Humanity is more than capacity: Autism is a site of resistance.
Autism is a site of resistance, What do you fear of those who can’t conform?
What do you fear of those who won’t conform? Complacency is key to fascism.
When you fascists demand complacency, Diversity is a mark of freedom.
Our freedom is marked by diversity, Conformity, a death wish for Disableds.
We Disableds wish death to conformity! That which truly liberates, liberates all.
That which frees us, shall also free you: Humanity is more than capacity.
Tiezst “Tie” Taylor is a Disabled Black femme who is non-binary trans. They are a radical educator, artist-activist, poet, and storyteller. Their work explores their experiences in surviving intersecting forms of oppression in the U.S. Tiezst is an Emerge 2025 Fellow with San Francisco State University’s Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability where they are working on an essay for publication on the criminalization of mental illness as it intersects with Black woman / femme identity. They were a Spring 2024 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and a past awardee of the NYSCA/NYFA Artists with Disabilities Grant. Follow Tiezst on Instagram @tiezst.
A Snowy Night in Reno after Getting an Extra MMR due to Sudden Travel Restrictions in Response to RFK Jr’s Measles Epidemic in Samoa
These are kids who will never pay for spray tan. They’ll never hold a pen to sign deportation orders. They’ll never play neutral to an invader and the people bloodied and collapsed They’ll never write executive orders. They’ll never go out with Republicans. Many of them will never use a woman’s body for their unpermitted pleasure.
These are kids who will never pave over historic rose gardens. They’ll never hold the security clearance to know how much of what we live on, we stole. They’ll never play Risk with real soldiers. They’ll never write this poem. They’ll never go to prom. Many of them will never wear jeans or itchy gowns.
These are kids who will never feel comfortable in gas masks. They’ll never know the joy of belonging to a line tapping out a riot shield beat. They’ll never wear bullet proof vests. They’ll never scale walls they haven’t imagined. Many of them will never imagine a world you’ll understand.
These are kids who will never pay for lip fillers, art -fully broken bones. They’ll never know the pleasure of connection found in small talk and shared financial advisors. They’ll never plot a real coup—or not one they can rally masses to—they’ll never win. They’ll never go to Washington. Many of them will never leave home on weekends.
These are kids who will never give teeth to gears. They’ll never feel comfortable keeping teeth either. They’ll never stop probing their teeth with their tongues. They’ll never fit in. They’ll never stop rocking. Many of them will never be found.
Elizabeth Kate Switaj (elizabethkateswitaj.net) is a neurodivergent poet originally from Seattle and currently living on Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Her sequence, The Articulations, was published in 2024 as part of a tête-bêche from Kernpunkt Press; her chapbook, Serial Experiments, was published this year by Alien Buddha Press. Her second full-length collection of poetry, The Bringers of Fruit: An Oratorio (11:11 Press, 2022), won the 2023 Whirling Prize.
people are like cities in that you need three apps to navigate them without getting lost & at least a few furtive DMs in the bathroom of a crumbling theatre venue & you still don’t know
where to find your trinkets and eternities lost— you fall asleep in the void that fills my lungs & i sing rumors and false promises to you then take a does she like me? quiz on the internet and feel like an idiot. only you could make me
have a public freakout in the middle of a suburb that is every suburb that is every dilapidated TV set that is every worldbuilding project i abandoned when i was three & you say all of two words and i stretch out every syllable like an anthem & make a mixtape for you then swear that it was about an OC. keep finding ways to tell you
that only make me look pathetic—because asking if you want our d&d characters to date is easier—than asking you to gently undo me like the glow of unspoken desires and blue light, blue moods, am i alive?
mk zariel {it/its} is a transmasculine neuroqueer poet, theater artist, movement journalist, and insurrectionary anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. it can be found online at mkzariel.carrd.co/, creating conflictually queer-anarchic spaces, writing columns for Asymptote and the Anarchist Review of Books, and being mildly feral in the great lakes region. it is kinda gay ngl.
Adam Ahmed is an Egyptian-American poet and educator based in the part of the settler colony known as California. He is currently working on a collection of poems that explore the space between breakdown and breakthrough, between the colonial foreclosure of Arab rage and its insurgent outpouring in language. This unclotted speech is coming soon to an English near you. For now, you can find his work in MQR Mixtape.
