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”
During my tenure as BHP’s Guest Editor in March 2018, I was lucky enough to publish many gifted writers. One of these was Kate Dlugosz, whose mythic poetry stayed with me long after my editorship was over. Earlier this month I invited her back onto Burning House Press for a gothic Halloween special. She agreed. Take note, this interview is merely masquerading as an interview. What follows is a gorgeous helping of dark prose poetry for those of us who have October in our bones. Enjoy! —Amee Nassrene Broumand
In your poem “Springtime,” you write: “If nothing else, I know owls come from flowers.” Tell us some more origin stories. Where do bats come from?
Bats come from song, as the shape of music from the cords formed of autumn constellations played by the wind upon the harp of the waning crescent moon. It is from the stars and the moon that the bat took flight from the night sky, the space between the stars where they learned to see by shape. And released by moonlight, through the darkened canopies of wine-red treetops they fly as hordes of poppy seeds, scattering over the moon as grey clouds, and the world below them becomes strange and wild and unknown in the dark. The bats echolocate the moths and the beetles in the night, and in the blindness of their own vision seeing with clarity the worlds of ghosts and spirits that pass over our own. You feel the first chill of autumn is the hiss of the bat as it grazes your neck. At times the bats hang down from the banisters of old barns, the wooden planks slicing the moon to shreds like a white moth between their fangs. And sometimes they sleep hanging from the limbs of oak trees by their claws before taking flight into purple dusk in search of blood, the moths and monsters prowling under moonlight. Bats suck the red from apples and rosehips and would consume the sun if they could sink their teeth into flame. Should you stare into the vast night sky on a clear autumn night, you are stargazing through the blackness of their wings. Continue reading “The Wolves Ripen: A Gothic Halloween Interview with Poet Kate Dlugosz”
It’s a bad habit I picked up
when still living out my pack of lies
& can’t quite shake
attention like a drug
I keep shooting
down the highways of my wanting veins
exposing myself to men
like a circus curiosity
the Amazing Chick with a Dick Continue reading “Confessional by Meeah Williams”
Emma Miles is a English graduate and writer, with a particular interest in typography and all things experimental. Most commonly found pretending to be other people.
we, the children of this revolution
who came to it all from fields afar
not born beneath a dissident star
of parents dressed in shades of green
but found we belonged only in between
and here we stand, and here we’ll fall
and we’ll die together
or not at all
we, the children of this revolution
who carry our books instead of swords
who taught ourselves, despite it all
who search for truth wherever it lies
and see the world through suspicious eyes
here we stand, and here we’ll fall
and we’ll die together
or not at all
Continue reading “Children of the Revolution by Emma Ireland”
it won’t do,
grandmother said,
to show bare legs.
you need smoothness
and muscle tone—
not to mention the
barrier between
the hands of men
or even their eyes
and your flesh.
no silk to be had,
and there’s a war,
by the way.
but, still—
the illusion must
remain intact,
nothing’s changed!
When she speaks, the penny bomb drops,
When she decides to say #MeToo #TimesUp
When she remembers, but doesn’t voice it out loud,
When the Ace woman speaks and says ‘Don’t touch me there’,
When the Bi woman speaks and says ‘Actually I’m happily married’,
When the drag queen speaks and says ‘stop bothering me’
It isn’t a challenge, a threat to your identity,
She’s telling you her boundaries.
They are not up for negotiation,
negation, conquering, obliteration,
her body is not your inclusive space.
She doesn’t need your arrogant attempt at re-education.
When she speaks, the penny bomb drops.
puckered tight,
disapproving lips,
where threads have
pulled and gathered
red and white gingham
checks across a chest
that doesn’t know how
to expand, just yet.
tennis shoes tied
in double knots,
sun licking pavement
until it is gooey,
spongy with heat. Continue reading “S(mocked) by Juliette van der Molen”
I am a straight ally.
And I choose to make an oath to all that choose to hear it
I will defend the different dissonance, I will stand with
those told who to love and when to love and how to love
those told that they cannot have.
Those told that they are somehow lesser, that being gay is a joke
That being Trans* is just convenient cover for a pervert
Those told that simply being anything other than straight is not normal, Is deviant, is ‘other’
I make this oath because of the things I see
I see forty-nine threads cut short, I see the right to pee safely being ruled by fear
I see the rules of divorce still governed by straight law
I see secure employment being based on your sexual orientation
I see religion twisted into hate, I see corrective rape, I see murder
I see you, queer girl, your slip shed soul constantly bruised from unwanted advances
When a man reeking of arrogance says,
“You’ve never had a real man, bet I’ll give you a good fuck”
Continue reading “A Song From a Straight Ally by Suzanne Fraser-Martin”
I have ten minutes here,
Less than ten in this press of people, before I go through those gates
to tell you that, Berlin was beautiful, a free celebration of all love
The Self-Owners, The Island, The Girlfriend, The Schwanenberg.
Then under the strict shadow of a worded paragraph I am now a number
Scratched into my skin, my name pressed into records,
between pages and pages of names.
Before Berlin was lights and love and music, gay bars and open study
Here is mud obscuring my identity,
photographed from three angles,
in grim stripes and triangles
we become homogeneous herd, corralled into camps.
oh 200 grams of you
today they told me you will be a woman
a girl, a girl
we are having a baby girl
I will be a father
and with this great news
I’m hurt by the privilege
that exists
that continues existing
that besides all of the battles
will exist when you are born
remember
you don’t have to be a princess
or wear pink
(unless that be your desire)
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 