Poetry

Gabby Mijalski-Fahim

San Francisco Pride

Our bodies ripple across rainbow cladded streets,
pretzeled on our partners’ shoulders with raised hands,

enough to hold up a sky that won’t have us.
Each chant a stone through a helpless window,

a love song to queens with beads for thongs
who paved these streets with glitter-turned-ash.

A shaggy dyke boasts neon suspenders and clutches the neck
of a beer bottle, hooking the lip of its head

with her stained teeth, releasing golden streams of light
that slither down her chin and land on a road once caked with wings
of glass and spoiled blood.

Gabby Mijalski-Fahim is a 22 years-old cat parent, queer poet, and karaoke aficionado who lives, breathes, and works in the somber state of Oregon. Her work is featured in Tempered Runes Press and Cathexis Northwest Press.

Hunter Burke

Vanilla Shit

We kiss watching Glee, the pizza box
open beside us like a cathedral. You fumble
with the clasps of my overalls, and I can smell
your cologne, the whiskey barrel freshness
of your skin. It’s been five months
since I tasted liquids that were not my own.
I think we’re getting good at this,
or maybe your spit-shined palm
is a beacon and I am tired of being lost
at sea. When the cum gets in my hair
you kiss me and tell me it’ll dry.
I laugh and tell you that this is the episode
where Rachel sings Papa Can You Hear Me
as Kurt’s father lies in a hospital bed,
arteries choked and coiled around the meat
of his heart, trying desperately to keep up
with the beat of it. Maybe music does change
lives. I try not to question it as my Uber carries me
away from you, baby. No. Not baby anymore.

Hunter Burke is a queer poet and performer originally from Friendswood, Texas. His work has been previously published in Passengers Journal, Impossible Archetype, The Beacon, and on poets.org. He was the recipient of the 2019 William C. Weathers Memorial Prize for Poetry. Hunter currently lives in New York City and can be reached at h.emmett456@gmail.com. Instagram: @hemmett__

Rachel Stempel

Crash-Test Dummy Roleplay

You are familiar 
only in passing. You call out 
in tongues so I can pretend 
I don’t understand the rotting
orchestral rage between us. 

A sound I like is 
the dull horn of a four-door. 
Violence is a closet female.

I still see you through hurricane 
cataracts. We were once
both insufferable. We are the same 
people, just dying. The dial-tone 
rings in cackles. Remember to say
you’re uglier when you laugh. Remember

muscle makes a string instrument. 
I am leaking, my skin
rheumy & porous but not entirely 
off-putting. In whispers you tell me 
You don’t pretend well.
I am leaking combustibles. 

You warn me
Rule a generation, not a person. 
I am leaking. 

Your television cry 
travels slow 
through my brackish trail. 

I catch fire. 

I remember you love your baby 
best when burning.

Rachel Stempel is a genderqueer Ukrainian-Jewish poet and soon-to-be PhD candidate in English at Binghamton University. They are the author of the chapbooks Interiors (Foundlings Press, 2021) and BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT (Finishing Line Press, 2022), and their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from New Delta Review, the minnesota review, SHARKPACK Annual, and elsewhere. They currently live in New York with their rabbit, Diego. Find them on Twitter @failedcaptcha.

Trisha M. Cowen

Nantucket Island, 1971

Karla stands at the end 
of the docks in the quiet repose
of pre-dawn,
her breath like corked wine,
waiting for Marcella
to appear from beyond 
the breakwater in her husband’s 
          barnacle-spotted
     sailboat
from the mainland. 

Meet me just before sunrise 
she’d said, unraveling Marcella’s 
mermaid hair, wild 
and silver, smelling of lavender and salt-water, 
out of a tight braid. 
We will go where they can’t
make us feel like fish 
out of water. Urchins
at low tide. Sea stars
in a glass aquarium. 

Karla studies the shoreline, 
stripped down
in low tide. The sun 
is a closet door
                         opened. 
Herring gulls, swathed in an
other-worldly glow, deal out Darwin’s 
justice, eyeing the pockmarked 
sand for the heretics,
the queer nonconformists,
the half-dead bodies that bleed
clandestine fantasy 
of an underwater world 
that surges, swells with high tide.