Christine Huang 黃凱琳 (she/her) is a queer Taiwanese-American writer, facilitator, and practitioner of insurgent pedagogies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Foglifter, ANMLY, Pinch, and many wor(l)ds, among other publications. She stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine and with oppressed people everywhere struggling against the forces of colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and capitalism.
next year, next month I’ll see you— all the ways we know to say not now, no matter how longing stretches, how we writhe against the calendar’s rigidity. the numbers rising again— of deaths, I can’t not say it— & our co-napping, our kitchen harmonies will have to wait. Jorie Graham says there are endless shapes of justice but only one taste of salt, so I cried through July, cancelled plane tickets, ate ripe peaches with ricotta, soft-yolked noodles in cold broth. these days, too much of anything means rinsing my nose over the sink, wheezing awake at 4am, wondering where I left my inhaler. I try, I’m trying to tend to the restless child inside— done running from this to that, now then next, done fearing the evening empty of plans. sunflowers in the alley, wind on the wind, quiet tugging at the day’s edges & I’m glad it’s you, startling my rhythms, insisting on rest. to rebuild in more tender terms— bottle, cradle, mend. a life collapsed into the present tense.
(Jody, August 2022)
life collapsed into the present tense
That’s it, really. Wheezing, peaches, humidity: the myth of progress mildews over as we watch
the stream oxbow, cut herself down a too-sharp turn and just like that: small river-alley of sunflowers
nodding welcome, forked off from the rush. Riotous as September chicken of the woods in damp forest, you
answer your own rhythms. I’m proud of that, of how we all learn from your not now,
how presence, too, has so much unfolding to offer. Like the snapdragons I picked
just Friday, frozen now in full bloom on my mantel as the water holds their life in its hands
a little longer. somebody convinced us there was a steady stroke forward: ahead, ahead.
To span our whole living with the momentum of a never-there, always just up
ahead, nearly, almost—but in this freeze frame the love we’ve canned for next season
still fills our cupboards near to bursting: peaches only getting sweeter in their sleep.
(Zoë, September 2022)
borrowed light
last year I imagined a glass house for us— modernist sky-lust, private decks in every room. visitor, traveler. at what point does a transient state become a way of being? this week, a friend wrote, being present is just microdosing eternity. no walls, only windows stretching to let in dusk, beaver wake, rental kayak stranded in the lilypads. lately I’ve been afraid of death— that eternal present tense. blurring of inside, outside. history floats in a garden. down the road, a former prison farm bleeds DDT into a lake. dahlias dip their necks in a glass vase on the dinner table. teak, brushed. brightness, borrowed from the water’s polished surface. lonely in my life and sailing on shrooms I thought death must be the moment when our arms touching, fall asleep. the house in my hands defies geometry. wide as September, one now or forever. when, as I must, I lose my I, let me be touched by a season of peaches, the momentum of dahlias. let me be touched. let me be a window, wherever you need me, to let in every angle of sky; every second of light.
(Jody, September 2022)
death must be the moment
the fingers we’ve been reaching out across these 1’s and 0’s find each other in the slipstream of after and. Of we we we we we. Thank you, gone I for the wind winding our matted hair around her finger. Thank you, you, kaleidoscoped into ever and cottonwood, snowing down in seafoamed bursts, those tufts of seed— which is to say reachings, which is to say more and, you and, yesterday’s season now: the last few browned leaves shake like a hand on the branch before they let go for good. For now. The ones who already gave in mark the tides as the lake spoons herself into herself: tugs the boundaries she dissolves. Even as the Busch cans glint from the bed, easier and easier to see as autumn drought thins the lake down. I think you’re right, J—death the joining: our good arms. Gooseflesh now. Rainbow trout leap the surface, skin-split. We slips: we foams: we holds: clot and froth: wherever we goes let sky angle down in tufted light. Let death in. Let touch lose me every second.
(Zoë, October 2022)
Jody Chan (they/them) is a writer, grief and death worker, and community organizer based in Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the author of sick (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry, impact statement (Brick Books, 2024), and madness belongs to the people (Brick Books, forthcoming 2026). Jody is a member of the Daybreak Poets Collective, a co-host of the podcast Poet Talk, and the former 2023-2024 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s Queer and Trans Research Lab.
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, land-based poet and essayist with roots in both the French and American south, currently living on unceded Cherokee lands. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. They are a student of belonging and embodied relationship to land who believes in slowness, reciprocal relationship with place and people, and queer, kincentric futures.
