GRAY AGPALO

Newborn

upon taciturn dawn

a collapsed sassafras

divided the driveway

inconveniencing us

our machines our

appointments and money

our grave tradition

is an obsequious tome

in reading it I became

a student of refusal

if upon getting born

we are told to root

for a certain death

we ought to choose wisely

a corrective officer’s salary

cushy without succor

is blown up

on the back of a bus

my hapless eye squints

to mimic the jail windows

tracking the isomorphism

between suffering

as the state is wont to do

⥀

capital probes the perpetual

question of love’s enoughness

romantics obscure both

its frailty and lack’s affluence

such that love yields liberally

to be clear

I’m less hater qua hater

more like living & paying

rent & looking around

in the end love is meritocracy

like the beached anglerfish

is perverted aberration

or pure complaint

revealing the brute base

dying in broad daylight

of course we have the work

of ontological rehab

cut out for each other

when the World rots

I pray for death

to sick nettling

factions to diagnosis

and cure to annihilation

of invasive species

those magnificent survivalists

⥁

an oceanic feeling

will protygynously persist

wide-eyed wrasses turning

wordlessly to reinvent

sex change ovum

for encrypted sperm

transsexualling into what

exactly? I don’t know

is desire a question

about completion?

sunflowers get planted

to absorb nuclear fallout

of course the job calls

for their destruction

the complete pre-colony

is now pure fantasy

yes I root

for the World’s rot

slow the omniscient fern

blinks sporadic clocks

Gray Agpalo is a writer. They are Communications Editor of Apogee Journal and a member of the collective, Sick in Quarters. He lives in Philadelphia.

BRAD LIENING

Your good time is already ruined
By global economics you don’t understand
Whatever chemicals tumbling forever through your bloodstream
Trash blowing across the tarmac
Then the beaches
Then directly into your face
People everywhere not like rats lice or other vermin
Just people in flip-flops and t-shirts
Suggesting they love America and death
Without really knowing
What either of those things could possibly be
The sun doesn’t set so much as disappear
A book not read so much as redacted

Brad Liening is a poet living in Minneapolis, MN, and at bradliening.blogspot.com.

MARISSA YANG BERTUCCI

PISS POEM

I’m back from BeingLovedWell, USA wearing two more coats of paint. Bumping into walls, trying to echolocate with only this pissant heart and its sundry hungers as a compass. Dykes know how to piss, so the honey bucket at Dolores looks respectable even at six. Sometimes

I run the scenario all the way back to the Castro where Pam put her hands underneath my polite panties, shocked in the elastic. I was so young as to be almost translucent, figured okay... A distance from it, my tendresse was lost trash beyond the moon. I who have danced on tables to be closer to the divine light of god. I could take a mass shooter in an ordinary tussle. Sat on the grass,

I observe all versions of the same outfit. Can’t even catch my own eye at this velocity. At the bar, you bring my leg onto your lap. I drink your usual drink. You take the drink I don’t like. When you come over to kiss me from your short vacation in the bathroom, it makes so much sense. You spirit me as if Cinderella to the donut shop OPEN LATE. A simple glaze, hot from dip, tears apart between us. Painterly steam transmits at the open gash. We could take a mass shooter, I think. You’re laid out just a little differently than me, your pelvic bone sharp against two fingers rinsed clean of their icing.

You’re on my cupid’s bow in the morning’s anterior heat. I am allowed to wash my face but I go fast, getting away with something. What is that sound? How could a mouse squeal so loud, and what on earth could be so sexy at this hour? Garbage truck’s hard labor of gears. Show me a quiet effort and I show you a mommy issue. How come all the soap you got is dusty, what do you actually use day to day, huh? You tell me I smell good. I just smell like you before.

Marissa Yang Bertucci is a Korean dyke writer, printmaker, and public school mental health worker. They were a recent BIPOC artist-in-residence at the Independent Publishing Resource Center. They are from the Bay Area and currently live on Kalapuya land in Portland, OR. @marissayangbertucci

NAA ASHELEY ASHITEY

I who have never relied on substances stronger than Wellbutrin to get me to catch the 7:27am bus

The light hasn’t necessarily turned off,
but I can see how muted it becomes after a few puffs.  

I can no longer see the
single line across your sclera 

that always held that
blueish-lilac hue. 

The red blood vessels in the inner corner of your eyes,
or maybe they’re called arteries, 

you’ll have to excuse me,
I struggle with anatomy, 

blend nicely with the pinkish red of what was
once the whites of your eyes.

