Beyond Queer Words 2020 - A Collection of Short Stories by Beyond Words Literary Magazine

Beyond Queer Words

Beyond Queer Words A Collection of Short Stories Including an introduction by Dylan Ward Editor: Gal Slonim Editorial Board: Dean Drinkel, Nicholas Higginson First Printing, July 2020 Copyright © Beyond Words Publishing House ISBN 978-3-948977-00-9

Front cover artwork by Tomislav Šilipetar. Salut. Tomislav was born in Zagreb. In 2014 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of Igor Rončević-Painting Department. He had a number of solo exhibitions in Croatia as well as in other countries. The paintings are mostly made in acrylic, and the themes vary from solitude and isolation to the very existence of human in a condemning society. In 2016 he gained the status of an independent artist.

Back cover artwork by Tony Murray. LGBT Sculpture. Tony is a self-taught artist. His work has been in over 75 nationwide and regional juried art shows and exhibits. His works begin with a title or a word and then he creates that vision into captivating verisimilitude while informing otherworldliness. The Founders Ball at the Brooklyn Community Pride Center was a fundraising event which included a silent auction. Tony decided to create this sculpture as part of that fundraiser. He did not have a lot of time to create it and even his pictures of the piece were rushed so he could ship it in time. The piece is made from Aluminum, Copper and Plexiglass. It represents a coming together of singular entities to form a prism of color. None of Tony’s sculptures are welded or soldered but rather they are precision machined and fit together, think Legos on steroids, this allows the use of non-homogenous materials and found objects.

Beyond Queer Words

Table of Contents 7 10 13 18 22 26 31 38 44 50 57 67 70 72 74 79 89 99 103 107 116

Tahnee Jones Still Queer artwork by Grace Plimpton-Sims Renee Boyer Finding Zak artwork by Nisha Patel Liza Rose The Line artwork by Betsy Jenifer Rebecca Portela Damaged Goods artwork by Harri Aburrow-Newman J. R. Jamison Saint Jerome and the Ghosts of My Past artwork by Anna Ryabtsov Alex Pieroni Alexander (The Great) artwork by Kateryna Bortsova Philip Harris Scar artwork by Vicente Ortiz Cortez Luke Markinson Beyond White artwork by Emily Iris Degn Brian Sheridan Broken Clocks artwork by Caroline Meehan Donovan Bridgeman Eric artwork by Sandeep Shete Frank DiPalermo The Friendship Gallery artwork by Timothy Phillips James Evan Burroughs The Diamond artwork by Annie Dawid Erin MacKenzie Sweet Summer Songs artwork by Cassandra Hamilton D. S. Davis Soft Lips artwork by Oliver Bliss Erin Riley The moments in which I love you artwork by Eliot Claire Jeremy Schnotala Sand Angels artwork by Van Lanigh Michael Handrick The Ones That Got Away artwork by John Waiblinger Paulina Pinsky 27B artwork by Jordan Mejias Thomas McLean Laws of Attraction artwork by Mackenzie Thorpe Phong Huynh The Canyon artwork by Trevor Eichenberger Dean Drinkel Thalassa artwork by Alahna AlvĂŠ

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Beyond Queer Words

Introduction When I was young, it was stories that allowed me to explore and make sense of the world. I grew up in a family of readers, teachers, and professors. My parents encouraged this habit of reading, and we visited the library often. I was always shy and a bit of a loner. I’d get lost in the stories I read, curled up on a couch somewhere and immersed into whatever fictional world I was reading about. My taste in genres was eclectic. Usually, the bigger the book –– the more attractive it was, and I’d likely be reading it. At some point I discovered short stories. While novels were easy for me to understand and absorb, the short story was a curious thing to me. For a long time I avoided them. There was an otherness to them that I didn’t understand. They felt somehow alien compared to the familiarity of the novel. I wondered how anyone could write something so complete in so few words, that would give the reader just the same satisfaction. I was genuinely surprised to learn that this was possible and short stories could hold the same breadth and power. Short stories encapsulate moments in time. They concentrate on specific human escapades that can make us laugh or cry or even gasp. They can be written in just about any genre and any subject. A short story might let you glimpse the complex, private thoughts of an unhappy couple. It might haunt you with the aftermath of a plague. It might invite you into the bedroom to experience a frenzied passionate night between two strangers. It might leave you in awe at a city with floating icebergs. It might hurt you with the lamentations of the elderly and loss. It might spellbind you with the tender kiss of a first love. When my family moved south to what is generally known as the Bible Belt, I was thirteen and on the verge of discovering my identity and sexuality. It was around that time I discovered

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Beyond Queer Words

queer short stories. I don’t remember how I did, but I found them amid the shelves of books in the library and I stole away to a quiet corner to read them. They felt bold and dangerous, but also strangely freeing. I knew there was something special about those stories. Flushed, I relished at the chance to peek into the varied, private lives of men who loved men and felt the same feelings I felt. Through those stories, I began to understand a little of my differences and desires, especially since I couldn’t quite articulate into words yet what it all meant. Growing up as the son of a minister, I discovered myself at a strange time. There was still a great fear and stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS. We were years away from any conception of legalized gay marriage. The Internet was just being born into the world. Our government struggled with allowing gays in the military. I existed in my own small world sphere where I could read queer stories and dream of what the future may hold. I held an internal struggle with religion while eagerly exploring being gay and my attraction to boys. The controversy over a new gay nightclub opening in my hometown and news of parades excited me beyond measure. I longed to be in that world circle. It was those few queer short stories that helped. They were the thread that connected me and allowed some small measure to be part of that community I desired. June is designated as Pride month, so it seems right that we should celebrate the stories and writers within the pages of this new anthology. Some of us are fierce advocates, while others live quieter lives like me. I’ve celebrated Pride in my own way over the years with my husband and now with our adopted son. It always feels good to know that we share a kinship in our celebration. Though our youth today has more support than many of us my age and older ever did, it is not perfect. We still face discrimination and struggle with acceptance. For decades, we’ve existed in shadows and searched through the darkness to bring a light to our voices and our lives. We’ve lost giants of the early days of the gay

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Beyond Queer Words

rights movement while welcoming new generations into the fold as we continuously define and advocate for our diversity. We need queer writers today more than ever. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s possible to have too many or enough queer writers. And we need to celebrate them in every way possible. It is through our stories, that we can share our personal experiences and form a collective experience. We should allow queer writers to share small truths of themselves through the power of story, where they initiate intimate conversations with readers. The writers in this anthology now add to the many voices over the years that have helped shape our queer culture. Together, we can share our diversity louder, seen and heard! Dylan Dylan Ward is an American writer with work in print and online, including One Person's Trash, Silver Birch Press, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and Split Rock Review. He's also a reader for Flash Fiction Magazine. He lives and writes in North Carolina.

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Beyond Queer Words

Still Queer Tahnee Jones She’s been with him for three years, which means it’s been three years since she was with a woman. He’s sleeping now, snoring lightly. She runs her fingers over his back. She likes how broad it is. She likes the hair. It is a masculine back, and she loves its masculinity. But she loved her back too. Her back was brown, and soft, and smaller than her own. When she ran her hands over her back, it was arousing to think that there were two small breasts on the other side of it. That if she reached across and over the side, she would brush against one of them. Her hair was sandy-coloured, highlighted. They always pulled their hair back into buns so it didn’t get in their mouths when they made love. It was novel, in the beginning, to be with someone more petite than she was, and it first it made her feel huge. Frumpy, and unfeminine, as if the presence of another woman in her bed had somehow transformed her into a man. But she settled into it. She loved the feel of her small, curvy body, how she could encase it in her own, and how they were not Big Spoon and Little Spoon but just two spoons, equal, partnered, with no assumptions, no defaults, and everything to be negotiated. She still misses the feel of breasts. She still misses the depth of their conversations. Women, and her in particular, have a way of knowing her that men can not. Or do not. Women look deeper because they are curious. Women want to know her. Men want to be loved by her. She loves them both. One time, she watched a movie with her, in which a bi-curious woman found her way back to a heterosexual relationship with a man. It upsets her. “The woman always goes back to being straight,” she says. “In film, the relationship with a woman is just a fantasy, for the man.” She doesn’t know what to say in response, so she just watches the screen. ****** When they break up, she still wants to know her. But she wants to cut contact. She wants to be friends.

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Artwork: Receptivity by Grace Plimpton-Sims. Grace is a queer artist based in NYC with a huge heart for inclusivity. Her work focuses on connection and evolution of self.

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Beyond Queer Words

She says she can’t. She says she just fell out of love. She says that she hasn’t accepted being in a lesbian relationship, and she says it isn’t true, and almost a year goes by before she realises that she was right all along. Because she had accepted her attraction to women, and accepted the idea of dating a woman, but she was not yet able to comprehend the idea that she was falling in love with one, and that a woman might actually end up being the one. And by the time she figures it out, it’s too late. She is married now, to a woman they knew. She has twin babies. And she loves a man. Years ago, she told her friends she was bisexual, and they met her and accepted her. But now she is dating him and she feels them forgetting. To them, she has gone “back” to heterosexuality. But to her … what? Can she still be queer if she is dating a man? She assumed so, but each year, it feels like heteronormality is growing around her, a garden of traditional gender roles, blocking out the sun and obscuring her from view. His family don’t know she is bisexual. He says they don’t need to know her sexual history, and she concedes it doesn’t seem important for them to know. Except, it does. She has queer friends and is in queer groups, but sometimes she feels like she doesn’t belong there. How dare she talk about queer struggles, when she is dating a man. How dare she go “back”. There are fewer and fewer opportunities for her to express her queerness. People that meet her now assume she is straight. “I’m bisexual,” she blurts out, to a friend of his, at a party. It’s not appropriate. But if she doesn’t blurt, then what is left? Is she bisexual in anything other than the porn she chooses? She runs her fingers over his hair and he stirs in his sleep. He is one of the great loves of her life, and she wouldn’t change him. She just wishes she could have him, without the lifetime of assumptions that will come with spending her life with him. “I’m still queer,” she says, into the void. Even if no-one is there to hear it. Tahnee Jones is a teacher and writer, living in Melbourne, Australia. She has written and produced plays including, 'Where We Were When Norm Died', and 'Humanity in Confined Spaces'. This is her first published short story.

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Finding Zak Renee Boyer I see you in a duck-ripple on the lake, the one that sits in the park I cut through to get to school. I stop to look, and you’re there. In the curve of an eyebrow, the shadow of a jawline, the arch of a cheekbone. You’re deep inside my eyes. I gave you a name last week. Zak. The Z buzzes in my mouth, like the almost-silent growl of a cornered dog. The a is short and sharp. The k’s a slap. I practise saying it when no-one’s listening. Zak. Zzzzzzzakkkk. It feels good as I roll it around my teeth. The end of it clicks in my mouth, into place, settles around me like armour. You grow more solid with every repetition. When the surface of the water stills, you disappear and I come back. But I don’t want to look at me. I’m wearing the ‘me’ costume to school, like always. Stupid grey skirt, blue blouse, mascara, ponytail. But you’re still there in my eyelid flickers, and in the shadows that dance along the cobbled path. Sculpted in the bittersweet cloud Betsy Myers blows at me from behind the smoking tree, on the edge of the park nearest school. “Dyke,” she hisses, and I smile as I walk past because she thinks she has me figured out but she hasn’t. She doesn’t know about you. Not yet. ****** Tonight is Edward Baker’s party. I’ve been invited (because he’s got a thing for my friend Lena), but I’m not going to go. You are. I count my dollars on the bus to town after school, and I think it’ll be enough to find you. ****** Edward Baker’s place is on the flash side of the park. You’re sitting on a fancy park bench, staring at his house. On Regent Street the houses march along, tall and straight like the Queen’s Guard. The matching squares of lawn are a uniform shade of green. No tendrils of kikuyu bleeding onto the footpath like where you live. You wonder if any of the houses would rather be on a street with lower expectations. Somewhere they could settle down onto their foundations, patch the lawn with vegetables, and let their paint peel a little.

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Artwork: Crown of Thorns by Nisha Patel. Nisha is an award-winning queer poet and artist. She is the City of Edmontonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Poet Laureate, and the Canadian Individual Slam Champion. Her debut collection is forthcoming with Newest Press. Nisha works to further her goal of building a stronger artistic community through living in her truth.

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Right now, there are people spilling out the front door like ants startled from their nest. You sit a little straighter, not sure whether to hope you’re seen, or not. Someone peels away from the pack and lopes across the street. It’s Edward Baker. Shit. Edward peers at you through the street-lit haze. “Um, Elyse? Is that you?” You can see his wide eyes taking in your close-cropped hair, flattened chest, lumberjack tartan shirt, black pants, boots. You can’t quite read the expression in the lines of his face. You take a deep breath. “No,” you say. “Actually it’s Zak.” “Oh,” Edward Baker replies. “So, are you… I mean, you’re…” He stops. Your heart pounds. And then he holds out his hand to pull you up. “Cool. So, are you coming in, Zak?” And you are. And I am. Zak. Renee Boyer is a communications professional by day, creative writer by night (and sometimes lunchtime). She lives in Raglan, New Zealand with her 11-year-old son, and is currently completing a Master of Professional Writing at the University of Waikato.

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Beyond Queer Words

The Line Liza Rose Knees pulled to chest. Head nestled between shaking hands. The sound of my own breath, my own thoughts, frightens me — my mother’s face permanently in my mind like an image burned into a screen — I wonder if she still loves me — I can still hear the party going on outside — My father’s brother, who I never met, in my thoughts all the time — I wonder if my sister’s children will meet me someday — Veronica, why are you crying so much? Stop crying stop crying stop crying. In this closet, in this closing-in space amongst the tossed shoes and fallen jackets, I am safe. ****** “I’ve had to pee for like two hours,” the dark-haired girl said, “but they kept playing really, really great songs — I couldn’t leave!” “So, what song got you off the floor?” I asked. “Shit, I don’t remember!” she laughed. I laughed too, not because I was too tipsy, but because I was afraid that if I didn’t, the silence would remind her that time was passing around us. She had been waiting in line for nearly three minutes now. I glanced at the locked bathroom door. On the other side, my only two friends resided: one on her knees before a stranger’s toilet, the other acting as a hand clamped around sweatdampened hair. Keep guard, they had said. Distract anyone who might have to use the bathroom from the fact that in it were freshmen who didn’t even know anyone at the party. Didn’t even know whose apartment it was. “Have we met before?” the girl asked, “I feel like I know you.” “I don’t think so. My name’s Veronica.” “What?” “Veronica.” “What?” “Ver-” She waved me closer, turned her head slightly to expose a thrice pierced ear. The smell of soft vanilla perfume and sweat on her skin. “I’m Veronica!” I shouted into her hair, and finally, she nodded. “Holly!” she shouted back. “Nice to meet you!” Veronica and Holly together in the hallway. A line of just two people.

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Artwork: Girl by Betsy Jenifer. Betsy is a twenty-year-old artist from south India. She has previously been published in After the Pause, Alexandria Quarterly and Door Is A Jar, among other places.

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Beyond Queer Words

“So where are you from?” she asked, absentmindedly rubbing at the glitter on her eyes. When I told her, she had the same reaction that everyone has: “What made you go to school here?” How was I supposed to tell them? Well, I didn’t. “My uncle went here,” I lied. I had never even met my uncle. Didn’t even know if he went to college after he disappeared. “Cool, cool. It’s a great — oh, oh, I LOVE this song!” A hand grabbing mine. “Let’s go dance!” Down the hallway, her in front. “‘Scuse me, ‘scuse us!” she said to no one in particular, just pushing through the living room as though she stood taller than five foot three. At a group of stumble-dancing girls: “This is Veronica!” I tried to mimic their motion. The carelessness they carried. All these girls sweet with whatever was in their cups. Did girls like this ever feel out of place? Alone, even in a room like this? I wondered what secrets, if any, hid beneath their cropped shirts and denim skirts. What words hid beneath their skin like blood. Of all of them, they were my hands Holly grabbed. And I let her. Let her throw my arms around as she moved to no beat in particular. The nearness of her body. The warmth it gave off. Her waist-length hair moving all around her. The soft dimple on her right cheek when she smiled at me. The freedom. After about five songs she let go. Drinks. We leaned against a new wall and talked. I watched the way her mouth formed each letter in an attempt to understand what she was saying. And the way her lip gloss shone in the lights. A rainbow. I felt like myself for once, for the words came so easy with Holly. Except for one. Every time the question I had for her came into my head, I could think of only one word and the weight it carried. The first time I heard it, it was that feeling after a concert when your ears feel fuzzy. Everything was quiet except for that word ringing on and on in my head. The first time I said it was in a whisper to my reflection. The first time I spoke it to anyone else, it was to my mom. The way her face contorted. Then softened. “That’s ok. Just don’t tell anyone at school, alright? I love you too much.” But it was right there on my lips. Vomit I had to suppress. It wanted to come out. You don’t even know whose party this is. You might never see her again. You’ll regret it if you don’t speak now. I thought maybe if I put more alcohol in my cup, the question would spill from me easier. We moved from topic to topic, tongue twisting around the only thing I needed to know. Fifteen minutes, thirty. Getting drunker. Dancing around the truth.

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“Fuck that.” She said, when I told her how my family wanted me to switch from English to Engineering. “You live your life for you….”

Speak now. “I came in as a bio major, I’m nursing now…”

Speak now. “Screw what anyone else thinks, ya know?”

Speak n— My stomach seized. Puke. It hit my shirt mostly, a little of the floor and a little on her shoes. “Oh,” she said, “Oh, oh.” She was disgusted, I could tell, but she stayed nice. Stayed Holly. Even though I felt something change between us. She took me to the kitchen and sat me down, slid the trash can in front of me, but I didn’t need to puke anymore. “Let’s get you some water.” She said. “I’m so sorry.” I said again and again. “I’m so sorry, Holly.” She had her back to me, filling a glass. “It’s ok, really. I’m sorry I let you drink so much. You’re just a freshman.” “How’d you know that?” “You told me.” “Oh.” “Where are your friends?” “They don’t know me.” “I mean, who are you here with?” “The girls in the bathroom.” “The — ok, I’ll go find them.” She came back in two minutes that felt like two hours. She couldn’t find them. “Do you know anyone else here?” “I don’t even know whose party this is.” I said. “Oh,” she said. “It’s my boyfriend’s. This is our apartment.” ****** She had gone to find my friends again, and I had begun to cry so horribly that I decided to lock myself in the closet, that closing-in space, and let the thoughts wash over me. My mother’s face contorting. The cries I heard later

that night. My father’s brother, kicked out when he was 16. Where was he now? My grandmother who didn’t understand, still wouldn’t understand. Everyone who wouldn’t understand. My friends. Would they? The closet door swings open. My only two friends in the world stare back at me.

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“What are you doing?” They ask. And I tell them what only I know. Liza Rose is a student at The Pennsylvania State University where she studies English. You can find her on Instagram at @LizaRosePoetry and @Liza.Lies.Alot

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Beyond Queer Words

Damaged Goods Rebecca Portela What was your first introduction to sex? How did it shape you? Did it affect you at all? Was it in a classroom with unsexy diagrams of the male and female anatomy? Did you see a scene in a movie? Was it passionate? Animalistic? Too much, too soon? Was it so early that you don’t even remember? Was it so early that it has always just been there? That it influenced who you are, without your consent? ****** We kissed on her couch. I kept my hands out of the way as an awkward gesture of respect. I leaned back and lay down as she climbed on top of me. Her breathy kisses on my mouth, her hands fumbling for the button on my jeans, her breasts smushing against mine, but I dared not touch her. “I think we know how our own clothes work,” I stammered as I slipped out from under her eager body. I couldn’t fathom the embarrassment of trying to unhook her bra or pull tight jeans off a foot. We locked eyes as I placed my folded shirt on the corner of her coffee table. I expected her to undress at the same time so we could meet in the middle, ready to go. But she just watched me take off my clothing piece by piece, placing each item onto the little pile I had created. I topped off my small mountain with my earrings and necklace like I was going in for an MRI. I stood before her, fully naked. I didn’t pose. I didn’t stick one leg off to the side or arch my foot to look thinner. I stood as if I were getting a mugshot of my whole body. Facing forward, arms to the side, looking guilty as hell. “You are so beautiful,” she stated as though it were fact. It was the first time in my life I believed those words. From her or from anyone. It was the first time I didn’t immediately think it was just a thing people say because they want something from you, because they want you to feel better about being taken advantage of, because they are not naked, and you are. I was not beautiful at all until she said it. I was just the embodiment of everything that had ever happened to me. This woman, who could have any woman, let me nervously stack my clothes instead of throwing them on the floor in the heat of passion and then called me beautiful and meant it.

