NICOLETTE NODINE

with the fishes

miss you pink

Nicolette Nodine is an abolitionist, poet, collagist, and full time lover girl. They write about loving, revolting, and resting in LA. On her iPad or in the club, she's just looking for a good time. 

RYAN TAYLOR

yr light floods me till I’m a still lake singing yr reflection.

Will we ever be kids on the train again? This time is short, composed of bracketed, intimate infinities. I love you all. We may never play as we do now. We may lose our enemies and angels and live by other rules, in other worlds. It will be different.

You are married with children,
are living in Lima,
are buried in West Virginia,
are joining the USCG,
are getting your PhD,
are breaking my heart.

The tender invention of my life has so many moving parts, and it is yet too soon to say what it does. I live in hope we are Amateurs forever.

Ryan Taylor writes in Queens and sleeps in Yonkers, NY. Their work has appeared in Polyester Zine, Pure Nowhere, the Luna Collective, and Peregrine Mag, which they edit. Their website is https://hopechest.neocities.org/. They love you, and hope you will forgive them.

KD SIMS

KD Sims is a lesbian poet and smut writer from Illinois. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Dream Boy Book Club, Stone of Madness Press, Hooligan Magazine, Hot People Read Poetry, PITS MAG, and Cosmic Dog House Press, among others. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

BEE LB

BEE LB is the facsimile of a living poet; a porcelain pierrot with a painted face. they collect champagne bottles, portraits of strange women, and diagnoses. they've been published in PULP, Dirt Child, MOODY, and Landfill, among others. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co and they can be found at patreon.com/twinbrights

LILY HERMAN

Underwater

My gynecologist says There are
other fish in the sea, and also
Starting at 35, we do rectals,
and
I think, What the hell,
what’s one more
sensation
demanding surrender

And anyway
maybe if I lay very still
my grief won’t be able to find me
Maybe it’s a tracking animal
whose eyes live to follow
the line of my movement,
to find I’ve grown complacent
and stopped guarding
against it

The doctor tells me Take a deep breath
And
I say
Yes, OK, the sea

Lily Herman is a writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has appeared in Bruiser, 86 Logic, Blue Fifth Review, and Across the Margin. Her poetry chapbook, Each Day There is a Little Love in a Book For You was published by Dryad Press. She has been supported by residencies at Yaddo, Wildacres, and Monson Arts.

ALEXA VALLEJO

Top Down

On a layover in Dallas, I bottle
my newlywed joy and pretend
Jess and I are nothing more
than friends. Sluggish and
travel-weary, we eat fish and
chips in the airport terminal,
mindful of the people around
us. But I let my guard down in
Palm Springs, where the rental
car clerk sees our rings and
offers us a convertible for no
extra charge. We thank him
but stick with the Nissan Rogue.
Outside it’s dark, and the wind
won’t quit. We kiss at a stoplight
while coyotes sprint across
the highway. Deeper into the desert,
I roll down the windows and think
about that convertible, how we
could have Thelma and Louise’d
our way to Joshua Tree. But that’s
not quite the honeymoon vibe.
Who would choose an outlaw love?
Give me a science fiction where
everyone is gay and no one is afraid.

Alexa Vallejo is a transfemme, Filipina-American writer and musician living in West Philadelphia. Her work has most recently been published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, swamp pink, and TriQuarterly.

HANNAH STRAUSS

everything under my hand is intolerably round 

infinite as in 
oh no wonder 
nobody can bear to be unboxed 
turning this annihilatory 
gesture on things 
instead every thing 
that is sacramental void 
cheque like 
the belly of a vase 
whose interior 
is always emptying 
little unwitnessed deaths 
into regular air 
to mingle 
with everything not 
under my hand 
like clockwork 
or Key West 
anything is as open 
to interpretation as 
death even 
my words who are growing up 
by the way to be 
entitled sons of bitches 
even across the length 
of this page and these 
last few lines 
much as I 
keep getting better and better 
until I rot, like a – you get it – 
a joke in little adidas shorts 
still my deaths keep 
coming back for me 
in nascent forms 
all the things I like 
a lot or a little 
even trout 
seems to turn up 
under my hand 
diminished, round, 
and infinite

Hannah Azar Strauss is an artist and occasional translator living in Montréal. You can find her online at https://hannahazarstrauss.com. 

ANNIE LOU MARTIN

Attention is a Way of Loving

I.