I know they say this state brings euphoria,
even calm for some,

but selfishly,
I feel as if I have been robbed.

I no longer have a galaxy to admire,
to lose myself within. 

Neither do you though.
I too think you see what it steals from you, 

what she makes you
put away. 

Hiding is never the solution
it makes itself out to be.

To be a stranger in your body
never really solves our problems.

Is it wrong for me to say
That I wish I could go up and tell you that a

white to red formed by a
self-made ocean may may be crushing,

but it at least ensures that the
lilac is watered and visible.

Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey (She/Her/Hers) is a Chicago-born writer and an MD-PhD Student at UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. She is interested in the intersection between scientific research, medicine and the humanities. Her works have been published or forthcoming in Hobart, The Brussels Review, JAKE, Abstract, The Inflectionist Review, Sage Cigarettes Magazine, and more. More at NaaAshitey.com 

Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social

JESSLYN WHITTELL

Dear Psyche

this year, let’s not vote for love.
Let’s rub ourselves into sand against each other.
Let’s be mountains and speak with mountain voices,
or scones passed on the table.
I’m begging this city, the giant dead
astronauts sleeping off its coast,
their fingers peeling into the tides,
waterfalls discoed over their stony flanks--
Psyche, does this rash look normal to you?
Do you want to push me into the cold bathroom tile and smooch?
How tall are you? I bet tall, I bet taller than me.
Tunneling with hydraulic needs,
I spoon the coastline, a whiff of limestone in my face
a plea in 10000 years to be quarried.
With long-suffering heat, I affix the curls to my hair,
my singeing lash upturned to the seasonless
interrogations of renter’s insurance, so like love.

I’m drying up for you, my tongue is poured out
is already clinging pouty and molten
to the lack of you.
A flinch of burning air divides us
some slight and efficient
conclusion I cannot make,
pang of hair bell-rung
in the smoke-orange light, fear
as close-fit doubling of better
sensation—listen, what if we fuck
until I remember the planet
exists? Even the curt ground has nothing to do
but root for you with rearing legs.

Psyche, let’s not flourish and say we did,
let’s wetland together, birding in flight,
take an egret’s egress into egregious.
I want to accidentally clip your teeth with mine,
discover all your edges.
Won’t you inquire politely after my internal organs
strung together with industrial whining?
Hurry, I’ll be a weather event by morning,
or a patch of grass so sweet you’ll smell your steps
leaking into condensation.

Jesslyn Whittell (she/her) is a poet and contingent academic based in Los Angeles. Other recent poems are in or forthcoming from Peel Lit, Action, Spectacle, The Indiana Review, and The Georgia Review. She can be found online @lofi__loaf 

MYKYTA RYZHYKH

He

he couldn’t open his eyes
he couldn’t move
he was me if it’s not you
he dreamed about mercury
he played the music of silence
he drank sandy dead time
he rode on a black cart
he doesn’t know what’s happening
he found himself deep underground
he found himself alone
he spent his whole life alone
he was born alone
he didn’t have time to say goodbye
he wasn’t going to say goodbye
he doesn’t know anyone he could say goodbye to
he didn’t believe in anything and nothing has changed
he remembers that life is a streak of bad luck
he remembers that a person is a black square
he remembers that he doesn’t remember anything
he sleeps like he’s alive pretending to still breathe
i buried my childhood in the cemetery
today the letters fell into a notebook with the rain
hello bird take this glass on my palms
i’m ready
he’s ready

Author from Ukraine, now living in Tromsø, Norway. Nominated for Pushcart Prize 2023, 2024. Published many times in literary magazines іn Ukrainian and English: Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal and many others

S. SMITH

Straight Time

Neural pathways light up
Like the Nile delta from space,
A reedy voice suddenly mourning time
Lost to fantasy, fascist and alien
And when I (do not) desire, I lose too
I am people who fall off buildings
I am women in desert cities
I am the human in the loop—minute, eternal, endless
“Inhale the letters that hum,” I murmur to myself
Bare legs roughed up by oak-dappled light
Adjusting my spine between wooden slats
Semiconscious in the park

S. Smith is a transsexual writer living in North Carolina. They have been published in Imposter, Transfix, and elsewhere. Find them on Instagram: @scorpionfossil.

