From the Guest Editor

Why queer?

So there’s this excellent Queer sociologist who said somewhere, in some article about some GLBT organization, that our sexual and gender identities are the source of both our oppression and liberation.

(See what I did there? I used the “de-privileging of academia” as an excuse to be lazy and [...]

Crystal Boson

she’s a prayin’ kind

i am fifth in the line of twelve men prayin for the night to end
some can wrap a prayer in gravy and straight conversate His name
some marinate in ass sweat soaked up to the spine
some can dark the hell outta a church door
the eighth will get home [...]

Mike Buffalo

Excerpts from Mike Buffalo’s Kotton Kandy Klouds (Or The Consummation of Empire), A Restoration of Zachary German’s Novel Eat When You Feel Sad:

YEAR OF THE PIG (A SPECTRAL ANALYSIS OF THE DEEPDENE DIAMOND AFFAIR)

There is a small package on Lobert’s mailbox near the cafeteria. Lobert picks it [...]

Doug Paul Case

Already Sticky

Poundingkissingpumping, then
him trickling down my abdomen;
sun-sinking & sweaty, bracing
for my release. He waited
(his fours over mine)
but didn’t help. Touching?
He wouldn’t. He was new and I—

I was already sticky. He looked
down, into my eyes & believed
when I said I’m good. We towel-
wiped, but I showered when he left.

Bottom

That boy’s [...]

Elaine Castillo

Graphy, or The Girlhood of Achilles

Figure 1.

She spends the first year of her life being dipped into fire, or the River Styx.   Story as a wholeness or constancy has not been conceived.   Of seven brothers, she is the only one to survive the process.   Her father, who [...]

Abhishek Chaudhary

MY MOTHER’S BRA

For my mother, her bra is just another piece of clothing. For me, it is a magical potion. My mother isn’t proud of her body at all. Specifically, she detests her breasts, and I smell that from the way she treats them. Whenever I open her lingerie drawer [...]

Dennis Cooper

KINDERTOTENLIEDER 1

How cool would it have been to live back when the wind and birds and avalanches sounded like Black Sabbath, and killing gave people these huge fucking hard-ons?   You’d be so dead.

If death is like a million miles of this then pick up that rock over there and [...]

Sarah Einstein

FAT

Neil and I rented a side bedroom from his brother’s girlfriend for fifty dollars a month.     We called it our afternoon home—it was where we lived between the end of my school day and my ten o’clock curfew.   I was a junior in high school, [...]

Ben Engel

IN THE FOREST

A yellow leaf hits my knuckles. I grip the tree. The old man behind me breathes on my scalp. I hear cars driving over the hill, past this picnic area, toward small-town Crabapple. I dig into his thrusts. He calls me “son,” “his boy,” even though I’ve [...]

Holly Jensen

Sugar The Tiger
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I told him not to worry, that my favorite word is dyke, and my second favorite word is cunt. I told him that I left the army on good terms, considering, although I didn’t tell him considering what. And anyway, I figure Boxer hired me [...]

Adam Jest

Brought Forth for the Full Significance of the Psychonervous Life

Casper brought forth inversion on an assured scientific standpoint, yet he condemns all sexuality, which requires for its manifestations some vice or insanity.

Is no doubt. Is solely because. Is sexual inversion. Is an abnormality, is thus a narrower term. Is extremely [...]

Tim Jones-Yelvington

Meat from a Hunter Woman

After Lindsay Hunter

I want Lindsay Hunter to hump me nude. I want her tits to brush my teeth with my eyes wide open. I’m a faggot can appreciate an ample bosom, cause tits is like asses with the cheeks up front. I want Lindsay Hunter [...]

M. Kitchell

LOOP
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Darkness, night time, the woods, surrounding, movement in bushes, trees, the moon’s highlight, a hum of air, thick fog, clear skies, a bite of crunched sticks, leaves, the weather surrounds, late-fall, no path, forward momentum. The edge of the forest, an empty alley, an open door, [...]

Rickey Laurentiis

(This poem was originally printed in the final issue of Ganymede, a tribute to the late editor John Stahle).

Mood Indigo

New Orleans, Louisiana
August, 2005

1.

How is it out? Is, from the sky,
water still coming?

Are trees out? Do you hear
their argument? Do you know

it for an argument: how to manage
(they are yelling) [...]

Paul Lomax

Engaging Screensavers

To preserve the poet’s original intent, this work is available for your reading pleasure as a PDF.