A RUBBER BAND CAN STRETCH FROM RALEIGH TO HOLLYWOOD
for my girlfriend Tatianna, before she was my girlfriend
I cried last night, holding you outside the dive holding you in the middle street
& again this morning, when the fool squirrel crossed Ray Road without incident
(it’s not goodbye) Walking the empty daylight downtown,
looking through open doors of closed bars in dust, the impressions of laughter
I’m grieving proximity/ I’m inconsolably celebrating your departure, the relief of roots repotted,
& those Los Angeles lesbians will love you— you clearsighted, searching the ceiling
to pluck the truest word, eyes crescent with a smile, like a cat with a new secret sharing her morning kill,
holding libraries, cynicisms, evasive light, both the pirate sterning fitful waves
& the spinning shine of safety above crag, sitting next to you in undivided comfort,
a chasing rainbow, you, your voice
& yes I fall in love with all my friends, but we share wanderer’s honor—
a rubber band can stretch from Raleigh to Hollywood tension humming gleefully when plucked
look up! the endless, cloudless, nursery blue
sun rays kissing earth like a painting of god
climb out your window, go to yourself you’ll be on the California Zephyr:
sharp undercut, guitar, duffel bag of boots, fresh roll of film, the fervor of motion,
the whole fucking world make a mess! & I can’t miss you
still with me, close as always: watching the heron at Lake Lynn
shake the city from her wings & fly west
MISPLACED BELONGING
for Salix & his light
a seagull in Asheville!
odd in birdsong, maybe adopted by murder though you shouldn’t trust me i’ve been awake since four supine in dark wondering about extinct bugs & if i’ll quit my boyfriend
but no nightmares unlike the last sleep where i met the vice president & was smothered in shallow ocean by an evangelical mob
i don’t find meaning in dreams (the meaning is obvious) Audge made me breakfast— granola & tea, then left for work which was awfully kind because they don’t know me & they build houses for the downtrodden while i sweat on their couch
& since a parade of porch Winston’s next to toy skeleton, reading Lunch Poems i think i’ll steal O’Hara’s voice or borrow it, just for the morning until Salix wakes & makes coffee
then i’ll walk to ingles to watch mountains or walk to mountains to watch ingles feeling awe either way old earth majesty & supply chains almost one-sided love, Appalachia cradling hot asphalt even that’s pretty (everything is)
gloaming over pine-softened-peaks, the peaks over waffle house, grass scratching tenderly, warm engine light, the churning chaos of star birth, it’s me in & all things welcomed with misplaced belonging
but enough about bodies— it’s a birthday! Salix turns boy!
Kat brings a bar’s worth of booze i bring shades of blue balloons somewhere a waterfall brings clarity to the earnest sewer
to be trans is to joyfully emerge in dire circumstances not the butterfly’s unfurling but a cicada surfacing mud there’s a reason babies fall sobbing from the womb into the overwhelming hold of light, we’ve lived it twice
so tonight, for his becoming we plant willow wands in compost try to fit love on folded notes & Brennan (almost a year-old now) leads our spells, gives our prayers eager hands tossing tobacco to the fire at our center the always becoming now
shine circling shine
Chamomile Wheatley is a poet, songwriter, and musician from Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Her poems have appeared in ANMLY and Five South. She performs and tours as the frontwoman of the folk/punk project, Marble Berry Seeds. Chamomile currently lives in North Carolina.
We’re now in the gray of afternoon, the sky a single cloud, high shadow painting a shade of comedian sadness onto the clay tiled roof. The silver birch is no longer shining no longer growing out in the open, no, now it’s a static hibernation standstill.
This is the delusion: not that I can change the world but that it’s always changing me. The birds still crow, but not ecstatic. They’re motioning through all their goings.
In the background deregulations strip away feelings because we are a country bent on rules, what’s more, less restriction in particular if you are a corporation but many regulations if you are a uterus
The north bark on the tree exhibits a rule, though no moss follows it. I want to be like the moss, or like the ornamental plums down the road who can’t tell whether it’s winter or not; they’ve been holding onto their buds since November. With this Celsius, it’s below zero. They must not know.
whose rules do I cinch up like a corset whose rules do I bone up whose rules do I put on what bones do I wear
February is January’s shade, and I am not changing but something is changing inside of me.
whose half-moon room points every chair toward a single throne framed by curtains whose rooms do we resemble whose assemblies cinch up who owns these bones
Friend, I am with you in Lowell, with you watching YouTube with Robert Grenier who describes Vermont, putting the garden to bed, from somewhere in London. I am with you in our backyard, here watching gray-haired winter fatten up. We must not stay in the background. We must not stay in the shade.
