CROSSES

Coming soon in Garland

Backseat, bedside, Ramona visits when nobody else can catch her haunting me. Pink knees cooling on the bathroom tile, I turn from sour tendrils of vomit and toilet water and seek her shadow behind the shower curtain to find how often I’m alone.

To replace one binged chocolate cake, open the oven so the ghost slithers through your legs, then preheat to 375.

It’s tomorrow, and neither partner has hinted birthday plans. Will they collaborate, compete for star baker? A year into dating, no amount of quality time, words of affirmation, or physical touch seem to alleviate the psychic damage of me proposing we live together. The monthly potluck, one profound threesome, one awkward threesome—nothing proves scarier than trying a thing like family.

On all fours, Ramona doodles a pink pool under the kitchen table. I shoot her and caption the arch of sunlight and rainbow to my boyfriend: “When a ghost swallows your soul: A) You become the ghost, B) They become you, C) Consult your psychiatrist for exorcism, or D) All of the above dwellers are ghosts?”

HUNGER STRUCK

Read “Hunger Struck” in Apogee

When my partners refuse to share the number of post likes, I try to explain how U-locking my appendages to a Jefferson City bench to waste away on the capitol steps seemed too dramatic, even for me, reminding them I might be the only queer who hates camping. I know suicide isn’t funny, but I want to hear my partners laugh, not because existence is a mirage, a waste of good tears, but because it’s not.

Lighteaters

Read “Lighteaters” in Black Warrior Review

My counselor talking me through the divorce-transition can’t say, “You have an eating disorder.” “Your experience of disordered eating …” she starts, and her gracious strings of language between the light and me doesn’t change a damn thing.

This Ring I (Opal) & EX

Read “this ring i (opal)“ and “Ex” in manywor(l)ds :: place

Remember the time
we tossed our bloody
knives into the lake     held
our breaths until
the waves parted         Me neither

Gray Rainbow

Read “Gray Rainbow” in Split Lip Magazine

“I could eat,” he says. “You?”

I’m OK if he eats me. I’m starving for relief from dysphoria, or I hate my body. I believe the difference matters. What does a trachea weigh, testicles, a few millimeters of bone?

Jake asks about my other partners. Might he run into us at Pride? “My wife is bisexual, and my kid recently came out. She’s trans.”

“Congrats.” What else to say—him fucking trans women will be great for his daughter’s self-esteem?

Like Mother

Read “Like Mother” in Gulf Coast

A broken beer bottle waits at my guts. “I can’t go on,” says my first girlfriend. Her head is a red balloon. She’s going to kill me, then herself. Cancer stole her mother, and at fifteen, promises are cold stones.

 Some days, I struggle to carry mine for the woman in the mirror—the daughter who mutilated a perfect son, Mom’s great loss.

 Time can mean grace for survivors of sharp ends. Like, how one afternoon, god meant finding your eyes. I’m trying to say thank you for teaching me how to quit arching away from the glass, how to lean in.

TRANS MAGIC

Read “Trans Magic” in bedfellows

Something about mirror neurons, Ramachandran, phantom
limbs. They kiss my smile lines, thumb my temples. Poof—
the cock is Beth’s. I ask to be fucked, Please, sir. No, I won’t
reveal the trick. Tattooed shoulders in a tight muscle T, Beth
enters me with gender affirming care. My first time T4T,
they know what I need. I know how it feels: Beth is in me,
takes my breath. I open. To the edge

B-ing

Read “B-ing” in Strange Horizons

We leave messages for each other: amateur theories, emotional support, makeup tips. One user insists we’re casualties of a military-big pharma collab. “So you’re stopping?” another asks, ending the thread. Another user plans to ignore the doctors’ warnings and “fold”—meet their past self to alter their personal history. They believe their biological present will reattach to the Central Timeline, a chance at normal. We wish them, “Good travel.”

“You willing to risk that?” Ro says, not saying no.

RP

Order to read “RP” in Witch Craft Magazine

Hello?? my sister tries, calling a name—for a person that isn’t me.

What If

Read “What If I Am Here: (Non)Fiction & (Trans)Reality” in beestung special issue: Trans Is The Future. The Future Is Trans.

When late queer friends share childhood memories, I hear our interpretive chorus, “I was so trans,” “I was so gay,” “I was so …” I sense the insistence of a through line, the truth of latent queerness, maybe led by a cultural bias toward a consistent (monolithic?) identity for historicity and/or to conform to expectations (either/or?) to claim Realness. I sense my interpretation of that interpretation is opened by my bias toward polyvocality. I sense we tell stories to shape our realities that shape stories that tell our realities to shape stories …

UNTIL AFTER

Read “Until After” in Passages North

You and I spend the night together from junior high into our twenties. Best friends and bandmates, we share a bed. When our families joke their boys are dating, we laugh shyly. We have no words for winter nights, me stripped to my underwear and you—my big spoon, my fire. No words for how I moved into you, the goosebumps, the girl I was.

