POSTS

Content warning: forced medication, needles, blood, death, parasites, unsanitary, sex, body horror

Plateau 1001

            Now is afternoon and the waves wash quietly on the lake Pawnee’s lips. Children cry at the edge of this cool reservoir, some hard line between land and water, a boundary at once uncrossable and enticing, beckoning onlookers to drop on in, fall, dissolve. Sunglass-sporting and through-the-shadows-of-visors-creeping women are laughing and pointing in our direction, toward two bodies planted firmly in the sand, fixed to one another.
            “They are laughing at me,” I say to Giovanni, weakly, stumbling over myself, snaking my hands through the damp sand, hoping to find something to grasp onto. Gasping for air, the chest constricts. My resting blood pressure is 142/98, but I can tell it is higher now, at or approaching crisis; untreated hypertensives have a way of knowing these things. Best understood as spiritual, knowledge of how the rust is moving comes naturally. The force under which it circulates… this stuff is easy to discern. We can imagine how far the blood would spurt if we removed the arterial walls, made naked the surrounding flesh; this process determines our blood pressure without the use of a cuff. I threw mine away three months ago, flushing a bottle of eplerenone in the process, the doctor’s words ringing in my mind, Take this twice a day, it will help. If only it were not placebic.
            Gio takes my arm and says, “No, they aren’t.” I can tell he’s lying by the way his chin moves as he speaks, barreling to the left, his left not mine. The ultimate sign of deceit. All liars move their chins this way when they speak, one trait among countless others I’ve picked up on. “They are not laughing at you, come and sit down,” he says. I realize I am standing with my arms crossed against my bare chest, facing the women. Another sign of lying, it is known, is demanding that one closes a physical gap, some attempt at repairing the broken sacrament, skin touching skin increasing serotonin in the cleft, dopamine. Chemical concealment.
            I sit down between his outstretched legs, laying my head on his body. He works his hands into my shoulders, stained with those small, red bumps, the ones inherited from my mother. People start to stare at us, staring this time not at me in particular, but at the closeness of two men, of male intimacy gone public. What is wrong with me, I want to ask him, why am I this way, why am I so defenseless and broken, why is the world centered on me but in the most denying ways, but the answer to each is clear. “They were laughing at me,” I repeat, “but I trust you.” I attempt to convince myself of this. My hands, working through the sand, catch on something sharp, and my mind turns now to syringes. Long acting injectables are reserved for those who need antipsychotics, but who forget or refuse to take their medication. Creating a localized mass in the body, intramuscular, deep, raw, that gel finds itself implanted and absorbed over time, a month, three months, it depends. My haloperidol decanoate appointment is three months overdue as the foam rolls rhythmically over itself, back and forth, in, out.
            “Amorito, do you want to go swimming?” he asks while patting my shoulders and standing up. The sand, brown and clumpy, falls off his body, returning to the source, hourglass-like in form and function. Some amount of time has passed, but how much is unclear. The women are no longer there, the sun has moved in the sky, the foam coating the edge has changed shape, flatter now. The snaking of time yet again escapes me. “Come on, you’ll love it. To float, become nothing at all. Emptiness in the middle of everything, the center of a wide-reaching circle.”
            The day and my body slip away as I swim, the low waves reaching the shore and the sun receding past the horizon, brown and aching. “Let’s make a fire, Gio,” I say as we pass in breaststroke. “As tall as our house, let’s make a fire hot enough to scorch the dirt and melt down our rings, hot enough to pierce through the sky’s skin.” We approach the waterfront, soaking still, and as if under a trance, time flashes by once more: the wooden platform finds itself built in but a moment, our bodies as ants trickling around the artifice. Soon ablaze, it swells to a diameter wide enough to swallow both our bodies whole, large enough to consume and make into ash my heart.
            And the smell. Gio and I met at an Omaha acreage, a support group for HIV-positive men, with the fire shimmering blue-hot, crackling, the burning sap giving off that almost-sweet smell I recognize in the fire just ahead of me know. He said to me then, “You look nice for a dead man.” We were being torn apart from the inside, but he carried himself with an air of confidence unlike any other, his shirt crinklefree, his back straight. The kind of posturing learned only through the rough obedience of private school, Catholic, or maybe preparatory. “When did you catch this miserable bug?” he asked, and I told him the story of seeking, of catching, seroconversion alone in a dorm as those so-worn sounds of life were extinguished deep into the evening. That night, my eyes ran dry, the blood pounded against the temples, and on every beat, the vision blurred as so many halos, circular yet jagged. “In algebra,” he told me, “the simplest object is a group, and his complicated partner is the ring. There, as here, navigating groups is simple, but when it comes to rings, it all falls apart.” We talked as the night stretched itself into the pale blue of day, going home together, hand in hand, laughing and full.