The Militarism of Spiking Anti-Bird Technology
A single-engine drones low overhead and here I am in the backyard on this concrete slab in a plastic lawnchair the backyard smells of cracked earth and at the grocery store I saw a bird perched atop the spiking anti-bird technology Hey, this is great! she seemed to say with her lithe jumping. Hey, hey, thanks for this bird-like gymnasium, hey! And now I’m in the backyard, not faring as well in the heat but there’s no going in, each lesser goldfinch sings weet-weet-two-woo and other kinds of chortling wheezes before the door. The purslane, too, echoes a squeaky weet-weet under my sneakers and this kind of ventriloquism is only possible when the audience looks the other way. I am looking toward the sideyard and don’t know which goldfinch is the quiet one. This heat won’t let me clean my head. The brother-heat pulling me under, this swamped-in- prehistoric-like-thinking but present in burning.
*
point of fact: the sun is just overhead, the slab under my feet leads up to the watermelon patch and the only shade is next door, without counting the side yard, I mean, but the slab’s still radiating heat there. The swamp moves from my mind to my legs. I am overcome.
*
I hear a pentatonic wind, it’s 2016, it’s deafeningly calm and I’m crying somehow because of it. Or because of the world, I mean, you know? It’s summer, or it’s almost fall and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney say that so much of business logistics begins in the military and then the boomerang angles back onto citizens: shipping containers, pallets, and the Internet with its propaganda. Drones. Now we all live near an airport.
Laura Wetherington and Curtis Emery have been collaborating for almost 10 years. Their work is interested in exploring the possibilities of cooperative writing and reading, the power of location over our imagination, and language’s place in the modern landscape. Their work has appeared in Conjunctions, ELDERLY, Pamenar Press, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s blog 1508, and others.
Inside your chest there is a room that’s just for warmth, another just for fingers. Jellies molded into sex shapes, shaking glorious. Eyes are dripping wax down your skin. You are sitting so gingerly, talking about the things you love to drink that taste like dirt, the way you could have been a prism with the light shining through. You are breathing: parliament menthol. Your nipple shares expression with your face: you’ve never used clippers before (aesthetical). Your ass shares coloring with an apple: you’ve never been bruised before (purposeful). Your cells mitochondrial castanets: clapping Chappell (cadenced). Whites are redding, purpling. There are corridors, there are stairwells, there are chanterelles for dinner and watermelon for lunch. You always get to the rind too soon.
Inside your chest there is a that’s just for warmth, another just for fingers. into sex shapes, shaking glorious. Eyes are dripping wax your. sitting so gingerly,t,alking about the things you love to drink that taste like dirt,been a prism with the light shining through. parliament menthol. Your nipple shares expression with your face: cyou’ve lippers before (aesthetical). Your ass shares coloring with an apple: you’ve before (purposeful). Your cells castanetsl (cadenced). Whites are redding, purpling. There are corridors, thrstairwells, are chanterelles for. aYoulway get to the rind t sn.
intoshaking dripping waxgingerly, talking you love to dirt, the way you co(aesthetical). (). cellsr(ca edding, corridors, are the rind n.
Ode to The Low
No one’s boyfriend’s band is invited to play live, and that goes double if he plays the guitar. Inside it’s warm, not too well-lit, wood-paneled, zhuzhed up by christmas
lights year round. 90s r&b bumps and grinds juicy bass through root chakra banging on the dance floor, surrounded by tables and chairs that don’t stick to your miniskirt
thighs. It smells like sawdust, sweat, a hint of spiced black tea. Through the screen find the garden bursting out with laughter, jasmine, rose geranium. Heat in winter, misters
in summer, shades for rain and sun, fairy twinkle lights climb periwinkle flowered trellises amid squishy cushioned wicker. A touch of wildness thrown in by firepits for those long, clear,
dark blue nights in winter when the stars come out. Free library plump with poetry journals, anarchist histories, dog-eared copies of fucking trans women by Mira Bellwether. Oh
and a treehouse built in a sturdy catalpa, raining beans and orchid flowers, leaves long as a forearm make private nests for those who would get cozy. Hydration is having
a moment at the bar: crunchy cucumber water, an array of herby syrups for latte or soda (add liquor of your choice to curate hyperlocal cocktail), session IPAs and cheap italian
red wine, a carafe of hot water and glass jars of dried flowers so you can make a tea. Glassware is green sturdy stemless, the ice mineral, not bleachy. Safety shelf
stocked with narcan, liquid IV, mutual aid fliers. An array of prophylactics rivals a mid-90s abortion clinic with its bounty of barriers, litany of lubricants. All-gender
bathrooms bloom with free tampons, floor to ceiling doors, those paper towels textured like linen to dry hands, face, splashed drinks, spilled tears. Vanity with velvet cushioned
ottomans, botanical face mists, wintergreen gum and Altoids so the bisexuals don’t have to choose, mirror lights bright enough to see if you need a touch
up but not so unforgiving that you have to run home to moisturize. When you’re ready to go at the end of the night, you don’t need a ride. Look around. There’s no queer bar in town.
