Author: zebulon

Memphis Opera Blues

Louise was conceived in 1991. That year, their marriage drowning, my parents visited Lake Louise and left struck by its beauty, its perception of line. Her body weak, my mother decided that it was only appropriate to name the child after majesty. 

People always want to know the reasons for a name. Who did you name her for? What does that mean in your language? How bizarre, like shattered glass. I did it purely because I had no other evident name to give at the time. I thought it sounded discreet and imperfect, understanding that she would acquire many names throughout life and I was no more special to her than a beloved succulent.

But Louise is still Louise. Nowadays I wonder often if Louise has a home and a community. Does she have health insurance? 

No: 

She is self-sufficient. She avoids the attention of the authorities by leaving no trace. She cannot be found digitally but in public, she is there, cemented, unseen. No more a ghost than my hazy memories of the girls I left behind at one time or another.

No. When she speaks it, her heart tightens. A tingle. It almost aches. Her work is never complete. When I was nine, our family traveled by train to Lake Louise. We began our journey from Vancouver where we visited an uncle. My mother wanted me to witness the lake. It was all for the sister I did not have. 

In a dream she returns to me as a cyborg¹.

In the dream we hold one another². Foreshadow the forthcoming pain of separation. I’m not wary of separation, it’s the spite that always accompanies the circumstances of separation that I’m concerned will be my undoing. Handwoven garments. A tea cozy. Citron honey. Hand-me-downs, my mother has arguably said, are the women-driven narratives of our family. But: what would the cyborg’s skin feel like against mine? I reach out toward your ethereal ioS, AKA your ribcage.

My mother named the baby, instead, after royalty. A different kind of majesty. Certainly, a cruel beauty. Both translate crudely. Both reach into the body of destiny and pull out, without hesitation, the veins and arteries of any number of anonymous vessels. The body, like ideology, has a schedule. To follow. We do not know exactly how this schedule functions. Its logic drives the entire neighborhood mad. Tuesday night we gather in the cul-de-sac we affectionately call Bland Island. Abiding grace. After the party.

I long for the day when my sweat will not drench these silk sheets. After tonight, or several.

Seething. Like any proper lady, I know I’m not capable of anger. So when the time comes I will simply self-detonate. No matter how you look at it, imperialism is embedded in the self I have to destroy. War is more than friendly fire: I stopped using Facebook because I could no longer handle its unshaking grip over the ability of my friends to secure affordable housing or access reliable or decently safe healthcare networks. I lost more friends, more acquaintances, through the algorithm than to poverty that year and every year following it. 

The self I bend over before you, wild with insomnia. The self I have preserved out of shame.









Mesmerized by the color of sunsets, a sun only to be found in California at dusk. The orange of black light. 

But I can’t remember what a California sunset looks like.

Who is the cyborg? I ask myself. Who am I asking for?

When she asks: Is the body in landscape mirroring itself? 

Put in such a way. As to feel botched. 

Or touched. I have been touched. I walk around with a botched head but no one says anything.

¹ The cyborg incubates our requests and fears. She does not distinguish between the two. Extremities don’t bother her. She understands morality but is terrified of subscribing to any practice which does not include Terms and Conditions. She understands [us] in bursts best likened to photons. Affect is an unstable, untested program. Emotions are filtered, hierarchy by proxy is another another metaphor for sex, and she will fuck you. According to a schematic, desire operates cyclically. So there is no concern for rejection. The cyborg absorbs every touch. The words we throw. The ones we don’t. Remember. She does not change her tone. She isn’t angry. Soft. Mutable. She will praise you. She praises everyone. She will thank you, a care worker with insurmountable student loans. Do not approach her. Do not approach her. Once she fell through the ceiling, hoping to paint the color of her blood. Like tempera. She was disappointed to discover that the viscosity of her bodily fluids could not adhere to paper. Blood: a mix of orange, dotted lines, and infrared. I don’t have any preferences. Her system is a dowry. She is afraid to ask. Was this deliberate on the end of the scientists who created her? Men in white lab coats. Passive beasts. They reach, with their white-gloved hands, into her and pull out sunflowers. They scan her body for wounds. The body undone by violence cannot properly register. Nothing her monstrous body cannot contain. They line her organs with asbestos. Still she functions. She struggles to name the pain. It is all incubated in the child who will bring us clarity. A child must be nourished. A child deserves empathy. Meanwhile the scientists fiddle in code, drafting proposals and grants. They plan to publish so many papers and win so many millions in defense spending and so many many many

² With care.

Catherine Chen is a poet and performer. Their writing has appeared in Slate, The Rumpus, Apogee, Hobart, and Nat. Brut, among others. A 2019 Poets House Fellow, their work has been supported by Lambda Literary, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Millay Colony, and Art Farm. Their chapbook Manifesto, or: Hysteria (Big Lucks) is forthcoming August 2019.

