]

After Ada Limón Rain is the truest bright dead thingI’ve ever been afraid of. Rain as it beatsagainst a window, tiny little bodies,each drop a chance to catch something beforeit splatters. I live most of my lifetrying to avoid disaster. One day,in our car on the way to churchMy husband asks me what I’m thinking […]

did you know that you can reignite a fire by the tail of its smoke?sometimes i wish to be bright orange ashascending and illuminating the deep blues and wisps of grey. i could lie and say that smoke trailed into my eyesbut i cried within to the heavensasking for a flame reignited. i don’t need […]

With viscous clouds of lighthair-thin on your Vaseline lips. Pearl-lit sweat through yourravine hands. This is not half of the half that I remember:the kerosene whistle of your skin, spit collecting in the saw-toothof your mouth. Your blue-smothered eyes. Everything I remember is noteverything I wanted. Nor is it anything that I did not.There was […]

My mother asks us to be quiet, to not let words come before thoughts.And I think of women kept in cagesIn houses where they kill the birds. My mother asks us to not make trouble.She pours wax in our open mouths and it hardensI obey and my teeth leave impressions. When I try to swim, […]

To hoard –silent stare,light flickeringmouth agapeand emptyswallows withheldwithering vineimperfect harvest.Evenworm riddledthe apple sweetensand buzzes.Evenunlapped,the juice ripens.A symphonyunstruck. Serah Wolfe is a poet, painter, and writer dwelling in the American Midwest.

It turns out, if a person takes all the anti-anxiety pills at once,anxiety disappears forever.Everything disappears forever. My mother was the age I am now.I, a child. All gets crushed beneath the weight of a single fact.I don’t remember leaving the house. Don’t remember packing my clothes,my guitar, my baseball cards.Her Stephen King novels, which I’d read with jittery […]

Dakota Smith (she/her) is a poet, performance artist, and writer who received her MFA from Randolph College. Her work can be found in The Rumpus, Good River Review, Imposter Lit, and The Westchester Review. She lives in New York City and is on Instagram as @likethestates. 

i want a miracle so plain,so unassuming& without drama— a bush full of leaves the sea as it is the sun swirling through the skylike the gasses its made of the miracle must be happening: steam rising from the wet woodlike ghosts leaving the body murders of crows eating the bambion the roadside two coyotes […]

It hits better whenyou predict the weather wrongly.Now is a weather for big feelings—wordless big feelings.But I’ll try to word them for you.Listen up— with your body, I mean. So I see a deep cloudy portal forming west.A sky folk braces her chariot,raging, charging into nothingness.I see a sky folk perform a southern smile.His hair laid […]