JESSIE MCCARTY

Grift, Shovel, Identify

I was an impenetrable system
of canals. I was a lawless romantic
in de-escalation. I was a phantom
boom disseminating matter from
Midwestern plumbing systems
under a deep, sleek, sneatcha.
I saw it, mid-city queerness
lár na cathrach aisteach,
as it was bubbling up from
nothing, o cuinne to corner.

Jessie McCarty (b. 1997) is an Irish-American writer and information professional. Their full-length debut, Pretty Punks, is forthcoming with Magra Books in December 2025 (edited by Sean Pessin & Paul Vangelisti).

JANE SHIN

Jane Shin is a writer and artist from Corea and California. They live in Los Angeles.

ARTHUR BOYLE

NINE BY NINE

Heaven cooks novenas freely in its kitchen:
a thicket studding currants
in the nine unleavened rings;
feeding
each other from each other
with the promise of a triumph
of the long unbidden summer
and a hummer in the graces

You n me babe––Terror the Divine,
chlorides sheltered heartside
and a scheme of inexactitude––
long across the country, a marriage in every state
Analog maps of numbers and flaunting
in the poolside manner of the criminal

Forgive me this the culmination
of all our love trajectory,
a labor unfulfilled

Forgive my long unwanting
Or that's not really right
The apposites of apices'
death to restart feeding

in a quatrain's notion
of completion,
a rectilinearity
bent into a circle

J. Arthur Boyle is pleasant, co-editor of The Amenia Free Review, and adjunct at CUNY. Work is in or coming from Annulet, Bruiser, the CRB, The Chicago Review, Community Mausoleum, Fence, GROTTO, Verso, and other lovely places.

MADELINE CRAWFORD

Lupa my lupa

it’s from the river
I lap up that eternal water
I paddle as the dog I’d become

there the twins
who found their virgin mother’s nipples dry
revere my breast
cry lupa my lupa
ask where do wolves live

I show them my nest

these baby heads
impressed
order me
with my lupa paws
to build a city

where there is a difference
between branch and limb

Madeline Crawford lives, teaches Latin, and writes in London. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in Die Quieter Please, mnemotope, Paloma Magazine, dadaku, The Mantelpiece, and Vast Chasm, among others. She has worked as a reader and editorial assistant for A Public Space. She went to Hunter College and received her MA in Classics from University College London. 

BROOKE SPALDING

A CALLBACK.

A brine in glass and metal scoot, an anonymous cast as rubber ducks posed next to a sign reserved. Preserved pimento bubbling apart in the bathtub, two currents warm down the drain, remember. I remember the midwest pause, it shows an inability spreading. Member of genius, elaborate.

PECULIAR, MISSOURI

Scene 1: FARMER pulls his TRUCK over on a farm road, the scrape of gravel on a turned wheel sounds

FARMER turns to HORSE who is sitting passenger

HORSE

Do you tell your friends I’m a good kisser?

FARMER

Errrr

HORSE straddles FARMER, her back pressed against the steering wheel of his TRUCK

FARMER leans in and HORSE tries to accept his tongue, FARMER’S braces feel hard against HORSE’S mouth

Scene 2: FARMER drops HORSE off in the southernmost part of the field, drives away in his TRUCK

HORSE starts her long walk back with three adderall pressed into the mud of her front right hoof

Brooke Spalding is a writer from Kansas City, Missouri. She is considered “Missouri hot” which makes the midwest her final resting place. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Always Crashing, phoebe, and Tampa Review, among others. 

CLAIRE SOSIENSKI SMITH

MY BAD HABIT

I will never leave the party

I am in your garden
watering the gardenias
you thought were gypsophila

I am on your roof
replacing the loose tiles
washing your bedroom window
nodding emphatic to show my
pleasant demeanour, the ripeness
of my upbringing

my mouth is full of shells

I am bleeding your radiators

organising your junk mail
by grammatical accuracy

picking hair out the
bathroom sink

you say get out of my
bathroom I need to take a shower

I say
if I was your cat I
would never kick
litter out of my tray

Claire Sosienski Smith is based in SE London and a part of Resonance Poetry Collective, a queer-led collective that hosts free workshops and open mics. Their work has most recently been published in eff-able and 14 poems.