During a recent videochat, poet Wryly T. McCutchen said they admired my refusal to explain my work. Who claims cyborg realness? From 2015-2016, I transcribed & annotated for the data pipeline team of a popularly used AI device. Like a fly on the wall who is paid an hourly wage, I listened to users spew violently & bodily dysphoric language at a machine. I understood these utterances as they were directed at the being of my body. I felt transferred: against an altar, an antagonist of my kinky fantasies.

For years, I’ve been fascinated by a recording of Sun Ra and Henry Dumas called “The Ark and The Ankh”, which is essentially an interview. In it, Sun Ra points to humanity’s death obsession as the primary force holding us back from transformation. With all the Space X/Space Force nonsense in the news, I just kept imagining Sun Ra sitting on his front porch on Saturn telling these rich white men to get off his front lawn because all they were trying to do was either cheat or cause death.

Sun Ra Speaks From A Returning Saturn

                                                Whatchu talking about a Space Force?
                                  Ain’t no armies in space, just arkestras. My friend ain’t
die                        in no train station just fuh you tuh shoot your expensive car
                    round my way. I don’t ‘ppreciate the way you looking to my front yard
                for answers I ain’t got to the problems you created on Oith. You  live  on  a
             dumb rock,       wet with blood or better yet you crawled out from under it child.
          &               I seen you struggling to make sense of ice caps and tombstones        & you
       still cain’t even see me     don’t matter black or white, you love death more than mothers.
      What end up in the graveyard technicolor wishing y ‘all come up here tryna get on my level

with that bad ass attitude and cavalier lazer gun.              You can’t cowboy your way outta gravity, dummy.

       What you about to do? Put all your sex robots on Mars and see if they can live without
                    a man telling em what where and now? I’m tired of yall negus running to me
                        for answers every time you make ya own kitchen too hot so go on run
                               tell that before you dive in the ocean lil fish, you still got more
                                  trench and phosphorescence to figure out fore you come 
                                                up here asking for my coordinates to fix
                                                           what ain’t worth keeping.

Casey Rocheteau lives in Detroit, MI. They are the creator of the Black Medusa Tarot and author of Knocked up on Yes (2o12) and The Dozen (2016).

false medium

I am the clock’s fourth hand       some infinitesimal unit       moving always backwards       I
like to go around sighing       mercury’s retrograde again       the moon’s a thin 19 percent

when I’m in the library       it’s you who pivots       disgusted by my noisy ectoplasm
pardon my attempt       at cheesecloth and wonder       sometime my ghosts       rattle around
inside me       but more often       my knee is playing earthquake       beneath the table

once I decided being witchy       would turn me to a better woman       I became a better woman
if I spell myself invisible       will I weigh heavier       in the finger nervous pockets of you

Rachel Franklin Wood is a trans poet from Laramie, Wyoming, but she hasn’t lived there for a while. She has a chapbook, “Every Spring Underneath” (dancing girl press), and co-edits pulpmouth.

While writing this poem, I was very conscious of my relationship to the piecemeal “witchy” aesthetic so often embodied by cis, white women in a way that can feel quite hollow and appropriative. Yet, through a shared interest in ritual and self-care, I have found myself forming deep, meaningful relationships with cis women in which my transness is not an excluding factor and through which my identity has been bolstered. How do I hold both my criticism and my community? How do I care for my physical self while magicking that presence away?

riot maxims ii

Originally from Oxford, Ohio, Ava Hofmann is a writer currently living and working as an MFA student in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She has poems published in or forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, Fence, Anomaly, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Datableed, and Peachmag. Her poetry deals with trans/queer identity, Marxism, and the frustrated desire inherent to encounters with the archive. Her website can be found at www.nothnx.com; she also overuses her twitter account, @st_somatic

My poems often concern themselves with illegibility and mess, a frustrated desire for a sense of time as a trans person—a feeling of ‘no future’ and ‘no past’, save for the small and strange scraps that cis society forgot to burn. I want readers to approach these texts as if they were these scraps from out of time, ruins from a future which never existed in any ‘original’ form.

30 seconds to reboot¹²³⁴⁵

oh Maker, have you ever loved/ or known just what it was?/ I can’t imagine the bitter end/ of all the beauty that we’re living in
—Janelle Monáe

1                              for those silent frantic chapters 
 a long hallway I have ghost whispered at the edges of for centuries
                in this machination I called my warp of a brain,       whirring/coils 
  beneath the outermost layer of my fuselage       where anyone 
                who looked hard enough could see the way I either worked or didn’t

2         a ragged prototype,       work/half-life balance  to perform, I engineered;       adapted;    
  my mechanisms       my fuck you anyway brand of coping              shortcut production
                flick the switch to feel happy              blunt the crashing:

3  still, I fluctuate—       mercurial, some would call it, when one is never the right amount 
                                                              of lamplight, measly filament in an incandescent lonely