            “Is everything okay?” he asks me. “You’re losing yourself again.” Now I am staring into the gargantuan fire with my face all wet and my tongue salty, the night sky black, punctuated with so many stars, a weblike structure expanding every which way. I nod, grab a lob to sit on, one outcropping of twigs just barely hanging on to the base, and I start to open my clenched jaws.
            “I have pinworms,” I say. “Enterobius. I haven’t seen any directly, but all of the signs are there: itching in the shadows, insomnia, appendix pain. I have a pinworm infection and I’ve known about it for a year, maybe more. Every month or two I buy all the available pills, but I throw them away. I can’t bring myself to kill them, and even though they’re unseen, there they are. If you listen close enough, you can hear them sucking at the side of the bowl, gurgling and splashing in the water. I am being eaten alive. It’s a bit scary to admit it, but anti-pinworm medication is just like trizivir. These pills just make them lie dormant, waiting for a moment to reinfect, multiply, to take you over again. It does nothing but destroy a few and make the rest stronger, killing you faster in the end.” He looks in my eyes in that Gio sort of way, his head cocked, his eyebrows dug in something deep.
            But this drops away, and suddenly I am thinking about the blades in our medicine cabinet. Feather is considered the most effective brand. They are aggressive, those slabs of stainless steel: the sharpest consumer blade available. They are so strong that every time I run the razor over the back of my head, I nick myself. The scalp has a rich blood network supplied by five thick arteries, three from the external and two from the internal carotids, nourishing the white psoriatic skin and thinning hair, and whenever I make a pass with the handle, these vessels just start to seep. All these cuts accumulate and start to paint the back of my shirts as so-vibrant watercolor. Sometimes, I run my tongue on the stains, to bring them out, to repair the underlying fabric, to return the natural hue. This fails. I find myself vomiting immediately, the metallic taste overwhelming, dull. But the first time I shaved my head at the age of twenty, the age my father was when he, too, first shaved his head, I forgot to do the neck. Gio held my head in the pit of his elbow and said, “You forgot to get it all. Let me do it.” He turned me over and applied clearance-rack shaving gel, my face laying in the divot of the sink, water flowing over and around my body, the follicles softening, open. With one stroke, the entire epidermis sloughed off, and with it the band of skin underneath. Blood gushed out and filled his hands, soupy, hot, spurting and so very thin, quickly hardening into something gelatinous. Thick. Mealy. The steam, or maybe it was the smoke, filled the air, hotboxing the two of us in my own filth, the body spoiling, releasing fumes, toxic and overwhelming. “I am so sorry,” he said over and over. “I never shaved with a razor like this. I wanted to help you.” Contagion spilt. He tightly wrapped my neck in bandages, licking his fingers as he grabbed new spools to contain the damage. Contagion spread.
            “Let’s go home, amorito,” he says as he throws water over the still-raging fire. “You are tired. I can tell you’re not feeling well. Let’s grab our bikes and go.”
            I run ahead of him. “Catch me if you can!” I yell back, my feet slamming against the packed dirt of this great hill, repetitive predictable. It takes all of a minute to get to the bike racks, and I breathlessly unlock them both, waiting for him to arrive.
            His body now comes into view from beyond the crest. “Did you miss me?” he asks, running at me and jumping into the saddle of his bike, pedaling without waiting for a response. I nod anyway, and so off we ride, the red-flashing lights behind us, the white luminescence ahead.
            With the wheels tucked in deep, rutlines snaking past the cedar and oak, I have a hard-on. Spokes clicking. Each tick is some sort of relief, the whirring, wobbling of the metal a kind of assurance. It is a reprieve, the passage of time, calculable by the counting of loops. One’s body as a spring stopper for doors, a generalization of the bikemetal’s murmur. A great cycle. Push and be pushed, brought to climax. And I ride eastward in hope of a life never promised to be mine, in the form of a double-layered stopper, the turgid body with this peculiar outgrowth, cancerous by function if not by form. Truthfully, a life of happiness, fulfillment, was promised to nobody, but especially not a vein-marked boy with a trembling cock growing by nothing but subtle movements of the flesh, of the man biking on my side. Just beyond arm’s reach. Tanned calves and the tapering off of the waist. Evading twigs and leaves with grace. Pouncing.
            We stop after an hour of this, pushing ourselves and the bikes into a clearance not much larger than a house, a grove of trees, ferns, bushes swaying in the wind of so-full night. “Sometimes it feels as though I have died and inhabit a rotting body,” Gio says. “My heart and lungs are filled with formaldehyde and I am dead or dying and the world continues spinning on its axis without me. Arnold Pyle died 47 years ago. I painted him, and my painting is showcased at the Sheldon.”
            The plains are rustling. Native grasses and wildflowers bloom over and beyond the horizon. Purple, I think to myself, illuminated in the moonlight, but I can’t quite remember what they look like in the dappled sun. Withered from drought, probably, this year was as hard as they come, but radiating color anyway. The great expanse unfolds. “I wrote a letter to him before he died. It’s all stored here.” He points to his temple. “The great repository.” A beat. “What are you thinking about?”