Allegra Wilson is a writer living in Northern California. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Inflectionist Review, and BRAWL.
How does one handle a long distance situation? Long distance is never easy and circumstances can make things worse. The two of us spent years long-distance in different countries on different continents with a time difference of 8 hours. This was extremely hard and got harder during COVID, when we couldn’t see each other for almost 15 months. How does one navigate something like this? For us: lots of texting, lots of phone calls, physical letters, reading stories and books to each other over voice message & phone, videochat. But one cannot be on the phone all the time and even less on videochat staring at the screen, especially with an 8h time difference; one person is going to bed when the other is in the middle of their day, and then wakes up as the other is going to bed. How to feel together at this distance in spacetime?
We needed something more active than a phone call, more a joint process than reading a text into the phone (though reading aloud is one of the coziest and most mutual activities we know of). We needed something to do together. When together in flesh we play a lot of board games of various kinds, games like backgammon and also more abstract games and ones we make ourselves. For this specific situation we made a game together that we could play from distance and played it, bringing ourselves into parallel space, translating the space of each of us into the space of the other, trying to bring ourselves close when physical closeness was not a possibility. This game is what we want to share here.
1. The game
Taking walks is fun and interesting. So many things to see, hear, smell, touch; so many new stimuli; so many opportunities to connect with the rest of the world. It’s especially fun with a friend or partner, especially just with one person – you show each other the things you notice, point them out, move bodies together through space, stop for a snack or a drink or to play a game of cards, jump on a bus or train and go somewhere. This pleasure is the basis for our game.
Every walk traces a path through spacetime. It runs along a trajectory in space and a trajectory in time. These kinds of trajectories can be mapped to each other and describe parallel spaces with similar paths but perhaps completely different characters. This means that two walks in two different spaces, while perhaps leading through totally different scenes, peoples, colors and smells, can still occupy the same amount of time and run along the same – or similar – trajectories that map to each other at some level of abstraction. These trajectories can also be constructed in parallel, jointly by the two moving points that are the loci of the two paths: that is, the two people taking the two walks that comprise those paths. Setting those trajectories is the game; moving along those trajectories, jointly and together, is how the game is played.
The game: to take walks together, connected by phone, making joint decisions about the path. Choose a starting location and make a call. Then walk through the space you are in and make decisions together about how to guide the path. In the city: when possible paths diverge, for example at each intersection (or at whatever intersections feel interesting), choose together what direction to go in. Left, right, straight. In our games the only rule is that we do not go backward; or perhaps this is just such an obvious point to the two of us that the idea of turning around never has come up. As you walk, observe what is around and talk about it, describe it, create a joint mental space from the two physically separate spaces you move in. At the end, you have had a walk together. You have drawn the same figure on two distinct maps of physical spaces. You have occupied the same slice of time with this activity. Ultimately, you have folded the map of spacetime and brought two distant spaces together into one via joint choice and joint attention. Somehow, despite being so far apart, you are together. This is the game.
There are various ways this game can be realized. In part, it depends on the kind of choices that are needed; this in turn depends on the space one is in. Different spaces have different granularities and different choice points. If one is in the city, choices involve intersections and directions, entering into spaces like shops or libraries, climbing stairs or not, boarding (or not) a bus or train.