Did you see her? Did you love her? Even now, I can’t hear you.

Shooter

Read “Shooter” in Gertrude

Sometimes to break the surface means breath. I plunge a 1.5-inch needle into my ass and shoot Depo-Estradiol because I love me, the woman in the mirror, rising.

Disassociation is a common pre-transition symptom, I’ve learned.

Facing the camera for my first HRT anniversary selfie, I’m grateful for the light in my eyes, something like a soul. Did I die that day of the confrontation, and this is the afterlife? Yes, in his story. I’m writing to tell you I made it out alive.

Myth Fest

Read “Myth Fest” in Peach Mag

The land art is closed. Our stay’s “bohemian” “nomadic” “tepees” are gross. Marfa’s best burrito is OK.

The desert is a waking dream. Smoky purple mountains, chaparral breeze, 5/5 sky.

 Barb uses Dad’s “purity knife” to micro dose mushrooms. She loves herself. “Ever since the divorce, Dad bitches about me eating pasta like his dissatisfaction is my responsibility.”

I agree our bodies owe no man explanation.

Barb sees the ghost of her dead brother, deletes. She continues about our future apartment. “Between our ’rents and Austin rent, what’s worse?”

“It’s intersectional,” I say. “Everything’s worse.”

Bugs

Read “Bugs” in [PANK]

Half the time, the Senator goes soft.

“My big boy,” he breathes on my body. We’re in the parking lot in his Escalade. The backseat’s leather squeaks under my knees.

“Too risky,” he says about his place. I ask again to hear our shame echo.

A Chinese herbalist cured his stage four cancer with daikon radish. In his new life, the Senator fucks muscly young men while his wife jet sets. He squeezes my pecs like ripe grapefruit. I close my eyes, and I’m her. The calm is the scary part.

“So strong,” he says.

The first time, I thanked him.

<3

Read “<3” in Hobart

“I don’t want you to see me as a broken thing,” I say.

We have the talk. Our consolations are so familiar that we stop. We’re someone else we loved. We don’t take the parallel selves vibe personally.

“We’re another chance to get it right,” I say.

“What if there is no end?” you say.

We touch foreheads. Fools, we leave our eyes open. You see me, and I see you, giant and uneven, blinking and gazing, here and there, monstrously human.

Boys & This ring I (fire)

Read “Boys” & “this ring I (fire)” in Be About It Zine

this is becoming

ladylike

to shove

a straight-legged

xenomorph

screaming out

an airlock

Kill Yr Idols

Read “Kill Yr Idols” in Anomaly #29

“What will your parents say?”

I’m eighteen, writing in a notebook about hackers in a queer love triangle overthrowing an oppressive oligarchy. The story is fiction.

My best friend strokes my thigh with the backs of his fingers to comfort me or himself. We’re supposed to dorm in the fall. I won’t, and our relationship will splinter.

“I need to write,” I say. It seems simple. My life will be fiction.

Resting His Eyes

Read "Resting His Eyes" in Entropy Magazine

The one movie I couldn’t explain away was Day of the Dead. Remnants of a military unit survive in an underground base. The last doctor on Earth experiments on a corral of zombies in hopes of discovering a cure. The best the doctor can do is turn one into a pet, which later—you guessed it—kills him. The movie is slow, long, poorly lit, with sparse dialogue. There is very little threat throughout. The soldiers are otherwise perfectly safe from the horrors above, yet they’ll never leave. In gray bunkers surrounded by several rings of fence, in a hell they cannot escape, they are away from the world, isolated, trapped. This made theirs more frightening than the world outside, teeming with undead.

My grandpa and me, we watched this movie many times.

In the goriest scene, zombies rip the doctor in half. They dig into his guts like children scooping handfuls of sand, and then pull. He is a bad man, yet the scene is terrifying.

I look to Joe for a punchline, a justification, a way of seeing that doesn’t make me want to scream.

He’s on his back in the armchair, resting his eyes.

Trophies

Read "Trophies" in Bull: Men's Fiction

 The gentleman nodded at the bartender, who took up Curly’s drink. When Curly sat up to tell them where to go, the older gentleman blew at his chest as if he were a candle’s flame. Curly looked down to see if the man had spit on him or something. His eyes must’ve screwed up because he tumbled out of the saddle and spilled onto the floor. If he’d hit his head, he didn’t feel it. The older gentleman held out his hand to help him stand, as if they were going to be friends after that.

“I’ll do it my damn self,” Curly said.

The older gentleman crossed his arms, silver mustache a stiff line, immovable, a dare.

Curly climbed the leather stirrups. He pulled at the horn of the saddle, found his feet.

“You see?”

The older gentleman gave three slow claps. Curly wanted to hit him.

Behind the man, the family huddled in their corner. The stragglers, just shadows, shuffled near the door. The bartender disappeared calmly in back. No one was on Curly’s side, except the bear. The beast leered behind the glass.