            “I’m thinking about what you said,” I say. I take in the view, the air, the way the wind feels as it beats against my sweat-soaked shirt.
            “What do you mean?”
            “What you said, about Pyle, I’m just thinking about it.”
            “I didn’t say anything.” Now with the cocked head, the brows set deep on the face. “Are you okay? Do you need some of my water?” The wind has stolen all the heat from my body, and I start to shiver.
            “No, I’m okay. Just daydreaming. Home.” I point.
            He nods, turns around, and starts to pedal as I follow. The calves stretching and retracting. Constriction. About twenty feet ahead, too far to talk comfortably, but close enough to hear if you listen close. “Sometimes I wonder how long I have been dead,” I hear him say. “How many reunions have been lost to the annals of time, empty or emptying. Struggle in these times. Mythologizing unlike any other.” But this is how we ride, huffing as the Fuji and Canyon dart beneath us, between our stretched bodies.
            As his body runs away from mine, the distinctive wobbling of the bike sends me back. The first time I held a man was the summer I turned eighteen. I rode my bike with a buggy behind me both ways to school, under the same sun along the same path, winding and growing along Salt Creek to the east of downtown Lincoln, marshy and muddy, that he rode to and from work. Silent and meditative, we rode alongside one another until he flagged me down and pulled me into the darkness beneath these great, swaying, cottonwood trees, the popcorn shade to which I am allergic. And with me sniffling and sneezing, he dug his fingers into my collar, pulled it and the belt off until he left my body exposed, wiggling out of his worn clothes, soon connecting together as one. He told me, “You know, I’ve never done something like this, I’m straight.” And while slipping back into my skin I thought, Yes, me too. Once a week we would stop at that enclosure, bathe in the darkness and silence and it was all I imagined it would be. Come and go and cum and go, feeling and being felt, seeing and being seen.
            Yellow light. A mirror reflects a coffee table with a pitcher of water. We are not on our bikes anymore but rather home. “What’s happening with you?” he asks, appearing to my left, our bodies facing one another. A gift only in name, we are sitting between the arms of his father’s old sofa. Torn apart, in shambles, it was destined for the dump. Pictures of us hang on the smoke-faded walls, an image of wholeness. Gio and I smiling in Wien, in Las Vegas, wrapping our arms around one another, merging the bodies, kissing cheeks and giving thumbs up. The frames are old, found in my mother’s attic, the kind given away rather than sold at garage sales. The paint is stripped, the wood is flaking. Whenever I run my fingers over the rough edges, splinters embed themselves in the skin, puncturing the boundary, spilling blood and creating a site of infection. Bacteria, viruses, fungi grow and multiply. It is something wicked, the way they are able to grow without impediment: the clumps of biology traveling throughout the arteries, veins unable to contain them, totally ineffectual, diseased and burgeoning. He puts his soft hands on my knee, one, two, three times, patting and reassuring me, rubbing the oil of his palms deep into my skin, so deep that he replaces my blood’s plasma with his. Chimeric, I am now a parody of myself and Gio, grappling with two destinies at once, all for the price of one. I can feel the DNA shifting, the nucleotides warping whenever he touches me, as though the polysaccharide ladder is being caramelized. I am liquid, overflowing myself.
            And now I am not here, but in the cloudy reaches of memory. The first time I was held by a man was my sophomore year of high school. With the sky burning, he took me out to the country to watch the sun devour itself. “Anh,” my boyfriend said, a Vietnamese term of endearment for men, “you are the light of my life.” The corn waved altogether in unison, as if in anticipation, the way it seems to move just before rain nourishes its so-repulsed roots, knowing. Two boys on the wide-open prairie, I thought, utterly exposed. He took me in his arms, holding me as though I were a child in need of comfort or consolation. “I want to kiss you,” he whispered in my ear. I want you to kiss me, too, I thought. I want you to kiss me and bite my lips, eat my tongue, I want you to suck up the roots that lie beneath the teeth and digest me, I want my throat to be exposed to the sun as you leave me here all alone, I want you to cannibalize me, I want to be made an object made legible only through consumption, I want my identity to peel away and be forgotten, I want the skin to melt away as I am made invisible, I want you to spit in my mouth and build me up as a garbage receptacle, I want to be called a Republican as some kind of revenge against those who hurt you, I want crows to find me and rip me to pieces and I want you to be the proximate cause, to be my first. But instead, a tractor rolled up behind us and we flew off back home, our mouths untouched until we were in my driveway, masked in darkness and the smell of cottonwood, moving quickly to evade detection. “I had a good time,” he said, planting a kiss on my lips, rubbing into my chest and my ass, as I rubbed his hard cock through his jeans. “I had a good time and I want to do this again with you.”
