The Moon, Reversed

Noah Mullinax

“before and after is just another false binary”
- Jenny Xie

When I think about death I imagine
birds flying straight into the Earth.

I think about you singing Big Thief,
buttermilk, the silvery glance at Divisoria

about how I spend my time developing
a schema that accounts for the abundance
of fern that may (or may not) exist.

Do you ever wonder why there are
rivers in the world? I don’t

(anymore). The greenish water
reflecting light from tugboats into
the kitchen bears no relevance.

I wonder more about sleep as a
preparation for death. I wonder

most about freedom. When I was
chatting with Gaby on the phone
(through the ruckus of Dyckman)
she told me how she’s tired of
being tired–therefore, limitless.

About death (I mean birds), though,
is that it can only be felt. Sometimes,

when the dust settles (momentarily)

I think about death
(only to remember)–

these hands are the hands
you touched
these ears are the ears
that heard
this body is the body
you hold.

1

Sutures

Joshua Wetjen

By intention or catastrophe,
the world is often close to splitting.

I have two sutures,
freshly bombed bridges
between my legs
blockading
the highway of fatherhood.

On your left temple,
a line zigzags
where doctors teased out
the imprint of the sun,
radiance spoiled,
the price you pay
for a complexion like stirred cream.

We pace,
our needles and thread,
ready to stitch.

We suture our bodies
in every private place,
yearning with
cries of need.

2

A Cancer Patient Considers The Collapse Of The Gulf Stream

Christian Ward

My body slowly
collapses
like the Gulf Stream,
unable to handle
the unnatural alchemy.

Data scoffs at me
behind gated spreadsheets.

One day, my feet
will dip into the Jacuzzi
of the Atlantic,

every toe curling
into an apology
for the both of us.

3

N/mm2 = queer flesh

Sarah Amsler

soft not as in flesh to bullet but like
the depth of the penetration of the
indentation of the thing that soil does
when skystones strike from space—

when your body, the elders say,
hurtles home to a decision you make
and your skin settles into spectacular shape.

yielding to be less broken,
to be bent in more beautiful ways.

some chisel future from boulder some
sculpt wet earth into form and sometimes
we crawl out of cocoons built from
the detritus of our own detonation

like all things metamorphosis do.

*

The science ǀ N/mm² or Newton (force) per square millimetre a unit used to measure the stress, hardness or resistance of material. ‘Tensile strength’ is the maximum amount of stress that a material can bear before it breaks when impacted, stretched or pulled. This is not a fundamental property of matter, but exists only in relation with other factors such as elemental composition, molecular structure and connection, temperature, size and fatigue. What might be corresponding measures for the possibilities of queer trans-formation? What conditions allow human beings to queer our meaty, spiritual and political bodies and relations; to restore more flow into their form without breaking?

4

I Dream of Fetal Pigs

Adriana Beltrano

their mouths unhinged
by the unsteady slices of my scalpel,
the one I got in the kit.
I butterfly their torsos
and crack open their sternums
to get at the pumping squirmy things inside.
The intestines are a dead gray
but snake in loops that should be writhing.
I dream the pigs rise, leap,
connect jaw sinew to jaw sinew,
mend the mark I made, the clown’s grin,
and bite down on the flesh of my arm,
tell me I taste like pork.
They lie still in the deep sink.
I reach in and extract-
first the heart, the size and shape of a fig
that’s been abandoned by the wasp that was fucking it;
then the lungs, twins in the void,
layered flakes of deep-purple tender meat
that miss snorting through sweet snout;
then sex organ, heavy with the weight of lost potential.
The scalpel is back in my hand and I am cutting again,
opening the pigs up in ways they didn’t know they could be
and know they weren’t meant to be.
I open their leg joints,
detach the tubes holding in the life-giving blobs;
it is a hatchet job.
Their mouths yawn open toward something they can’t see behind them.
I wrap them in translucent plastic and bag them up.
I take off my too-thin apron and my fogged-up gloves and I wash my hands.
I put the bag of pigs in the passenger seat
and I drive us to taco bell
and I order too much, I am indulging:
Nachos BellGrande,
Chicken Quesarito,
Beef Crunchwrap Supreme,
Mexican Pizza,
a dipping tub of liquid cheese the color of affront-against-god.
The pigs squeal out the ancient names of tacos from their bag.
The pigs and I scarf it down in the car in the parking lot.
We use fingertips and
hooves and
nails to scoop the gloop out of every plastic crevice.
I dream we smell of formaldehyde and things that should’ve stayed inside.

5

Sonnet for my Optometrist

Ella Wisniewski

I must confront my own eyes,
my orange-gleamy retinas punctuated
with veins like sneaking tributaries. My doctor says
I should have come in to see her much sooner
as she swivels over with the refractor,
that heavy mess of clicking lenses.
I imagine that she can see through
to the bubblegum sponge of my brain,
and that she will pluck away
each deficiency, each tiny terrible prize
of being alive, and she will find
my best memories doused in their lazy
neon shine, streaked with color lineated
like wings unfurling.