Elsewhere the choice points might be quite different. In the forest or at the sea the choices are not so discrete: one can always choose to move in any direction when there are no existing roads to choose between. Thus the game requires that both (or all, if there are more than two) players are in spaces with similar option sets: if one player can move in any direction but the other only left or right, it is hard to choose together. In this kind of situation, one must at least find a way to make the two kinds of spaces similar in a way that allows a joint decision. This is easier to do mapping from the city to the forest: one only needs to impose a discrete set of choice points on the continuous space of the forest in a way that reconstructs the options available in the city, for instance letting any path leading leftward in the forest be analogous to the city player’s left turn. (This probably also says something about the kinds of freedom that are accessible in these kinds of spaces as well: we always have choices, but the city channels those choices into much more specific directions.)
2. A playthrough
We met on Thursday, March 20, 2025: the spring equinox, though the celestial did not play a role in our game this time. Karina in Gothenburg at 11am, Seraphine in Tokyo at 7pm. We chose to let dice determine our path. Seraphine had a 12-sided die in her pocket and Karina picked one up at the beginning of the game. 12 sides is a good number for a city-walk game: it gives a clear procedure for choices between two options (1-6 vs 7-12, e.g. left turn vs right turn), three options (left, forward, right: 1-4, 5-8, 9-12), for four options (left, forward, right, back), or for 6 (when presented, say, with multiple flights of stairs, station exits, doors, menu items when ducking into a bar). This is very functional. For choice points with other numbers, one must develop strategies.
K I start off at the scifi bookstore at Kungsgatan in Gothenburg, over the phone selecting a 12-sided die together. It is still winter time here, meaning Seraphine and I are on 8 hours time difference. My noon is past her dinner time. It’s always difficult, or maybe it should be difficult to find a time which works for both of us, but we always manage somehow. We walk together through familiar places, letting each other and die rolls decide the way. Talking away like always, we stroll through the streets. Sometimes decision points leave us walking paths we don’t necessarily want to walk. This part is interesting for me, and is something that is pivotal to a joint activity, both leaning on and leading each other, sometimes by choice, sometimes by chance.
The landscape I see is blended together with the descriptions of Seraphine’s scenery which I receive through my earbuds. The result is a portrait of a city we could only experience except through this medium. It is both night and day, temperatures are both below and above 10 degrees, smells, sounds and textures fuse and produce fluky new profiles, sketching out our joint hour in this liminal space. When Serpahine stops in to charge her phone and have a drink, I stop at the convenience store and have a hotdog. I fumble on a bench and manage to drop my phone through the boards of the box which makes up the bench. After slight panic I manage to pull it out by slipping my notebook in between the boards and using it as leverage point. We keep talking until our phones run out of battery. S Karina called me just as I stepped off the train in Shinbashi. I almost never go to this area: I associate it mostly with basic bars and restaurants catering to the after-work businessman world. These days it’s tons of chain izakaya where it used to be hostess bars and trashy neon, but it still has small back streets with old bars which actually look cute. This I learned after I left the train. The space immediately around the station is very noisy and while Karina made their way to the game store I walked straight down a long small street, past lots of bars and lots of touts trying to get people into their bars. The street got quiet and dark and this was nice. A cold night, not windy; I wore many layers and tights and felt warm and happy. I rolled my die to help decide which to get on the Swedish side. Then we started to play for real.
We walked, rolled dice, made choices. The night was cool and slick like silk. We were messy and unprepared, both our phones low battery, which meant Karina bought me a drink when I stopped at some terrible bar to charge mine a bit. The dice roll resulted in me ordering a bottled beer half frozen in some freezer, which was interesting as I would otherwise never ever have ordered it, especially on a chilly evening like this one. I rolled my die on the pavement, on benches, bouncing the die off walls, taking photos of the die on the ground and forgetting to pick it up twice and having to run back. The photo and the game and the conversation more present than my attachment to the object. The low-charge situation though was difficult and it felt hard to stay completely focused. Then finally my phone was almost dead and I said “I worry my phone will die now” and in that moment it died. Game over for the night.
4. Variants
This game can be changed up in many ways: there are many things one can do. In our play through above we let chance decide our walk by rolling dice. There are of course other options, even just in path choice.