            The yellow comes back into view. I can hardly remember what he said, so I wait a minute to develop a response. Gio’s face is warped in that so-Gio way. “There’s nothing happening,” I conjure up, my chin moving to the left. My senior year of college is upon us and I teach single-variable calculus, the study of change, what lies beneath a line. Boring, machinic, an overreliance on the straightforward applications of arithmetic, the subject is worthless. The subtle tricks of abstraction ignored, falling in favor of a prescriptive regime of power. “I’ve just been stressed about school, work. The semester is almost over and they haven’t learned anything. I am worried about what the future holds, living in a time of pandemic, of loss and disease.”
            “You know that’s not what I’m talking about.” The clock strikes 5:27 and his eyes meet mine. “And we have lived in pandemic our whole lives. What have you been thinking?”
            “I haven’t been thinking of anything,” I offer, my mind wandering elsewhere. The spring I turned fifteen, people started reading my thoughts and putting others in my head. Proof is abundant, everywhere, we are so steeped in it. I’d think of a sequence of numbers, and immediately those around me would perform a series of actions to confirm they got the message: two sneezes, one dropped pencil, a dozen spoken words. They would blush whenever I thought of something risqué. Implantation occurred irregularly, so it was always a surprise, but my mindwriters would make me think about formulas embedded in the faces of clocks. Looking at the façade when it is precisely 12:36 says nothing other than the sum (and even the product) of one, two, and three is six. Six carries a special meaning. Baked into the fabric.
            “I’m exactly as I always have been, just stressed, overwhelmed.”
            Overwhelmed, I think. Last winter, Gio’s skin turned translucent and flaky. The bags under his eyes sunk deep into the sockets, as though there were no bone supporting the muscle, nerves. The veins were bulging against his taut skin, wrapping around the cranium, the fascia of his throat, making his body a sickly quilt of off-whites and purples and blues, more alien than man. His tan had receded, replaced with ghostsheet. After a few days of this, I asked him what was wrong. That Gio stare, before he relented. “My mother called about a week ago,” he said. “I told her about you and the rings,” he could not bring himself to say engagement, “and she blocked my number. I am disgusted with myself. After all of my schooling and training, after all this promise, I live with a man in a small house at the center of a conservative Nebraskan town where we get stared at, and since I was deathfucked as a teen, my own cells kill themselves because of some rogue and treatment-resistant recombinant dual strain hiding in the brain, destroying any hope I had of being a thinker, of ruminating on the questions lying in the intersections of math and love, or of having a life worth living. The future has been taken from me, and now my past is out of reach, too. Nothing of worth has ever existed or remains here.” He pointed down, bursting into tears. “Nothing here.” I took him in my arms and rubbed his back. I wanted to tell him, No, you have nothing to be disgusted with, or no, our house is big enough for both of us, and when you get cold and want your distance, it’s big enough for you to sulk silently and out of view, or no, this disease does so many despicable things, it makes us weak and nauseous and vulnerable and makes the body falter, but one thing it does not do is empty you of value, or no, the virus may lie dormant in the brain but it does not disrupt yours, yours is too full to ever be emptied. But instead, I said, “I am so sorry, my heart. I am so sorry. I am so sorry,” as he filled my shirt with tears and snot.
            “Things are not okay with you,” he says. He stands up to turn the radio on low, NPR or some other talk station about the upcoming election. There is something afoot, the broadcaster says, and this is deeply unnatural behavior, never before seen. “I’m worried you’re falling again. Every time this happens, it takes something deep and intractable for you to get help again. It’s an impossible ask, like asking a kid to be introspective, curious.”
            “Unplug the radio,” I say. (My speech has been slurred since infancy, tripping over itself, fluid and meandering, the letters melting into one another, r’s finding themselves misplaced, appearing from nowhere. On our first official date, Gio asked me to repeat every sentence. “It’s kind of cute,” he said when we got back home. “The slurring, I mean. Unable to find stability, language itself becomes incoherent. Most gays have a strong command of language because they’ve got to, sibilance maybe being the exception. But slurring is something faithful. Like the muscles in the mouth and throat have been displaced, altogether too human. A great regret of mine has always been my decision to repair my speech in elementary school. I was forced to go, but I could have resisted, I could have kept the malleability of the letter beneath the teeth, along the tongue, intact.”) “Please just unplug it.”
            “Why?” he asks. “There’s nothing wrong with the radio. Just background noise while we talk.”
            “They’re listening in,” I say. “There’s nothing benign about it. The transmitter behind the dial. It sends and it receives, both at once, constructed with enough bandwidth to allow information to be sent back, forth, a single beam of particles but sending, receiving, all at the same time. Radio as a double-stranded helix, moving through space, time. When radio was first invented, Marconi allowed for it. It’s built-in to the science, the frequencies.”
            “They’re not listening in.” His chin twitches.

