Joseph-Kass Tomaras

Feats of Strength

I am freshly vaccinated against coronavirus and attending a goth/industrial dance in the Catskills region of New York, during the calm before the Delta Variant. There are two on-stage performers, each single bodies with band-like names, and a DJ who will spin the most rhythmic expressions of horror and Todesangst. I am there to show support for my friend E., one of the performers. Also present for their sake: M., E.’s current romantic allegiance, and Z., a young woman I met through E. We are a transfeminine clique, two they/thems and two she/theys. It has been a year since I first came out, and this is, in a sense, my first outing.

The venue: Somehow a 1970s tiki bar was grafted onto a Korean restaurant, and together they spawned a gender-diverse performance space on the side. We have to walk through the bar on the way to the entrance of the venue, through a cloud of squinting boomers trying to figure out what we are. The skinhead stamping entry in exchange for $7 seems oddly solicitous, offers help with anything I might need. Later I notice he is hanging green and yellow hankies from his left pocket. Since I am not interested in paying to be pissed on, I see no need to ask him for anything further. I was wearing a red mask; perhaps he misinterpreted it as expressing interest in fisting.

It has been over twenty years since my last attendance at a show like this. For two reasons. First: early in my relationship with my former partner, we both mistakenly believed that, as much as possible, we had to do things as a couple. I feared that my existence was so charged with desire that if I ventured too often into settings from which she was absent I would never be able to keep myself aligned with her. I limited our separations to those mandated by political work, which I conceived with such rigidity as to be wholly uncontaminated by sex or its threat. And she hated this music, so why would she ever go to a show with me?

The second reason was that I did not own the right clothes, could not do the right makeup. Tonight I own the right clothes, and I have done the right makeup. I am getting better at the Siouxsie eyeliner, though on me the effect may always be more Robert Smith. My nail polish and lipstick advertise themselves as being wine colored, but in this setting that shade evokes blood. I am confident enough in my tits to wear nothing but a black camisole as my top, confident enough in the lighting not to worry about the week-old stubble on my chest. I just bought a new belt at my favorite consignment shop, black leather studded heavily with cowrie shells, red beads, and a single turquoise. Worn off center, the teeth of the cowries make my black denim cutoffs look sinister.

The other performer is younger than E., and some of the people in his entourage look like they might even still be in high school. I am also pretty sure they are all cisgender. Most of the guys on that side of the floor look like they got lost on their way to a Vampire Weekend concert. I am offended at how little effort they have put into their looks.

I did not know it was possible to slam dance affectionately until I saw E. and M. precisely calibrating the force of their impacts—soft enough to say, “I don’t want to hurt you,” but hard enough to warn that it’s a possibility. Midway through E.’s set, a bottled blonde wearing sandals and a sky-blue princess dress wanders in from the bar, takes a look at all of us and gets a look on her face that signifies that she is willing herself to think, “wow, this looks like fun!” She starts noodling her arms like a hippie at a Phish concert in the middle of the floor, impinging on M.’s hardcore steps.

During the outdoor smoke break, we sit in companionable silence until someone finds something kind to say about someone else. The first target of praise is E., who has expressed some doubts about their own tunefulness. I end up comparing their work to Christian Death.

We return to the dance floor, then go out to the bar. Somehow our bar table conversation turns into a friendly round robin tournament of arm wrestling. M. is indisputably the strongest, followed by E. I surprise myself by besting Z., and apologize to her profusely. I suspect each of us has bad childhood associations with feats of strength or relative lacks thereof. I do my best to counteract whatever humiliation she might feel.

We talk about coronavirus, and masks, and when to wear them and when not and what we like about them. M. says she likes that it hides her goofy smile. I say I like how they hide my grouchy scowl. Z. says she likes that they hide her face. “Stop it,” I blurt out. “Your face is gorgeous.” E. and M. add their praises. Z. points out that her mask bears a design that makes it look like she has amazing fangs, and we all concede that fangs are amazing.