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Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Bo and Lauren by Harri Aburrow-Newman. Harri is a queer, nonbinary artist and writer from the UK. They enjoy exploring LGBTQ+ themes and people in their work, and discovering all the different things that make folk tick. 19

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Beyond Queer Words

She got up from the couch and kissed my face. We moved to the bed and I froze. My senses glazed over. You want to be here, it’s okay. Stay here.

Don’t go away. Stay here. “You know, you are allowed to touch me,” she joked as my arms suspended in midair like an undead zombie. My hands found their way to her waist. My boyfriend in middle school used to put his hands on my stomach and ask higher or lower? I lost either way. I guess, higher? He would move his hands up my torso and cup my breasts. He’d pinched my nipples and I would wonder if there was something wrong with me for hating him. For recoiling as soon as our skin touched. My hands softly slid their way up to her breasts and I hated myself for wanting to touch them. Rebecca, please touch me! I squeezed them hard and waited for her to wince. She moaned and leaned into me, like a functioning reactive body. She moved her way down and her mouth was between my legs, something I hadn’t been able to handle in over a decade. I traversed her body of mounds and flesh and fresh rivers of promise and light. Where is everything I know? Where is everything I hate? What do I do? Who am I? I felt it coming – it was in my gut and in my throat and in my mouth. This frightened child, reminding me that touch is always wrong. The UTIs, the rashes, the burning, the bleeding, the tears, the disgust. Several months earlier I had been in my gynecologist’s office with an entire roll of paper towels in my hands because she was tired of handing me single tissues. I put off getting pap smears for as long as possible to save the embarrassment of having a panic attack with swabs and salad tongs in my vagina. The moment my other foot went into the stirrup, I’d fall apart completely. Shaking, hyperventilating, sobbing uncontrollably, snot running down my face, and gesturing to the doctor to hurry up and finish. After the exam, she suggested I use “vaginal dilators” and some lidocaine cream that would numb my vagina completely so that I would be able to have sex that I couldn’t feel. “I think that having sex with a woman will save my life,” I said out loud, without ever having that thought in my head prior to that moment. “Do you really believe that?” she frowned. ****** “Tell me what you like,” she said, as if it were a normal thing to know.

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Beyond Queer Words

I spent so many years contorting my pain to sound like moans, my shudders to bend like ecstasy, that the idea of having preferences seemed like a far-away reality. I didn’t know when the sex was supposed to end. A man’s body usually decides that. I didn’t know I had a say. I didn’t know sex could be a participatory act. I didn’t know that I would feel like an equal. I didn’t know about pleasure without shame. I didn’t have to do my best impression of a woman being sexy or make sure to move my body in ways that didn’t accidently reveal the fat roll on my tummy. I didn’t casually and precisely keep my hand covering the part of my thigh that houses a birthmark similar to the one on my father’s arm. “Tell me what you like,” she repeated. Rebecca Portela is a writer and speaker for human rights and animal protection in New York City. She specializes in the genres of psychology and comedy writing. She recently finished writing her memoir, “Unearthed”, where she uses her unique sense of humor to address difficult subject matters, including PTSD and sexual abuse. Her work can be found in in Idle Ink magazine, X-Ray, io Literary, Stone of Madness Press (inaugural issue), and elsewhere.

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Beyond Queer Words

Saint Jerome and the Ghosts of My Past J.R. Jamison I stretched my arms across the card table and admired how my veins flowed down like tiny rivers; each abruptly disappearing into my palms. Between these deltas, flames of tea candles danced in wind that crept through the clouded cellar window. I took deep breathes and tried to remember how I ended up here in the first place. I recounted each step of my day: the visit to the grocery store; the call from my mom; the argument I had with an old friend. A psychic with short, platinum blonde hair and light blue eyes lit a stick of patchouli incense. She took both of my wrists and squeezed. “Clear your mind. I need to feel your energy.” I closed my eyes and pursed my lips to keep the giggles at bay as she recited some prayer about Saint Jerome and inviting his presence to surround us. Saint Jerome, after all, was a noted “homosexual,” so I couldn’t help but think, Mhmm . . . I see what you’re doing here, Miss Psychic Lady. Had it been the sass in my walk when I entered her shop or the over-articulation of my vowels when I introduced myself? Whichever one, it had been reconnoitered. I cleared my throat to hide my laughter and shifted in my seat to sit up straighter. The psychic tightened her grip. “Why I’ve invited him here is because you’re a writer, just like our Saint Jerome. He watches after you, along with the others.” A tingle rushed up my forearms and into my shoulders. I lifted my elbows from the table and pulled back, but she kept her hands tautly positioned around my wrists. “Those who wait with Saint Jerome and watch after you are family,” she said. “One has been there since birth, and the other—a woman—has only been with you the past few years. You call her ‘Big’? Do you know who I’m talking about?” I furrowed my brow and shook my head in disbelief. We called my grandma “Big Mom.” The psychic smiled and asked me if I had any questions for her. “Is she proud of me?” “Very much so,” she said. “Does she always see me? You know, like during private times?” “Oh, no,” she laughed. “The dead, they don’t hang around for the mundane. Only when you need them.”

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Artwork: Wanderer by Anna Ryabtsov. Moscow born photographer Anna has been using the camera as illustrative tool for over ten years. After obtaining her BFA in photography, Anna evolved her work from the studio to the outdoors. Her interest in philosophy and Jungian psychology has led her to travel around the world searching for solitary and alien-like landscapes. Her ongoing project since 2016, titled "Ant Farm" captures anonymous silhouettes wandering through dream like terrain. Their human form becomes diluted to a universal archetype using light, shadow and time of day. Anna currently resides in Jersey City, NJ.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

I slid a twenty and a ten across the table and thanked her. She gave me her card that had a Skype handle. It read: Available any time. I smirked and put the card in my pocket. I once again recounted the steps of the day that led me to the depths of the dank basement and into the hands of the psychic. It wasn’t the trip to the grocery store or the chat with my mom or that argument with an old friend. The psychic had extracted the truth; it was Big Mom. A year after she died, I woke in the middle of the night with my throat tight. I could smell her—the way her house always smelled: strong coffee percolating, cornbread baking, stale cigarette smoke hanging in the air—Pall Mall unfiltered. And as fast as it came, it was gone. At first I was afraid I had lost my mind, but she kept coming back. Each night I drifted off to sleep and like clockwork the smells permeated my senses, and the haziness between wakefulness and REM cleared to unveil her. In these visits we sit together in the living room of her old farmhouse and we don’t say anything. I feel a calmness, and after some time I try to speak but the words are held back, my throat tightens again. I wake. The next night, repeat. I wasn’t around much the last ten years of Big Mom’s life. I saw her at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I never called to check in. The last time we had spoken by phone was the night before my wedding. Her voice quivered with sadness and anger. “I won’t come. The Lord will know.” My voice remained calm and demure. “I understand.” When I hung up, tears welled in my eyes and anger choked me as I tried to breathe. My soon-to-be husband grabbed my hand and caressed it. “I’m sorry, sweet pea.” During those once-a-year holiday gatherings, as we picked at the turkey, Big Mom’s eyes would catch with mine before she lowered and shook her head. Her unpinned wig mimicked her every move, mocking yet bracing me for what was to come. “I will always love you,” she said. “But I will never accept that part of you.” The woman who bathed me as a child; who snuck me sweet treats when my mom said no; and who deepened my love for storytelling when she strummed her mandolin and belted songs about family and faith and acceptance—loved me, but not enough to celebrate me. When my mom called to say she was dying and that I should go to the hospital to say goodbye, I pondered if the years of silence that hung between us was too much to bear for a death-bed visit. Love fades, and sometimes there isn’t enough room in our hearts to let back in those we have let go. But my heart stretched, it ached, it opened up and brought me to the foot of her bed where

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

my mom and aunts placed their hands on my back and shoulders. Big Mom’s eyes caught with mine. Her heart monitor went flat. The nurse turned it off. “I can give you all a moment if you’d like,” he said. We nodded. There are mistakes we make in our lifetimes, apologies we never give, and forgiveness we don’t extend. But what if the psychic was right and existence is subjective? Then love can and does transcend all boundaries and planes. Maybe Big Mom chose me. Or maybe she chose Saint Jerome after he showed her that gays can indeed be saints. Or maybe my subconscious willed her into being, only a ghost of my past forever haunting my dreams. As I drove home from the psychic, I lowered my windows and let the warm night breeze blow through. Silent and content, I headed to another night of slumber. J.R. Jamison is a writer based in Indiana, and he co-hosts The Facing Project Radio Show on NPR. His work has been featured in multiple journal outlets, including The Guardian and The Huffington Post.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Alexander (the Great) Alex Pieroni The most liberating part of transitioning for transgender people is picking a name. But this is the part of my transition that I’m having the most trouble with. I’ve cut off my hair, I’ve changed my clothes, and changed the pronouns that I use, but names are meaningful. In my mother’s third trimester, she had both a boy and a girl name picked out, already creating the perfect child in her head. She hoped I’d like music, because that’s what she loved, and she wanted her child to be just like her, except with fewer mistakes along the way. She didn’t want her daughter to go through a punk rock phase, to break the rules, to push her mother’s buttons. (Oh, if she knew what was coming.) I am currently using the name Pepper, but I didn’t always. I have an old name. A dead name, someone else’s. A name that I don’t like saying. Anna. Anna Kathryn Pieroni. My mother named me Anna because she loved the name (but really because it was in a Top 100 Catholic Names book), and picked the middle name because she liked that Anna Kathryn Pieroni was in 6/8 time. (Now as a musician, I know that it’s actually in 7/8. She never quite got the rhythm of things.) She said it made me destined to be a musician. “But I always wanted another daughter. I wanted a name that was just feminine enough. And it’s a palindrome too. Your name is important to me, honey. I put a lot of thought into it.” My mother said this as we sat at the Royal Blue Café in Dallas, TX, during one of our mother-“daughter” dates when I was eleven. These were customary for the springtime, and she always insisted I wore lace pastel dresses with straps that dug into my shoulders. The café walls were brick, but the brick had aged so much that the store owner had decided, at some point, to paint the whole place white. White tile, white walls, white chairs. A white-washing. My mother sat across the table with freshly dyed blonde hair and a dress that blended into the walls of the café. As she sipped her Earl Grey tea, she flinched as she burnt her tongue. I thought about how much I hate that my name was a palindrome, the same back and forth, telling the same bland narrative over and over again. I felt disconnected, more than ever, with who Anna was, with who I was. Eleven-year-old Anna loved her name, she thought it was classy, but even she wanted to change it to something with more sophistication, like Stasia, or Emily. Anna wanted something memorable, not just symmetrical; a name that wasn’t that feminine, and something more significant than white walls and white tiles.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

More than anything, she wanted a boy’s name. “We wanted a name you wouldn’t have to spell because Pieroni is tricky.” (I would realize later that she would have a much harder time spelling Pepper. Spelling my name would be harder than she imagined.) “Mother, what about the other names in our family?” Anna would ask. Her mother chuckled into her tea cup, and repeated the stories that she’d heard many times before. ****** My mother inherited her old-fashioned ways of mother-“daughter” teas from her grandmother, Phyllis. Phyllis’ name was name picked from the Greek wife of Demophon who hung herself from a tree after she was abandoned (and from that point on Phyllis is only referred to as a tree). My mother always calls her Granny Mac. Her name wasn’t always Phyllis, though. Until the age of one, she was called “Pete” by her entire family because they hadn’t come up with a name yet. By the time she was two, however, they had decided that Pete was too complicated and changed her name to “It” until she was four. I had always known her as Granny Mac before my mother told Phyllis’ story with her burnt tongue. It lived the first four years of its life without a name, identity, or connection to its family past. Maybe that was a good thing; perhaps that was why my mother loved It so much. It was more than what a name limited it to be, and It was one of my mother’s favorite people. It also had a name that didn’t quite fit it, and while it took her a while to find a name that worked well for herself, for itself, Phyllis found one in the end. Mother went on about father’s side of the family. My father’s middle name is Alexander. It was my grandfather’s first name, and he thought it should be passed down because we are a “family of Greats.” My great, great, Grandfather, was the first Great. He was Alexander Reginelli. (A few years after this tea date, I asked my grandfather if he knew much about his grandfather, but he responded with a mumble, followed with a “not really.” My father’s side of the family had a harder time keeping track of their history.) My grandfather was the first one in our family who came from Italy to Arkansas. He became the King of Lake Village instead of Macedon, which is a pretty good deal if you ask me. Mother always said that she also liked Anna because it reminded her of Alexander, which is what she would have named me if I was born a boy. She always says that she’s glad she never had a son, that two daughters were the

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Pride by Kateryna Bortsova. Kateryna is a painter – graphic artist with a BFA in Graphic Arts and an MFA. She participated in many international exhibitions (in Taiwan, Moscow, Munich, Spain, Macedonia, Budapest etc.). She has also won a silver medal in the category “realism” in the Factory of Visual Art, New York, USA and in the 2015 Emirates Skywards Art of Travel competition.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

perfect combination. (She would learn three years later that she had a son all along.) ****** Her mother finished her tea, took an Americano with low-fat milk and extra foam to go, and Anna walked out with her, pulling at the hem of her dress. “Anna, please don’t pull at your dress. It’s not lady-like.” And thus, Anna’s venture to find a new name began. It only took a few weeks for Anna to grow tired of her name. She didn’t want to say it out loud anymore because for her, Anna meant the mother“daughter” dates and being the same forwards and backwards. She wanted to become someone more interesting, and the easiest way to do that was to change her name, just like Lady Gaga did when she became famous. (Anna also didn’t hate the idea of having a gender-neutral name, just in case.) She went to a summer camp as a musician, fated by her name (but mostly by her mother). When she got there, she settled into her cabin. She watched students and artists from around the world squeeze sixteen sixteen-year-olds into one room with bunk beds. They all talked about where they had come from and where they were going, and they all knew their names. Anna didn’t tell anyone her name was Anna. She taped a pepper packet from the dining hall on top of her lanyard and got a few chuckles out of it along the way. She found friends, and her friends started calling Pepper “them.” Pepper, now “they” instead of “she,” liked this, for they felt the bliss Phyllis must have felt: freedom from their past. Soon, Pepper went to school away from home. They decided that Pepper would be their name, full-time––none of that part-time bullshit. They started wearing what made them comfortable, and Pepper told their parents about their new name. “Oh, Anna! Camp nicknames are so cute! I’m sure it’ll be fun for your camp friends to feel like they’re in an inside joke,” their mother said. They didn't know who Anna was anymore. Pepper decided that they wouldn’t tell their parents much else and that if they wanted their parents to accept them, they would have to figure themself out first. Pepper realized through experience after experience that they were more of a boy than they thought. He started changing the way that people referred to him, and he found words that fit. Finally, he had discovered his Phyllis.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

****** I am now Pepper. I have cut my hair, changed my clothes, thrown away my dresses, and I feel the best I have ever felt. But I don’t want to be as ambiguous as Pepper anymore, or at least not for much longer. Pepper is my “It”: my interim. I am on the path to Alexander: Alexander, from the king, Julian, from Iulus, Pieroni, from my past. I love the ancients, like Alexander and others, but I also want my name to reflect what the writers had to say. In The Aeneid, Jupiter sends Mercury as a messenger to Aeneas. Oh, Aeneas, why aren’t you

fulfilling your fate? You owe it to your son, Iulus, to your father, Ascanius who passed down the name Iulus, to your past and present, to your inheritance and legacy. I think the name Iulus reflects what we owed, owe, and will owe to our past and to our present, and it’s a name that I’ve picked all on my own, without fear of being similar to my mother. That’s how I got Julian. Alexander Julian Pieroni. I want to be a Great, to give myself my own inheritance. But the thing about being a Great is that others tell you why you are Great. Others decide your first name, your first destiny, and what you are fated to be. It seems like a lot to live up to, but to be honest, my family of Greats hasn’t done too much that is good. My grandfather doesn’t believe that all people should be treated equally, and he acts on that belief. My father is a financial investor who manages the bank accounts of people who could never use so much money. Maybe I need to stop waiting around for someone else to tell me that I am a Great. I should have the chance to have the name, a chance to prove to my past and my present that I am a Great. The only person that I need to justify my Greatness to is myself. I am a son in a family of Greats. I have discovered what it means to be myself, and I have found the value of my name. Alexander, who I soon will be, is a name that I have a lot to learn from, and a lot to live up to. When your child finds themselves, they will find ways to show that they have learned what they will be and what makes them a Great. Alex Pieroni is a transgender male from Dallas, TX. After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, he will be attending Duke University to study Classics and Neuroscience.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Scar Philip Harris I keep the circumstances of my scar to myself. They can have my mouth, my dick. Sometimes I’ll fuck them if I’m feeling vulnerable. They can know where I live, my eye color, how tall I am, my HIV-status. But my scar— that swath of hashtagged flesh that traces a line from my eye socket to my right ear—that’s mine. ****** This is sort of the story of a pickle. Not a pickle one finds in a hamburger or in a green jar. Nor is pickle a sexual inuendo. I mean the sort of pickle I discovered watching my older brother play baseball. The sort of pickle in which you become stuck between two options, both relieving you of your place in the game. Making you out, not safe. If you could run around your dangers, you might be able to make it to base, you might be able to keep playing, but no. One will catch up with you, and you’ll have to walk across that strange desert, back to the bench. Back to the line where you must wait, maybe, for your next turn. ****** I went to all of my older brother’s baseball games. He wasn’t a star by any means, but he was well-liked and was a valuable member of his little-league, and then high school, teams. He played first base. I went because we did everything as a family. I went because his teammates were beautiful. As a child, I wondered if their bulges were actually that big, only to be disappointed in my adolescence to learn protective cups were the reasons for all those strained zippers. My dreams dashed by hard plastic. I still went to the games, because in all the public restrooms of all those parks, I could see dicks first hand—those of the players’ fathers and older brothers. The dicks of strangers and men jogging down the paths. ******

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

There was one season in high school when my brother couldn’t play. We’d gone snowboarding and coming down a modest hill, my brother hit a snow-buried tree stump, breaking his femur clean in half. He needed multiple screws and pins and was in a cast the rest of the winter and some of spring. Friends and family came from all over California to shower him with affection. Our aunts brought plates of food. His buddies snuck in beers, and there were a few times, when our parents were out wine tasting, when a girl (or two) would come over. ****** “Do you play sports?” my geometry teacher asked me when I was a sophomore. I shook my head no. “But, your older brother. Everyone knows he’s a sports guy. Guess you’re not, huh?” I remained silent. “Fag,” someone whispered behind me. Everyone laughed, including the teacher. ****** The best time to get sex at the adult book store is late in the afternoon, just before sunset. That’s when guys like me—jobless, young stoners—are awake enough to be horny but still haven’t figured out what they’re going to do with their day (or life) yet. The adult book store is called Rocket, and it’s down on San Fernando Road across the street from a K-Mart my mom used to take my brother and I to when we were kids. The K-Mart is gone, but the building is still there. Chain-link surrounds the empty parking lot where weeds have broken through the pavement. There’s nothing like one of those golden, California afternoons when the sun is hot and the day feels endless. The sky is bright instead of blue; everyone is moving, and getting a nut is the only thing that matters. That’s also the best time to go to Griffith Park. Less hot guys cruise Mineral Wells for whatever reason. You get older guys at the park, guys who might be homeless. Doesn’t matter to me. The crackle of the leaves on the ground as someone is on their knees blowing me is intoxicating. The breeze is gentle, the sun quiet. There are stories of a Mineral Wells heyday, when it was a

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

veritable orgy every afternoon, like it used to be up in San Francisco. I don’t know about that, though; I’ve never been to San Francisco. Rocket is cleaner than the parks. Safer, in a way. It’s air-conditioned, dark. Everyone sort of knows what to expect. The staff don’t care. Each booth has a glory hole. I’ve gotten some other younger guys in there—some high school seniors who told their mom they were going for a bike ride, community college students on their way to their part-time jobs, those young dudes who work at mobile phone companies taking a break before they have to go back to their kiosk at the mall. ****** My faggot status was my only visibility. If I was seen, it was only because I was gay. I talk to therapists about it now that my parents believe me and pay for it all. They now know what it did to me, that it made me a sex addict. Now they know. There was logic behind my scar. There was a reason. I’ve written about it in short story classes. These are not like official classes, mind you. These are just writing groups I find online or whatever. “But, why didn’t you tell your parents you were being bullied?” is what I’m always asked. For the longest time I didn’t have an answer. ****** On Facebook, I follow the life of one of my bullies. When we were in junior high, he told his friends that if they didn’t spit on me during lunch, he’d beat them up. I had to dodge phlegm and saliva for two weeks. We had English class together. He read everything quicker than everyone else. He was in the gifted math class. He used to punch my arm every time he walked past me. I hid the bruises from my parents and my older brother. That bully now has three kids and a wife and a job. They live in a small condo a few cities away. I’ve seen their furniture at Target. I’ve seen their lives, similar to all those straight people who leave us behind—the stained clothes, the comfortable sofas, the televisions from Costco and the refrigerators filled with deli meat and oat milk and baby carrots. I’ve seen the messy, micro-fibre blankets strewn on beds with too many pillows and the pile of toys in the corner, and the waffles, and the parental controls on the iPads. The streaming video accounts, the shelves full of trinkets