CHLOÊ LANGFORD

(transcendental authority)

the lord is giving time to his creature
definition before and after

two things compared to each other
before the flood loaded with life

the lord is reaching out downloading
the holy spirit into adam’s finger

adam is discerning the abasement
of free will the freedom of some profanity

barbarity he’s making up the world of turmoil
michaelangelo’s high definition muscular angels

in a way he’s casting off a snake and that's intentional
crescendo of negative emotions fear agony death ankles

knees the folded up arm that he gave to christ
michelangelo he’s gna play with the detail

building down and layering the accumulation
of soil restored put together; its becoming more

crowded pagan nero his head split like an egg
zygote face dragged across the frame tapestries

tapestries are no rugs fine art that rustles
painted in Rome and shipped to Brussels

twisted snail torn slain swan the world
laid out like a wrinkled carpet rivers

and towers of muscles pouring down
curtains pinned he peers down upon

us his brother biting his elbow behind
even pinky fingers uncannily ripped

by horsetail brushes moses parting
the sea shiny black helmets emerging

from the floods like beatle’s shells
or blood grapes and beneath jesus

a bearded man holds the shrunken skin
of a man his face crumpled sinking beneath

clouds and at their feet the baby curled up
with the softest goat known eyes turned up

mouths hung open under angels with hands
and arms folded in paper poses and papillon

wings flooded folded the eyes on that guy
the most beautiful jewels and gems are hidden

continuity columns of ham ok lots of people
are leaving broken scars left on the body

he did that in a year and a half the body
is where we saw it this is the memorial

tomb the hall of maps his virtues wisdom
helmet wise and faithful lebanese canadian

italian half jewish tour guide and a sea
of clear plastic chairs the perspective is radial

Notes
1. (transcendental authority) includes quotes from Ribal, a tour guide working at the Vatican in July 2025.

Chloê Langford is an artist who works with writing, performance and video games. They live in Berlin, Germany. They are a part of the experimental video game collective Fantasia Malware.

RAJA'A KHALID

Scenes from a Red Cutting Room Floor

scene 1, yoga

black stone floor / black sun eclipse / you pick a spot at the back / crimson bleed, you go deep / pigeon, forehead to the mat / Childish Gambino’s Redbone on speakers fades to / D’Angelo and the Vanguard’s Really Love / Is there anyone else? you’d asked / You’re crazy, her reply / her lie / welcome to practice, sixty minutes, Soul Power / praise the black sun / as scorpion / lizard / cobra / Fever by the Cramps blends into jungle sounds / on your back, shavasana, you are spent / by this life, by this class

scene 3, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love

slow motion Maggie Cheung / up / down / those stairs / moving like a snake / you take / all that you can, and / pull out a cigarette / to make your own silver ghosts / like Tony / someday you too will whisper / your secret into a tree / but for now you watch / the stroke of a finger on an arm / aura / dress / room / if only they had been in the mood for love / letters / they could have told each other their story / at the close they never see / each other again / you press your lips to the bark and whisper / look at me / never again

scene 4, Athens

Exarcheia square / pool of vermillion leaks onto the street / from a neon light / stabbing this electric night / broken hearted / you ask a girl with a teardrop tattoo / if she has some hash while anarchists gather contraband cigarettes into a pile / and set the whole lot on fire / speech / applause / old Greek ladies salvage packs of cigarettes from the heap of ash / you smoke / rising sun will be / blood / tears / you close red eyes, say no more fears

scene 6, nightclub

set up like a cave / long shadows spill into the scarlet / dance and / glittering at their throats pieces of colorful rocks / made of glass / all pass / as the real thing / you hold your arms up high / sweat on your back / icy trickle now and watch the girl dancing in the middle / for she is one of a kind / maroon dress looks white in the warm light of the club and you see the dark smudge on her eye / birthmark / a crimson island on half her face and realize you have never seen anyone so perfect

scene 8, Chinese restaurant

walls of cadmium red / golden paper lanterns overhead / father and son at a table alone / you and the girl watch the boy trace the shapes / dragon / pig / rat / on the paper mat / little baby finger knocks over the glass of raspberry juice / like blood / white table cloth / carnage / an unholy mess / white paper napkins lie pink / shaken like pieces of a life gone sullied and then comes the slap / baby cheek / pink / shaken wet like a piece of a life gone sullied / and the boy runs out into the rain screaming for a mother that won’t ever come back

Raja’a Khalid is a Saudi-born, Dubai-raised (and based) artist and writer with an MFA in Art from Cornell University. She has been nominated for Best of the Net (2025) and the Pushcart Prize (2025) and her stories appear or are forthcoming in Vestoj, HAD, Maudlin House, SAND, KHÔRA, Baffling Magazine, Yalobusha Review, River Styx, Strange Horizons and elsewhere.