We dance some more. Everyone is beautiful in the strobe lights.

 

Joseph-Kass Tomaras (they/she) is a writer and translator living in the Hudson Valley region of New York State. Their fictions and unfictions have appeared in Salvage, Lackington’s, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, among other places. She is currently working on translating a collection of short fiction by the Yiddish writer Der Nister. They blog occasionally at skinseller.blogspot.com and tweet somewhat more frequently as @epateur.

 

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nat raum

gender euphoria as a toadstool

after Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

is there a clear obsessively played
as an anthropomorphic mushroom
person to extremely gay pipeline?
i’m asking for a friend who once
loved Toadette deeply, but changed
their main to her boyish adventure
buddy around the same time they
dropped two syllables of their birth name. 

is it evidence enough that we know
Toads have no gender either, and isn’t
that way of phrasing it the very thing
i’m searching for here—the knowing
why woman was a disguise and why
man never fit either? all of this is
to declare my infatuation with this
particular style of void, this particular
glowing toadstool of future euphoria.

 

nat raum (b. 1996) is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster from Baltimore, MD. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press, as well as the author of you stupid slut, the abyss is staring back, random access memory, and several chapbooks. Find them online: natraum.com/links.

 

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Rodolfo Avelar

Creation Myth

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Ghost | Girl | Cypher

i think i’m mourning
in my dream, my dad is dead
my dad his hija

trans girl & her wrath
in the dream land, needles
puncture toward ghost

something out of time
how can i be okay tonight?
bones weave & i awl

a vine of uvas
& i don’t know why i feel
love-but i do love

the valley woman
solders into wrist a pair
trans girl & her dad

flo werg hostca sket
woozy woozy breasts appear
something out of time

shapeshifting casket
glamor a home to sleep in
my skin clean of him

de-gloss all the wrath
like i owe him anything
this fantasy land

i wanna be / am
a single point in spacetime
flower ghost casket

& divine femme juices
or at least the dream of them
shapeshifting mutant

puncture a question
build a papier-mâché hut
de-gloss lips to eat

so i’m left with zinnias
i can be a woman i
an ancient valley

 

Rodolfo Avelar is a poet and visual artist from Fresno, CA. Their poetry projects queer people of color into science fiction, the future, outer space, and queer liberation. They hold a Bachelor of Arts from Fresno State, where they studied English Literature and Creative Writing. Currently, they are an MFA candidate in Poetry at UC Riverside. As a Milkweek summer intern in 2019, they designed and edited book length poetry manuscripts. Their poetry can be found online at the Acentos Review and COUNTERCLOCK, and forthcoming in Até Mais: Until More, an Anthology of Latinx Futurisms, and Pleiades. They hope to publish, edit, & teach poetry, perfect their desk set-up, and play some video games along the way.

Dylan McNulty-Holmes

Masc for Femme

It’s a lot, this wanting 
to keep sweetnesses, exist outside 
of conservative status quo bedrock—
to be loved, respected and desired—
Devil Moon, I have no idea
about feel-good, or making-the-most, or bra-sizes—

But these sparks rise out of the ground—
climaxes, anti-climaxes, the glory of
delicate silver chains, loud brassy fake jewels,
deviant afterlives, mysterious treasures,
slugs with bold black etchings against pavements—
a glossary of resistances.        there’s something
lost, singing—

The Devil Moon
presses her fingers deep into my dimples, 
making me forget sweaters, curse love terms
embedded into me like chunks of terracotta— 
works me over, leaves me dressed
in flowers, sprayed across my chest.

 

Ordinary Talk

Writing as investigation: how disabled bodies mark us out, 
but invite us into dreams of different futures.

Dreaming that feels like foraging, 
like an occupation.

This year has been tiresome, overlaid with struggle,
pain singing right through it.

If yelling is an inquiry into the resentments of others,
afterwards: how long must we rest?

Is it death to accept exasperation, 
to run on a streak of take take take?