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Paz Eterna by Vicente Ortiz Cortez Vicente is a contemporary Mexican artist based in Philadelphia, USA. His work addresses themes of sexuality, identity, and anthropocenic anxieties. He has been curated into the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea, and Museu da Praia in Brazil, among others. You can find him on Instagram @ortizcortezstudio.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

rather than books, and the heterosexual held hands that don’t get shouted at in the street. The commiserate camaraderie of friends whose bodies have also been changed by reproduction, who are also tired and need a nap, but

wine will do, and have you heard about so-and-so? Her kid bit so-andso’s son at the park last week. Ah well, probably serves the kid right. He’s a little effeminate, you know. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Did you get that coupon in the Target ad this week? I know, I’m going to go pick some stuff up for the kids’ lunches. But I don’t really love their produce. Oh, I love that picture frame. I saw one just like it at the dollar store. Oh, that’s where you got it? I love that place for party supplies. By the way, I had such a good time at so-and-so’s birthday party. A circus theme but with no clowns. Genius! The photos looked great on Facebook. And did it even happen if it’s not on Facebook? That’s where we live now, Facebook and by piles of dirty laundry. Ah well, that’s the life of a working parent these days. Are you signing so-and-so up for baseball this year? Remember when so-and-so broke his leg snow-boarding and couldn’t play that season? That was so sad. But we all rallied around him and took care of him. But, yeah, you have to be careful with Facebook. You never know who’s watching. I mean, I’ve almost forgotten all those people we knew from middle school and high school. If they didn’t become parents like us, I sort of let them fade away, you know? What are you doing with your life if you don’t become a parent? Like, join the rest of us and be miserable. Of course, some can’t, but then again, were we ever friends with them anyway? ****** Look at that last paragraph. Where is the bullied kid? He’s drowning in the middle of all that straightness. No one sees him. He’s barely registered by the vacuous narrators. Some become calloused. Some harden. They grow tough shells to deal with the razors of the world’s blinding, beckoning light. Some are raised by parents who did their best. Some are raised by parents who tried to kill them. Some make it. Others die. And then some of us aren’t tough. We are still afraid. We still go to the parks, and Rocket, and the spas. To the porn theaters, the public restrooms. The grassy hills behind the beach, the mall parking lots, and the saunas at the gym. And some of us went to the backyard to find the sharpest rock we could and held

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

it up to our faces thinking that we might possibly be seen if we did something drastic. ****** One day when my older brother’s leg was healing, he was playing video games in the den. I walked by to get something from the kitchen. “Hey, buddy,” he said. “Come here.” He paused the game, and I sat down next to him. “You know you walk like a girl, right?” he asked. I stared at him. I hadn’t considered my walk. I wasn’t aware there were “boy” or “girl” ways to walk. I shrugged. He continued: “I just—look, I know what they say about you at school. Mom and Dad are totally worried that you might be a queer. I just don’t want anyone to think you’re a fag, okay? You’re not a fag, right? I, of all people, can’t have a fag little brother.” I shook my head. “Good,” he said. “All right. That’s settled. We gotta toughen you up, rough you up a bit, you know? I’ll think of something. You’re a big kid. Maybe football when you get to high school. But, look. I break my leg and they practically wanna make me freakin’ mayor around here. We’ll figure it out. All right, lemme get back to my game here. Love you, dude.” Logic: If I’m roughed up, I’ll be a man. Seen, respected. Not a fag. ****** Earlier I wrote I didn’t use to have an answer to the question “Why didn’t you tell your parents you were being bullied?” I have an answer now: If I told them, I would have had to come out. How can you tell someone you’re in danger when it will put you in danger? You don’t. So, you let them tag you out. You choose how to exit the pickle. ****** I go to the spa. When I was eighteen, they’d let me have a locker for free. Now, I pay for a room. The rooms are barely rooms. Everything is dark, so I don’t exactly know how it all works, but the walls don’t meet the ceiling, which

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

is exposed, just like the patrons. Wires hang down, whilst fans and vents whir above the “rooms.” I disrobe, tossing my clothes on the small bed (a cot, really). I turn the TV off, and wrap the towel around my waist. For twenty minutes I sit in the jacuzzi. A few others join, and we fondle each other under the rolling water. I go to the sauna, where I watch two guys older than me blow each other. I jerk off for a bit. I try to join, but they brush my hand away. In another dark room, I get my dick sucked for about ten minutes. On the roof, I wait in line to bareback a dude in a swing. I almost cum in him, but I decide to wait. I’ve been here less than an hour. I shower off and go back to my room where I turn on the TV and watch some porn. I’m jerking off pretty steadily when there comes a knock upon my door. “Hey,” a cute blond says, walking in. He is younger than me but not by much. “I saw you on the roof. You haven’t cum yet, have you?” I shake my head no. “Let’s take care of that, but you have to promise to cum inside me.” I nod yes. We are both already covered in lube. I cum fast. When I think he is about to leave, he wraps his towel around his waist and plops on the bed. “Come on,” he says. “Sit with me. Let’s snuggle.” I have no interest, and he can tell. “Come on!” he says, laughing. I sit beside him. We quickly fell asleep. I wake up after what feels like an hour. He is still beside me. It must be nearly four AM. He is staring at me. “You did that to yourself, didn’t you?” he asks. “Huh?” My mouth is dry. “This,” he traces my scar with his right index finger. “It looks like mine.” He then traces his own trauma across his chest. A thick, deep gash, dark with scar tissue. “I did it when the bullying became too much.” He pauses and then says, “You gave yourself that scar, huh?” “Yeah,” I say. “I nearly lost my eye.” Philip Harris is a writer living in the Bay Area. He received his MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University in 2017.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Beyond White Luke Markinson For the month of July, I hop on trains, small planes, taxi cabs, miniature Ubers, and subways in Europe. There are three other people I travel with: one a best friend since before puberty, one a close friend whom I have recently bonded with, and one that seems to linger. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know exactly what I was looking for going on this trip, except to be forgotten for a second, shoveling newly graduated roots into newly discovered sand. Not to be planted but to be immersed if for a second, collecting a rain of new experiences with an independent bucket. The Parisian house we stay in is located on the outskirts of the city. It is meant for guests. It is not a home but an Airbnb that reeks of white walls and lemon Febreze. The streets are uproarious and bustling. Laughter reverberates against the rusted crimson bricks of time (of ashes) long ago. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get their memes. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t laugh with heart. They are sleeping, but I want to go outside. The red drapes taunt me with their stillness. I want to breathe in cigarettes and cauldrons of murmur. The specks of light that seep in feel purposeful. To become smoke. Circling. Rising. Enveloping. Parading. Diving into lungs. Springing out of chapped lips. Immersing as one into the beat of the noise. Only to spread and ascend into the perceived noiselessness above. I am uncertain and restless in my quiet but continue to be surprised by how my thoughts unwind. As if the loss of routine has spiraled into a massive clear question mark, I am but a wanderer in a forest, continually placing stones one after another after another so that I can look back and see the trail from beyond the tunnel that brought me to this city. Am I scared about flocking to college? Am I sad? Am I worried about not feeling comfortable in a barren and white-walled dorm? I want to be accepted for who I am finally. I think about death-beds and how we are all blindly shielded from truth until the moments of twilight.

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Beyond Queer Words

****** We arrive in Berlin, Germany. We segway and Bird and walk and prance around a reunified city. Not so long ago, these people hated my people. But now the cashiers, merchants, and vendors who sell me sausages seem friendly. I don’t understand how hate can become so palpable. How violence can infiltrate the mind so swiftly, infiltrating reason and empathy. Neglect is buried beneath the cobblestone and inside the derelict construction zones. I witness the wall in all its glory. A divide between two realities & two fantasies. On one side of the wall for 1.5 kilometers, bright hues intoxicate the viewer. I stumble upon “It Happened in November” and stand a few feet back absorbing an amalgamation of blues, greens, and reds. Unidentified faces - shock, disgust, joy, confusion, angst, apathy, sorrow, trepidation, liberation - pour westward. As if they are football players who have all dogpiled onto the ball. Thousands swarm in a sea of blue towards oblivion; Into the reassuring immensity of the waves. Their emotions (once barricaded for so long) radiate outwards and transcend two bleak white walls. We have crossed so many borders. Overcome so many imaginary lines of property and real ones made of people. Constantly my friend reminds us that we look like dumb Americans. That everyone can tell how lost we are in navigating the external. My other friend buys bus passes, converts our money, talks to the bouncers, figures out the question marks as I blindly follow. But I don't think that anyone is really paying attention to us. I think I’m just one of the faces, but I wonder how obvious my emotions are. When I wither inside do others hear? Or are they just focused on moving forward? Like the expressions in front of me. ******

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Woven Skin: Wrapped in the Rainbow by Emily Iris Degn. Emily is a multilingual writer, travel writer, published poet, and artist. She seeks to bring awareness to environmental and social issues, and she uses her art to fuel that fight. She currently lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains with her partner and almost 30 plant babies.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

In Amsterdam, I meet a blonde-haired girl named Julia who offers to give us a tour of the city. She has a delicate, pretty face - blonde hair & blue eyes - that seems archetypical in this domain. We peruse down the crowded floors of the Rĳksmuseum. We talk about music festivals, the differences in teenage culture (but mostly find similarities), her friends, and college. I stumble upon “Portrait of a Girl Dressed in Blue” and stand a few feet back. I feel Julia’s presence next to me and find it hard to concentrate. I think about how difficult it is: being in silence with someone you have just met. A young girl adorned with pearls, dangly earrings, and lace gazes back at me; She is the perfect actress if not for the jubilant expression that betrays her mature role. I think she looks a lot like Julia. We get tired of art and sidestepping and the stillness that comes when one is to be present and vulnerable to a wandering mind. We decide to eat sandwiches outside. Later in the day, we decide to buy shrooms (they are legal here). The rush of consuming the vile fungi wears down and we have a “now what” moment. Before I know it, we are climbing down stairs & clamoring down streets. Feeling as though everything has been laid out for this very moment. I pay less attention to how my arms sway when I walk and how my hands interlace when I am standing still. I look at my arms and really see them for the first time: two channels filled with blood in motion; I look at the lines on my hands: they are spiderwebs and scratches and layers and layers and layers. We stumble upon a canal. I imagine dipping into the water. Each of us undergoing a baptism. A reclaiming of what is pure. What is beckoning under the surface reaches out. Kicks and paddles and strokes break white concrete and all is fluid. Julia starts crying as she watches a boat graze the water. I give her a hug and ask what’s wrong. “I don’t know. It’s all so beautiful”. My best friend tells me he loves the way I’m sitting. I get embarrassed for a second but think about how nice it is: being validated for who you really are.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

****** Later that night, I see rainbow flags out of our window swaying in foreign soil. Tall and unashamed. They tell everyone that they are secure, bold, and withstanding. Two cities later, I am in Prague. Then I am in a nightclub spread over five floors. Then I am on the third floor (EDM themed) in a bathroom for “gents” with a stranger I found on an app. I am coaxed into a hidden world: shameful, underground, buried. I soak in the toxic air that reverberates from dirty sinks and muddied floors. We squeeze ourselves. Constricting the very forces that pulled us together. Muffling the sighs and moans of a hundred soldiers in the vault of a cage. Pounds rumble on the aluminum rusted door. “Shit. Shit.” The white wall breaks and we are exposed to a deep blue whirlpool. I miss the barricade; The connectedness that comes with separation. Our faces blend in with the crowd and we segregate like strangers. Disbelief, Envy, Guilt, Lust, Disorientation, Indignation, Amusement all pour westward. I make it outside onto cobbled streets and wish I didn’t have to hide. That I could be sucked in to the current but flow with the rest of the gaping-mouthed fish beside me. I wish there were no roles. That whatever I did would always feel right. That I didn’t have to talk so much or avoid looking at someone for too long in the eye. I think of all the faces I will never know and all the friends I will forever be separated from. Barricades fall down only to be reimagined & reconstructed. Emotions boil only to freeze and melt. Do we ever change permanently? How many faces I have come across. Misread & misunderstood. I like how the skies here are never dark. Always a deep unrelenting blue so far away from twilight. The little girl could have hated blue and pearls and fancy lace.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

And I most certainly have been every one of those faces at some point or another. The most beautiful part is when the white walls dissipate. When we are in motion. Coloring over a flood of blank. Luke Markinson is an enthusiastic student at Washington University in St. Louis studying Psychology, Writing, and Marketing and literary editor for Spires Magazine. Luke grew up in Los Angeles, California and attended Harvard-Westlake school where he was a literary editor for Stone-Cutters Magazine. Currently, he writes on his blog @thecollegegay.com. You can find him on Instagram @lukemarkinson.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Broken Clocks Brian Sheridan I know it’s kind of cliché to say life’s a game, but after being fucked over so many times, I’m thinking it has to be. I don’t know who or what I pissed off to have curveballs constantly thrown at me, but at this point, I was begging to be benched. Everything started fine, I guess. Having your friends as roommates had always seemed like a good idea to me. It would be easy to talk to them, plans could be made on the fly, and drunken, 3 am karaoke sessions were a welcome staple of the weekends. I had just made the President’s List last semester, and I was looking forward to taking my spring classes, despite some of their ungodly hours. It was almost perfect. Fat emphasis on the was. This time, one of those curveballs slapped me square across the jaw. I had somehow accidentallymaybe-sort-of developed a crush on one of my roommates. I wasn’t too sure where it had even come from. Sure, my friends and I had admitted that Jasper was attractive, but it had been a casual and passing observation. We had met two years prior — by chance — at a record store. He and I both grabbed the last copy of St. Vincent’s Masseduction. We had an… interesting first conversation, to say the least. He claimed to have listened to her since she’d started music, while I argued that I’d been to more concerts than he had. Our debate concluded when the cashier had enough of our arguing and threw both of us out empty-handed. I started walking away when he asked if I wanted to grab a coffee. I wasn’t going to turn down a cute boy and caffeine, especially if it meant I could continue telling him why I was the worthy owner of that vinyl. I’d never really met another guy I connected with before him, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover how similar we were. Things just clicked. We discovered we went to the same college, and I was shocked to learn we shared several classes. He sat next to me in all of them for the rest of the semester. I found myself growing more and more drawn to him, and I’d actively seek him out during my free time to check in on him or offer to look at his drawings. I started to realize that I not only liked him but that I admired him. He was a lot of who and what I wanted to be. I think what stood out to me most was how he carried himself. I envied the confidence he had in his identity. Aside from his

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: A Night Out by Caroline Meehan. Caroline is a queer, non-binary visual artist and educator from the southern United States. Their work is mostly traditional, illustrative, and figurative, exploring themes of gender expectations, queer relationships, religion and spirituality, and trauma.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

friendship, I think I just wanted to be as close to that confidence as possible. So, I asked him to be one of my roommates. Maybe it was this close proximity that led to my attraction to him, or perhaps it was due to my idolization of Jasper that fueled this want. Whatever the reason, it created a state of constant confusion and conflict that wasn’t at all enjoyable. I took to avoiding extra contact with him, and by association, the rest of my friends. I’d often lay in bed just staring at the ceiling. Watching the strings of star-shaped, violet lights on my walls while they phased in and out of brightness was oddly enchanting. That night, they were joined by the sultry, androgynous voice of Marina and the Diamonds, emanating from my record player. My lights were seemingly controlled by her pitch as if they were a part of the tracks themselves. A soft knock interrupted my thoughts, and I pulled myself up to crane my neck at the door. “Got time for visitors, Cameron?” a cheery voice called. “Hmm, not sure if I can squeeze you in Farrah, my schedule’s pretty busy,” I teased. Farrah half-heartedly scoffed, her head peeking in the doorframe. “Yeah, you seem so preoccupied,” she said with a roll of her eyes. She kicked off her shoes and made her way over to my bed, hoisting herself up next to me. She wore a silver, vintage stopwatch around her neck. The soft ticks synced nicely into the beat of the music. “Are you doing alright?” I shrugged, pulling my pillow into my arms to press the right side of my face against it. “Yeah… just tired,” I murmured. “It’s been a long week.” “It’s… it’s only Tuesday…” she stated, trying to catch my eye. “You’ve barely been home lately, and when you have, everyone’s told me you’ve locked yourself in here,” she said, her hand brushing against mine. Her touch felt like a rush of cold air. “Hey… you know you can talk to me.” I nodded, letting the music overtake the room once more. I shifted a bit and pushed my back against the wall, a small smirk spreading on my lips. “Do you remember when we were together?” She blinked, looking back at me with slight confusion. She pulled herself up further and pushed back next to me. As she moved, the lights faded out, and it seemed like she had disappeared completely. When the brightness returned, so did she. She was leaning against me slightly, her gaze fixed on my closet doors. “No, but I remember when we were sleeping together…” she corrected. “Okay, but… remember when I wanted to —”

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

“Start a real relationship? And we both decided we wouldn’t be able to put in the effort and commitment given our circumstances?” I let out an exasperated sigh, jabbing a finger at her side. “Will you let me finish?” I laughed. “Yes, we started that relationship without getting emotions involved, and though neither of us wanted to admit it, the commitment was terrifying. I started to develop feelings for you after the fact, which was more of a surprise for me than it was for you.” “Why is that?” Farrah questioned, lifting her head from my shoulder. “I never really understood.” “Feelings just… aren’t something I do. I’m alright with keeping things casual because that’s what I’m so used to. I don’t really develop attachments.” Farrah’s brow furrowed at that, moving to touch my knee. Her fingers now almost felt frozen. I wanted to say something about it, but the silence of my record took precedent. “One sec,” I murmured, rising from the bed. I flipped the record onto its “B” side and gently placed the needle back down on the silver surface of the vinyl. When I turned around, Farrah had pulled one of my spare blankets up around herself. Although I couldn’t see her mouth, I could tell she was smiling, and I knew exactly the kind. It was the smile she’d wear when she was trying to wake me up on a Sunday morning, still tangled together with the lingering smell of weed on her breath. She’d play with my hair and poke my cheeks until I finally gave her a response, though we’d end up staying in bed for at least an hour after. “What?” she asked, laughter in her voice. “Just reminiscing,” I murmured, the lights and Farrah fading out once more, bright again by the time I had climbed back onto my bed. “I hardly think our past involvement is solely what’s been keeping you in here,” Farrah stated. “Though I’m assuming it has something to do with it?” “I… please don’t tell anyone,” I begged, lowering my voice. “I have a huge crush on Jasper.” Farrah blinked, almost stunned, her face shifting between a mixture of glee and confusion. “You what?!? You have a crush on Jasper?!?” she repeated, certainly a bit too loud. I pulled the blanket up over her mouth, shaking my head. Her muffled giggles only caused me to become more flustered, grateful for the dimming lights buying me time to hide my blush. “Jesus Christ,” I mumbled. “S-sorry,” Farrah panted out, hot from the struggle. “It’s just… unexpected,” she said evenly. Straightening herself out, she folded her hands in her lap. Her gaze once again fell on my closet. “I’m the only one who knows?”