I don’t believe utopia 
is any more stable than muse.
If I can’t have stability 
I would like to have beauty,
that thinning that turns 
the vignette pink. 
Utopia’s detritus: 
plant clippings, a full set 
of knives, fresh ground coffee, 
clean needles, a toothbrush 
unmissed, the lover’s copy
now used to scrub the tile cracks.
Attention, taken to its highest degree,
is the same thing as prayer. 
It presupposes faith and love. 
I’m showing you what I’ve made because I want 
to be closer to you, because how I see says 
something about who I am. But that’s not quite right. 
Courtney says a poem is like a birdhouse.
I think your movie’s like a poem. 

II.

Looking is a way of loving.
Love makes me want to turn out my pockets.
I can’t imagine anything less than sharing 
every dream as it comes to me. Last night,
two men, one famous, in a cabin on ranch property.
My father knocks on the door, the shadow
of a cowboy hat. I pull out, 
say, pretend you’re my gay professors!
And when I wake up the light is orange, 
sex still as banal and central as it’s ever been. 

III.

Thought is a vector of attention, and every pattern is imposed. 
But there are signs that endure, like a toothbrush or a party.
I like parties because they’re domestic, with certain effects dialed up;
the potential of anonymity, a so-called public. You look
because you want to be looked at. I’m looking at you.
You’re a Pisces. Your fish skin gleams when you flip.
Strobe light, tea kettle. You seek a wet archive. 

IV.

I told you I like poetry because it feels like cinema,
a birdhouse built from crystal and gelatin emulsion.
The muse liberates energy by requiring full attention.
There is an “I” that functions on its knees.
Roost; I know I can be fed on light alone. 
I don’t need specificity or anonymity.
If this is a gift it’s vacant and proud, the reflection 
of a glass of water in a smudged table. 

V.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I hold the camera. 
I watch people I’ve brushed against and forgotten. 
They embrace and turn each other around. 
It rarely comes to sex. Of course, in my dreams
they’re all me, and in my dreams I’m nobody at all.

Annie Lou Martin is a poet. They read and write in Brooklyn, NY.

ZO FLICKER

Zo Flicker is a poet, sound artist, and photographer from the San Francisco Bay Area, now based in Philly. Her writing has appeared in Reality Beach, Voicemail Poems, Frozen Sea, and Peel Lit, and has been collected in two homemade and handmade chapbooks, Anaerobics (2018) and [SIC].rar (2022). Her preferred styles include serial poems, queer forms, noise, drone, sampling, and collage.

JEREMIAH MORIARTY

Surveil Me Daddy Before My Time Finally Comes

Joke’s on them 
because I love the attention. 

Corporate revenant at my bedside, 
a million-eyed sky orphan greeting me 

at sunrise and sunset, and it plays 
the bit xylophone alarm that, in my mind, 

is now synonymous with defeat. 
How lucky are we, the watchers and 

the watched—a cat’s cradle of engagement. 
Alongside the eyes I come awake, so many 

eyes. White and silver and rose-gold. 
Plastic and plasma-hewn. Wings of 

aluminum. Under its eyes I come 
alive, approximation of alive, and another 

watcher nods his head in passing, falls 
as a dust cloud into my outstretched 

digits. A cat sticker put over a phone mic 
sings a xylophone dirge with 

its little cat mouth, but all I can hear 
is a voice that resembles mine 

finally confessing 
you were famous to me.

Jeremiah Moriarty is a queer writer based in Minneapolis. His poems have appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, poetry.onl, The Cortland Review, Puerto del Sol, No Tokens, and elsewhere. His micro-chapbook of poems 5G PROTECTION SPELL was released in 2023 from Ghost City Press. Additionally, his writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize, and Best of the Net. You can find him on X and Instagram at @horse_updates, or read more of his work at jeremiahmoriarty.com

HENRY GOLDKAMP

FAT CONTENT

(ADJUNCT GETTING $2000 PER 16-WEEK COURSE hands out no. 2 pencils and scantrons to STUDENTS WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR.)  

ADJUNCT GETTING $2000 PER 16-WEEK COURSE: If stranded on an existential desert island, which of the following, given in unlimited supply, offers the greatest chance of survival?  
A: Bread and butter
B: Bread and water
C: Bread and circuses 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 1: There's sand in my mouth! 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 2: Were we supposed to read for today? 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 3: Ain't no mountain high enough. 

ADJUNCT GETTING $2000 PER 16-WEEK COURSE: If stranded on an existential desert island, which of the following, given in unlimited supply, offers the greatest chance of survival?  
A: Bread and butter  
B: Bread and water  
C: Bread and circuses 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 1: This is a "no"-6 pencil. 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 2: I don't even know what question we're on. 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 3: This paper tastes like peppermint. 

