My brother’s childhood room and mine connect through paired doors, at three different points. Walk out my room and and ten paces would take you to my brother’s door, next to the AC control, across from the panic button. We also shared a bathroom, each room opening onto the sinks where we would brush our hair, or teeth, or forget to, side by side. With both doors open, you could have seen from pillow to pillow if you tried hard. Continue reading “Dov Nelkin: 6 doors and One Slammed”
When
You wake
From sleep
You wake
From death
You know
The door opens to a married man, a single bed.
You’re not here, but your presence is everywhere. The bed is meticulous, signs you’ve been here are subtle, imagined, your outline dimpling the duvet, just a trace; Continue reading “Ben Gedaliah: Room 168, the Hotel S-“
Strange goings on today televisions walk in and out the door pills spew from the cat’s mouth
here take your medicine fox at the door yip yips pit bull chews a piece of Wonder Bread the skull
of a boar on the table the boy reaches through a hole in his bathroom floor the door is open the
window is open Continue reading “Rebecca Loudon: Portal”
From a jail in a far off island, boats arrive to
deport the sad. Grieving blood is tasty like the
legend of vanished rivers: an Acheron emptied
out by thirsty souls. Continue reading “Aditya Shankar: 2 poems”
Based in London, Konstantinos Papacharalampos (Greece, 1988) works in poetry, performance, installation and regeneration. After releasing K – On (ed. Entefktirio, 2011) his poems appeared in leading magazines in Greek and Russian and installed in situ in contemporary art festival Action Field Kodra. He then performed his second book Είναι/ Íne (ed. FRMK, 2015) in English (Velorose Gallery, London) and Greece (Lola Nikolaou Gallery, i.a.). Selected work was translated in German for Dichtung mit Biss (Freie Universität Berlin: ed. Romiosini/ CeMoG, 2018) and English for Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, UK, 2015). He holds a Diploma in Rural and Surveying Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and an MSc Real Estate from CASS Business School (London). In 2018 he released his new poetry book, 3: Ανθρώπων Ιστορία/ 3: Anthrópon Istoría (ed. Koukounari), the hybrid pop project about repetition of ego in social media. See more from Konstantinos in his website or contact him via email. Twitter: @Kon_Papach Continue reading “Konstantinos Papacharalampos: Hi, Passenger”
Between your [social] legs
Sometime in the past, B was born..
B breathes, welcoming the air external to the host person.
A: ‘What is between your legs, little one?’
B cries.
A: ‘Congratulations, it’s a.. >insert binary pronoun here< .’
B cries, again.
A: ‘What are you going to call >insert corresponding binary pronoun, here< ?’
Sometime later, after B has spent years experiencing on earth..
B: ‘I still breathe, and cry. The questioning human at my birth got the pronoun wrong. It was a mistake to think that my anatomy somehow directly corresponded to a distinctive set of social behaviours. Or, knowingly or unknowingly, any attempts to make that the case. Other determining factors which continue to make me me, were quite underestimated, overlooked or ignorantly bypassed. As were possibility and actuality.’
B Pauses.
B: ‘Yes, I have something between my legs, and person/human/homo sapien is my name’
A: ‘What is between your.. social.. legs, big one?’
B: ‘A variety of focal points for questioning. And I may not be one, but many. And why the assumption of ‘I’, anyway? But that’s for another time.’
A jar of paint-thick blood and mire
To wet an oxen’s head
A finger blackened by the fire
And pressed against the red.
A mask of white upon the fool
Who stares up from the feast
A couple fleeing with their mule
But cannot move the beast.
girls are silver
I was taught that
girls are silver smiles to be polished
laughter the sound of a fingerflickedagainst
a trophy ringing with emptiness.
I knew that I wasn’t
silver knew I was drinking from the depth
of starving wells knew that girls
like me
would
I want to be a Monstrous Woman
To speak out of turn
To take up space
To scandalise tabloid newspapers
I want to question authority
To win more fights than I lose
To take my fair share
And allow you to take yours too
I want never to apologise for myself again
Yellow Flower
Are you a girl
or a boy?
my nephew would ask me,
puzzled.
I’d smile and try not to answer
for as long as I could.
But he was so persistent, so
needy for reassurance.