Working on poems, which neighbour the
all is well. alles ist gut.

Writing as learning how to open, to love so fiercely, to understand the 
all is well. alles ist gut:

              (1) to pay in carelessness; to capsize;
              (2) to push prams, use fancy moisturisers; to be spritzed with pleasure;
              (3) actions modifying clamouring egos; to sleep in a bed assured of one’s     work;
              (4) to be competent in the challenges of this time; to struggle;
              (5) open up, open to me; tell yourself you can, then recognise me; let us spin together in the cool water;

fear fogs my thoughts
but I shan’t forget the drop of anguish,
the blood, the mask thrown down,
the angers I try to somehow unfeel
in the back of my throat.

 

Dylan McNulty-Holmes (he/they) is a writer based in Berlin. His writing has been hung in a corner store as part an art exhibition, live-scored by a disco band, made into a T-shirt, and performed in book shops, sex toy shops, galleries, and burger bars. It work has also been featured in publications including Visual Verse, Femsplain, and DADDY Magazine. These poems are from a chapbook-length collection, for which he is currently seeking a publisher.

Jose Hernandez Diaz

El Tío in a Mars Volta Shirt

A tío in a Mars Volta shirt played tetherball at the park with his niece. He was proud of being an uncle. His niece was dark-skinned Mexican, like him and their abuelita, too. The tío in a Mars Volta shirt played tetherball with his niece and then they went to In-n-Out for burgers. When they finished eating, they went to an old record store. The tío in a Mars Volta shirt showed his niece a guitar. She liked it. They bought one.

Within a couple of weeks, his niece was enrolled in guitar lessons. Her favorite band was Pink Floyd, like her tío. It was kind of boring to her, honestly, but she liked that they shared that. The tío in a Mars Volta shirt showed his niece how to play a ranchera on the guitar. They laughed and played until sunset.

 

The Fairgrounds in the Rain

A man in a Chicano Batman shirt and sunglasses went to the fair in Southeast Los Angeles. It was late summer. He rode the bumper cars. He rode the Ferris wheel. The man in a Chicano Batman shirt bought a hot dog on a stick and a glass of lemonade. He tried to make a large ball into a small hoop but was instead swindled for $5. He laughed it off.

Then it began to rain. Most folks went home. The man in a Chicano Batman shirt decided to wait it out. He sat beneath some palm trees and pulled out a sketchbook. He drew the fairgrounds in the rain. It brought him peace and pleasure to draw. It didn’t stop raining, though, so he eventually went home. The next morning, he painted the drawing from the fair onto a canvas. He used rather dark tones for the clouds and the rainfall juxtaposed with bright colors for the rides and concession stands. He titled the piece, “The Fairgrounds in the Rain.”

 

An Ode to the California Burrito

A man in a Chicano Batman shirt surfed in the ocean. It was late summer. He grew up driving the hour and twenty minutes distance from Southeast Los Angeles to the coast. Instead of wearing a traditional wet suit, today, he wore a Chicano Batman shirt, because it was a hot summer day, and the water wasn’t too cold. He caught some decent waves and then laid out on the sand to read a book of poetry by the Uruguayan writer, Marosa di Giorgio.

After he finished reading, he went to a taqueria across the street. He had a California burrito. The California burrito consists of carne asada, fries, pico de gallo, cheese, and guacamole. He had an horchata alongside the burrito. It’s the man in a Chicano Batman shirt’s go-to meal when he’s looking for comfort food. When he finished the burrito, he drove home. The sun began to set. When he got home, he showered and then wrote a song about his day. He called it: “An Ode to the California Burrito.”

 

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Journal, Los Angeles Review, The Missouri Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Witness Magazine, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology 2011. He lives in Southeast Los Angeles and teaches creative writing online.

Yucai Chan

The Accident

welcome to my home

the night i left

Yucai Chan is a Fujianese-American illustrator-writer who lives in New York City. She fell in love with doodling from a young age, and hasn’t been able to quit since. Today, she revels in the act of autobiography through comics, poetry and painting.