ADJUNCT GETTING $2000 PER 16-WEEK COURSE: If stranded on an existential desert island, which of the following, given in unlimited supply, offers the greatest chance of survival?  
A: Bread and butter  
B: Bread and water  
C: Bread and circuses 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 1: I used to be a slick chef.

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 2: I used to lead a life of crime. 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 3: I used to tell people I'm going to be a U.S. Sentator. 

(ADJUNCT GETTING $2000 PER 16-WEEK COURSE collects scantrons, puts them through a paper shredder, lights the shreds on fire, and eats the flames. The STUDENTS WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS  LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR rise and leave.) 

ADJUNCT GETTING $2000 PER 16-WEEK COURSE: (To their backs. Flames escape at each word.) We still have 48 minutes left. Please. Y'all. 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 1: I'm going to the drinking fountain. 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 2: I'm going to milk my cow. 

STUDENT WHOSE MEDIAN INCOME IS LESS THAN $27000 PER YEAR 3: I'm going to get that bread.

Henry Goldkamp (he/they) is an interdisciplinary poet who enjoys clowning boundaries between language, visual art, and sensory performance. He lives in New Orleans, where he hosts the poetry reading Splice, acts as intermedia editor for Tilted House, teaches experimental poetics and clown studies at Louisiana State University, and serves as communications director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival. Recent art, criticism, and performance appear or are forthcoming in Chicago Review, DIAGRAM, Annulet, Volt, Blue Bag Press, Poetry Northwest, Accelerants: An Action Books Poetry Film Series, Triquarterly, NOIR SAUNA, and Sonora Review, among others.

JONATHON TODD

Livestream

An espresso and a few grapes later
I am communing with dead labor in the
Form of spectacular myths every purchase 
Imagines a future without time
Desire captured in the direction of profit
Every dream (every sleep) runs counter
To clocks or stasis.

Christ the end of transcendence
The constant irony of a refusal to cast
Sound against production
Property reimagined 
Which is why the middle class shits itself.

I’m beginning to believe in cycles
Chants and objects, fetish
Our desire is just another commodity.
I take short naps as a way to communicate
Indifference and awe.

God striking down the last capitalist
On live TV.

Jonathon Todd is a poet, essayist, leftist, and musician who is also not any of those things. He lives in philly with his familly and enjoys performing.

FRANCESCA KRITIKOS

Pink

You’re brutal in the morning
Neck of a slender dog

Bad things stay bad
The good things turn cold

You don’t clean me up
when you leave

Does pink skin stay pink
under white sheets of snow

Francesca Kritikos is the author of SWEET BLOODY SALTY CLEAN (Feral Dove, 2023) and Exercise in Desire (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2022) as well as the chapbooks In the Bed of Sickness (Pitymilk Press, 2023) and Animals Don't Go To Hell (Bottlecap Press, 2021). Her works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction have been published in English, French and Greek in numerous online and print publications. She also serves as editor in chief of SARKA, a journal and publisher focused on works of the flesh.

SAM WRIGHT FAIRBANKS

Called a Faggot

How many years of bleaching until I become Americana?
You don’t strike me as a crier, but we both were born in July.

Am I expected to believe you
had too much love?

The future’s come. It is not chrome
and does not shine.

Have some fucking reverence for deep time.
All the world can be staged

as a marked-up online showroom, and the shape
of the universe is no concern

since everything on earth became a top with nothing under.
I am called a faggot in the grass where I write this draft,

and I am. I say goodbye from the moment we meet
and the last sun sinks in the bottomless television.

I take your picture when I go but have none to give
and hear voices at the wrong time.

Life is a brief comparison with nothing,
and I fight it like a punishment.

I travel every living room in an evening, screaming
Aspirations are never the same as their taglines.

Now everyone’s on top of me at bedtime, screaming back
The harm has already happened so it’s okay for banks to be gay.

I will never sleep—a bloodshot diva never dreaming
through the west’s most flammable night,

stomping every solid wood credenza in the lower 48
to pulp and hoping for a spark.

Time Theft Is Best Practice

Note the finer textures of dystopia

Technologies of touching, plucking
files from screens or clouds from skies

with like effort, ingesting them
with comparable dispassion.
There's a search bar where my eyes close.