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

I nodded, pulling my pillow to my face again and pushing my head against the cushion, quieting a sigh. “Well that’s good, isn’t it? You’re moving on!” “I just… I don’t know how to feel about it. I haven’t felt this intensely about a boy before, and it’s hard to discern if I’m attached to him romantically or not. But I don’t want to lose the connection that we already have,” I murmured. An unexpected wave of emotion suddenly crashed against me, my thoughts swimming through an anxious minefield, blowing up inside my head and threatening to drown me. “But… a part of me wants it… to try at least,” I choked. “I haven’t felt like this since you and — I want to explore it. But I don’t… I don’t want him to look at me differently if it doesn’t turn out the way I want it to. I don’t want him to hate me,” I whimpered. My face felt hot as I started to cry. I sniffled when I felt Farrah’s cold fingers slide against my skin, smudging my tears. “Cameron… it’s okay,” she said, pressing against me slightly. The lack of body heat sent shivers through me, but her touch still served as a comfort. “Look… I’m not sure talking to me would help that much, and if you really are as close to Jasper as you say, I don’t think he’ll react negatively. He’s never given off the impression he’d do something like that, don’t you think?” I mumbled an agreeing response, wiping my nose. “He’s probably gonna need some time, regardless of his reaction. Otherwise, I don’t think you should be afraid to confront these feelings,” she said, smiling. “You know better than anyone that life’s too short not to take chances.” I lifted my head to look at her, just when my lights faded out. I searched for her hand as the lights slowly started to brighten, though I knew I would find nothing. The final note from my record seemed to linger in the air. My room once again filled in violet light; taking a deep breath before I moved. Placing the vinyl back in its protective sheet, I found myself drawn to my closet doors. Opening them, I reached and pulled out a sleek, metallic box. I sighed and rummaged through it, smiling at the remnants of our relationship. I pulled out pictures of us together, tickets from the concerts we went to, and one of her old t-shirts. At the very bottom of the box, I gently picked up her now rusted and cracked stopwatch necklace, as if it would crumble at any moment. Pulling the chain over my head, I caressed the clock as it fell into place. Taking a deep breath, I stood and made my way to Jasper’s room. I could hear him softly singing along to the music. I almost felt bad for interrupting him, but I wanted to ride this wave of inspiration and enthusiasm

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

as much as I could. For a moment, I thought I heard Farrah’s stopwatch start to tick, only to realize it was the intense beating of my heart. I touched it one last time before taking a deep breath, knocking on his door. His voice paused, and I heard him stand up from his chair. When he opened his door, I watched a small, half-smile spread on his face, his head cocked in amused confusion. “Hey, got time for visitors?” Brian Sheridan is a fourth-year college student double majoring in Professional Writing and Secondary Education. In his free time, he enjoys listening to 80's synth-pop, buying concert tickets he can't afford, and looking for pictures of Jenna Marbles' dogs.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Eric Donovan Bridgeman The back of Trudy’s was the graveyard of a vast and deadly jungle. Joseph kicked a syringe at the wall where it smashed, leaving brown and red tinted glass scattered among beer bottles, pieces of foil and cigarette packets. Jack gave him a scrutinising stare and Joseph felt embarrassment replace his sense of accomplishment. It was quarter past six and still light outside. Everything was a little golden and it was hard not to squint. The boys stood close together, sharing a cigarette with their bikes safely out of sight from the car park. Joseph threw the butt of the cigarette on the floor. He didn’t step on it but watched the cherry turn to dead ash. Jack put a hand on his arm. “You ready for this?” he asked. “Ey, you kidding me? I’ll do it by myself and you can guard the bikes. Probably makes more sense anyway,” he reasoned. “Trudy knows your ma, and she knows you’re with me. If you go in there by yourself and the old bitch brings it up the next time they see each other, your ma is going to ask what you were doing in there. It’s not like you have any money.” The boys left the bikes and walked around the building and through the door of Trudy’s. Joseph started to whistle and Jack pinched his arm, prompting a soft, girlish yelp. Trudy, who was reading the newspaper, glanced up and smiled. “Well hey there, boys. Here for yourselves or on an errand?” “We’re just looking around, might buy some chocolate,” Jack said. “Okay, well you boys let me know if you need anything, I’m not going anywhere.” Joseph picked up a bar of chocolate and studied it carefully. He couldn’t read so the task was particularly boring for him, but he played his part well and Trudy went back to her paper. Jack quickly walked around to the other side of the aisle and found exactly what he was looking for. He stuffed it into his back jeans pocket and headed back around to join Joseph. “Let’s go,” he whispered. Just as the boys were walking out, Trudy called out to them. “Boys you’re lucky to have caught me in a good mood.” They froze. “I remember what it’s like to want things I couldn’t buy.” “Miss Caphram, it was ju—”

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

“Take a chocolate bar, one each, and get out there and soak up that sunlight,” she said. A little relief came from the boys. They each picked up a bar and thanked the old lady. Outside they marvelled at their success. “Not only did we rob her, she actually gave us chocolate for free. Now that’s a job well done,” Joseph said. The boys fetched their bikes from behind Trudy’s and cycled the mile and change to West Cheverton Park. ****** The first condom tore as Joseph opened the packet and it was rendered useless, so Jack snatched it out of Joseph’s hand and flung it into the river. “Gently does it, we’ve got to get this right or it won’t work,” he told Joseph. Joseph slapped him and took another condom, his last, out of his wallet and opened it with more care than he’d ever use again in his life when opening that particular type of item. No tear this time, so he held out a hand to Jack, signalling his readiness for the stolen good. Jack pulled the sausage from his back jeans pocket and handed it over to Joseph, and in return Joseph handed him the condom. Joseph removed the sausage from the packet and crushed it between his hands while Jack held out the condom. Joseph now carefully stuffed the sausage meat into the condom, taking great efforts not to lose any of the meat. Once the job was done, he washed his hands in the river and called for Jack to throw him the empty bottle from his backpack, which Jack did excitedly. Joseph filled up the bottle and returned to his friend with matching excitement. He poured the water into the condom until he could fill it no more and then looked at his friend and raised his eyebrows in that way young boys do. “No fucking way,” Jack said. “I crushed the sausage! My hands smell like a fucking slaughterhouse,” Joseph replied. “I stole the sausage.” Jack now. “I filled up the bottle!” Joseph. “Yeah but—what? You filled up the bottle? How the fuck is that as big a deal as stealing? I sold a piece of my soul for this!” Joseph stared at him with defeat and a hint of anger. He had been bested. “Fine, give me the condom.” Joseph brought it to his mouth and hesitated. “Just blow,” Jack said. “Oh, really funny,” Joseph remarked, and slapped his friend.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

“I wasn’t joking! I was being serious; you just need to blow into it. Jeez, no need to be so sensitive.” Joseph sighed and brought the condom back to his mouth. Perhaps he was being overly sensitive. He started to blow. “Yeah that’s right, bitch. Blow it real good,” Jack said in his best Wesley Snipes. ****** Fat Tom was an asshole. The type of asshole who stole lunch money, made crude remarks about mothers and sisters, and still managed to screw girls who registered as high as a seven on what the kids at school called the dickter scale. Joseph and Jack detested Fat Tom. While they all experimented with a little harmless bullying here and there, Joseph and Jack were little rascals, charming even. Fat Tom was just an ugly stain on their little town with no redeemable qualities. This is why Jack and Joseph held the deep desire to rubber him. Rubbering was a breakthrough in modern science that involved mixing raw meat and water in a condom, blowing it up and throwing it at an unsuspecting victim. At seven-thirty Joseph and Jack were now on the corner of Meadow Street. They knew Fat Tom, who finished his shift at the local Chinese spot, would currently be cycling home. Home for Fat Tom was 117 Meadow Street. As a sign of pride, confidence and the desire to stand strongly behind any action as they were encouraged to do by the elder statesmen of the edgier side of town, Joseph and Jack did not hide. Joseph held the rubber and Jack stood just left of centre behind his friend. They didn’t speak to each other and they did not slouch. They didn’t move an inch even when Mrs. Grossman drove past on her mobility scooter, eyeing the boys up and down before eventually deciding to mind her own business. Then the boys saw him. Fat Tom was cycling towards them on a downhill stretch of pavement, approaching the corner of Meadow Street with considerable speed. Fat Tom, who had the occasional run in with the boys but never truly the upper hand, just assumed the boys were fooling around with the younger kids in the street. They looked very proud of themselves and he thought he ought to knock them down a peg by hurling an inventive insult at the pair as he passed them. He thought of something that implied they were not only homosexuals, but incestuous homosexuals. This was quite clever as it meant if they denied the homosexuality, it would seem to suggest that they didn’t have a

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Trudgery by Sandeep Shete. Sandeep ("SandyVisual") is a self-taught visual artist who creates digital artworks and single-panel gag cartoons in his free time. His work has appeared in American and Indian publications, such as The Esthetic Apostle, Chaleur Magazine, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Reading Hour, and Fireside (an in-house corporate magazine). Sandeep lives and works in India and shares some of his creations on Instagram and Facebook under @sandyvisual.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

problem with the idea of being intimate with a relative. On the other hand, if they denied the incest, they were still queer. As he began formulating the insult, just a few feet away from the boys now, Joseph hurled the rubber at his face and it exploded. Fat Tom didn’t have time to figure out exactly what had happened before losing balance and falling to the ground. His leg was trapped under the bike, which was dragging him toward a parked car with such force, the sound of the impact alerted several neighbours. Fat Tom was bleeding from the face and calf, he was covered in sausage meat, and his bike was broken. “Don’t worry asshole, I’m sure your old man will still think you’re pretty,” Jack shouted. The boys got on their bikes and cycled back to West Cheverton Park at a casual pace. ****** “That fat bastard is going to get us back for that somehow,” Jack said. He was staring up at the moon, using Joseph’s backpack as a pillow. Joseph sat cross-legged next to Jack, smoking a cigarette and playing with a tear in his jeans. “He’ll always remember that we fucked him tonight. We got him good. If he tries anything, we’ll just think of something better. He’ll probably stick to messing with the Barnard kids anyway, they don’t fight back so much,” Joseph mused. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m not worried about him. I feel a little bad for robbing Trudy’s earlier though, especially after she gave us a bar of chocolate,” said Jack. “I don’t feel bad. She’s a lunatic anyway. My ma says she tries reading people’s palms to tell them their future but she always tells them the same thing: they’ll have long and healthy lives. My ma says she told it to Jackie Davis two days before she stabbed herself, and then said the same thing to Jackie’s sister two days after Jackie’s funeral. Fuck her, we needed the sausage.” “Let me read your palm,” Jack demanded. He took Joseph’s dirty hand and pulled it toward him. He then started gently tracing Joseph’s palm and alternating between concerned grunts and approving hums. Joseph felt a little awkward and yet he also felt no desire for the moment to end. The post-war adrenaline in his system subdued and his stomach started to ache a little and a few beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

“You’re going to die young. Young, lonely and skinny as a rake. But you will fuck Sarah Morris and I see a time of wealth and luxury,” Jack told his friend. “Now do me.” Joseph, feeling disappointed that his friend had let go of his hand, quickly took Jack’s by the wrist and started tracing his palm with the index finger on his right hand. He didn’t know what a real palm-reader did, so he copied the same movements Jack had used. Even if it was wrong, he liked Jack’s way. “Well I can see here that you die a virgin. You put on a lot of weight too, and after I fuck Sarah Morris you get really jealous. You start hanging out with Fat Tom and plan to rubber me, but he keeps eating the sausage meat before you can make one.” The two boys laughed but Joseph hadn’t let go of Jack’s hand. He looked down at his friend’s palm, and said: “When your dad finally wakes you up one morning and says you have to start helping out at the garage, you’re going to tell him no. You’re going to get on your bike and cycle to a new town where no one knows you. You’ll walk into the first bar you see, cowboy style, and ask if you can pick up a few shifts. You’ll interrupt a few fights here and there but no one will fight you. You’ll meet a girl, have a couple of kids and you won’t think about this place.” Jack grinned and raised his eyebrows. “You know damn well I’ll end up working for my old man,” he said. “Maybe. Maybe it says that on your palm. You should know better, I can’t read,” Joseph replied. The boys laughed and Jack got up and put his arm around Joseph, pulling Joseph’s head towards his own. “If I do cycle out of this town, I’ll pick you up on the way and we’ll rubber Fat Tom again on our way out.” Joseph chuckled and then the two boys kissed. Joseph thought he might pull away at any moment but once he realised he didn’t actually want to, he was at peace, aware only of his own weightlessness. Jack felt sad, and a sense of urgency to prolong the kiss for as long as he possibly could. The two boys embraced, and eventually they felt nothing at all. Jack had just opened his eyes in time to see Eric, Joseph’s older cousin by two years, walking towards them. He pulled away and nodded in Eric’s direction. Joseph turned around and saw the expression on Eric’s face. He knew what would happen next. Before Joseph could utter a word, Eric kicked Jack in the face, sending a resounding scream of pain through the peaceful night of mere moments ago. He kneeled down on the grass and gripped Jack’s throat with his left hand and delivered gunshot punches to Jack’s face with his right. Joseph dived on his older

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

cousin, begging him to stop, but Eric dismissed him with a backhanded slap to the face, sending Joseph sprawling on the floor. By the time he had steadied himself enough to start standing up again, the beating had stopped. Jack was lying on the floor, his face bloodied, faint moaning working through the pool of blood that simmered in his mouth. “Don’t move,” Eric ordered the pair of them. He picked up Jack’s bike, walked calmly to the river and threw it in. He walked back toward the boys, expressionless. When he was just a few feet away, Joseph stood in front of Jack, not heroically, but hopelessly. He was partly relieved that he no longer had to look at what had become of his friend. “Can you stand up?” Eric asked Jack. Jack got first to his knees, then to his feet. He stood and swayed, and blood fell from his mouth to the grass below, blackening it. “Get the fuck out of here,” Eric told him. Jack looked at Joseph, then at Eric, and then began to carry himself home. Eric turned to Joseph. “I’m staying at your place tonight. Your mother needs me to speak to a delivery guy tomorrow morning and we don’t have anything to eat at my dad’s place. Let’s go.” Joseph looked behind and saw Jack fading in the distance. He appeared to be steadier on his feet. Joseph thought about the kiss he had shared with his friend. He thought about the gentleness of Jack’s fingers against his palm and then he thought of Jack’s mouth against his own. Bloodied. And the scream of pain from the first kick. Joseph raised his hand, the hand Jack had used for the palm reading, and he held it against his sore, aching cheek. He picked up his bike and his backpack, and then followed Eric home. Donovan Bridgeman is a writer of poetry and short fiction. He has a creative background and a degree in the musical arts, with production and performance credits on several works. He currently teaches English at a school in South Wales and is working on his first novel.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

The Friendship Gallery Frank DiPalermo Almond cake. The idea of it dropped into the old man’s head like a premonition, like the thought belonged to someone else—maybe his next door neighbor with the scrappy orange tabby named Muscles, the homeless man who sang torch songs outside the liquor store, or the freckled little girl across the street with the new cast on her left arm. Yes, a stranger’s thought had gotten misplaced and now he was thinking it. The timing was convenient since he hadn’t been thinking anything worthwhile just prior. In fact, he’d been wallowing again. His lunch set him off this time. An insipid meal of a soft-boiled egg with lightly buttered toast, made even more boring by the fact that he ate the same thing for breakfast. He probably ate the same thing for dinner the night before, but he couldn’t recall this with any certainty. His dinner parties had once been a hot ticket. Andrew, Paulo, Cassidy, Austin, Benjamin, all of his friends clamored for invitations. Even Henry, a midwesterner raised on nothing but meat, potatoes, corn and broccoli, couldn’t get enough of his salade niçoise, spaghetti carbonara or bouillabaisse. After the last of his friends died, the old man tried to cook decent meals for himself. Spaghetti Bolognese, quiche Lorraine, or poached salmon, these things should have been delicious. Instead they tasted flat. At first, he thought he overlooked something in the preparation which, he had to admit, had become quite easy to do. So, he checked each recipe carefully and laid all the ingredients on the counter in the exact order he’d need them—olive oil, onions, garlic, mushrooms, sliced fennel, chicken breasts and so on. This made no difference. The results were edible but dull enough to send his taste buds into a stupor. It took him some time to realize the one ingredient missing from everything he cooked. Companionship. Without it his meals lacked spark and weren’t worth the effort. Such a surprising state of affairs. Companionship was once so abundant it came knocking. Now, a shortage. Almond cake again. The rudeness of that thought, the way it shoved itself front and center. He could see it—a little square of dense yellow cake with a toasted almond pressed into the very middle. He could smell it—vanilla, a hint of cinnamon, and possibly saffron. Saffron? Was that her secret? The Chaldean woman who ran the fruit stand on Voltaire Street? She sometimes, not always but sometimes, sold pieces of the exquisite treat for a dollar. It was never displayed. You had to ask. You had to wink and nod. She would give a secret smile and pull a pink cake box from under the register, hand you a piece

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

wrapped in waxed paper and tied with a thin green ribbon. It was delightfully cloak-and-dagger. Almond cake. His stomach growled for it. He must have a piece and he must have it now. The old man reached for his cane, struggled to stand and did something he had never done, not once in the fifty years he lived in the house he inherited from Aunt Ophelia. He left his dirty dishes right there on the table. He had an appetite and knew better than to delay. If he waited too long his hunger would abandon him, leave him in his usual disinterested state. Plus, right now his joints felt good. He moved as swiftly as he dared, hoping to outpace the arthritis that could freeze his knees while making his hips grind and burn. When the ache got bad it sometimes made him queasy. The queasiness often outlasted the pain. But even rushed, he made himself stop by the front door to say good-bye to his friends. Hard to believe it now, with his hands gnarled and his vision dimmed, but he’d once been a photographer and quite a good one. Mostly weddings, graduation photos, family portraits, that sort of thing. But also, and always, portraits of his special friends. Black and white, never color. Razor sharp focus. He didn’t go in for artistic fading and couldn’t abide blurs. He’d arranged the best photos of his best friends on the wall by the front door. And there he stopped. Top row: Andrew (died on the beaches of Normandy), William (a car crash in Rochester not long after Japan surrendered), Christof (Benzedrine overdose). Second row: Sabastian (lost at sea during the Korean Conflict), Benjamin (lung cancer), Fernando (skiing accident), Liam (beaten to death during a mugging after leaving a gay bar in New York), Robert (Suicide). Third row: Cassidy (Vietnam war), Steven (beaten to death during a mugging after leaving a gay bar in Chicago), Carlo (drowning, possible suicide), Victor (pancreatic cancer), Paulo (suicide). Fourth row: Austin (AIDS), Phillip (AIDS), Cesar (AIDS), Xavier (AIDS), Henry (suicide if you wanted to be technical, AIDS if you didn’t). Fifth row: Taylor (Alzheimer’s), Vincent (stroke). He left an empty space in the last row for one more portrait, his own, although there was no one to take it. He stood facing the wall of photographs with the tip of his cane placed between his feet and both hands resting on the handle. He imagined he would look quite debonair, like Fred Astaire himself, had he not been so shriveled and hunched. “Hello, hello, hello!” he said to his dear friends. “And good-bye, goodbye, good-bye! Gentlemen, I’m hungry. I believe you know how rare an occurrence that has become. I simply must have a piece of that Chaldean lady’s almond cake or I won’t survive the hour!”