6

Questions about the Body

Lori D’Angelo

Maybe we are all
just cogs in the
machine, but some parts, like hands,
mean more. You can do without a middle
toe, I think. Just ask my aunt. She had hers
lopped off. Her bunions so bad, her foot
circulation not what it should be, it became
more impediment, less useful. What are
the essential parts in THIS machine, and
am I one of them? Like Father Abraham?
If everything reconfigured itself like some
sci-fi dystopian nightmare or an episode
of Stargate maybe, and I became redundant
like an extra door lock, so you remodeled
and put me in some forgotten kitchen drawer
that no one ever checks, would you miss me,
or would you
just go on?

7

American Birth

Alyssa Sales

Mama tells me that I was a fighter from the start.
At first, I grew inside her belly quietly,
like the calm waves that lulled her island to sleep
before roaring monsoon storms wreaked havoc
among drifting curved canoes.

Mama tells me that when I kicked her insides with
Samson’s strength, she spit sunset guava as her tongue twisted
into forbidden curses. The nurses rolled her into the emergency
room, draped blue lagoon covers on a chocolate hill.
The moment I am brought into this world, my cries engulfed the OR,
the same way a dolphin screams in acoustic song.

Perhaps, I carried my ancestors’ memories inside me —
entangled lives rooted in perseverance and loss,
their forgotten stories culminating in my screams
begging for people to remember before
colonized culture

8

Learning to Say This as It Is

Rachel Roupp

In every metaphor I write
for rape, I am the land and
the men are still men.

I am the one shapeshifting
saying,
a man cut me up
like a road through a mountain

or an axe through a tree
instead of, simply,
a man held me down and
fucked me when I asked him not to.

And he didn’t need
an axe
or a truck
or a knife.

9

White Angora

Danielle McMahon

In the dream, at the funeral, Grandmother’s spine
hardens against the marbled sofa, her body
more upright than she ever had been
in life, a pale light cast out from her milky eye

In her bone-blue arms languishes
a giant angora rabbit, a knot
of snow white, a cancer with red eyes

She is the seat of plenty,
the cradle & the keeper
She wears a smile as blank
as cool porcelain

Her fingers hook into the rabbit’s plump
flesh & fur overflowing in her lap
A soft song escapes her
like a cry

In the dream, at the funeral, I want deadly
to be small again, to sidle up
to her familiar shape, rest my head
on Grandmother’s hip, push

hungrily into the cradle of her arms & bury
my hands into soft angora, but she
is so still & cool as stone
& when I wake:

ravenous

10

Lumbar

Samuel E. Blackburn

Bend me just a little farther.
Atrophy rewards the diligent.
Embrace the toil, hardship, and gloom.
Asphyxiate, kill yourself, do not—

straighten up. I will not comply
without cracking, snapping, punishing
you; making you wonder how you
came to this, acclimatised to pain.

Your stone chair and improvised desk
destroy me. You fool! Undoing your
bone and muscle, tools of your work.
Enjoy them while you still can.

11

Sixty, Single, and Doomed

John Ganshaw

Hard to believe we made it this far, and being sixty
in gay years we are considered to be living on
borrowed time. Time that is not part of the living
but not quite dead. We reside in our own Palm
Springs. We wait for the hourglass to run out by
revisiting our haunts of yesterday. Same stool at the bar each
day at two. Surrounded by the same friends who all
discuss who died the previous day. When home at night,
look out the window and X another day down, go to
bed, and wonder, how many more? At sixty, interest grows
amongst the twinks and the thirties crowd. Why should they
invest in a relationship of thirty or forty years when one
can be in a “loving” relationship for possibly ten or so
and find their name in the will? An outfit of black for the
funeral has already been planned, while an outfit of lace stockings and
a black jock for the wake is waiting in the wings. We accept
our fate with the curiosity of who will attend. All is not quite lost,
as at the mature age of sixty, we are still ready to be had
A well-to-do society woman would give an arm or leg for one of
us to be a guest at dinner and an evening about town. A
night at the opera, or Broadway is the price for holding a hand.
Tricks at twenty would have been more fun, however,
to accompany a lady in her eighties is also nice, just be sure to
let her pat your ass. That’s our life as gay men now, lived beyond
our youthful years, sitting in a holding tank and waiting for
our second line and possibly another life if provided the chance.

12

I Am the Clay

Julie Esther Fisher

What you leave behind:
Clay grief, a gnashing of tools.
I use your fettling knife to cut two crude lumps,
slice fingers into the slabs,
sculpt the sculptor’s hands. 
I give you our mother’s ridged nails,
hint at eternity
with lucent half-moons,
crimp your knuckles with the needle.
Then there are veins, those rumors of blood.
Lifesize hands. I make them bigger than they were, 
with a longer reach.

In the morning I wake to find them upside down
in supplication,
noticing only now
the dead smoothness of the palms.
I’ve forgotten to give you lifelines,
sent you off without a map.

What you leave behind:
Clay. Tools.
The sculptor,
only you can help me shape this grief.
Use your knife to cut me from the lump,
your ribbon tool to hollow me out.
And your needle?
Use this
to pierce my numbness. 

Then,
lay down your tools.
Don’t stop there. Don’t spare me.
Get in here with your bare hands.

13