MIRA CAMERON

My first few weeks in Massachusetts I was lonely so got way too high and walked around.

Or should I say remembering.
Splayed out subjectivity
worthy of reinvention.

Worthy of the event,
the power of love. Transformation
and little miracles keeping vampires from the door.

There is an animal here,
a thick wave its own echo
wet with rain, sweet evening
Crazy Bitch
coo “baby girl”

Legacy babbles different stretches of life.
I trust the profane, need the everyday.
It brings me to
believing.

Mira Cameron is a girl helping create, maybe anarchy, or a phantasia, or a group of trans people holding hands. She is playing in warm dirt and feeding as many as she can. Her debut collection, Praying for Dykes, is forthcoming with DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, and she is the co-EIC of Imposter Review.

ELIZABETH HALL

HOLETARIAT

Virgo, my rising sun moon. I’m perfect
save my skrimpy intestines, sleepy
anus. Left unaddressed
is a problem.

One strong hole,
all I need.

Colon shiny as a glass eye.
125 liters of triple-filtered water,
pumped clean through me.

An observation tube, please.
I want to watch myself leak
the synergistic power of water,
nozzle of traditional knowledge.
Ancestral to us all.

$150 for 60 minutes. Cash
app for wild bark
aids: magnolia,
buckthorn, slippery elm.
A promise: my body,
pure lily status.

A deep ache, deep
inside. A small cost
to rouse my rectum,
make her behave, unlock
my potential. Good girl.
Now slaked. Free
from rangy desire, red
dye 40, any lingering
debris of dreams.

Now I’m easy.
Light. The go-to destination
on the westside.

BIRDWATCHING

Pussy, protein goals,
Tom Petty song,
scroll on.

God please let me
get into birdwatching,
baking bread on Sunday
afternoons, farmer’s
market hauls splayed
on a rough cloth.

A shaft of sun sets
the plums ablaze.
Crushed fennel
seeds in my palm.
Almost enough.

Of course, the finches
in the yard fascinate.
Crayon red plumage,
and fast. 40 miles per hour,
clean above the palm line.

Crease of pink
on the horizon.

Eight seconds,
then I’m off,
looking for another
bright thing
to take flight.

Elizabeth Hall is the author of Season of the Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books) and I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

SIOFRA THOMAS

DOG POSE, JULY

that summer,
may : september
lazy ‘s a teenager
recidivist syntax
on full display, i lay
myself in long lines
on your – birthday card,
for no reason other than because i can.

over the shoreline
a glutton’s curve
hangs ungraded
but you
little want-for-nothing,
you get pissed on and sneer
shine impossible in midas robes.

i cock a mongrel tongue
to the quick of it,
mollusced
methinks
c’mon, take this arsehole
out for a walk...

siofra thomas is a poet and a translator.

STEPHANIE YUE DUHEM

May You Live in Interesting Times

And the monkey’s paw curls
around mine.

I’m another monkey
pretender.

I’m a cloth mother
an LLM brain.

Monkeys paw me for love
but I only give them language.

Maneki-Neko

How to beckon the good:
Play Top 40 on the road.

Sing along.
Replace song

lyrics with “meow.” Beget
luck and money, little cat.

Stephanie Yue Duhem is a poet and essayist in Austin. Her debut poetry collection, CATACLYSM MOVES ME I REGRET TO SAY, is now available from House of Vlad Press. 

LEONORA DORA DONOVAN

The Pussy Gazette

Fourth floor suite in the downtown area. The doors, encrusted staccato marrow, and, inside them, bushed freely, all sorts creep crannies as each many planes for potential growth (like cells put away into slutty little dishes). The carpets are here sewn with ingrown legs and they are thorny soft like you wouldn’t believe. And, anyways, they’ve been stained with any new fluids of all kinds, developed and pumped around like water for those who drink it. The Pussy Gazette operates a slick, sickening suck void long for their way to get off here. For letting go, gender-antagonistic restrooms inspect genitals for their own inconclusive pleasure. No sooner are you in the room than a craned camera clamps down on whatever you’ve got on offer, like a kiss through a rubberized camera, like a kiss you’d give the world, like a sexuated goose chase for the fuck of it. And sometimes some articles do still flow through here from the press to paper-flavored condoms that you can read while you fuck, the story revealed and disappearing per gyration per attempt to tantalize the reader.

Leonora Dora Donovan is a decadent transsexual. You can find her work in emails to her friends.