###

            I am in the bedroom now. There is no light peering in from behind the curtains, so it is unclear how much time has passed. I move to light the woodwick candles, the kind that crack with force as they burn away, as the headlights of some small car flash by.
            I remember now the taste of being exposed in the backseat of a green sedan, windows all fogged up in the eleventh grade, being held by my friend until we both got hard and touched one another, soft and supple and, all at the same time, turgid, a man coming around on a bike, shining a light in the tinted windows, underwear and belts all loose in the cabin, the buttons of dress shirts bulging, so very exposed in the white, white light, jumping back to the front seats and speeding off, being chased and chased until we lost him, stopping for a moment, laughing until our bellies and groins ached, and, resuming where we left off, he ripped the fat from my sides and made me into something new, unrecognizable and full.
            Gio is standing at the door with his head titled. “Follow me,” I say, and time slips away once more.

###

            Today is the day of reckoning. Soon his body lies narrow between the outer reaches of mine, between the downward-facing palms, as sweat fills the air, an ocean thousands of miles from any seaboard, salt permeating through the skin, accumulating in the liver, kidneys, deposits forming crystals whose only purpose is to break off into the blood, passing through the urethra as daggers. The first nude photograph I bought was when I was seventeen, one of James Bidgood’s. It swung on the inside of my handle-less closet, visible only to me, able to be viewed only through the destruction of another handle, the repurposing of the old crystal knobs found in drawers throughout the house, in pursuit of something more. Sat in front of a circle of mirrors, Bidgood’s model has his pants infiltrating the corpus, pulled tight, the interior reflected in and made coherent by the exterior. A thousand lonely nights were spent with the two of us staring into the eyes of the other. 
            Gio is now of the turned guys and has a gaping hole in his chest and from it leaks the fluid that makes up the night sky, black ink, sweet and high and warm: dark, rotten, fragmented blood, torn by sunlight and heat and the art of holding someone close, piled up, and it is awful, the blood, low and thick and grainy, running out of this poor boy’s chest in a continuous stream in thick, ragged clots, ones with bits of hair and teeth and the nails he bit and swallowed over the years, some painted, pastel and smooth, running on and on, and when I penetrate the skin to best enter that abyss, pools of light congeal and run down the horizon, blotting out the fire-warmed blackness behind, the remaining ribs creaking as he breathes in and out, trickling starlight, falling around burst arteries and through cracks in bones, until the boiling and frozen and black and dead blood mixes with my purity, and I take my hand, pull the skin taut and the jaws open, reaching in to grab a memory of the two of us, and douse myself in the newly-refined gasoline, flammable and warm with the smell of sepia, of being kissed on the cheek at a middle school dance, thinking to myself, what will history say of this, a turned guy getting stoma-fucked while he rots and falls apart at the seams, the perineal raphe of this walking corpse disintegrating and leaving exposed stones to twist and starve themselves, what will history say of the self-immolation of the healthy one, burning it all to feel warm and to feel frozen and to feel rotten tissue rubbing against cold and living flesh, and I stop thinking, continue to envelop myself in melted tourmaline until history slips away, the vastness and the density of it all splattered across my chest, softening the peach-light hair, the two of us trading commodities at a loss, secrets on how best to hold a man, how to make love with tears in your eyes, how to ignore the way that your body is falling apart and the way it resists crumbling, and soon the two of us have our chests held against one another, life and death imparted between the two of us, the infection and the cure, one a chariot and one a jockey of this electric thing, watching the scent of necrosis and renaissance fog up our thick-brimmed and square-framed glasses, and I feel my outer layer of skin start to slough away, tasting the possibility of recovery-as-loss, or is it loss-as-recovery, until the buds fall off as bubble wrap, so many pockets of air and saliva cracking apart the muscle as the water-starved air presses it, warps it, transforming the flesh quickly to dust and then nothing, washed away, the black blood and radiant light quickly moving by osmosis, eliminating movement and the cut-across, seeping into the bones of the living, breaking and folding and cracking them, sucking the marrow out and replacing it with the warmth and allure of becoming phantasma, bloody and shredded apart and broken and mended and whole all at once, blood and vomit and an ocean spread out in all directions, a spectacle draped in black on a great circle around the body, a spectacle contained in the body, which serves no greater purpose than as a site of trauma, and it all slips away. I run my arm over his side of the bed, feeling air and air alone.