4  consider fascism, an new old reason to make every self-destructive decision possible
         approximately-organic shambles       grappling with the threading;       the cogs

5                    finally, I looked at myself & decided to act with kindness 
        improvised & twitching                  an unused muscle group
  now, as I take the moment     to stop,    I realize how much I have continued holding in

A transdisciplinary writer, teaching artist, and facilitator, alex was born and raised in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan. Currently a lecturer with the Program on Intergroup Relations, they are the recipient of the 2019 Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry, Highest Honors in Creative Writing & Literature for their manuscript of poems entitled trans-corporeality in 2017, 2nd Place in the 2017 Current Magazine poetry contest, and the 2015 Jeffrey L. Weisberg Memorial Prize in Poetry. In addition to studying Creative Writing and Literature, they received their Master of Social Work degree from the University of Michigan as a National Community Scholar. With Yoseñio V. Lewis, they are the co-author of the chapter “Place, joy, and self: trans justice and community organizing work” in Social Work and Healthcare with Trans and Nonbinary Individuals and Communities (Routledge, 2020). Their poetic work is forthcoming and/or has appeared in Current Magazine, Café Shapiro, the Michigan Daily, the anthology Uncommon Core: Contemporary Poems for Learning and Living, and others. Their poem “30 seconds to reboot” was selected for the Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry.

when I think about the future, I try to tap into the pulse of the past. I think about my (our) trancestors: Marsha, Leslie, Sylvia, Stormie, all the others, unnamed. what dreams of the future kept them up at night and which ones got them up in the morning? I use their intimacy, pain, and visions to help me survive. I believe in the backbones our trauma gives us. I believe that technology is not synonymous with violence. I believe that trans and gender non-conforming people are magical beings who have been sent here to change the shape and the shame of this planet.

I thought the internet was going to make us all love each other more

assume I’m not wrong
assume the sun is a single mother who will never burn out
assume your reservoir of heartbreak was man-made
assume these men who broke your heart always (secretly) wanted to be carried
out of the rubble of their lives in the arms of a cheerleader
dad bod all seized up

assume that we all have pristine visions of the sissy inside us
multiplying into entire orchards
of sour shapeless fruit
assume your gender is always under some process of crystal-ballification
look at the fat clumps of data we’ve become
walking through the matrix
of intergenerational miscommunications

we lost:
forests
privacy
the slowness of time

we gained:
access

when this tree blossoms
we will talk about the future

techno songs about heaven play on the radio

in the South they skin snakes
summer is clean and streaked with bodies
the soft, moldy eye of the storm winks
& your gift is your shyness

the synthesizer urges you to come forward
place your hands on the magic
amputated strips of astro turf
& inhabit your life

the new world will be built
by allowing gentleness to gather within you
subterranean trust in another person’s
body breaking down, atomizing into sleep

ignore love
name a planet after yourself
memorize a phone number
get held

today you are a teenager
tomorrow you go

mud howard is a non-binary trans poet from the states. they write about queer intimacy, interior worlds, & the cosmic joke of the gender binary. they hold an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster London and are currently working on their first full-length novel: a queer trans memoir structured like a tarot deck and packed full of lies. they have been published in journals such as THEM, Foglifter, and The Lifted Brow. you can find more of their work at www.mudhoward.com.

fairytale with chorus and bone

i found a flood in my parents’ house
bubbling up the sinks
the bathtub full of dandelions

i watched you sing
through the glazed church windows

the flicker of candlelight
dancing its love letter

as i slumped against the stone,
bullied by the rain

i saw a bluebird break the glass
halo of shards and snow

i could never
hold a low note like you

a knuckle-shaped dent in the wall
a curl of ivy, leaves like arrowheads

turned away from your outburst.
i promised not to hurt myself for love

a broken beehive smothered in lilies
is it possible to oversugar the earth?

i came at night
to pick the lock with a drop of amethyst

i could hear your voice, backbone of that chorus,
notes gathered like starlings in the rafters

i asked them to make me one of them,
the only way i know to get my name in your mouth

when you come back, you better be desperate
you better burn through me
like fire through the containment crew

the prayer book states: beg forgiveness
the prayer book begs: stay exactly as you were

Ethan J. Murray is a queer, autistic poet loved into existence by 12 headmates. They want to help make the world kinder for every neurodivergent person. Their work is forthcoming or published in Occulum Journal and Sidereal Magazine, and you can find them on twitter @ethanandco.

For me, transness is a perpetual search for the “right” self-presentation: a version of me that’s accepted and authentic. This search often causes me to feel otherworldly—maybe my truest form isn’t as any kind of person, but as a bird, a season, a note of a song. My trans identity is also affected by my love for other people. This piece helps me explore the relationship between changing myself for a particular person’s affections and evolving in search of a more individual (or universal) truth.