Is interstitial something we can be?
Are years a thing we can consume?
Could there be undoctorable proof
of the online marketplace for subjunct summers rolling jokes
and almost blowing damp-socked jocks against snack
hut cinder block; of the shared delusion of plastic houses,
ponds called lakes, mulch and pine cone beaches, sap-
stained boxer shorts, vestigial mills, dry sockets, bloody
breaths, sprigs in our nail beds; we fluky creatures
of discomfort sucking dew from boulders, fanning damaged
hair across the creek to lift an errant fleck of mica from
suspension or, when ritual or spasm caught us (a coin I
have termed dozen-meets-dime), when, neither content
nor content, the console could console us by some slippage
in depiction?

Do we carry ideology,

or does it fall on us, e.g., anvils?

In any event, the country’s now a corporation,

and time theft is best practice.

Sam Wright Fairbanks was born in a bog and raised on the internet. They write poetry in Brooklyn.

DUNCAN MALASHOCK

The First Thing You Ever Said to Me
AUGUST 13

the first thing
you ever said to me
was, about your girlfriend,
“don’t let her intimidate you.”

it’s getting harder now
to persuade myself
i’m worthless to other women,
but i can still do it

if i ignore the way we
stood hip to hip
at the pool table,
read aloud from leather zines
together in the Archives,
joked about how uncomfortable
that sex scene was
in the Akerman flick.

it was my freshman year,
and i got beaten up
at the lesbian bar
for looking like a girl.

In the Sex Dungeon with You
JULY 27

in the sex dungeon with you,
i focused on being
a good conversationalist

while in front of us,
lit vermillion in harness,
a leatherdyke fucked their
ball-gagged underling.

i reviewed evidence:
i wasn’t your type,
didn’t know you well enough
to ask if i could kiss you,
play with your hair,
touch your bare shoulder.
in our black lace bras
we stood like sisters.

the couple passed by us
as if through a stage door;
i held back my applause.

the maze was a grid
of black plywood.
inside it we found a lonely spot—

you told me your troubles:
social anxiety,
insular couples,
one-word answers.

i tried to be a thoughtful friend
in this wild place
where anything could happen,
like the rest of the world.

Duncan Malashock is a poet in Brooklyn. She's feeling more confident speaking in groups, and she has a crush on Debra Winger.

YUYI CHEN

#1

a truth fall
speaking vulgar

spitting my metro
politan eye saw

a chink chomp
ing the nuts fall

ing cheap airline
gentle parent

ing a loud plane
by the road where

your mom died
because of you

#2

I plead a mountain
Wakes without the help
From phone alarm
Feast on my ankle; modern
Technology! Each day I am
Closer to an icy bone
At mountain top.

Yuyi Chen is from Sichuan, China. First coming to the US in 2017, they are now in a PhD program in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Their work can be found or forthcoming in antiphony, Nat. Brut, HOT PINK MAG, and Pile Press. Their first chapbook Erotic Continent is forthcoming in 2025 from Discount Guillotine. They go by Echo.

COURTNEY BUSH

It’s all over now famous baby blue raincoat

He lived here and then he didn’t live here
Where the cat clawed through the screen
And I swear he got smarter from Lumosity
And watching Columbo who can do everything
It seems but bring the dead people back to life

It’s gonna be just like this in heaven
Biting plastic ice cubes open
And licking up the chemicals
I’m a simple person
I see the world as I’ve been taught
Inside the fifth sorrowful mystery of the rosary
I can’t quite buy into the versions of love

Red flag this man
Drink blood from this ditch
They fucking wish we’d burst

Ben thinks every angel is terrifying
Because it might tell him he’s the new Virgin Mary
Now we’re in the commons
Now we’re in the movie theater
They put on Jeanne Dielman
Someone asks if we’re really
Supposed to watch the whole thing
I mean is that what she wants

So not only is every angel terrifying
Every person is terrified for a different personal reason

And they’re all tired
The whole ensemble ballet
And the principal can only dance for two to three minutes
It’s all a trick of the light
But I wasn’t joking back there
I really am going to sing

Courtney Bush is a writer and filmmaker. She is the author of Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022) and I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023). Her third book, A Movie, is forthcoming in 2025 from Lavender Ink. More of her work can be found at courtneybushgreatartist.com.

ELLEN BOYETTE

EVERYTHING TASTES LIKE CANDY

In the dressiest of minefields
in the conundrum of footwear.

In the looped youth obsession with block
letters on bracelets in the hermit’s

heart. In the foreground of a Cadillac
in the background of a pomegranate.