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

He turned and movement blurred at the very corner of his vision, as if Cassidy or Steven had changed position or brushed back a lock of hair. The old man’s scalp prickled, and gooseflesh sprang up on his arms. He turned back too quickly and almost lost his balance. “Mercy,” he said. Cassidy and Steven were unmoved. Of course. Their portraits looked exactly as they’d always looked since he developed them in the shed alongside the house, the one Aunt Ophelia used for trowels and flowerpots that he’d converted into a darkroom when he first moved in. The fact that Cassidy’s smile seemed more devious than he remembered, the fact that there was an unfamiliar and mischievous glint in Steven’s eyes, well, this was just more evidence of the old man’s advancing decrepitude. He shook his head three times. “Mercy, mercy me,” he said as he headed toward the door. When there was another flash of motion, this time on the first row somewhere between Andrew and William, the old man ignored it. “My vision, my memory, my joints, nothing is trustworthy anymore. It’s as simple as that.” He opened the door and stepped onto the porch. At least he could still appreciate a fine day. It was August. The sun was warm but not yet harsh. That would come later in the afternoon. Everything had been rinsed in light—the white azaleas on either side of the porch, the turquoise blue kiddy-pool in the yard next door, the palm tree with gray-green fronds as big around as a wheelbarrow. Just barely visible over the roofs of the houses across the street was the shimmering sea. The sounds of the day were just as marvelous—the two low and musical tones the manhole cover made when a car went over it, the squabbling of the seagulls, the yells of children down the block playing a game of tag, and the breeze through the neighbor’s magnolia tree whispering a secret language he could almost understand. He stepped off the porch and said to himself, “Down the path. Left at the sidewalk. Right at the light.” Today, he let his words fall into the rhythm of a waltz (last time it had been more of a samba). “DOWN the path. LEFT at the sidewalk. RIGHT at the light. DOWN the path. LEFT at the sidewalk. RIGHT at the light.” As he stepped onto the sidewalk, he set his foot down exactly wrong, jarred both his knee and hip, and sent a flare of white-hot pain up his spine to the base of his skull. It would be easy to wallow again, right there on the sidewalk. So much had been taken from him, his ability to walk without hurting, half of his vision, more than half his hearing and every one of his friends. He’d been left spindly, old and alone. He’d weep right now if he let himself.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: A Place to Talk by Timothy F Phillips. Timothy is a naive type artist who paints with brilliant colors and fine details. His honest view of the scene becomes bold when he finishes every piece of art.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

He would not give in. The pain in his knee and hip was already subsiding, was in fact nearly gone. He remembered he was going to the fruit stand because the waltz of his destination was not far from his mind. “DOWN the path. LEFT at the sidewalk. RIGHT at the light.” He could not quite remember why he wanted to go there but that didn’t matter. It would come to him once he arrived. At least this was his hope. Something moved again. At the very edge of his vision, a flutter like the hem of one of those frilly skirts Paulo used to wear on Halloween, the ones with a tropical floral print and a flounce at the hem that flared when he danced. Then a sound like a snippet of laughter, there and gone in an instant. He could not let these things distract him because just ahead was a y-shaped crack in the sidewalk that sometimes shifted under his weight and made walking treacherous. He placed his cane on a plot of ground that seemed secure and planned to step over the broken section. Just as he was about to set his foot back down on the other side of the troublesome crack--pop! Only not a sound. Instead, a not-unpleasant sensation of something inside him giving way. Almost immediately a warmth spilled from the top of his head, down his neck to his chest, his back, over his sore hips, all the way to his feet. It was like having bathwater poured over him. Or no, that’s not right. He felt that he’d expanded beyond the boundary of his skin the way light expands beyond the boundary of a candle flame. Perhaps he’d begun to glow. He looked at the back of his hands, an almanac of ropey veins and livercolored blotches. As far as he could tell, his hands did not emit light. Again, pop! The old man dispersed within himself so that now he saw not only with his eyes, but with his entire body. He heard not just with his ears but with every cell. He felt not just by touching a thing but also by not touching it. He discovered that he knew the exact sounds the dog lazing in the sun would make when the mailman arrived. He knew how the little boy’s lower lip would quiver when he dropped his ice cream cone. He knew that a blue Chrysler would park at the curb just ahead. These things had not yet happened but that didn’t matter. The difference between things that were going to happen, were happening, and had already happened became insignificant. Everything had taken on a luster, the red van with the crumpled headlight parked across the street, the silver maple tree in front of the library, even the rusted chain link fence around the empty lot. Everything looked as if it had been crafted from blown glass; all the colors as dark, rich and sacred as the stained-glass windows in an ancient church.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

The distinction between things thinned and blurred. The red roses were not so separate from the loamy soil, which was not so separate from the white stucco house, which was not so separate from the woman with long black hair walking out of it, which was not so separate from the sidewalk, which was not so separate from him. It became difficult to pick out one thing from another. Everything was beautiful but also bewildering. He couldn’t help wondering if he was being tricked in some way. They warned of such things on the news, con jobs played on the elderly. Maybe there was a way to confuse an old man like him, make him befuddled and vulnerable. He heard a quick peal of laughter again, shrill and high-pitched, like Benjamin when he was tipsy. The old man saw a bench. There, just a little further along, to the right of the sidewalk, a bus stop bench. Sitting seemed a good idea. He could collect himself and ponder these strange events. Once seated, he put the tip of his cane between his feet and rested both hands on top. “Here I am at the bus stop.” He was fairly certain he said this aloud but it’s possible he merely thought it. “This is where I’m going to stay.” Again, the sound of laughter. It didn’t come from anywhere near. Instead, it came from someplace in front of him, someplace distant. He looked past the blown-glass houses across the street to the blownglass sea gleaming beyond them. On the horizon, just above the water, he saw something. Directly in front of him, a blur, a shimmer between water and sky. Something was coming and he knew, somehow, he knew it was coming for him. This scared him quite badly. And it excited him. The two things, excitement and fear, bled one into the other. He sat on the bench and waited. ****** The blown-glass sun, which had been high in the sky when he left his house, now hovered just over the blown-glass sea. The old man discovered a young woman in a blue uniform kneeling in front of him. He was pretty sure the young woman was speaking. It was hard to be certain because sounds had lost their boundaries too. The chirping of the finches in the bushes behind him, the call of the seagulls wheeling overhead, the thump of the music from the passing cars, these things seeped one into the other. He watched the woman’s lips move and tried to pick her voice out from everything else. “You have quite a sunburn,” she said.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

The old man looked at his hands and discovered weeping blisters on the back of them. He found more blisters when he touched his fingers to his lips and his forehead. “You’re probably dehydrated,” the woman said. The light in her dark eyes, the set of her mouth, the tone of her voice, these things made her seem very kind. “Do you have any almond cake?” the old man asked. The young woman smiled and patted the side of his knee. “Let’s get you to a hospital.” At first, he didn’t want to go. Hovering over the water, where the blur and shimmer had been, was now a row of dashes. They floated toward him slowly-slowly. He was delightfully intrigued and terribly scared. He didn’t know if he should wait or run. Then he realized waiting or running made no difference. The dashes were everywhere he looked, the side of the pink apartment building to his left, in the window of the liquor store across the street, against his closed eyelids. When they put him on a stretcher and loaded him into the ambulance, he saw the dashes against the ambulance roof. Then, he was in a hospital, lying on a bed with the top half of him raised. There was another bed to his left, two more along the far wall which was exactly the beige of the erasers on the pencils he kept in a chipped coffee mug in the kitchen. Closer now. No longer dashes, instead rows of squares, black against the eraser-colored wall. A person leaned over him.

Willyouhaveasipofwater?No?Wouldyoupreferapplejuice? The person smiled.

Letmeputalittleoitmentonyourlips.Thoseblistersmusthurt. “I would love some almond cake,” he said, tried to say, thought, one of those. But the person was already gone. Still closer, he saw they were not merely squares. Glass glinted in them. Windows! All stacked on top of each other like the sweet little apartment building in Yonkers where he lived after World War II. Shadows shifted behind the glass. His heart raced. His breathing went fast and shallow. His rickety body thrummed with alternating currents of fear and joy. He knew no one else saw the floating windows but that didn’t make them less real. They were at least as real as the hospital and they were far more interesting.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

The first few notes of Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy drifted toward him like smoke. Then the whoop of a crowd of delighted people. These sounds were distant but unmistakable. Someone on another floor must have been having a party. But he was in a hospital. Such things did not happen in hospitals. The windows, the windows. The sound was coming from the floating wall of windows. He looked through and peered into a world of black-and-white, no color at all, but in that black-and-white world he could make out people moving. Dancing! People on the other side of the windows were dancing! And then, he couldn’t have been more surprised, Andrew appeared in the upper right corner. Andrew who died on the beaches of Normandy at the end of World War II was right there in the window. Blond crew cut. Square jaw. Those shoulders. So broad and strong. You’d never expect a man like that to be gentle. Andrew looked right at him and smiled. Such delight! Such relief! The old man almost wept. “To think I’ve been frightened,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been scared if I knew it was you.” William appeared in the next window. Christof in the next. Sabastian in the next. Benjamin. Fernando. Liam. Cassidy. His friends filled every window. They were devoid of color but still alive, smiling, laughing. The music got louder. The glass in the windows trembled with it. Then, bang! The music, the joy, the laughter was too much for the glass to contain and so the first shattered. Then, bang! another. And another. And another. As the glass in the windows exploded, the world on the other side flooded with color. Liam’s red hair. Cassidy’s blue eyes. Xavier’s paisley shirt. The music, the laughter, so loud and enticing. “You’re more beautiful than I remembered,” he said. A person in the hospital, probably a nurse, rushed toward him and blocked his view.

Areyouinpain? But he could see right through the nurse. In an inch of time the hospital had become flimsy and transparent. Carlo leaned out of his window, laughing and smiling, his teeth startling white against his brown skin, a slight shimmer to the gold shirt he wore. Satin? Perhaps. Carlo always favored shiny fabrics. “Where have you been?” Carlo said. “We’ve been waiting for you.” “I’ve been here,” the old man said. “Just here.” Youseemagitated.I’llgetthedoctortogiveyousomethingtohelpyourelax.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

“Come on!” Vincent said. Vincent’s hair was longer than he remembered, almost down to his shoulders. “The band is playing a tango next and I need a partner.” There was a window on the lower right side, the only one empty. Now the old man understood, was pretty sure he understood. Vincent swayed his hips and positioned his hands like he held an invisible partner. “I’m waiting for you to join us! And I’m not patient!” “No. No. No,” the old man said. “I can’t. I’m scared. I’m frightened.” The music stopped. So did the laughter. His friends, the whole array smiled gently at him. “We know,” Taylor said from the fifth row. “It’s scary.” “But we’ve all done it,” Paulo said from the third row. He’d somehow gotten hold of a Carmen Miranda wig threaded with a yellow silk scarf and decorated with fake fruit. “Some of us even rushed things along a bit, if you take my meaning.” A cluster of grapes dangled just above his left eyebrow. Paulo had always been fond of Carmen Miranda. “Darling, let’s be serious a minute. Haven’t you lived long enough?” “Too long,” The old man answered. “I have lived too long.” He did not know he was going to say this. He did not know it was true until he spoke. The music started up again. Quietly. “Begin the Beguine .” Vincent slapped the windowsill. “I was promised a tango!” “I’ve missed all of you so much,” the old man said. He longed to feel their arms, their hands, their lips. He longed to smell their pomade, the cigarettes on their breath, their cologne. “God, I’ve missed you.’ “There’s only one thing for it then,” Andrew said. Sweet Andrew. Gentle Andrew. The man who would hold a spider cupped in his hands and carry it outside when anyone else would squash it without a thought. So sad and wrong that he would die in war. “Besides,” Andrew said. His smile became clever and a little impish. “We have almond cake. Sabastian made heaps of it. More than you could ever want.” Andrew held out his hand. Taylor held out his hand. Austin held out his hand. Steven held out his hand. Henry. Vincent. William. Carlo. Victor. Paulo. Xavier. Sabastian. Christof. Phillip. Benjamin. Cesar. Cassidy. Fernando. Liam. They all held their hands out to him. He was terribly frightened but, for the first time in years, he was not lonely. The old man mustered his strength and reached.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Frank DiPalermo is a scholarship MFA candidate in fiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His short fiction has appeared in His, an anthology of short fiction by queer men, as well as the literary journals Slow Trains and Between the Sheets. His essay, “A True State of Grace" (unfortunately retitled “Diver Man” by the editor) was broadcast as commentary on the American Public Radio show, Living on Earth. He is a frequent contributor to So Say We All, San Diego's curated storytelling showcase (think The Moth, not Dr. Seuss). One of his stories was developed into the award-winning short film, Kathy. He is currently at work on “Singing in Tongues”, his second novel.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

The Diamond James Evan Burroughs When I rounded the corner, he came into view. An irresistible smile stretched across my face. Jack and I embraced. I took in the smell of his musky cologne which masked the curious, mostly putrid, scents of the city on a hot summer's day. “You look handsome today,” I said. “Thank you,” he said. “Let’s go have a drink.” “Okay,” I said. “You are special to me,” he said. “You’re a diamond.” “A diamond?” I asked. “Our friendship is forever,” he said. Nothing was unfamiliar about the bar. The shiny gloss of the mahogany, the dim lighting and the tall mushy stools that cushioned our butts. It was cozy and familiar. We ordered a pair of vodka martinis from a shirtless bartender with abs that replicated a Greek sculpture. I envied those abs. I wondered what it must be like to possess that level of desirability. I decided I wouldn’t be willing to put in the work. “If we’re not in committed relationships by the time we’re 40, we should get married,” Jack said. “You’re already married,” I said. “Like it’s going to last,” he said. A smirk flashed on his face bringing dimples to his cheeks. He lifted the cone-shaped glass to his lips and took a long sip. The mere idea of one day calling Jack my husband brought me palpable joy. Jack, his tall lanky figure, milky white skin, dark brown hair and piercing green eyes. Jack, this handsome, charming man who could have anyone in the world, would want to be with me? Love me? Marry me? Spend the rest of his life with me? Could my loneliness have an expiration date? I could love him better. ****** Four months had passed since the divorce. Jack’s now ex-husband had since moved to Florida with a new lover. The rain came down in buckets, pelting the pavement. We stood together, Jack and I, at the entrance of his apartment building, under the covering. We had no umbrellas. We waited for the rain to pass.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Diamonds by Annie Dawid. Annie is a writer and artist living in South-Central Colorado whose work can be seen at www.anniedawid/photos/. Her three volumes of fiction can be purchased, used, online just about anywhere! Her photos have appeared on the covers of American Poetry Revew, Cake, Oregon Focus, and, most recently, Into the Void.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

“Let’s go,” Jack shouted and took off down the street at a run. We ran with the freedom of wild horses, the raindrops slapping against our bodies, soaking us. Our shouts and laughter rang out. It felt as if we were in the middle of the forest, barefoot on a muddy path with tall trees reaching towards the sky, instead of the concrete buildings of the metropolis. We stopped to catch our breath. I could feel the weight of wet clothes stuck to my body. We looked into each other's eyes. The world around us seemed to disappear. Jack placed his hand gently on my cheek. “You’re a diamond,” he said. “My diamond.” The rest of my life would begin at this moment. Jack broke away. “Let’s go have a drink,” he said. All we ever do is drink. Over a cocktail, he filled me in on his latest hook-up. A wealthy guy with a knock-out apartment In Greenwich Village. “He has the perfect ass,” said Jack. ****** My body floated in a cocoon of steaming bathwater that turned my skin lobster red. Soft music played and a blanket of candlelight covered the bathroom in a warm yellow hue. I recalled a lecture from a college professor. “Diamonds are not rare,” She said. “The entire industry is a farce. The supply of diamonds is controlled. It’s all a hoax invented by a marketing team. Diamonds are indeed beautiful, but there is nothing special about them.” James Evan Burroughs is an emerging author and humorist. He is the author of a series of humorous nonfiction books entitled The Ubiquitous Blond. Beyond Queer Words is the first publication to present his fiction. James currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Beyond Queer Words

Sweet Summer Songs Erin MacKenzie My fingers start drumming on the steering wheel of our ’09 truck. To distract myself from the thickening silence I glance at her phone, mounted on the air vent, more to provide us with a timeline than directions. This drive down 78 is familiar, and I don’t really need to check the phone to know that we’ve still got two hours left. A handwritten sign that proclaims “You will meet God” speeds past, marking the halfway point from home to her parents. The drive is familiar, but the silence is different, full of things left unsaid. Dirty dishes, hidden half-finished bottles of vodka and tequila, hushed phone conversations that were “nothing”. We’re heading up to her parents for a long weekend, eight hours of driving for less than three days there. We take the trip often because her parents have a harder time coming down to visit us, and she feels guilty if too long goes by between visits to her parents. So we’ll endure the three days, three days of them saying things like “It’s so good to finally see your faces” and “Ever since you two got together we never get to see our daughter anymore” and “I always envisioned my daughter being married to a nice gentleman, and giving me lots of little grandbabies. Oh, but I suppose having a daughter-in-law is fine as well.” Family dinners at their house will be fraught with danger, like a table lined with mines, one wrong move and someone blows up. Normally on our rides we’ll talk the time away, talk and laugh and sing loudly to sweet summer songs. But we’re only halfway there, and I’ve run out of things to say. We’ve already talked about her parents, but not everything, not anything really, just her mom’s chicken and dumplings that we were both hoping she would make. We talked about my parents too, and the brunch that we have planned for next weekend with that couple from our apartment building that we wanted to get to know better. We even talked about a cloud in the sky that looked like a fish, a fish trying to fly through the sky. Stupid little fish didn’t know that fish don’t fly. She’s singing along to the radio, in her thick honey voices that melts me to the core. I try to sing with her, but I don’t remember the words anymore.

Erin MacKenzie graduated from Messiah College in spring 2020 with a Bachelor's in English. Likes her girlfriend, animals, nature, reading and writing.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: The Gas Pump by Cassandra Hamilton. Cassandra is a disabled artist/writer with MS and loss of central vision in one eye who creates from dreams, shamanic journeys and life. Her art has displayed at The Mystic Museum of Art, Marlborough Arts Center, Cromwell Creative District, Prometheus Dreaming, The Door Opener Magazine and MUSED, a BellaOnline Literary Review. She teaches Active Dreaming (a synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism) and you can view more ofher work/contact her at www.beardogdreaming.com. 71

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Soft Lips D. S. Davis Look, just because I don’t want to go home with you, bro, doesn’t mean I’m not comfortable with my sexuality. Too often big, drunk, men accuse me of being in denial. Grabbing me by my shoulder, pulling me in to whisper in my ear. Their whiskey breath, tequila breath, vodka breath grabbing at my chin. When the third in our group uses the bathroom, gets a drink, or grabs a smoke; they wait for their right moment to pry me open. What they know is I drink too much beer, shout about sports, and chase too much tail. What they choose to ignore is I wear tight pants, kiss my best friends, and I’m a great dancer. What they don’t know is in 2010 I was a go-go dancer at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. I shook my ass in yellow Calvin Kleins for two hours a night, taking home at least two-hundred cash. What they don’t know is gay men slide fives, while straight men at strip clubs throw singles. When my boyfriend Sidney’s back-up dancer cancelled on him, he asked me to fill in. Of course, I knew the dance. I’d been watching his fine ass do it for weeks. The manager offered me a job. He had me audition in a backroom, hula hooping as I stripped off my clothes. He made Sidney wait in the hall. After every shift, I’d spend the night dancing with Sidney. He bought me drinks because I was underage. We’d go back to his place. I could never bring myself to have sex with him and he never tried to force me. To be honest, dicks gross me out. I don’t know why anyone would ever have sex with one. I only dated Sidney because he treated me better than any woman had. So, today, when I walk away from big, drunk men it’s not because I’m in denial. It’s because you, you’re no Sidney. D. S. Davis is a writer of middle-grade and young adult novels from New Jersey. He writes books with reluctant readers in mind because that’s who he was throughout school. He is a former English teacher and currently the MFA program coordinator of the low-residency Creative Writing program at Sierra Nevada College, where he received his MFA focusing on writing for children and young adults.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Silent Identity by Oliver Bliss. Oliver is an artist based in Worcester, UK. His work explores identity, sexuality and gender. For further information please go to his website www.oliverbliss.blogspot.com

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

The moments in which I love you are too numerous but here are some of them Erin Riley * That time, not long after we met, when I complained that my baby pink sweatshirt had stains on it, despite my furious washing, that just wouldn’t come out. I came home from work and you told me to close my eyes because you had a surprise for me and into my outstretched palms you placed the baby pink sweatshirt minus all its grotty stains. Perfectly folded. It was one of the most beautiful things anyone had ever done for me. I think I cried. * When you suggested we fuck when I got home from the shops. I hadn’t been in and out of a supermarket so fast. I came through the door of our flat to you wrapped in a towel. I placed the groceries on the kitchen bench and turned to you. You tilted your head in the direction of our room. ‘Hurry up,’ it said. * The leftover olives. Two perfectly round crisp green ones, some salty kalamatas floating in a tiny bowl. I ate a few of the kalamatas and left a green one for you. I tell you that there are some olives left for you. I come back to a half-eaten green olive. ‘That half’s yours,’ you say, not knowing we had the same idea. * Lying on top of you. Chest to chest, on the green couch on a gloomy Sunday. ‘You are very pleasing to me,’ you say, looking into my eyes. I went to the gym and I wrote about it in my diary. * I was nervous on our second date. I had not seen you for three whole weeks. Three weeks that felt like the longest, most exciting and excruciating weeks of my life. I walked the steps to your apartment and stood at the front door for a few moments before knocking. You opened the door to me in the most magnificent black outfit. We did not even greet each other in words - but walked toward each other and kissed one another so tenderly for so long. It was the moment I knew that I loved you. It was the defining kiss of my lifetime. If there is a memory I think I will have when I am close to my end – it will be this moment. * Your hands. Hands so elegant and soft. I watch your hands in the world and I am mesmerised. There is so much kindness in those hands.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Space Between by Eliot Claire. Eliot is a nonbinary poet and artist currently in Chicago. Their work can be seen in Mad Hat Literary Magazine, Verity La, Black Heart Magazine, The Cape Rock, and others.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

* The December leading up to Christmas when every morning for twelve days you would send me one of twelve perfect nudes. The advent calendar of my dreams. The photographs you’d taken on your phone at the Airbnb in between my making breakfast and going to the shop for painkillers. * The way, when talking to other people about me, you speak of me as they, as if it was the most effortless fit. In watching you hold space for me, stretching other people’s minds while also opening yourself up for critique, love overtakes me because in this moment, I notice how much I matter. * The way, on finishing a book, you rise to collect your diary, rifle to its final page and add another title to the books you’ve read this year. * Curled up on our bed, watching a show and you mime a doorknock and I know to lift my arm so that we can be closer. * At some point the robot vacuum cleaner has become ‘our child’ and continues to swallow computer cables and phone chargers. I smile at you because you’ll say things like ‘our child got into the spare room,’ and ‘I’ll get our child to clean the floor after dinner.’ Sometimes we hate our child and put it upside-down on the couch. * The drive home from Lithgow. We had tasted the food we will serve at our wedding. Singing Dreams by Gabrielle and imagining all the songs we will play. Also on our minds is the karaoke party. What will we sing? “Chumbawumba”, I suggest. We sing – no, chant – it loudly, between smiles as wide as our love, all the way home. I park the car on the corner of our block. We unpack the car and you kiss me, tenderly, my hands at my sides, full of bags. * You in your puffer jacket on the wrong side of the bridge. Its pastel pink and blue matched the harbour’s fading sky. We kiss at the water’s edge and spot a rainbow. * I felt faint walking up the stairs to the front door. Bags in my hands. This was the beginning of our half of the week. You open the door to my face without colour and lay me down on the golden couch. With your beautiful, kind nurse hands, you count my pulse. Forty beats per minute. A vasovagal you think it is. You call your dad. The doctor agrees. You prop my feet upon a pillow and deliver