 

 

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Zach Powers

What We Gave the Galaxy

It was Halloween when the aliens came, so we mistook them for kids in great costumes. There were the big-eyed grays of Roswell. Ones with tentacles instead of arms. Some were basically just translucent blobs, a mess of organs in see-through sacks. The insectoid and the spider-like. Hairy aliens that could inspire werewolf stories and feline aliens that had the comical tic of pawing their own faces.

It really was the best Halloween ever.

Joni first noticed something amiss when a group of aliens dropped into her bookshop on November 2nd. They browsed politely, but a particularly sticky alien left slime-prints on all the books it touched. Another, with a tiny blue baby face centered on a massive head, hovered a book open in front of itself using only the powers of its mind.

These were clearly not costumes. These were clearly not kids.

The aliens picked up English pretty quickly. They spoke human languages in a way that sounded more like math, as if every sentence was an equation in need of balancing. For example, the first words they spoke to Joni:

“We wish to read your books,” they said, “and your books wish to be read by us.”

Anyway, this situation went on for a few weeks. All these aliens in town, wandering the streets, still expecting to receive candy whenever they knocked on doors.

We had such a hard time explaining holidays.

They, in turn, could never make us grasp how they saw all days as one. Or how they marked time from a perspective outside it. Our minds were too limited, too grounded in the now.

The aliens loved scones. We had to get to the coffee shops as soon as they opened if we ever wanted a scone for ourselves.

Scones aside, the aliens never adjusted to human meals. They were snackers. They adored appetizers. Tandy, who waited tables at Outback, explained how groups of aliens would order one sirloin and cut it into bites to share. They attended art show openings but ignored the art in favor of catered canapés.

There were probably ten thousand aliens in all, and even in this tourist town, where we’re used to comers and goers, their presence was hard not to notice. The aliens traveled in mismatched packs from site to site, but rarely the sites other tourists visited. Not the fountain in the park. Not the railroad museum where you can climb inside old cars. Not the statue of the Revolutionary War soldier, lofting a battle flag in one hand, staunching his mortal wound with the other. Not the restaurant run by the TV chef with a history of racism.

The aliens were generous with their time. They answered as many of our questions as we asked. Even insensitive or annoying ones. Of course, we mostly asked about alien sex. Spores were a shockingly popular option.

We learned that galactic civilization was thriving and advanced, a million sentient species coexisting among the stars. Few planets besides Earth knew anything but peace.

We tried to share our grandest accomplishments. We made sure they read the books by our greatest thinkers: Crichton and Clancy and Franzen. We coerced them to the art museum for an exhibition of impressionist landscapes. We showed them documentaries featuring Saturn Vs and baseball and nuclear explosions.

This is where dealing with the aliens became a bummer.

Nothing we’d produced, nothing we’d done, nothing we deemed original, none of it impressed them in the least. In a sprawling galaxy filled with very smart aliens, literally everything we’d ever thought of had been thought of before.

Even scones, which the aliens so relished, they only relished because they recalled a similar food from another world.

Thanksgiving that year turned disastrous. We’d invited the aliens to share our meals. We set up folding tables and rolled extra desk chairs up to place settings. The shorter aliens sat with the kids. It was homey and warm, at least until we presented the food.

The aliens balked at our spreads. Those with cilia set them aquiver. Those with color-changing skin chameleoned to a threatening hue. Some secreted foul-smelling pheromones. Others made shrill calls of warning. We learned ten thousand new ways to express displeasure. 

After all, no beings who prefer their sustenance bite-sized could possibly be prepared for such human gluttony. Our sheer excess. They were polite about it but excused themselves from our tables before a single platter was passed.

We ate our meals with vacant seats for company.