Wrap me in foil, put me in the Airfryer,
wheel me out of the dereliction, the hospital,

the fishtank. I like to be carried from
my womb to your brain. All I want

is a handful of cash and gum to chew
like a cow in the mud.

Read your phone. Go to heaven.
In the harpsichords of yesteryear

in the fridge humming, in the bazaar
in the bazaar I saw you running

toward a fur coat and thought
the world a superb lie. Now

it is my turn to pull apart a stranger
with my teeth. Psych—no such thing

as stranger. They said you taste like
Candy. Everything tastes like candy.

Ellen Boyette is a PhD student in English and Creative Writing with a concentration in Film Studies at the University of Georgia. Her area of specialization is Occult Poetics. She received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a recipient of the Alberta Kelly Fellowship as well as a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Her first book of poetry, BEDIEVAL, was a finalist at Slope Editions Books, CSU Press, and Inside the Castle. She was also the recipient of an Action Books Fokus Feature. Her work appears in jubilat, The Columbia Review,  Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Prelude, Bennington Review, New Delta Review, poets.org, Tagvverk,  and elsewhere. She is the author of two chapbooks, NITROUS OR MY VELVET KNIFE and CUFFING SEASON. 

MOLLY GORELICK

Gym, Tan, Laundry

In America, I’ve only had two thoughts and they’re both secrets, little pearls stuffed in shells stuffed in the dumb expanse of the ocean. The peacemaker walks through sand, jungle, desert, prairie just to become earth herself. Lump and pleather, sweat soaking into artificial fabrics in which I don’t think I could do a squat thrust. I can appreciate your literacy while acknowledging the competence of my own. If I love you, I’ll become literate in any language. Caricature of unconditional love. What would that look like on the boardwalk? An exposed midriff can either be meaningful or American. Tell me I’m fabulous! Couldn’t anyone technically move into hospice? Fondle the cough and rotate. Painted hermit crab shell, I’ll make myself at home anywhere.

Molly Gorelick lives and writes in Philadelphia. Her online chapbook Ariana Grande Accompanies Me to My Ovarian Cystectomy and Slips Me Some Extra Codeine was published by Metatron Press in 2024. She is the person behind the A Year in Philadelphia community archive project (ayearinphilly.com) and you can find her at @mollygmollygmollyg on Instagram.

ZIA PERTHUISOT / TRANSLATED BY SALOMÉ MERCIER

une histoire de bac à légumes

j’espère perdre mon tel dans une bouche d’égout pour
avoir une raison de ne pas voir que tu ne me répond pas

quand je demande à papa
comment ça va
il répond

Les bêtes vont bien

Mon père grandit à l’envers
Plus il va vers la fin
Plus il va pour m’aimer

Qu’est-ce qu’il dirait de toi
De ton mignon téton percé
De l’encre plein tes pores et des poils que tu cultive
De ta tête de meuf gouine
si charmante
qui investit les pronoms comme on choisit sa paire de chaussettes
selon l’humeur du matin et comment le soleil du dehors vient nous toucher en dedans

peut-être
qu’il ne dirait rien

il est taiseux mon père

peut-être qu’il irait s’assoir dans le canap en faux-cuir
jambes croisées
pour comprendre
pour fouiller internet
sur son tout nouveau smartphone qu’il ne quitte plus

peut-être qu’il irait chercher une bière
pas dans le bac à légume - le froid lui retourne le bide
mais là sous l’évier entre le compost et les bouteilles de Badoit

il poserait sur la table basse
une large coupelle de cacahuètes et
trois canettes de bières tièdes.

a vegetable drawer story

I hope I drop my phone in the gutter so
I’ll have a reason not to see you’re not texting back

when I ask dad
how are you
he says

The beasts are okay

My father is growing in reverse
The closer he gets to the end
The more he goes to love me

What would he say about you?
About your cute pierced nipple
About the ink all over your pores and the hair you grow
About your dyke look

so charming
wearing pronouns like you’d pick a pair of socks
depending on the mood this morning and the way the outside sun feels inside of us

maybe
he wouldn’t say anything

he’s a quiet one my father

maybe he’d go and sit in the fake leather sofa
legs crossed
to understand
to ask the internet
on his brand new smartphone that he never puts down

maybe he’d go get a beer
not in the vegetable drawer - the cold upsets his stomach
but there under the sink between the compost and the bottles of Badoit

he would set on the table
a large bowl of peanuts and

three cans of lukewarm beer

Zia grew up in the center of France and moved to Paris for my studies. She writes poetry and non-fiction, and she does photography. Her instagram : @zia.perth