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

me toast with peanut butter. You sit next to me on the couch and we laugh because I’d taken too much beta blocker. * Our game “open or closed” where you are to guess whether my very small eyes are open or closed. It is most fun when, early in the morning the difference is a slither no thicker than an eyelash and you, devilishly, refer to my clearly open eyes as “CLOSED.” * Our bedroom is full of light. It blankets our fleshy geography in purples and golds. We are explorers in a land we’ve never been, and we are making this our home. * Words and how they form in your mouth. Put together in combinations soft and measured. Your poetry of the everyday. You look at me, mesmerised and in wonder. After knowing so much of my story, you remind me how incredible it is that I have grown myself into the person that I am. * I live between my apartment and our apartment. It was once your apartment but now we share it and it is the place we call “home.” Since March we have spent Thursdays to Mondays making a life here. I took the oversized Monstera down from the top shelf at work and it now lives in our bedroom where every few weeks you gently point out its unfurling baby leaves. We cook in our small corner kitchen and read on the golden couch in silence and sometimes we raise our heads and let our eyes speak the words we don’t have. On Saturdays I take our coffee cups down the street to the café where the Barista knows the coffees for each cup. I bring them back and place them on the side table and I put my inside pants back on and I climb back into the warmth of your arms. * You sent me a text asking if I was in private as you wanted to send me a video you’d made. I was in my bedroom writing. I put down my pen, got up and closed the blinds. I opened the text message and pressed play on the video. It was your toenail on the brink of collapse. I was at once disappointed – my hands had drifted into my jocks in anticipation, though I’d fast removed them in a fit of laughter. A life-time picker of toes: “I’d like to have a go at that tonight,” I texted back. You said it was getting hard to hang on but that you would try and hold out for me. * You lie behind me, your chest to my back, your hand curves around my belly. In it you hold my cock. Your tongue is in my ear and my hand reaches in the

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

space between us – desperate for your warmth. I find you, hard between my fingers. You fuck me gently for a while, long and soft and tender and deep. You’re close when into my ear you whisper, “Can I come inside you?” “Yes,” I reply without hesitation. * In the depressive throes of PMS which leaves you struggling to remember you are not so deeply troubled always, your answer to my “you’re not going to top yourself are you?” is “not with you next to me in the bed, no.” * The red-bricked corner block next to the pool. The pool where, for years, late at night I took myself to escape days spent supporting other people. A lane to myself, I would glide, up and down, with only numbers in my head. Swimming, not drowning, made beautiful. Leaving the pool, I would look to the red-bricked corner block – its long windows like eyes. A dull pink illuminating the room of someone I didn’t know. I was obsessed with the red brick corner block with its lights and windows for eyes. As if alive, I felt them warmly waiting for me after my nights at the pool. I would gaze up into its soft face as I climbed into my car. I would sometimes say to myself: one day I’ll live there. My fantasy second home by the pool. And then I fell in love with you. You, who lived in the red-bricked corner block with its windows like eyes. Erin Riley is a social worker from Sydney, Australia who has spent the last decade working in community based aged care. They have since left this work to pursue work in a custodial setting – with the hope to provide a more radical lens to social work practice with incarcerated dying people. They are new to writing and enjoying it very much.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Sand Angels Jeremy Schnotala On Sunday night, I kissed a boy. Now that might not sound like that big a deal, but when I tell you that I’m a boy too and that the boy I kissed was Jesus Christ, well, that changes a thing or two, don’t it? It all started Sunday night with my Ma yelling from the bathroom, “Marky, are you ready to go? We’re gonna be late for church.” She’s always yelling we’re gonna be late even if I’m already ready, which I mostly am. She does it to hurry herself up. Her boyfriend and I both know that, even though we don’t really talk to each other except when I’m smarting off at him. I decided a couple months earlier that I was done giving him a chance the day he hatcheted the shit out of an old wooden chair in the garage while yelling at me for leaving my bike in the driveway. “Marky.” That’s what he calls me too even though I hardly know him and my Ma only knows him since about three months ago when she met him at the party store where she stops to buy her Salem Lights and a six pack of Fresca. “Come in here.” Here was the garage and instead of pressing the button to shut the door behind me, he pulled the rope and dragged the screeching wheels over their metal tracks. “I,” he said, and his hatchet came down on the back of the chair, “will,” hatchet again, “not,” more hatcheting. And just like that, one word and one hatchet at a time, he hacked away at that chair while I just counted the chunks of wood flying left and right. I was at nineteen before he finished telling me that if-he-found-my-bike-in-thedriveway-again-he-would-run-it-over-on-purpose-yes-on-purpose. He had hatcheted a big half-moon shape out of the back of that chair. It made me smile, which he didn’t like at all, but I kept picturing some six-foot beaver gnawing away on that poor chair. That’s exactly what it looked like. So, like I was saying, it’s Sunday night and I’m in the car waiting with my Ma’s boyfriend and we’re not talking and my Ma’s still yelling from the bathroom we’re gonna be late, but using the f-word too because she really loves that word. And Ronald, that’s her boyfriend’s name, although he likes my Ma to call him Ronny or Ronstantinople depending on the situation, is in the driver’s seat smoking a cherry-smelling cigar, which I actually like the smell of, especially compared to nasty unfiltered Marlboros. Ron’s cigars kind of smell like those little pine-tree things you hang in the car that come in all sorts of other scents not just pine. Just like one of those in cherry.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

I’m reading the name off the little cigar box Ron threw on the dashboard because it makes for a great tongue twister warm up for the church play we’re heading to where I’m one of the stars—me and Jesus. Swisher Sweet. Swisher Sweet. Swisher Sweet, I’m saying over and over again in my head when my Ma finally comes traipsing out of the house like she’s been waiting for us for over an hour. “Lock the door,” she says to Ron, probably because her nails are wet, and Ron gets out of the car and throws his half-smoked Swisher Sweet into the lawn, which is still pretty wet from all the rain we got this spring so I’m not too worried it’ll start a fire even though it’s still smoking and making a little cloud of cherry above the grass. “Do you have all your lines memorized, honey?” That’s my Mom. Yell at you with the f-word for probably like an hour, and then two minutes later look you in the eye, put her soft hand on your head to move the bangs out of your eyes, and you just kind of crumple up into a cry. She’s real pretty, too. Dark hair curling down to her shoulders, kind of like Wonder Woman’s, only a little bit flimsier. And tonight her makeup is all perfect and her eyes are shining out like green magic. She has on her Primo perfume, which may smell cheap to some of the other women in church, but to me it smells like my Ma and I make sure I save up my money each winter from shoveling driveways so I can buy her a big bottle of it from the Rite Aid and tuck it in her stocking. And there she is, quizzing me on my lines while Ron takes his time to lock the door probably because he ran inside first to grab a couple packs of Little Debbie snack cakes to hold him over until church is finished. These are the times that I remember how good it was when it was just me and my Ma. “Sure I know my lines, Mom,” I tell her and pull out the notecards from my pocket. “Plus, I put all my lines on cards in case I get nervous on stage and blank out like a fool.” “You’re not gonna have pockets in your costume, honey,” she reminds me and then I feel nervous for the first time. My costume is basically some old bed sheet that the church ladies sewed up to look like a tunic. And I have a brown belt and matching vest-like thingy that makes me look more like a shepherd, even though I’m supposed to be the Apostle Paul. Jesus and I are the narrators of the church musical. He’s a year older than me, and if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t even be doing it. He came up to me one Sunday after Sunday school and said, “I think we should try out for the narrators in the Easter cantata.” He was new in church and I about died when he talked to me and about died even more when I heard myself say, “Okay.”

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

So, I’m shuffling through all my cards, saying my lines out loud in the back of Ronald’s Oldsmobile on our way to church even though he keeps yelling at me to shut up because he can’t hear Kenny Roger’s singing one of his favorite songs on the radio about counting money and playing cards. I just say my lines louder, maybe to bug him, but mostly because I’m getting more nervous by the second because I really don’t want to mess up—not just because this is the biggest thing at our church every year, or because it’s my first time acting and I think I really like being a star, and not even because my Ma is singing two choir solos in the same show, but because since Jesus and I first practiced our lines together two months ago next to the lost-and-found box in the church basement, I can’t think about anything but him. Of course it’s all just a big ol’ fantasy. That’s what my Ma calls a thing you wish so hard for but know there ain’t no chance in hell it’ll come true. My Ma and I share all of our big ol’ fantasies with each other. Like the one she shared with me when just me and her drove out to the beach a year ago on a school night even though I should have been studying the periodical table of elements for a quiz the next day, except she wanted us to watch the eclipse of the moon that we never did get to see because of the stupid clouds. “Let’s make some sand angels,” she said, and we did, even though it was too dark to see them and we got buckets of sand in our hair. “You know what I wish, Marky?” she said and stopped moving her hands and legs through the sand. It got all quiet. “I wish that I could meet someone, someone who’d love us not because we’re so beautiful, but just because.” Then she started up again with the sand angels, but this time so fast she was throwing sand around like a lunatic. “But, ain’t no chance in hell,” she laughed. “That’s just a big ol’ fucking fantasy!” And I kind of agreed with the f-word that time because it just felt right. We pull into the church parking lot and it’s packed. “Even the devil himself comes to church on Easter,” Ron says and I kind of laugh, mostly because I start to picture him with horns and a pitchfork like that little devil on the sides of those cans of meat. There are so many cars that some of the people are parking on the lawn and Ron says, “to hell with it,” and pulls his big Oldsmobile into one of the three empty handicap spots. “Limp,” he tells my Ma and laughs while he turns off the car and licks his fingers to straighten his red moustache in the rear-view mirror. Both he and my Ma limp out of the car and chuckle and they seem real happy together.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

I start to run ahead, calling, “Bye, Ma. I gotta go. I still have to get my makeup and costume on,” but I’m not so far away that I can’t hear Ron say, “you gonna let them put that boy in makeup?” I open the back door of the church that leads to the basement and right away Miss Parton runs up the stairs and grabs me. “Oh Mark, I told everyone to be here a half an hour ago,” she says, and I’m about to make something up about the Swisher Sweet catching fire to the lawn, but we’re already down the steps and in the basement and I’m standing next to Jesus and feeling that big ol’ fantasy feeling in all sorts of places. He’s sitting in a chair in front of one of those hallway mirrors turned on its side and propped up on the table with two rubber snow boots from someone who must have had like a size 20 foot. “Welcome to our makeshift salon,” Jesus says and laughs as he waves his right hand like he just made it all appear. He’s not wearing a shirt, but instead is covered with an ugly pink poncho made of the same kind of plastic they use for picnic tablecloths. It’s supposed to be tighter around the neck, but it’s hanging half way down his arms and I can’t help but stare because he’s so beautiful. “Sit down, sit down, sit down,” Miss Parton says over and over again, and she’s the director so I have to listen. She pulls off my T-shirt like I’m some four-year-old. “Put this tarp on,” she says and Jesus laughs. “It’s not a tarp, Dolly. He’s not a boat you’re covering for the winter,” Jesus says and I laugh too. He started calling Miss Parton Dolly a couple weeks back and the name kinda stuck even though I haven’t gotten brave enough to call her that yet. But that’s how funny Jesus is, and we both start singing “Working 9 to 5” until Miss Parton gives us a look. “Ok, gentleman,” she says. “Very funny. We have about twelve minutes to finish getting you boys into your beards and ready to go onstage.” “Beards?” I say. “Did Paul have a beard?” I ask, but what do I know? It was only a week ago that I realized Paul wasn’t one of the twelve disciples. “Are you sure,” I had asked, and Miss Parton pretty much told me to read my Bible. I never really read my Bible much because it bored me, and when I did have time to read, I picked a Choose Your Own Adventure book instead. I never told her that, but she knew it because I almost always had a Choose Your Own Adventure book with me and so she almost always made a point of saying in front of everyone, including Jesus, that the Bible has every adventure in it that

you’ll ever need. “But,” Jesus said out loud one time, “does it end differently every time you read it?”

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

So, I’m sitting next to Jesus, and we’re both shirtless under our pink tablecloth ponchos, and Miss Parton and the other church lady are off finding our beards when he reaches over and grabs my hand. “Good luck,” he says and squeezes it a little. I don’t want him to let go, and he doesn’t, at least not until Miss Parton screams, “Who took the Vaseline off the baptismal tank?” and then we’re both laughing so hard there’s no way anyone could hold hands. Miss Parton finally scuttles in just like one of those water bugs, and we can hear the music minister talking to the congregation upstairs. “They’re going to sing three praise songs and then we’re on,” she says and snaps open this mammoth jug of Vaseline and shoves her hand inside with a slurp and scoops out so much Vaseline I can’t even see her hand anymore. The church lady helping Jesus does the same thing and then they start covering the bottom halves of our faces with Vaseline and I can’t stop from laughing. “What the hell?” Jesus says and Miss Parton pretty much goes white because someone said hell in church and wasn’t quoting the Bible. “What are you doing?” “We’re giving you beards. Stop talking or you’ll mess them up,” his church lady says. “If we can’t talk, how are we supposed to narrate the cantata?” he asks and I’m sure he wanted to use hell again but didn’t. Next Miss Parton grabs a can of Maxwell House coffee, and an old rusty can opener, shoves them at Jesus’ church lady, and tells her to open it. The can opener looks like it hasn’t been used in a hundred years and the church lady struggles so long to open it that you can tell Miss Parton is gonna explode. “Give me that!” she says and grabs it all back. The Vaseline on my face starts to itch. “Does your face itch?” I ask Jesus. “Like hell,” he whispers, and even though both ladies can hear him, at this point, getting that coffee can open is more important than sin. Miss Parton finally gives up on opening the can with the crank-thing because there’s obviously something like a piece of dried up chicken caught in the little wheel, and you can see her face crumple all up trying to figure out if she can use the other end, the pointy end that you use to open up a can of juice or that really thick milk my Ma uses when she’s making a pumpkin pie which she hasn’t done for a really long time. But instead of just opening up a little triangle on both sides, she starts hatcheting all over the metal lid of that poor can. “They’re on the second song and I’m not letting Jesus and Saul go onstage without beards,” she says, chopping away at the top of that Maxwell

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Kissing Angels by Van Lanigh. Mixed-media painting on Paper, 31 x 23 x 2 cm (framed). 2018. Van is a Russian artist from St. Petersburg, who couldn't find his place in hometown. He always liked art. He has been painting and drawing since he ever remembers himself. At the age of 8 he started to study art in a local school. After years, when the time has come to go to university, he instead started to put all of his efforts on researching and developing his voice in the field.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

House. Ron would have opened the can with one swipe of his hatchet, I think, but Miss Parton’s hands are too small to do anything but make dents in the metal, and she’s about crying. “I’m actually Paul,” I tell her because I’m hoping to kind of lighten the mood a little. She doesn’t answer. “You called me Saul,” I say. And then she stops hatcheting. It’s real quiet for a second in that church basement. And with sweat dripping down her forehead and that rusty can opener in her hand like a knife, she looks up at me and reminds me of this crazy lady I saw once in this old movie about a psycho-hitchhiker who convinces these dumb people to let her inside their car because it’s raining outside. And, of course, she pretty much hacks them to death, and then just stares off into the darkness with these tiny pupils and sweat and blood all over her face. Miss Parton looks like that, minus the blood. “What did you say to me, young man?” she asks and drags out each syllable of her sentence so that they all kind of blur together. “I just said that I’m Paul now, not Saul. You called me Saul. I had some sort of transformation on my way to Golgotha and God changed my name to Paul.” “I know my Bible, mister, and it was not on the way to Golgotha, it was on the way to Damascus,” she says, and then Jesus reaches out, just like I can imagine the real Jesus would, and calms her down by putting his hand on top of hers. “Let me help, Dolly,” he says, all caramel-like. That’s what my Ma calls it—caramel-like—when someone talks in a way that makes you feel like you’re eating caramel, and not the sticky hard caramel like is already on a caramel apple, but the melted caramel in a pan on the stove just before you dip the apple in. That’s Jesus. He takes that can opener and just like he’s multiplying some fishes and loaves in a desert somewhere, he flicks out that piece of dried-up chicken and opens the dented lid of the coffee can the way it’s supposed to be opened. Miss Parton doesn’t tell him thank you, which I’m sure Jesus is used to. Instead, she grabs a handful of those coffee grounds and pats them into my Vaseline. The church lady helping Jesus does the same thing on his face. And before the third song is done upstairs in the sanctuary, we have matching coffeeground beards. Looking at ourselves in the sideways mirror, I don’t dare laugh, even though we look ridiculous. “Let’s go,” Miss Parton says all commanding. “We’re on.”

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

“Um, we’re still kind of naked,” Jesus reminds Miss Parton, and I can’t help but think of what it would really be like to see him naked. I look away from my own reflection in the mirror, and without moving my head, I look at Jesus. Instead of pulling the tarp up over his head, he pulls it down to his waist so he won’t mess up his coffee-ground beard, and he’s inching his way out of it because he can’t get the knot of his tarp undone. Miss Parton shouts at the church lady, Bertha this and Bertha that, and I have to ask Jesus if I heard right because I thought Bertha was a fake name they only used in cartoons for people who were really big. “Bertha, go tell them to sing another song,” Miss Parton yells and Bertha scuttles out exactly the same way Miss Parton scuttled in earlier, and now I am pretty sure they’re sisters, Dolly and Bertha. She pauses at the door and turns back toward Miss Parton. “Any requests?” she asks, and you would have thought the whole church collapsed in on itself. “Any requests? Any requests? I don’t care if they sing Yankee Doodle!” she screams, and I’m not lying, screams so loud I’m sure people in the sanctuary upstairs can hear her. Miss Bertha runs out and Miss Parton throws our costumes at us and the whole time I’m still thinking about Jesus half naked. He’s standing there shirtless and in his jeans, and I kind of trace the outline of his face with my eyes, and then I trace the outline of his chest, and just when I’m about to trace his pants, I swear to God, he unbuttons them and pulls them off. Just like that. “What are you doing, young man?” Miss Parton asks and her eyes are as big as the sugar cookies my gram use to make before she got sick, and I’m telling you those were so big I could only eat two. “It’s hot in here,” Jesus says, “and if I don’t cool off, I’m going to start percolating.” By this point, I’ve got my poncho off and my robe on, and I’m thankful it’s so baggy because I’m staring at Jesus in his underwear and can’t help myself. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God!” Miss Parton is saying over and over again, and I’m afraid at first it’s about my hard-on, until she grabs a couple church bulletins and starts fanning my face. Sure enough, I’m brewing coffee off my chin, right onto my white robe. “Put your robe on!” Miss Parton tells Jesus, and he steps into the white gown and it makes his skin look even more golden than before. He pulls it up and slides his arms through the holes and then backs up in front of me. “Zip me up?” he says, and sounds a lot like my Ma does when she’s dressing up for church and runs out of the bathroom half dressed with her nails still drying and shouting we’re gonna be late.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

But there’s no zip on the robe, just a bunch of holes with some white shoelaces zigzagging back and forth and one big brown button at the top. So I start tightening his shoelaces and he’s standing so close to me that I can kind of smell his skin or shampoo, and it smells real good, better even than a Swisher Sweet. Something like fresh rain when the grass needs it most. “You better take your pants off too,” he says to me, “or you’re gonna brew a whole pot of coffee all over your tunic.” At this point, Miss Parton isn’t listening to us, she’s just shoving newspaper bibs over the front of our tunics. I slip my pants off under my robe when she’s done putting on my bib and I feel a whole lot better for a lot of reasons. “Keep these bibs on until right before you go onstage,” she says. “Now upstairs with you both. You know your cue.” But to be honest, I have pretty much forgotten everything, including my cue, because I’m sneaking up the back stairs of the church with the cutest boy in the whole world and we’re both in our underwear and I’m in love. The congregation isn’t singing “Yankee Doodle.” They’re singing “This is the Day that the Lord has Made” and we wait real quiet in the pastor’s office which has a back door that leads to the basement and a side door that leads right out onto the stage. The door is open and the music minister is smiling to the congregation and showing everyone when they need to clap during the song. We can’t see anyone in the audience, but I’m sure Ronald is sitting in the back row cleaning his nails with his keys or eating another Little Debbie and stuffing the wrapper inside a hymnal. But we can see my Ma onstage with the choir where they’re all standing on some creaky wooden risers. Next to them is the silly, cardboard barn we made the weekend before during set building with a bunch of broom poles, cardboard, and masking tape. In front of it is a little wooden manger made out of real wood and filled with real hay, and the two playing Mary and Joseph are already out on stage kneeling in front of the plastic baby wrapped up in his swaddling clothes inside the manger. And only then it strikes me how weird this Easter play is. “Isn’t it weird,” I ask Jesus, “that there’s both a baby Jesus and a grownup Jesus in this play onstage at the same time?” He agrees, then takes off his newspaper bib and throws it on the pastor’s desk. We start talking about the movie Back to the Future and how a play about Jesus going back and forth in time in a DeLorean would be much more interesting than this musical where Jesus sits next to Paul on bales of hay and talks all about the birth and death of himself. In front of the fake barn and right next to the manger is a six- or sevenfoot wooden cross that’s pretty much blocking everyone in the audience from

