‘Cause I am not this body
that imprisons me.
-The Mountains Goats, Isaiah 45:23
Cocaine aspect ratio move out I want to see it in full
lonely breakwater, lonely pebblebeach storming
over the underpass like a ghost of a girl knocked by
the wind, cocaine aspect ratio move in to see the detail
on your sullen face, the way your eyes move from
floor, to wall, to door, to garden, to windowpane Continue reading “The Only Trans Girl at the Party II by Alison Rumfitt”
I know you are tired of hearing me talk about my complexion. How I quiver when I flow out of my house with a tabula rasa and see skins recoil with revulsion. Some do it with fear, others point, ripple, and giggle and call me dirty, ugly, but quite pretty for my race. My face. My hair. Oh! She’s surprised that my dreads smell great. Who would ever have thought that anyone with dreadlocks could smell so nice! I know you are tired of hearing me talk about how the gatekeepers of this world have a different set of hoops set aside purposely for those packaged like me to leap through. How like the video games I play, there is always a higher hoop to scale, impossible levels to complete… so I can enter your countries, so I can enter your schools, so I can find love, so I can get a job, so I can dance like you. Continue reading “They Think Me Dirty by Mercy Ananeh-Frempong”
The olfactory bulb feeds directly into the limbic system, the seat of both long-term memory and the emotions. The results of smelling are processed here, and loaded with associations, before they even reach the upper cortex, where language is composed.
NOTES ON SCENT
Adam Jasper and Nadia Wagner Continue reading “The Unrecalled by Rita Hynes”
I stand in the shower and let the water pound against the knot in my neck until the spasm seems so strong I register pain before terror. Every possible nerve I can find rests against the jarring freeze of the granite. Water drenches my arms, face, and stretch-marked body – kissing parts of me I used to reserve for your masochistic ego. Continue reading “Translations of a Post-Apocalyptic Love by Jessica Ciccarelli”
Body a fragile thing
burgeoned by words Continue reading “When the Sickness is a Permanent Physical Thing by Gervanna Stephens”
A pair of paradox, or pandora’s box
We are forgotten yesterdays of tomorrow,
note-booked mementos on thighs time travelled,
back from the future, a few tsha-tsha with flashes
blackouts and gray-matter gashes,
the slurred dance of good memory,
crib-notes on collar-bones,
bare chest, a loose tie, knots, not around neck
formal education white suits, tucked-in remembering.
A formal date chasing me indoors.
chasing me into doors of consistent
nurturing nature of the neuro
doors on the right, left doubt in the cold.
A manner of hindsight sighs. Continue reading “Art + Poetry by nublaccsoul”
k23
when I was first introduced to the whole gender conundrum I tested whether or not I might be a boy by letting the end of my vibrator hang from my vagina and fill my panties with purple plastic. so similar. Continue reading “Two poems by Alexis Diano Sikorski”
1.
Out of all four seasons, summer is the least inviting to love. Continue reading “The Unforgiving Season by Paula Geanau”
Unlike Thinprep™, the small white brushes or ‘broom-heads’ associated with Surepath™ preparations just snap right off. They are made to just snap off. Insert the brush into the endocervical canal and rotate it five times in a clockwise direction. Then pull it out and snap it off. Simple. There’s no mystery. It sounds reckless? It isn’t reckless at all. The sole aim is to sample the squamous cells in the transformation zone for it is the cells of the transformation zone that are most in danger of becoming abnormal™. By snapping off the head of the brush inside the vial of ethanol-based preservative fluid there is zero chance of air-drying artefacts and you can be sure that the sample is 100% ‘there’ to be transported to the lab in the same vial. Continue reading “Girl at End at the Algorave by Richard Brammer”
1. The Kitchen
Dear Louise,
eight days and nights of the painbirds –
flapping and feeding and shitting voices into me.
I sit, or pace up and down stairs,
or try to lie down,
or hide,
crouching behind the Ikea clothes rail
in our bedroom. Continue reading “Number 18 by Paul Hawkins”
EXPOSURE
First responder histamine affects the top two
layers of skin, itch races up uncushioned nerves
like a house on fire: one that wants to unzip
its unfortunate human suit and go jump in a lake.
Science, for all its hypotheses, cannot explain Continue reading “Three poems by Betsy Housten”
Some years ago I wrote a draft on my left arm. An inarticulate tale. Scarry. A slasher script. Part-listless, part-restless. Preverbal. The script looked—and still looks—like tally marks. The kind of marks used to count ever since upper-paleolithic days. Tally marks to count days, for example. The days of a sentence.
Have you ever thought of your body as a prison cell? [Y/N] Continue reading “Some Body by Florence Lenaers”
Fear the Trees
There were figures in the night who blended with the trees & we could only see their eyes—every shade of violet. They moved when we did. They breathed when we breathed. It was impossible to tell how many surrounded us, or what they wanted. Or maybe they didn’t want. Or maybe they were the trees, just waking up.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 