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for the time i saw Marsha P. Johnson at the Stonewall Inn on a visit to new york city
Blue, Linnea Shurig surely not the ghost of your body inflated with the hudson like an old mylar balloon the kind a child begs for and then abandons to wander through hallways until it withers and dies i imagine you as you were— a whole generation of queers in your hair a brick in your hand…
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Bhooth
The Japanese House, Effie Jia They pick marrow from their teeth With calloused fingers and fish bones Outside because the sweet night air and smoke from the street vendor’s tawa Is only slightly more delicious than warm skin More palatable than newsprint with their daughters’ names Branded like cattle before Eid Recounting forgotten horrors…
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Everything Must Go
Little Architect, Natasha Hirt as is tradition for the women / of my blood, / I shop too much. will sacrifice / a paycheck like a lamb for the chance to conjure up / a fresh silhouette. & I am supposed to hate / this about us. the nerve: to wrap our bodies in myths…
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shame is a screen door swinging violently shut
Cellular Hierarchies, Effie Jia i’ve heard about the man who eats boys in the backseat of cars—we all have, learned to fear him, the weeping pustule. i didn’t think i’d come to know him, let alone share his blood— shame is a dog, no, it’s a man who beats dogs & grinds their teeth into…
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Ripples
Light and Dark, Grace Long now der’s clothes to wash and suppa to fix the missus want it all done quick she hate my black ass cus when i walk in a room she smell her husband on me she watch his eyes fall on my body and him lickin’ his chops like a hungry hound…
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asexual dysphoria waltz
Disrupted Cannon, Colleen Simmons i wanted to be a slow dancer. then i wanted not to move my body at all. not even a ghost in upbeat funeral dirge should come this close. once, when i ascertained the formula, i danced with arced & straight body. i blessed god for allowing my tongue to skirt…
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These Sheets and Hollows Are the Truest Things I Know
Comfortable, Jihyea Jang rotten peaches, over ripe plums, splitting along their skins. juices the color …
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Discovering the Erotic Creature After Sheila Kelley’s TED Talk
Defense Mechanism 3, Elizabeth Ellenwood Watch her barefoot in cotton— not high heels and silk— enough skin to grip the surface, but not enough to make you think this is for anyone but her. Watch her pace like a lynx around the pole, swoop like a snowy owl, suspend herself upside-down, mane brushing the floor while…
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It Was the Summer
Say a Prayer, Mikaela Rae Atiogue After Neil Hilborn I ate nothing but apple slices & eggs, hard-boiled, lightly salted. It was the summer of forgetting. The summer of scrubbing my tongue until it bled. Trying to get that taste out of my mouth. I can’t remember if this was the summer I spent every night…
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Your Name is a Splinter
We Sleep the Same, Kate Drakulic Your name is a splinter, an ice-breaker a loop of pearly fog. Your nineteen are kill notches scratched with an accurate slope on a buttstock, a perfect shooting range for Cupid. I’m slightly in love with you. A timid grace of a kitten playing in the grass. Small ears…
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Listerine Bones
Study of Myself, Bella Pozo Every time you kissed me you left bacteria in between the crevices of my teeth But it’s funny how whenever I got sick we both seemed to blame the weather Instead of the virus attached to your tongue I had to stop going outside because my mother became sick of buying…
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Penthouse Serenade
Girl, Azure Arnot When the note is so high that it shatters thick glass And the smile so hard that it hurts And the tower so tall that it topples and crashes And crushes all lovers on earth When your laugh is so hard that tears roll down your cheeks And your feet ache from…
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growing pains
Nature Administers a Rorschach Test, Margaret May i watch lovers on the street kiss with more tongue than fang and call them pathetic for their forked bittersweet longings before peeling off my skin and leaving it at the front door slithering over the threshold to pull the slivers of your name through my teeth like…
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Adam’s Gun
For Sale, Jess Mezzi is a womanizer / which is to say its victims are born / between itching crosshairs. this feminine inheritance: / to be prey from birth. / at the bodega on West 42nd, / I bear witness to its everyday violence. / the summer hums slow & thick / & I watch…
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A.R.
Flickering Strings of Love, Paul Knight Constellations mapped across her face Space matter and nebulas rest under two blue moons Stars mark a trail over a happy nose A spray outdone only by the up twist of her lips Swimming only to drown in the ocean of her eyes The calm currents swallow my beating…
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unsent letter to my upstairs neighbor who’s taking a shower at 3:42 a.m. on a thursday
Rise, Meg Jenson Because, even if we meet, I’ll have no idea how to bring this up in conversation. And you’ve started doing it with some regularity. Sometimes once, sometimes even twice a week I’ll hear the high-pitched whine of your shower faucet at some ungodly hour. And, boy howdy, is it a whine. A—is he…
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Perennials
Seven Sundays, Azure Arnot autumn The night I was born, my mother clawed up the tiles in the kitchen floor and buried her deciduous heart beneath the mortar. Concrete-stained fingertips leave her more cement than girl: she weaves glass and steel into the strands of her shadow-dark hair, building a greenhouse in her chest that…
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Little Havana, Miami
The Grass is Never Greener, Vinnie Hagar To the children of Operation Pedro Pan They did not sail above sandy shores dripping salt. Their banners and flags grappled onto their simmered clothes like bodies scrambling for spines. It was January of 1962. Fourteen-thousand slept on wings that sliced through orange clouds. Swollen eyes like mangos,…
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Seed-Pod-Head
The Battle of Antietam in Technicolor, Alexandra Moleski I shaved the back of my head on a whim at 2 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. There was a gap between classes. I wear it in two braids down my back and the fuzzy shaved bit peeks out. My dad ran his palm over it when he…
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The Bones of St. Valentine
Untitled, Jessica Ram I walked through a church with an unholy mouth gazed upon this love ghost, this dead thing with sacrilegious eyes (they were looking for God, they were looking for you) Marble walls nothing without your back against them Here, honesty does not pray clean or bless politely. Here, honesty drips your sweat…
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clenched fist and honeycomb
World’s Finest, Chloe Hiu See Tsang my girl sits in the garden like eve on her knees and i bite her shoulders in the milk white dusk leaving half cleaved marks of my sore teeth on her skin. we sit on our haunches like dogs in the afternoon, red faced semi-nymphs begging for something to…
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A Boy
Illuminated, Ava Fojtik Popped off my knees like bottle caps & became a boy Daddy crushed Diet Coke cans & I became a boy hands goldfished in the creek—colorful pebble feet Don’t feed her too much or she’ll grow into a boy Flag pulled down from its perch—waved laughing upside down The monkey…