Here are some. One can add stimuli and actions to the game and its process. For instance, one could play a variant of the classical car game while traversing the path, where each player looks for some specific item (something green, a white horse or car, a constellation of cracks that form a particular rune, a vine or road that doubles back on itself). One could build something with materials found along the way; we played like this before ourselves, during COVID, selecting three objects from the trash or just discarded on the road, building something with them and giving it a story. The players could add a new creative element by running metaphorical mappings of the objects along the paths traversed, putting them into a story or transforming the walk itself into a fairy tale. Ultimately, these moves are all about situating the pathbuilding game in a bigger gamespace which allows for richer and deeper transformations and building things together. The space of games of this kind is very large and they are very fun to play. The big question they raise: what does it mean to be together? How does one build things together, in this case temporary paths and stories and assignments of meaning? Maybe: the pathbuilding game is itself a model of a relationship, and its variants are too. In this sense, this game that we made when we had to be far apart in space brought us even closer together. We hope it can do the same for others, and also that it is fun to play.
Karina prefers to spend time in bogs, forests and ditches. On a quest to tie together things and non-things. Spends most of her time making, thinking about and playing with string. Currently twisting fibers of hemp and nettle. She defeats the rule of the game; lucky both at cards AND in love! Looking to play in Barcelona. Contact: [email protected]
Seraphine cares about words, birds, stones and spells, and also other things. She is a gamer for many years, but not on screens, or not mostly. Her favorite games involve chance, choice and manipulation. She would like to make things better. One day she will figure out how exactly magic works. Then: watch out, or, alternatively, don’t. She lives between Barcelona, Berlin and Tokyo. Contact: [email protected]
mishearing “A”-7 [Horses: who will do it? out of manes? Words…]
Whores, let’s bewilder our many verbs willfully out of reach, I don’t care. Most days have no names, so we’re argonauts. Blurred adverbs frenzy together, muffing ghosts. Forget haphazard, forget boyhood, forget stubbled logic. Tribbing and I’m homophonic, loudly TRANS UP TO NO GOOD! Unreliable narrator I squirt an em dash—compartmentalize while revisiting cut ups. Fresh out of another relationship, it’s clear I’m not cut out for courtship. You’re cuuute though, no doubt we’re corresponding. I want to (do I?) pursue something new; if I’m single too long I get stuck in a loop…
…honestly I’m pretty shifty. Won’t belong to anyone alone—I need my autonomy. Come near but don’t latch on too strong or I’ll be gone. Want to disappear with me just for tonight, tie me up to the bedpost? Leave me delirious, then let me loose my dear. Let ellipses surround us like hopeful ghosts. You know me, prone to mishear whatever I fear, an enduring tentativeness that’s hard to shake. That’s my queer orientation: words leaving wounds. Tell me it’s okay, how recklessly my heart aches as I suffer for my art = life’s expression. No rehearsal, nor time for questions. Can we change roles/letters/verbs, switch worlds?
EAR-SPLITTING
mishearing “A”-23 [An art of honor, laud…]
On earth I must be LOUD pleasuredome jaws cavernous incantatory sagas fervently breaking escape velocity loquacious self-expansion.
O knock-off creators, no one forgives the pen’s pantomime. Why not be braless and lawless?
You up? Writing late?!
I’m author now. Don’t bother slipping on the horizon. My noncompliant wordplay a switchy fantasy: wounded animals wanting vice versa wrong directions named for ghosts we carry on lip-synching seeking euphoria, untrained sensation.
Do re mi fashion respelled to justify incipient selves far from earshot, worried we’ll miss the flight. Incoming aberrations: verbatim or not, sing all detritus!
Until grammar embraces delirious tonguelessness I’ll risk entering surrealism’s dangerous cunnilingus. Questing fingers rhyme pileup gasps in no time.
Haven’t you too whispered disclaimers while lust-stricken? All I mean to say: stay close / read between my lines.
Then do I bare my trust, let you steer me? Spillage madrigal implies I’m undaunted, which (blushing) I’m only pretending.
Oopsy daisy you slurp my synonym our covenant of whatever you choose. Flip over—
If you want sounds dreamy bb
Pillowtalk spills over to exclamatory moaning.
Infinite Nomi: last seen romancing infrasonic where words backflip, linger, fortune-tell.
E’s song hollers back devours A’s reverie nourishing faggotry.
Noa Micaela Fields is an echodeviant (trans poet with hearing aids) in search of the hypervivid in her one and only captionless life. She is the author of E, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2025. Find her poems and art writing in Tripwire, Zoeglossia, Tyger Quarterly, Jacket2, Poem of the Day, Action Spectacle, Sixty Inches From Center, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she curates public programming at the Poetry Foundation. Photo by Sarah Joyce.
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