Lexus Root is a poet and scholar of queer studies living in Lincoln, Nebraska.

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Content warning: unsanitary, eugenic ableism, gore, ableist & anti-sex worker slurs reclaimed

we do not grant you title here

after htmlFlowers // grant jonathon‬

we
::
abhorrence of
violated future-lost revileds
dripping prophets of abled demise 
carriers of glib disease 
whoring our bodies to medicine while we
gutter roll the streets on our backs
begging violence from an emptied moon
that loves us through her fever
a buried ocean
that has forgotten how to sing her emptied wife through
birthing bloody fecal prayers
::
your funerals after endless apocalyptic hemorrhaging
the beetles and maggots consuming what you called you after 
funerals have gone out of style and we all
rot in the remnants of streets
gutted and fetid
fish caught and sliced and
abandoned
when oil slicks slip from our sclera
::
vicious snapping commodities devoid of capitalist gain
commodifying our snarling survival until we take you     into
our writhing underbelly    into
our oozing cunts     into
our hovels built of bone and gristle
intestine colon viscera festering under the sink piled     into 
your throat
::
all you hoard putrefying
all you press distant creeping close—
pink insulation sticky with nineteen thirty-nine consensual homicides in your attic
drywall peeling parting from grey sludge hidden between 
your world and what you
have graciously granted us
while we
overstay our unwelcome beneath your heavy feet
plastic doll heads filled with molding toothpaste
corvid skulls unearthed still gripped in tangling milkweed roots
algae growing 'round the edges of your eyes nostrils aorta vertebral foramen
::
well , come 
into this unsprung mattress
 , empty handed con man ,
if your answer sates our shrivelled cripple gut—
what offal bring you
 ,  to please our whoring hearts ?

q is a white queercrip dykefag artist, sex worker, and death doula, primarily living, working, creating, and dying on the land of the Ts’elxwéyeqw tribe of the Stó:lō nation. A formerly-homeless high school-dropout, its workshops and writing are grown from joy and spite found in Mad queer disabled and ill community.

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Content warning: drinking, domestic abuse

YOU EMAILED ME YOUR RÉSUMÉ

You were looking for different 
words to say good team player. I 
suggested you use  more  verbs. I
suggested you say you over 

saw the team. I suggested you 
call me. Together, we practiced 
for the part of the interview 
where they ask if you have any 

questions. I have a question. My 
question is, what team do we play
for. My question is, what did you
do, did you manage or over 

see, my question is, what did you
oversee, my question is why do we keep
using the same words and how would 
a wolf talk and what would it say.

THE WOLF EMAILED ME ITS RÉSUMÉ 

works well with others      magna 
no, summa     no, magna cum laude
feels at home     in competitive 
fast-paced work environments     no, 

thrives in     highly-structured, close-knit 
work environments     should i say
team, community     or should i 
say environment     should i say 

highly specialized     harder than 
bone     the one who went in first when
it heard the herd-lost     calf call out 
certificate program     master 

of business     administration 
highly motivated     who went 
in second when     it smelled the coat 
dyed red     words per minute 

experience with excel     and 
java     executed special 
projects     stumbled home the morning 
after wearing someone     else’s 

clothes     went in first and never 
once fell behind     not ever

THE ANIMALS IN THE ROOM 

You drank too much. The animals came into the room.
They saw your path to the exit blocked. Their herd-sense
calculated one or two escape routes, attuned
tick-bitten ears on your behalf to the exact
moment when you could have spoken up, turned an art
appraiser’s eye to silence, threw themselves into
the painting on the wall, the deer with hard black eyes
with one bright painful spot of blue in them. They came
into the room. Your terror wanted them to watch
what happened and your terror saw the blue spot and
your terror got a lichen-eating audience
to your bullseye focus on that blue-stained motel
deerseye, your terror drank too much, your eyes summoned
them, they saw your story shrink into a fist.

THE WOLF MAKES AN APPOINTMENT AT THE O.B-G.Y.N. 

I just had some quick questions. I was just calling for a routine checkup. My first question is whatare you saying. My next question is what do you mean by contraindication. What do you mean by sexual preference. What exactly are you offering me and can I avoid eye contact and can I say no thank you and

Look, is this one of those things where the story’s author finds itself complicit because I was just asking questions I was not following orders I was just writing things down and I didn’t ask for any of this. It’s not my fault if the cattle don’t keep track of their numbers, it’s not up to me whose clothes I’m wearing and if fawns go missing. What I am asking is,

Look, it was just body language. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m just saying I was hungry, it was just a hotel room I paid for. I was only baring my teeth for show.