The morning fog,
coral aflame,
dangles over the sand 
like the legs of 
                   jellyfish  
                             floating
     midair.

From the burning fog,
the upper-portion of a 
woman’s body emerges 
from a low-cresting wave.
The sea nymph lifts her 
body onto a rock, her
silver hair loose,
braided in fog and orange-hued
sea-spray.

Worlds away, 
a barnacle-covered boat 
bobs, unmoored, while
                       Marcella sinks, 
sitting on a wooden chair that rocks, humming to 
arrest the sea witch’s poison— razor sharp legs
for your perfectly perfect tail.
The crib calls her name, 
the one her pretty husband
dreamed in as a pretty child,
the crib, like her womb, lies empty, 
a white picket fence around the borders 
of his affection—no anchor
to his house; she spins 
in a feverish sea as the witch brews
Prometheus’ fire and the embers of sea stars
die under a veil.

The sea witch bellows: 
Give me your tongue,
your unborn children,
your pretty little voice,
for love,

                           eternal.
Karla runs to the sea’s mouth 
made of teeth and bone, as
herring gulls swarm like
a sea-storm.

She wails                
                     Marcella! Marcella!
Years of silence ignite a match
she’d carried in her throat,
in her lips and breasts and squeezed fists.
Her voice is a lighthouse, 
a song for ghost ships. At sea, the song
sounds like holding hands, like the murmured
arpeggio of meteors during a 
shower. The staccato notes also sound
like gun shots.

The shadow of a sea nymph turns and dives, 
swimming deeper and deeper into 
                         herself. 
The message in her bottle 
shatters on the shore where 
it will be thrashed
to sea glass
until it’s nothing but
a tiny speck of sand and sea foam,
mortar for some perfect sand castle
in the sky. 

Trisha M. Cowen is an Assistant Professor of English at Westminster College. She earned her doctoral degree in Literature and Creative Writing at Binghamton University (SUNY) and completed a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College. Her creative work has appeared in The Portland Review, Bitter Oleander Press, and 2 Bridges Review, among many others. She is the author of the chapbook Mobiles in the Sky (2014), published by Gertrude Press. She lives in Pennsylvania with her wife and two young daughters. For more information, go to https://trishacowen.com/ or email her at trishacowen@gmail.com.

Eben Bein

Half-built house

It stands on a side street—
half a façade wrapped in Tyvek paper
embedded in the frozen ground
of my new neighborhood,
an empty A-Frame against a grey sky.

Is this the door?
Or the foyer wall I am stepping through,
a screw and washer kicked tinkling into the dirt?
I imagine your frown
at the dirty snow I track across the plywood expanse of
perhaps a living room
(Shoes were always to be removed upon entering, you had said.)
as though your very soul
flickered in the floorboards of this
maybe kitchen with a promise of windows
by the staircase
to the landing that isn’t.

This house could have been the one we had planned,
the one you had built for us in the SIMS
while seated on my lap, my chin perched on your shoulder
for a better view of the lighting fixtures
we would or would not have
depending on who won the argument.

That would put the children’s bedroom right there,
hovering above my head
like a soap bubble by the pin
oak’s pointing finger
but that's where the construction stopped,
where we lay down our tools,
where we lay down our bodies
on a foundation that had required all we could muster,
to cry
and wonder, as kings might,
at our castle of imaginings.

Eben is a high-school-biology-teacher-turned-climate-solutions-educator. He grew up in a cohousing community in Acton, MA, and earned a B.A. in Biology from Dartmouth College and an M.S. in Science Writing from MIT. He is currently the Massachusetts Field Coordinator for Our Climate, where he educates and empowers the next generation of climate advocates. In the margins, he writes poetry and nonfiction. If not working or writing, you might find him dancing, doing yoga, singing with his rock bands, or sautéing leafy greens in gratuitous amounts of olive oil with his boyfriend. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at @beinology.