The next day was awkward. The aliens couldn’t bring themselves to speak to us. Their eyes, those of them who had eyes, wouldn’t meet ours. And for us, how could we possibly relate? How could we ever know—really, truly know—someone who’d never tasted cranberry sauce from a can?

As we browsed the bookshop’s Black Friday sale, Joni worried the aliens would leave, and we’d be alone forever in the universe. Now, when we imagined Earth floating through space, we imagined it smaller than before. A bluish BB, and then a dot, and then a speck, and then an invisible point in proximity to the pinprick of our sun.

The aliens bought all the city’s scones to go. They carried tote bags full of tchotchkes and novelty t-shirts to their awaiting spaceships. They posed for holographic selfies, though always in the strangest of places. It was never clear what background they were trying to capture. The dumpster in the lane? The snarl of power lines? The hungover human couple taking brunch?

The aliens lingered, like at a party when you’re ready to go but too shy to initiate a goodbye.

We didn’t know what to say to them, either.

Or we knew, but how do you ask someone to stay without sounding desperate?

We were about to be dumped by the whole galaxy.

It was Duncan who saved us from this fate, surprising everybody, uppity prick that Duncan was. Cantankerous, rich, opposed to everything in the city that wasn’t exactly as it had been when he was a kid, approximately a hundred years ago.

But Duncan was good for one thing: Christmas decorations.

Seven a.m. Saturday morning, he was out spewing orders at Marguerite, the local handyperson, as she balanced on a tall aluminum ladder, adorning Duncan’s Victorian townhouse with wreaths and garlands and, most importantly as it turned out, twinkle lights.

A few aliens gathered in the square. Then more and more of them. Soon, all the thousands of aliens packed together as one.

The decorating was complete, the twinkle lights barely bright enough to be seen against the sun. But the aliens stared and waited and waited and stared. Dusk came, and when the equation of darkness to twinkle balanced just right, the whole mass of aliens cheered in all their native tongues at once.

A sound raw and pure and lovely.

Tandy asked the aliens what was up.

“In all the galaxy, this is something we have never seen before,” they said, “and we have seen before all other things in the galaxy.”

The aliens stayed there through the night and the next day, and they might still be there if we hadn’t told them that other houses, too, had been decorated. The aliens wandered our streets, oblivious to the cold, touring our decorations, preferring the tackiest, munching scones, and we like to think they finally understood the concept of a holiday, a single day distinct from all the rest.

At the post-Christmas sales, the aliens claimed every discounted strand of lights. Through their spaceships’ windows we could see the strands crisscrossing everywhere. At night, the ships twinkled from within, and somebody who didn’t know better would assume a different technology. The source of their hyperspace speeds, perhaps. But us, we knew the truth.

The New Year arrived, and soon the aliens left us. But it wasn’t like we’d worried it would be. This was a see-you-later. A temporary parting of friends. They even took a human representative with them.

So, this is the story of how humanity joined galactic civilization.

The aliens invited along the one who introduced them to twinkly lights. No, not Duncan, thank the heavens, but Marguerite. Our envoy. The face of the whole human race.

What was she thinking as she boarded the spaceship? What did her Mona Lisa smile imply?

We’re still waiting for her return. We spend our conversations guessing what she’ll tell us she’s seen. We’ll have imagined the whole cosmos before she ever makes it home.

Until then, we gather outside on clear nights and wonder aloud how of all the species among the Milky Way, only us—small, backward, hate-filled, war-torn, spiteful us—thought to recreate the stars.

At Duncan’s house, the lights are still up. The wreaths and garlands wilt. Marguerite left before Duncan could hire her to take them down. And he’s too old and too frail and too human to do the deed himself.

 

Zach Powers is the author of the novel First Cosmic Velocity (Putnam, 2019) and the story collection Gravity Changes (BOA Editions, 2017). His writing has been featured by American Short Fiction, Lit Hub, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. He serves as Artistic Director for The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry magazine. From Savannah, Georgia, he lives in Arlington, Virginia. Get to know him at ZachPowers.com.

 

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