THE WOLF RETURNS YOUR CALL 

It has a question. 
It wants to know what 
you mean when you say 
Seem. For example, 
when they say that You 
don’t seem like yourself, 
it does not know what 
Seeming is, so it 
can’t tell. You tell it 
this is a question 
of taxonomy. 
This is a question, 
this is not a pet. 
This is a question, 
a wild animal. 
Do not touch the bars. 
Keep your hands to your 
self. Come home wearing 
someone else’s clothes. 
Don’t be mistaken. 
What do they mean by 
Do not feed. Do you 
understand what that 
means. Do you find it 
confusing for some 
reason, when it licks 
your face and asks you 
questions. What happened, 
it asks. You’re crying. 
What does crying mean.

Meghan Kemp-Gee was born in Vancouver BC and writes poetry, comics, and scripts in Los Angeles. She won the Poetry Society of America 2014 Lyric Poetry Award. Her work has also appeared in Copper Nickel, Helen: A Literary Magazine, The Rush, Switchback, and Skyd Magazine. She teaches written inquiry and composition at Chapman University.

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Content warning: unsanitary, death

I’m here

Here is my brain. It is writing this. For you. In Times  New Roman. To make us both feel. Better. We feel  even. Here is my brain. Here is my brain on drugs.  No eggs this time. Only the good ones. The doctor  ones. Perfectly legal. I feel fine. Perfectly regal. I  don’t feel pain. The earth is. Rotating on its axis and  so. Is this room. And so are you. We are. Fine.  Welcome to my book. 

Here is the world. We are in this together. The body  pulls. In towards itself and towards all of us. That is  all we need. Am I doing this right. Where was I  again.  

Here is the body. Of water. That you were looking  for. Take a drink. Kiss the mirror. It will last longer.  Don’t forget. To call the pharmacy again.  

Here is the state. Of things. We are in this together  and the room is moving with us. How nice. How  orderly. How together we are. I love you for being  here with me. We think about hop scotch and that’s  fine enough for now. I offer us a cold beverage. We  love cold beverages especially when it’s hot out.  How nice.  

Here is the fire. Place. It’s warming us up. We  needed it. We feel safe now. We breathe it in. The  smoke that’s good. We’re saw dust. We love this  stuff. We’re so happy we’re here. Did you see the  moon. Landing.  

Here we go again. It’s hurling towards us. Look out.  That was close. Let’s take a bath. Let’s promise each  other we’ll never bathe again. That will make us  proud. That will make us eat peaches. It doesn’t 

matter what we think. We forgot to call the pharmacy  again.  

Here is your brain on. Music. I’ll give it to you  Einstein. I’ll take you on a boat and make you watch  it sink. Do you believe me now. Is anybody alive out  there. Can anybody hear me.  

Here it is. We’ve been looking for you and here you  were all along. That’s the nature of it we figure. Hide  and we’ll seek. Do you think we can find it by smell.  Should we bake cookies. Can we find our way home  from  

Here is an orange. Let me show you how to slice it.  First you take an orange. Then you stick your thumb  in it. Then you hold it up to the moon. This step is  important. Don’t think about it. Think about orange  juice. Think about swallowing. Spin it like it’s the  earth. Now you can eat it.  

Here is that memory I wasn’t looking for. You  brought it back all of a sudden in a little tote bag. I  had forgotten all about it and now here it is. What a  surprise. Did you bring a gift receipt. 

Here is the new one.  

Here is my dusty balloon. I unpacked it just for you.  It will stay put if you let it. Give it a kiss.  

Here is my note. I am writing to you. To express my  gratitude for your prompt response. It is nice to be  thought of so quickly. I’ve been thinking about what  you said about jam. I am with you for the most part.  Have you given any thought to peaches. That is the  only hole. 

Here. I said here. A little to the left. A little more. A  bit higher. Not that high. But a little higher. Yes. 

Here’s your hat. What’s your hurry. 

Here I’m giving you an out. I’m giving you an out.  Well if you don’t want to take it. That’s not on me.  

Here I am. Surprise. I got you this time. You should  have seen your face. You looked like an icicle. You  hardly knew you were dangerous. You keep dripping  in my eye. I shouldn’t keep looking up. Let me know  when you spot the moon.  

Here we go again. 

Here I will read it back to you. So do you love it. You  can be honest. It won’t hurt. My feelings. Well you  could have been nicer about it.  

Here are my keys. Now get lost. 

Here is my urine. Sample. I made it just for you. I  hope you like it. I wiped the outside with toilet paper.  I even signed it. I packed this silver tray just to  deliver it to you. I hope you don’t mind the garnish.  I couldn’t decide between turnips and peaches.  