Kaleigh O'Keefe 

Passengers Journal Poetry PRIDE Prize Winner

Correspondence

no one said that I look like my father until recently. but I don’t know 
if it’s because my hair is short now or because he’s dead

every time you apologize for getting my pronouns wrong, 
I want to apologize for being alive

the only cat-safe place to keep my father’s ashes 
is the tall bookshelf in my bedroom

he can’t forbid me from closing the door anymore, 
but he’s still watching my every move

how do I love my body 
and hate it at the same time? 

doctor says learn meditation and mindfulness
I downloaded an app, but never open it

I’m a hopeless rusty pipe. the second I plug up 
one problem, I’ve already sprouted a new leak

don’t slip on the oil. my insides 
are collapsing infrastructure

probably I’ll give you lead poisoning. 
maybe the only option is a bulldozer

the pain is too big to bind anymore 
and the transtape sticks too eagerly

but I’ll keep trying even if it strips the skin 
from my body. that’s not a metaphor

I need a change of scenery. until then, 
I’m getting new everythings

new pots and pans. new laundry bags. 
new bowels. new fathers. new memories

Kaleigh O’Keefe is a gender outlaw and proud union member living in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Their poetry has appeared in “Breaking the Chains: a Socialist Perspective on Women’s Liberation,” Slamfind, and on indie music legend Ceschi’s album Sans Soleil. Kaleigh writes and edits for Liberation News, is a co-founder of Game Over Books, and hosts the First Fridays Youth Open Mic in Jamaica Plain. You can find them at www.kaleighokeefe.com and on Instagram at @kaleigh.okeefe.poetry, @GameOverBooks, and @FirstFridaysJP.

Sophia Noulas

Why I can’t say Yes

I can’t trust the Love Poem, she makes me a messy bitch.
Gets me drunk and drags me to the bodega looking 
for Haribo gummy frogs at 3 am, kinda dumbass.

Buying the brand of stupid that launches you 
off a paddle board into the Hudson River.
That smile sparks my brain like  
a match trailing a powder keg. Knowing 
I’d kill (for) you, no words, one look,
because I now know you like that.

Every minute on the wrong side of this door
I am breathing a little harder
So I know better than to walk over to talk
to you as if I’d announce…
Do I look like a fool to you? Yeah, sure.

Sophia is an Editorial Coordinator in New York City who also moonlights as a reader for Electric Literature. Her most recent poems can be found in the 2021 edition of Aurora, the annual poetry anthology produced by Allegory Ridge. She is also the winner of Causeway Lit's Fall 2020 Poetry Contest, and has been published in La Piccioletta Barca, High Shelf Press, and others. Follow her journey on Instagram @sophia_noulas

Lux Aeterna

Secret Chord Apocrypha

A blank page demands a godhood,
it’s that simple. Create
from nothing. Years, it takes,
to learn the Word, the words,

and all their terrible weights:
Screaming is the same
word in every language, I know

we have screamed away the years,
and despite half tone deaf, I hear
synonymy, apart together a harmony,
music more mysterious than faith.

Too long I studied love like religion,
took my Sundays with Lana and Gibson,
killed god to make heresy with bodies,
damned by rights to adore women.

I thought I was done with confessionals,
but no one seems to tire of poems that lift
our sinful similes to heaven, the audacity
of asserting divine right as our own.

In my dream, you came to the church
of your office, the gold glass ringing
a halo mockery or the key truth of it,
the organ thrumming second voice,

and you, open palmed, hazel messiaen,
saying, holding hands was the first prayer.

Let me sanctify this, choose these words
to break my year’s fast, all to praise
how no one can strip the holy
from our sainthood—

Only that, perhaps, with gentlest hymns
of breath and touch do we pour our blood back
into old wounds healing, un-martyr ourselves
incarnate to a newly Worded reality,

sharing in obscure miracles
others would call us mad to believe
but their blindness can’t make us unsee.

A blank page commands apotheosis,
my offering to this sacred whatever we are,
sending up a resounding of that first prayer:
oh, to hold your hand again, to feel

your name lay lamb in my throat—

to tender off your plaid and denim vestments,
whisper cold away from your knit-capped ears,
slow slide each cloth concealment, a revelation
to piece by peace reveal you

just to kiss the backs of your unbent knees.

Lux Aeterna is a queer near-death experience survivor and neurodivergent poet from New York. Since 2014, Lux has performed poems and pole as part of the New York City Poetry Brothel. She appeared as a guest reader for various museum exhibition openings and on Broadway. Her recent pieces are published or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Passengers Journal, and A Whore's Manifesto anthology.