Dennis Mahagin

Seven Dwarves And Their Seasonal Affective, Intimacy, Grandeur-Cum-Dependency Issues

Dirge For Happy

Happy?

Why,

with his little half-pint heart
on sleeve—he lived mainly for Art
and Laughter, yet couldn’t believe
when the babes he pined after
shined him on, saying
all they ever wanted
was to be his

Friend. : (

So he began a spitefully torrid bisexual affair
with a Jewish [...]

Robert McDonald

The Dorothy Allison Poem

For I shall praise Dorothy Allison

For Dorothy Allison is fearless and angry, the pull of that anger, the pull and the fire

For I do not like to be angry and I am most often afraid

For while Dorothy Allison’s anger could plow down a mountain, Dorothy Allison’s [...]

Christopher Phelps

An Ouroboros
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Together, n queer men can form an ouroboros.

Cases

n>2:

More common in cities. A segmented circle of feedback: a circuit so excited it shorts, but no one is

shorted. Everyone desires the milk of his fellow man, and everyone shares his own. A model of

queer utopia not yet established.

n=2:

Also [...]

Sofia Rhei transl. by Lawrence Schimel

Cenicienta
listen to this fairy tale

La puerta del aseo está llena de inscripciones amorosas. Si no me
hubiera entretenido leyéndolas, no habría oído cómo alguien entraba en
el cubículo contiguo y se masturbaba lentamente, susurrando, entre
jadeos, un nombre muy poco frecuente: el mío.

Tan sólo pude ver sus extraños zapatos, ya que se fue [...]

Maureen Seaton

When I Was Bi(nary)
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I contrasted nicely with unary,
ternary, quarternary, and so on.
In this way, I functioned hypothetically

and trouble-free as a pair of   bosons,
which, we know, will happily occupy
one quantum state, unlike two fermions.

Explosive, I fissioned and coded. My
planetary bodies orbited themselves
like a bi-asteroid, a bi-star (blue/white),

bi-nomials, [...]

Kevin Simmonds

Barnes and Noble
listen to this poem

Widening my aperture for Ai
(It’s what you want. If you didn’t/you wouldn’t
beg to be poured into my mouth)
I’m distracted by a young Asian squatting
in front of the philosophy section

Even if I get
that cabin by the creek patient dog at my feet
while I write my [...]

Rachel Swirsky

This story also appears in Swirsky’s collection, “Through the Drowsy Dark,” published by Aqueduct Press.

Defiled Imagination

“Would you kiss a dead dog?” asked Jordan.

He concentrated on my eyes to see if I’d flinch. I’d lose if I showed that I was grossed out. It would be conceding [...]

Simon Sylvester

Boys

The breeze plays patterns with the curtain, shifting it aside and letting in the sunlight, drifting flat against the sill. The boys sit and sweat. Mid-afternoon, and the room is tired and tanned as all of August. School’s out for summer. School’s out forever. We don’t need no education.

“I’m bored.”

“You [...]

Andrew Tibbetts

Gifted

How long was I in the cardboard box? Hours? Surely not days? I was sore, hungry and, with mounting bladder pressure, worried. I occupied my mind by writing a poem about Soren Kierkegaard, who surely had it worse, until I heard ripping.

That’s wrapping paper, I thought. I’m being opened. Honeyed [...]

Julie Marie Wade

The Storm

All day it has been raining,
and all day this poem has been sinking
into my skin like sticky blossoms.
The sky a grey-blue bucket,
heavy and tarnished to its rims with
copper lightning—shaking, rumbling,
this rain I have carried in ruddy pails
from far north to the sun-thick South.

The earth is splitting at its seams,
goldenrod [...]

Robert Warwick

And The Sea Keeps Its Fabulous Shadows

There isn’t anything we can do from here.   They are too far out, mere dark dots on the bright brimming water, water as white, as gray and dark, as the clouds over it.

“Must be cold,” I say.   Curt is watching them, holding [...]

Robert Alan Wendeborn

listen to this poem
Use Your Lips And Teeth

This didn’t start with casual sex
it was just a moment in a long string of moments that will end in our death
I gave you my scarf because I wanted it back
Worrying is the last thing on my mind because you’ll be on your [...]

B.G. Will

Room For Two

Son of a bastard-bitch! I am trying to do homework! I really am.

But images, images won’t leave me the hell alone: Erika, when I was gripping her thighs, mouth working between her legs—her grinding, bucking up, begging me to fuck her—her words, not mine: “Fuck me, fuck me!” [...]