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

seeing how beautiful my Ma looks in her blue choir robe. The cross is empty, other than a purple chunk of fabric draped over both arms which is to symbolize—that’s the new word I learned during this whole event—to symbolize Jesus’s sacrifice for our sins. “The audience has a fine enough imagination,” Miss Parton told us, “to picture Christ’s suffering on their own. They don’t need me to gore it all up with a bunch of fake blood and a crucified Jesus.” That’s pretty much how she said it when Jesus and I suggested that she should show the crucifixion on stage because we kind of wanted her to gore it all up. But for a moment I’m not thinking of the blood, I’m thinking about the real Jesus on that cross and whether I’m counted in all that sin he forgives. That’s when I hear the congregation getting to the end of “This is the Day that the Lord Has Made” and I feel Jesus grab my hand again. His hand’s a little sweaty and sticky with Vaseline and coffee grounds since he’s been itching at his beard, but I don’t mind it. He pulls me close to him and with his other hand he takes off my newspaper bib just like we’re in some old black and white movie. The congregation is applauding like they always do after the last song and some people are out there shouting Hallelujah and Yes, Lord, Yes, and Jesus is right here with me, still holding my hand, both of us in our underwear, and both of us pretty much glowing. And that’s when I kiss Russell Anderson. Right on the lips, Vaseline, gritty coffee grounds, and all. My big ol’ fantasy come to life. On the way home, I can’t think about anything else. Ron says, “Well, that sure was anticlimactic!” and yanks out another cigar. It seems like a big word for Ron to use, and I can tell it hurts my Ma’s feelings really bad because she sang her two solos better than even an angel could sing them. And her only son played one of the lead roles without forgetting a single line. Normally I would’ve shouted, “You’re anticlimactic!” Right at the ugly backside of his head. But I was too busy thinking about stuff. Like are me and Russell Anderson boyfriends now? And if so, does that really mean I’m gonna go to hell like the pastor always says when he preaches about people like us? And how, if it does mean I’m going to hell, then this is the first big ol’ fantasy I can’t ever share with anyone. Jeremy Schnotala has an MFA in creative writing from Western Michigan University. He lives with his husband in Grand Rapids, MI where he teaches English and creative writing and directs theater in the public schools. Along with recent Pushcart Prize nominated stories ("An Altar of Skins" and "Flower World"), links to recent works in American Fiction vol. 17, New Ohio Review, Temenos Literary Journal, Chagrin River Review, SHANTIH Journal, Haunted Waters Press, and more, can be found at schnotala.com. “Sand Angels” was first published in Saints and Sinners: New Fiction from the Festival 2018.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

The Ones That Got Away Michael Handrick We fucked in Green Park. It was my idea. It was the first time that night that we sat in silence, outside the bar flicking ash on the street. The sound of the music, the chatter on the street, the accelerating of cars became unbearable as we glanced at each other, blew smoke, and looked away. He stared at me right in the eyes. I locked back his gaze for once instead of steering mine away. “What are you thinking about?” “You,” he replied without blinking. He smiled languidly, almost wearily. Not the one where his eyes squinted, and he showed the gap between his two front teeth. It filled me with fear that anything could happen. Just for a second, I played with the thought, and remembered that many different faces, in many different accents and languages, had said it to me many times before. All with the same result. He lingered on me, studying me. I was running out of time. Like always I had many things to say that I left unsaid. I turned my face, broke the gaze just as I had broken the silence. To look like I was thinking about something, to seem nonchalant about his presence. Yet, it was the fear of struggling to find something to say. All I could think about was holding him. His lips against mine, seeing his eyes crease as he smiled. Perhaps by looking away I thought I could force a distance when all I wanted was the opposite. Not knowing how to voice what I truly felt. Earlier, he had guided me with his hand against my arse so was there anything more he was thinking about than what was beneath those two layers of fabric? We kissed savagely on the street. Uncaring, unthinking, unaware of the people around us. I kissed with violence. I didn’t want his tongue to untwine with mine. I pressed myself to him with urgency. I wanted to do it over and over, now, later, in the morning to confirm that it was something more. There was nothing more, but I wanted to stretch this moment out for a little bit longer. I was on borrowed time. Love always has an expiry date. There was never a sequel, so I’ve learned to indulge in what’s before me. I did it without regret. Even though I knew in the morning that’s all I would feel. Giving up to impulses, to his desires that extended no further than pushing me against the trunk of a tree. I hated the future me that waited and hoped he would message me, the part of me that hoped he would finally spend the night. But in that moment with him inside me, with my hands gripping the

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

bark, my knees tearing open against the dead foliage, I didn’t feel regret, I didn’t feel anything. There were other couples with the same idea. It was a Tuesday evening yet we were all on heat in the zenith of the summer. Not wanting or unable to wait to get back to a bedroom. I held his hand and guided him through the shadowed park. When we found somewhere covered enough, I pulled him into me, my beer-laced breath merging with his rum tinged. Time was running out. No time for preliminaries, no time for romance in the night-drenched Royal Park. He pushed me down. Pushed the dick he’d made into a gif into my mouth – that quivering thing that made up the apex of his being. I gripped tree bark. From the oversized clothes and his tall skinny frame underneath, you would expect him to be skin and bone. Yet, when his body pressed against mine it was more like flicking raw steak – tough, resilient, taut. His heavy breathing, and whispered profanities stopped, and I listened to the wind and the leaves drop as he sagged against me. On the way out he held my hand as we walked past other rutting couples. I watched their silhouettes and tried not to think about how I’d just been some shadow in front of him. We kissed after we passed through the barriers and said get home safe. I stood up on the Piccadilly line on the way home listening to the late-night theatregoers discuss what they had seen. I took a photo of my mud-grazed knees for documentation and sent it to him. ****** Wanna meet up again before I go on holiday? Definitely, when you thinking? ****** Around this weekend? Can I get back to you? I’ve got a lot of stuff going on at home and work so may be away. ******

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Bed of Flowers by John Waiblinger. John uses his fixation on the beauty ofmen to transfigure the carnal into his own embodiments of adoration and celebration. You can see more of Johnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work on Instagram @johnwaiblingerart.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

Delivered 20:02 Last seen today at 21:19 ****** He now keeps messaging me on Grindr – two months later. I assumed he’d deleted my number. I got home after having an STD test and put on my pyjamas. I had been thinking about messaging him for a few weeks. I’d even had a dream about him the night before. I filled up a bowl of ice cream, crumbled some chocolate on top and started watching He’s Just Not That Into You. It reminded me once again that I’m the rule, not the exception. I deleted his number. ****** Masc4masc. No fems. No Spice. No Rice. No Curry. No Chocolate. Scruff and rough. If no abs, you’re not fab. 6 figures not 6 inches. Only play together. Trans only. Over 6ft. Hung bottom for XXXL top. Open relationship. Str8 acting. 2 for more. High n horny. Vanilla pods only. Now? Ready, set, go. You’ve got your check box list for love. Fill out the web form, pass the CAPTCHA test. Human or robot? Prove you’re real and you’re in. Deal signed. The algorithms will keep working, keep selecting: the preordained love. It’ll choose, you choose. Algorithms and attraction are one and the same. All the algorithms lead me to you. You were missed this time, keep tapping, keep upgrading. Purchase required to increase your chances, to purchase love. Download required, upgrade required, upgrade yourself. Another app, another tap, another chance. Not this one, but there’s always another chance at love. There is always another chance, another opportunity, another swipe, another body to love. ****** I remember it was the last night we were all going out as a group before the others went to university. I remember the girls dressed up, the guys didn’t, as that’s how it was done then. I brought him along as he came to visit. I finished his drinks when he couldn’t drink anymore. We danced until late. I remember we decided to walk home. I remember us debating along the main road, supporting each other as we stumbled our way back. I remember pushing him against a fence and kissing him. I remember us climbing into bed. I remember

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

the bed creaking and the fear of waking my mum up. I remember passing out. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember him fucking me. I remember in the morning crying in the bath, hugging my legs and thinking that it would all be washed out somehow. I remember hoping that it would all be okay. ****** Every now and then his cock went soft from the drugs he had taken. I lay on my front and waited until his was ready and winced as he pushed it back in. ****** What are you looking for? They always ask. The answer is theirs, not mine. Love. A body to curl up against my body like a question mark. Answers. Proper grammar. Satiating this hunger. Someone to walk along the shore with and watch me skim stones across foam and breaking waves. Someone to spin me in the rain. Support me as I sing and stumble drunk home. Someone to look at me in the eyes and want nothing more. What do I want? ****** The windows were left open and the shutters pulled down. The night was hot and sticky. Blue candles burned in a vintage suitcase next to the bed, melting into the lining. I was in my underwear, wishing that I could take them off. He hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t made a move in the three days we had been together. The bumps of his spine stuck out in between the lines of muscle that divided his back in two. It narrowed down to the point where the buttocks split. The point where pale skin and shadow played with each other. I had measured all the moments between us by distance. The year we spent hundreds of miles separated but connected by bandwidths and pixelated webcams. The hand span as we drunk coffee opposite each other. The centimetres between our legs on the train back from Venice. The arm length between us on that bed where the white sheets seemed interminable, blending into the white curve of his back. I measured the times I could have breached those distances and slid my hand over his, reached across and pulled his body

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

into mine and stitched our bodies together. I measured the thoughts unsaid then forgotten. ****** I remembered the nights we had spent reading Sexing the Cherry to each other. Him in Italian, me in English, learning the other’s language where we twined imagery and places at the root of our tongue. We lived in worlds in languages we didn’t understand. In that moment I questioned whether all we had been doing was imitating stories, and in the flesh we could not replicate or fulfil those nights of prose and desire. He turned, eyes still shut, and his curls fell across his brow. Lips pursed as if he were confused by something or waiting for a kiss. In those perfumed shadows, he reached across and pulled me into him. His chest pressed against mine, our skin stuck lightly together. I wished it would mesh together. He opened his eyes, the irises changing between green and brown in the candlelight. He took my hand, pressed it against his and closed our fingers together. We had never fucked. Never kissed. Strangely, this act seemed the most intimate. In the darkness everything became heightened: our breathing, the cicadas singing outside the window like land-wrecked sirens, the sneeze from the neighbour that made us laugh into each other. “Can I kiss you?” as if he could feel the confliction in me. It felt dangerous to be me, to be with him, to be us. Yet I did it anyway. I said “yes”. To vocalise it gave reality, physicality to those long-awaited desires and feelings. There is power in words and voice. Saying it out loud gave confirmation to myself that what I felt, what I wanted was okay. ****** I often think about that summer where I had lied about who I was visiting and where I was going. ****** We pushed and grabbed and laughed at each other on the streets of Riga. On the way back to the hotel our faces were flushed from the cold and alcohol. He slipped on the ice, legs splayed; he looked up at me and smiled. Snowflakes settled on his eyelashes and glistened momentarily on those wide, unblinking eyes. I tried to pull him back up laughing at his feet skidded beneath him. We didn’t resemble two grown men. In that moment, I realised how

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

much the joy in his face brought to my own. A feeling of childishness that hadn’t been felt for so long. Seeing his face look up at me, I realised more and more I did not want to lose it, lose this feeling. I wished that like the ice glinting beneath us that this feeling, these moments could freeze around us. With the window flung open, the snow blanketing the city, we burned and burned and burned holding each other. The sheets were unmade and tangled like how he had found me. Our bodies entangled with the lacy night around us, the bed soaked in shadow and expectancy. Disentangle, re-tangle. Revisiting, denying the things that neither of us could voice. He curled my hair around his finger, twirling tiny golden whirlpools across my head. He never broke contact from my face, yellow around the irises; as if he were scared I would slip from his grip into the night. I closed my eyes, looked away. I felt them lingering on me. I could smell the alcohol on our breath, lulling me in and out of heady thoughts and lapses. It’s how he liked it. The two of us isolated from the world as it froze outside the window frame. I think of the traces of me left outside, disappeared under snowfall. It’s how I wanted it. Enlaced together in the darkness, hidden from the eyes of others. Hostages to our own desire and turmoil. I wonder what traces of me are left inside. In the shadows with the night muffled by the snowfall, I became more and more aware of our bodies, his heavy breathing, expectancy. Like some animal biding his time to figure out its prey’s weakness. The hesitancy between us, clinging to each other, and the unbearable resistance of wanting to press my lips against his parted ones, to not look at those wide eyes that never seemed to blink. He pulled me in closer, as if to graft me to his body, and kissed me. “I don’t want to,” I whispered. “We need to.” ****** Hey ****** Wanna grab that drink soon? Sure, I’m pretty booked up for the next couple of weeks, after then work? ******

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

And I wish I could see him again as I did that first night. Curled up beside me, hand under his cheek, as I did as a child, eyes half closed like moon slits. The yellow in his irises flashed in the candlelight. He asked me softly to stay. He promised to make bacon butties in the morning as I put on my clothes. In that moment there was an unbearable innocence, a sign of his loneliness and inability to be alone. It’s only with time that I realised that it didn’t matter which body was there under the sheets with him. Those loveless sheets. Memories give the privilege of retrospection, but in the moment, it was only the good that could be seen. The abuse is wrapped up in laughter and sex and sighs. Only with time can you peel back the layers like changing sheets on a bed until you reach the mattress with nothing left to cover it. That night, those hours remain as an undeveloped negative, a frame that has been tarnished by the following frames, the snapshots of him, of me, and the roll of film that sits on my shelf. ****** I didn’t think love’s expiry date would be at age twenty-nine. ****** I miss doing nothing with him most of all. The mornings where he smiled as he pulled me in and talked about books and films. The sleepy, southern drawl of his accent ran through scripts, the cuts, why it wasn’t their best work. I listened with my head on his chest and my eyes closed as the sun filtered up and across the room to the point where I saw orange behind my lids. He read the ideas for my novels and we gave each other feedback on our analogue photos sent digitally. His kisses were the most tender, always as if he were kissing me for the first or last time. The first time was under the rain one February night. I texted my cousin on the way home that I had butterflies. I only took a half-day off work when he moved back to America. We sat next to each other on the tube with his suitcase between us, filling the silences with conversation that was suitably filler. What time do you get back? When does uni start up again? As the train moved closer to Heathrow it had been, “not sure when we will see each other again.” If I had known that it would be “I will never see you again”, I would have held him tighter at the station. I’d have twisted my hands into the shirt he loved so much that I said he could keep and smelled the cocoa butter on his skin. “Let me see those baby blues one more time,” he asked me as I cried. When I broke up with him a year later on Skype, we laughed between

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

tears as our faces froze on the screen. “Can I see those baby blues one last time?” He never did. It’s terrifying when remembering a face, and that bizarre, fearful moment when all it has been reduced to is snippets of words and a laugh. The nights, the mornings when cast with first light or moonlight, spent memorising the way it shifted, the way the lips and mouth metamorphosed with worry or laughter, for it to suddenly not be anything physical at all. We carried on messaging for a while. I don’t hear from him anymore now that he lives in LA and has met someone new. ******

There are people out there in the city that I never thought of again once we’d had sex and locked the door behind them. I never hesitated not to reply if I didn’t feel the fizz, the vibrations, the butterflies. Yet, somewhere in the city they’re thinking why haven’t I replied, what did they do wrong, did they Message too many times, not enough? While all I can think about is, he’s probably having brunch with mimosas on Broadway Market. He’s messaging someone else. Our own chat history deleted. Scrapped data. ****** The ones that got away are the true claimants of our lives. ****** I often think of my parallel lives, the lives that were lost. Somewhere I’m living with someone with curly haired children. The house with the chaise longue and the piano where he plays Edith Piaf. The road trips through Florida where Spanish moss drips shadows on the tarmac. The ghosts of former and future selves. ****** I’m walking to the tube. The cool nights have finally become cold. I want to be back by the shore where the wine-dark sea was outside my window. My phone keeps vibrating in my pocket. Someone to message, someone to connect with, someone to fuck, someone to forget, someone who has forgotten

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Beyond Queer Words

me. I long for the days when all I had to worry about was being home when the streetlights went on before dark. The fizz and vibrations of the city have become unbearable. The sediments of bodies who barely want or have time to leave an imprint on my mattress. The bodies shoving, pushing, elbowing their way past me. Spilling through the barriers, in and out of rotating, closing doors. Doors that always open. Another replaces me, and I in turn, displace another. Always someone who succeeds, someone who precedes. The repetitions, the same movements, motions. A series of bodies, a series of actions stuck on repeat. The tube barriers slam open and shut. The bodies file past, carry me with them, and all I want is for it all to stop. Michael Handrick was born in the UK and raised in various countries. A graduate from the Creative and Life Writing MA at Goldsmiths, University of London, his short stories have been published in various anthologies; his journalism appears in magazines such as PYLOT, as well as academic research published by The Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

27B Paulina Pinsky Every day looks the same. I wake up and am served one soft boiled egg and one fig. Since the accident, I’ve never had anything else and I will never want anything else ever again. I leave my apartment with keys in my pocket, goggles and swim cap in hand on the twenty-seventh floor and enter the elevator. The man presses W50 without my having to speak. When I first moved here, he would try and say hello. But I do not respond to such probings. Now we don’t say anything at all. The sleek metal doors open. I step out and head through the locker room towards the pool. I sleep in my bathing suit, so as not to waste time in the morning. I swim: freestyle, breast stroke, back stroke, freestyle. Back and forth, back and forth. The lifeguard watches, but we both know I won’t drown. Exactly twenty-three minutes later, I peel off my goggles and swim cap, before heading to the steam room. It’s not that I don’t want love. I do. But how can I find love that will let me do what I need to do? The sense of order I have maintained would only be disrupted. To let anyone in would require me to let go of— I sit in the steam. I close my eyes and meditate: I imagine myself walking up a flight of stairs. One, two, three, four— What if I let go? What if I let someone in? Five, six, seven, eight, nine: A door. I imagine myself grabbing the gold handle. I turn the knob, I enter. Standing in the middle of a white room, I wait to see what will be presented to me. Cool air hits my skin. I do not like the cold. Soon I realize it’s not the room in my mind but the steam room itself. I open my eyes. No steam. ****** I’ve been in this building thirteen years. Never, and I mean never, has there been a problem or any sort of malfunction. But I guess that’s what I get, for letting in the thoughts. The thought that I could let someone in. Because the moment you let your thoughts go is the moment you start to unravel. But I refuse to unravel. I refuse to let myself go. ******

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Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Reach Out, Reach Me by Jordan Mejias. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and growing up in New York City, Jordan graduated with full scholarship from Parsons School of Design, New York, BFA. He has been artworking for many international publications and companies, including Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Future, Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;OrĂŠal, and Germaine Monteil. He found himself represented with his paintings and graphic work in countless private collections in the United States and abroad.

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I push open the door and walk out of the locker room to the front desk. The Lifestyle Manager is not present. I stand, wet and in a towel, dripping onto the marble floor. Someone must answer for this. And that’s when he enters: long brown hair that parts to the left, round blue framed glasses, a white linen suit, and a gold cane. I had never seen him before. He strolls towards the locker room as if I wasn’t standing in right front of him, dripping wet. I haven’t spoken to anyone directly for years. But I feel my jaw crack open and the words spill out: “Steam room is broken.” He pauses. Turns around. Looks me in the eye, and smiles. Then he turns his back to me and continues on his way. Did he not hear me? I follow, careful not to slip on the carefully waxed floor. I swing the door of the locker room open and find him sitting on one of the hardwood benches. He has placed his cane carefully next to him. He has removed his jacket and is carefully folding it in his lap. I catch him only in a button down and his linen trousers. I regret my decision. I should have assumed he hadn’t heard me and left it at that. But I feel the same wave of words roll out of my mouth, “The steam room is not open.” His smile cracks open again, before he picks up his cane and struts over to the steam room door. Placing his hand on the handle, he pulls: “Looks open to me.” “Who are you,” I accidentally bark. He laughs. “Easy! Down, boy!” His hand shoots out, “Name is Chrys. Chrys with a y.” I don’t take his hand. I can’t allow for him to clock my weakness. “Alright, no shake needed,” he says, as he strolls back to the bench, places his cane beside him before unbuttoning his shirt. “I’ve never seen you before,” I say, gaze on the ground. But I can’t pull my eyes away from the gold chain around his neck. Each button he tugs at reveals another part of him. A dash of light, shiny skin spilled down his sternum. He feels my gaze and answers my question without my having to speak, “Burn victim. 1982. Ex-lover splashed a tea kettle.” My face burns. How can he be so open? So willing to tell a stranger such an awful thing? How dare he not try to hide himself. Hide away from his shame and his hurt. I decide to turn my body away from him, so as to give him some privacy.