My nephew is secure in his boyhood;
no questions, no blurriness
in his mind. He, him,
boy things, boy clothes
and books.
But me? An enigma, Continue reading “Poem, Writing & Art by Alix Hyde”
Sam Kaner is a visual artist and writer based in Nottingham, UK. Her work is rooted in the personal experience of social and political navigation as a depressed trans woman of colour.
Her work is documented on her website, www.samkaner.com, and on her Instagram account, @skamglamart.
Shapeshifter
I exist somewhere between `
a match and a flame,
a tear and the sea,
a handful of clay and a sculpted vase.
No other being determines or
influences which form I take,
which direction I follow,
which air I choose to breathe into my lungs.
Those who fear my state of being
fear the unknown,
the unsubscribed,
the undeclared.
And that which causes their unease is my strength.
disrobing
gender is the seam of ill-fitting pants
that, no matter how they are altered,
continue to give me a painful wedgie.
it is a pair of support tights,
that I’m required to wear beneath a skirt,
which gives me a miserable yeast infection.
the only relief is to remove the constraints
of gender entirely and allow myself
to breathe freely…
droplets of revolution
ideas require darkness and a steady drizzle to germinate. letters and syllables mingle. seeping layer by layer into the ground. entwine and thrive deep in the earth. forming stories which push their way up. they present themselves without shame. basking in sunlight. continuing to grow. shouting the brightness of their names. for as long as we tend to them…
rainseed I feed words to the cloud
The way we communicate, specifically with stories, is part of what makes us human. It’s how we know about our past, how we investigate and work through our present, and how we can contribute to the future. By writing our own narratives, we take control instead of allowing them to be written for us. As with growing plants, timing is important in the process of culminating and sharing our stories. This process is a way we can work through conflict and maintain the power of our identities—our resolution for revolution.
Robin Anna Smith (she/her) is a non-binary, disabled writer and visual artist, currently residing in Wilmington, Delaware. She primarily writes about personal experiences with trauma, loss, disability, mental health, and gender identity. She is a regular contributor at Rhythm & Bones Lit. Her work appears or is forthcoming in a variety of online and print journals internationally, and in Unsealing Our Secrets: A Short Poem Anthology About Sexual Abuse and You Are Not Your Rape Anthology.
More of her work can be found at her website robinannasmith.com and Twitter @robinannasmith.
Good golly miss Molly
Did you marry a man with a miner’s lamp and
No brolly?
Didn’t you know that the marriage bed came sprinkled with
Soot? Did he blind you
With a title, then tempt you with a butty?
How long did you keep that aspidistra flying?
Through the childbirth and the child death
And the end of the piano music
Pink is pretty and bravery blue (or so we’ve been told)
forgetting that once upon a time
Victorians held the opposite view-
so when will we stop
teaching young children
that pink, make up, Barbie dolls and dresses are for girls
whilst boys have blue, guns and action heroes?
When will it end?
Women raised to believe they need saving,
their short skirts sexualised from infancy,
infants expected to be raised by their mothers,
not fathers, these men taught to save everyone:
except for themselves.
Two sides, no in-between, began I don’t know when
No, no, you can’t confuse the ladies with the men
Each day the frame repeats
We’re told the story again
In silence and in actions, signs and words
These are the questions thou shalt not ask
These are the persons thou shalt not see
And these commandments are all we need
It’s dangerous
Beyond the gender lines
It all started when Harry had to move into the apartment.
The walls were white, and there were marks where the previous tenant had hung pictures. Harry went around the place, measuring these spaces. In a notepad, he wrote down numbers. He drew little diagrams.
Then he spent the next day in town. It was more difficult than he’d imagined, but he finally got everything he needed: seventeen pictures, each one corresponding to a white space on his walls. Harry didn’t care about the pictures – one was of a grinning cat in the rain, and Harry disliked cats – he just cared that they fitted the spaces.
He spent that evening drinking coffee and hanging the pictures, and eventually he lay down in bed.
The previous tenant had left the mattress, and although Harry was used to sleeping on the left, this mattress had an indentation on the right. Harry lay down in this exact spot. It was too small for him, but it felt safe, and in the morning when he woke he found he hadn’t moved. Continue reading “Someone Else and Harry by Jason Jackson”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 