Here comes trouble.  

Here you went. I let you die without asking. I could  have done it. I could have made it easier for all of us.  But here you were and I couldn’t say a thing besides  no I am not my mother. It was too late for talks about  The Great Depression. Our great depression. I don’t  know why but I knew. I will save them for us forever.  We will live on forever.

Olivia Muenz is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Louisiana State University. She received her BA from NYU and is currently the Nonfiction Editor for New Delta Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill Journal, The Boiler, Pidgeonholes, Heavy Feather Review, Timber Journal, Peach Magazine, Stone of Madness Press, and ctrl+v. @oliviamuenz

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Content warning: anti-Blackness, slavery

our greatest ambition, to be met somewhere other than the middle

passage—just a shadow but sometimes
it’s hard to walk around in your own 

worn shoes like an old truth, grotesquely
retrospect of addressed flesh & grit 

teeth. across a sea that is big & was
already old, what survives may not be 


               pretty: what color could shadows
               be once this present is subsumed? 

answered in that familiar hush,
saved for spaces where your life is

the one game in town. so many bodies 
find predicaments, but it’s rare
 
to worry over naming 
blame while they are still 
 
only named bodies, haunting  
us like a ghost that isn’t quite
 
friendly yet carries along with you  
knowing you need the company  

for the habit of horror.  
a habitat teaches you to remain

resilient or alive. most times  
that is enough to be and joy  

is safely ignored, but when they demand 
to hear mourning you can remain 

enough, be made sacred by silence &
 
leave them to listen & listen & listen
for the stillness of no  

sound at all, running head 
long for your brilliant, elated pause.

in the absence of a parrot 

                                                      a nature curated in the obverse  
                                                      self we have always craved as conquerors
 
                                                      airbrushed past all recognition 
                                                      of our predation, a shadow at the whole 

                                                      which word alone cannot erase  
                                                      from the geologic record 

                                                      expanding as we are into time measured  
                                                      in strata, the historical record keeps 

the familiar shapes of our noses, the color  
on our backs and our shoulders, the voices  
trapped as legacies of legacy invested in ornaments  

like truth, molded into anachronistic  
oddities waiting for their day to be
  
sold at market literate in the value of remains  
grown small with time, even our oak shriveled, softened 
 
for the hands of children elastic as they wiggle  
the rods, rattle bladeless sabers, able to imagine  
they never sought blood, never drained color from any face
 
recognizable as man; how inviting these artifacts
as they approach dissolution. even waves turn  
static waiting for break, distance decays, even 
 
the sand slows itself from melting as glass resting 
between you and drowning, an imagined protection 
 
                                                      expanding as we are into time measured 
                                                      in strata, the historical record keeps 

a hilly cemetery nearby in the tall weightless grass, an old
barn melting into ground across the bay, a good place  
to share with a cat or something else to outlive, accessories 


to remember instead of leaving behind. the world at my back,
exposed to nothing but the humming drone of nothing, the rest  of
the world all in process. become this thing we tell ourselves we are 

                                                      expanding as we are into time measured 
                                                      in strata, the historical record keeps  

the grief which your cat lacks when it fails  
to miss you, or your own
  
nostalgia, an evolutionary wedge which found a way
to process loss as promise, holding on 

to every one of our mistakes, until mirrors  
fade back into sand and we drown
 
                                                      under the weight of it all  

                                                      the historical record keeps  
                                                      for its sheer number of things 
 
                                                      expanding as we are, the time 
                                                      to answer question is past.

for all the broken things unfixed with nothing  left but time to fix them 

we’ve discovered whole vocabularies 
of disappointment; maybe I am 

as old as we all feel, detached 
as we all think. what if all this talk 
 
of new normal is nothing more  
than old rumor finally hitting the fan 
& we all see the very same thing 

in the inkblot splatters on separate walls 
& can’t chalk it up to happenstance, again. 

what if all this distance is is 
a really big mirror facing 

the wrong way. what if the universe was not 
such an unspeakable terror
 
for its endlessness & my hands, 
pale palms unburned & open, 

tumbled each and every one of you 
I could ever imagine loving, breathing 

& petrified, into the inert 
vision at the ends of my own 

go-go-gadget arms, finally enough 
to fold each and every one

within a single shared thought and not 
recognizing the universe in deference 

to its scale we always mistranslate 
as endless difference. will each and every
 
or even just one of you 
please pity me with this simple kindness:
 
tell me it’s okay that the universe is so big 
that it must be ignored.

Isaac Pickell is a passing poet & PhD student at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he lives & studies the borderlands of blackness & black literature. His work’s found in Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Fence, Protean Magazine, and Sixth Finch, and his debut chapbook everything saved will be last is available now from Black Lawrence Press. 

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