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He laughs at me. A deep, bellowing laugh. “What, never seen a man’s chest before? You’ve got one, honey. Haven’t you?” he asks. Before I know it, I fly out of the locker room, finger jamming the elevator button until it opens— a quick ride to my front door. I drop my towel to untangle my wet keys out of the netting in my swim trunks and promptly open the door. The door slams. I slide to the floor and start to cry. What if I let go?

What if I let someone in? What if I let go? What if I let someone in? What if I let go? What if I let someone in? Paulina Pinsky is a writer living in Brooklyn.

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Laws of Attraction Thomas Lofton McLean The geese are late tonight. This is the first time in seven years they’ve been late. They normally come right when the last bit of light causes a reflection on the lake. Some evenings, I watch my reflection dissolve in the water as the honks of geese can be heard overhead, pairs of them flying to the other end of the lake, where they rest on a sandbar for the night. But they are not here, and I wonder if they will ever come again. What is in the sky, however, is something I’ve never seen before, nor has ever occurred this far south - ribbons of green and red light, pulsating and moving like sidewinders on fine sand, becoming brighter as the sky goes dark. It is mildly awe-inspiring but feels dangerous somehow, as if the path of illumination will reach out from the sky and whip my body full of radioactive welts that will never heal. I go back inside my house and turn on the news. The east coast is dark - there is no power, no energy, available for anyone. Pundits are saying it’s a coronal mass ejection, yet it’s something much more sinister than that. Within a week, all magnets will stop working, and I’ll be forced underground. What’s left of the news is a mixed bag, coming from first-hand reports of people who are lucky to be in one of the few areas where their phones still work. People in New York are celebrating at bars, which are giving out free beers that are no longer being chilled in refrigerators; like they did that one summer in the 1977 when the power went out and David Berkowitz was shooting people in their cars. There is no looting being reported this time, and no killer. I figure New Yorkers still remain humble after the attacks all these years later. Now the news is saying the power outages are spreading westward, and have just hit the Appalachians. I figure I’ve got about an hour left before I’m impacted by the eventual loss of this attractive force. I think about a friend who I’d last seen about fifteen years ago, who lives right on the other side of the mountains. He’s probably got about ten, maybe fifteen minutes before it reaches him. I distanced myself from him when I realized I loved him. That I loved him completely, in that way you love someone when you’re old enough to understand at least some of the implications of willingly devoting your consciousness to another person, but you’re still young enough so that you feel like you have all the time in the world to figure out how to deal with that

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Artwork: Canada Geese flying Over a Norfolk Marsh by Mackenzie Thorpe. Mackenzie was born in Sutton Bridge in 1908 and died 1976. His grandchild, also named Mackenzie Thorpe, is one of the biggest selling British artists ofthe last 30 years.

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obsession. To feel that you could get them to love you back even if you didn’t think it was possible. When we went to New Orleans one summer, everyone we met thought he was gay and I was straight, which we thought was hilarious. He mentioned several times that if he were to ever date a guy, he’d date me. He was the last person I saw from that circle of friends before I went back to college just a hundred miles away, and the last time I saw him was right before September 11th, in a bookstore. He hugged me from behind and his beard lightly scraped against my face as he said my name, and I had to hide my erection with a book on computer programming. We talked for a couple of hours, promising to keep in touch, but then the attacks happened and he joined the army. It was then I realized how I wanted him in my life more than anything else. That I had actually allowed myself to love him for years, but failed to say anything about it, because I believed he would be unable to reciprocate. I found his number in a book on drumming I had in my library, and wondered if he’d kept the same number for all these years. I dialed and he picked up. I recognized his voice. “It’s me,” I said. “Your old friend.” He was silent for a moment. “How were you able to get through?” he asked. “I haven’t been able to call anyone with everything that’s going on.” “I have a question for you.” “I’m not sure now is the best time for questions.” “Humor me. What else are you going to do?” “From the area code you’re calling from, I should be in a car heading in your direction, but it’s too late to escape it.” “Remember when we went to New Orleans?” “Yes, I remember.” “Remember that night you wanted to go to the gay bar? And I said no, and we played that funny quiz show on my laptop — ” “You Don’t Know Jack.” “That’s the one. We were sitting on your bed. I wanted to kiss you. Would you have let me kiss you?” Silence. Then he said, “I thought you—” A metallic pulse pierced my eardrums and jolted the phone out of my hand. The ringing in my ear was slowly replaced by the sound of something substantial repeatedly hitting the roof of my house. I looked at my phone, which was now dead, and the sound on my roof became relentless.

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I made my way to the front door and turned on the light, standing in the open doorframe. I heard what sounded like small bales of hay hitting the ground. But instead of hay, it was geese. They were flying right into the ground, their honks interrupted as they crashed into the asphalt, breaking their necks with a sharp snap â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it was a rhythmic orchestra of death, these geese being pulled towards something the world never saw until it was too late to do anything about it.

Thomas McLean lives in Atlanta, Georgia and is a

graduate of Emory University's Creative Writing Certificate Program. He has published non-fiction work on PopMatters.com. This is his debut fiction publication.

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The Canyon Phong Huynh “You are going to tell her tonight, right?” Tim gently grabbed my pinkie. I was not sure if that was a real question or a rhetorical question. I had no choice in the matter. “Yes, Tim. That's the whole point of you coming to meet my mom for dinner." I looked away and pressed the lift button. The mucky doors inched to a close. When two lovers had nothing much to say to each other in the lift, it meant the cracks in the relationship had sucked out all the words, like air escaping a punctured space suit floating in the void. ****** Tim had been urging me to come out to my family for a year now. He did not understand the struggles of a gay Singaporean Chinese boy growing up in a devoted Christian family like mine. How could he? Tim was everything that a gay boy desperately wanted. He was six-feet tall with six-pack abs and dreamy cerulean eyes. Relocating from the Bay Area three years ago, Tim worked as a corporate lawyer at Google and lived in a penthouse in Orchard, the posh area of Singapore. Tim had the wit that lit up every party like the first ray of sunshine on a crispy, cold winter morning. Yet, none of this was the real draw for me. It was his normal, uneventful upbringing that I craved for. His first crush was a shy, middle school boy who always offered him homemade jelly puddings after lunch. He came out to his parents at thirteen, and his dad just said, "Ok, son. We know that for sure. Now let’s eat breakfast.” They laughed and had waffles with fried chicken. His dad then sat him down and taught him about the importance of condoms, like any dad would for a straight son. The summer he turned twenty-one, his parents invited his boyfriend to go on a cruise with them through Scandinavia. That's normalcy, so understated that it's disgusting and painful to think about as a life few Singaporean gay boys got to live. Sometimes, I loved Tim, but sometimes I secretly envied him. I first met Tim at a meeting of InterTech, a support network for LGBT+ people working in the technology scene of Singapore. The very first question he

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asked me during the post-meeting cocktail party was, "Are you out to your family, Clement?" “Not a chance, Tim. Not a chance. I love my family.” I sipped some champagne and smiled, painfully cut inside. “I don't understand. You love your family, and families should have no secrets." “Welcome to Singapore, Tim. You will understand it the day you start dating a Singaporean boy.” Tim texted me the next day for brunch, "Hey there, thought about our convo yesterday. Got a book I want to lend you. Good for brunch at ten?" No dick pics. Just pure normalcy. So we had brunch. Then brunches. Then everything else: morning jogs, book discussions, dinner dates, Netflix nights, and sex. His parents visited and went to Phuket with us. I became a part of his family. But what about my own family? I was leading a double life with my parents. I knew it. Tim knew it. And he loved me so much that he wanted to put an end to all that. One Sunday evening last week, he texted me, “Can I meet your parents? Dinner at yours next week?" I blue-ticked him. I did not know what to say. I was not ready. He called me the next morning, "Honey, I was serious. I think it is about time I meet your parents." He sounded serious, which was the opposite of his usual devil-may-care tone. “Errr… you know my dad just had a stroke, right? My mom has gone to church every Sunday since she was five. How do you want me to do this?" “You can come out to your mom, at least? By introducing me at dinner? Killing two birds with one stone. Don’t all Singaporeans love efficiency?” “Tim, this is not a joke. And what you said was really stupid. I am going to hang up.” We did not speak for a week. Tim repeatedly texted me a thesaurus of apologies, but this was the funniest of all: “I love you to the closet and back. Say something, please?” I had mulled over this coming-out dinner for more than a week. I wrote two-column pros and cons lists, plucked petals out of roses, tossed coins, and so on. But in the end, the answer had always been in me. I did not like Tim pushing the issue. Yet, I also loved that he was giving me the reason I had needed to tell my parents I was gay. And that reason was plain and simple: I am gay, but I won’t die alone. I have Tim. I finally texted Tim back. “Deal. But you have to say the words, okay?” “What words? I love you? I say that to you every single day!” “No! Tell my mom, ‘I am Clement’s boyfriend.’”

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Artwork: Leisurely by Trevor Eichenberger. Trevor is a queer artist whose paintings depict homoerotic intimacy. He is inspired by artists like Matisse and Hockney. You can follow him and his work on Instagram @Eichenbergertrevor.

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Beyond Queer Words

****** A few days ago, Ma, with hair dyed in a shade of purple popular with greying aunties in Singapore, had asked me what should be on the menu. She always cooked a feast, a Peranakan feast to be exact, whenever we had guests. Her babi buak keluak was exquisite. The chicken melted in your mouth as soon as it touched your tongue. Her chap chye made you want to go vegan. Her kueh pie tee beat any Western hors d'oeuvres you could dream of. “Just your usual specialties, Ma," I told her. I knew the Baba-Noya in her would scream with joy. “And bak kuk teh, also?” I added. “What? Your friend is ang mo, right? I didn’t know ang mos are also fans of bah kuk teh ah.” “He is.” Little had she known that Bedok 85’s bak kuk teh was what we ate at my first brunch with Tim. No overpriced avocado on toast with poached eggs. ****** The smell of bak kuk teh spices filled the house. Tim and I took off our shoes as Ma jovially rushed to the door. “Harlow, harlow, come in, come in. You are Tim, right?" “Yes, auntie. Nice to meet you.” Tim nodded. “I heard so much about you, Tim. Clement told me you two hang out a lot!” “Yea, auntie, we get together to discuss books we read every weekend!” I chuckled inside. Yes, it was true. Book discussion every weekend, but also steamy nerd sex afterward. The Peranakan feast was worthy of kings, and the laughter echoed among our walls. Tim was going at it again with his expat jokes. “You know, auntie. My jawlines are getting slacker now compared to my time in San Fran. You know why?” Tim passed me the plate of kueh pie tee, grinning. “I know. Singapore’s food is too fatty, so you get fatter!" "Oh, auntie, why are you calling me fat? No, it's because I can't chew gum in Singapore lah.” Tim’s lah sounded a bit off tone, which made it all funnier. We left the best for last, Ma’s pièce de résistance: chilled pulut hitam. After the first spoon, Tim sat up straight with a serious face: “Auntie, I have something to tell you.”

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Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

“What? My pulut hitam nice, right? Better than those at the shops." “Yes, auntie, exquisitely made. What I wanted to say, though, is that…” Tim paused for a second, “… I am Clement’s boyfriend.” "Yes, I know. Clement has a lot of boyfriends. He is quite popular lah. Why do you tell me this?” Ma kept slurping the dessert. Tim looked very confused at Ma’s response. “Ma, I am Tim’s boyfriend. You get it?” I emphasized boyfriend. “I get it. Why do you two keep repeating this?” “No, boyfriend. I am gay. Tim and I are in love. We are dating.” The spoon stopped right at Ma’s mouth. She put it down, looking at the half-eaten puddle of purple rice in coconut milk. “Ma?” Ma stood up, raised her hand, and slapped me on the right cheek. I felt it through my bones, a mix of love mired in embarrassment and confusion. “Tim, you should go now,” I looked at him, feeling a bit wet in my eyes. “I can stay.” “No, go!” "Okay, call me, okay?" Tim grabbed his bag and left. Before closing the door, he looked back and said to my mom, "Clement loves you very much. Please do not hurt him." “Get out!” Ma shouted. I had never seen her shout like that for years. The pitch was vibrating through our windowpanes; her anger was dying to get out. “You are not my son anymore,” her voice quivered, tears rolling down cheeks sunken with age. Grabbing a fruit knife, she dashed towards me. The knife tip was an inch away from my belly button. She grasped the handle, but trembled and fidgeted. Blood dripped down through my fingers. I had stopped the knife with my bare hands. “Ma, what are you doing?” I strained my voice and pushed the knife back in a kind of reversed tug of war. Five-feet tall, a head taller than her, I was no longer her little Clement. The son with whom she had held hands, and walked to school through the wet market stinking of fish and freshly-butchered meat, whom she had petted on the head and showed off to the neighbors whenever I won an award, whom she had taught how to make various kuehs. Little had she known her son would now hand her a lemon. I am now a grown man; I love another man. “Are you going to tell your Pa, also? You are going to kill your Pa if you tell him. Have you not seen how dead he already is?” Ma wailed and pushed the knife closer to me. The blade cut deeper into my palms. The blood kept flowing.

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Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

I felt light-headed. I used to think my biggest regret if I died would be not finding a man who loved me. But now, if I dropped dead here, I would never be able to tell my dying father my big, little, secret. That. That would be my biggest regret. “I love Pa. I want him to die knowing his son is loved.” I yanked the knife out of Ma’s hands and threw it to the corner of the kitchen. The clanking sound of it hitting the ceramic tiles echoed through the dark, grimy air around us. Ma dropped down on her feeble knees, holding her face in her hands, weeping hysterically as if her whole family had died and left her. Her grief was prescient. I stood still, staring at the half-eaten pulut hitam on the dining table, at the bloody knife, the smears of red on the dining chair and the floor tiles, then at Ma. My blood kept dripping. ****** I loved both my parents. But Pa was my favorite. He was a man of few words, but he loved me through his actions. When I was in middle school, he would let me sit behind on his moped and rode me around town. From behind, I could smell the stench of cigarettes mixed in the musk of his sweat. I was but a little boy wrapping my arms around his potbelly. I grasped the bottled-up love nervously as we breezed through the city like a big comet and its tiny rock child on an odyssey through glitzy urban Singapore. He would take me to Basheer Books and buy me whatever I wanted. I had always liked books with beautiful drawings and designs. I guessed the stereotypical gayness in me was already awakening back then. Sometimes I wondered if all the books my quiet father had given me contained the oceans of words he would have said but couldn’t because the rolling waves of sentences piled on and on drowning his voice. Pa always had this grief that he could not be the man of the family, freelancing as a writer and being a stay-at-home dad. Ma, on the other hand, was a high-flying civil servant: Head of Strategic Planning at the Singapore Economic Development Board. Ma was always the matriarch of the family, having the final say in everything, from which color the wallpaper should be, which brand of furniture we should buy to which university I should attend. Pa's grief, that of a belittled man, turned into an endless stream of cigarettes and

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Beyond Queer Words

alcohol. He said they helped him with his writing. All they did was give him a stroke. He never got to publish his novel. ****** The air conditioning in our bedroom ran with a humming sound, the white noise that enveloped us through the night. I turned around, spooning up beside Tim, wrapping my right arm around his. My chest kept a tiny canyon of distance from his back. A pocket of warm air formed between us. “Are you asleep?” I whispered. “As asleep as you are," Tim mumbled. “We need to talk about my dad.” “What about him?” “I told you he only has days left.” “So, we need to tell him about us." “We can’t. Don’t you see these bandaged hands?” "Do you hate your mom?" “I don’t know. She is still my mom.” “And we are just going to live like this, hidden from your family, skulking around like thieves?” “I love you, and we already told my mom. Isn’t that enough for you? You know how great that went.” “You have to tell your Pa. You told me it would bring great regret if your Pa dies not knowing about you, right? If you love him, you have to tell him.” “And if you love me, why are you pushing this? My whole family is falling apart because I gave in to your demand for the normalcy you are so used to.” “Demand? That’s how you see it?” Tim pulled away from me. The canyon between us grew wider. The cold air slipped in. I felt it slithering on my skin while I kept still and thought about the thieves that we were. What did we steal? ****** The intensive care unit at Tan Tock Seng hospital smelled like death. Pa was hooked up to all sorts of machinery, looking like a cyberpunk octopusman. The vital sign monitor beeped slowly, tandem to his dying heartbeat. The

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Beyond Queer Words

ventilator hissed every time it gave Pa a breath of air. Ma was sitting next to him, holding his left hand gently against her forehead. I looked at my hands. The bandages still wrapped around the wounds. What would I tell Pa about these hands? He was still asleep. The doctor had said in an ominous voice that he could wake up any time now for the last time, and we should be prepared. How would you prepare for death? Would you roll out a red carpet and give it lemonade on the way in? I put my bandaged hand against Pa’s forehead and kissed him quietly. Where there used to be hair was now just a shiny field of skin, reflecting the clinical light of the ICU room. "Pa, I am here. Can you hear me?" Silence. "Let him sleep." Ma gave me a stare, which I usually got when she had been about to beat me. She wouldn't hit me anymore now that I had grown up, but that habitual stare never went away. A knock on the door broke the perpetual silence punctuated by beeps and hisses. Tim was here. His usually unruly blond hair was combed back neatly. “What is he doing here?” Ma stared at Tim and then me. “I wish I had given birth to an egg instead and eaten it.” We stayed quiet. Tim and I came to Pa’s side. It seemed everything was timed to the second by a higher being. He suddenly let out a groan and opened his eyes, bright and lucid as if he had never been sick. In Chinese culture, it was believed that there would be a moment right before a person died when he or she would wake up and be as clear as day. This was that moment. Ma, not letting go of his hand, leaned her head over to his. “You are back, my dear.” Tears were on the verge of flowing from her eyes. “Clement?” “Yes, Pa. It’s me. It’s your little Clement. And this is Tim.” “I see you. I see both of you.” “Pa, I have to tell you something.” “Don’t you dare,” Ma shouted. “I am gay. Tim loves me very much.” "It's good that you are loved because Pa can't stay with you forever, you know." Pa looked at Tim and then at me, struggling to say the words while breathing heavily.

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Beyond BeyondQueer QueerWords Words

Beyond Queer Words

I burst out crying. I did not have any words to describe what I felt. The feeling of realizing you should have told somebody you loved a secret sooner. That everything would turn out better than you had imagined. Pa turned to Ma, his eyes pleading in pain. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Honey, can you do one thing for me? Please, love Tim like your own son.â&#x20AC;? A long beep overwhelmed my weeping. Tim held me in his arms as if he were trying to save me from plunging down a cliff. Ma wiped her tears, said nothing, and walked out of the room. And Pa closed his eyes for the last time. Phong Huynh is a Vietnamese gay spoken word poet and short story writer based in Singapore, currently doing a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at LaSalle School of the Arts. His works deal with the themes of individual identity, LGBTQ+ rights, mental well-being, family relationships and social mores. He has performed spoken word poetry at various platforms such as Spoke & Birds, Singapore Poetry Slam and Destination Ink.

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Beyond Queer Words

Thalassa Dean M. Drinkel For Harvey when it rained the old man told me he loved me I love you he said putting the barrel of the gun to my forehead the barrel is a tunnel with no light at the end and pulled the trigger the bullet stormed my skull and shot out the back splattering my brains in waves he whispered I love you I love you too I whispered back as the tempest drowned me in the bloody ocean I saw him at the edge of the sea with another who he told he loved as much as me these tides lie too

Dean M Drinkel is a published author, editor, award winning script-writer & film director and was Associate Editor of Fear Magazine. In 2018 he established the horror press Demain Publishing.

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Beyond Queer Words

Artwork: Zephyr by Alahna AlvĂŠ. Alahna is a pansexual abstract artist located in Houston, where she spends her time pouring paint, studying the future and antagonizing her loved ones. She lives (and thrives!) with her husband, their three ungrateful cats and a persistent mental illness. Look for her on Instagram at @alahnaaalve.

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